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Reconsidering Mail Art: 1960-1980, a definition and brief history… What is it? Mail Art, or the term I prefer: Correspondence Art, was about communication, a shared discourse about experience. It was also a network, a complex of interweaving relations, which occurred among thousands of artists and individuals on an international scale. During the decades 1960-1980, ten thousand people or more may have participated, and among them were hundreds who were regular participants. Correspondence Art was a lively search for communication forms that produced expansive, transformative models. Those models had recognizable effects on the aesthetic and psychological growth of participants, and provided options for realizing change and survival in those arenas. The network helped develop awareness and encouraged action(s). To some participants the very existence of a network symbolized all these possibilities. Over the years the network involved persons on all continents, save Antarctica, and stretched from Japan and Australia across the Americas all the way to Eastern Europe. This mailing activity expanded horizons beyond local or regional limits, and provided access to information unavailable elsewhere. The network could be seen as experimental, especially when compared to market-based operations and interests (read galleries, museums, collectors and the “95% rule”). There was also much that was just a popular fad, a quick and easy way to make art. On the surface it seemed to embrace a rejection of art history, criticism, business functions and other aspects of the art world that were considered distasteful and oppressive to participants. Often the activity expressed concern with the crucial issues of the day, but without assuming the responsibility for producing real outcomes or responding to challenging feedback. Many have critiqued the activity for not realizing its more positive potentials—and while they may have existed, were not always constant or visible on a large scale, and tended to vary with the times, culture, settings and the moods, talents, spirit and determination of the participants. Much like other art. For some, Correspondence Art was a serious activity, aimed toward establishing a community and participating in the life of the network. For others it was a fun and gregarious activity, something like pen pals. Some saw the phenomenon as a tool for injecting society with the means for realizing greater human achievements. Claims were made for the ability of the activity to effect widespread change—albeit from a grass roots or marginal level. Others considered their mailings as strictly personal or private. Correspondence Art could be about aesthetic issues, or, as it was most often, mostly about sending aesthetic messages—or snail-mail twittering. Some saw it as a way to incorporate life into art, or vice versa, or didn’t care. Others saw the activity as a means to provide an international community with a sense of connection and to provide a form of psychological support—especially for those not living in an approved urban art setting. During the years 1960-1980 this activity flourished and grew. In order to gain a perspective on what it was, it might be useful to consider what it was not. It was not new— this was an activity built upon images and texts for the most part—connected to the inventions of writing, the printing press, postal system and to a broad history and transformations in image making. It was not avant-garde. In an art world operating without overriding paradigms the notion of a rear guard that someone was defending had disappeared. It was also not an underground activity—because beginning in the 1970’s it began to go public and appeared in galleries, museums and art centers at exponential rates. Books, magazines and catalogues of this work achieved wide distribution and accessibility. Correspondence Art was not a movement or an “-ism.” The activity was pluralistic and diverse and defied easy classification. It cut across many historical traditions without subscribing to any one in particular. Finally, it was also not about the postal system, although it used those means for it ends. The postal system allowed the activity to occur and was the basis from which it operated, but the post office was not the object and was only rarely the subject of this art making. In the book Correspondence Art, I approached a definition and overview of the activity by overlaying a variation on a basic theory of communication. This read: who says what to whom, by what channel, for what purpose, to what effect. The “who” and “whom” in the model were easy. They were the senders and receivers of these aesthetic messages, whether intentional participants or not. Theoretically they were interchangeable, especially when using two-way communicating models though this was not always the case. Generally mailers kept things between themselves, and the majority of the works that constituted the field were sent and received between individuals. Later, emergent activities like mail art shows and publications revealed the activity to a more anonymous public, and helped it spread at the same time. The “what” of the paradigm refers to the content, or meaning in the messages. This gets very unwieldy. Images and ideas about art, life, self, world, politics, relationships, gender, sexual orientation, philosophy, science, communication, time, space, gossip, mysticism, games and secrets and much, much more, proliferated and were bountiful. The proof in this pudding depended on the degree to which participants or viewers were informed, enriched, or nurtured despite the sheer volume and diversity of the content of the messages. You quickly learned to sort through a lot to find meaning—kind of like surfing the web. “Channel” referred to the “how” of mail art activities. Since all the works eventually entered the international postal system, there were inbuilt constraints. Letters, envelopes, postcards and objects weighing less than 70 pounds predominated. Also abundant was a use of stamps and rubber stamps that approximated their bureaucratic counterparts, often with tongue-in-cheek, or other delightful results. And like I said before, eventually shows and publications also became carriers for disseminating these works. Some mail art was no different from ordinary mail—impersonal, and spam-like. But the works that embraced the spirit and intention of two-way communications, and, participating in a network helped define mail art as a distinct entity. “Purposes” and “effects” were sometimes difficult to discern. This might have been the fault of the sender—ambiguous or obscure message(s); of the receiver—misperception, misunderstanding, lack of other language skills; or of the postal service—destruction, loss, or censorship. Some of the intended purposes senders stated were to amuse, delight, anger, shock, inquire, compare, confound, inform, signify, affirm, negate, record, satirize or destroy. Some of the effects reported to me included: gains in knowledge, vision, understanding, awareness, dialogue, feedback, growth, choice, change, survival, and even boredom. Communications today still retain all these features. Where did it come from? The short answer is: Ray Johnson, Fluxus and the French New Realistes. In that descending order. Ray Johnson Ray Johnson is the most widely known mail artist. There have been more exhibitions, articles, interviews and reviews devoted to him and his mailing activities than any other artist on the network. Not only was Johnson the most persistent and prolific mail artist, his involvement can be traced back to the late 1940’s. He was personally responsible for spreading the activity—starting from a small personal list and eventually gaining enough critical mass to evolve into the activity we are examining here. In most corners, Ray Johnson is considered to have been the father of the field. Johnson has been affectionately referred to as the Master, the Mr. Citizen, and the personage of mail art. His reputation does not end there. To some, Johnson is the “Dada Daddy” of mail art. To others he was seen as a grand eccentric, or a ‘monkish-type’ of person. His role and reputation were maintained in part by elusiveness, mystery and curiosity that surrounded the Johnson persona. He has been described as intimate, funny and hip—playing the role of the romantic avant-garde hero; not in a profoundly serious sense, but in a light and joking manner—good at words, associations, and game playing. On the other side of the coin are those who found Johnson very difficult, even “the hardest fucking man to get stuff out of.” No matter the reaction to Johnson, his role and importance to the field has been established, documented and remains intact. Ray Johnson sought to bring extremes together. This notion was consistent in his work whether the approach he took was witty or seductive, of confounding and irritating. The attitude of Johnson’s mailings ranged from entertaining, amusing or educational, to being negative and contrary. His works are clever and attractive, and his role as a communication artist was unique. Johnson’s content was typically imbued with loose associations and references about people and relationships, or between people and objects. His work appeared as drawings, collages, Xeroxes and postcard messages, which combined image and text to delightful effect (most of the time anyway). In a 1976 show catalogue from the North Carolina Museum of Art, curator Moussa Domit explains: “The meaning of Ray Johnson’s art

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