INTERVIEW WITH EMMETT WILLIAMS, Judith Hoffberg

INTERVIEW WITH EMMETT WILLIAMS: FLUXUS ARTIST EXTRAORDINAIRE

On the occasion of an extraordinary exhibition curated by Paul Schimmel over the past eight years at the Museum of Contemporary Art entitled "Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979" and the ancillary event called "Beyond the Pink" which brought performance artists from all over the world to Los Angeles, I had the great privilege of escorting Emmett Williams, the pre-eminent poet-performer known to many through Fluxus, but who has distinguished himself throughout Europe as a visionary poet, visual artist and performance artist for a week in February. During that time, I asked him if he would be willing to sit down and have a chat, and here it is on the eve of the publication of his book: Mr. Fluxus: A Collective Portrait of George Maciunas to be published in the U.S. by Thames & Hudson in May 1998.

I told him that he has been in my vocabulary for at least 25 years, but we never sat down and talked before this very day of Friday the 13th of February.

I asked him how he got involved in Fluxus.

It was because of receiving a letter one day in Darmstadt, where I was living, from La Monte Young and he was saying he had seen some of my writings and drawings in a German book called Movens (1959) and he wanted to know if he could use some of this material for a magazine they were preparing called Beatitude, and I said yes, and all things developed from there. I did have a letter from La Monte that there was this strange guy named Maciunas who was coming to Europe, trying to escape some bad debts, and that he would look me up and talk about performance and things like that. His letters to me are all in the Getty now because of the Jean Brown Collection. Suddenly, there came George Maciunas, and he had heard about my work, and the work of Robert Filliou, Daniel Spoerri, and Dieter Roth, who were all good friends of mine, and Jean Tingueley and so on and so on. Eventually, in September 1962, that was Wiesbaden and that was the beginning of Fluxus as performance festival. It was simply performance. And of course, there were 14 concerts in Wiesbaden and then Paris, and then Copenhagen (1962) and in early 1963 we went to Dusseldorf for a series of concerts and that was when Joseph Beuys joined the club.

What distinguished me was that I belonged to the European faction, because my friends were Europeans, and soon after Dusseldorf, George Maciunas went back to the United States and started the Fluxus thing in the United States. Alison and Dick had been visiting from Turkey and so that's how I got to know them in Wiesbaden. I remained in Europe, and Fluxus became something very important in Europe, much more so than in America, thanks to Beuys, Vostell, Ren≠ Block and other people who believed in Fluxus in a much more serious way than in the United States. These were very accomplished artists, and they were involved in Fluxus and people took note. They explained what Fluxus was, different from what I thought or what Dick thought, and it remains a very very European phenomenon. George was Lithuanian-born himself and had spent the first part of his life in Europe, shaped by these things. He was the "immigrant boy".

Was the transition in New York, in the heart of AbEx and Pop Art, the reason that Fluxus could not grab on with such competition.

No, no one called himself or herself a Fluxus artist in New York who could match a Vostell or a Beuys or a Kopke or others who remained in Europe and had an entirely different approach. People who made Fluxus created a glorious scene in Europe--Eric Anderson, Kopke, and we did not come out of nowhere, because we had been doing things. My Opera was first done in the 1950s, and so much of my work was done before Fluxus. I knew Vostell, Spoerri, Beuys, Filliou, Ben Patterson and Nam June before there was a Fluxus. I remember meeting in Milano before Fluxus went to the Biennale in the early 1990s and Gino di Maggio asked, "How did Fluxus change your work and your life?" Oh, Ben Vautier said this happened and this happened, and I just said, I saw you Ben Vautier in London before Fluxus and you were doing the same things before Fluxus and after Fluxus. When George said, Let there be Fluxus, we didn't change our ways and do something else. He gave us a forum so that we could come together and do things.

Did you come together before Fluxus?

I was very close to Spoerri and Filliou. The first performance of Opera in 1959 was with Spoerri and Klaus Bremen and myself in the Keller Club in the Castle in Darmstadt. Daniel was very active in theater at the time, he comes from ballet--the poetry that has come to be identified with me as Fluxus was all there before. It was my work that many people regard as Fluxus work that La Monte saw and that caused Maciunas to phone me and say that I'm coming over to talk about Fluxus. So many of the Americans allegedly came out of John Cage's class. The only comparable thing in Europe was the summer courses in music outside of Darmstadt where I first met these Americans like Earl Brown and John Cage. I was more interested in those days in Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bruno Maderna and Pierre Boulez-- whose ideas of notation changed the nature of my poetic work and gave me ideas of structuring my performances.

I was in Europe from 1949 - 1966 when I went to New York to become the Editor-in-Chief of the Something Else Press. My closest friendship there was with Ay-O, and we are more than brothers to this day. And there were others. And during the years when I taught at Cal Arts, Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, and the Sabitas Girl's School in Massachusetts and at Mt. Holyoke and then the culminating teaching experience in the United States was at Harvard. Ann Noel and I had the finest time at Harvard. We had marvelous students, many friends, and we did not want to stay there forever, because it was far too comfortable. In 1980, I was invited to be a guest artist in the DAAD program in Berlin, and we went to Berlin and have been there ever since. Gary, our son, is now a composer studying in Canada, and Annie and I see our old friends who are still alive and with whom I collaborate: Spoerri, Hamilton and Roth. Al Hansen finally came to Europe, but he dropped dead recently. My friends and collaborators remain European. It is significant that the only prize I ever won was the first Hannah H ch prize, given to me by Berlin, and it was so funny for an American to get this. It made me feel very comfortable. This year, Vostell got the prize. It's very interesting that this marvelous award should go first to an American, and the next year to Vostell and it is for lifetime achievement in the Arts. I'd like to think that it was given to me in Berlin by Germans.

Berlin has been very good to you, recognized your merits, given you a great studio. It's very unusual for an American to be embraced so much by this German city.

It is really very nice, and I do this not as a Fluxus artist. When I have exhibitions, I do not say I am a Fluxus artist, I say it is my work. And that makes me very comfortable. And it's nice to outlive descriptive titles like that. There are not too many people who know about my background. They come to my shows and buy the work, because they like it.

The 30th year anniversary of Fluxus seemed to stimulate the interest in Fluxus with students, curators, and art historians. It was not only in history, but with actual performances, objects, and installations.

The beginning of the anniversary in 1982, and then in 1992 had international repercussions. But many people misunderstand what Fluxus artists complain about--that is, that the museums had ignored their work, but in the beginning there was no work, there was nothing to put on the wall and nothing to look at, so it wasn't until there came to be things by Fluxus artists to put on the wall that they came to see things on the wall. In fact, what distinguishes the US Fluxus from the European is that Fluxus USA began to make boxes, and we in Europe continued in the tradition of performance. We did participate in the box program, but we didn't do boxes exclusively.

But coming to the States in 1966 to become Editor-in-Chief of Something Else Press obviously attracted you.

Well, I would never have done it on my own, but the fact is that Dick Higgins knew the French edition of Anecdoted Topography of Chance of Daniel Spoerri, and I translated and re-anecdoted that book and Dick Higgins published it as a Something Else Press book and invited me to the United States to be his editor-in-chief, and passage was paid for this translation, and there is that connection. I had no intention to come to the US for a signing party. I came because to it was to help pay for the translation.

Two years ago, in London, Atlas Press brought out an absolutely staggering new version of The Anecdoted Topography of Chance, all reworked, so that except for Robert, and Topor presented a little introduction, and we all went to work and re-anecdoted the thing again--it is much thicker and more beautiful--and the British press just raved over it. They liked the first thing I had translated, but the Times Literary Supplement said this is the classic of its time--etc. And this time around, of course, the publisher used Fluxus. He said he personally felt that this was the most important Fluxus document ever published--From my point of view, I don't think so at all. And Daniel would certainly disagree with that, since he wasn't so hot about Fluxus when he first did that book, and the word doesn't even appear in the original book. Now it does, because it is inevitable and in the book, we debate that. Dieter Roth translated for the German edition of the book my anecdoted notation in German and re-anecdoted that, so the Dieter Roth German appears for the first time translated into English. Dieter didn't like Fluxus and didn't like George (from the Mr. Fluxus book) and Dieter has always been considered a Fluxus artist, and George Maciunas hoped and believed that he might be, but Dieter thoroughly rejected George's ideas of design, etc.

How did you pick up artists?

George said, we have this museum in Wiesbaden, let's do something. We have this church in Copenhagen and let's do something. Mind you, we paid our own way. Why did we pay our own way? Because nobody had a dime. George had a job and I had a job, but I was raising a family and we had real jobs in Germany working for the government. He was supporting Fluxus and his mother, and I was supporting my family. He paid for all of his boxes out of his own pocket. He didn't have a work ethic, because he didn't have a play ethic. It was all work.

Is Fluxus a movement?

It was enough of a movement so that Spoerri and Tingueley had a big argument about it, because Daniel and Tingueley and Yves Klein were Nouveau Realistes. When Daniel got involved in Fluxus, Tingueley, his best friend, told him to leave it alone--it's no good. You have to go in a straight line--that was Tingueley's warning. But Daniel said, I never go in a straight line, and participated in it. It didn't mean he was the great champion of Fluxus, but he joined it. As far as Christo and Jean-Claude, they were very friendly to Fluxus and proposed a thing for George, and their contribution to Mr. Fluxus was very sweet in the book. They remember him very kindly.

Then there are embarrassing things. Nam June talks about how Maciunas knew so and so and worked at Cooper Union, and George knew Oldenburg--so I wrote to Claes and asked him to tell me about his relationship with George. He answered that it wasn't like that. I have documentary proof that George and Claes didn't work together. I worked with Claes about the Store Days book in 1966, and I don't think we ever talked about Fluxus. Claes was teaching me all about Pop Art and the American scene which I had missed while I was in Europe. He did not talk about Fluxus at all.

When you were with Something Else Press, what was the distribution problems?

Dick and I tried to get a campus bookshop to get interested in the product, but they said they never got involved in the "vanity press" publications. Dick joined up with Aperture and the Small Press thing Michael Hoffman directed--and there was a meeting with the salesmen. I remember that I was so proud of the international success of a book I did with Hansjorg Mayer, Sweethearts, which Richard Hamilton loved and Duchamp loved it, and eventually Dick decided to publish it. He published it, and Duchamp was very happy to put the coeur volant on the cover. So I had to listen to a salesman, who said, well there was one book, Sweethearts, by Emmett Williams, you know it's printed back to front--how are you going to sell a book like that to a bookstore, you ought to burn the whole edition. This very thing of considering it printed back to front has generated an essay about that, placing me in a class with Jewish mystics by Jean Sellem at Lund He sent me the outline of his essay and I told him that he was convincing me! It's nice to know that the ambiguities are there to allow critics to re-interpret the book far from the intentions of the author.

What about your Anthology of Concrete Poetry?

