This interview was conducted many years ago. It was published as a small booklet (see image above) and also published in the Books with Mail-Interviews at TAM-Publications.
Details see:
The complete mail-interview:
THE
MAIL-INTERVIEW WITH DICK HIGGINS
RJ : Welcome to this mail-interview. First let
me ask you the traditional question. When did you get involved in the mail-art
network?
DH: Dear Señor
Janssen - I got involved in the mail-art network in July 1959 shortly after I
met Ray Johnson in June. He sent me a marzipan frog, a wooden fork and three
small letters in wood, which I correctly misunderstood. I sent him some wild
mushrooms which I had gathered, and they arrived at his place on Dover Street
just before they decomposed.
RJ : Was this mail-art in the beginning just
fun & games or was there more to it?
(Together
with his answer Dich Higgins sent me his large, 46 pages long, Bio/Bibliography
and a contribution to my Rubberstamp Archive, a stampsheet with some of his old
and new stamps printed on)
DH: Indeed it was fun to communicate with Ray.
But it was a new kind of fun. I had never encountered anyone who could somehow
jell my fluid experiences of the time when I was doing visual poetry (thus the
letters), food and conceptual utility (perhaps I had shown him my "Useful
Stanzas" which I wrote about then. But what had he left out? Nature - thus
my sending of the wild mushrooms, collecting and studying which was an ongoing
interest (I was working on them with John Cage, an important friend of Ray's as
of mine).
As for
rubber stamps, in 1960 when Fluxus was a-forming my home was in New York at 423
Broadway on the corner with Canal Street and my studio was at 359 Canal Street
a few blocks away. Canal Street was known for its surplus dealers (some are
still there) including stationers, and one could buy rubber stamps there for
almost nothing - and we did! I had already made some rubber stamps through
Henri Berez, a legendary rubber maker on Sixth Avenue, long gone but he was the
first I knew who could make photographic rubber stamps - Berez made a
magnesium, then a Bakelite and finally the rubber stamp, And I blocked the
magnesiums and used them for printing as well. I had stamps of musical notation
symbols made and also of my calligraphies, etc. At an auction in 1966 when he
moved to Europe I also bought Fluxartist George Brecht's rubber stamps (mostly
of animals) which he used starting ca. 1960; I used those to make a bookwork of
my own, From the Earliest Days of Fluxus (I Guess), which I think is in
the Silverman Collection. Others of my rubber stamps are in the Archiv Sohm and
perhaps Hermann Braun or Erik Andersch have some, I am not sure. I think there
was an article on Fluxus rubber stamps in Lightworks - that must be
listed in John Held Jr's Mail Art: an Annotated Bibliography (Mettuchen,
NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1991) and/or in Jon Hendricks's Fluxus Codex (New
York: Abrams, ca. 1992). I also composed some music using rubber stamps,
notably Emmett Williams's Ear/L'orecchio di Emmett Williams (Cavriago:
Pari & Dispari, 1978).
That's
about all I can add to the rubber stamp thing at this time. It would be much
more efficient for us if I send you my Bio/Bibliography which has facts
that need not be endlessly repeated, so I am doing that under separate cover.
The curious type face I used on that is one which I designed and named for
Fluxmail Artist Ken "Kenster" Friedman, "Kenster."
RJ : Your Bio/Bibliography is quite
impressive. The sentence on the first page: "I find I never feel quite
complete unless I'm doing all the arts -- visual, musical and literary. I guess
that's why I developed the term 'intermedia' , to cover my works that fall
conceptually between these" , indicates you are always focussing on all
kinds of media to express yourself. Which place has mail-art in this?
29 °C and
about 85% relative humidity
(Together
with his answer Dick Higgins sent me a poster with titel "SOME POETRY
INTERMEDIA" explaning metapoetries or how poetry is connected to many
other art-forms. Published by Richard C. Higgins, 1976 , New York, USA)
DH : Yes, I am a "polyartist" -
Kostelanetz's term for an artist who works in more than one medium, and some of
these media themselves have meaningful gradiations between them. Visual poetry
lies between visual art and poetry, sound poetry lies between music and poetry,
etc. But between almost any art and non-art media other intermedia are
possible. What lies between theater and life, for instance? Between music and
philosophy? In poetry I got into this in my "Some Poetry Intermedia"
poster essay. If we take any art as a medium and the postal system as a medium,
then mail art is the intermedium between these - postal poetry, postal music,
mail-art [visual variety], etc.
