RECEIVED: Asemics and Letter Art from Theresa Ann Alshire Williams (Bradner, Ohio, USA)

Hi Theresa, you certainly did convey an entire narrative with this material. I saw the collage, wrapping, and correspondence as a single entity. Thus, as CB noted, I scanned the torn tissue paper and included the tape.

 

You've given us characters, such as Jim (I know he's based on a real person), and a literary context, Brautigan. I can interact with the piece physically and in terms of interpretation, especially filling in a narrative. For me, you capture the essence of mail-art, which is more than just sending art through the mail. Your letters are purely wonderful, IMHO. And since mail-art involves a mingling of real people and invented persona and even places, it works as a kind of fiction.

 

Ray Johnson's letters to people in the Correspondence School and others are incredibly engaging. He was an artist, of course, and mail-art is grounded in concept and conceptual art. Ruud Janssen's writing about mail-art (our IUOMA founder) is some of the most illuminating I've found. And I've taken to heart something he wrote saying to think about what you send out as being built around a concept and the recipient should have ways to actively interact with the work. This is akin to what is meant to be achieved in Fluxus performance scores, I think. The mail-art movement has always had ties to avant garde art and Fluxus in particular. Ray Johnson was also a performance artist. I know this is not essential for everyone who just wants to send mail-art because the movement is incredibly egalitarian and accepting. But I gather you are someone who would want to dig into its cultural history and practices, which are endlessly fascinating.

 

So, thanks again for the great art. Marie and I have, through synchronicity and chance, made a little Theresa Day for sure.

'Tis a great "Theresa Day"!  Both the "Kansas" mail art by Theresa and the Sloan commentary are amazing! 'Wish i had a stronger internet signal at the seaside shack, it is about to close down, but i'll surely come back to this blog at midnight! 'Been on-the-road through Kansas once...yep, lots of memories this evokes!

Brilliant work, blogger and bloggee!  We can post these poems now, Theresa? This Jim one is poignant, beautifully done.

Woh, there was a poem on the reverse side of the card Theresa requested I not post. Is it OK to post the pieces here? I can pull them if there's a problem.

It's great you're getting placements in journals, Theresa. I can see why. Having had to deal with this issue myself - once it's released into the network, the work can turn up anywhere. It's great because it reaches a relatively large audience. If you have copyright or embargo issues, however, things can get out of control. During the zine era, people started reprinting my stuff without asking. I was flattered but also had this feeling of loss of control. So I established for myself what to release and what not to release. It's an issue for people who are more on the literary side of the network.

Going on midnight in Greece, but just late afternoon in the Midwest? I am back, Theresa, to view the great art and to read and reread the poem...'twas a lazy hot summer day here today,...( and my friend, Toby, diabetes, nearly blind, too...somewhere in the Midwest, don't know anymore, lost contact. sigh), your poem brought up many thoughts this late evening. Thank you, dearie!.

Wow Kat, glad you can check on the Midwest from the beach. Great response to Theresa's poem.

 

Theresa, in the 80s and into the 90s there was a huge surge of, a can only think to call them, underground magazines - zines - all over the US. A lot them were made by disaffected kids in their basements, and they tapped into the mail-art network for much of their content. Circulation ranged for different zines from a dozen people into the thousands for some of the more successful ones, like "Factsheet 5." Some editions can be found posted online now. A perfect example was John M. Bennett's (yes, our John) "Lost & Found Times." I think that's available online. Many of them have found their way into rare book collections at this point. I had a lot of concrete poetry, poetry, and articles in many of the zines, but to be honest don't remember many specific items and would have to dig through a lot of boxes to find them. Anyway, that's the context.

Oh, I think the first zine I encountered from that wave was "Beatniks from Space" that came out of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Wow, Factsheet 5. That was edited by a guy named Mike Gunderloy here somewhere in New York. He did reviews and tried to keep track of all the zines, so it was a hub. A lot of the zines focused on music: kinda punk and post-punk and they were a departure from the counter-culture, clearly something different. They also ran counter to the LANGUAGE poets who were in ascension, although zines like Generator published Langpo along with vispo and Fluxus stuff - it's an interesting era.

'Scuse me  piggy-backing, but I received a work from Theresa yesterday that I think needs a captive audience!

The Biggest Birds:

Or - In Praise of Folly?  This is considered one of the most notable works of the Renaissance and one of the catalysts of the Protestant Reformation. Theresa did you just GUESS I was wading though the Renaissance like an oxpecker - with picture!!!

Cheryl, what on earth is an oxpecker?

Its part of the  Buphagidae family. No, I'm not kidding. Ask Theresa - she ringed it :-)))X

Oxpeckers are birds we get here in Aaaafrica - they sit on the backs of buffalo and peck stuff that they find on the buffalo....insects and things. Cheryl is oxpecking her mail art I suppose picking up bits and pieces that interest her and nourishing her.

we have woodpeckers - really

Hey! I repeat I never ringed it! Do you ring birds in America???

Those that are extinct. We call them dead ringers. They have a complex pecking order.

Do you mean radio-tag them? There was once a cockroach I recommended for that.

Nancy, I'm fairly wrung out with all this South African chatter about ringing birds. I think we might be missing something, as I'm only beginning to understand "popping" and "gumboots," which I think are equivalent to "rubbers" or "galoshes." I would think being an oxpecker would be a lousy experience. What we call cats, they call crosspatches or something. I would like to see a monkeypecker, think they have those?