I supposed I was the ideal person to do it, because I was doing that before I came to New York in 1966. I had published my first book of concrete poetry with Daniel Spoerri in 1958, and published quite widely, and I knew all the poets and they had my work and I had theirs. I had brought most of it to become the core of this book (1966-67) and this was seen in America widespread for the first time in that book. With 18,000 copies sold--quite an achievement for a small press. And in Budapest, so many people there had a copy of my book. I consider some of my best work is in the German language now which is not known to those who do not have the language facility.

For those you know you only as a "concrete poet", doesn't that seem a limited view of Emmett Williams?

I am a poet, visual artist and performer--and those objects are what sells. What I'm involved in now and for the next couple of years is a project of tongue- in- cheek history of post-studio art from 1960 to the present day (there are going to be 100 of them, and I've already done 75)--and 12 ceramic pieces in Verona--learning how to do ceramics--and two of those things are going to be made into tapestries in Pakistan. It was not my decision.

I did some fascinating prints a year ago with a genius in Hanover who does these extraordinary special effects things--and people said it's some of the best work I've ever done, but it's not really me, since he did them--but I hardly take credit for them. Annie and Gary always want to bring me up to date with these machines, but I do it my way.

We've made some trips to Africa, and I've made designs of the little people I make--and decided they should go on large wheels and shields--and so these were carved by natives in Kenya (not artists) and they are large and in such bad shape (transport, etc.) and it takes weeks and weeks to get them in shape in order to paint them, and so Annie and I are working on 25 of them. And it will be smashing when they're all done. The wood has to be dried, and then we have to plane it down.

When did you think about Mr. Fluxus? Was it a long-term project?

When I was in New York--after the death of George--I had been in Harvard and came down for a weekend. And Ay-o and I decided that wouldn't it be fun to do a book about George--the dozen important people in Fluxus who had been there--called The Book of George-because we saw that after the death of George, funny things were happening. Someone released a story that "I will be in charge of Fluxus"--others said, he was nothing. Two of my friends said well there is not very much to say about George--he's an overblown figure.

So I asked certain people to give five anecdotes about George Maciunas so that we could get to know him through the anecdotes that people remember him by--from Watts, Shiomi, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Ay-o, myself, about a dozen. We thought how to do this--Ay-o went to Japan and I to Europe, and we forgot the whole thing. I mentioned occasionally that Ay-o and I had been planning to do this, and Michele Verges said I'd publish it if you gave it to me.

I started working on it again 10 years later,trying to find people. It took about 10 years to get letters, manuscripts to me to get them all together--and then to bring it together. I wanted to do a book "from womb to tomb" in the words of other people--sometimes with anecdotes--the story of his life, of his death and how he was loved, hated and feared by all these people and their assessment of what he was--great or terrible. Out of the most devastating is that of Allan Kaprow, who zeroes in on the feud with Stockhausen.

And what about this Love-Hate situation with George Maciunas?

We were all kicked out--only two were not kicked out: Ken Friedman and Ben Vautier. We were all prima donnas--all kicked out. Vostell was never let in; George hated his guts. Beuys was never let in. George absolutely despised him, but Beuys loved him. George not only kicked me out--Kopke, Anderson our of Fluxus, but he denounced us to the Soviet press and to the world as fascist thugs--and this was a joke that Eric did: Eric was making a trip through Eastern countries and started to send letters and postcards from Moscow, etc. how we were performing Fluxus in various cities and George believed it, and we were dismissed.

Bici (Hendricks) has one of the most beautiful accounts of the dying. But it was only after he had died that we knew that it was "gossip" . We only renewed our friendship when Jean Brown brought George to an exhibition of mine at Mt. Holyoke-- and George said that maybe we can be friends again and gave me a beautiful name box--but I told him we had always been friends, but "you didn't believe it". But he never forgave Dick Higgins for Something Else Press.

There are those books which dictate Fluxus as defined only by George Maciunas. What is Mr. Fluxus about?

George does not have the last word in this book. There are some 70 people pro and con telling what they think Fluxus is and what Fluxus is not. This is not hero worship. 75% ended up in the garbage, and they could save it for their books, but not this one. And I told some contributors that I was returning stuff asking whether they could try again?

Ken ended by saying he hardly knew him. Ben Vautier loved George very much showing a maximal amount of respect for George with a poem that he wrote. Catalogs have served as amazing new data about Fluxus. Ren≠ Block's 1962 Wiesbaden Fluxus 1982 is still one of the best. The Fluxus in Germany catalog I believe is the best documentation and it's too bad it has not been translated.

Do you think that art history books in the future will give Fluxus its due?

I don't see how they can avoid Fluxus. the time hasn't quite come yet, but you have some first-rate historians such as Thomas Kellein whose small book on Fluxus published by Thames & Hudson has been translated into German, Japanese and English, and the English edition is now reprinted in a second edition.

And now that Mr. Fluxus is almost here?

Well, the jacket by Ay-O is definitely eye-catching. And I was very happy how the critics treated My Life in Fluxus with great seriousness. It was not a history of Fluxus at all, but was an attempt to show what one member of Fluxus did, what it was like to be part of Fluxus. In this regard, I had many arguments with Jon Hendricks, because he was basing the history of Fluxus on a collection that Gil Silverman was able to buy, which is not complete and not comprehensive.

Let's talk about Hanns Sohm for a minute.

Well, no Sohm, no Fluxus. The Hanns Sohm Archive was before Fluxus, and it's all there. Fluxus fits into a large and important archive. If you want Concrete Poetry, go there; if you want Ginsberg, Beats, go there. If you want Wallace Berman, go there. The Sohm Archive gives context to all movements. I used to enjoy going to Sohms' and staying there before the collection was sold to the Stuttgart Museum. He looks at the material first, then puts it into context. I send all my material to him at his home, before it ever gets to the museum. I had my Opera performed last summer in a Castle outside Stuttgart and it lasted four hours. Sohm was there. And he's there when you're short of cash; he'll buy something to keep you going. And the museum of Stuttgart is one of the jewels of Europe, and it's wonderful that the archive is there. My letters to George and to Daniel Spoerri are at the Getty now, and it's too bad they're not in Stuttgart.

And tell us what plans you have now.

Well, Mr. Fluxus has been translated into German, Lithuanian, Japanese and English. The German translation came out first, and it was from the English original. The English edition is larger, since it has more new material in it. And we have several Fluxus books by this one publishing house in England, Thames & Hudson , including the Fluxus show at the Tate. Ben Vautier and I have done a tape of our ICA performances in London. In March, I have been invited to Australia as President of the Museum in Lodz, Poland and I plan to work with the Aborigines, as well as doing performances in Melbourne. Perhaps I will also visit the Fluxus Collection in Queensland.

above copied form: http://colophon.com/umbrella/emmet.html

Interview with Ray Johnson, Diane Spodarek and Randy Delbeke

Reprinted with permission from The Detroit Artists Monthly Feb. 1978.
(Diane Spodarek,with her husband, Randy Delbeke, created "the magazine "Detroit Artists Monthly" which was a vital organ for giving exposure to local artists as well as airing the views of well established NY artists and art critics through her regular hard hitting interviews." Jay Yager 2001)

On September 26, 1977, Ray Johnson was in Detroit. The following conversation with Johnson and Diane Spodarek and Randy Delbeke took place at the Detroit Artists Monthly offices. Ray Johnson, who lived in New York, is originally from Detroit. He received an Artist's Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts that year and is the founder and director of the New York Correspondence School. The following was approved by Ray Johnson.



Let's start by talking about the Grant you received from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The interesting thing about the Grant is that my friend Nam June Paik and I have grants for the sum of $10,000 and I have it in painting and other painting and sculpture Grants are 7,500 or 2,000, they had some juggling around with funding, and 10,000 is what I requested. This is the second NEA Grant I have. There was one a year previously for 5,000 to document the New York Correspondence School and then I got the New York State CAPS Grant of $3,500 to document the Corre-spondence School. All of my works overlap and relate and in-tegrate; the documentation involved the use of a Minolta copying machine so that in doing silhouettes I document any visual information which is then mailable in envelopes to people concerned with getting such information.

Are these part of that same project? [reproductions in October 6, 1977 issue of Rolling Stone Magazine]

Yes, they fit into a time sequence of one year. I have the Grant in painting and I will proceed to do portraiture similar to this although the~caIe may change, the paintings may get larger. The first Grant was to document the New York Corre-spondence School and I had declared my house and studio a twenty-five year accumulation Archive of papers which is in cardboard boxes, no very clear filing system at all. It's a repository of materials which I recirculate, recycle, send on to other people, add to, go through; it's a kind of archeolo-gical situation in papers and rearrangement of papers.

When did it first become called the New York Correspondence School?

Well, that's documented in the spring, 1977 issue of the College Art Journal by Ed Plunkett, teacher and artist, who coined the term 'New York Correspondence School' he writes about it in the College Art Journal; it's an interesting short essay on the history of the various correspondence schools and the influences, and activity...... I've been labeled as the Father of Correspondence Mail Art, which I probably am because of the number of years of activity in the distribution, through mailing processes, of art works, information and material in an international network of daily free distribution. Since the 1940's I have freely distributed, through my own funding, papers. I had a show in the North Carolina Museum last November of letters from about a hundred various lenders of Ray Johnson boxfulls of material and this was all cataloged and displayed. I'm on my way back to Cornell where they want to have a second correspondence show, a smaller show, not a hundred lenders but maybe five specific people who will lend papers. And this exhibition at Cornell will then go to two or three other museums, Houston, Orberlin, Detroit, whatever, the terms are at Cornell, it's in a state of organization.

How long have you been in New York?

Since the early 50's. I've been in the house I live in now eight to ten years which is in Locust Valley which is an hour's drive to New York City. But the house is merely a shell; it's a structure which houses these cardboard boxes. In applying for grants I have had to declare my own history in a fashion of stating what I've done. Somehow I had to clarify the confusion of all these papers, the history of correspondence art - there is no history - it hasn't been written; it exists as magazine articles, newspaper things, private experiences. Lucy Lippard's book entitled, Six Years, mentions the painter Arakawa and myself in her forward. I can't quote her exactly, but she says what we do is difficult to describe because it hasn't been historically or critically written about - it has happened but it hasn't been analyzed or described. And in the spring issue of the College Art Journal a friend of mine attempted to write a chronology of occurences in the New York Correspondence School because I have held events and meetings involving the participation of people, and she attempts to write the chronology but she doesn't put in any dates. At the very beginning is April 1, 1968, 'this thing happened in a quaker historic church,' and all the other events don't have the years so it requires someone to come in and actually track down what year this happened or what year that happened. So historically it is interesting because of the phenomenon of File magazine which is an offshoot of the correspondence school, not that I published a magazine. In labeling me Dada Daddy they have in every issue a picture of me as their father, this is what they proclaim. But File magazine was then parodied by Vile magazine in San Fran-cisco and since File was a parody of Life and Time and Vile a parody of File, I then invented Smile magazine.

Where's that?

