A collage is a composition made from fragments of diverse elements glued together. Collage artists arrange the fragments to create internal tensions and balances that form new meanings. The purpose of this dissertation is to pull together fragments of interviews and observations, whole works of art, portions of web sites, and artists' attitudes to form a collage of the effects of the Internet on the Correspondence Art Network also known as the Mail Art Network.
PUSHED ENVELOPE
Illustration 1: Bat Tub is an add-to-and-send project by Ray Johnson
In 1994 Ray Johnson telephoned my house. Johnson was the founder of the New York Correspondence School that expanded into the international Correspondence Art Network. John Held Jr., historian, librarian, and collector of correspondence art, said that when you got a phone call from Ray Johnson it was a sign that you had become a full-fledged mail artist. Johnson was as famous in the Correspondence Art Network for his enigmatic phone calls as he was for his enigmatic mailings. I was in the bathtub when I found out that Johnson had called. If you are familiar with the Bat Tub project (Illustration 1) and JohnsonÕs many associations with water, these damp details of my bath story may carry additional weight.
Illustration 1 is an add-to-and-send project started by Ray Johnson and has been sent through the Correspondence Art Network for years. The bottom layer of each drawing shows a hand-drawn bath tub, often with a photograph of Johnson's head resting on the right end of the tub. Large upside down letters spelling "Bat Tub" loom over the tub. At the left bottom of the page Johnson printed upside down and in smaller letters, "Please add to and return to Ray Johnson," and in the lower right "Philip Guston's bath tub." Artists are invited to add their own art to the Bat Tub and send it on, eventually back to Johnson. Figure 1 is one of dozens of Bat Tubs I intervened upon and sent out over the years. In this version I added a photocopy of a group photograph of all the women artists who attended a panel held in September 2000 in conjunction with the Wexner Museum of Art's Ray Johnson Correspondences exhibition. The photo of the women standing side-by-side is cut out and glued to appear to be in the tub to the left of Johnson's head. I added pink and yellow paint around the tub. This example is one of probably thousands of variations by many artists on the Bat Tub project. I don't know when Johnson started the project, but I know that Bat Tub variations have been circulating since I became a correspondence artist in 1989 and that I received a photocopy version as recently as 2001 from Ruggero Maggi in Italy.
My son yelled through the bathroom door, "Mom, do you know who Ray Johnson is?" I yelled back, "Yes, he's the guy who started mail art." My son said, "Well, he called. Dad left a message." There was a splash. A few weeks later I answered the phone and it was Johnson calling back. Johnson asked me to explain the Internet to him. I don't know how he heard that I am an Internet artist but I described the Internet the way I see it, in terms of mail art. For example, I told Johnson about how objects in multi-user role-playing games are like mailed art because the digital objects are creative experiments, freely distributed in communities of online role players, that can be transported to other shared environments. These objects, made from text and computer code, have associated actions programmed to lead the reader/user to the next description of a characters' performance. For example, a virtual blimp base on MediaMoo, an online role-playing game at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has a mooring tower where players select the verb "climb" to launch a description of the character's climb to the top of the tower's ladder. When the character reaches the top, the choices are "jump on the gondola" or "walk the gangplank." If you choose the wrong one, the character will plummet to his/her/its death, be kicked off the system, and have to log in again. These automated texts, delivered to random users, are versions of visual poetry or Dada surprises distributed through a network. You can't get much more like mail art.
On January 13, 1995 there was another splash. Ray Johnson jumped off a bridge into the freezing water of Sag Harbor. This agile 67-year-old man, who had jokingly announced his own demise many times as part of his art, jumped from a bridge on Friday the 13th in January 1995 and drowned.ÉHe was last seen alive by two teenage girls in Sag Harbor, N.Y., as he was backstroking into a cove. The next day, his corpse was pulled, fully clothed, from the water. (Bloch, 1999)
Johnson left an influential body of work swirling around the planet setting other artists in connective motion. My mission is to trace the moving currents of the work started by Johnson. At the end of the mechanical age photocopy ruled the zine scene and the postal service was the technology of a global net. At the dawn of the information age wingless wireless messages fill the frequency layers between earth and sky. This research is about the international art movement that Johnson left in motion and the effects of the Internet on that network of artists.
