Perhaps we could also ‘react’ to the PO Box as
an object in its own right (like the door of the Wrong Gallery). Could we arrange a group visit to the Box? Perhaps we could stick something onto the box itself? It would certainly be interesting to see what its relationship with the surrounding PO Boxes is and what this might reveal about the infrastructure of the postal system.
Could be interesting to see the Chipperfield show at John Soanes (which is a really interesting site in its own right) at some point?
Mar 6
Megan: I think the link between mapping and the postal system is really interesting. It relates back to our conceptual field trips and the decision to use a PO Box to gather images and information on the interstitial spaces we were individually exploring. On another note I have been meaning to post a link to Ray Johnson for ages. He was one of the first artists to use the postal system as a conceptual
40 Post-Space
art practice and he sent an enormous quantity of material through the post, including elements of his chopped-up collages; drawings; found objects; and annotated newspaper clippings. He regarded his mailings as gifts and thus contrary to the market, although he implicated recipients in his project of exchange by asking them to send things on to specified others (‘please add to and return...’). He incorporated instructions for active participation in the artwork into the artwork itself and this, simultaneously and seemingly perversely, introduced an element of chance to the final piece. In this way he created a network and, in 1962, one of his correspondents, Ed Plunkett, suggested that mail art might be informally incorporated as the New York Correspondence School. Johnson changed the penultimate ‘e’ of ‘Correspondence’ to ‘a’, thus ‘Correspondence’, to suggest movement and play. Occasionally he would organise meetings of the New York Correspondence School at which ‘nothing’ would often happen. This later became a form of performance art in which Johnson would stage an (in)activity before an audience. This is obviously just an historical aside. I am not suggesting that we are anachronistically reactivating the mail art movement through our PO Box. I know that nobody wants the project to be nostalgic but I do think that the rematerialising of communication is valid. Hopefully we will establish tangible systems of contact through the appropriation of our small space, which is like a nodal point in an intimate yet potentially global network. I do not mind if the network we create occasionally reaches back to the past.
Alice L: Rather than trying to operate outside of an existing art world, free from commercial exchange we are consciously operating within its existing mechanisms. We have paid a fee to hire our space and are using common tools to seek submissions, in order to test the limits of these and explore the possibilities for new approaches.
Mar 4
Katie: It’s really interesting that the use of maps and area delineation dictated the postal system – there are so many fields of space to consider with something such as ‘mail’ in both physical and non-physical senses. Following Paulo’s suggestions
Post-Space 41
http://www.rayjohnsonestate. com/
http://www.ravenrow.org/ exhibition/rayjohnson/
networks
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