jeudi 25 février 2010

The Black Madonna, interview of Martin Irvine for ACNE Paper

Interview for ACNE Paper (full version)
Paris/London/Stockholm
Issue 9, Winter 09/10
theme: Art & Spirituality



Introduction
One of the most venerated of the Black Virgins, the Black Madonna of Czestochowa is credited with saving the Jasna Góra monastery from destruction during a siege that took place at the time of The Deluge, a 17th century Swedish invasion of Poland. Stimulating Polish resistance, they eventually repulsed the Swedes, and the King of Poland proclaimed the Black Madonna protector and Queen of the lands in his kingdom. Thousands of pilgrimages are made to visit her every year, and she is credited with many miracles.
Martin Irvine, expert in classical, medieval and Renaissance culture, is also the director of the Irvine Contemporary art gallery in Washington, DC, and a professor at Georgetown University. Having greatly explored the codes and symbols of eras when spirituality ruled all, he was key to unveiling the mysteries of the Black Madonna’s past and lending a critical eye to the rose-tinted rationality of our present.
Montana Mathieu: The Black Madonna of Czestochowa seems to derive great spiritual power from her mysterious coloring.  How does this icons differ from other icons of the Virgin?
Martin Irvine: What’s fascinating about this icon is that it is also regarded as a sacred relic. According to the legend kept in currency by the monastery, the icon was painted on a plank of a table from the holy family in Jerusalem. Medieval monasteries, by the way, competed to have the most sacred relics in their shrines and chapels for drawing the most pilgrims and donors to the monastic property. Sacred space was a major value for the political economy. Relics are very corporeal: a relic is either a part of a saint’s body or an object touched by a saint, having contact with the saint’s body. This is the primary “aura” that Walter Benjamin is famous for inserting into art historical discourse: art works, even in the modern era, carry over the sense of the spiritual known in the “ritual use” of art objects. Of course, the Black Madonna is “pre-art” in our sense, since its historical function was in the religious cult. The miracles attributed to the Madonna, then, come from its function as a relic, not a painting. It would be very unusual for an icon painting in itself to be associated with miracles or the sacred power of relics. Icons were for veneration and functioned as signs of access to the spiritual by the saints or divine vehicles (Christ, Mary); relics were experienced as stored sacred power. It’s clear that the Black Madonnas were also felt to be specially marked with sacred power, and did not signify something sinister (an inverse of white associated with the Virgin) but something blessed as truly extra-ordinary.
The Black Madonna of Czestochowska (late 14th century, ?)
The Black Madonna of Czestochowska (late 14th century, ?)
MM: You mentioned traveling to see the Vièrge Noire of Rocamadour. What was that like?
MI: My experience of seeing the Black Madonna of Rocamadour for the first time was partly influenced by all my prior experience as a classical, medieval and Renaissance scholar. (Yes, believe it or not, I used to write about about medieval semiotics before I moved into contemporary art!) The chapel of the Black Madonna is dark and lit with candles, and the keepers of the site have done their best to maintain an atmosphere of veneration in the space. You get a sense of the sacred, the dark wood of the Madonna and Child figure makes you search for something. The statue is actually quite small. I have been in maybe hundreds of temples, churches, and chapels over the years, and Rocamadour, with its dramatic cliff-side buildings and church, seemed connected to some deep history, like the Chartres Cathedral.
This sculpture of Madonna and Child may have been carved from dark wood, and has become even darker over the years. I think the blackness or darkness of these Madonnas was treated as another sign of the sacred in the original Latin sense of the term (sacer), something marked as from the gods, either cursed or divinely chosen. When something–or someone–is marked by the divine, it can take many forms; in this case, blackness is a sign of difference, an unusual sign in the context of other color+figure symbolism (gold, white, red).
MM: What inspires so many people to visit the Black Madonna, sometimes more than once?
MI: Rocamadour still draws thousands of tourist-pilgrims per year. This type of cultural tourism draws on Romantic expectations of the sacred. People go there, and to many other Black Madonna sites in France, Spain, and Italy, for an art and culture experience. Since there are few devout or doctrinally conservative Catholics who do the cultural tourism routes, the experience is meant to be quasi-religious, like a mainstream middle class view of art itself. So you can have a nostalgic quasi-religious, aestheticized experience, or an art-historical experience. Getting there is like doing a pilgrimage too, except today you can there by tour bus and car.
The Black Madonna of Rocamadour (France), 9th century (?), with later altar and shrine.
The Black Madonna of Rocamadour (France), 9th century (?), with later altar and shrine.
MM: The Black Madonnas of Europe have been associated with pre-Christian earth goddesses and Egyptian goddesses like Isis, the Mother of Horus – whose eye, a symbol of protection and power, is in fact inscribed on the Black Madonna of Jasna Gora.  I also read that the Celts venerated statues dark Mother Goddesses at the crossroads of underground rivers and other points of high earthly energy. Does their blackness hint at a hidden spirituality, like that of primordial Mother Goddess?
MI: There are over 400 Black Madonnas around Europe (according to various scholars’ accounts), but it’s important to understand that they come from different sources, materials, and cultural contexts. If we universalize or over-generalize the phenomenon, it’s not very far, then, from talking about people who see Mary in their buttered toast or Christmas lights. Most of the Black Madonnas are wood statues, and many of the black faces seem to come from the natural aging of the wood, oxidizing of paint pigments, and the smoke and soot of candles in churches. There were local cults all over Europe that may have memories of pre-Christian goddesses, but certainly there is no cultural memory of this today. The significance needs to be explained by other means, according to a cultural grammar and symbolism current in the cultures that find them significant. Similarities with cultures that had little or no contact with European Christianity is not causality or an indicator of some universal truth. One could say the same thing about red or white cultural symbols: what we could say about this in universal terms doesn’t explain how or why they have meaning in the historically specific cultures that take them to mean something.
MM: How has this meaning changed with her appropriation by the Church?
MI: This kind of question presupposes that there is some lost origin, a declension (fall), and continuities from a lost origin that could be changed, an assumption which I would contest. A myth of origins is usually at the root of many ideologies, and certainly in the various forms of post-Romanticism that have come down to us in the modern world. The role of the cultural historian, however, is to find meanings that are in place and circulate at any given moment; cultural meanings are always experienced as full and complete, at any moment, and not dependent on unknown origins.