Some
of these are more capable than others of the subversive function which I value
in mail art - it bypasses the gallery world and the marketplace, so it becomes
somehow immune to censorship. If used aggressively it can make a reactionary
politician's life Hell. And it is not yet played out yet. For instance, while
Fax art has no special characteristics (it is like monochromatic regular mail,
"snail mail") what is e-mail art? Can't it subvert the rich folks'
machines? Ruin their modems? Yet even that is a commonplace, once one has
considered it. Little artists can do it. Its power is inherent in its medium. I
can tell you stories of how the Poles of K_odsko tortured an
East German bureaucrat who has banned a Mail art show in (then) East Berlin. I
happened to be visiting there at the time and was involved in this.
But
let's think about more positive areas. Please tell me about the spiritual
aspects of mail art. How do you see that?
RJ : Yes, a nice try to end an answer with a
question to me. I will send you some 'thoughts about mail-art' for you to read,
but in this interview I would like to focus on YOUR thoughts and knowledge. I
am in no hurry, so I would like to hear that story of how the Poles of K_odsko
tortured this East German bureaucrat who banned this mail art show in East
Berlin.....
DH : (today in 1843 Herman Melville signed
abroad the frigate 'United States,' this began the journey that led to
'White-Jacket')
It
must have been about 1988 and I was traveling through Poland, reading and
performing with a friend, the critic and scholar Piotr Rypson. Our travels
brought us to K_odsko down in the beak of Galicia to where a group of
unofficial Polish artist had gathered to discuss what to do since the Mail Art
Conference which Robert Rehfeldt had organized in East Berlin had, at the last
moment, been canceled by some bureaucrat. It was a final and irrevocable
decision the bureacrat had made, finalized by his official rubber stamp besides
his signature. This was a great disappointment to these artists who had very
little opportunity to meet personally with each other, especially across
international borders, and to exchange ideas. However these artists were Poles,
from the land of the liberum votum , and they had six hundred years
experience at protesting. They made a list of things to do. Having access to
some things in America which were problematic in Poland, I was asked to have
four exact facsimiles of the bureaucrat's rubber stamp made up and to send one
to each of four addresses I was given, one was an official one in the
Department of Agriculture in the DDR and the other three were in Poland. I was
also asked to buy some homosexual and some Trotskyite magazines in the USA, to
send them one at a time to the bureaucrat and, if possible, to subscribe in his
name to these things. I did these things and also I appointed the bureaucrat an
honorary member of my Institiute for Creative Misunderstanding and sent an
announcement of his appointment to Neues Deutschland, the main communist
newspaper of the DDR.
For a
few weeks it seemed as if nothing had happened. But then I received a long
letter from Robert Rehfeldt in English (usually he wrote me in German)
lecturing me on what a terrible thing it was to try to force a person to accept
art work which he did not like. And a few weeks after that I received a post
card from Rehfeldt auf deutsch saying "Fine - keep it up [mach
weiter]."
In
this story we can see the usefulness for using the mails on the positive side
for keeping spirits up and for keeping contact with those one does not see, on
the sometimes-necessary negative side for creating powerful statements which
must have caused great problems for this bureaucrat. I have no idea who these
people were to whom I sent the rubber stamps, but I can imagine that they were
forging the bureaucrat's signature onto all sorts of capricious papers and
causing great consternation within official circles of the DDR. For me this
story tells well one of the main uses of Mail Art.
Perhaps
it also suggests why Mail Art taken out of context can sometimes be such a
bore. It has no particular formal value or novelty, especially when one has (as
I have) been doing it for nearly forty years, so that mere documentation seems
tendentious and egotistic. Would you want to only read about a great painting
of the past? Wouldn't you rather see it and then, perhaps, read about it?
Making good Mail Art is like making a soufflé - the
timing is very very critical. Who wants to be told about a decade old soufflé? And
documenting the matter is not nearly so interesting as receiving and consuming
it at precisely the right moment - with the right people too, I might add. It
is an art of the utmost immediacy.
RJ : What was the reason for creating your
"Institute for Creative Misunderstanding"?
(Apollinaire
born today)
(Besides
his answer Dick Higgins also sent his poem "Inventions to make")
DH : Kära
Ruud, For years I was struck by how little one understands of how one's work
will be perceived by others. We can prescribe how others will see it at risk of
discouraging them. Duchamp, when anyone would ask "does your piece mean
this or that...?" would smile and usually say "yes," no matter
how absurd the question. The impressionists thought they were dealing with
light; we see their contribution is one of design along the way towards
abstraction. The Jena Romantic poets of Germany saw themselves as applying the
philosophies of Kant and Plato to their writings, but we see it as reviving the
baroque and providing a healthy restorative emotional depth to their poetry
which had often been lacking in the work of the previous generation. The same
is true of Percy B. Shelley who knew his Plato well (and translated passages of
Plato from Greek into English), but who in poems like "Lift not the
painted veil" or "The sensitive plant" moves Plato's ideas into
areas which Plato never intended to create a new entity of art-as-concealment.
