It is 10 years today since Ray Johnson jumped off the Sag Harbor Bridge in NY. I am meditating on Ray's many gifts to me and to the larger me, the mail art networker. Years before the Internet, Ray started the art flow that grew into mail art as an international network of free exchange. Many of my dearest creative contacts are mail artists. I now have an actual doctorate in mail art from The University of Texas at Austin. Life without Raimondo and Franco, Federico and Silvia, Ruggero, Ennio, PLG, Dragonfly Dream, Anna Banana, Carla Cryptic, Jean Kusina, Kiyotei, John Held Jr. Buz Blur, Ex Posto Facto, the Mail Art Choir, Mark Bloch, FaGaGaGa and Mel Art, Pedro Pescador, Judith Hoffberg, so many others (
http://www.mailartist.com/honoria/research2003/participants.html), and of course, Bill Wilson. Unimaginable! I thought I needed an academic publisher for my dissertation research because I was seeking a teaching job, but now, it seems more appropriate to rework parts of the diss for mail art style publication. (www.mailartist.com/honoria)
Today's art reading is from my dear friend Henning Mittendorf in Germany
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~drs/PEEP/peep6_henning_magic_of_art.htmlSometimes an artist of today manages to find a shape according to the time. It in the end always illustrates the new old human myth, to be connected in a mysterious way with all orders and to be responsible for the whole. (Henning Mittendorf, The magic of art, Germany, 2004)