One aspect of post-Romantic ideology still alive today, which keeps the mythology of the Black Madonnas going, is a myth of origins, a “back formation” of some prior state, from which our modern era is a fall. In the primitivism myth, still alive and well today, that prior state is posited as somehow authentic or unified, and all else is a fall away from the origin. It’s the myth of the Fall from Eden rewritten for different ideological uses. So, we can’t talk about “change” by the Church, certainly not positing the Church as an monolithic agent that acts to change cultural origins, nor can we posit that black goddesses, because of surface similarities, were sources or origins that could be changed.
MM: Sailors are known to paint this symbol on the bow of their vessels to ensure safe sea travel, and centuries after the Black Madonna “saved” Poland from the Swedish invasion during The Deluge, the Polish anti-communist resistance wore the Black Madonna on their lapels. I find this symbolism interesting from an anthropological standpoint. I wonder what kind of spirituality surrounds these Virgins with darkened faces to make them venerated above so many other Marian icons? How is their mythology different?
MI: The blackness was definitely taken to be a differentiator, a sign of difference, and a sign clearly associated with Polish identity, even the Polish Church as a distinct ethnic/national entity. Polish Church leaders were on the side of the nationalist anti-communists. This explains how the Black Madonna could still be a powerful secular symbol.
MM: In her conference on the Holocaust  in the City of Czestochowa, Dr. Barbara Allen says, “It is worth mentioning that during the 1980s, Walesa didn’t drape himself in the Polish flag when he was leading the outlawed Solidarity movement. Instead, he wore a Black Madonna lapel pin on his jacket. Poles know it to be a subversive message. Walesa’s Nobel Peace Prize rests in the monastery’s museum, just outside the chapel of the Black Madonna.” Can we speak of a popular spirituality, bound less by doctrine than by community and the communal experience of the spiritual?
MI: That’s really interesting. The Madonna image was appropriated as a symbol of historic Polish national identity in the face of more recent communist dictatorship. The movement recognized the historic identity, so Walesa was doing a “return to origins” mythology, which of course would have been an irritant to the Communists and Soviets. It was still a viable symbol, secularized.
MM: I’m really amazed by her power in the collective unconscious to foment social rising.  Not only was her image appropriated, but it was recognized as a subversive message of solidarity against oppression and even collective action. Quite a complicated aura – and so interesting in light of what you were saying about the sacer, being either cursed or divinely chosen – or both?
MI: But it’s a collective conscious, not unconscious. Without knowing the social code– “Polish Catholic icon > Polish national identity”– there would be no symbolic power, only an artifact lost in prior history.
MM: Even at a time when the spiritual was rooted in religious tradition, local popular devotion seems to have superceded the Church’s control on the aesthetics of religious art. Although the icon’s skin color may not have been significant during its creation, it has come to hold a specific significance today. Is the color symbolism based on popular spirituality?
MI: Let’s first bracket off the question of when many of the icons’ colors changed. The Black Madonna of Czestochowa has been repainted, with attempts at “restoration,” several times. I don’t know if anyone knows when the black face first appeared and how it became symbolic in the local religious practice. So we’re back to accounting for cultural meanings at each historical moment based on the known symbolic relationships.
Remember, too, that “the Catholic Church” was not a monolithic totality, even more so the pre-Reformation Church. Local beliefs and customs always merged with the main church doctrine and beliefs. Veneration of saints and the Virgin, of course, in many ways extends and merges with pagan and Roman ritual practices, beliefs, and identity groups. I think in each case of Black Madonnas becoming locally significant we’re going to see long cultural and historical cultic practices in place before and during Christianity. But the prior histories would neither be known by the community nor required to participate in the symbolic meanings current at any time.
It would be useful at this point to borrow from two of schools of thought on cultural meaning. I’ve always been able to discover things with the ideas from “reception theory,” a main proponent of which was Hans Robert Jauss, a German scholar, and from “cultural semiotics,” a large field, but one defined in the 1960s by Yuri Lotman, a Russian scholar. Reception theorists introduced ideas like “communities of reception” and “communities of practice” to help account for how cultural meanings circulate in different historical moments and how the meanings of things are anticipated in actual practice. The meaning of anything circulating in a culture–and we can use any example in the arts or popular media today as well–comes from how it is received, not from its sources or the intentions of producers. So, we can look into the meaning of the Black Madonna as understood by the community in which it was taken as a sign, an image and object invested with special meaning beyond a mere artifact.
The meaning doesn’t come from outside the community, but inside: responding to different historical and identity forces, the community of practice could use the Madonna image as a sign of Polish solidarity, identity, or even special Polish spirituality, over against the pressures of “official meanings” coming from other sources (the government, the papal authority). With reception theory, we can account for how an icon could be used as a sign of resistance or special identity as a response to current social and political conditions. This meaning was possible, and could only emerge from, the community in which the Madonna could be used as a sign.
Symbolic objects also perform the important function of cultural memory and identity. Yuri Lotman observed that culture is the non-hereditary memory of a community; it’s what we receive and continually reinterpret. Culture is transmitted in texts, narratives, images, and symbolic objects, not genes. Culture is what converts raw time and events into history and memory. Lotman also observed that every culture experiences itself as incomplete, always adding new meanings, new arguments, new interpretations from what’s inherited and received. The Black Madonnas represent stored memory and identity, but the symbolism can shift as the living historical “community of reception” changes. So you see, at any moment that we want to try to understand what the Black Madonna “means,” whether long ago or very recently, we find that the community of practice experiences the meanings as internally consistent from within their own living, local culture. Changes in material history will occasion new meanings, new responses, but that’s the sign of a living culture. For art historians, the cultural object entering a museum or into canonical art history is the end of the line; the object is an artifact of history, only the sign of a function in the grand narrative of “art history.”