Harold Bloom, a famous academic critic in the USA, was, in the 1970's in books
like The anxiety of influence, stressing the role of recent art as
cannibalizing and deriving from earlier art. I was not satisfied with Bloom's
models and preferred to extend them and misinterpret them myself along
hermeneutic lines using a Gadamerian model; this you will find in a linear
fashion in my book Horizons (1983) and in the forthcoming
"Intermedia: Modernism since postmodernism" (1996). But a linear
presentation does not satisfy me either; it does not usually offer grounds for
projection into new areas and it focuses too much on the specifics of my own
ratiocinations. To broaden my perspective I conceived of a community of artists
and thinkers who could take conceptual models and, with good will (my
assumption, like Kant's in his ethics), transform these models - evoking not
simply intellectual discourse but humor or lyrical effects which would
otherwise not be possible. This is, of course, my Institute of Creative
Misunderstanding. Into it I put a number of people with whom I was in touch who
seemed to be transforming earlier models into new and necessary paradigms. I
tried to organize a meeting of the institute, but could not get funding for it and
realized that it might well be unnecessary anyway. I still use that Institute
as a conceptual paradigm when necessary.
So I
would not discribe the Institute for Creative Misunderstanding as a "fake
institute," as you did, so much as an abstract entity and process of
existence which creates a paradigm of community of like-minded people by its
very name and mentioning. Are you a member of the Institute, Ruud? Perhaps you
are - it is not really up to me to say if you have correctly misunderstood it
in your heart of hearts.
RJ : Who is to say if I am a member? But I
sure like all those institutes and organisations that there are in the network.
You spoke of the intention to organize a meeting. In the years 1986 and 1992
there were lots of organized meetings in the form of congresses. Is it
important for (mail-) artists to meet in person?
(Cage
born -1912)
DH : (laughing) Who's to say if you are a
member? Why the group secretary, of course - whoever that is. Perhaps I am
acting secretary and I say you are a member. Anyway, to be serious, the
question of meetings is not answerable, I think, except in specific contexts.
The events planned at K_odsko could not have been planned without the people
being together; but at other times it would seem unnecessarily pretentious to
bring them together - frustrating even, since most mail artists are poor and
they would have to spend money to be present. At times this would be justified,
but if it were simply a matter of pride or of establishing a place in some
pecking order, well that would not be good.
Think
of a camp fire. Shadowy figures are in conversation, laughing and talking; what
they say makes sense mostly among themselves. A stranger wanders in and
listens. The stranger understands almost nothing - to him what is said is all
but meaningless - and the part which he understands seems trivial to him. The
stranger has two options: he can stay and learn why what is being said is
necessary, or he can go away and suggest that all such campfires are silly and
should be ignored or banned. Mail art is like that. I go to shows, and the work
is arranged not by conversation but according to a curators's skills of the
past, as if these were drawings by Goya. But they aren't. Their meaning is more
private, often contained in the facts and conditions of their existence more
than in the art traditions to which they seem to belong. The show therefore
doesn't work. Few do. But a show arranged chronologically of the exchanges
among some specific circle mail artists - that would have a greater chance for
an outsider to learn the language and love the medium. Wouldn't you like to see
a show of the complete exchanges between, say, San Francisco's Anna Banana*1 and
Irene Dogmatic (if there ever was such an exchange) than the 65th International
Scramble of Mail Artists presented by the Commune di Bric-á-Bracchio
(Big catalog with lots and lots of names, but all works become the property of
the Archivo di Bric-á-Bracchio).
*1 of
course Anna has since moved to her native Vancouver, and I haven't heard of
Irene Dogmatic in many a year)
Chance
encounters among mail artists, meetings among small groups - oh yes, those are
quite wonderful. But I don't usually see the point in large gatherings of mail
artists. Actually, there haven't been many of them - thank goodness. Berlin
would have been an exception, methinks.
As
e'er- Dick (laughing) (Dicks signiture was placed here as a smiling face)
RJ : What is the first 'chance encounter' (as
you call them) that comes up in your mind when I ask for a memory about such an
event?
DH : By "chance encounters" I mean
those meetings which could not have been anticipated or which take place on the
spur of the moment. In on Wednesday I arrange to meet you the following Tuesday
at 7:30 and if I am unable to sleep Monday night because of faxes from Europe
arriving all night long Monday night and the cat is ill on Tuesday so that I
must waste half the day at the veterinarian's office, you and I will have a
very different kind of meeting from the situation of my meeting you in the post
office and the two of us going to spend a few hours together talking things
over, or if I say: "Look: I cooked too much food, please come over and
help me eat it."
