okay, i was just over at crosses.net trying to find some of this bad rain comments (to no avail) but i did see the flood of spam that is on it now: how can rain rien nevermind be blamed for this?
on the other hand i did find this wonderful message from bill wilson (won't you please start posting again bill?): Author: Bill Wilson (---.proxy.aol.com) Date: 02-07-03 19:10 During the 1960s, a few people using the postal system for aesthetic more than practical communications organized into a self-developing network of visual conversation, eventually calling itself mail-art. A mail-artist was put to the expense of stamps. Stamps have an odd relation to money, because of seigniorage, the difference between the face-value of a stamp and the cost of its production. A $5.00 stamp costs no more to print than a $00.01 cent stamp, so that correlations between financial value and use value are broken, leaving a gap where meanings can appear. Stamps have another oddity in that after use, the financial value of a stamp for a collection can be higher than the face value, a collector possibly paying $5.00 for a cancelled 1 cent stamp, but no more than 1 cent for a cancelled $5.00 stamp. In mail-art, the price of stamps is a small expenditure of a quantity of money that has no rational relation to the aesthetic value (information) that can be added to a stamp. A mail-artist can get more energy out of a stamp than an ordinary person mailing a letter can. The artist can use a stamp as an image that will combine with other parts of the mail-art, so that the stamp can enter the whole experience of mail-art differently from the indifferent use of stamps, or metered machines, in ordinary mail. Of course sometimes, case-by-case, not always, since many accidents occur at the cross- roads where mail-art intersects money. A stamp can cost twenty-three cents, but the witty deployment of the stamp might be priceless, as aesthetic gestures are. In one direction, outgoing money, the mail- artist may have to spend money for stamps in order to mail the mail- art away to someone---spending money to give something away, that's an emancipation from getting and spending, buying and selling. In the other direction, in-coming money, the mail-artist who has spent small sums of money has not usually sold mail-art, because selling would annihilate the meaning of the art as a gift. Taking a loss of money gives the mail-artist much to think about, for that act, at least for a moment, releases the mail-artist from the calculations of the financial system, opening a system that would if it is not opposed close over every experience of life. With advertisements using every private moment, and each nook and cranny of the body, in order to sell a commodity at a profit, the profitlessness of mail-art has been an emancipation, a moment of economic truancy and mischief, as irrational as love. A mail-artist reciprocating to another mail- artist is a relation that is weightless and free, a reproach to other relations, especially those that involve money. The materials for early Johnsonian mail-art were often paper objects that might have been discarded as trash if they hadn't been redesignated as part of an experience of art. The twist then is that something that might have been thrown away is given away, rising in the hierarchy of values from trash to art. The film by Agnes Varda, The Gleaners and I, along with its sequel on the DVD, records people who collect trash as supplies for art. A more informative title in English would be, Other Gleaners and This Gleaner, since Varda is not merely an observer of gleaning, but a participant/observer, one whose whole film gleans the gleaners. Every gleaner in her documentary is thinking about freedom from the financial economy, rather than how to surrender to that economy, so that each has a touch of the artist. During the 1960s, mail-artists surfaced with an ethic within their aesthetic, following self-set rules, and thinking with their activities about temptations to acquisitiveness and possessiveness. A few years before his drowning, Ray Johnson checked with Buster Cleveland to see if I had relayed to Buster an exquisite little box with a tiny ladder, and the explicit instructions, "Please send to Buster Cleveland." When Buster phoned me, both to thank me for relaying the mail-art, and to tell me about Ray's investigation of me thirty-five years into our friendship, he said that his discipline was to mail Ray Johnson's objects immediately to the designated recipient, lest he yield to temptations to possess the objects. Such mail-artists necessarily contemplated the relations between aesthetic values and financial expenditures, but especially the concept of selling in relation to the concept of the gift. Yet by 1970, Yoko One was planning to sell at auction the postcards she exchanged with Ultra Violet, which was their privilege, and perhaps the auction could be subsumed within an aesthetic performance. However, for Ray Johnson, the party was over, although partying continued (maybe this was near the time when people started to pay to go to parties, another sacrifice of meanings an old man can but rave about). In the early 1970s a curator who had received free Ray Johnson mail-art sold some, and then wrote to him requesting that he send her millions of pieces of mail-art (I have her note