SA slang seems to be Austin Powers meets Prince Charles meets Crocodile Dundee on Gilligan's Island.

Gee I don't know, DVS, it's all South African to me, but I totally agree: being an oxpecker has got to be a lousy experience. Can't think of anyone who would enjoy it, except possibly my mother. Crosspatch, now that I like!

Theresa, as affirmed by the comments, the bird names are great. John Bennett was on a kaka kick a few months back; it is very primal. I thought of its a typo Franz Ka(f)ka

Nancy, we used to be so cruel (but not any more). When Cheryl joined last year she posted pics of her crosspatches (and they really are beautiful I think Persian cats). I almost had her convinced that in the US they were considered possums. But she's too smart and has been here anyway, but I had her going.

 

Theresa, I was wondering if birds were slang for women. Back in the era of the FAB Four - Beatles - that was British slang for girls. Such as the song "And Your Bird Can Sing." or Franz Kaka was not particularly popular with the birds.

Kaka was what everyone called my great-grandfather after he came here from Norway.  There were 584 people in the family over here and no one thought a thing of it.

Still love crosspatch!  Funny about the possum attempt, but Cheryl would be too intelligent to give up the sterling name crosspatch and substitute it with a loser like possum.

Were they all in one house? Ka ka from Norway, if you say so! I'm sure sometime tomorrow you will find pics of the crosspatches here.

Yes they were. Here's a pic of 1/28th of them right now, waiting for someone to say something.

I would LOVE to see pics of the crosshatches.

Cheryl, may we see the crosspatches? I think they have been clipped.

It is strange, no question about it. And the thing is, he spent most of his life in Brooklyn after emigrating -- you'd think in NYC of all places someone would have clued them in eventually!  I have an extra nice picture of him somewhere; he certainly didn't look like kaka.

One clipped cross patch coming up :-) X

Nancy, in that collage with your family. Excuse my ignorance, but is that Hitler expelling them from Norway or something? And that woman who looks like Mother Theresa - what is that scene all about?

Ok you asked for it - official title title is Jelly Bean. P.S. The ACTUAL argument was that the American contingent did not believe that this was a Chinchilla :-) X 

I'm changing my position - it's an alien!

Shhhh DVS - no giving away family secrets - EVERYONE will want one!

I can understand grooming a cat like that but they took a lot off Jelly Bean's belly.

Too late, Cheryl:  I already want one, am not afraid of cute aliens! Does he live in a museum?

And talk about family secrets: Expose us why don't you, DVS. My ancestors were expelled from many places, but always by Mother Teresa. It's embarrassing because she wasn't that strong physically.

Jelly Bean is adorable, thank you for posting!  Around here that's called a "lion cut."  One of our cats had one a few years ago when the hair mats took over and we couldn't see her through them.

Nancy, the photo of the royalty and the church - it is intriguing. I don't know enough of history to figure it out. It IS all very interesting.

Cheryl once showed us a picture of Jelly Bean watching the monkeys through the window. Those monkeys must be howling with laughter now. The lion cut isn't working on the brave and fierce front.

Jelly Bean either looks like a Harrier Jet or a wiggie lion. Sigh. No middle ground.

De Villo, it's from a mostly demolished March 3/1934 edition of The Illustrated London News. Just pulled it out of a box. One frightening partial page is of some "astonishing beetles," as it says, and wow, are they. Another section, which is actually intact, is about the Acropolis, "weakened by rain, to be strengthened with cement." GREAT photos. I'll stop now.

Oh, and there's a partial caption of the royalty photo -- Catherine and Guido take note -- "Leopold III., the new king of the Belgians, taking the oath to observe ..." and "astrid and the royal children look ..."

Jelly Bean would be a perfect addition to the scene.

Poor Jelly Bean, what a cat has to endure ;-(

And how about Chocolate and Marshmellow?

Do we get to see piics of them, too?

(my favorite is Chocolate...one could eat it up!)

cool possum!

It's a chinchilla. That's why they took the fur, to make a scarf or sweater

Are you getting lonesome, DVS?

I agree, Nancy. A blog has run its course when I'm left here talking to myself. But, hey, from crosspatches to kaka, it was a good one. No point in horsing a dead beat, though.

It's been niggling at me that I called Cheryl's crosspatches Persian cats. Are there such things? I've heard of Persian carpets. And I've heard of Siamese cats - places that no longer exist. Or is is Siamese carpets and Persian cats? I don't know. I think Jelly Bean appeared in the old James Bond movies, sighting on the shoulder of the guy from SMERSH - Dylan talked about in "Like A Rolling Stone." A very famous Siamese carpet.

It's time for supper, but whoa ... I know "Like a Rolling Stone" like ... anything in my house ... and Jelly Bean is not in there. He can't be. He'd have said something in response to Dylan by now. Now you make me sick with nostalgia just as it's time to eat.

Nancy, think again about the Zimmerman masterpiece. Notice the reference to the Siamese cat in this stanza:

 

You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all come down and did tricks for you
You never understood that it ain't no good
You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you
You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain't it hard when you discover that
He really wasn't where it's at
After he took from you everything he could steal.

 

I've always felt that base image of the diplomat and his Siamese cat was taken from the James Bond films of the time. I might be wrong. S.P.E.C.T.E.R. and S.M.E.R.S.H. ( and the Ian Fleming novels are great) reflect not only Cold War paranoia but also international conspiracy theories that certain elements in the "red" camp and the "free world" camp were working in unison.