We
have all had such meeting, no? Those meetings are the most productive, I think.
Few mail artists (or any artists) can really control their own time, their own
scedule. Only the rich can do that, if anyone can. We are mostly poor and must
depend on the schedules of others. But there are days when this is not true -
days when it works perfectly to see someone. Ray Johnson was a master of this -
he would call, "I am with (whoever), we're down the street from you. Can
we come see you?" If yes - great. If not, one never felt locked into the
situation.
That
is how I never met Yves Klein. One night, perhaps in 1961, at 11:15 Ray phoned
me from down the street and said that Yves Klein was with him and would like to
meet me. I said I'd like to meet him too but I was in bed and it was a
week-day. I had to go to work the next day. We agreed that I should meet Yves
Klein the next time he came to new York. It didn't happen; Klein died instead.
It is
also how I met Alison Knowles, - Ray Johnson and Dorothy Podber and myself had
dinner in Chinatown in New York and then they took me to Alison's loft nearby.
I had met her briefly before that, but this time we got to talk a little. That
was thirty-six years ago, and Alison and I are still together.
And so
it goes -
RJ : Yes, and also the forms of communication
are proceeding. To my surprise I noticed on your 'letterhead' that you have an
e-mail address too. Are you now exploring the possibilities of the internet as
well?
(Dick
Higgins handwritten answer came from Milano, Italy, where he is preparing a
retrospective show of his work.)
DH : Yes, "exploring" is the only
possible word, since the internet is constantly changing. You can
"know" yesterday's internet, but today's always contains new
variables.
In the
world of computers, most of the "information" is irrelevant, even to
those who put it there. Few of us bother to download clever graphics since
advertising has made us numb to those. I only download graphics if the text
which I see really seems to need them. I need them no more than I need to watch
show-offy gymnastic displays, divers or pianists who play Franz Liszt while
blindfolded and balancing champagne glasses on their head. What I like on the
"net" are three things:
1) Making contact with people whose
contributions to the internet shows interest similar to my own. Far from being
alienating, as others have said of the web and internet, I find this element a
very positive and community-building factor. For instance, I enjoyed meeting on
the internet a guy whom I'd met three years ago, a visual poet named Kenny
Goldsmith, and had not seen since. Now he does "Kenny's page " -
<http://wfmu.org so/~kennyg/index.html> - where he creates links to
anything in the new arts which excites him. It was like looking into someone
else's library - a revelation, and one which I could use. It led me to meet him
again in person, a real delight.
2) I cannot afford to buy the books I once
could. But often I can download and print out things to read before going to
bed. For an author, what a way to get one's work and ideas around! Why wait two
years for your book to appear, for your article to come out in some magazine
which nobody can afford? Put it on the net and it is potentially part of the
dialogue in your area of interest. Further, it tells me not only what people
are interested in, but what is going on - a John Cage conference , which
interested me, was fully described on the net for instance - and it gives me
access to everything from dictionaries, indexes and lists of words, people and
events.
I
suppose a saboteur could list false information, and of course commercial
interests can tell me about their stuff, but this only sharpers my skeptical
abilities - I can avoid their garbage with no more effect than on a commercial
television set. I suspect the internet is a blow to the effectiveness of normal
advertising.
3) As someone whose favorite art, books
and literature are seldom commercially viable, I am happy to see how the
internet actually favors the smaller organizations and media. If I access a big
publisher's pages with ten thousend titles, I stop and quit almost at once - it
takes too long. But a small publisher's page is often worth a glance.
Further,
the phenomenon of links gives an element of three - dimenisionality to the
internet. A book sounds interesting. I click on it and I see a few pages of it.
This is like browsing in a wonderful book store. A good example is the pages
for Avec, a small avant-garde magazine and book publisher in California.
I found it through a link on the Grist pages -
<http://www.phantom.com/~grist>. It's designed by the editor of Witz
, a new arts newsletter (address: creiner@crl.com). Perfect. Another good one
is Joe de Marco's pages <http://www.cinenet.net/~marco> - full of fluxus
things and theater. All this suggests new forms of distribution, which has
always been a problem for small publishers. If you can safely transmit credit
information to an address on the internet, then, if you live in a small village
as I do, it is as if you lived in a large city with an incredible book store
near you.