MM: So although Man has always been spiritual, each token of the sacred is a product of his place and time?
MI: Yes, what’s taken to be sacred or spiritual will always be embedded in what’s possible for a community at a given moment, not something universal and timeless. Andre Malraux is well-known for his observation that art took on the functions of religion in the modern world. He observed the transition to a modern view of art, what I would call the cultural category of art as established in our institutions today, as differentiated from earlier eras where the objects, which we consider “art,” were known by their functions (tools, fetishes, religious ritual objects, for example).
Malraux’s view in The Metamorphosis of the Gods was that the modern era is defined by the strategy of estrangement or detachment from the local historical function of objects in order to create a trans-historical idea of “art,” an essentialist view that requires one to buy into a notion of a universal human tendency to create art, no matter what the culture or historical condition. (Hence we have museums of “African Art,” “Asian Art,” “Outsider Art.”)
MM: Searching for the essential connection between color and feeling, did modern abstract artists like Kandinsky and Mark Rothko want to ignore the cultural associations between the artistic and spiritual experience, going towards this “trans-historial” idea of art, or even spirituality?  I know they were also interested in primitive art. Is there a connection between their interest in spirituality and primitive art?
MI: The other Malraux moment for us here is the convergence of primitivism and spirituality, that is, ways that “the primitive” has been constructed as bearing a kind of pre-rational spirituality and transcendence. This was part of the modernist movement and its legacy today. There is a long literature on this topic. For Western institutional definitions, the monumental exhibition, “Primitivism in Modern Art: The Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,” produced at MoMA in 1984, and the two-volume catalog of the exhibition, summed up all the received ideas to that point. African art and medieval Black Madonnas have an affinity in the way they are constructed in the now (universal) history of art, grandfathered in because of a way of constructing ideas about transcendence and the “authentic” cultural vision of pre-modern and non-Western cultures. A chilling parody of the primitivism ideology was captured in the great line given to the Nazi archeologist in “Raiders of the Lost Ark:” the ark isn’t a historical artifact but a radio transmitter to God!
In modern art since the 1920s, there have been several ways of talking about “the spiritual,” and making arguments for the function of art as a “spiritual” practice. For Kandinsky and others, it may mean taking about art as a gateway to emotions, ideas, or a sense of transcendence beyond the material world, beyond the world of industry, machines, business, necessity. For Rothko, it was the experience of large-scale color fields and the emotional responses that, for him, marked the transcendental function of painting; it was a secular mysticism. But in any case of art works being presented as spiritual statements in the modern world, there is an “interpretive community” for whom these are possible statements, possible kinds of arguments about what art is or can be. Modern statements about the spiritual in art are not indicators of some universal sacred sense, but very historically located sets of arguments that have no meaning outside a community with shared assumptions and expectations.
Chris Ofili, "Virgin Mary" (1996); "No Woman No Cry" (1998)
Chris Ofili, "The Holy Virgin Mary," 1996. Paper collage, oil paint, polyester resin, mixed materials, elephant dung on linen. "No Woman No Cry, "1998. Acrylic, oil, polyester resin, paper collage, elephant dung on canvas. Tate Museum.
MM: Are there any parallels with the Black Madonna in contemporary art that you find especially illuminating? Are there artists revisiting the spiritual in cultural or universal terms that you find successful, and where do their practices fit in the post-modern era where the spiritual is seen as one facet of life among many?
MI: Good question. I think there are some interesting examples in contemporary art: Chris Ofili’s Madonna, and Melissa Ichiuji’s works.
Ofili is intervening with a new interpretive work that depends on our culture’s received ideas and visual language of Madonnas, and disrupting it with African imagery and references. It’s a Black Madonna in the African, racial, and ethnic sense. He’s riffing on a number of things–our received ideas about primitivism and Black Madonnas as already known. Ichiuji in a different way looks at the Madonna symbol and reinterprets it through traditions of surrealist sculpture and found object works, rechanneling it all through a vision like that of Hans Bellmer and Louise Bourgeois, but with childhood innocence. Her Black Madonna has a child observing the mother’s body in which breasts and the vaginal delta look like stained glass rose windows. Both artists riff on traditions without invoking or stating explicit spirituality.
What we find today, I think, is a still deeply felt expectation, desire, and need for art to provide some kind transcendence in a world that has been deconstructed out of all transcendence. Transcendence has been exposed as illusions and suppressed ideologies of dominance and exclusion. But people still want art to do something that only our cultural category of art can do. We hesitate to name it–”creativity,” “spirituality,” “freedom,” “ecstasy,” whatever–because all inherited terms and discourses are riddled with traps, baggage, and pre-commitments that few want to buy into now.
Artists are still often treated as secular priests, seers with irrational prophetic utterances (echoes of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra), providing glimpses of the divine, or whatever the simulacrum of the divine would be now and still satisfy without dissolving immediately in a sea of irony. Maybe what we have today is an erotics of art, multiple displacements of desire, that still add up to something other-than-the-banal-world. Without this contemporary erotics we would have no drivers for the making and acquiring of art. Art is still fetish, not in Marx’s sense but the anthropologist’s, and the Black Madonna of Czestochowa or of MoMA both call out as icons of desire for something-more-than-what-we’ve got, however we want to name it.
MM: The erotics of art– we displace our desire for a transcendental experience onto the way we look at and feel about art?
MI: Others have written on the erotics of art. Art often satisfies a hunger like sex or erotic pleasure. It’s actually trite and ordinary to say that art is displaced sex, but when you see the kinds of expressions and language that circulates about art today, you start to see the language of sexuality and religion, even addiction. If you corner an artist or collector, and try to ask “why do you do this,” “what keeps you going,” the answers are like “because I love it,” “it saves my life.” It’s the “but there’s got to be more” for a secular world too knowing to buy into nostalgia or religious ideologies, but still secretly hoping for wild transcendence, everyone seeking their own inner “St. Theresa in Ecstasy.”