to Ray, which he gave me, changing the meaning of her message by encapsulating it in his gift). I have no objection to anything people do with their "mail-art," something else important might emerge, and it's none of my business. However I do want acknowledgement of the loss of a theme which will be given away, with no reciprocity compensating for the loss, if mail- art is made with an awareness that it might be sold. No greater themes exist than are bundled in the concept of the gift. Mail- artists necessarily unpack the concept of the "gift," and the experience of being free from money, and they must say for themselves what such experiences are worth to them. At least in his work, Ray Johnson gave not only interesting pieces of paper, but with each "gift" he gave the theme of gift. With his work, thinking about art was thinking about "free," and the constrictions and unpleasantness that money brought into art. When a work of art enters the market for art, it enters a system that would close down over art with its own calculation of quantitative values. Financial meanings suffocate art when thoughts of money weigh down the aesthetic thoughts. Museums, which have been deconstructed accusingly for their politics, have at least usefully emancipated art from the market- place, allowing it to escape the closed classifications of the market. Now the selling of art from their collections by museums compromises or betrays their function of dissociating art from money. Apparently the Guggenheim Museum cannot afford to keep a few of its paintings, for it both sells paintings and trashes its moral and aesthetic values. Even if its punishment is what it has become, such punishment punishes everyone who needs to use museums to outdo and undo commercial uses. To cross from aesthetic values to financial values is dangerous for any artist, but some can make expressive art that is about money and investments, so again, the system of art is unsystematic, and money cannot be ruled out as a subject for art. Andy Warhol pretended that his art was subjected to money, and sometimes made money the subject of his art. However as the prices for his paintings have increased, those prices have become expressive of meanings that are different from rational financial calculations. That is, the prices are subject to principles like those that animate the arts. But Warhol's success in outwitting financial calculations, that is, in satirizing and subverting rational finances, is impossible to imitate. Under ordinary circumstances of finance and art, any "art" that does not conform to the sphere of finance loses its place. The financial "sphere," as a sphere, has a uniform curvature to which the art must conform or be debarred. Since a sphere has no margins, art that does not fit the uniform sphere is excluded, so that if it is to exist, it must construct a place for itself. Such a place has already been constructed in part by mail- artists, a rare achievement, so that people might want to think about that achievement before tossing it away, if only because they would be "giving away" something that was a gift to them, the structures and functions and meanings of a mail-art network that was not of their making. One of the attractions of art, and of a life of art, is that art as such, and postal art usually, participate in open aesthetic systems that money can only try to close down over, yet can't, unless the artists help. To commercialize mail-art would subordinate the meanings of mail-art to the meanings of money, so choices arise. Two alternatives at the moment are, 1) to intensify the meanings of mail-art in relation to closed systems, as in mail- art responding to themes like Mad Cow Disease and war, helping to open vents in oppressive events; or 2)to subordinate the open system of mail-art to commercial systems. With enough imagination, mail- artists might be able to prevail over commercial calculations with aesthetic meanings and values, yet they have work to do if they want to participate in the meaning of gifts, that is, of art that is free. If an artist commercializes mail-art, then if even once when making mail-art the artist is swayed by thoughts of marketability, then the self-constructed freedom of the artist would be constricted. People are only as free as the acts they perform which construct their freedom (see Miranda and Ferdinand in Shakespeare's The Tempest for how to achieve the freedom that a father might want for his daughter, yet cannot give her as his gift, because freedom is a self- construction. Prospero can but provide the circumstances for her to construct her freedom by choosing to perform acts that free her, much as mail-artists can do, as they might realize when "stealing" time at work to read this message about mail-art.) 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. But if mail-artists are artists, they are elastic, so that no one can predict the shapes such shape-shifters might evolve. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> In low income neighborhoods, 84% do not own computers. At Network for Good, help bridge the Digital Divide! http://us.click.yahoo.com/S.QlOD/3MnJAA/Zx0JAA/fuDrlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mailinglist from Sztuka Fabryka http://www.sztuka-fabryka.be/ Yahoo! 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