Because
of links, I do not see how big corporations can commercialize all this. My
computer is black and white, I have no money to invest in their corporations,
and their rubbish is easily avoided. Thanks to the internet, the damber kind of
popular culture will probably begin to lose its strangle-hold on people's
attention. Of course it will take time and other developments too, but the
internet rips off the conservatives' three-piece suits, remakes them and gives
them to us in a better form.
RJ : It seems like publishing is very
important for you. In mail art a lot has been written about the book "The
Paper Snake" by Ray Johnson, which you published with Something Else
Press. What was the story behind this specific book?
DH: There is no doubt in my mind that Ray
Johnson was one of the most valuable artists I've ever known. He was a master
of the "tricky little Paul Klee‑ish collage," as he modestly
dismissed them; most of his work of the late 1950's was collages in 8 1/2 x 11
format‑roughly corresponding to the European A3. That was a time when Abstract
Expressionism ("Tachisme") ruled the roost in America, and art was
supposed to swagger, lack humor, be big and important‑looking. Johnson had
rejected this long before, had, in the 1950's, made hundreds or thousand of
postcard‑size collages using popular imagery, had also made big collages and
then cut them up, sewn them together into chains, had buried the critic Suzi
Gablik in a small mountain of them (alas, only temporarily), had printed
various ingenious little booklets and sent them off into the world, and, since
there was no appropriate gallery for his work, had now taken to sending his
collages out‑along with assemblages in parcel post form. For example, a few
days after I had startled Ray by throwing my alarm clock out the window, he
sent me a box containing a marzipan frog, a broken clock and a pair of
chopsticks, calling shortly thereafter to suggest that we go to Chinatown for
dinner.
But
Ray could write too. He was always interested in theater and performance, had
picked up many ideas from the days when he and his friend Richard Lippold lived
downtown in New York City on Monroe Street on the floor below John Cage (all of
them friends also from Black Mountain College), and he wrote and sent out
innumerable playlets, poems, prose constructions, etc.
I saw
Ray around town for several months before I met him, which was at a 1959
concert where I asked him if he were Jasper Johns. "No," he said,
"I'm Ray Johnson," we got to talking and soon to walking and not long
afterwards to visiting. Years later, when I met Jasper Johns, in order to
complete the symmetry, I asked him if he were Ray Johnson. I expected him to
say, "You know I'm not‑why do you ask?" Instead he said, acidly:
"No." And he walked away.
Something
Else Press was founded on the spur of the moment. First I did my book
"Jefferson's Birthday/Postface" (1964). But before the thing was even
printed, I decided the next book should be a cross‑section of the things Ray
had sent me over the previous six years. So, having little room at my own
place, I packed them all into two suitcases, visited my mother and spread
everything out on her dining table. I sorted the book into piles‑performance
pieces, poems, collages, things to be typeset, thing to be reproduced in Ray's
writing‑taking care to include at least some of each category. I knew the book
would be hard to sell, so I didn't want to make it a Big Important Book; I
chose the format of a children's book, set the texts in a smallish size of
Cloister Bold (an old‑fashioned Venetian face), decided on using two colors to
simulate four (which I could not have afforded), and then laid out the pages in
a way which I felt would invite the reader to experience Ray's pieces as I did
on receiving them. Ray, who had at
first been displeased by the project, perhaps feeling it would lock him into a
format too much, become very enthusiastic as the project developed. Where at
first he had refused to title the book, later he called it "The Paper
Snake" after a collage and print he had made. He also wanted the price to
be "$3.47," for reasons I have never known (prices of that sort were
always $3.48 or $3.98). And when, one winter day in 1966, the book was being
bound by a New York City binder, I took Ray over to the bindery to see it being
cased in (when the covers are attached to the book). By then he was delighted
and wrote me one of the few formal letters ever received from him thanking me
for doing it.
As for
its reception, the book was a puzzler to even the most sophisticated readers at
the time. Even someone who was a regular correspondent of Ray's, Stanton
Kreider, wrote me an outraged letter saying what a silly book it was. Such
people usually felt that Ray's mailings were and should remain ephemera. There
were almost no reviews, but one did appear in Art Voices, one of the most
scorching reviews I have ever seen, complaining the book was precious and
completely trivial, a pleasure to an in‑group. These letters and reviews are
now in the Archiv Sohm in Stuttgart, where you can persue them for yourself if
you like.
RJ : It is good that you keep mentioning the
places where things can be found, if I do or don't persue, now somebody else
might do it too. There are a lot of archives in the world. Besides the
'official' archives there are also the privat collections that most (mail-)
artists have built up. Are there still things that you collect?