mercredi 10 février 2010

Ray Johnson (1927-1995): Life as Art














“Ray Johnson tells parables. He finds a use for coincidence. He pounces on and proclaims a day-by-day order and meanings in events… Since Ray Johnson lives a life that is a continuous revelation of pure and radiant design, the image of that life is art. Since the life itself is designed of coincidences, like a walk taking a line, the aesthetic reciprocal of that life is a Ray Johnson collage… It happens that his life is a collage. At least it happens that he works at his life until it is a work of art, and he works at his art until life catches up with it.” – William S. Wilson (front flap of The Paper Snake, by Ray Johnson, Something Else Press, 1965).
There is something perverse and impossible about reading Ray Johnson's work, like trying to decipher the cast-off of a lobotomy. Both courting and disavowing the art world, he deconstructed its reified hierarchies into a web of arbitrary associations whose "density [was] more the point than the various specific things he referred to." (Henry Martin). Not half-man, half-art but whole-man-whole-art, Ray Johnson (1927-1995) was a "living sculpture" (James Rosenquist), and his art works are like cells: as partial compositions and individual manifestations of the whole body, they compose a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. While naïve, marginal and somewhat arbitrary, his work was the product of dedication, tenacity and an all-encompassing aesthetic creation, blurring the lines between art and life, mixing randomness and intentionality. Today, his works are celebrated as intricate instances of artistic draftsmanship, signpostings of pop culture transience, manifestations of a subject position wholly subordinate to its aesthetic cause, and archeological troves of the fervent activity of New York's avant-garde.
“I’m classifiable as a Pop artist, as a Conceptualist, as a Surrealist,” he said in 1993.
Coming to age in 1950s, as Madison Avenue America pulled the wool over its eyes, Johnson would tap into the deep underlying anxieties of the Golden Age's surreal dream, such as isolationist guilt and the difficulties of private/public reconciliation that were compounded by the social rejection of homosexuality (Ron Lippard).
Attending Black Mountain college, he studied under Joseph Albers and Robert Motherwell, with classmates such as Willem and Elaine de Kooning and Richard Lippold, with whom he would live upon first moving to New York, in the same building as the composer John Cage and the choreographer Merce Cunningham, who first introduced him to the theories on chance that, with his readings in Zen, would greatly impact his move towards mail art. Joining the downtown art scene, he befriended Andy Warhol while they worked commercially designing book covers, and was introduced to Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly. In Twombly's fireplace, he burned all his previous work, and began a life-long practice of "moticos", collages and "tesserae".
Calm Center, 1951, a recursive grid

