"A new book out soon about a mail art pioneer who was sending weird things
through the post before Ray Johnson was even born!" And after that birth,
in high school, Ray began a relay of notes passed in class (I have a note
passed to "Pete" in 1943-1944, asking Pete to write back), and then,
uniquely, he founded a network of personal exchanges within the impersonal
postal
system. Bray's brilliant tests of the postal system have their profound
meanings, as with the mailings of Daniel Wenk in our own time. However,
Ray, who fathered nothing, certainly never founded "mail art," or claimed to.
Bray's values in his trials of postal systems are quite different from the
moral value of reciprocities within Ray's original network of performative
mail events. He got strangers to participate in the overlapping friendly
relays of mail. The tiresome journalistic misrepresentation, that Ray was
"the father of mail art," needs to explain itself, or to be replaced with
the truth about his network.