DH : I feel overwhelmed by THINGS at my home. My
letters are one of the main things I have done in this life, and I try to keep
copies of each letter I send; but there is no space to save them. For years now
my files have been going away - to the Archiv Sohm, for about 1972 to 1989 to
the Jean Brown Archive, and from then till now the Getty Center in Santa
Monica, California.
I
don't think it makes sense for a private individual to have a closed archive if
such a person is going to present a face to the world. I have read that Yoko
Ono founded Fluxus, and I have seen that quoted as a fact many times. One
critic or student picks up errors from the one before. I don't know where that
"fact" came from. Yoko is a good. modest person; she was a friend of
ours and she had done pieces which are very much part of the older
Fluxusrepertoire. But she was not present on that November day of 1961 when
Maciunas proposed to a group of us that we do a magazine to be called
"Fluxus" and that we do performances of the pieces in the magazine;
nor was she in Wiesbaden in September 1962 when we did those performances and
the press began calling us "Die Fluxus Leute" - the Fluxus people. So
while she, for instance, was surely one of the original Fluxus people, she did
not found Fluxus. Well, if I am going to assert this, it is important that the
documents of the time be available somewhere besides in my own files. Too, my
writings are complex and full of allusions; this is not to create mysteries but
to enrich the fabric and draw on reality. It can be useful therefore that my
files be open to anyone who needs them, and this would be impossible if the
files were here in my church.
Then
there are other collections: from 1977 to 1991 I collected things related to
Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), - apart from a passage in Plato's Phaedrus, Bruno's
"De imaginum, signorum et idearum Compositione" (1593) has the
earliest discussion I know of intermedia - but when Charlie Doria's translation
of this work came out (which I edited and annotated) I sold off all the Bruno
materials I had. From 1968 to 1990 (about) I collected patterns poetry-old
visual poetry from before 1900 - but that too has gone away, most of it anyway.
I have collected almost all of the books written, designed by or associated
with Merle Armitage (1893-1975), a great modernist book designer, and my
biography of him, "Merle Armitage and the Modern Book", is due out with
David Godine next year. I will then sell that collection too. Perhaps it was a
good experience acquiring these things, but that part is over now. Other
collections have been given away. I collected a tremendous amount of sound
poetry and information on it, meaning to do a book on the subject. But there
was never money to do the book right. Perhaps that collection also should
depart. There is too much art work by myself here in the church in which I live
and work - it gets damaged because it cannot be stored properly. I would like
to move to a smaller place, since I do not need and cannot afford this big one,
and if that happens more things also go away.
There
are some phonograph records, tapes abd CD's too - too many to keep track of,
some going back to my teen years when I used to spend the money I earned by
baby-sitting on records of John Cage, Henry Cowell, Göesta
Nystroem, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Anton Webern and such-like. I suppose the
only books which are also tools and (for me) reference work-books on design or
artistic crafts (orchestration, for instance), Fluxbooks and Fluxcatalogs (I
need to check my facts), books and magazines in which I am included (so I can
tell where such-and-such a piece first was printed). As for objects, I care
about my mother's dishes and one table, but that is about all - the rest can
go.
No, I
am a temporary collector - as Gertrude Stein said of her visitors, she liked to
see them come, but she also liked to see them go. I will acquire things when
they are needed, but I need to unload them too. I have no right to own art,
even by friends, because I cannot take care of it properly. It too must go.
This church is dark with things, things, things - and maybe somebody else,
somebody younger that I, might like to have them.
RJ : Why do you live in a church?
DH : I live in this church because, when I moved
to this area from Vermont (where I had lived almost fourteen years, off and on,
up near the Quebec border) I bought a house, garage and church complex. It had
been "defrocked" by the Roman Catholic Church in 1974, its
consecration taken away and the cross and bell removed, and it was sold to a
couple who wanted it to become an antique shop. However there was no drive‑by
traffic so they found that would not work. But nobody wanted to buy it from
them. So I got it at a good price, as they say. My plan was to live in the
house‑ a modest parsonage,‑ for my wife Alison Knowles to use the garage (where
we set up a photo darkroom to be shared), and for myself to use the church as
my own studio. For this it was fine.
But in
1985 when my finances began to collapse‑with the decline in the US art world,
the rise of our Radical Right and neo‑Christian coalition, and with the Fluxus
syndrome among exhibitors and collectors, I had to rent out the house to
survive and to move into the church. It is a nice space, well suited to be a
studio, but it is dark in the winter and is quite gloomy and expensive to heat.
It has no doors so nobody is separated from anything else that is going on.
There are virtually no doors to close, so there is no privacy. Sometimes I
think I will go mad here. Maybe I have. I would love to move, but like the
previous owners I would find it hard to sell and in any case I have no money to
move. Next winter I may have to do without heat here most of the time unless
things look up. It is a curious environment for an artist.
