THE NEW YORK Correspondance School is an art of witty
resemblances; it originates with Ray Johnson, but any number can play. It
takes the 'New York school' of painters, an invention of careless art
historians, and schools of art by correspondence in which famous artists
teach commercial art through the mails, and it combines them into a satiric
portmanteau that carries still other meanings.
Correspondence is spelled correspondance, not in the French manner, but
because a Ukrainian poster from the Lower East Side of Manhattan announces a
dance in a word that looks like 3AbaBy (three-a-baby). This poster (dance,
3AbaBy) became an image after Ann Wilson gave birth to twins and M. T
.became pregnant; three-a-baby seemed a sign of the times.
In the same spirit Ray Johnson invented the Robin Gallery as an answer to
the Batman Gallery in San Fran- cisco (Robin was Batman's youthful companion
in the comic as we now all know). The Robin Gallery not only held 'robbin' ,
events (in October, 1963, Ray Johnson and Sari Dienes stole a painting back
from friends at Haver- straw), it also held (at least announced) an eight
man show with only three artists, because 3 and its inverted reflection £
make an 8. Clearly the truth for Ray Johnson is not correspondence to
aCtuality (verisimilitude), but is cor- respondence of part to part
(pregnant similarities that dance).
Now correspondence belongs in a thesaurus not only with 'correlation,
agreement, symmetry, and concord', but also with 'epistolary intercourse,
written communication, and letter writing'. So the NYCS uses the US mails as
part of its method or m~dium.
~ Ray Johnson first notices something about a person, an ~ image which.
might be central or marginal, and then he I fills an envelope with scraps of
images that comment on or ~ add to or combine with that image. This process
begins " with a fondness for filing things, so he sends horses to
Billy Linich, lobsters to Henry Martin, balloons to Karl Wirsum. He files a
person under something in his mind, and then sends along through the mails
whatever he feels belongs in the same file.
The use of the US mails, a sanctimonious institution with pretensions to
heroic purity and endurance, offers
the delight of turning to aesthetic purposes a practical outfit with ethical
ambitions ('Report obscene mail to your postmaster.') The slow daily post is
still useful, but technologically as obsolete as the nineteenth-century
middle-class family in which grandfather seems to have devoured bacon and
the morning post together. Now that data can be communicated electronically,
the old fashioned mails begin to yield aesthetic possibilities. At just
about the time that mailboxes ceased to be painted drab green, as nature
intended them, and became red, white and blue, like US hybrid petunias, Ray
Johnson founded the NYCS.
With correspondence as content (similarity) and as method ( epistolary
intercourse), many otherwise flat details come into relief. The bombastic
statue of Samuel S. Cox, 'the letter carrier's friend', at Thompkin's Square
off lOth Street in Manhattan, becomes a work of art when it is drawn by Karl
Wirsum for page 7 of the Book About Death, a series of multilithoed sheets
Ray Johnson has mailed around. An envelope becomes part of a work of art,
and the typical envelope of NYCS missive has been found discarded by a
commercial firm or municipal agency (in truth, some filched by friends).
Envelopes carrying the crest of TIME-LIFE INC rather deflate that afflatus
of editorial wind, and envelopes from IBM turn up as truants from commerce
playing a part in art whose value cannot be computed. The envelope usually
has a com- mercial history, then, but its future lies as an unsalable part
of the NYCS taking its chances in the unassailable US mails.
On the envelope is usually a correct return address for Ray Johnson (176
Suffolk Street, New York City, 10002), the address of the recipient, and
stamps. The picture on the stamp can correspond to something, and the
position of the stamp, and of the cancellation, is important formally to the
success of the envelope. Stamp and cancellation are as significant as the
position of a collector's seal on an oriental painting-sort of New York
Chinatown Dada. (Ray Johnson has lived at Munroe Street and Dover Street,
both near New York's Chinatown and City Hall. He has collected scraps
ofpaper, pictures, and other trash from both. Chinatown has provided
words-probably the
price of chop suey-which are opaque, beautiful, and unintelligible, and
which easily become part of a visual language of articulate design. City
Hall has provided examples of English so stupidly depleted by municipal
misuse as to be ready for resurrection in art. )
Some envelopes in the NYts contain items that are, like a poem, overheard,
since they are inscribed, 'Please send to John Doe, 123 4th Street, New York
City 5'. The envelope, having passively passed through the mails, is now at
the mercy of the first recipient. Some alter, some add, some subtract, some
detract, some discard, some hoard, and others conscientiously forward the
materials on their appointed rounds. Ray Johnson says he doesn't care what
is done, that there are no rules, but he once circulated a list of people
dropped from the NYCS for various offenses.
The relationships can get rather complex, as Ray Johnson directs to someone
an image which he mails to someone else first. The first recipient, the
middle-man, might or might not see something in what is passing through his
hands. Knowing that people have been tampering with the mails, the final
recipient cannot be certain what Ray Johnson originally sent.