I deal with invisible things, like Smile is the cheshire cat in the tree: my magazine doesn't exist. I also send out in the Cor-respondence School an advertisement: "Ray Johnson's new books, send for Fragrant Hitchikers, please send for your free copy." People fall for this joke and say, 'please send me your free copy' - well, this book does not exist, you think it exists because you've seen an advertisement.

What do you do with the requests?

Methodically every day I open my mail and respond to every letter and postcard. I have a whole process, of a steak knife which I use to open my letters, it's like prayer, it's a ritual for me, a ceremony. I'll go out to the mail box, bring the mail into my house, I have avery good mailman, he sort of piles things very neatly. I put them on my work table; I turn on the television set; I have my cup of coffee; I turn on the overhead light; it's like a corpse on the table. It's really my prayer; I start at the top, I perhaps see there is some very juicy inter-esting things here at the bottom. It's like archeology. It's like if you discovered a tomb and you have your little brushes and you brush away the dust of years and you don't want to destroy an urn handle so to speak. And then I surgically in-sert the knife in these envelopes, open them, quick look at the contents and then I do sorting: bills go here, new people go here, I get new people every single day which is very ex-citing because here's some new person, and I'm very inter-ested in what is absolutely new. Like a name or address on a postcard, or whatever, from someone I've never heard of, it means I get to do a little detective work to try to figure out.
like the card you said you received. For instance when I have to give a lecture I can be pretty sure that I will receive something in the mail that morning that I can wear at my lecture: aT-shirt, aring, it's magical, I'm dealing with magic. I provoke the mail box to provide me with or I will use what is in the mail for the subject of my lecture; I will read what appeared that day. To me that's very important because that's the concentration because I'm possessed by letters and correspondence.

You obviously send mail out all over.

Oh yes, and since I'm running the Dead Pan Club

What's that?

Well, it's a kind of humor where you don't smile and you simply say something terribly funny.

It says, "Dada sucks - first of the red hot dadas, [referring to a post card that Diane Spodarek received a few months earlier].

Oh, Buster Cleveland.

You know who he is?

If it says, dada sucks, it's Buster Cleveland.

But I don't know where he got my name.

Let me see if I can do some detective work here.

Maybe he saw the publication. No, this is before the publication. The post card says, "Diane, did you know Ray Johnson is from Detroit?

It isn't cancelled.

No, it's not - that's what confused me, it wasn't cancelled.

I always notice things like that.

But he must have mailed it. It did come with the mail.

I know him. I've drawn...... in fact he pleaded and begged meto draw his silhouette which I did in the back room of the O.K. Harris Gallery and Buster was involved with the Christo fence and Buster's group performed atrocious, audacious acts like spray canning the beautiful Christo fence with red spray paint and doing things with outdoor toilets there

Hmmmmm

doing dreadful things which you and I find shocking (laughter) and I don't shock easy because I was recently a guest of Edie Beale in Gray Gardens. Did you see that movie?

No, I read a lot about it.

She's a very eccentric lady. It's really interesting. . . person-ality changes you know three faces of Eve, and that other one. . . .20 different faces; Edie Beale was avery good actress. She locked the door five times when I went into the house at Gray Gardens where she lived with her mother who recently died, and then she went into a pitiful whispering thing which is in the movie, and she would whisper when mother was upstairs, when she didn't want mother to hear, but mother was dead so it was as if mother was a ghost and still there. She then went from her whispering, and I think she was trying to frighten me, she went into the Snow White witch with the red lipstick and long black fingernails, and she suddenly went into that and I didn't flinch an eyelash because I placed trust in her and because I was telling her how beau-tiful she was and what a great actress she was, and she is. We went to this little upstairs porch. . . well, it's a very long story but I said to her, "Edie, this place is like Cambodia," and she replied, "Jackie was once in Cambodia," she's a relative of Jackie Onassis, she's like the poor relative in East Hampton living in an area of manicured lawns and mansions and her house is covered with weeds, they're twenty feet high and the whole thing is falling down. She opened a door and said "this is the ballroom," the whole ceiling had collapsed, there was plaster all over the floor; she said, "That's mother's
- telephone - piano in the corner," and here was this piano covered with gray mold. I loved it when I said, 'telephone, which regressed from your original question.

I think you were talking about opening your mail.

But actually the way I'm talking is pretty much the way I lecture, it's exactly the way I work and live my life. I'm one constant babble of going from this to that, to this, which is the way I compose my paintings, letters, my life is

But your paintings look so. . . magazines are different from actually seeing the work but they just seem to be so 'clean."

It's interesting that you say that because they were even cleaner before. They're hygienically clean and these were deliberately scumbled paint surfaces for East Hampton be-cause in the show they are very very painterly in their deliberate smudginess and they are also masonite abrased with sandpaper so that they become like pastels; because there is a great pulverization and dust, you can sort of see it in there. That's very abrased with sandpaper.

This little figure is something I've seen before.

It's a rabbit or a mouse or something.

Do you use it often?

Yeah, sometimes it's Mickey Mouse, sometimes it's a rabbit with longer ears. I'm the President of the Shelley Duvall Fan Club and sometimes it's a round head with round eyes, Shelley Duvall eyes, that are neither here nor there, it's sort of like doll eyes that roll. I was just telling Jim Crawford that I'm going up to Stamford, Connecticut to interview Ernie Bushmiller, the creator of Nancy, Sluggo and Aunt Fritz comic strip, who is about 70 years old and has had a great influence on pop art, like there are a lot of early Warhol canvases of Nancy saying, 'Brrr if's cold,' and Roy Lichten-stein is agreat admirer of. . . although he hasn't used, lifted, Nancy the way Warhol or Joe Brainard have and I've also done
well, it's a liftable theme of a lot of people doing corre-spondence art, people always.

What will you do with that interview?

Hopefully publish it in Art In America because I did a feature article for Art In America on the theme of artists' childhood toys for a Christmas issue which was six pages in length and I did ten interviews with Willem dekooning, Marisol, Lynda Benglis, Morris Graves, Jim Rosenquist, Les Levine, I forget who else and my investigation involved their childhood memories of toys. This was for Christmas based on the Orson Welles' 'Citizen Kane" rosebud sled idea of foregotten childhood objects or memories and Marisol gave me a beau-tiful photograph of her and her brother with a doll, Lynda Benglis came up with an extraordinary photograph of her standing on the grass with her back to the camera which I placed next to the Lynda Benglis naked derriere postcard which came out years later so it was an interesting kind of connection.

Did this appear about 1973?

No, it would have been 1975 or '74,1 just can't possibly carry that information around with me in my head. I've sort of cultivated an unclarity of history, I always say, this or that time.

Specifics are not important?

I try to be clear but there's something about me, in going back to Fragrant Hitchikers and cheshire cats and sort of. .

But you communicate this information when you're lecturing and communicating to. . . .

I lecture when I'm asked to talk, wherever it comes out. I don't go out of my way to send out resumes or to state that I'm available, people sort of ask me to do things.

What are you in town for now?

I'm here to visit my mother and father and in driving here I began getting all kinds of ideas and came up with the portraiture of Detroit personalities. I'm trying to work with journalists and photographers in a kind of conceptual art piece of writers writing about what I do from the initial scale to the finished portrait, and photographers documenting the writer and myself as a little Hollywood set that we're all involved in a cooperative thing, and one of the ideas I have is to have Hans Namuth, the photographer, who had done all those historic photos of Jackson Pollock painting and who has photographed artists over the years, for Hans Namuth to photograph me doing a drawing of Joe Namath, football star, and another photographer would be photographing Hans Namuth photographing me drawing Joe Namath and then a writer would write about what had happened - a sort of theater piece. I'm involved with a sort of introduction of people. Another possibility of having what I'm doing in silhouettes is the Warhol "Kiss" movies, is it a face or is it a vase, have two people confronting each other in a kind of smooch, they could either be husband or wife or two people that are enemies. I have the ability like in a puppet play to put people together and Marisol stated, which is in my article, that when she was a child one of her favorite games, I just remembered this now, she said she would make these little dolls and they would do this little sex play together. She said she would make them kiss and do things to each other, I made notes, and she was telling me all these childhood memories of how she played with dolls. I'm going to want to stop after ten minutes, I don't want to do anymore because I have to leave, okay?






Ray Johnson. ANDY WITH TWO COWS, drawing-collage, 1976,15 x 15". Photograph by Eric Pollitzer.
Okay. I was thinking of your lecturing and painting.

I'm coming back to lecture at the Society of Arts and Crafts, they asked me about two years ago and I never got here and I'm sure I'm probably going to come back.

Is that soon?

I don't know, I think I'm serious about the Detroit portraiture thing - I'm apt to get home and get involved with what will get the thing going will be my drawing Lily Tomlin, Diana Ross, Jane Forth, and Taylor Mead and Ellen Burstyn. Those five people are on my New York list who are available to me.

The thing in Detroit, which lust occured to you on the way in, will this be part of the whole painting project?

No, what I would do for Detroit is portraits of Detroit people who are from here or have something to do with Detroit. And I'm doing historical people like Henry Ford, finding something from the 1920's - he must have been done in silhouette for some newspaper or as a trade mark, and I want to make some kind of statement about my art work coming from Michigan. In the portraits I like to put words onto the things. I write onto the people's faces, I write a letter across the face, none of those four show that but my correspondence gets into the paintings, doing poems onto the face of this.

Are these poems that you have written?

By poems I mean writings, things that I write which are often poetic, nature-like, like, I killed another ant today. I'm doing a full documentation of carpenter ants which are eating my house which I ruthlessly kill, put them under straping tape and record the time of their death.

You do?

Oh yes. I began by picking them up and putting them out on the front lawn and then one day I realized that they were eating my house and it's a

Torture and murder?

My Philadelphia lecture is going to beaheavy death presenta-tion, sort of a surprise, not a surprise but it was a decision after my Franklin Furnace reading after a few years ago.

Where?

In New York there is a new book store called Franklin Furnace, in fact you should know about Franklin Furnace. Franklin Furnace is run by Jackie Apple who is the wife of Bill Apple who's an artist, and Martha Wilson who is from New Brunswick, Canada, and it's a space with artists books, that have gotten a lot of attention and publicity recently and one can go there and look at or buy books; it's not like a book store because they are specialized in dealing with artists books and things that one generally can't 5 very up-to- date and they have had a series of artists' readings. I read, Richard Kostelanetz, John Cage, and people that I've never heard of are reading in a series. I attempt in the correspond-ence school to be a sort of free clearing house of people and information and objects, and I spend a great deal of time just bopping around and meeting people, old people and new people, and finding out about things and distributing infor-mation since I don't do this as a business, but I've been applying for grants.

Is that how you live?

No, it's not how I live, it's something that I'm just getting into. I've always lived very precariously - I'm not a business man, I'm an artist and a well, I shouldn't call myself a poet but other people have. What I do is classify the words as poetry. Something Else Press published a book in 1965 called the Paper Snake which is all my writings, rubbings, plays, things that I had given to the publisher, Dick Higgins, editor and publisher, which I mailed to him or brought to him in cardboard boxes or shoved under his door, or left in his sink, or whatever, over a period of years. He saved all these things and designed and published a book, and I simply as an artist did what I did without classification. So when the book appeared the book stated, "Ray Johnson is a poet," but I never said, 'this is a poem,' I simply wrote what I wrote and it later became classified

When did you start painting or have you always painted?