I
often refer to this "Fluxus syndrome." It is my term for a problem
that I face. It goes like this. A gallerist, critic or exhibitor tells me
"I like your work. I know you are a Fluxus artist." Then they see
more of my work and they compare it to the work of George Maciunas, whom they
take to be the leader of Fluxus instead of its namer and, in his own preferred
term, "Chairman" of Fluxus. They note that there are differences and
they say to me: "But that work is not Fluxus. Do you have any Fluxus
work?" I say yes,‑and I show work from the early sixties through late
seventies. It still does not resemble the work of Maciunas. It isn't usually
even fun and games, which is what the public thinks of as Fluxus. So I am
marginalized in Fluxus shows, or I am left out of other collections because
"This is not a Fluxus gallery/museum show/collection." The problem is
all but unavoidable, and in vain can one point out that if Fluxus is important,
it is because of its focus on intermedia, that Maciunas recognized this repeatedly,
that he knew perfectly well that there was room in Fluxus for work which did
not resemble his at all. If one says anything like this in public, it is taken
to be a disloyalty to George or some kind of in‑fighting for prestige. I have
sometimes been tempted to show my work under a false name in order to escape
this syndrome altogether. But even that sounds as if I were ashamed of my
Fluxus past, which I am not, even though it is not awfully relevant to my work
since the late seventies. Also I still feel affinities to some of my Fluxus
colleagues, though the work of others has, in my opinion, become repetitious
crap. Many of my Fluxfriends could do with a little more self‑criticism, in my
opinion. Fluxus also has its share of hangers‑on, people who were utterly
marginal to the group and who kept their distance during the years when Fluxus
had not acquired its present and perhaps false public image, but who are now
all too willing to con their way into the list and to enter their colors for
the next tournament.
RJ : This story about "Fluxus
syndrome," is quite interesting when I compare it to mail art. There is
the difference that in mail art most artist try to avoid the traditional
art-world, and there is even the phrase "mail art and money don't mix"
by Lon Spiegelman, that is used by others too. There are on the other hand also
artists who say to organize a mail art show and then start to use entrance-fees
and ask for money for catalogues ; try to 'con' people in the mail art network.
What do you think of "mail art and money don't mix"? I know it's not
an easy question to answer.
DH : Money and mail art? Money and Fluxus?
Mixing? You are right, I can't answer that one easily. Certainly if somebody
got into mail art (or Fluxus) as a means of advancing his or her career-
"Gee," says the dork, "ya gotta get inta as many shows as
possible, I was in thirty-two last year and here's the catalogs to prove
it," -he or she would swiftly learn that is not what the field is for.
Rather, its purpose is to combat alienation, and that is only in some respects
an economic problem. Mail art has tremendous disruptive potential (and even
some constructive social potential), as I described in my story about Polish
mail artists and the East German bureaucrat. And it has great
community-building power - even my hypothetical dork can say" "Wow, I
got friends all over, from Argentina to Tooneesia." But I must make a
confession: I have probably seen forty or fifty actual exhibitions of mail art,
and NOT ONE OF THEM was interesting to see. There were good things in each of
them of course, but the effect of looking at them was weak. Why? Because they
did not reflect the function - they always treated the sendings as final
artifacts (sometimes ranked according to the prestige of the artist). But mail
art pieces are virtually never final artifacts - they are conveyors of a
process of rethinking, community-building and psychological and intellectual
extension. Thus it is, I think, a distortion to think, of mail art as a
commercial commodity of any kind. Because it is typically modest in scale
usually and it is usually technically simple, the finest piece may come from
the greenest, newest or the least skilled artist. There is no rank in mail art
so long as the artist thinks and sees clearly.
Nevertheless,
the issue of money is one which must be faces. Lack of it can ruin your
capability for making mail art, for one thing. When the heat is gone and you
can't afford to go to the doctor, it is very hard to focus on making this
collage to send away, even though one knows that do so would bring great
satisfaction and comfort. Yet the mail art itself is not usually salable, and
nobody gets a career in mail art. One is free to be capricious, as I was circa
twenty-odd years ago when I spent two months corresponding only with people
whose last names began with M. It is not, then, so much that mail art and money
do not mix but that mail art simply cannot be used to produce money, at least
not directly, - which is not to say that one mail artist cannot help another.
Obviously we can and do. I remember when Geoffrey Cook, a San Francisco mail
artist, undertook a campaign through the mail art circuit to free Clemente Padín, the
Uruguayan mail artist (among other things) who had been jailed by the military
junta for subversion. It worked. And many is the mail artist who, wanting to
see his or her correspondent, finds some money somewhere to help defray travel
costs and such-like.