TENSIONS AND FRAGMENTS
The correspondence art movement and its community of artists are held together in dynamic tensions. The tensions include conflict between ideals and philosophies. Conflicts also arise between the manner in which words and art works differently express these tensions, but you will not follow these tensions in art history books because, with rare exceptions, art historians do not write about correspondence art. Correspondence artists themselves fill the resulting art historical gap by writing essays, letters, manifestoes, and even books. Their research ranges from na•ve to sophisticated. Their essays can be stilted, single-minded, or complaining. But correspondence artists can also be eloquent writers: Vittore Baroni, expounds sweeping philosophical views, Anna Banana and John Held Jr. provide historical perspectives, Guy Bleus and Rain Rein Nevermind are experimental. Some of the best correspondence art writing is blatantly untruthful, occurring when artists make up whole histories for themselves or create fictitious countries or planets from which to publish their own postage. But the purest complexity of correspondence artists' thoughts is seen in their artworks and their visual poetry. Visual poetry grows between words and images containing fragments of each. Since a dissertation is made of words crafted into questions, answers, arguments, illustrations, and rationales, this dissertation gives fair play to correspondence artists' words, but it also contains examples of their art works and visual poems. This research portrays the tensions and balances between the artists, their words, their works, and within their collective, especially in response to the rapid expansion of networking technologies. Traditions have coalesced and become accepted methods during the history of the correspondence art movement. New art forms, new technologies, and new artists create stress on correspondence art traditions. The layers of this dissertation illustrate tensions of today's Correspondence Art Network, often between words and images, and between the network's present and past. As remnants of Johnson's body of work still ripple across the oceans, the people he affects move in response to many currents. One of the currents still swirling is the question, what is mail art? In the following chapters you will read some of the many meanings as related by the artists themselves. To start the collage I have gathered an introductory array of definitions by curator and librarian, Clive Phillpot; professor of new media, Craig Saper; the late mail artist and Fluxus artist, Dick Higgins; mail artist, Ken Miller; Ray Johnson's friend and art historian, William S. Wilson; Italian professor and mail artist, Gianni Broi; Japanese artist and teacher, Ryosuke Cohen; and correspondence artist, arto posto.
CLIVE PHILLPOT: SIMPLE DEFINITION Clive Phillpot is a specialist in artists' books who works in the research office of the British Council. He was Director of the Library of the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1977-1994 and maintained a correspondence with Ray Johnson. Phillpot defines mail art in terms of it's relationship to the post office and to Johnson.
Mail art, simply defined, is art that utilizes the postal service, or, in a secondary manifestation, is art that takes a form relating to postal products or apparatus - for example, artists' postage stamps and artists' rubber stamps. On many occasions, Ray Johnson has been named the father of mail art, also the grandfather, and even the "sugar dada." (Phillpot, 1995)
DICK HIGGINS: MAIL ART AS INTERMEDIA The late Dick Higgins was a theorist, poet, composer, scholar, artist, publisher and seminal figure in the early Happening and Fluxus movements. Higgins revives the word "intermedia," from the 1812 writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge to define works which fall conceptually between media that are already known; he uses the term to demystify avant garde art. Higgins claims that intermediality rests on an artist's or group of artists' desire to fuse two or more existing media (Higgins, 1965 and 1981) and he defines mail art as intermedia.
Ébetween almost any art and non-art media other intermedia are possible. What lies between theater and life, for instance? Between music and philosophy? É If we take any art as a medium and the postal system as a medium, then mail art is the intermedium between these - postal poetry, postal music, mail-art [visual variety], etc. (Janssen, 1995b)
KEN MILLER: MULTI-DEFINITIONS Ken Miller is an artist and zine publisher with an extensive Web site called "Shouting at the Postman." Miller's site is a grab bag of articles about mail art, videos, zines, personal events, and recipes.