Calm Center, 1951, a recursive grid



A Dedicated Naiveté

“Ray detects personalities in all sorts of animals and inanimate things, such strong personalities, in fact, that he makes little distinction between persons and things.” – David Bourdon, a critic and his close friend.
Painting from a young age, Ray Johnson retained a naiveté in his work and his social interactions, channeling a dreamworld of game-like associations through his aesthetic “play drive” (Schiller) that resulted in the childlike minutia of his collages. With the past world of art as much an object of study as the present, Johnson’s sentimental disengagement allowed him to comb their imagery into a rhyming and disagreeing network of associations. His studies under Albers provided the focus on form, line and order that would reappear in the classical elements and architecture of Johnson's collages, often abstracted but in grids that directed their textual reading.
“My secret vice is making collages by Joseph Cornell”
His decorated building blocks of layered cardboard he called "tesserae" revealed a concern with boundaries that kept him symbolically connected to the idea of identity and home. He created "surrealist" maps of his analogical perception with Dada-ist spatial organization and Symbolist associations where color became thought and letters can remain allusive in seas of color. Johnson was fascinated by interpersonal communication, correspondences and associations, visual, linguistic, social. His art mapped a stream of consciousness where temporality flattened out into simultaneous past lived, imagined and learned experiences of art history, social interactions and imagined worlds. Here emerges a Surrealist influence that parallels the work of Jean Dubuffet: also employing a childish articulation of imagery and spontaneous language, as well as gouging and engraving the surfaces of his work like graffiti, both had a general disdain for institutions.
What is a moticos?
                           What is a moticos?
Image:gridCornell.jpggallery_moticos_hooded_figure.jpg

Interlude
In the 19th century, as modern city life became an increasingly noxious grid of deprivation and disenfranchisement, and rising capitalism was turning private life inside out, Baudelaire’s painters of modern life became intoxicated with the crumbling arcades and social fabric of Europe’s metropoles. Strolling the urban landscape they captured what was truly modern, “fugitive”, “contingent”, “ephemeral” – contained in its “gaits, glances, gestures, fashions, morals, emotions”, to be violently transformed by their “tortured genius” into a horizontal palimpsest of the icons and transience of modern life.
In bohemian Paris where the romantic idea of the lone artist had taken hold by the turn of the century, Gertrude Stein’s “unsentimental exploration of dis/connection” and the Structuralists’ textual deconstruction of art, society and language ushered in a new century of thoughts on connection. The exploration of memory and experience as a stream of consciousness rather than separate formations exposed an “intuitive apprehension of existence” underlying chronological memory, and became a bookend of Modernism’s concern with parts and wholes. Cubist collages and Surrealist Cornell boxes related the elements of the quotidian to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts, by virtue of their connections, while from disjoined assemblages of found objects and merz emerged instances of disconnection in the web of modern life The Situationists’ derives turned the city into a field of “psychogeography” (Guy Debord) where the wandering artist’s mind could open to the “unconsciousness of the urban space”. By showing that no system can be complete or consistent, Kurt Godel made way for the indeterminacy and humor that marked the flâneur incarnations in Pop, Fluxus and the tongue-in-cheek Correspondence art of Ray Johnson.