With
Fluxus, the issue is different. Fluxart has in common with mail art its primary
function as a conveyor of meaning and impact. But Fluxworks are not usually
mail art and do not usually depend on a network of recepients. Some are
enormously large. Some take large amounts of time to construct, some are
expensive to build and so on. Given this, issues of professionalism arise which
are not appropriate to mail art. If I insist on making my Fluxart amateur and
to support myself by other means, I may not be able to realize my piece. I am
thus forced at a certain point in my evolution to attempt to live form my art,
since anything else would be a distraction. I must commercialize the
un-commercializable in order to extend it to its maximum potential. What an irony!
It is, I fancy (having been in Korea but not Japan), like the expensive
tranquillity of a Zen temple in contrast to the maniacal frenzy of Japanes
commercial life outside it. Peace becomes so expensive one might imagine it is
a luxury, which I hope it is not. So one is compelled to support it.
The
difference is, I think, that commercial art supports the world of commodity;
Fluxus and other serious art of their sort draws on the world of commerce for
its sustenance but its aim lies elsewhere - it points in other directions, not
at the prestige of the artist as such (once someone once tried to swap, for a
book by Gertrude Stein which he wanted, two cookies which Stein had baked, then
about twenty-two years before) and certainly not at his or her ego in any
personal sense (John Cage musing at the hill behind his then home, "I
don't think I have done anything remarkable, anything which that rock out there
could not do if it were active"). One must take one's work seriously, must
follow its demands and be an obedient servant to them: nobody else will, right?
If the demands are great and require that one wear a shirt and tie and go light
people's cigars, then out of storage come the shirt and tie and out comes the
cigar-lighter. That is what we must do. But we do not belong to the world of cigars;
we are only visitors there. It is a liminal experience, like the shaman
visiting the world of evil spirits. We can even be amused by the process.
Anyway, that's my opinion.
RJ : Some mail artists say that the mail art
network is more active than before. Others say that mail art is history because
almost all the possibilities of the traditional mail have been explored, and
that all the things that are happening now in mail art, are reproductions of
things that happened before. Is mail art a finished chapter?
(Santayana
born today (1863) and Jane Austin too (1775)
DH : Well, I think both sides are right. Mail
Art is more active than before if more people are doing it. Of course, for
those of us whose interest in exploration I am glad they are doing it even
though I see no need to do it AS SUCH myself. Mail Art is [only?] history if
all the possibilities have been explored ‑ yes, if one's job is to explore
things only formally. Of course I love history ‑ without it I never know what
not to do. For me this last assumption is therefore right so far as it goes,
but it does not go very far. Why should we assume that doing something once
means it need not be done again? That is what I call the "virgin attitude,"
fine for people who are hung up on sleeping with virgins but a dreadful idea if
it is really love that you want. Aren't you glad that Monet painted more than
one haystack or waterlily painting? Don't you have a food recipe which you
would hate to change? A "finished chapter?" That has even more
problematic assumptions.
After
all, a chapter in a book (including the Book of Life) involves reading, and the
best books invite reading more than once. Isn't reading as creative as writing?
Mail
Art is, in my opinion, not a single form. I am not much of a taxonomist‑someone
else can decide how many forms it is, can classify and sort it out. What I know
and have said in this interview is that Function precipitates Form. So long as
new uses for Mail Art can appear, new forms are likely to arise. Just for
instance‑e‑mail letters and magazines are relatively new. The ways we can use
them have not fully revealed themselves. The politics of this world are as
fouled up as ever; perhaps there are mail art methods (including e‑mail
methods) which can be used to help straighten things out or at least point to
the problems in a startling or striking way. No, I think mail art may be
history ‑ it has been with us at least since Rimbaud's burnt letters ‑ but only
a Dan Quail (a proverbially obtuse right‑wing politician here) would say, as he
did in 1989, that "History is Over!" And as long as there are people‑artists‑living
alone here and there, confronted by problems (professional, formal, human or
social), Mail Art is likely to have a role to play in helping to alleviate
those problems. What we must not do is
allow ourselves to take ourselves too seriously‑tendentiousness is a natural
health hazard for the mail artist. The freshness and unpredictability of the
medium are part of why, if mail art works at all, it really does. Just as we
must always reinvent ourselves, according to whatever situations we find
ourselves in, we must always reinvent our arts. And that includes mail art.
RJ : Well, this is a wonderful moment to end
this interview. I want to thank you for your time and sharing your thoughts.
(c) TAM Publications - Breda (iuoma@outlook.com)
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