So how do I define "mail art"? * It has no set criterion other than it must be sent by mail. * Like anything that can be defined as "art", it is a reflection of our culture, an aesthetic that uses devices associated with mass production (rubber stamps, Xerox, mass mailings) to convey it's message, but everything (and I do mean everything) can be (and is) added to the mix. * It is decentralized, in that mail artists all rely on other artists to convey their messages, their work, their advertisements for projects. * It is international, and it goes beyond the usual cultural barriers of geography and language. * There is no sanctity of completion; all that is put into it is subject to further manipulation by other artists: nothing is ever finished. This is what art is really all about, continual reinvention and metamorphosis. Paintings in the museums are just interesting stops along the way, but they are never the end of the road. * Because it is freely reproduced and traded, but never sold, it cannot be compromised for the sake of money. * It embodies the do-it-yourself spirit that has been absent from conventional art and music for too long. Anybody can participate. One can take comfort in knowing that no matter what you do, chances are good that there is someone, somewhere who will like it. (Miller, 1995)
These first three definitions are strongly tied to the postal systems. In the following collection of additional definitions, author Craig Saper sees mail art as kind of intimate bureaucracy, theorists William S. Wilson and Gianni Broi connect correspondence art to gifts and to systems. Artist Ryosuke Cohen views correspondence art as a brain.
CRAIG SAPER: INTIMATE BUREAUCRACIES Craig Saper is professor of Digital Rhetoric and Networked Art and Literature at University of Central Florida. His 2001 book Networked Art is an important analysis of Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual poetry in terms of collective art-making. Saper theorizes that when "aesthetic and poetic decisions embodied in artworks lead to a heightened or changed social situation,Éthese forms [are] sociopoetic rather than artworks within particular social contexts" (Saper, 2001) (p. xiii). Saper's insights into the dynamics of artists' networks as art is original and useful because it visualizes the relationships between artists and their collective products (including their networks) as a system of intimate bureaucracies.
An intimate bureaucracy makes poetic use of the trappings of large bureaucratic systems and procedures (e.g., logos, stamps) to create intimate aesthetic situations, including the pleasures of sharing special knowledge or a new language among a small network of participants. (Saper, 2001)p. xii
WILLIAM S. WILSON: SYSTEMS AND GIFTS OF MAIL ART William S. Wilson shared a close friendship with Ray Johnson for over 40 years. Wilson's New York apartment holds a rich archive of for information regarding Johnson and Wilson, recognized as the most informed authority on Johnson.
Mail art as a system Even movements in the visual arts tend to become systematized, and are likely to run out of energy if they do not remain open to valid novelties. However some people prefer tightly closed systems and join a police force or the military. Can one expect a person who has chosen to dwell within a closed system like a military unit, a monastery or a country club to participate in an open system like mail-art? The phrase "stable open system" I borrow from Michael Polanyi, who borrowed the words to describes life as a stable open system. The implication here is that mail-art is a model for systems that enhance the animation and livingness of life, and that it must be aware of the structures and functions of other systems, ranging from postal services through to museums. Not entertainment, but art, has in our culture often worked to break "the mind-forged manacles" (William Blake), and to enable people to fly beyond the nets of nationalism, religion and language (James Joyce) (Wilson, 2003b). Mail art as a gift Wilson also comments on the irrationality of mail art gifts and the effects of the gifts on the receivers. ...the profitlessness of mail-art has been an emancipation, a moment of economic truancy and mischief, as irrational as love. (Wilson, 2003a) Mail-artists have given a gift of experiences of gifts to other people, sometimes constructing those others into mail-artists. Having so often used what otherwise might be thrown away, mail-artists might want to think about values and experiences of gifts such as freedom from the marketplace, gifts which would be irreversibly and irretrievably thrown away. (Wilson, 2003a)
GIANNI BROI: GIFTS OF MAIL ART Professor Gianni Broi organizes correspondence art gatherings and performances in Italy and France. Since his first correspondence art exhibition in 1989 at the University of Florence on the theme of international postcards, Broi has contributed numerous scholarly and thoughtfully personal essays for exhibition catalogs. Broi feels that gifting in mail art began at its inception and is a natural development based on the nature of Johnson's personality.
The gift principle suppresses the commercial value of objects. This is the heart of mail art. Ray Johnson said, "ItÕs not at all a clichŽ when I say that I have a kind of natural generosity and that was the real basis of the New York Correspondence SchoolÉgenerosity of image and idea and information" É.[ Johnson's] suppression of commercial value is a gift from Johnson to mail art, because it is a native quality, a trademarkÉ.The gift principle throws light on the complex essence of mail-art by putting it into a perspective thatÉis perhaps the only one needed to explain its force of attraction (Broi, 1998) pages 33-34.
