Mail Art & The Correspondence School

Ray Johnson: The Present of Mail Art
Ina Blom, January 2008 [link]

'...Johnson had started it all in the mid-1950's, slowly building up a network of correspondents who would exchange objects and messages through the postal system.'

'Initially it was Johnson himself sending out small collage-like works to a mailing list, urging people to keep them, to add to them, to change them, to send them to others, to return to sender.'

'The initial network was named The New York Correspondance School (sic) - a spin or pun on the idea of artistic schools and the concomitant idea of art history as a succession of such schools.'

'...a technology and a communication medium which was just at that moment appropriated for artistic purposes.'

'But then mail art was seen as one of the new "communication arts", a form of media aesthetics that evolved alongside video art...'

'[mail art could be said to only have "a present"] - a present of communicational events, of uncontrollable exchanges, of things arriving and departing at unforseen times and places, thanks to the medium of postal system, which, just like television, could be seen to distribute "signals" across the boundaries of time and space.'

'[mail art]...could be seen to place itself squarely in the realm of social exchanges, that is the realm whose entire principle of circulation and reciprocity is kept in check by the system of gifts.'

The existence of exchange, of gift-giving, or sharing....'is what ensures the existence of true collectivity'

'[artistic] practices designed to intervene in social reality, to question existing social form or to try to form new types of collectives or to rethink collectivity tout court.'

'Johnson exploited the corresponding ambiguities of the modern postal system - a system founded on the premise that messages always reach their destination, but whose rich mythology is shot through with the anxiety provoked by the idea of non-received, displaced, returned and refused messages'

'At every level - from the semantic techniques deployed in his writings, to his organisation of visual material, to the idiosyncratic pragmatics of his mailing practice - Johnson evokes the same reality of associations promised and associations unmade, ruptured, dispersed,'

'...with Johnson there is never any guarantee of community, of the perfect social immanence of togetherness and understanding. Johnson reciprocates, but only through interruption.'

'He organized meetings and assemblies (of the NYCS members), but these meetings were without content or purpose'

ART / ARCHITECTURE; Dear Friends of Ray, and Audiences of One
NY Times, February 1999 [link]

'Ray Johnson perpetrated art that made its recipients work' <- subverts art!

'For 40 years, with the collaboration of the Post Office, he mailed out drawn, collaged and, in later years, photocopied confections concocted from visual puns, Pop Art references, the lives of friends, chance happenings and weird news items.'

James Rosenquist, artist and friend, '[Ray's work]...was a much more personal, private experience, a discovery kind of thing, not smack dab in your face'

Bill Wilson, retired professer, correspondent of Johnson 'Mail art meant that art should be free'

'An envelope from Ray was like a haiku, a moment of immediacy and indeterminancy, a particularly vivid moment outside the economy, outside the machinery of our culture. It was free.'

Andrew Hoyem, poet and publisher, Arion Press

'...The book never happened. Ray could be very coy, and it took me a long time to understand that the talking about it, the sending things back and forth, was the thing.'

------> THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE. NOT THE CONTENT. THE PLATFORM THAT IS DELIVERED UPON, HOW THIS SHAPES THE EXPERIENCE.