When given this assignment, I was excited about the possibilities; they were seemingly endless. I also just loved the concept of sending art to people just because. The lack of purpose that the guidelines gave was exciting because it was stripping down art to the meaning that I grew to love as a kid, something pretty that was shared from one person to another. While my view of art has grown beyond my elementary idea, it was fun to revisit this theme of sending art to people just for the sake of making their day. It did not need to be something profoundly deep or explore a new school of thought.
Despite the lighthearted feeling that I had going into the project, through the research I did, the mood of similar works was much different than my initial perception. Many of the pieces that were mailed carried political and social meanings. The concept of mail art was also much more profound than I had first imagined.
After reading about Ray Johnson’s work, this became very clear. Johnson was considered one of the pioneers of mail art and the concept of sending mail to a network that was ever expanding through the practice. He was based in New York and active artist until his death in 1995. Johnson was known as a pop performance artists that was driven by exploring new concepts through his art. Many thought of him as the predecessor to Marcel Duchamp as a conceptualist; always pushing the boundaries of what could be considered art and what could not. As far as Johnsons work with mail art, much of his creations were very text heavy and in collage form, the works were meant to spread ideas.
I also found the work of artist Walead Beshty incredibly interesting. While very different from Johnson, Beshty also explored the ideas of mail art. One major difference between the two is that Beshty’s concepts were based on the act of shipping and the damages made to the objects as part of the piece. In the series “Fedex Sculptures” he shipped glass boxes in FedEx containers to different parts of the world. The damage of both the box and its contents become part of the piece.
While I found this concept interesting and aesthetically pleasing to look at, I wanted to focus on the text aspect of Johnsons work in my own mail art project. As a result, I wrote the poem “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou across twelve water colored strips. I chose this poem because of its resilient message and its historical importance in civil rights movements. I only wrote one stanza per letter in hops that people would google it and see the larger component which they are apart of. While this may not directly resemble of the work of the artists that I did research on, my hope was to spread a message through the mail and ultimately show each recipient that they were a member of a larger network.
Lyx Ish (1987)
Ray Johnson (years unknown)
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