Reply on 27-10-1995 (internet)

DH: There is no doubt in my mind that Ray Johnson was one of the most valuable artists I've ever known. He was a master of the "tricky little Paul Klee-ish collage," as he modestly dismissed them; most of his work of the late 1950's was collages in 8 1/2 x 11 format-roughly corresponding to the European A3. That was a time when Abstract Expressionism ("Tachisme") ruled the roost in America, and art was supposed to swagger, lack humor, be big and important-looking. Johnson had rejected this long before, had, in the 1950's, made hundreds or thousands of postcard-size collages using popular imagery, had also made big collages and then cut them up, sewn them together into chains, had buried the critic Suzi Gablik in a small mountain of them (alas, only temporarily), had printed various ingenious little booklets and sent them off into the world, and, since there was no appropriate gallery for his work, had now taken to sending his collages out - along with assemblages in parcel post form. For example, a few days after I had startled Ray by throwing my alarm clock out the window, he sent me a box containing a marzipan frog, a broken clock and a pair of chopsticks, calling shortly thereafter to suggest that we Chinatown for dinner.

But Ray could write too. He was always interested in theater and performance, had picked up many ideas from the days when he and his friend Richard Lippold lived downtown in New York City on Monroe Street on the floor below John Cage (all of them friends also from Black Mountain College), and he wrote and sent out innumerable playlets, poems, prose constructions, etc.

I saw Ray around town for several months before I met him, which was at a 1959 concert where I asked him if he were Jasper Johns. "No," he said, "I'm Ray Johnson," we got to talking and soon to walking and not long afterwards to visiting. Years later, when I met Jasper Johns, in order to complete the symmetry, I asked him if he were Ray Johnson. I expected him to say, "You know I'm not-why do you ask?" Instead he said, acidly: "No." And he walked away.

Something Else Press was founded on the spur of the moment. First I did my book "Jefferson's Birthday/Postface" (1964). But before the thing was even printed, I decided the next book should be across-section of the things Ray had sent me over the previous six years. So, having little room at my own place, I packed them all into two suitcases, visited my mother and spread everything out on her dining table. I sorted the book into piles-performance pieces, poems, collages,things to be typeset, thing to be reproduced in Ray's writing-taking care to include at least some of each category. I knew the book would be hard to sell, so I didn't want to make it a Big Important Book; I chose the format of a children's book, set the texts in a smallish size of Cloister Bold (an old-fashioned Venetian face), decided on using two colors to simulate four (which I could not have afforded), and then laid out the pages in a way which I felt would invite the reader to experience Ray's pieces as I did on receiving them. Ray, who had at first been displeased by the project, perhaps feeling it would lock him into a format too much, became very enthusiastic as the project developed. Where at first he had refused to title the book, later he called it "The Paper Snake" after a collage and print he had made. He also wanted the price to be "$3.47," for reasons I have never known (prices of that sort were always $3.48 or $3.98). And when, one winter day in 1966, the book was being bound by a New York City binder, I took Ray over to the bindery to see it being cased in (when the covers are attached to the book). By then he was delighted and wrote me one of the few formal letters ever received from him thanking me for doing it.

As for its reception, the book was a puzzler to even the most sophisticated readers at the time. Even someone who was a regular correspondent of Ray's, Stanton Kreider, wrote me an outraged letter saying what a silly book it was. Such people usually felt that Ray's mailings were and should remain ephemera. There were almost no reviews, but one did appear in Art Voices, one of the most scorching reviews I have ever seen, complaining the book was precious and completely trivial, a pleasure to an in-group. These letters and reviews are now in the Archiv Sohm in Stuttgart, where you can persue them for yourself if you like.

RJ: It is good that you keep mentioning the places where things can be found, if I do or don't persue, now somebody else might do it too. There are a lot of archives in the world. Besides the 'official' archives there are also the private collections that most (mail-) artists have built up. Are there still things that you collect?

Reply on 29-10-95 (internet)

DH: I feel over whelmed by THINGS at my home. My letters are one of the main things I have done in this life, and I try to keep copies of each letter I send; but there is no space to save them. For years now my files have been going away - to the Archiv Sohm, for about 1972 to 1989 to the Jean Brown Archive, and from then till now the Getty Center in Santa Monica, California.

