Utopian Networks and Correspondence Identities
Stephen Perkins, 1997
The artist must realize also that
he is part of a wider network, la Fête Permanente [Eternal Network] going on
around him all the time in all parts of the world. We will advertise also, as
alternative performances such things as private parties, weddings, divorces,
lawcourts, funerals, factory works, trips around towns in buses, pro-Negro
manifestations or anti-Vietnam ones, bars, churches, etc...
Robert Filliou,
19701
[originally published under the title — 'Artifacts of the Eternal Network', this text was included in the exhibition brochure for the University of Iowa, Museum of Art's exhibition 'Artifacts of the Eternal Network,' Sept., 6 - Nov, 23, 1997]
The first public
announcement of the Eternal Network appeared in a poster published in April
1968 by Robert Filliou and George Brecht and subsequently mailed to their
network of correspondents. The impetus for launching the Eternal Network and
the context in which its conceptual structure was shaped are intimately tied to
the closing of Filliou's and Brecht's "non-shop," the Cédille qui
Sourit, located in a small fishing village in the south of France and in
existence from 1965-68.2 About the purpose of the Cédille Filliou
stated "we conceived the Cédille qui Sourit as an international center of
permanent creation, and so it turned out to be. We played games, invented and
disinvented objects, corresponded with the humble and mighty, drank and talked
with our neighbors, manufactured and sold by correspondence suspense poems and
rebuses, started to compile an anthology of misunderstandings and an anthology
of jokes..."3 The Cédille was never commercially registered and
was opened to visitors only upon request.
The manner in which the
Cédille's activities were undertaken grew directly out of Filliou's concept of
Permanent Creation (1963), an activity he later summarized as "whatever
you do, do something else, whatever you think—think something else."4
This model for creative activity and its inherent capacity for self-renewal was
grounded in Filliou's commitment to erasing the separation between artist and
audience and "joining them in a common creation."5 The
Cédille closed on its third anniversary because neither Filliou nor Brecht were
able to pay the rent. Faced with the imminent departure of Brecht, both men
felt the need to develop a means by which the Cédille's vision of the artist
and non-artist collaborating together could be continued. Filliou wrote of this
period, "we felt that we did not have to be on the same spot any more, in
order to keep this spirit alive."6 Out of their discussions
they developed the concept of the Fête Permanente, or the Eternal Network as
they translated it into English.
An important feature in the dissemination of the Cédille's
activities, as well as the means through which a number of its projects were
realized, was the postal system. With the Cédille's closure and its
supersession by the Eternal Network, this communication system became a pivotal
medium through which this utopian model of creativity could be activated on an
international scale.
The challenge that lay at
the heart of the Eternal Network was to close the gap between the artist and
his/her audience and, more particularly, art and life themselves. Implicit in
this challenge was an invitation to participate in and widen this circle of
inquiry and interactivity. In a few short years this idea would find fertile
ground in an emerging and geographically dispersed network of self-identified
correspondence artists. Rejecting the exclusiveness and competitiveness of
existing art world institutions in favor of open and collaborative exchanges
via the postal system, a community of participants slowly established
themselves as a parallel counter-institution during the late 1960's and early
1970's. It is for these reasons that correspondence art, also known as mail art
or postal art, has often been referred to by its practitioners, as the Eternal
Network.
A defining feature in
correspondence art's development was the emergence of the operational
guidelines for exhibitions that were being organized with increasing frequency
from 1970 onwards. These crystallized around the following: no fees were
charged for submission, no jury or selection process, all works were to be
exhibited, no works returned and documentation to be sent to all participants.
Clearly, the egalitarian ethos embodied in these conditions was formulated in
direct opposition to the norms that prevailed when artists sought entry into
the established art world.
A practice that
characterizes this early period of correspondence art, and which continues to
this day, was the adoption of pseudonyms and official sounding institutional
titles by individuals and groups. Stu Horn, a correspondence artist active in
this early period, wrote about the possibilities offered through postal
communication for the construction of network identities.
