Queens Library Gallery : Transmit

These are the invitation and the first pages of a catalogue of the exhibition TRANSMIT held in 1999 at the Queens Library Gallery in New York. The theme: Fluxus, Mail-Art, Networks.

Brochure Fluxus and Mail-Art

Brochure 5 generations in Mail-Art

Article in Broken Pencil - USA

The Undying Art of Mail

We used to send mail, and there used to be an underground movement of artists who made mail art. Laura Trethewey tracks down the artists who made the postal system an integral part of their work to find out how mail art is faring in the age of the Internet.

see: http://www.brokenpencil.com

Some help for Beginners in Networking

Drawing made by Ruud Janssen to explain some of the terms used in Networking. Not complete, but the essence of names used when explaining Networking.

New Book: Thesis Honoria

Title: Thesis Honoria

ID: 8151869
Category: Arts & Photography

Description:

The Dissertation Committee for Honoria Madelyn Kim Starbuck Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Clashing and Converging: Effects of the Internet on the Correspondence Art Network.

Publisher: TAM-Publications
Copyright Year: © 2010 by Honoria Starbuck
Language: English
Originaly written in 2003

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/thesis-honoria/8151869

The book is FREE for download. A printed version is available on non-profit basis.

New BOOK!

Paperback book €19.99 Printed: 280 pages, 20.99 cm x 29.7 cm, perfect binding, white interior paper (55# weight), black and white interior ink, white exterior paper (90# weight), full-colour exterior ink


Description:

B&W Version of Statements Collection on Mail-Art by Ruud Janssen. Reprint of statements written in period 1993-2008 on the subject of mail-art. These statements were first published as pamphlets. Later on the Internet, and now as a collection in one book. Some statements and texts were also published on the Internet first and later as print-out sent into the network. The last part of this book contains visual statements made when the Millennium came about and most recent is an overview of the slides used at a lecture at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam explaining the concept of mail-art. In the past 28 years Ruud Janssen has intensively written about how E-mail and Internet would change mail-art, and it has.

A colour-version of the book is also available. See an overview of all publications at:

http://stores.lulu.com/iuoma

Enjoy reading this book!

French postcards

THE NEW YORKER

September 24, 2008

French Postcards

A blogger on Libération?s Web site, Agnès Viard, reports that, in June, in Cahors, in the southwest of France, the mail artist Philippe Pissier (pronounced piece-Y¥) was being subjected to criminal investigation for having mailed a postcard of a bare-breasted woman, a nipple pierced with a safety pin, to a German exhibit of erotic mail art that had invited him to participate. After the assistant prosecutor Isabelle Ardeef began the investigation, Pissier was informed that he risked three years in prison and a fine of 175,000 euros for the crime of ?disturbing public order and mentally endangering children by means of a pornographic work.? The following month, his computer and many of his works were confiscated, but the artist has remained without official word since then. As Pissier remarked,

I am an adult, the mail sorters are adults, the mailman is an adult, and the addressee is an adult. I don?t see what the problem is.

The local press has weighed in, heaping scorn on Ardeef for the inquiry. Giard reminds readers that such paintings as ?Gabrielle d?Estrées,? by an anonymous French artist of the sixteenth century, is on open display at the Louvre, including to minors. ?Le ridicule ne tue pas? (?You can?t be killed by ridicule?), the French say; but officials there would do well to remember that, in 1966, Charles de Gaulle?s regime was shaken by its (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to ban Jacques Rivette?s movie ?La Religieuse,? a misstep that definitively revealed the aged President?s incommensurable distance from modern life.

Posted by Richard BrodyIn
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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/goingson/2008/09/french-postcard.html

http://pissierarchives.canalblog.com

Queens Library Gallery : Transmit

These are the invitation and the first pages of a catalogue of the exhibition TRANSMIT held in 1999 at the Queens Library Gallery in New York. The theme: Fluxus, Mail-Art, Networks.

Thoughts on Mail-Art

A hard-copy version of the first 10 thoughts I wrote for the Internet. The online version is still available at: http://www.iuoma.org/overview.html and a direct access to all the texts you can find though: http://www.iuoma.org/secret_9.html. All the texts are hyperlinked, so you can jump from one text to another. Realize that the texts are old ones. They are my views from back then.

Historikal Panel - USA

An Authentik and Historikal Panel on the Phenomenon of Mail Art
June 10, 2008

We are pleased to welcome five major figures in the Mail Art movement to speak about this unique and vital art form at a panel discussion on Friday, June 13, 2008, at 6:30pm.