Conceptual Trajectories


James Dean, "ceci n'est not une pipe"
James Dean, "ceci n'est not une pipe"
Image:elvisoedipus.jpg
gallery_breton.jpg Image:deanlucky.jpg
“I once answered a letter from Johnson with a reference to an article I had written on Gertrude Stein. He replied, “I contribute: ‘Knock! Knock!” The proper reply would surely have been, “Who’s there?” And Johnson’s only appropriate answer to this Stein critic would be, “There’s no there there.” That is certainly an amusing little car ride, but as the punch line suggests, it does not end up much of anywhere.” - Wendy Steiner
Johnson's mail art began with his penchant for witty, clever and unorthodox mailings to his close friends and eventually fellow artists, some of which he knew intimately and others he did not. First using the mail system as a means of distribution for his collages and later as a conceptual medium for a great variety of mailings and artworks, he influenced a global movement of artistic exchange that incorporates the postal transmission into its aesthetic (The Eternal Network)
Clemente Padin's artistamps, Uruguay
Clemente Padin's artistamps, Uruguay
Sharing the conceptual roots of Fluxus, launched by his friends and contemporaries like the chance composer John Cage and George Brecht with the “desire to work in the gap between art and life” (Donna de Salvo, Walker Art Center), Johnson let his work be carried away in the mail, incorporating the "noise" and chance of the real world on its path, and he often encouraged its performance to be carried out by its recipient or incorporated quirks to ensure its extended trajectory (with multiple addresses, strange shapes and instructions to send the piece on, destroy it, or do otherwise). As soon as a piece was sent out, it accumulated the effects of the “third person” postal worker and its physical travels – a source of meaning that has not gone untouched by young artists today, such as Walead Beshty.
Johnson’s choices valued artistic collaboration and viewer participation as integral components of his work thus transforming the medium of communication into an event in ways precursory and contemporary to the highly performative 60s and 70s. Incorporating this marginality with the change of his Fluxus leanings, he arbitrarily deconstructed the chance encounters and sightings of the art world flâneur into the visual and linguistic correspondences ordering his mind, ignoring existing layers of meaning and creating new ones in their place. By mailing his works directly and with a naïve generosity, he created a network of his own, and notoriously rejected the art world's institutional structure, avoiding rejection as well as setting his own terms for the exhibition of his work (never submitting his own, for example, instead soliciting that his correspondents compose the bulk of the Whitney's 1970 Show, Ray Johnson: New York Correspondence School).
“Dear Whitney Museum, I hate you. Love, Ray Johnson”
Unconcerned with classical concepts of value, pop culture ephemera was layered and chopped, recycled, destroyed and recreated "so any one picture plan has the possibility of various years of layerings and archaelologies and things added to it or things that get built up. Chop it in half and sign it 1982 to depict the act of the decapitation of the work, for whatever reason. So 1982 will document areas of removal of debris from things that were, conceptually, already pictures. But then, in blank spaces, I simply grind away to back to the basic brown masonite and stick a 1982 onto a 1978." - Ray Johnson
Stuart Davis, Lucky Strike, 1921
Stuart Davis, Lucky Strike, 1921
These mosaics became poems across the body of his work, repeating themes, altering its source material to create a new whole, each as subject to change as Johnson was averse to entropy. Constantly remixing, rehashing, Johnson stole and wrote on everything, defacing and re-facing the surface of all he came in touch with. With an early fascination with [graffiti] in the Latin sense of “graffito”, to write or scratch on a surface, his playfulness and the completeness of his dreamworld allowed him to appropriate every object and make it his own, adding new layers to his environment. The egalitarian sense of this “massive appropriation” (Wendy Steiner, Correspondences, Walker Art Center, 1999) was based in a free association within and between past and present styles and movements.
“Well, these collages are really like playing cards, so every time they’re shown, they’re reshuffled and become a different story, a different tape. It’s constantly and kaleidoscopically different.” – to Mrs. Levy, the widow of Joseph Cornell’s lifetime art dealer.
The endless Fordian reproducibility offered by Xeroxing often employed by Johnson to chronicle the endless chances in a single work allows for multiple translation of a single piece or even a single association, reveals his thought process into a temporal collage where images are textually interwoven, and text can act visually (e.g. anneagrams). Mixing English and French, mixing images and words, and remixing the stuff of symbols (tesserae), he creates his own vocabulary, alphabet, semantics. He developed several motifs and series in his collages, including silhouettes of artists and acquaintances, "Lucky Strike" symbols, Cupids, "Tit girls," Dollar bills, Potato Mashers, and "Fingernails." Often using word games, remixed portraits, with the superimposition of outlined objects over face of celebrities, the star becomes a vehicle for the moticos; “moticos love moving”. Johnson also calls for their destruction, underlining their ephemerality: “Destroy this writing. Paste the ashes on the side of your automobile and if anyone asks you why you have ashes on the side of your car, tell them”.
Although he called his collages, "Chop art, not Pop art", Johnson usually let others try to fit him into their conception of the art world. "I'm a Cubist," he one said to James Rosenquist, "because I put things in the mail and they get spread all over the place." It was this persona, and only tangentially his use of the postal service as a medium that contributed in greatest part to the impact of his work and the effectiveness of his humor. Despite having worked as a commercial artist upon first arriving in New York (after working as a New York City Library page and in a Zen bookshop), Johnson worked to de-commoditize the creation and reception of art, and his avant-garde practices soon garnered him the attention, mystery and reputation as “New York’s most famous unknown artist” (Grace Glueck). The intentionality and intimacy of his mailings breached the separation between the producer and the viewer, and between known and unknown artists, as his direct address made him a “fan” of everyone and (almost) anyone without (explicitly) making the distinctions of critical reputation or location. Ironically, his lifelong practice of recycling materials led him to pioneer Pop art, transforming popular culture references into aesthetic tableaux and appropriating and abstracting the ephemera of the visual world. With a host of ironic celebrity obsessions apparent in his work, and a “indefinable presence” ubiquitous in the New York scene, he helped found Pop art’s concern with the public persona by incorporating allusions to the art world’s intricate social performance.

