Re: (",) Re:Ray Johnson en rapport with mail art

[PARLLW]

Ray Johnson has been classified as a Pop Artist.  A more adequate way to describe him is to say that he was first within Pop Art, among Pop Artists, but later he was next to Pop Artists.  He made many collages which he designated as “portraits” of other artists.  His collage and his mail-art were elaborations of each other, governed by the same images and ideas.  I have written a statement  only as a preliminary sketch of the theme of “friendship” in the life and art of Ray Johnson. --Bill Wilson                            Ray Johnson: en rapport      Paul Cezanne, August 1906: "…le tout est de mettre le plus de rapport possible…"   Ray Johnson responded to the work of other artists as friendly communications to him.  He reciprocated with collages which mention those artists with whom he experienced rapport.  He often mailed envelopes with notes addressed to those artists, sometimes with apt images that related to a work of art, or to the artist, but always obliquely.  He never pointed toward something deep and perhaps secret, but always directed attention toward something available on the surface.  With his collages, his notes, and his lists of artists, Ray constructed more inter-relations with more artists than anyone else working from 1955 to 1995.    Ray also began to send apt images in the mail to people other than artists.   By 1961, he began to ask a recipient to relay an image to someone else, thereby starting a network which in 1962 became the New York Correspondance School of Art.   Ray encouraged thousands of people to participate in disinterested aesthetic actions, rather than remain outside art as observers.  By 2006, when postal mail has overlapped electronic mail, Ray’s network has become an international self-developing system of communication of aesthetic images and events.   By the summer of 1944, his seventeenth summer, Ray found himself safe in a field of visual artists.  By the summer of 1948, he was a twenty-year-old student at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina.   As he wrote in 1974, he "…walked with Bill and Elaine one sad evening up 'the Road' when they had just heard about Gorky's death."   Bill and Elaine were Willem and Elaine de Kooning, painters who befriended Ray.  So he walked and talked with American painters who were struggling with the achievements of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso in the European background, and of Arshile Gorky in the American foreground.   At Black Mountain College, Ray studied the relativity of colors with Josef Albers.  He became friends with Robert Rauschenberg, Sue Weil, Cy Twombly and Stan Vanderbeek.  He learned beside students like Ruth Asawa, Arthur Penn, and Kenneth Snelson, a group who were mediating among European Modernisms and American pragmatisms.  Forty years later, he reproportioned his chronology by adding that he had studied painting with Lyonel Feininger.   When opening himself toward Europe, he listened to music like Gregorian chants that he had never heard in Detroit, but also 20th century music from France and Germany. When opening himself toward Asia, he studied Asian religio-philosophies to learn how to get ideas to disappear into actions, and how to fill abstract concepts with concrete sensory experiences.    Through books and magazines from Europe, Ray became familiar with the paintings of Paul Klee, the poems of Antonio Machado, and the collages of Kurt Schwitters, John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch. He met Walter Gropius and Buckminster Fuller.  Thus he arose in the midst of Euro-American Modernisms in painting, music, dance, poetry, films, architecture, and other arts, including the weaving of Anni Albers.   He followed the gaze of immigrant European artists toward Native American Indian art, design and architecture, and participated in the study and use of the languages of Mayan glyphs, images which spoke to Josef Albers, Ben Shahn and Max Ernst.   By 1952 Ray lived on Monroe Street, in Manhattan, with artists who used the hypotheses of art in ordinary events.   He deepened his acquaintance with his neighbors, John Cage and Merce Cunningham, two artists who adapted the methods and values they used in the construction of their arts to their construction of daily life.   John and Merce made indeterminacy a way of life, but always in tension with precise knowledge and information, so that no one would eat a poisonous mushroom, and no one would break a bone.   Richard Lippold brought Ray to concerts, parties and openings of shows in galleries, where he met artists like Philip Guston, Kenzo Okada, Alphonse Ossorio, Hedda Sterne and Marcel Duchamp.  Thus Ray learned Modernism through direct acquaintance with artists, their families and friends.   At that time, Manhattan in the 1950s, the realms of visual art and of music had several hierarchies, but the number of people in any group was small.   Although most artists might stay within their group of sympathetic artists, Ray was taken to uptown mansions and downtown lofts, where marginal artists found margins in which to reconstruct life and art.    Settled in New York, Ray was able to exhibit with the American Abstract Artists, because at Black Mountain College he had studied with Ilya Bolotowsky.  As late as 1953, the visual and verbal thoughts of painters such as Piet Mondrian inspired paintings of Euclidian geometric forms.  In those early paintings in oil, Ray experimented with abstract objects like circles and triangles, shapes conveying ideas that can lead out of sensory experience toward transcendence.   But after a few seasons in New York, his thoughts turned from participation in transcendental forms like perfect circles and pure triangles, toward immersion in total immanence.   As he subsumed his earlier formalist education in the construction of his own life-world, he began to work with images clipped from magazines and books.  