Always. I visited one of my Saturday morning art school teachers from the Detroit Art Institute. when I was a little kid, every Saturday morning I would go off to art classes, I was a very productive, prolific student. I was always doing something.

Why did you go to New York?

I went to New York by way of Black Mountain College in
North Carolina where I was for about three years and then to
New York.

Were you a student there or a teacher?

No, I was a student. I went to New York to be a painter and have succeeded in doing so. I was very pleased to be classi-fied as an American Surrealist at the Whitney Museum's permanent collection recently. A work of mine hangs on the wall next to Joseph Cornell in a room with Lucas Samaras, H.C. Westerman, and it places me as an American, like here is a work of mine that is signed and dated ~nd framed and lit and museumized. It was my childhood dream in Detroit to be an artist and have one work on a museum wall, it looks good. I'm in many museum and private collections.

Do you try to keep track of the things you send out? Or do you know how many things you send out in a day or a week or a month?

I send out what is most necessary and essential - I'm very frugal I described my method before of intake and the process of receiving the mail and it's the same thing of things that go out - I just don't slap things in envelopes. Everything I make is made for the person I'm writing to - there is a whole daily process of what the envelope enclosure is to be, how it is folded, what is enclosed, what the envelope is, what the style is, whether it is very casual or very formal. I go to a lot of trouble hand lettering, or scribbling 5 a whole variety of ~yles. It's as though I'm here speaking to you, this is the way I compose a letter; when I'm alone I think of who I'm writing to so it can be lengthy or I can be very simple.

But you said earlier that you are getting so much mail and that you respond to all of it.

I attempt to, I try to.

Do you ever throw away any mail?

Oh yeah, I've had to; yes, for survival. And it all becomes an art work, at one point I created about a dozen large green garbage bags, big garbage bags full of correspondence and I went through and sort of tore it into pieces so it couldn't be used by anyone and put them into bags and drove them into the city two at a time, because that's all I could get into the back of my Volkswagon, and placed them in trash cans in some part of the city where I didn't want scavangers finding them because I didn't want these to be

Why did you take those bags into the city?

Because it was like an art work, I believe in pilgrimage, I have pilgrimage stories When the art director of Rolling Stone and his wife came to visit me, they loved my paintings, and when they were leaving I said to them, 'how many visitors in a year do you think I have Out here,' and they said, "probably about 200 people come out here a year," and I replied, 'no, usually about two.' And I said quite seriously, 'truthfully, I have may- be two visitors about a year, no one is invited, no one dares to come out.' I was telling Jim Crawford who has his windows half covered with white tissue paper that mine are covered with brown paper and when oi~e newspaper reporter left she said, "you wouldn't know from the outside what was going on in the inside," which I like very much.
That's what these portraits are all about. They are all the interior of the head. I'm trying to depict what goes on in the interior of the head: thoughts, images or ideas.

If you said twenty visitors a year that would sound pretty private in itself, but two is pretty eccentric.


Well, another answer to that see I'm a great put-on artist, I'm the Dead Pan Club and you really shouldn't take everything I say too seriously although I'm very soberly serious but I'm also a put-on person. Someone who thought they were going to get a rather interesting answer asked me that question, "how many letters do I mail per day," and I gave it a great deal of thought, and I said, 'one.' I think there was one day when there was nothing in the box and I almost had a heart attack. One day I got one awful cheap postcard and an advertisement, that was a long time ago. Every day I write or I have specific things or objects or images for each person, like Betty Small gets chopsticks, John Evans gets reports on the days when my mailbox is very low, Grace Glueck of the New York Times gets pictures of giraffes, although Susan Subtle of California is now going to get all the pictures of the giraffe, Lucy Lippard use to get slips, slips of paper or undergarments, Henry Martin of Italy use to get pictures of lobsters. I don't deal with people's requests, I certainly do it with my demands from people, like my phone call to you this evening was a demand upon you.

Were you happy with the layout?

Oh, very much so, yes, I was two feet off the ground: I was published in an international magazine and it was my writing, my drawing, my dumb writing, I write it like comic strip style.

"My dumb writing?"

Yeah, my dumb writing.

Is that because it doesn't follow formal writing

No, I'm not very well schooled in grammar or paragraph structure. I don't know how to write, I only know how to say what I have to say. It's what I believe in. I read William Carlos Williams throughly years and years ago and I believe in Amer-ican talk.

Who is William Carlos Williams?

Well, he's a very important American poet, I'm very surprised you don't know who he is.

Living?

No, he was a doctor and published ........

Someone just told me about him today.

Shame shame shame on you for not knowing who he was. I'm delighted that you don't know who he is.

So that I can now know him?

Right, you can discover him and enjoy his writing and his essays and poetry.

If I had to stop, during every interview, and ask everyone to explain everything I didn't understand, I would never finish an interview.

You must be having a marvelous time with it. Do you see the Warhol Interview at all?

Yes.

Because I followed it right from the beginning and find it in-teresting with great low and highpoints.

I know people who don't like it.
I don't think it's publicized, it's still a new thing here.
Maybe you could answer a question for me about this book of Andy Warhol's. [The Philosophy of Andy Warhol [From A to B and Back Again].]

Yes, I will be glad to answer your question and then I have to leave in three minutes.

If you can tell me what that is.

Well, it's Andy's autograph book to you and it's a Campbell soup can.

Is that what that is?

Yes, that says 'Campbells", and that says, 'soup', and that little round thing is the design on the soup label, and this line is the definition of the red and gold part of the Campbells soup. He autographed the very same thing for me. He does this consistently all through the country at autograph parties. He did this for practically everybody.

Who receives your mail when you're not at home?

Oh, the post office is holding it for me.

When you go back there must be lots

I go to the post office no, there won't be that much, I've only been gone a week. I was mentioning before when I lecture I depend on the mail to provide my workload or my props or my text or whatever, and when I went to the East Hampton opening this hatchet reporter who had written this thing about me that said, "Ray Johnson always wears an earring and a black T-shirt," and I called her up and said, what is this earring I'm always wearing', and she claims that when I came to her house to visit her the first time I was wearing an erring which is highly possible but I have forgot-ten, so I thought at my opening I thought I would have to wear my black I have eight of these I have to wear one of my black T-shirts with an earring and I got in the mail a color photograph of a very beautiful woman with an intense look on her face, sort of Spanish with red lipstick and makeup, and she was leering at the camera, it was a photograph of a stamp addressed to me, but I don't know who it is from, I don't know who the woman is, I don't know why it was sent to me. So I glued the photograph to a piece of cardboard and put a piece of string on it and wore it on my ear. I had this object hanging from my left ear and some friends of mine came to the opening and brought me a gift which was a flat seashell because of the Shelley Duvall Fan Club and they had drawn a head that was suppose to look like me on the seashell and had written, 'Ray Johnson Fan Club' and it had this tiny little roach on the seashell like an ashtray, it was presented as a gift. Is this still taping?

Oh, because I have one story that is sort of interesting. I had to decide recently that there would be one person whose silhouette I couldn't or wouldn't or shouldn't do and that was Valerie Solanis.

Who?

Valerie Solan is, the one who shot Andy Warhol, who is back in town and I somehow got the idea, because she got an in-terview printed in the Village Voice, she wanted some publicity about her new book. I don't know, I still may do her, I think it would be very interesting in my book to do a portrait of a murderess, or attempted murderess.

In your pornography book?

It's not a pornography book.

Oh, that was a section of the book.

Yes, that was a section but actually it might be interesting to do a pornography book, I hadn't thought about it before, you see people supply me with ideas but then I would have to do Charlie Manson which means when I get home I have a thing to mail to you which has references to Charlie Manson but not to Valerie Solanis; it's an article that appeared in the Village Voice about the Correspondence School which attempted to be a very shocking reportage, they wanted to make it very juicy and racey and they called me up and said, "what were the len most atrocious objects you received in the mail," they wanted to make it like Vile, it's not what I'm dealing with, what I'm dealing with is like utter boredom. . . .you don't believe that do you?

Did you supply ten things?

Oh sure, always in this kind of exchange, if someone wants that, I'll try I gave them a list of things like icicles, lunchmeat, it's a good list, I worked very hard on it, it's pretty funny.

Was there anything on that list that they expected?

No. Actually someone sent me a dead squirrel from Cambridge, Massachusetts in a shoe box once. That was the smelliest thing I have ever encounte,-ed, that was on the list. I can't remember all of them. But I have, because I've had to write my history, been doing this for a long time.

It has to be the longest of anyone in correspondence art, right?

I'm the maniac of correspondence, I'm sure. I have to take
Rolling Stone with me, it's the only copy I have, they just
came out last week, so I have my car keys and I have my
Rolling Stone and I had a very nice visit.

Yeah, thanks for stopping by.

So let's shake hands.
I hope to see both of you again.

We're coming to New York in January for the College Art Conference.

Where is that going to be held?

The Hilton. It's always at the Hilton.

Well, I'll reply with correspondence, do with it what you want.

The door sticks, you can't get out.

Bye Bye.

That was a strange interview.

Yeah.

Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, Guy Debord

Of all the affairs we participate in, with or without interest, the groping quest for a new way of life is the only thing that remains really exciting. Aesthetic and other disciplines have proved glaringly inadequate in this regard and merit the greatest indifference. We should therefore delineate some provisional terrains of observation, including the observation of certain processes of chance and predictability in the streets.

The word psychogeography, suggested by an illiterate Kabyle as a general term for the phenomena a few of us were investigating around the summer of 1953, is not too inappropriate. It is not inconsistent with the materialist perspective that sees life and thought as conditioned by objective nature. Geography, for example, deals with the determinant action of general natural forces, such as soil composition or climatic conditions, on the economic structures of a society, and thus on the corresponding conception that such a society can have of the world. Psychogeography sets for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The charmingly vague adjective psychogeographical can be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery.

It has long been said that the desert is monotheistic. Is it illogical or devoid of interest to observe that the district in Paris between Place de la Contrescarpe and Rue de l’Arbalète conduces rather to atheism, to oblivion and to the disorientation of habitual reflexes?

Historical conditions determine what is considered “useful.” Baron Haussmann’s urban renewal of Paris under the Second Empire, for example, was motivated by the desire to open up broad thoroughfares enabling the rapid circulation of troops and the use of artillery against insurrections. But from any standpoint other than that of facilitating police control, Haussmann’s Paris is a city built by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Present-day urbanism’s main problem is ensuring the smooth circulation of a rapidly increasing number of motor vehicles. A future urbanism may well apply itself to no less utilitarian projects, but in the rather different context of psychogeographical possibilities.