Correspondences


Like the simultaneity that took all of Johnson’s references and associated them out of context, he himself touched on many parts of the New York art world, either in person or through the wide distribution of his work, yet had a lack of real connection to the world, and to individuals. In the web of crisscrossing moticos, tesserae and collages, Johnson let the wholeness fail: more correspondence than communication, his work was more about formal connection than a “meeting of the minds” (W. Steiner). With a deadpan humor, he maintained a distance in which there was “nothing”.
One of the first performance artists, Johnson began staging what he called “Nothings” in 1960. These performances paralleled Allan Kaprow’s “Happenings” and later Fluxus events. Johnson described his “Nothings” to William S. Wilson as “an attitude as opposed to a happening,” and he staged numerous performances throughout his life, including his “Throwaway Gesture Performances,” which have been paralleled with the generous compulsion of his seemingly endless stream of mailed collages. As acts of symbolic exchange, they were meant to override the urge to keep and covet, and acted as signpostings of transience, gone before they could perish and asking to be altered by time, travel and chance.
"With the loss of the original I, or we, gained an implication: Conserve this! Restore this! What are the consequences of trying to resist perishing? When I declined to mail that beautiful object, planning to wait for a curator to visit, Ray mailed another film-still in an envelope with loose sand, some of which was irretrievably lost even as I opened the envelope. So I mailed both envelopes to London, exposing them to experiences very like the course of ordinary life, a course that can be hurtful if resisted, yet can become radiant if it is assented to. Ray thought of mail-art as more like fireworks than precious objects in a sanctuary of art. And if his mail-art evaporated or disappeared, its vanishing made a gap that could call forth newer mail-art, fitting seamlessly into a later event. He didn't keep fresh eggs around until they were old.” – William S. Wilson
While Duchamp questioned why art can’t be an object, and Warhol questioned why an object couldn’t be art, Ray Johnson made his life the object of art and art the object of life. Similar in many ways to Duchamp, Johnson also constantly reinvented himself, defied classification, questioned perception with ambiguous spatial organization and eschewed teleological biographical narratives and hierarchies: “leveling of death”, Duchamp called it. Johnson would refer to Duchamp explicitly and implicitly several hundred times in his body of work (Mason Klein), and even used his motif from Etant Donnés over 130 times. De Sassure said: “there are only differences, no positive terms”, and both Duchamp and Johnson took this up in their art by democratizing the source of their materials and information, with arbitrary differences to define space and meaning in the latter’s collages. By taking the modern refusal of historical narrative a step further, Johnson enters postmodern modes of communication with his ephemeral universe of intermedia of the late American 20th century. Creating “new objects for new subjects”, mail art guaranteed activity of the avant-garde mixed with the unpredictability of aesthetic formation, searching for new models of behavior and forming an active and adequate relationship with a new medium.


“New York’s Most Famous Unknown Artist”

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Untitled, (Andy on Dotted Ground) 1957-85-87 -- Untitled, (Chuck Close with Buttons), 1974-87-93+ -- Untitled (Joe Namuth), 1976-85-87-88-89 -- Untitled, (May Wilson with Andy Warhol)
Ray Johnson operated within the exclusive space that was New York’s avant-garde art world, carrying with him the habitus of his Black Mountain acquaintances and cultivating further associations by attending the events of this exclusive sphere – although many renown artists admit they had no idea he was actually making art himself (e.g. Dorothy Lichtenstein) – at the same time he broke the patterns of this exclusive sphere. He did not fight for power and recognition within it: he may have challenged previous ways of thinking about art, its distribution, but did not challenge the artists who engaged in their strategies. Rather, he invited them to participate in his alternative operations, and depended on their participation (much like the system itself). Nonetheless, he articulated a strong distaste for artistic institutions, never allowing the formal display of his work, perhaps simply because he couldn’t reconcile their practices with the persona he had created, billowed by the value of his disavowing stance (though the formal and historical appreciation of his work may have been greater than the value of his disavowal – but then disavowal was a function of his production). He was legitimized by the personal hand of his art-world participants, making him indeed the arch-insider Grace Glueck named him. Ultimately, Johnson shared the same capital as those whose field he disavowed, including an understanding and practiced allusion to the art history canon and an understanding of the network and social “presence” even if he never actually let anyone in on who he was personally. Perhaps this was an even greater source of value, as his persona could therefore never be denied or rebutted as fake.

