> contents / A Living Thing in Flight: Archiving Contemporary Alternative Art / John Held Jr. /

Contributions and Liabilities of Collecting and Preparing Contemporary Avant-Garde Materials for a National Archive

by John Held, Jr.

As I sifted through primary Mail Art and Zine materials intended for inclusion in the John Held, Jr. Papers, Archives of American Art, I knew that despite the benefits of the donation, the very act would engender controversy. A reviewer of the 1970 Mail Art exhibition, The New York Correspondence School, at The Whitney Museum of American Art, curated by Ray Johnson and Marcia Tucker, thought it, "a shame to catch a living thing in flight, to pin it down and make a museum display of it."1

Does increased public awareness, collecting and historification, destroy the object of the avant-garde collectors' affection? Or can archiving be used as an art in itself, illuminating formerly unknown terrain, heeding Duchamps' dictum that, "the great artist of tomorrow will go underground."2

Drawn from some twenty years of involvement in Mail Art and zine culture (1976-1995), the John Held, Jr. Papers are composed of correspondence files on 276 artists (Ray Johnson, Ben Vautier, Dick Higgins), critics (Clement Greenberg, Pierre Restany), collectors (Jean Brown, Ruth and Marvin Sackner) and an international cast of alternative cultural networkers from 48 countries.

In making the subject intelligible for future research, a collection containing works and letters from some 5,000 correspondents demanded delineation. While this seems a straightforward approach to the preparation of a collection for research purposes, it raises fundamental questions about the very nature of Mail Art.

Mail Art arose from the artists' desire to escape the confines of the gallery and museum bind; weeding out participants with judgments of quality. Mail Art is a democratic art movement, of which the greatest accomplishment has been the construction of an open system that creative people could partake in without fear of rejection. Mail Art exhibitions welcome all entries without fees, with all contributions displayed. When these unwritten rules are breached, as they were in the 1984, Mail Art Now and Then, exhibition at Franklin Furnace, New York, curated by Dr. Ronny Cohen, storms of protest ensue.

"Your invitation stated that 'all materials' would be exhibited," wrote Carl Pittore in an open letter to Cohen, circulated among fellow Mail Art participants. "As you know, this is a sacrosanct mail art concept...No rejections is synonymous with mail art, especially as the work is given and not returned, and you have arbitrarily decided to reject and edit. That you have decided to disregard this concept marks you as no friend to mail art, or to mail artists, and denies perhaps the most unique and appealing feature of this universal movement."3

This question of selectivity also extends to the mistrust of archiving. In preparation of the John Held, Jr. Papers, I strove to give these concerns expression. A number of correspondents included in the Papers, address the issue directly. A letter from J. C. Palmer (AKA Rudi Rubberoid), states, "The goal of a True Mail Art networker would be to keep nothing, pass on everything wouldn't it?...Since when does the artist become also a collector and a private museum...Will the mail artists working today have to rent separate houses to hold their archives twenty years from now? I think of a snail, packing around a bigger and bigger shell..."

"I think it is quite possible that archiving and mail art/networking don't necessarily go together. Even, possibly, there is just a little too much archiving going on? That one of the nice things about the mail art concept is its very transitory nature...Burn this..."4

Other Mail Artists acknowledge the relevance of archives, but note other factors for consideration. Carol Stetser writes, "When every person has a file and all works are included in a file, then the founding principles of mail art have been upheld. I don't think anyone will quibble about such an accumulation of material. Problems arise when histories are compiled and some artists and some material are singled out for mention as more important then others."

"I think this discussion is important because I don't want any of us to blindly kill what we love. I think we should stop taking ourselves so seriously and remember the playfulness that drew us to mail art in the first place....You seem very worried about being ignored by the establishment and desirous of mail art assuming its rightful place in art history. But beware - such acknowledgment is often a death knoll for freedom. The establishment tends to co-opt what it accepts."5

Pondering the propriety of constructing a history of the medium, Los Angeles Mail Artist Lon Spiegelman asked, "How does one formalize a book on a subject, which by its very nature is informal and anti-classification in its philosophy. It's a real enigma-a subject which has to be handled very carefully, if not to destroy its own subject matter in the process. (It) takes a special kind of person and approach to handle a job such as this. Not just documenting what has gone on in the past, but someone who has the contacts, deep into the bowels of the beast in order to make future contacts and extract information to fill in the gaps, from people who really don't want the gaps filled in. It's no easy job, and one, which I still to this day have not decided whether or not is proper to do."

"Any attempt at formalizing mailart will kill it. On the other hand, I feel that mailart should be written about and somehow documented. It's a very nebulous ambivalent feeling which I have, and one which a lot of other mailartists have which we are all finding very difficult to deal with. There isn't any easy answer to this conundrum."6

Should Mail Art remain "a thing in flight," isolated from scholarly research, or can creative examination of the field lead to wider awareness, appreciation, and participation in an open system of alternative art that flourishes to this day?