I don't think it makes sense for a private individual to have a closed archive if such a person is going to present a face to the world. I have read that Yoko Ono founded Fluxus, and I have seen that quoted as a fact many times. One critic or student picks up errors from the one before. I don't know where that "fact" came from. Yoko is a good. modest person; she was a friend of ours and she had done pieces which are very much part of the older Fluxus repertoire. But she was not present on that November day of 1961 when Maciunas proposed to a group of us that we do a magazine to be called "Fluxus" and that we do performances of the pieces in the magazine; nor was she in Wiesbadenin September 1962 when we did those performances and the press began calling us "Die Fluxus Leute" - the Fluxus people. So while she, for instance, was surely one of the original Fluxus people, she did not found Fluxus. Well, if I am going to assert this, it is important that the documents of the time be available somewhere besides in my own files. Too, my writings are complex and full of allusions; this is not to create mysteries but to enrich the fabric and draw on reality. It can be useful therefore that my files be open to anyone who needs them, and this would be impossible if the files were here in my church.

Then there are other collections: from 1977 to 1991 I collected things related to Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), - apart from a passage in Plato's Phaedrus, Bruno's "De imaginum, signorum et idearum Compositione" (1593) has the earliest discussion I know of intermedia -but when Charlie Doria's translation of this work came out (which I edited and annotated) I sold off all the Bruno materials I had. From 1968 to 1990 (about) I collected patterns poetry-old visual poetry from before 1900 - but that too has gone away, most of it anyway. I have collected almost all of the books written, designed by or associated with Merle Armitage (1893-1975), a great modernist book designer, and my biography of him, "Merle Armitage and the Modern Book", is due out with David Godine next year. I will then sell that collection too. Perhaps it was a good experience acquiring these things, but that part is over now. Other collections have been given away. I collected a tremendous amount of sound poetry and information on it, meaning to do a book on the subject. But there was never money to do the book right. Perhaps that collection also should depart. There is too much artwork by myself here in the church in which I live and work - it gets damaged because it cannot be stored properly. I would like to move to a smaller place, since I do not need and cannot afford this big one, and if that happens more things also go away.

There are some phonograph records, tapes and CD's too - too many to keep track of, some going back to my teen years when I used to spend the money I earned by baby-sitting on records of John Cage, Henry Cowell, G”esta Nystroem, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Anton Webernand such-like. I suppose the only books which are also tools and (for me) reference work-books on design or artistic crafts (orchestration, for instance), Fluxbooks and Flux catalogs (I need to check my facts), books and magazines in which I am included (so I can tell where such-and-such a piece first was printed). As for objects, I care about my mother's dishes and one table, but that is about all - the rest can go.

No, I am a temporary collector - as Gertrude Stein said of her visitors, she liked to see them come, but she also liked to see them go. I will acquire things when they are needed, but I need to unload them too. I have no right to own art, even by friends, because I cannot take care of it properly. It too must go. This church is dark with things, things, things - and maybe somebody else, somebody younger that I, might like to have them.

RJ: Why do you live in a church?

Reply on 4-11-1995 (internet)

DH: I live in this church because, when I moved to this area from Vermont (where I had lived almost fourteen years, off and on, up near the Quebec border) I bought a house, garage and church complex. It had been "defrocked" by the Roman Catholic Church in 1974, its consecration taken away and the cross and bell removed, and it was sold to a couple who wanted it to become an antique shop. However there was no drive-by traffic so they found that would not work. But nobody wanted to buy it from them. So I got it at a good price, as they say. My plan was to live in the house- a modest parsonage,- for my wife Alison Knowles to use the garage (where we set up a photo darkroom to be shared), and for myself to use the church as my own studio. For this it was fine.

But in 1985 when my finances began to collapse-with the decline in the US art world, the rise of our Radical Right and neo-Christian coalition, and with the Fluxus syndrome among exhibitors and collectors, I had to rent out the house to survive and to move into the church. It is a nice space, well suited to be a studio, but it is dark in the winter and is quite gloomy and expensive to heat. It has no doors so nobody is separated from anything else that is going on. There are virtually no doors to close, so there is no privacy. Sometimes I think I will go mad here. Maybe I have. I would love to move, but like the previous owners I would find it hard to sell and in any case I have no money to move. Next winter I may have to do without heat here most of the time unless things look up. It is a curious environment for an artist.