Until his final sighting in 1995, swimming backstroke in Sag Harbor Cove, before his body was found floating, face up, arms crossed, Johnson’s elusive identity, his loss of origins in the endless flow of collages, his merging of myth and everyday experience and his kaleidoscopic consciousness aligned him with the literary and visual model of transgressive modernism from Baudelaire to Duchamp. But his refusal of narrative in favor of dislocated time and space, endlessly altering, fragmenting and combining works, his global embracing of high and low culture; and his arbitrarily recycled and distributed information also aligned him with the vicissitudes of modern and postmodern modes of visual communication. It placed him squarely within a universe constructed through the ephemeral fields of movies, radio, television and Internet that would come to characterize the look, sensibility and philosophy of the US at the end of the 20th century.

...


The appropriations and blendings of the music world, beginning with sampling, one of hip-hop’s four elements, speaks to the continued relevance of the Johnsonian network, in which the hybridity of work amidst a pluralism of cultural narratives encourages us to reconsider our concept of authorship and authenticity. Wayneandwax.com. The multiplication of copyright lawsuits is evidence of art breaking the boundaries of previous theories, creating the need for a reconsideration of legally embedded conventions in the current state of “always already” information saturation. “Far from the Bohemian vision of the starving artist working alone in an unheated garret, leading contemporary artists like Koons, Murakami, Zhang Yuan or Olafur Eliasson, often work out of factory-like studios and employ large numbers of assistants” In Adbusters,The End of Aesthetics, May 2009, it was argued that the large-scale, hands-off production, extreme technical proficiency and businesslike approach to art-making have “contributed to the defining aspects of the postmodern aesthetic”, making contemporary artists “the new bourgeois” and sidelining the movement’s early concerns with social and environmental issues, including overconsumption. These so seemingly well-adjusted artist-celebrities, selling their “branded” designs as untouched by craft as Creation itself, clashed considerably with the ongoing 18th century idea that artistic genius is associated with the problem of spiritual estrangement. Even recently Melvin Rader argued in The Artist as Outsider that "As a means of spiritual communication, art breaks down the barriers between man and man, and thus provides a defense against estrangement. Many an artist would be an Outsider if he were not an artist." Paul Klee described the artist as the “trunk of the tree, with inspirations coming from the roots [of society] and channelling through the artist to the crown”, creating not reification but humility – and disunity or alienation from the “larger spiritual whole” when cut off from the community. Reassured by the renewed agency of those “outside” the system to subvert what had become an irrelevant institutional structure of a dead-end modernist narrative, i.e. artists deconstructing its hidden sociopolitical agenda (Joseph Kosuth, Play of the Unmentionable, or Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills]), the growing political insularity of those like Hirst and the commercial orientations of Murakami’s fashion-world collaborations may be disquieting to Melvin Rader. The “excessive presence” of the artist in performative trends of the 60s and 70s probably would have upset Klee. And although the outsider artist may not enjoy the monopoly on artistic merit in the pluralism of postmodern aesthetics, especially when society’s romantic vision of the artist has become slick under the glossy patina of marketing, the tributaries of those like Ray Johnson can be assured of the continued relevance of his work, and theirs. The street art movement, for instance, oversteps these artist-function anxieties by its (relatively) anonymous nature, and it would be difficult to argue its sociopolitical relevance. Perhaps the “true” contemporary artists, by continuing to blur the line between life and art, street artists reincarnate the Baudelarian flâneur that may have last been seen with the likes of Johnson, while currently enjoying an “outsider-insider” status simultaneously that keeps their feet on the ground and their works in the dailies.
“Are there any artists whom you particularly respect, or whom you feel to have a particular relationship to your owr, or who are involved in the same kind of total activity that you’re involved in?” asked Henry Martin. Yes,” replied Johnson, “All the graffiti artists.”







References and Bibliography

Ray Johnson, Correspondences, Walker Art Center, 1999
Aaron Rose et al., Beautiful Losers, D.A.P./Iconoclast; 2nd edition (October 15, 2005)
Clement Greenberg, Modernism and Postmodernism, 1979
Arthur Danto, After the End of Art (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997)
Klaus Honnef, Andy Warhol 1928-1987: Commerce into Art. Rev. edition. Taschen, 2000.
David Hopkins, Art after Modern Art, 1945-2000. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2000
Michel Foucault, The Author-Function, 1970
Jeanne Marie Kusina, The Evolution and Revolutions of the Networked Art Aesthetic, 2005
Melvin Rader, The Artist As Outsider, 1958
Adbusters, The End of Aesthetics, May 2009
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993)
Picasso English trans. From Stein’s french version by Alice B. Toklas (New York: Scribners, 1939).
Wayne Marshall, Giving Up Hip-Hop's Firstborn, A Quest for the Real after the Death of Sampling, 2006
James Putnam, Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001)