Attempts have been made to construct overviews of the field, with varying results. Planning to collaborate on an article with critic Robert C. Morgan, author of Commentaries on the New Media Arts: Fluxus & Conceptual Art, Artists' Books, Correspondence Art, Audio & Video Art (Umbrella Productions, 1992), we both agreed on the importance of Mail Art, but differed on the necessity of establishing a hierarchy of quality, the article coming to naught. "...Mail Art has every evidence of being a highly sophisticated art forum/form in the genre of or a sub-genre of conceptual art," Morgan wrote me. "I think what is brilliant about some Mail Art and not so brilliant about others forms the basis of some criteria; that, in fact, Mail Art is a qualitative endeavor as much as a quantitative one. Being sensitive to the critical discourse of art, I cannot help but see difference in quality, that is, the systemic/qualitative aspect of some Mail Art is simply more significant than others...Democracy needs qualifiers or it is simply morass and ripe for fascist futurist riots-and that is not what interests me in this genre."7

Included in the John Held, Jr. Papers is a questionnaire circulated by Michael Crane previous to the publication of his book (co-edited with Mary Stofflet), Correspondence Art: Source Book for the Network of International Postal Art Activity (Art Contemporary, 1984). Crane's course of action was more inclusive then that of Morgan, attempting to incorporate a variety of viewpoints into a collective construction of Mail Art history.

"What I am trying to do is put together a historical anthology. I think that this book will give us an opportunity to reflect to ourselves and others a cross-section of our activity for evaluation. I personally wish to see the possibilities for the network grow and communicate intelligent work, opportunities and choices...The task of this book is to outline a history of some attitudes that are still operative and changing and will have different results from a history-of-things. Everyones' contribution is significant in order to achieve an important and intelligent look at Mail Art."8

Cranes' book gathered thirty-eight texts on the definition, origin, spread, and practices of the field, giving voice to a number of active participants. It remains a long out-of-print classic, fetching several hundred dollars in the book market. Subsequent admiration was undeterred by the controversy it generated upon publication. In fact, at the book release party, which I attended in September 1984 at La Mamelle art space in San Francisco, several Mail Artists tore out pages from Crane's finished work and ate them.9

Neither did Crane escape the wrath of Ray Johnson, "the Father of Mail Art," who scurried to protect his offspring. In an interview conducted by Henry Martin before the publication of the work, Johnson bemoaned the questions Crane subjected him to, suggesting a different course in constructing histories.

"At the very beginning, when Mike Crane sent me his letters-they were form letters-requesting information about my mail art activity, my immediate response was not to respond at all. From the way the questions were being asked, I just thought, 'On, I have nothing to say.' And then he sent me a copy of something of mine that he'd found and wanted to use in his book, I don't remember exactly what happened, but he sent me a copy of a letter that I had once sent to David Bourdon and I remarked in that letter that the 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 letter form..."

"I was suddenly very huffy and rude, and rushing to my lawyer about copyright problems, and I don't remember exactly what I said or did, but it was a genuine gut response to every-thing and so I was uncooperative, deliberately uncooperative, I didn't like the way he was doing his investigations, I didn't like his way of conceiving of this book, he was sending out questionnaires asking, like, "how many letters do you get a week?"

"And anyway, I'd like to do my own book. 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, or I don't even know what year I did anything in except that I now keep insisting that 1943 was very important because I found a document in my mother's scrap book from 1943 and decided that the things I'd been doing then ought to be cataloged."

"I'm just saying that history is a very loose subject in which anybody can declare that anything happened at any time at all; and maybe that will be accurate information and maybe it won't be, and maybe that won't make a difference. I'm saying that history can be written in a very slanted fashion and that one can emphasize anything one wants to in history..."10

Johnson was notorious for sabotaging his own career, adding to his reputation as "being famous for being famously unknown."11 His frustration with the art world was hardly limited to Mike Crane. Upon his death by drowning in January 1995, Johnson's career exploded. No longer capable of creating roadblocks to his reputation, his well-placed and high-powered estate took over, assuring major art magazine coverage, and assisting with a major retrospective, organized by Wexner Center for the Arts curator Donna De Salvo, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in January 1999.

Despite the acclaim lavished on Ray Johnson, Mail Art eludes recognition, mirroring the disregard that Fluxus languished in before theoretical recognition. Even Greil Marcus, normally sympathetic to twentieth-century avant-gardes,12 found fault with the medium, while reviewing the Mike Crane book.