I often refer to this "Fluxus syndrome." It is my term for a problem that I face. It goes like this. A gallerist, critic or exhibitor tells me "I like your work. I know you are a Fluxus artist." Then they see more of my work and they compare it to the work of George Maciunas, whom they take to be the leader of Fluxus instead of its namer and, in his own preferred term, "Chairman" of Fluxus. They note that there are differences and they say to me: "But that work is not Fluxus. Do you have any Fluxus work?" I say yes, - and I show work from the early sixties through late seventies. It still does not resemble the work of Maciunas. It isn't usually even fun and games, which is what the public thinks of as Fluxus. So I am marginalized in Fluxus shows, or I am left out of other collections because "This is not a Fluxus gallery/museumshow/collection." The problem is all but unavoidable, and in vain canone point out that if Fluxus is important, it is because of its focus on intermedia, that Maciunas recognized this repeatedly, that he knew perfectly well that there was room in Fluxus for work which did not resemble his at all. If one says anything like this in public, it is taken to be a disloyalty to George or some kind of in-fighting for prestige. I have sometimes been tempted to show my work under a false name in order to escape this syndrome altogether. But even that sounds as if I were ashamed of my Fluxus past, which I am not, even though it is not awfully relevant to my work since the late seventies. Also I still feel affinities to some of my Fluxus colleagues, though the work of others has, in my opinion, become repetitious crap. Many of my Flux friends could do with a little more self-criticism, in my opinion. Fluxus also has its share ofhangers-on, people who were utterly marginal to the group and who kept their distance during the years when Fluxus had not acquired its present and perhaps false public image, but who are now all too willing to con their way into the list and to enter their colors for the next tournament.

RJ: This story about "Fluxus syndrome," is quite interesting when I compare it to mail art. There is the difference that in mail art most artists try to avoid the traditional art-world, and there is even the phrase "mail art and money don't mix" by Lon Spiegelman, that is used by others too. There are on the other hand also artists who say to organize a mail art show and then start to use entrance-fees and ask for money for catalogues ; try to 'con' people in the mail art network. What do you think of "mail art and money don't mix"? I know it's not an easy question to answer.

Reply on 11-11-1995 (internet)

DH: Money and mail art? Money and Fluxus? Mixing? You are right, I can't answer that one easily. Certainly if somebody got into mail art (or Fluxus) as a means of advancing his or her career- "Gee," says the dork,"ya gotta get inta as many shows as possible, I was in thirty-two last year and here's the catalogs to prove it," - he or she would swiftly learn that is not what the field is for. Rather, its purpose is to combat alienation, and that is only in some respects an economic problem. Mail art has tremendous disruptive potential (and even some constructive social potential), as I described in my story about Polish mail artists and the East German bureaucrat. And it has great community-building power - even my hypothetical dork can say "Wow, I got friends all over, from Argentina to Tooneesia." But I must make a confession: I have probably seen forty or fifty actual exhibitions of mail art, and NOT ONE OF THEM was interesting to see. There were good things in each of them of course, but the effect of looking at them was weak. Why? Because they did not reflect the function - they always treated the sendings as final artifacts (sometimes ranked according to the prestige of the artist). But mail art pieces are virtually never final artifacts - they are conveyors of a process of rethinking, community-building and psychological and intellectual extension. Thus it is, I think, a distortion to think, of mail art as a commercial commodity of any kind. Because it is typically modest in scale usually and it is usually technically simple, the finest piece may come from the greenest, newest or the least skilled artist. There is no rank in mail art so long as the artist thinks and sees clearly.

Nevertheless, the issue of money is one which must be faced. Lack of it can ruin your capability for making mail art, for one thing. When the heat is gone and you can't afford to go to the doctor, it is very hard to focus on making this collage to send away, even though one knows that to do so would bring great satisfaction and comfort. Yet the mail art itself is not usually salable, and nobody gets a career in mail art. One is free to be capricious, as I was circa twenty-odd years ago when I spent two months corresponding only with people whose last names began with M. It is not, then, so much that mail art and money do not mix but that mailart simply cannot be used to produce money, at least not directly, - which is not to say that one mail artist cannot help another. Obviously we can and do. I remember when Geoffrey Cook, a San Francisco mailartist, undertook a campaign through the mail art circuit to free Clemente Padín, the Uruguayan mail artist (among other things) who had been jailed by the military junta for subversion. It worked. And many is the mail artist who, wanting to see his or her correspondent, finds some money somewhere to help defray travel costs and such-like.

