Ray Johnson and Mail Art

'What Happened? Nothing. New York Times, April 11, 1965.
Grace Glueck, 1965, [link]

'New York's Most Famous Unknown Artist' Is Now More Important Than Ever
Vice, Nathalie Olah, August 2014 [link]

'Flippant and funny, his collages, warped bunny drawings and defaced portraits of Rimbaud, James Dean and Elvis Presley have always attracted more left-field independent publishers and street artists.'

'Fans of Johnson's work don't just admire its aesthetic, but also the spirit in which he created it - avoiding the infrastructure of the traditional art world to instead distribute his works through the mail, which led him being hailed by some as the founder of the "mail art" movement.'

'Both artists [Warhol and Johnson] were concerned with the growing cult of consumerism - of images and logos being disseminated to the masses via fast-evolving interconnectivity.'

'...he functioned as a weaver of connections; not a networker, but a social network unto himself, albeit for the pre-digital age.'

'...Johnson would share images of a rapidly expanding pop culture with his own followers through his mail art.'

'Johnson's mail art can be traced back as early as 1958. Often inscribed with instructions such as, "please send to...", "please add and return to..."'

'They formed the basis of a postal network that Johnson later formalised with the help of friends and renamed the "New York Correspondence School".'

'...Johnson continually obstructed his own root to pop-stardom, preferring to create works whose meaning was intentionally difficult to decipher.'

'In short, he had absolutely no ambition of being packaged neatly, distributed to the masses and launched into celebrity.'

Tate Online
Art Term > Mail Art [link]

'Mail art is a movement based on the principle of sending small scale works through the postal service'

'Mail art began in the 1960s when artists sent postcards inscribed with poems or drawings through the post rather than exhibiting or selling them through conventional commercial channels.'

'It's origins can be found in Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters and the Italian futurists. But it was the New York artist Ray Johnson who, in the mid 1950s, posted small collages, prints of abstract drawings and poems to art world notables giving rise to what eventually became known as the New York Correspondence School.'

Ray Johnson: The Zen Master of the Social Network
Utne Reader, Tim Keane, 2014 [link]

'...the available platforms for sending mail and messages to others have proliferated far beyond the post office - voicemails, emails, SMS, tweets, tags, selfies, Instagrams, public profiles, video clips, news feeds...we are urged to communicate something, anything, even when we wonder whether all this 24/7 contact might amount to a whole lot of nothing.'

'He was an analog-era hacker who wove a worldwide web using this collagist mail art'

[talking about his letters in Not Nothing, selected letters published by Siglio Press, 2014]

'[Johnson's multimedia letters]...eliminate boundaries separating poetry, prose, drawing, and collage'

'..in their miscellaneous observations, and in their crazy-quilt graphics, these letters unfold without any logic or cogently expressed purpose'

'The letters drop random threads and pick them up later. Or they don't. They reiterate cryptic requests, spiral into carefully typed logorrhea, and end abruptly'

'Surrounded by clip art that ranges from cartoons to how-to-manuals to product labels, Johnson's text shifts into styles that include diary entries, testimonials, asides, copy edits, gossip, intended typos, and cataloging'

'Concealing meaning behind complicated written and visual assemblages, Johnson calls attention to letter-writing's artifice and to the medium's lack of transparency'

'He anticipates the inevitable misinterpretations and confusions on the part of the recipient'

'The postal project had an immediate sociological objective, as Johnson levelled hierarchies around celebrity that were then being established both locally and nationally.'

'Subverting the cliquish New York scene, he mailed letters out in equal numbers to the well-known, to the up-and-coming, to the completely unknown, and even to the dead'

'Often printed on letterhead stolen from public or private institutions, or typed on wrinkled notebook paper or the back sides of Chinese menus, the letters revel in Freudian slips, Joycean puns, intentional misspellings and malapropisms, arcane glyphs and charming anagrams'

'the letters exasperate as they entertain'

'the banal and the profound are mixed together'

[Elizabeth Zuba, editor of Not Nothing in the introduction] '...she explains Johnson's operative principle that language and visual data form enclosed systems of self-replicating "codes" that preclude original expression and prevent meanings beyond their sound and fury'

[regarding the artwork on the letters operating as...] '...a collaboration involving many people, correspondences in a humanistic sense as well as an aesthetic one - art as an open-ended undertaking, a shared state of being present to someone else rather than art as a hallowed object to be hung on a white wall.'

'The letters' mysteries can be approached by trusting intuition, free association, thoughtful hunches, multiple meanings or indeterminacy, and bridging the psychological gap between word and world.'

[readers of his letters are] 'lost in such a literary and pictorial fun house'