The present abundance of private automobiles is one of the most astonishing successes of the constant propaganda by which capitalist production persuades the masses that car ownership is one of the privileges our society reserves for its most privileged members. But anarchical progress often ends up contradicting itself, as when we savor the spectacle of a police chief issuing a filmed appeal urging Parisian car owners to use public transportation.

We know with what blind fury so many unprivileged people are ready to defend their mediocre advantages. Such pathetic illusions of privilege are linked to a general idea of happiness prevalent among the bourgeoisie and maintained by a system of publicity that includes Malraux’s aesthetics as well as Coca-Cola ads — an idea of happiness whose crisis must be provoked on every occasion by every means.

The first of these means is undoubtedly the systematic provocative dissemination of a host of proposals tending to turn the whole of life into an exciting game, combined with the constant depreciation of all current diversions (to the extent, of course, that these latter cannot be detourned to serve in constructions of more interesting ambiances). The greatest difficulty in such an undertaking is to convey through these apparently extravagant proposals a sufficient degree of serious seduction. To accomplish this we can envisage an adroit use of currently popular means of communication. But a disruptive sort of abstention, or demonstrations designed to radically frustrate the fans of these means of communication, can also promote at little expense an atmosphere of uneasiness extremely favorable for the introduction of a few new conceptions of pleasure.

The idea that the creation of a chosen emotional situation depends only on the thorough understanding and calculated application of a certain number of concrete techniques inspired this somewhat tongue-in-cheek “Psychogeographical Game of the Week,” published in Potlatch #1:

In accordance with what you are seeking, choose a country, a large or small city, a busy or quiet street. Build a house. Furnish it. Use decorations and surroundings to the best advantage. Choose the season and the time of day. Bring together the most suitable people, with appropriate records and drinks. The lighting and the conversation should obviously be suited to the occasion, as should be the weather or your memories. If there has been no error in your calculations, the result should prove satisfying.

We need to flood the market — even if for the moment merely the intellectual market — with a mass of desires whose fulfillment is not beyond the capacity of humanity’s present means of action on the material world, but only beyond the capacity of the old social organization. It is thus not without political interest to publicly counterpose such desires to the elementary desires that are endlessly rehashed by the film industry and in psychological novels like those of that old hack Mauriac. (As Marx explained to poor Proudhon, “In a society based on poverty, the poorest products are inevitably consumed by the greatest number.”)(1)

The revolutionary transformation of the world, of all aspects of the world, will confirm all the dreams of abundance.

The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance that is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the terrain); the appealing or repelling character of certain places — these phenomena all seem to be neglected. In any case they are never envisaged as depending on causes that can be uncovered by careful analysis and turned to account. People are quite aware that some neighborhoods are gloomy and others pleasant. But they generally simply assume that elegant streets cause a feeling of satisfaction and that poor streets are depressing, and let it go at that. In fact, the variety of possible combinations of ambiences, analogous to the blending of pure chemicals in an infinite number of mixtures, gives rise to feelings as differentiated and complex as any other form of spectacle can evoke. The slightest demystified investigation reveals that the qualitatively or quantitatively different influences of diverse urban decors cannot be determined solely on the basis of the historical period or architectural style, much less on the basis of housing conditions.

The research that we are thus led to undertake on the arrangement of the elements of the urban setting, in close relation with the sensations they provoke, entails bold hypotheses that must be constantly corrected in the light of experience, by critique and self-critique.

Certain of De Chirico’s paintings, which were clearly inspired by architecturally originated sensations, exert in turn an effect on their objective base to the point of transforming it: they tend themselves to become blueprints or models. Disquieting neighborhoods of arcades could one day carry on and fulfill the allure of these works.

I scarcely know of anything but those two harbors at dusk painted by Claude Lorrain(2) — which are in the Louvre and which juxtapose extremely dissimilar urban ambiances — that can rival in beauty the Paris Metro maps. I am not, of course, talking about mere physical beauty — the new beauty can only be a beauty of situation — but simply about the particularly moving presentation, in both cases, of a sum of possibilities.

Along with various more difficult means of intervention, a renovated cartography seems appropriate for immediate utilization.

The production of psychogeographical maps, or even the introduction of alterations such as more or less arbitrarily transposing maps of two different regions, can contribute to clarifying certain wanderings that express not subordination to randomness but total insubordination to habitual influences (influences generally categorized as tourism, that popular drug as repugnant as sports or buying on credit).

A friend recently told me that he had just wandered through the Harz region of Germany while blindly following the directions of a map of London. This sort of game is obviously only a feeble beginning in comparison to the complete creation of architecture and urbanism that will someday be within the power of everyone. Meanwhile we can distinguish several stages of partial, less difficult projects, beginning with the mere displacement of elements of decoration from the locations where we are used to seeing them.

For example, in the preceding issue of this journal Marcel Mariën proposed that when global resources have ceased to be squandered on the irrational enterprises that are imposed on us today, all the equestrian statues of all the cities of the world be assembled in a single desert. This would offer to the passersby — the future belongs to them — the spectacle of an artificial cavalry charge which could even be dedicated to the memory of the greatest massacrers of history, from Tamerlane to Ridgway. It would also respond to one of the main demands of the present generation: educative value.

In fact, nothing really new can be expected until the masses in action awaken to the conditions that are imposed on them in all domains of life, and to the practical means of changing them.

“The imaginary is that which tends to become real,” wrote an author whose name, on account of his notorious intellectual degradation, I have since forgotten.(3) The involuntary restrictiveness of such a statement could serve as a touchstone exposing various farcical literary revolutions: That which tends to remain unreal is empty babble.

Life, for which we are responsible, presents powerful motives for discouragement and innumerable more or less vulgar diversions and compensations. A year doesn’t go by when people we loved haven’t succumbed, for lack of having clearly grasped the present possibilities, to some glaring capitulation. But the enemy camp objectively condemns people to imbecility and already numbers millions of imbeciles; the addition of a few more makes no difference.

The primary moral deficiency remains indulgence, in all its forms.


GUY DEBORD
1955



[TRANSLATOR’S NOTES]

1. The quotation is from Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy (chapter 2).

2. Two such paintings (Lorrain painted several of the same type) are included in Debord’s film The Society of the Spectacle.

3. The quotation is from André Breton’s Le Revolver à cheveux blancs.


“Introduction à une critique de la géographie urbaine” originally appeared in the Belgian surrealist journal Les Lèvres Nues #6 (September 1955). This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.

Above copied from: http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/urbgeog.htm

Stewart Home Interview, Mikkel Bolt

BOLT ON NEOISM FOR PSYCHOGEOGRAPHICAL WANDERERS EVERYWHERE, OR THE RETURN OF THREE-SIDED FOOTBALL PART IX: MIKKEL BOLT ASKS STEWART HOME ABOUT THE PHENOMENOLGY OF DELIBERATELY FUCKING UP

BOLT: It seems to be a recurrent aspect of your work to disappoint the audience, to frustrate them – making it difficult to know exactly what is going on? It is difficult to know whether you are presenting yourself as an artist, an art historian, an anarchist or underground agitator – it is always difficult to know from what position you are addressing the audience, it always seems as if you are changing positions and thereby making it very difficult to pin down the 'meaning' and intention of the particular project. Your book The Assault on Culture is an example of this – on the one hand it comes of as an attempt to present an 'alternative' avant-garde stretching from the Cobra movement to Neoism and Class War, on the other hand you never miss an opportunity to point out that the book was written in order to make space for Neoism within the traditional history of the avant-garde.

HOME: I think what I’m about is an overflowing of all capitalist canalisation. When Marx first laid out historical materialism in The German Ideology, he wrote about communism enabling one to be a hunter in the morning, a fisherman in the afternoon and a critical critic at night; of course being a vegetarian, I'd rather be an egotist in the morning (shades of Saint Max here, the main target Marx is tilting against in The German Ideology), a porn star in the afternoon, and a critical critic at night. The point, of course, is that its ridiculous to reduce (wo)man to one thing, to one function, and that this is one facet of the alienation we're struggling against. Life shouldn't be about repeating the same gesture endlessly regardless of whether it is as a factory worker or an 'intellectual'. To regain our humanity, we must live out all the aspects of what it is to be human, intellectual, emotional, physical, and live them as one (this is precisely what the old avant-garde slogan 'poetry must be made by all and not by one' meant, poetry must be made by all the senses and all the people collectively, it should be an overflowing beyond poetry). So one tries to act and create in a revolutionary fashion, and since truth is never one-sided this is dialectical too.

I am not trying to present myself as any one thing, but to be all things as far as possible in an alienated and fragmented world. The disappointment comes from elsewhere, since we all reproduce our own alienation in capitalist societies, it is never possible to overflow unrestrainedly in this bourgeois shitheap. All of anarchism can be found in the idea that it is possible to live differently in this world, and I am most definitely not an anarchist. So The Assault on Culture, can be viewed as a presentation of the post-war 'avant-garde', or an attempt to make space for Neoism within an (anti)-'traditional' her-story of the avant-garde, but it is rather better to view it as both. It is a practical demonstration of how the avant-garde (like the capitalist establishment, but for different reasons and in different ways) manipulates history, and since this is a trait of the avant-garde, doing so as a 'former' 'leading' member of the Neoist Network allows me to claim and make space for Neoism within the avant-garde. There is no real beginning or end to Neoism, it goes on and on… Almost forever…

BOLT: The attempt to frustrate the audience has been a constant feature of the avant-garde since dada. In a certain sense it is through this destruction of the audience that the avant-garde's paradoxical understanding of art becomes evident: art contains a special potential but only insofar as art is realised in everyday life, insofar as art is no longer art. This understanding of art was evident in the situationists group who on the one hand tried to activate the audience in, for example, the exhibition Destruction of RSG-6 in 1963 where the audience was supposed to fire rifles at images of politicians like de Gaulle. Kennedy and Krustjov. On the other hand the situationists always insisted that the 'real' situationist audience was never to be found in a gallery the 'real' (read self-critical) audience was already engaged in revolutionary activities out in the streets. You also have a long and complicated relationship between working-class theoreticians and art, where art is often looked upon as a mere illusion that makes it possible for the bourgeois to present himself as equipped with freedom. How did the Neoist group or how did your version of Neoism try to reconfigure this complicated attitude towards on the one hand art and on the other the audience?

HOME: I think you have to accept that Neoism was no more coherent as a 'movement' than dada, these are names that like fluxus or lettrrism have been pushed and shoved in endless directions. From this perspective the recent Dada exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris was particularly hilarious. One is presented with a range of work that is in no way coherent. To take just the political aspect, Julius Evola is presented as the leading representative of dada in Italy without any mention being made of the fact that he was always a reactionary and went on to become the leading European fascist 'theorist' of the post-war period, the so called 'Marcuse of the (far)-Right', the 'intellectual' Godfather of the 'political soliders' of the Third Position; on the other hand there is a single framed copy of the council communist magazine Die Action among a collection of dada publications, this was a revolutionary journal that bought together the communist left with the Berlin dadaists, who being the most revolutionary members of the movement necessarily made the best 'anti-works'. That said, the bourgeois minds who conceived the Pompidou exhibition have done better than one might expect in presenting the movement, but they baulk at attempting to deal with its politics. For these liberals hacks the dominant cultural history is a snow drift in which all their sacred cows are whiter than white.