RYOSUKE COHEN: MAIL ART AS A BRAIN MADE OF NERVE CELLS Ryosuke Cohen, a mail artist and school teacher in Japan, publishes one of the longest-running mail art projects, Brain Cell. Started in 1985, Brain Cell is a printed collage of all the images from around the world that Cohen receives each week. On his home page, Cohen addresses the relation between mail art and the community of mail artists with his definition about how fragments of the network share fragments of individual artists.
É you can be more than a mere individual, able to be free to create art pieces with a new attitude, just being a fragment of the whole Network and sharing fragmental parts of many other artists. ÉIn Mail Art, the network expands as A to B, B to C, and so on. It is not only limited to peer communication. In fact, you can put collages on the mail you receive and send it back, or you may be able to send other artists' ideas into your own mail. As a whole body, it appears as a brain constructed with numbers of compiled and complex nerve cells, which are created in a non-linear order (Cohen, 2002).
HONORIAÕS DEFINITION: MAIL ART AS A DRAMATIC EVENT Opening an envelope, an email, or a new correspondence art web site is a dramatic event. Correspondence art involves two people in a web of mailed messages. Inspired by direct or indirect messages from other senders, the mail artist uses art to communicate with one person while at the same time participating in a whole international network. Correspondence events hold mysteries of the near and the far. The near mystery is the artistÕs own relationship with her creative personality, the initial unknown of what will be created. The far mystery is how the art will be received. Who besides the sender will see it; will it be valued in a collection; will it be included in a publication? I once showed a folder of mail art to Oscar Mink, my open systems thinking professor. He carefully examined the small artworks and their stamps and said, "These seem to be part of some international system; they have some things in common but are each surprising in their own way. Why are they all addressed to you? Are you an attractor for this art?"
ARTO POSTO: BOX-OF-MAIL-ART AS TEACHER Correspondence artists agree that putting mail art into words is harder than putting mail art into envelopes. Dorothy Harris, known in the network as arto posto, is an artist's stamp creator. Sometimes she becomes a correspondence art teacher with a unique manner of distance learning. Harris educated a chat group devoted to mail art on the Prodigy online service by sharing information about mail art both online and through the mail. In 1996 artist, arto posto began to venture onto the Internet. She introduced mail art to people in an online community by assembling a box of correspondence art to send to people who had never seen it before. To arto posto, a box of correspondence art is a more accurate than words to define mail art.
I find it much more difficult to TELL someone what mail art is than to show it to them. For that reason I got the idea of boxing up dozens of piecesÉand routing it to those who had expressed interested in seeing what mail art is all about. Thus far twenty-seven women requested to be added to the list, and the box of mail art is currently making its way around the U.S. As each person gets the box, she posts enthusiastically on the computer bulletin board America Online. This arouses additional interest, and more people e-mail me to ask that they, too, get a chance to see the box of mail art (Janssen, 1996c).
I adopted arto posto's strategy in the collection of data for this research. In addition to conducting interviews, observing correspondence art message boards and Web sites, I asked correspondence artists to send original art on the subject of the effects of the Internet on their work. The results of this collection are discussed in Chapter 6.
SOUNDS LIKE "MALE" To avoid confusion in conversation when introducing the research I use the term "correspondence art" instead of "mail art." The homophones "mail" and "male" cause confusion especially because mail art includes many important women. Another reason I prefer "correspondence" to refer to the research is that I'm trying to discover the current relevance of "mail" to contemporary correspondence art. Keep in mind that correspondence artists refer to themselves as mail artists, and women mail artists must field silly comments about claiming to be men artists. Although correspondence artists are familiar with the term correspondence art, "mail art" and "Mail Art Network" are the most common terms used by the artists to refer to their products and communication systems. As the interviews and art works collected for this research indicate, many artists passionately value the postal imprints that pieces of mailed art collect in their travels, therefore, the postal association is central to their appreciation of the art works. Other artists consider their global community to be the real art work; still others believe that the individual personal network that they build over time is the embodiment of their art. Now that the correspondence art exchange is also conducted on the Internet, "mail" becomes a less obvious defining element. Volker Hamman, a social scientist, correspondence artist, and Net artist, recommends the use of the term "correspondence art." If the network is to maintain a vital flexibility that has characterized it from the beginning, a name change may be a good way to reflect the new networking environment. However, maintaining an increasingly outdated name would reflect the long history of the movement. The artists are good at making up names, and the creative collective will come up with the terms to describe themselves and what they do. In summary, I use the term "correspondence artists" interchangeably with "mail artists" and "Correspondence Art Network" interchangeably with "Mail Art Network." I capitalize the network name to correspond with other art movements such as Futurism, but I do not capitalize initial letters for "mail art" and "correspondence art" in the same way that the general term "art" is not capitalized in normal use.