Correspondence gives the artist the opportunity to create a new,
perfect identity for people to relate to. He can be whoever he wants to
be; or nobody at all. The majority of correspondents either create
corporate names (Image Bank, Daddaland, Dada Processing, Cow Studio, Gross
Enterprises) or use aliases by which even their close friends know them (Anna
Banana, Monte Cazazza, Arthur Craven, Woofy Bubbles). I like the anonymity of
correspondence & the possibility of creating and giving reality to
conceptual beings and institutions.7
One of the models for these
network identities can be traced to Dada, one of this century's earliest
avant-garde movements. Hostile to all institutions and cultural myths deemed
responsible for the carnage of World War I, the Dadaists constructed satirical
and iconoclastic identities as vehicles with which they attempted to explode
these myths once and for all. The appropriation of this Dada strategy, by North
American correspondence artists in particular, can be seen in the context of
the political and cultural upheavals that had recently convulsed Europe and were
continuing in the United States during the 1970's. In 1974, Anna Banana, a
Canadian correspondence artist then living in San Francisco, published a
'manifesto' in which she addressed the contemporary resurgence of interest in
historical Dada and her perception of the similarities in contexts from which
she saw them arising.
Disillusioned masses, dissatisfied with the leadership, the
unequal distribution of goods and services...revolutionary activity (S.L.A.,
for example) oppressive governments passing more and more oppressive
legislation, hiring more and more police forces, higher postage rates, general
inflation of currency etc, etc, etc. Alienation on the mass scale driving many
into group-living situations, where members can clarify and express THEIR identities
within an approving environment.8
As evidenced in this
exhibition (Artifacts of the Eternal Network, The University of Iowa Museum of Art, Sept. 6 - Nov., 23, 1997), many of the individual and group identities adopted were intended
to criticize, through humor and satire, the authority invested in establishment
institutions and to counterpose these with an array of alternative artistic and
social identities. Anna Banana herself and her related 'banana' projects
illustrates well the pervasiveness of this neo-Dada activity.
(cover of the 6 page exhibition brochure, 1997)
One particularly
provocative network identity was the Adolf Hitler Fan Club, created by the
British artist Pauline Smith. Initiated in 1974, the project developed because
she was "struck by the way Hitler's description of decadent Austrian
democracy immediately prior to WWI could equally well suit the last few British
Governments."9 Vehemently critical of the government and the
gentrification of the inner city in which she lived, the project was terminated
with the last edition of leaflets titled Adolf Hitler Lives, when the police
raided her apartment investigating a "possible contravention of the Race
Relations Act."10 Smith continued her activities with the more
neutral Corpse Club/Body Sculpture project. However, through her institutional
identity, she demonstrated to her dissatisfaction that the "freedom to
express ideas in this country is not as free as all that."11
A consistent feature in
correspondence artists' promotion of their network identities has been the use
of rubber stamps. This appropriation of an official and bureaucratic imprimatur
in order to lend legitimacy to network identities is widespread. More
generally, artists' adoption of rubber stamps as a part of their work gained
momentum from the late 1950's onwards, particularly among the Nouveaux
Realistes and more markedly within Fluxus. Their use divides broadly between
the creation of experimental yet traditionally conceived art works and numerous
examples which rely upon the replication of texts. It is the latter that
predominates in the early years of correspondence art. The preoccupation with
texts reflects the conceptual turn that work outside of the mainstream took
during the early 1960's. Dispensing with the image, the text becomes the
initiator of a mental image as well as the agency through which specific
projects, events and instruction pieces were set into motion. Other genres
which emerged within this potentially decommodified and multiple based activity
include: visual and concrete poetry stamps that examined the construction of
words and language and still other stamps created to instruct, protest and
authenticate. Later in the 1970's correspondence art expanded the use of
image-based rubber stamps.
Another institutional form
that was appropriated from its official bureaucratic setting, and which has
long been a part of the correspondence art landscape, was the postage stamp
itself. Robert Watts, a member of Fluxus, was one of the earliest artists
involved in the sustained production of artists' postage stamps. Having
produced his first stamp sheet in 1961, he stands out as an innovator in expanding
the potential of this ready-made emblem of communication. The development of a
medium so steeped in constructs of nationhood and identity, coupled with their
simultaneous re-insertion and re-distribution into the very system from which
their form was taken, aptly illustrates the Eternal Network's utopian attempts
at relocating artistic activity within the sphere of everyday life.
With postage stamps
stripped of their official function, artists were at liberty to explore other
uses tailored to their own priorities; often these were directly related to
their network identities. One artist who personified this approach was the
Italian Guglielmo Achille Cavellini. Propelled by his personal wealth and a
prodigious ego, he relentlessly pursued his own 'self-historification' project.
His aim was to insert himself into the pantheon of famous artists through the
dissemination of copious amounts of books, postcards, stickers and artists'
stamps, all of which extolled his greatness and individuality as an artist. Whether
he had achieved his aim by the time of his death in 1990 is debatable, but
without doubt he had succeeded in establishing a unique presence within
correspondence art, due in no small part to his use of artists' stamps, all of
which bore an endless succession of portraits of himself in various guises and
with art historical references.