The panel discussion is entitled: "An Authentik and Historikal Panel on the Phenomenon of Mail Art," and will focus on the origins of this art form and how it continues to be a critical and subversive medium in a society where modes of communication are undergoing rapid upheavals.
Panelists will include:

John Held, Jr. (Moderator) has been involved with Mail Art since 1975. He has written extensively on Mail Art and is viewed as a leading historian of the art form. He has had dozens of solo and group exhibitions in America and Europe, has appeared in multiple Performance Art pieces, has guest-curated and lectured widely, and has direct connections and long-term collaborative partnerships with many major figures in Mail Art.

A.A. Bronson is an artist whose work has spanned multiple genres and various modern media. He is currently Executive Director of Printed Matter, an organization in New York that is dedicated to the cultivation and dispersal of the artist’s book. He was also a founding member of General Idea, an artist collective from Canada.

John Evans has collaborated with almost every major Mail Arts figure of the last thirty years. His involvement with the movement began in the mid-1960s, and he continues to show in New York and in Europe. Evans uses the tool of collage and the philosophy of inclusion to express his personal sense of irony, humor and shifting aesthetic and socio-political ideas.

Barbara Moore is an art historian, writer, and former rare-book dealer specializing in avant-garde art of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. She was first editor at Dick Higgins's seminal Something Else Press. Since then she has written essays on and curated exhibitions of artist's books, multiples, and alternative media. She curated the first Fluxus exhibition in New York.

Martha Wilson is the Founding Director of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc., an artist’s center in New York which since its inception in 1976 has presented and preserved temporal art: artists’ books and other multiples produced internationally after 1960; temporary installations; and performance art. Trained in English literature, Ms. Wilson was teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design when she became fascinated by the art field in which text and image intersect.

William S. Wilson is a historian, art critic, and novelist. He has written extensively on Mail Art and is regarded as an authority on Ray Johnson, a major figure in the New York artistic community. He received his PhD in English Literature from Yale in 1961.

source: http://www.centerforbookarts.org/news/2008/06/authentik-and-historikal-panel-on.shtml

The Present of Mail-Art

Ray Johnson: The Present of Mail Art
by Ina Blom

Content Tags: Ina Blom, Ray, The Correspondance School

“Mail Art has no history, only a present”. These words, written by Ray Johnson, initiator of the international mail art movement, provide a key to 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 was eager 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 – a technology and a communication medium which was just at that moment appropriated for artistic purposes.
But then mail art was seen as one of the new “communication arts”, a form of media aesthetics that evolved alongside video art as well as the new questioning of distribution and public access that informed much of the new performative and conceptual art practices: A collage-like work by Ray Johnson even claims to present a “history of video art”, however idiosyncratic. It is in this precise sense that mail art could be said to only have “a present” – a present of communicational events, of uncontrollable exchanges, of things arriving and departing at unforeseen times and places, thanks to the medium of postal system, which, just like television, could be seen to distribute “signals” across the boundaries of time and space. However, the second (punning) meaning of “present” – present meaning gift – was just as important to the logic of Johnson’s postal system. Mail art had no history, since – unlike a modernist art that seems to reside in an independent realm of ever-evolving formal development – it could be seen to place itself squarely in the realm of social exchanges, that is the realm whose entire principle of circulation and reciprocity is kept in check by the system of gifts. Anthropologists see this phenomenon at work, with different ritualistic expressions, in every known culture: the phenomenon of gift exchanges (whose rules are both uncannily similar to and emphatically different from trade and barter) is what ensures the existence of true collectivity. The association of mail art with the rules and ambiguities of gift giving is present in Ray Johnson’s reflections on his artistic practice from the late 1950’s onwards. It is then also what makes it possible to see his artistic practice as a significant contribution to the 1960’s emphasis on situational or relational art practices, practices designed to intervene in social reality, to question existing social form or to try to form new types of collectives or to rethink collectivity tout court. And the emphatic return to these artistic concerns in contemporary art is among the things that accounts for the actuality of Ray Johnson’s lifelong artwork.
But to engage with this actuality is also to be confronted with the question of what exactly Ray Johnson’s present(s) consisted of, what exactly one got when one received a mailing by Ray Johnson and what it meant to be a part of his collectivity of mailers. The answer is complicated, to say the least. In contrast to the social contract set up by the international mail art movement as it evolved on its own accord (a contract informed by ideals of infinite sharing, of non-competition, of giving without thoughts of return, while resting assured that giver’s receive etc.), Johnson at every twist and turn seems to undercut the social ties seemingly established by his practice of gift giving, in fact to continually question the very concepts of communication, communion and community that are associated with it. Hyper-conscious of the ambiguities of gift giving (the difficult power balance between giver and receiver, the difficult distinction between coercion and voluntary action, between ritual and spontaneity and between gift and mere exchange), Johnson exploited the corresponding ambiguities of the modern postal system – a system founded on the premise that messages always reach their destination, but whose rich mythology is shot through with the anxiety provoked by the idea of non-received, displaced, returned and refused messages. At every level – from the semantic techniques deployed in his writings, to his organization of visual material, to the idiosyncratic pragmatics of his mailing practice – Johnson evokes the same reality of associations promised and associations unmade, ruptured, dispersed. His presents are, in other words, full of nothing, and his non-historical present fundamentally undercut by absence: with Johnson there is never any guarantee of community, of the perfect social immanence of togetherness and understanding. Johnson reciprocates, but only through interruption. He organized meetings and assemblies (of the NYCS members), but these meetings were without content or purpose, as if mere gatherings of names on a mailing list. But then concept of nothing informed his artistic project in so many ways, from his mailings to performance-like activities to his rare exhibitions: it organized his very thinking on art and on the role of art and aesthetics in relation to that entity called the social. Through this means continually opened up of the question of sociality itself, the very meaning of notion of “the social”. At a time when so much artistic work is once again focused on “social action”, on all sorts of community-oriented practices, this questioning is of the highest relevance.
Ina Blom, January 2008
About Ina Blom
Ina Blom is an Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo. She has written extensively on modern and contemporary art and is also active as an art critic.
Ina Blom curated the following exhibition:
2003 The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design Oslo ‘The Name of the Game’ (11 January-9 March, 2003), curator Ina Blom. The exhibition traveled to the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (April 2-18 May, 2003), Museum Het Domein Sittard (31 May-17 August, 2003)
[exhibition catalogue] Ina Blom (ed.), The Name of the Game. Ray Johnson’s Postal Performance / book edited and exhibition curated by Ina Blom (National Museum of Contemporary Art : Oslo 2003).