PURPOSE The purpose of this study is to understand the effects of the Internet on the community of artists who traditionally exchange art through international postal systems. How does rapid development of networked technologies influence the 40-year old global art movement? How do correspondence artists respond to emerging global electronic networks as they initiate aesthetic shifts in their art and social restructuring in their network?
SIGNIFICANCE This research will be useful to: - Assist curators of correspondence art collections to identify internal systems of the Correspondence Art Network - Detail correspondence art networking strategies for comparison to other networks - Determine established artists' adaptations to Internet networking - Determine ways in which established correspondence art systems carry over, are changed, or are eliminated, when artists make choices in their uses of postal communications and electronic communications. This study provides a view of Internet community interactions through the cultural lenses of correspondence art networkers. The value of this study lies in the perspectives of artists who invent and practice strategies that build ongoing creative relationships across time and distances. Do correspondence artists transmit culture, art, skills, and attitudes through the Internet as they do using the postal service? What patterns emerge as electronic objects and physical objects of correspondence art flow around, merge, and build upon each other?
LIMITS OF THIS STUDY This research is limited to members of the loose international community that have exchanged art via the postal system since the 1960s, and recently, via the Internet. Since the late 1980s correspondence artists have increasingly incorporated the Internet into their practices. This study was conducted over a three-year period from 1999-2001. The collected data and conclusions may have broader applications to other kinds of dispersed communities affected by adaptation to the Internet, but this research concentrates only on correspondence art. Like all qualitative research, this dissertation is unique to this group and generalization to other groups is limited.
IMPORTANCE Mail art is a vibrant international network founded on trust, experimentation, freedom, free exchange, and mutual respect. The Internet is a much larger and more diverse network system. I am a member of both of these interconnected networks. I am fascinated by the differences in attitudes and strategies for successful communication and exchange of ideas in each network. This dissertation is important to understanding currents that buoy, convey, or drown aspects of the Correspondence Art Network as thousands of participating artists increasingly use digital networks, learn from each other, and inhabit collaborative conceptual spaces. The resulting dissertation will be posted on the Electronic Museum of Mail Art (http://www.actlab.utexas.edu/emma) together with an invitation for correspondence artists to continue to contribute. The Electronic Museum of Mail Art research pages will continue to be a place where conference papers, interviews, and publications form a growing resource available for future studies in networks and correspondence art.
DISSERTATION LAYOUT The eight chapters of this report are collage pieces full of data that can be arranged in any number of patterns. I have chosen the following order. This introduction chapter is followed by Methods Chapter 2, a meditation on the methods of grounded theory. Message boards Chapter 3 listens in on mail artists' message board conversations about the research topics. Chapter 4 is a case study of the Travelling Art Mail (TAM) Web site and its creator, Ruud Janssen. JanssenÕs 1994-98 TAM interview project set the stage for my research because Janssen questions artists' about their early uses of computers and the Internet. Chapter 5 is a series of essays distilled from my interviews with artists. Chapter 6 is an alternate set of data, actual correspondence artworks because the artworks provide nuanced attitudes, in the artists' natural communication media. The artworks range from simple drawings and rubber stamp impressions to complex collages and digital images. Chapter 7 is an analysis of trends and patterns in the data from chapters 4, 5, and 6. Chapter 8 discusses the relevance of the trends and patterns to the Correspondence Art Network and suggests areas for future research.
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EMMA Index : Research : Dissertation : Abstract | Introduction | Methods | Message Boards | TAM | Participants