Any account of the
development of correspondence art must take into consideration two important
precursors whose use of the postal system has provided lasting and influential
models. The first community of artists to systematically incorporate the postal
system into their activities was Fluxus. This diverse and international
grouping, which included Filliou and Brecht, coalesced during the early 1960's
under the tireless organizational efforts of their New York based 'commissar'
George Maciunas. The postal system played a central role in providing a medium
for the dissemination of text-based event works, the means through which
collaborative projects could be undertaken, as well as the development of an
independent and alternative distribution network for anthologies of boxed
objects.
One Fluxus artist, the
Frenchman Ben Vautier, produced a work that is paradigmatic in its use of the
internal mechanics of the postal system. Titled The Postman's Choice (1965), it
is a blank postcard which bears on both sides the lines indicating where the
sender is to write the address and in the upper right corners the rectangles
for affixing postage stamps. To initiate the piece, the sender is required to
write two different addresses on both sides of the card, accompanied by the
necessary stamps for each destination, in this manner the role of the postman
in determining the final destination of the postcard is activated.12
The humorous collaborative strategy which shaped this work reiterates the
Eternal Network's commitment to joining the artist and public in a "common
creation."13
The second precursor, who's
presence permeates correspondence art to this day, is Ray Johnson and the
postal activities he initiated under the rubric of the New York Correspondance
School.14 A graduate of Black Mountain College, Johnson lived from
the early 1950's in New York making his home the close-knit art world of that
city. From this period onwards he refined his use of the postal system as the
connective tissue through which he spun a network of relationships with members
of New York's expanding art world and beyond. Typically his correspondents
would be initiated into the New York Correspondance School upon receiving a
cryptic envelope of collages, drawings, found texts and images which
accompanied his letter. This material frequently contained oblique references
to art world personalities and occurrences, most often extrapolated from
incidents or conversations drawn from real or imagined relationships with his
correspondent. A particular feature of many of his mailings was his request
that the recipient add to his mailing (often specific items) and forward it to
a third party. In this manner his correspondents became active participants in
an expanding communicative web of relationships in which Johnson was the
initiator and director.
Johnson's whimsical
personality is present in many of the works in this exhibition, perhaps most
noticeably his 'bunny' motif as well as references to the New York
Correspondance School (the name was a pun on the 'New York School' of Abstract
Expressionists and traditional Correspondence Schools). Always elusive and
unpredictable in his dealings with friends and acquaintances, he was
nevertheless able, through the medium of the postal system, to envelop
countless artists, and non-artists, into the quirky and ultimately humorous
play of chance and association that lay at the heart of his private world of
correspondances.
A consistent feature in the
topology of correspondence art is the presence of artists' periodicals. As
common reference points for its geographically dispersed participants, they
functioned as alternative spaces for exhibiting work, places where invitations
for projects could be broadcast and coupled with the growing practice of
listing contributor's addresses, initiators of community building. Equally
important, they provided correspondence art with an image of itself, a
momentary snapshot that illuminated the scope and breadth of its activities.
Self-published in small print runs, utilizing available print technologies,
these periodicals were distributed primarily through informal exchange and
circulated almost exclusively within the participating community.
An early periodical that
actively promoted and engaged the concept of Eternal Network was the Canadian
magazine File (1972-89). Published by
the Canadian group General Idea (AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal), it
parodied the myth and mass media format of Life magazine. The following
statement by General Idea locates File's
beginnings.
We began File Magazine in 1972 as a networking publication. It
functioned as an in-house organ for an art network of the early seventies,
blurring the line between contributors and readership and authenticating fringe
art activity as something really happening.15
Over the next two years File disengaged itself from
correspondence art and concentrated on General Idea's own projects. Anna Banana
stepped in to fill this void with Vile
magazine, "I visualized a magazine that would look like Life, but on close examination, would
reveal its true nature; subtle put-downs of mass media culture with nasty, dada
'up-yours'-type messages."16 Throughout its eight issues
(1974-83), Vile dedicated itself to
publishing work from the correspondence art network, as well as being one of a
galaxy of similarly oriented 'dadazines' published by the Bay Area Dada group.
