anna boschi-mail Art 50 2012 - Boek 861

Ray Johnson
50 years of Mail-art
It is unclear precisely how the Mail-Art was born, but we agree to find it a father, Ray Johnson The most famous
unknown artist in New York who founded the "New York Correspondance School" 1 in 1962, an informal network to
exchange mail, baptized by one of its correspondents Edward M. Plunkett and that Ray Johnson defined as: "the
only way to understand something at my school is taking part for a while. It's secret, private and has no rules." the art
of Ray Johnson was not exhibited or sold, we had access only through exchange. The mailing was a substitute to
the conventional circuit of galleries to disseminate his art.
One can of course find a lot of "ancestors" of mail art as the story begins with the invention of a mail transport
service (folds decorated of 18th century are known). This story is developing in the 19th century with the first
postcard (Austria - 1869) and experiences of artists: Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Erik Satie, and in the 20th century with
the Italian Futurists, the Dadaists, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp .. .
This was only the beginnings of a new art form: poetry or curious items, collages, letters whose address was in the
form of a riddle, a poem, a picture poem, stationery or postcards decorated which were trading in a narrow circle
of artists.
Ray Johnson has introduced new concepts: it is no more to make beautiful envelopes or broadcast a message to
one way, this is an act of artistic communication, an alternative way of disseminating his work , exchange and to
come into contact with the world.
In the ensuing years, other artists are reinventing the mail art. It was no longer a limited communication to a tight
inner circle of friends, on the contrary the network of exchanges should extend to infinity.
A dozen homes of mail art appeared during the late 1960s: in South America, Japan, the USA, Europe ... It was often
spontaneous homes with no direct link to Ray Johnson or Fluxus group and often ignoring their ancestors. And
to the early 1970s the Mail Art really get off and "networks" began to form connecting countries and continents.
The number of participants in these networks ranged from tens to hundreds. In total, several thousand mails artists
were active during the period 1970-1980. Today, there is a stable core of 300 to 500 practitioners and many casual
players. By 1970, exhibitions were held giving new impetus to the mail-art, the earliest and most notable include
Ray Johnson exhibition at Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970, the section Mail-Art organized by Jean-Marc
Poinsot at the Paris Biennale in 1971, Mantua Mail in Mantua in 1978, Mail-Art section of the Biennal of Sao Paulo
organized by Walter Zanini in 1981. Mail-art and has gained currency in the official exhibitions and some galleries,
but there is always an international network with hundreds of artists exchanging and communicating freely outside
institutional channels.
Daniel Daligand
May 2012
1 The spelling "correspondance" instead of "correspondence" in English was not a typo, but a deliberate choice of Ray Johnson.
He decided in 1973 that his school was dead and published a letter in the obituary column of the New York Times.
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