Ray Johnson <http://abcnews.go.com/sections/living/DailyNews/rayjohnson_art.html> bugs me. He bugs a lot of people (e.g., "A Collage in Which Life = Death = Art," Michael Kimmelman, New York Times, Sunday, October 6, 2002). I mean, what was the guy doing? He was doing something. Over and over and over and over--Ray Johnson moved tons of mail, tons of xeroxed pieces of paper, endless repetitions of his bunny character <http://www.artpool.hu/Ray/raymap.html> and his various Correspondence School phrases & logos. Some people who have looked hard into Ray's life find various sorts of structures and patterns (some of it weird, like the pattern of his death and the number "13"). So what was the "medium," what was "the art," what was the intention? I understand why art dealers, writers and such want to deal with his more formal collages (that stuff you can put a real frame around and hang on the wall and talk about how Ray used this or that image before Warhol ran with it, etc.). But I have never been able to get my arms around the whole Correspondence School thing. I've never been able to get my arms around all these pieces of paper flying endlessly through the mail. What was Ray Johnson doing? Why didn't he ever "explain" what he was doing? Or did he and I just missed it?
Last Tuesday I attended a lecture by Stephen Wolfram <http://www.stephenwolfram.com/scrapbook/timeline.html> at the University of Michigan. Stephen Wolfram bugs me. He has spent much of the last 20 years holed up in his study endlessly running the same little, simple computer programs (e.g., cellular automata) over and over. He sets up a simple set of rules and runs them out to thousands (sometimes millions) of steps...just to see if some of them "come to life" (i.e., where despite their humble and simple origins produce a truly complex/random pattern). Unlike Ray Johnson, Wolfram has gone to great lengths to explain what he is doing (see "A New Kind of Science," 1197 pages <http://www.wolframscience.com/>)--using these little games to study how the natural complexity in the universe might be produced by simple rules (a general shortcoming of "traditional science"). So I've been feeling a similarity between Ray Johnson's mail activities and Stephen Wolfram's cellular automata activities: taking a simple game, setting it in motion, repeating the game over and over, with countless variations--to see what happens. Maybe Ray was intuitively playing his particular game in hopes of finding the variations that would take off, "come to life," or produce a huge complex "a lot" from a simple "not much." Was Ray successful...did he learn a lot from his "research" program? Who knows. Or perhaps Ray and Wolfram are simply enjoyable victims of an extremely high-level intellectual autistic compulsion and Wolfram has been able to rationalize his and Ray wasn't (and didn't seem to care to try). Maybe I am just seeing things that aren't there. If only Dick Higgins were still around. He could probably explain all of this. If you're one of those people whose interest in Fluxus involves "randomness" and "chance" operations, then I recommend spending a little time looking at Wolfram's stuff. Allen Bukoff P.S. While I'm at it: I think Ray Johnson was real different from the rest of the avant-garde pack of his contemporaries. If you were a "nobody" and sent him mail, you'd get back a ton of stuff in the mail from him. Multiple mailings. You'd always get more back then you put in. Try this with any of the other "name brand" avant-garde artists and you'd get back zilch, nada, nothing...or at best, you'd get a response representing a lot less time and effort than what you put into it. That was my experience, anyway. Ray Johnson turned the social "rules" and the general entropic principles of the art world heirarchy upside down. I don't even know if he was trying to do any of this! What WAS he doing? Ray Johnson bugs me.