source: http://www.rayjohnson.org/Ray-Johnson-The-Present-of-Mail-Art/

Mail-Interviews - PART 5

The last part in the Book-series of the Mail-Interview Project has now been published. It contains only a few more interviews, but they are also quite interesting. Also the complete lists and details about the project are added with reprints of the hardcopy covers that were made over the years.

Printed:

161 pages, 6" x 9", perfect binding, cream interior paper (60# weight), black and white interior ink, white exterior paper (100# weight), full-colour exterior ink. Paperback book €12.07

Description:

A selection of 5 more Mail-Interviews conducted by Ruud Janssen with International Mail-Artists and Fluxus-Artists in the years 1994 till 2002. This time also unfinished interviews and an overview of all names of the interviewed persons! Includes interviews with John M. Bennett, The Unexpected, Jürgen O. Olbrich, Ko de Jonge, Michael B. Corbett and a reprint of the mail-interview Newsletter that explains the Mail-Interview Project. A part of the book is reserved for reprints of the covers made for the booklets in the 90-ies.

Order online at: http://www.lulu.com/content/2359294

For all books go to: http://stores.lulu.com/iuoma

New Books available.

On http://stores.lulu.com/iuoma you can have an overview of the publications that I have made available for you. This includes now two books with the complete texts of 28 interviews I did in the years 1994 till 2007. A selection of the most interesting interviews, including people who are no longer with us like Edgardo-Anonio-Vigo, Ray Johnson, Dick Higgins, Norman Solomon, but also some very active Fluxus- and Mail-Artists. Just have a look.

The information insides these books is always available online as well for free. These books are made for the persons who rather have the texts in printed form so it can be read and archived.

Available are:

Mail-Interviews - Part 2 Mail-Interviews - Part 2 (book)
Print: €16.23
Download: €2.50
A selection of 12 Mail-Interviews conducted by Ruud Janssen with International Mail-Artists and Fluxus-Artists in the years 1994 till 2002.

Mail-Interviews - Part 1 Mail-Interviews - Part 1 (book)
Print: €13.59
Download: €2.50
A selection of 16 Mail-Interviews conducted by Ruud Janssen with International Mail-Artists and Fluxus-Artists in the years 1994 till 2007.

25 Years in Mail-Art 25 Years in Mail-Art (book)
Print: €8.83
Download: €2.50
A book with Biographical materials connected to the the 25 years of active work by Ruud Janssen in the Mail-Art Network. Overviews, Interviews, Dates and events.

TAM Rubberstamp Archive TAM Rubberstamp Archive (book)
Download: €3.75
Hardcover Print: €21.48
This catalogue is made to support the exhibition of the TAM Rubberstamp Archive Collection at the L-Gallery in Moscow, Russia. The TAM-Rubberstamp archive started in 1983 and is currated by Ruud Janssen from the Netherlands.

Mail-Art

Digital Publications

More publications are in progress. Just have a look on the many sites I work on to find the links. A lot in the form of .PDF files which are free and available for everybody....