He was once questioned by Lieutenant J ohnston of the New York City Police
department because a young woman received an envelope of indecent pictures
with his return address. He explained the NYCS to the lieutenant and was not
arrested. Even apart from hysterical females afraid of photographs, the
possibilities are complicated, and in each case unique; what arises out of
the NYCS is a curious tissue of relationships, a society of sorts,
associating people who might think in images.
One of the sources of the exhilaration and liberation in this game is the
lack of respect for privacy. We all came from homes in which even our
sisters could be trusted not to read private letters; now letters most
private get dumped into the NYCS, but these expressions of emotion are
treated as abstractly as a triangle, as parts to be combined with other
parts. Cries of the heart are examined for form and pattern, not sincerity
.Personal letters are not sacred, because what is real is not the self or
emotions (see Abstract Expressionism), but the special moments of
discovery in which the apparently random forms parallels. Ray Johnson is not
accepting the lukewarm pleasures of
a thermodynamic and chance distribution of junk through the mails. (Nam June
Paik, a disciple of John Cage, once kept on his mantelpiece a mailing from
Ray Johnson, who told him he had it wrong-side-out. For Paik, all sounds are
music, but Ray Johnson turned the mailing to the signi- ficant side.) He is
not shooting dice, he is creating possi- bilities for pattern, metaphor, and
meaning.
We are familiar with metaphor that illuminates or enhances existence, but
metaphor is not only a way of thinking about things, its use can be a theory
of reality. Ray Johnson is a realist for whom reality is in designed or
coincidental resemblances, a tissue of correspondences, a fabric of
metaphors. These correspondences imply no 'higher' reality .The images do
not bring forward invisible worlds in the way that the Visible Church
embodies the Invisible Church. The envelopes and images do not clothe an
underlying ens, nor are Ray Johnson's collages a shadow of the real. The
mailings and collages, however deliberately the image may be veiled or
obliterated, present that which is real because it is sufficient:
correspondences. This real world of parallels and resemblances works with at
least three principles :
Identity: Ray Johnson never read Leibnitz, but he plays with the problem of
the identity of indiscernibles, renew- ing excitement and wonder that two
things are identical, or almost so. He often uses lc stamps so that several
identical images are repeated on the envelope-George Washington George
Washington George Washington George Washing- ton George Washington-to make
the 5c postage. Inside the envelope there may be two copies of the same
photo- graph, or one photograph of J ames Dean in different sizes reproduced
on different paper in different magazines. The photograph is the same, and
yet it is other, and this fluctuation of same-and-other speaks to us of
images enduring in the flux of things when they resemble other images.
Analogy: Sometimes Ray J ohnson sees with a biologist's eye resemblances in
form or function, but he works out his own genera and species, cutting not
at the joints of scientific distinctions, but carving out his own
'impertinent
correspondencies' (Lamb). To him, a photograph of Bt:ster Keaton leaning
over the side of a ship belongs with a postcard of a gargoyle leaning over
Notre Dame. An Indian drawing of a woman, seen sidewise, looks like a
photograph of a pistol in the same envelope. The equation, woman and pistol,
relates to a whole theme of' Annie Get Your Gun', Ethel Merman, muff
pistols, and Connie Francis in a recent movie in which she plays a female
mail- man with guns hanging above her mantelpiece.
Focus: A horse does not resemble, however abstracted, a cup and saucer, in
the way that the Indian woman resembles the gun. But Ray Johnson can find a
horse that is seen in the same way that a cup and saucer is being seen (Femande
Olivier painted by Picasso looks more like Kahnweiler painted by Picasso
than like herself painted by Kees van Dongen). Ray Johnson finds
resemblances between two things that are being imagined from the same point
of view, or photographed from the same mental focus, and offers the
resemblance as correspondence, and correspondence as meaning.
What suffices for Ray Johnson is a mind that makes metaphors and a world
that yields them. He perceives identities in spite of obvious differences,
and holds a tension between identity and difference in his work. The meaning
of most envelopes in the NYCS is partly in the
Icontent (a picture of a horse conveys an idea), but more is in the method,
the use of correspondences. These corres-
pondences are not part of a cosmic design with metaphysical consolations.
They represent a temporary balance between an unsatisfying common sense
world and an imaginative mind, moments when miscellaneous items are shown to
be a coherent motif: moments that rhyme.
Ray Johnson finds it sufficient to discover correspon- dences, and he
corresponds with people by mail to convey to them images that correspond to
some image they will recognise as appropriate.
His address is: 176 Suffolk Street, New York City, 10002.
New York Correspondance School,
1964, using an
envelope as the background of a collage-letter ,. note the variety of type
and means of printing. The entry on Pope
-is clipped from a dictionary and attached with tape
Ray Johnson is an American collagist born in Detroit, Michigan, October 16,
1927. He studied under Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, before
working and living in Manhattan. His first one-man show at the Willard
Gallery in 1965, hailed him in the New York Times as 'New York's most famous
unknown artist', His. one-man show this April, '66, should brt"ng his public
reputation into line with the private reputation he has had for a decade as
an artist ranking with Rauschenberg andJohns. A book of Correspon- dance
School material was published by' Something Else Press', 160 Fifth Avenue,
NYC.
Text by William
S.Wilson,New York
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