With Fluxus, the issue is different. Fluxart has in common with mail artits primary function as a conveyor of meaning and impact. But Fluxworks are not usually mail art and do not usually depend on a network of recepients. Some are enormously large. Some take large amounts of time to construct, some are expensive to build and so on. Given this, issues of professionalism arise which are not appropriate to mail art. If I insist on making my Fluxart amateur and to support myself by other means, I may not be able to realize my piece. I am thus forced at a certain point in my evolution to attempt to live form my art, since anything else would be a distraction. I must commercialize the un-commercializable in order to extend it to its maximum potential. What an irony! It is, I fancy (having been in Korea but not Japan), like the expensive tranquillity of a Zen temple in contrast to the maniacal frenzy of Japanese commercial life outside it. Peace becomes so expensive one might imagine it is a luxury, which I hope it is not. So one is compelled to support it.

The difference is, I think, that commercial art supports the world of commodity; Fluxus and other serious art of their sort draws on the world of commerce for its sustenance but its aim lies elsewhere - it points in other directions, not at the prestige of the artist as such (someone once tried to swap, for a book by Gertrude Stein which he wanted, two cookies which Stein had baked, then about twenty-two years before) and certainly not at his or her ego in any personal sense (John Cage musing at the hill behind his then home, "I don't think I have done anything remarkable, anything which that rock out there could not do if it were active"). One must take one's work seriously, must follow its demands and be an obedient servant to them: nobody else will, right? If the demands are great and require that one wear a shirt and tie and go light people's cigars, then out of storage come the shirt and tie and out comes the cigar-lighter. That is what we must do. But we do not belong to the world of cigars; we are only visitors there. It is a liminal experience, like the shaman visiting the world of evil spirits. We can even be amused by the process. Anyway, that's my opinion.

***deleted question***

RJ: Why has mail art, which seems so ephemeral in one way, held peoples' attention as it has? Is there anything uniquely timely in mailart?

***deleted question***

RJ: Some mail artists say that the mail art network is more active than before. Others say that mail art is history because almost all the possibilities of the traditional mail have been explored, and that all the things that are happening now in mail art, are reproductions of things that happened before. Is mail art a finished chapter?

Reply on 16 December, 1995

(Santayana born today (1863) and Jane Austin too (1775)

DH: Well, I think both sides are right. Mail Art is more active than before if more people are doing it. Of course, for those of us whose interest in exploration I am glad they are doing it even though I see no need to do it AS SUCH myself. Mail Art is [only?] history if all the possibilities have been explored - yes, if one's job is to explore things only formally. Of course I love history - without it I never know what not to do. For me this last assumption is therefore right so far as it goes, but it does not go very far. Why should we assume that doing something once means it need not be done again? That is what I call the "virgin attitude," fine for people who are hung up on sleeping with virgins but a dreadful idea if it is really love that you want. Aren't you glad that Monet painted more than one haystack or waterlily painting? Don't you have a food recipe which you would hate to change? A "finished chapter?" That has even more problematic assumptions.

After all, a chapter in a book (including the Book of Life) involves reading, and the best books invite reading more than once. Isn't reading as creative as writing?

Mail Art is, in my opinion, not a single form. I am not much of ataxonomist - someone else can decide how many forms it is, can classify and sort it out. What I know and have said in this interview is that Function precipitates Form. So long as new uses for Mail Art can appear, new forms are likely to arise. Just for instance - e-mail letters and magazines are relatively new. The ways we can use them have not fully revealed themselves. The politics of this world are as fouled up as ever; perhaps there are mail art methods (including e-mail methods) which can be used to help straighten things out or at least point to the problems in a startling or striking way. No, I think mail art may be history - it has been with us at least since Rimbaud's burnt letters - but only a Dan Quail (a proverbially obtuse right-wing politician here) would say, as he did in 1989, that "History is Over!" And as long as there are people-artists-living alone here and there, confronted by problems (professional, formal, human or social), Mail Art is likely to have a role to play in helping to alleviate those problems. What we must not do is allow ourselves to take ourselves too seriously - tendentiousness is a natural health hazard for the mail artist. The freshness and unpredictability of the medium are part of why, if mail art works at all, it really does. Just as we must always reinvent ourselves, according to whatever situations we find ourselves in, we must always reinvent our arts. And that includes mail art.

RJ: Well, this is a wonderful moment to end this interview. I want to thank you for your time and sharing your thoughts.

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