Moving on, there is a danger in the way you frame this question of ending up perceiving all avant-gardes as seeking the realisation of art in life, which on the one hand is something that emerges from the theorising of critics such as Peter Berger and on the other, is something that just might be found in the movements he is writing about in Theory of the Avant-Garde, viz dada and surrealism. Berger wrote about a desire to integrate art and life, sections of the situationist movement (those grouped around Debord and Paris after 1962) propagandised for the simultaneous realisation and suppression of art. These varied positions are reflected in the attitudes of different sections of the Neoist movement. Some former Neoists would even claim that Neoism wasn’t an avant-garde movement at all, but then that's also a typically avant-garde manipulation. So I think some Neoists could be viewed as attempting to integrate art and life (Pete Horobin, Istvan Kantor) and others to realise and suppress, or at least suppress it, and the stress should very much be on suppressing art (tentatively a convenience). Other Neoists, and in particular Blaster Al Ackerman (who is an absolutely key figure), weren't so much interested in addressing the status of art in capitalist societies, as meeting sex partners who were 'dirty and under thirty'. It is not for nothing that the Berlin Apartment Festival was redubbed The Syphilis Festival by a number of its participants, who - it is perhaps superfluous to add - all caught the clap. Likewise, when the Neoists said dirty, they meant dirty, since a perversion heavily favoured by a number of them was snot sex, which entailed nose blowing with mucus rubbed all over the body prior to penetrative sex. Because of such interests, The Syphilis Festival was considered a major disaster, the antibiotics used to clear up the clap simultaneously relieved a number of Neoists of their almost permanent colds. It was, undoubtedly, the beginning of the end for Neoism since without mucus lubrication many Neoists found it impossible to rub along with each other.

However, to return to the question immediately in hand, my own position is, of course, that capitalism provides the material conditions for art and German idealism supplies it with its theoretical justification. Drawing on the same philosophical sources, Marx concluded that human activity constitutes reality through its praxis, truth is process, the process of self-development. Since it is shackled by commodification, artistic practice is necessarily a deformation of the sensuous unfolding of the self that will be possible once we’ve attained real human community. The goal of communism is to overcome the reification of human activity into separate realms such as work and play, the aesthetic and the political. Communism will rescue the aesthetic from the prison of art and place it at the centre of life. While art as we know it continues to exist, it would be ridiculous to expect those seeking its abolition not to engage in and with it. However, progressive artists must always keep in sight the fact that their role of specialist non-specialists must be abolished. Therefore their cultural strategy in this transitional period must be to automonise the negative within artistic practice. We must live out the death of the avant-garde not just in theory, but also in practice, just as we will live out the death of politics as a separate sphere. What artists and politicos must seek is the abolition of those things that most engage them, so that a great tidal wave of humanity can fuse together and swamp capitalist canalisation in a revolutionary overflowing. This flood tide will necessarily originate both within and utterly outside the gallery. Since capitalist reification exists everywhere, we can fight it everywhere; we all reproduce our own alienation, including and especially artists. There is no 'outside' to the capitalist world, only the necessity of moving beyond it.

For the Neoists, as they endlessly reinvented what they were and represented, the question of audience really wasn't an issue. At Apartment Festivals and elsewhere, the Neoists themselves provided the audience for each other's work. Performances were meticulously (or sometimes sloppily and carelessly) documented, for if there was to be an audience in terms of passive spectators, then such drones did not yet exist and would be called forth from (and in) the future (but only so that they might be simultaneously transformed into actors on the theatre of the world). The assumption being that anyone present at Neoist events was a participant, someone who joined in (as would those who took an interest in its his and her-story). So even now, in retrospect, it is still possible to actively engage in Neoism, by manipulating its history. In my book The House of Nine Squares, you can see Florian Cramer and me doing this in our exchanges with each other. I think this constant rethinking of Neoism is important, and Florian played a major role in it. I've found his insistence on stressing Neoism's immersion in occult discourse particularly useful.

BOLT: How intentional was the attempt to transform the Neoist activities into an avant-garde? Some critics seems to read your attempt as an ironic gesture whereby the logic and self-understanding of the avant-garde is ridiculed, while other critics read the packaging as a more straightforward attempt to reconstruct a post-modern avant-garde.

HOME: After the fact it didn't much matter what was done with Neoism. As far as I am concerned Neoism was finished by the end of 1986, the 64th Neoist Apartment Festival in Berlin being its last hurrah. What interested me after this was its half-life, which I wanted to use to irradiate culture. So by the time I came to write The Assault on Culture in 1987 (it was first published the following year), Neoism wasn't ripe, it was rotten. I felt its putrid corpse was something that might very well stink up the institution of art, so I wanted to make it simultaneously attractive and repulsive to some of those in positions of cultural power. My intentions were simultaneously ironic and deadly serious. I wanted to see if this wreck could be dragged into the academy as a post-modern Trojan Horse. I also wished to have the pleasure of seeing a certain kind of purist ranting about Neoism in a museum, how disgraceful! By stressing the process of historicisation within my manipulation of Neoism, I hoped to make it harder for the institution of art to assimilate this tendency, precisely by ironising what were previously perhaps almost unspoken aspects of avant-garde activity, to ridicule and destroy the logic and self-understanding of the avant-garde; i.e. to make it live out its own death in practice as well as in the less mordant realm of theory. This was and remains, however, a high risk strategy, since capitalist culture has become so debased that those critics who mistake these clincially administered death spasms as an attempt to reconstruct the avant-garde in post-modern garb (i.e. to revive art by making it somehow 'relevant') are now treated as serious contenders in the race for intellectual credibility. Should they succeed in foisting such interpretations upon the academy, they naturally enough run the risk of being exposed as the theoretical-cum-practical necrophiliacs they undoubtedly are. As Breton might have said had he managed some form of rapprochement with Bataille: 'death will be convulsive or it will not be at all.' The old Neoist slogan 'convulsion, subversion, defection' might almost also be taken as having something to do with this. Art no longer has anything to say, if it ever did (i.e. prior to 1914).

All of this is satirised in my novel Slow Death, which addressed in the form of fiction the historicisation of Neoism before it had really occurred, and was quite consciously intended to make such historicisation more difficult for anyone who wanted to carry it through. In the nineties when I wrote Slow Death, and even recently, I have championed the notion of 'Proletarian Post-Modernism', which was a way of broadening matters out, and drawing in among other things trash film (trash that is, if this is a suitable form of description for productions as diverse as Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Persona). So we might rephrase your question in the following terms: can the academy recuperate laughter? Or rather, by providing a means by which those operating within the acadaemy but critical of it, might smuggle something radically humorous (or at least human) into overly rarified institutions, am I not providing them with an opportunity to subvert the academy from within? Or to put it another way, Neoism functions best when it is used to generate questions rather than provide answers.

BOLT: In retrospect the 80s comes over as a period characterised by the return to power of different conservative or neo-liberal political projects like Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl, in a Marxist jargon we could call it a counter-revolutionary move after the experiments of the 60s and 70s: May’68, the different student movements, the feminist movement, punk, Autonomia, etc. Much of the art produced in the 80s seemed very ambivalent towards this historical development: on the one hand you had the return to painting (in different version from Art & Language through the Italian painters to Schnabel in the States) and sculpture (Gormley, etc)), in the middle you had the so-called post-modern appropriation art of Sherman, Prince and Levine and on the other hand you had activities like ACT UP, Group Material and different community based projects that focused on specific political problems. Where does Neoism fit into this picture?

HOME: I don’t entirely agree with your respective characterisations of the sixties and eighties. In many ways what Reagan, Thatcher, Kohl etc, represented was a continuation of the dominant strand of libertarianism within the sixties counterculture. A lot of what passed as leftist in the sixties was in fact extremely right-wing. The yippies, for example, were completely gung ho about going and exploiting people from outside the overdeveloped world, and you only have to read what Abbie Hoffman in Steal This Book has to say about stocking up on American consumer goods to resell in Mexico to realise what exploitative scum these people actually were. What much of the sixties counterculture was about was so called 'free trade' (or more accurately neo-imperialism), which was why 'hipsters' were attracted to so called 'guerilla capitalism' in the form of drug dealing, or in the case of a perhaps not surprisingly large number of 'hippie chicks' prostitution. All of anarchism could be found in their conception of living differently in this world, and while many of those from this milieu tried to disguise their real positions with some incoherent Marxist jargon (most usually of a Maoist, or at least a Bolshevik stripe, so even the source for this rhetoric was counterrevolutionary), they were at base anarcho-capitalists. Thatcherism and Reaganism were a continuation of this, and while the largely rhetorical opposition of many eighties conservatives to a free trade in drugs was blatantly hypocritical, they understood that keeping certain substances illegal was the best way to maximise both profits and their at times deleterious effects on the working class. Likewise if one is to take the feminist movment en bloc, and while remembering that there was much that was useful within it, it remains nevertheless highly ambivalent, with large sections of it caught up in bourgeois puritanism over sex and pornography. Punk, it should go without saying, is even more problematic.
The institution of art is, of course, the cultural arm of the bourgeoisie, so while many artists may want to 'appear' 'critical', the majority feel highly ambivalent about dealing seriously with political issues (and this was as true in the sixties as it was in the eighties) since doing so not only potentially jeopardised their careers if art collectors disliked their political posing, they also ran the risk of further exposing themselves as the reactionary poodles they'd always been. Of course, the understanding of the average artist is so deformed that it is unlikely that they were consciously capable of comprehending or articulating this, but most would have grasped the consequences intuitively. That said, many of those who involved themselves with Neoism were as intellectually confused and challenged as the average gallery artist, but the Neoists taken en bloc were 'genuine' cultural fuck-offs with little to no interest in making money from selling art. This is why there is no real Neoist painting to speak of; although obviously there are odd paintings ranging from the deliberately atrocious and self-consciously worthless garbage produced by Istvan Kantor under the rubric of'‘blood paintings' to Pete Horobin's far more competent, albeit very occasional, canvases. If you look at Neoism prior to my involvement, it was totally divorced from ideas of post-modern appropriation (my notion of plagiarism operated slightly differently, more like 'situationist' detournement), and so up to 1984 it tended to be grounded in classically avant-garde and romantic notions of originality and participation. Something the more infantile of the Neoists stressed, most notably Istvan Kantor, was the need for a total revolution (although very few of us could conflate the terms revolution and tantrum as seamlessly as Kantor). In contrast, while one could feel a certain sympathy for some of the work done by the groups campaigning on single issues, precisely because of their acceptance of such canalisation they needed to overflow the boundaries they'd set up for themselves in order to become revolutionary. The naivety of Neoism, particularly early on, was its strength.
Neoism was a continuation through an almost self-conscious degeneration of the more radical currents that flowed out of fluxus in particular, but filtered through mail art and punk. It was this anarchronistic quality, this absurd belief in the revolutionary potentialities of an underground art, that made Neoism cultural dynamite. The Neoists remained ahead of the pack, avant-garde, a damp squib the world wasn't yet ready for, precisely because they were on the one hand completely anarchronistic, but on the other rushing to embrace newer mediums such as video and computers. Mail art, and in particularly Neoism which emerged from mail art but with a sharper focus, was an important precursor to the web. Likewise it is important to remember that it was the French Canadian Neoists who were the first to make and spread computer viruses on a large scale, Precisely because the Neoists reversed so recklessly into the future, they were able to drag in their wake some otherwise forgotten (in the art world at least) subversive potentialities from the past, including a belief in totality and the dematerialisation of the art object, and even in some cases in the death of art. Neoism doesn't fit into your picture of the eighties art world, it belongs to absolute elsewhere, the utopia of learning about life by fucking death in the gall bladder. It has more in common with the cultural anti-productions of the sixties or even the twenties, than with the eighties art world.