The relative ease with
which North American correspondence artists could access affordable printing
technologies, and within a climate that tolerated their publications, was not
enjoyed by all members of this international community. In Uruguay, Clemente
Padin published Ovum (1973-77), under
very different circumstances and in direct response to "the needs of
communication provoked by censorship and outrage at the dictatorship imposed in
our country since June 1973."17 Similarly, Pawel Petasz in
Poland started Commonpress. From its
first issue in 1977, this collective project was premised on having different
editors publish individual issues. After consultation with Petasz, prospective
editors were given an issue number and were then free to choose the theme and
format of their issue. By the time of its demise in 1990, fifty-one issues had
been published by editors from fifteen countries, firmly establishing Commonpress as a new collaborative
publishing paradigm possible only through a community of common effort.18
Another collective
publishing strategy that was embraced by correspondence art was
"assembling magazines." Named after a well known American example
called, appropriately, Assembling
(1970-87), this periodical relied upon contributors submitting a specific
number of pages of original art work, which the editor then 'assembled' to
create an edition. Particularly well suited to countries where access to print
technology was restricted, such as Latin America and the former Eastern bloc
countries, these periodicals with their open and participatory strategy had a
mobilizing effect in literally 'assembling' the correspondence art community.
The continued existence of
correspondence art, and the wider application of its communication model within
present day computer networking is evidence of the endurance of the concepts
underlying the Eternal Network. The artifacts gathered here are the most
visible residue of ideas that took form in response to the Eternal Network's
invitation for collective dialogue and exchange.
It's not incidental that
Filliou was trained and worked as an economist, for it's clear from his
writings that economic theory confirmed his conviction of the
interconnectedness of everyday life and economic and political systems. It was
this conviction that led him to research in the nature of creativity and it's resolution
in the utopian, and essentially poetic and spiritual concerns, of the Eternal
Network. The correspondence art community, through the most accessible of
communication systems, embraced this collective attempt to forge a new ecology
of human exchange. Art, Filliou believed, was to be incorporated into the
"fabric of everyone's life, so that it becomes an art of living."19
Footnotes
1. Robert Filliou, Teaching
and Learning as Performing Arts, Köln/New York: Verlg. Gerbl. König, 1970,
p. 204.
2. A cedilla is a
pronunciation symbol used in French and placed under the letter ç. Translated
La Cédille qui Sourit means 'The Cedilla that Smiles.'
3. Filliou, Ibid.; 198.
Equally involved in the Cédille was Filliou's wife Marianne and Brecht's
partner Anna Lowell; although their participation is not detailed in
documentation from the Cédille, their presence is evident.
4. Robert Filliou,
"Transcript: The 'Gong Show' Tape," Centerfold, 2(4), 1978, p. 29.
5. Filliou, Ibid.; 7. On
page 191 of this book Filliou describes how the idea of Permanent Creation came
to him.
6. Filliou, Ibid.; 203.
7. Stu Horn quoted in:
Carolyn Pinkston, "Correspondence Art," MA thesis, California State
University, Northridge, 1973. Ken Friedman papers, Alternative Traditions in
the Contemporary Arts archive, University of Iowa, p. 37.
8. Anna Banana,
"Manifesto," Intermedia,
1(1), 1974, p. 6.
9. Pauline Smith (1933-2017),
"Corpse Club," in: Anna Banana, About Vile, Vancouver:Banana
Productions: Vancouver, 1983, p. 59-60. Smith was born in Kenya in 1993 and passed away at the age of 83 on March 19th, 2017.
10. Smith, Ibid.; 60.
11. Smith, Ibid.; 60.
12. In 1978 the University
of Iowa Museum of Art sent out a bulk mailing of this postcard in association
with the exhibition Dada Artifacts. The reaction from the Iowa City post office
was swift, the postcards were returned and the museum's non-profit mailing
permit was temporarily suspended.
13. Filliou, Ibid.; 7.
14. The term, The New York
Correspondence School, was coined by the artist EdwardPlunkett in the early
1960's to describe his correspondence art activities. Johnson adopted the name
but changed the spelling of 'correspondence' to 'correspondance.' He did not,
however, use this particular spelling consistently.
Source: Edward Plunkett,
"Send Letters, Postcards, Drawings, and Objects...," Art Journal, Spring 1977, p. 234.
15. General Idea:
1968-1984, (exhibition catalogue), Kunsthalle, Basel, 1984, p. 38.
16. Anna Banana. About
Vile. Vancouver: Banana Productions, 1983, p. 2.
17. Clemente Padin,
"Assembling Magazines: Ovum's Saga," in Assembling Magazines
(exhibition catalogue), Subspace: Iowa City, 1997, p. 29.
18. These figures from:
Géza Perneczky, The Magazine Network, Köln: SoftGeometry, 1993, p. 121.
19. Filliou, Ibid.; 24.