"The history of contemporary mail art is the history of an immediately quaint form that excused itself from history. Dada opposed history-not just as facts but also as theory. There's a difference. Anyway, as Man Ray put it in 1958, just about the time mail art was getting off the ground, 'Now we are trying to revive Dada. Why? Who cares? Who does not care? Dada is dead. Or is Dada still alive? We cannot revive something that is alive just as we cannot revive anything that is dead.."13

Fluxus, an antecedent of Mail Art, was also difficult to posit in a traditional art historical context. In her introduction to "In the Spirit of Fluxus" exhibition catalog, Elizabeth Armstrong, Curator at the Walker Art Center and co-organizer of the exhibit, writes that, "The terminology needed to describe...much of the work created by Fluxus artists-has yet to be found or agreed upon, and it is one of the reasons that Fluxus has been notoriously difficult to discuss, collect, and display."14

Difficulty in collecting and classifying, led to marginalization. Andreas Huyssen, a contributor to the, "In the Spirit of Fluxus," exhibition catalog, traces the movement's rise from obscurity. "Somehow it failed, but its very failure now turns out to have been a success of almost mythic proportions. For if the worst that can happen to an avant-garde is to be co-opted, collected, 'musealized.' then Fluxus, until recently, was a resounding success-precisely because, unlike Pop Art, it failed to be successful. Apart from a small coterie of aficionados, it even managed to be-almost-forgotten, a fact that somehow has guaranteed its long afterlife in artistic practices and that provides excitement for its current rediscovery."

"... Fluxus has come back from oblivion, even though its new life is now in the museum, the archive, the academy. But, then, the museum today is no longer a bastion of high culture only, but, at its best, a space for the kind of cultural encounter that might actually not betray the spirit of Fluxus while representing it."15

The shame of catching, "a living thing in flight, to pin it down and make a museum display of it," admonishes us to appreciate the transient nature of a p ure, historically valid, fragile art. Catching sight of it is a blessing. Our inclination to "pin it down," guarantees that, like Johnson's reaction to Mike Crane, it will defend itself by fluttering away from investigation.

This "thwarting" runs as a utopian current through much of the experimental art being produced today. Susan Hapgood, a curator responsible for the exhibitions, Neo-Dada: Redefining Art, 1958-62, and Fluxattitudes, traces this trend to unstructured communities prevalent on the Internet.

"I see art made for the Web echoing certain developments in the art of the 60s, that is it thwarts preexisting art distribution systems and markets, and it cannot easily be controlled by existing institutional power structures, which immediately gives it an independent footing and presence...Art during the 60s tried to do much of the same kinds of thwarting, and certainly succeeded in making the distribution, marketing, and exhibition contexts more evident, if not changing them for once and for all; it did change awareness, and provided alternative ways of going about making and showing and communicating art (the mail, Xerox machine, the performance, ephemera, everyday activities)."

"Now the Internet seems to provide a new opportunity, with many of the old qualities built into it from the start-independent, cheap, accessible (only in terms of geographical distances and speed of communication), infinitely reproducible (hence nonunique, noncommodifiable). Another built-in feature is the networked structure, how virtual communities of like-mind individuals can work together to produce work, often suppressing their own egos in the process."16

Simon Anderson, who has written eloquently of Fluxus, recently turned his attention to Mail Art, while acknowledging the difficulty of doing so. "Correspondence art is still too fresh to be clear, still barely open to traditional historical analysis; it remains sufficient only to include rather than exclude. Theories of communication merely skim across the surface of t his densely woven phenomenon; the light of history penetrates only so far."17

With the spotlight of art history aimed on the mainstream, Mail Artists have taken it upon themselves to preserve the materials they have accumulated for a sympathetic future audience. In his essay, "The Museum and the Mail Box: International Mail Art Archives, 2000," prepared to accompany responses from thirty Mail Artists polled on the scope of their archives and their reasons for engaging in the process, Matt Ferranto presents an excellent summary of their motivation.

"Mail Art involves a multitude of lateral exchanges that inherently resists conventional art historical interpretation. Many mail artists maintain that the structures of communication are more important than mailed objects themselves, and others privilege the perpetual circulation of mailed art works over their preservation. Mail art archivists are frequently motivated by an allegiance to the historical value of their medium, and several of them are presenting a reevaluation of the nature of art and the subsequent reading of cultural history. How might the means and methods of the art museum change? Today, some of the most ambitious and challenging responses can be found in the mailbox."18

Man Rays' observation about the death and life of Dada guide our vision to the fluttering "thing in flight" of Mail Art. Revivification is not a issue. Mail Art is still very much alive, both in the mailbox and over the internet. Since Ray Johnson's New York Correspondence School exhibition, the field has expanded through the staging of thousands of exhibitions, publications, and correspondence activities. Like painting, sculpture and drawing, creative postal activity has become a medium of art. Increased public awareness has not killed Mail Art, it has been invigorated by it, manifesting the century long attempt of the avant-garde to make anything art, and everyone an artist.

Mail Art remains an on-going process, the remnants of its' past reminding us of paths taken in the creation of an international network of artists paving the way for the internet. What has kept Mail Art, "a living thing in flight," is an obsessive need to reach out to others beyond borders. Objects sent through the mail are springboards for contact. If these objects are not the main reason for involvement in Mail Art, they remain vivid reminders of interpersonal interaction; markers of our past, signposts to our future.

Copyright © by John Held Jr. - Johnheldjr@aol.com
printed in the Archives of American Art Journal, Vol. 40, Nos. 3&4, 2000.