Joey Patrickt Meets Gertrude Stein (Oakland, California, USA)

[De Villo Sloan]

Mail art by IUOMA member Joey Patrickt (Oakland, California, USA)

“A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system of pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.”

– Gertrude Stein from Tender Buttons

“There is no there there.”

– Gertrude Stein on Oakland, California

March 12, 2015 - I am thrilled to present a West Coast Report featuring new work by Joey Patrickt in Oakland. Joey Patrick’s smooth surreal, often ironic and extremely witty mail-art has graced my blogs before. This new installment seems a departure from the kind of art networkers usually associate with Joey. The package has a more conceptual, even Fluxus, flavor. I think I detect a hint of the Trashpo influence. Gertrude Stein’s writing comes to mind (0nce a resident of Oakland too). First, Joey Patrickt included this great, unaltered vintage material:

Unfortunately, I had to do some of our famous scanner chop shop work to document the piece.

This is wonderful, relevant material that stands on its own unaltered. Yet does it have a thematic connection to the other work in the envelope, possibly involving themes of observation and concealment? Associations can be made. Otherwise, I see the trend that appears in so much current Trashpo of including found material for indeterminate purposes. This event score-type document holds the work together thematically:

Perhaps art is pointless or Joey Patrickt is pointing at one of the standard bourgeois objections to conceptual art: its alleged pointlessness. Perhaps this mail art is actually very pointed. As Gertrude Stein wrote in Tender Buttons, Joey Patrick has created “an arrangement in a system of pointing.”

The work involves visual and textual puns, the play of the literal and the figurative and paradox. All in all, I find it a very compelling piece and a great example of mail art in the conceptual art lineage established by Ray Johnson.

As ever, deepest thanks to Joey Patrickt.