So where once Ray's abstract paintings had been answerable to the paintings of Piet Mondrian, soon photographs of Mondrian became images in collages.   The aesthetic theories of Mondrian seemed less useful and inspiring than stories of Mondrian improvising dance-steps to Boogie Woogie.      Ray's friendships with Black Mountain College faculty and students opened him to new acquaintances in New York, so that he met and interacted with George Brecht, Robert Watts, Oyvind Falhstrom, James Lee Byars, Christo and Jeanne-Claude.  He developed friendships with artists in Chicago, especially Karl Wirsum, and he responded to artists in California who seemed to travel light though the history of art.  He felt visually refreshed by early issues of Art Forum for which Ed Rusha composed the pages.  Rusha gave even a casual reader an experience of visual design that acknowledged the surface of the page as a page, rather than manipulating sight away from the page toward a product.   Rusha and Ray in different ways both used the format of advertisements as an expressive art-supply.    While Ray was a man who felt empty in several ways, and who philosophised about Nothing and Nothingness, he appreciated artists and their art.  The artists he responded to, often in collages sometimes designated as "portraits," were the artists with whom he felt rapport.   After all, he and Andy Warhol were together, if only by being far from their birth-places, and not in danger of sinking back into them.   Ray would discover a rapport with an artist, and then reveal that rapport in a collage, even in a series of collages.  His collages, as works of art about artists, did the work of gratitude, giving back appreciations for having been given so much.   Ray often gave away more art than he sold, because he preferred the rapport of the gift to the anxieties of a sale.  He eagerly made his portraits of artists, but he was reluctant to sell them lest he appear to be profiting on a friendship.   So he worked, largely ignoring fame and the sales of art, to give thanks for the astonishments that each artist gave him.     On that plane, Picasso was like a distant cousin who had been generous with Ray, doing favors that prompted him to return the favors, even though they had never met.  Yet in his own time and place, he could actually sit in cafés with Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, or drink beer with aesthetic kinfolk in the Cedar Tavern.  He was aware, touching the hands of Elaine and Willem de Kooning, that he touched the hands that had touched the hands of Arshile Gorky.   In later years he sat at a table in Studio 54 with Salvadore Dali and his body-guard, whom Ray identified as Dali's life-guard.    A work of art is constructed of interrelations among parts, and one of the parts of Ray’s art was often the name, or the silhouette, of another artist.   Because of his collages of Elvis Presley and James Dean from 1956-57, he was among the earliest Pop artists.  Then, as Pop Art became popular, he became the artist who used the names and images of other artists in his own art.   He made collages about Pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.  His collages about Pop artists over-lapped his mail-art, wherein he mailed apt images about Pop Art to other artists, including Jim Rosenquist and Chuck Close.   While the implications of most Pop Artists were folded into their paintings for unity and coherence, the implications in Ray's images stretched toward other artists with whom he felt alliances.   Thus he was next-of-kin to Fluxus artists, while preserving a flexible interval between him and them.  He played games of near-&-far, of now-you-see-me, now-you-don't, with Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, Robert Filliou, George Macunias, Daniel Spoerri and Geoff Hendricks, while making perhaps twenty portraits of Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik.   He was an artist who introduced many artists to each other, ignoring hierarchies, constructing his own network by bringing Arman to meet May Wilson.   He was aware of the American Declaration of Independence, and in 1976 combined John Hancock, who signed the Declaration conspicuously, with Lynda Benglis.  He juxtaposed a silhouette of George Washington with a profile of Marcel Duchamp as two of his liberators.     Ray was the artist of cross-references and inter-relations.  He and his art were independent, but he was dependent on his inter-dependencies.  So, given the satisfactions of complex interrelations, how could Ray judge that everything is nothing?   Part of an answer is in the status of relations and interrelations in Ray's experiences.   He was so intent on constructing fields of relations that anything that entered his life must yield interrelations, or else not exist for him.  Thus Ray was open to communication with anyone, anywhere, at any time.  He held "meetings" for people, among them many artists, where nothing much happened but their meeting en rapport.   Another answer is that Ray was aware that abstract relations are not physical, but are as weightless and immaterial as aesthetic illusions.  For Ray, interrelations were felt at the time as evanescent, always about to evaporate like dew, and they were ephemeral, often as brief as haiku noting the disappearance of dew.  His relations with other artists existed in his consciousness of them, a consciousness he had long planned to end by drowning.   So, even in astonishingly full moments of immediacy and indeterminacy, he sensed that relations were ultimately nothing.  Yet while he lived, the rapports Ray Johnson constructed with other artists, and among other artists, were everything.    __._,_.___ To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mailinglist from Sztuka Fabryka http://www.sztuka-fabryka.be/ SPONSORED LINKS Network storage Network management Network performance management Network security Network performance Network switch YAHOO! 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