--- In ma-network@yahoogroups.com, par...@... wrote:
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.
RAIN RIEN NEVERMIND
BROTHER FROM ANOTHER MOTHER's POTATO MASHER WROTE ::
Journalist Survive on Catch Phrases. YES WE CAN O WORMS !
Instead of father of mail art
Ray Johnson the Event Tour of Performative Chorus Sponge Dance
While @t least covertly accurate is TOO MUCH for Journalist to Wallow in...
much less swallow HOOK LINE and SINK CORE.
Marianne Moore's LAPELS
Ray Johnson CLIP HEART