BOLT: What was the connection between the Neoist activities and the Art Strike?

HOME: The Art Strike was a means of articulating some of the more radical aspects of Neoist practice, but at the same time self-consciously articulating aspects of a critique that up to that point had largely remained unspoken; thus it was also a means of negating Neoism. Most of those involved with the Art Strike (for example Steve Perkins, Aaron Noble, Scott McLeod, Tony Lowes) had not been involved with Neoism. The obvious exceptions were me - but I’d broken with Neoism, and announced the Art Strike immediately afterwards – and John Berndt (whose involvement in both Neoism and the Art Strike is more ambiguous). The Art Strike was among other things a means of virally infecting Neoism, it speeded up the death of the movement (and I wanted to kill it so that newer, younger, more radically iconoclastic and ironic pseudo-avant-gardes might emerge in and through its wake; i.e. the avant-garde practice of living out one's own death), while simultaneously ensuring that retrospectively Neoism would be (mis)read through the prism of my own activities. I came to Neoism with an interest in fusing situationist legacies (among other things, but also Auto-Destructive Art) with that of fluxus; prior to this there was little interest in the situationists among the Neoists, the lineage up to my involvement clearly came through mail art and fluxus, from were it flowed back into the avant-gardes of the earlier part of the twentieth-century, most obviously futurism and dada, with a dash of surrealism added for good measure.

BOLT: In the foreword to the Polish edition of The Assault on Culture you mention different projects that could be seen as continuations of the projects that you write about. Looking back what projects and activities would you include if you were to write an 'updated' version of the book?

HOME: I think my problem with that book now is the disjunction between the chapters dealing with the situationists and fluxus. Once could tie these things together more tightly by looking more closely at both the 2nd Situationist International, and dealing extensively with Alex Trocchi's Project Sigma. That said, I am well aware that the former all too often ended up degenerating into anarchism, while Trocchi's cultural activities were ultimately eclipsed by his drug scamming. Today I think I would ignore Class War, a movement that continued to degenerate to the point where its decomposition might be likened to the collapse of time and space inside a black hole, and instead concentrate on some of the projects that emerged in the 90s and which very self-consciously fused different (post) avant-garde practices in a deliberately ironic manner; viz Manchester Area Psychogeographic, Workshop for a Non-Linear Architecture, Luther Blissett Project etc.

BOLT: Could you please explain the different splits that occurred in the Neoist Network and also talk a bit about the Neoist Alliance? In retrospect the Neoist Alliance seems more connected to different 90s projects like AAA, London Psychogeographical Association, Decadent Action, etc than to the Neoism of the 80s? The use of occult references seems more massive in the later projects than in the first round of Neoist activities.

HOME: Different people split at different times from the Neoist Network. For example, Peter Below sometime before me, but all that really happened with him was he fell out with Istvan Kantor. Mostly it wasn't even a case of splits, it was more entropic, people simply drifted apart, gave up, moved on to something else (for example Graf Haufen became a successful businessman in Berlin, running the Videodrome stores that rented and sold cult films). Since I was trying to ironise the avant-garde, my own split was overly self-conscious and ridiculous. So in 1985 I broke with Neoism (or at least Istvan Kantor, I remained on good terms with most of the other Neoists, and worked closely with Pete Horobin and to a lesser extent John Berndt). After 1986 the Neoist Network simply became less active, it just came to a natural end. Some people might place the date for this end a bit later, after all there was a so called Millionth Apartment Festival in New York, covered by C. Carr in the Village Voice. But relations between participants in Neoism loosened of their own accord, or else interactions were less frequently carried out under the rubric of Neoism. Naturally, Istvan Kantor carried on using the name, but there was no longer any real network or sense of community, so whatever half-life Neoism retained as an active current consisted principally of nostalgia. Those who took part in the recent resurrections of the Neoist Apartment Festival in Germany and Hungary were self-evidently old men who have yet to move on from the follies of their youth. It is best to leave 'active' Neoism to these buffoons, since they excel at dragging Neoism through the mud, and while they have a dirty and unfulfilling job, someone has to do it in order to repel the semi-sophisticated breed of art historian, and thereby prevent the 'movement' being misrepresented as some sort of monolith.

The Neoist Alliance by way of contrast was a rather more self-conscious joke, a deliberate choice of name that sounded like the old Neoism but had nothing to do with it. This was when a lot of people were putting together 'groups' in London that only really had one member – which was our way of dealing with the question of organisation within the revolutionary communist movement (something that actually still requires proper, as opposed to this merely humorous, resolution). So everyone would have their own group, and we'd each join in whatever activities the other groups were engaged with if we felt in sympathy with them. We were drawing on the legacy of the occult within the avant-garde (most obviously in surrealism), not only to ironise both 'discourses', but simultaneously to make our activities and those of certain precursors unattractive to academic hacks. Many of those who work in universities, and particularly those (and there are many) who are intellectually and practically incompetent, find the occult intolerable, so putting it to use to banish the avant-garde was our way of creating unacceptable theories, discourses and activities. The Neoist Alliance was simply a project of mine active in the mid to late nineties which sowed discord and spread confusion. Beyond the fact that I was a 'former' Neoist, it had no connection to the old Neoist Network of the eighties.

An email interview for a Danish publication that looks like it was done around 2005 (really I should keep better records).

Above copied from: http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/interviews/neosim.htm

An Interview with Bern Porter, Mark Bloch

circa 1985

Bernard Harden Porter (1911 - 2004) died Monday, June 7. He was a fascinating man. Before WWII, he worked as a physicist on cathrode ray tube technology that led to the creation of television. When the U.S. entered the war, Bern was drafted for uranium separation work on the Manhattan Project with Albert Einstein, a job he quit after the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945.

Next, Bern Porter was the first U.S. publisher of Henry Miller. He published Miller's anti-war tract, "Murder the Murderers" and also actively promoted and published other writers such as Kenneth Patchen, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Anais Nin under his own imprint Bern Porter Books. He was also an early correspondent with Ray Johnson and urged Ray to collaborate with him on a project for a Russian publisher that was never realized. At the same time he published others, he developed his own art that incorporated found poetry, sound poetry, mail art and performance art among other art forms. Porter remained an advocate of self-publishing throughout his life.

Porter worked again as a physicist on NASA's Saturn V manned space project and while working on the integration of science and art, he formally developed his "Sciart Mainfesto" in 1950. He later founded the Institute for Advanced Thinking in Maine, a headquarters for his network of non-academic scholars in various arts. Among other things, the Institute had a Wilhelm Reich Orgone Accumulator on the premises. He lived in Maine until his death of natural causes June 7, 2004, the day after Ronald Reagan died. He probably would have found this coincidence annoying, or perhaps amusing. I do distinctly remember his opening a New York City lecture and discussion in the mid-eighties by chanting ritualistically, "Hail Nancy Reagan. Hail Nancy Reagan."

It may have been during that visit of his to Manhattan that I had a chance to sit down with Bern in the kitchen of our mutual friend Carlo Pittore for a taped discussion about mail art. His strategies for world peace were quite interesting then and perhaps even moreso now. Either way, he was an amazing person and the world will miss him and his unique point of view a great deal. His official website can be found at http://www.mainepoetry.com/bern.html

So here is our interview, which I present as a tribute to him. I am not sure when it took place. Some time in 1984 or 85.


Mark Bloch- So tell me, Bern, how's New York?

Bern Porter- I find it almost as repulsive as it's ever been. It's noisy, it's crowded, the streets are lined with garbage, buildings are in need of restoration, the people are ...well, people, I guess you'd say.

MB- Do you like people in general?

Bern- Well its possible I would like to see a miracle in biology and see better, stronger, wholesome, more enlightened, people born. I'm looking for a new person, in other words, to be created, biologically.

MB- I was looking at this interview that you did with Phil Nurenberg. You've certainly known a lot of interesting people over the years. Gertrude Stein, Kenneth Patchen, Einstein, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Werner von Braun, Anais Nin, Henry Miller. What do all these people have in common, if anything?

Bern- They were, are, pioneers in producing. And their work is such that has never been created before. They made breakthroughs and were adventuresome in their explorations. They were not afraid to oppose tradition or society; they were referred to as controversial because they rebelled. Without them we would be stagnant and pretty much behind the eight ball. I came in contact with them because I was in the publishing business, I sought them or vice versa.

MB- In 1983, I sent out an open call for the Last Mail Art Show and I have extended the deadline indefinitely because so many people are giving such interesting answers on the topic of mail art being over with.

Bern- I'm delighted to hear you started in 83 and you haven't finished because this is a continuing phenomenon and there will be no one, in my opinion, who will be in the position to say The Last Mail Art Show. Unless you are a satirist and making fun of the whole thing. It's very unfortunate to get out any suggestion that it has come to the end. The reason is quite clear that even those who practice it don't even know what it is. The quality of the items they submit is not up to their best and the total realization of what this is, is not known to the masses.

We were at 57th Street last night and saw 200 people, if you asked those 200 people, "What is Mail Art?", I would be surprised if there would be more than four who could even tell you anything about it.

So we have a long way to go with a very powerful tool. And it's not possible for you or anyone to sit around and say The Last Mail Art Show, unless you're making fun of the whole thing.

MB- Do you think that public awareness has something to do with our efforts coming to fruition, or is it just for us?

Bern- The first thing you have to realize is that this is an underground movement and its success depends on it being underground. But it's success also requires that a very substantial majority know about it and know where it is and what it's doing. To my knowledge that's not true. We are a very select people throughout the world, not more than 600 in number. Our number should be considerably more than 600. On the other hand, it's very interesting that 600 may just be enough to carry on with what we are doing. So I'm not happy with the following:

Number one, how few people know about what we're doing.

Number two, how few of us who are doing it understand what it is we are doing.

And three, that the quality of our work is not much more improved.

So in effect I'm saying if you feel that it's ending, it's because of the inferiority -that the practitioners are falling down along with our responsibility. And the masses are unaware, continuing to be unaware, of our worth.

MB- And what is our worth?

