Ray Johnson, dead 17 years ago today: “I have simply had to accept the fact that out of a life necessity I have written a lot of letters, and given away a lot of material and information, and it has been a compulsion.”

Guy Bleus:

Mail-Art is an international network of hundreds of artists who apply communicationmedia as artmedia. It concerns networkers or mail-artists who distribute their work primarily via mail, and less or not via galeries and museums. Through the years thousands (sometimes 50.000 is mentioned) of artists and non-artists have participated to this artistic movement. Ray Johnson once got the historical titel of “Father of Mail-Art” and that will always remain.

Ina Blom:

Ray Johnson [was the] initiator of the international mail art movement, . . . one of the most complex and idiosyncratic art projects of the 20th Century. A painter associated with the New York School of painting, Johnson had started it all the mid-1950’s, slowly building up a network of correspondents who would exchange objects and messages through the postal system. Initially it was Johnson himself sending out small collage-like works to a mailing list, urging people to keep them, to add to them, to change them, to send them to others, to return to sender. In time others joined in this activity, and in the course of the 1960’s and 1970’s the network grew way beyond the immediate reach and touch of Johnson’s own mailing activities. The initial network was named The New York Correspondance School (sic) – a spin or pun on the idea of artistic schools and the concomitant idea of art history as a succession of such schools. But then the quip about the history of Mail Art was itself a pun, of the most serious kind. Like so many other avant-garde artists (who left painting and behind) Johnson waseager to cut through the historicist temporality that informed modern art history and art production, with its logic of continual succession and supersession of artistic tradition. Cutting through this logic meant placing the production and thinking of art within the immanence of an eternal present, an uncontrollable present of events, not unlike the eternally present liveness of television [or the Internet? -- PF] – a technology and a communication medium which was just at that moment appropriated for artistic purposes.

On January 13, 1995, Johnson was seen diving off a bridge in Sag Harbor, Long Island, and backstroking out to sea. His body washed up on the beach the following day.Many aspects of his death involved the number “13″: the date; his age, 67 (6+7=13); the room number of a motel he’d checked into earlier that day, 247 (2+4+7=13), etc. Some continue to speculate about a ‘last performance’ aspect of Johnson’s drowning. Hundreds of collages were found carefully arranged in his home. He left no will and his estate is now administered by Richard L. Feigen & Co.

Chuck Welch, otherwise known in the mail art network as the Crackerjack Kid, has been an active participant in the international mail art network since 1978. In March 1995 — over 2 months after Johnson’s drowning – Welch received in the mail Johnson’s last self-portrait.

Clive Phillpot, in “The Mailed Art of Ray Johnson,” writes:

Examining the elements of Ray Johnson’s work, or disentangling the threads of his activity, would not be so worthwhile if he were not a superb graphic artist who pursues the embodiment of his thoughts with consummate economy and skill – and wit. The movements of his hand are responsive to the fluidity of his verbal and visual ideas. He animates the most unpromising shapes: he makes life flicker in the simplest forms. He is highly sensitive to words, both the way they look and the way they sound. He detects words within words, puns, and other oddities as easily as a heat-seeking missile rips through skeins of camouflage. He shapes letters and words deliberately and effortlessly, giving them, too, an organic life. He also knows how to animate the page, how to make the white spaces buzz. He combines pictures and texts in new, hybrid forms that seem genetically determined.

Mailings from Ray Johnson are a concatenation of ideas, sometimes distinct or decipherable, sometimes slippeng or sliding into one another Thus , Johnsonian physiognomical and biographical images mingle with recycled images of earlier work, with facets of a current art, and with other uncategorizable motifs and insertions, almost paralleling he flux of thought itself. Any of these elements may also overprinted with other images or texts, so that a mailing may be literally multilayered.

Reading such mail is simpler than reading a collage, for the layered elements can generally be isolated and examined. But Ray Johnson’s mind is so fertile, information-rich, and cross-connected, so full of potential visual and verbal associations, metaphors, puns, and rhymes, that while the flavor of his work may be enjoyed, some of the ingredients may remain mysterious. An unanticipated incident, image, or remark sets the Johnsonian circuits humming, and images and ideas print out that relate overtly or obscurely to the stimulus. Ray Johnson’s thinking is marvelously fluid and full of Leonardesque eddies. His ideas move and change, swerve and submerge, but continue on like a river.

Ray Johnson, however, describes the production of these “concatenations of ideas” as the result of his compulsion to give away material and information:

[T]he New York Correspondence School has no history, only a present, which was a pun, of course, on present as now, and present as a gift, a pun on my way of giving information and objects or whatever in letterform. . . .

I’d like to do my own history as to what I think happened. Every time I get any publicity or press everybody has a different version as to when anything happened or as to what anything was and I myself don’t even know when anything happened, or what happened . . . .

I have simply had to accept the fact that out of a life necessity I have written a lot of letters, and given away a lot of material and information, and it has been a compulsion. And as I’ve done this, it has become historical. It’s my resumé, it’s my biography, it’s my history, it’s my life. And now, people always come up and say, “oh, you’re the father, you’re the father of mail art, and everybody got the idea of it from you, or was influenced by you” . . .