Bern- Well it happens that on the top layer the media of newspapers, radio, television and books create a screen of fear, doubt and misunderstanding, and all of this has to be broken.

MB- And how can it be broken?

Bern- The only way it can be broken is by people touching one another.

MB- On what level?

Bern-The only way I know of is through the world network of practitioners like ourselves. So, we still have a long way to go.

MB- Do you know what we're doing?

Bern- Not really, and the reason I don't know what we're doing is that, unlike most of you, I am in touch by personal visits ... I have more than personal contact, I have meetings face-to-face in exotic parts of the world, I find it difficult to answer your question because in each part of the world that I go, the people that I encounter are flavored by their own background, their own native tradition, their native myths. The universal aspect of combining these national views which are now regional, into a universal language is still to come. And I must point out that, so far, this is a universal thing. it just hasn't come to its full fruition.

MB- So, are you talking about things that we have in common as a sort of lowest common denominator, or celebrating the differences between people? What do you think it would take to get us all on the same wavelength, or are we already on the same wavelength?

Bern- Well, 600 of us in about 40 countries are already on the same wavelength, I should be elated about this instead of making disparaging remarks, because the 600 of us can in effect save the world. If we could somehow only get over our regionalism.

For example, some mail artists in Sri Lanka are influenced by their incredible background of forty thousand years of civilization. Where as the mail artists in Manhattan are hampered by the fact that they are only 350 years old. The mail artists of Malaysia and those of Manhattan do have a common objective, that is, of touching one another, reaching one another and saying something to one another. This is highly desirable.

The time has come to clarify the atmosphere, to clarify world confusion, doubt, fear, and violence. That's why we are essentially an underground movement and as such are extremely valuable. Maybe if we came to the surfaces then maybe we would fail.

MB-Yes, isn't there that danger of reaching a lot of people, or gaining public acceptance, mass attention?

Bern- There is a danger, but there is also a danger of being totally underground. There's a happy medium however, that I'm in favor of. I insist that the quality of the items we send must be better. If you feel we are coming to a close, it's because the quality of the things we are sending is inferior to our best. When you send out an item, it should be the very best that you can produce.

MB- What if people just don't have the time to produce quality work?

Bern- In that case they should not assume that they are part of the network. You either produce your best or get out.

MB- The obstacle that we're all up against, the reason that we're trying to "save the world" is because there are obviously some problems with it. And a lot of these problems dictate that people just can't spend a lot of their time making personal objects to send to individuals that they've never met. Especially when they are trying to reach out to 600 people or any portion thereof.

Bern- It behooves us to think about it more seriously than we do. My complaint is that while it's true that we're doing a fantastic job, and we have great potential, I think that we're falling down.

Even you. You made the remark that this is the Last Mail Art Show. I think that our future has just begun. There are groups all over the world working on all matters of issues. It's interesting that the mail artist has the advantage over all of them. Some miners, for example, are parading today on the streets of England. Some people in Ireland are shooting at one another. In Central America they are carrying on in numerous directions involving violence and misunderstanding.

On the common denominator level, there stands the mail artist who is free to send an underground message to all groups, "Let's resolve our problems, lets get on." so we're in a very ideal position. We don't march on the street. We don't put ads in the paper; we don't speak on the radio. But in an underground way, we're in a position to send a message worldwide of any theme that we want to mention. And it's interesting that all of these themes, no matter what they are, are speaking about the same thing: Primarily, let's touch one another; let's get together. More than that, let's love one another.

MB- What I'd like to know, is how much ego there should be in mail art, because obviously there has to be some, because without ego, there wouldn't be the personalities to do it, right?

Bern- All of us are a bundle of egos to be sure, but in this journey to be an egotist, one stumbles over a great number of issues and bundles of questions. In the course of this, takes on one which sort of feels right for him, what feels right for him whether he is in Columbus or Sri Lanka, also feels right for someone in Japan or West Germany.

MB- And what is this something that, "feels right?"

Bern- It's a vibration, plasma of energy, a gem on a vast beach, which says, "Hello, I am well, are you well? Do you feel as I do?" This is a very important contact and I know of no other means of establishing it. The next step is to improve the quality of our submissions and secondly, to feel more intensely the message that we are trying to impart, it is very wrong for us to send something to someone and expect a reply. It is better that we merely manifest the energy of an idea and send it out.

And if you don't feel right about what you generate and send out, then perhaps you should get out of the whole thing. Just forget about it. On the other hand, if you're not willing to set it aside, then you should examine why it is that you want to put anything out, I'm wanting everyone involved to make it top quality and in addition I'm hoping everyone involved will feel some personal excitement, some fulfillment in the act of having an idea. Than cementing it to a piece of paper and running to the post office with it. Just that act alone is all that I feel is necessary. That's the key element. That ideas be generated, manifested, then sent out. And this energy will take care of the result.

You seem to be experiencing some doubts and I would like to ask you not to have that. You must discover the single most exciting thing that you personally can do for yourself. If you find this and express this, then send it out, you have fulfilled yourself. It's not necessary to question what the others are doing, or has it come to an end. And if you're not getting any satisfaction in this process, then perhaps you should say, "Well, mail art is not for me," and move on to something else.

One of the features of our culture is that only with great force and discipline can you concentrate on any given thing. There's a staggering number of possibilities, so much that they are overwhelming. So we must fight off what is undesirable, which is not intense and concentrate on this simple little spark of awareness. Which brings me to the point that out of 24 hours in a day, it's a very unusual individual who is using his faculties any more than 5 or 6 minutes out of 24 hours. I'm calling for high intensity, concentrated production; first quality, which gives you pleasure and satisfaction, without questioning it, without doubt. I'm saying that the generating is the feature.

Throughout the world there are people who are doing this and it's interesting that at the end result of what they do is pretty much of a common statement. A metaphor would be the innumerable religions and cults and all of them are talking about the same thing. They just use different symbols and languages. So in this morass of what you think is complex is actually quite simple.

You have to achieve zero position through relaxation. You have to be cool, calm, collected and aware, then you start to glow, radiate and that's what matters.

MB- Do you think that the universe is perfect as it is now, or are there things, events that disturb you?

Bern- Well, its been put together by a perfect designer. Of that you can be sure. It's just that the interpreters can come along and they've fouled it up in such a way that it's hard to be aware of that design. So you have to dismiss what has been done before you and see what you personally can contribute.

It turns out that what you can contribute requires first this state of relaxation. It requires an excitement about something. And to the degree that you have the urge to state it, make a postcard of it, then send it out. You have to review the things you are doing and discard those which are causing you concern and doubt, and cling to those which you are most secure with this is a continuing process, this organization.

MB- Do you think that mail art should organize any more than it is now?

Bern- No. It's success depends on the fact that its not organized. Its very loose, free. If it becomes organized, I think the spontaneity would be lost.

MB- How can it gain more attention without being organized?

Bern- Most people, as I understand it, feel that they must send something back the same day they receive something in the mail. When you receive something, you are the bearer of a torch, which must be passed on. Maybe not to the sender, but to anyone, near or remote. Someone you've never met. So, when you send something back to the sender, you're closing the circuit. When you are sending it to someone you've never met, you are bringing in a new cohort, a new convert. You are spreading the message.

You might get a response from the person asking, "Who the hell are you?" which would be a very healthy response. The only way we can widen this circle is by sending things to unknowns. Just go through the telephone book, pick out an interesting name, put a stamp on it and send it to him or her.

MB- Do you really think that will work?

Bern- I think that achieves the objective of the system, I think we're closing it, tightening it when we send things to one another.

MB- You mean the mail art system?

Bern- I mean the simple act of receiving something from a mail artist and feeling an obligation of sending it to an unknown, when some theme is established for a central collection point such as an exhibit, you of course send to that. Simultaneously you send copies or other items to others unknown to you. I guess most mail artists think of this as a new idea. The thinking is that we're a closed circuit, but we're not. I suggest everyone try this the next time they receive something, don't feel obligated to reply by returning something of yours to that person, send it to someone who you've never met.

MB- But we get things now from new people and we just don't know where these things are coming from, or who's behind it, or how they ever found out about mail art; what their objectives are or who will see the work we send back. Do you feel that matters?

Bern- That's contrary to the whole system. We shouldn't be questioning who started this, "How did they get my name?" You should respond as early as possible and send your best work.

MB- You think we should send our best work to a mystery address?

Bern- That's correct, it's one of the basic principals. You have been contacted and you respond.

MB- Is there any responsibility in any of this?

Bern- Yes, there is, several. You respond immediately, spontaneously and with your best.

MB- What is the responsibility of the person on the other end?

Bern- No need to worry, if he's part of the bona fide system, then he is under obligation to send and exhibit and not to reject.

MB- Is it a mistake then to challenge Dr. Ronnie Cohen, when she....

Bern- No, that (mail artists publicly challenging a curator who erred) was one of the most exciting things to have happened around here in a long time. And if Colby (College) messes up (on their mail art show), then they are to be challenged also. But don't start out with the idea that things are going to be contrary. And don't think that there's no responsibility at the other end. They will take care of that. You have to take care of yourself by responding immediately.

MB- Couldn't a person make a career out of this, similar to a full time job?

Bern- Yes. I personally receive anything from four to eight items a week that need response, so its a personal choice on the participant's part.

MB- My Last Mail Art Show could be considered as a statement, about running out of spontaneity and creative ideas in this particular form. I'm tired of all these shows. And people who don't really know too much about it writing articles and books about it. I'm wondering what's something similar that we can do to take it a step further and let it evolve into something else.

Bern- It has generated quite a few things. For instance, the mail poem. This is a system where instead of sending so-called art, you send poems. They can either be complete, or just two lines. And they, in effect, ask the receiver to either criticize or add his own two lines, and then it gets sent on. Then when someone feels it's complete, it gets sent back to the sender. This serves as a valid outgrowth of mail art. Dick Higgins and I invented mail poems and had specimens published in Germany. Couldn't get it published here, everyone thought we were nuts, but in Germany they're highly appreciative. What else? There's people who play chess by mail.

MB- This year is the 100th Anniversary of Duchamp's chess by correspondence competition. He was the head of the French team. I thought we should commemorate it this year.

Bern- This mail phenomena touches chess, art, poetry, music.

MB- What can it extend to that it already hasn't touched?

Bern- Hopefully the political arena. In that sense we would have mail politics, mail government. This is a very powerful tool. So again, I'm very disturbed that you may want to end it all with this Last Mail Art Show.

MB- I haven't really said that I wanted to end it; I'm merely raising the question, should we end it?

Bern- No.

MB- Why do you say no?

Bern- It's unfortunate that you would even raise the question. What's important is to respond without question. And if it gets too expensive, cut back, but keep your hand in so that you are not completely forgotten. I admit that I've done it, slacked off. And I apologize for it. But in general, out of every ten requests, eight I will respond to.

MB- Do you think that a mediocre response is not as bad as no response at all?

Bern- If you can't make a super response, don't make it.

MB- Thanks Bern.

above copied from: http://www.panmodern.com/berninterview.html