The Brooklyn Rail

One morning last month, on my way to work, I was thinking about the artist Ray Johnson as I rushed up the imposing stairs of the James A. Farley Building to the United States Post Office. I carried with me a plastic sack I had taped up to return a pair of pants I had purchased online; taking a suggestion from Instagram’s algorithm, I had chosen poorly and needed to return them. The plastic bag and anachronistic trip to a brick-and-mortar post office brought Johnson to mind.

During a 1977 conversation published in Detroit Artists Monthly, Johnson—by then in the third decade of his mail art practice called the New York Correspondence School—claimed he received so much mail he sometimes had to throw it away, in his words, “for survival.” Though, as he told his interlocutors, the mail always became art; on one occasion clearing out his home, he shredded unwanted mail so it couldn’t be used for other purposes, packed the refuse into twelve green trash bags, and drove them into Manhattan two at a time (what would fit in his car in one trip) to drop them in trash cans around the city. He likened the action to a performance, or “pilgrimage.”

In Queer Networks: Ray Johnson’s Correspondence Art, Miriam Kienle elaborates on the other uses Johnson made of his mail as art by sending messages that included collages and altered documents to recipients often asked to then forward the mail to someone else, forming networks of friends and strangers alike. She emphasizes the specificity of her book’s intervention in analyzing the queer stakes of Johnson’s practices that engaged with different forms of “networking.” Whereas in Kienle’s estimation much of the existing scholarship presents a historical/anecdotal view of Johnson’s queer milieu or explains his queer/homoerotic puns and references, she stakes a claim for “the structurally queer manner” in which Johnson carried out his work, and not simply its queer content.

Kienle sums up Johnson’s queer practices as deploying “misfitting associations, triangulating correspondences, and uncertain forms of contact,” touching on the breadth of his output but focusing on his mail art, conceptual publicity documents related to his imaginary Robin Gallery, and antiexpressive portraits. Her method pastes together a theoretical framework of network theory, queer theory, and poststructuralist notions of signification and power. In the missives he sent as part of the New York Correspondence School, Johnson mailed collages, altered images, and other documents to correspondents whom he asked to forward the mail to subsequent recipients, sometimes strangers to either Johnson or his correspondents, or both. Kienle mines the rich connections between the contemporaneous birth of the field of social network theory and Johnson’s artwork. “Much as Johnson was interested in how people connect across distance and difference,” she writes, “the emergent field of social network analysis asked how interpersonal connections might traverse entrenched social divisions related to gender, race, and class.”

Crucial to her reading in this last theoretical mode is the diagnosis of a “society of control” put forth by Gilles Deleuze in his well-known 1990 essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” For Deleuze, power moves differently in the society of control than in the disciplinary society Foucault had theorized out of eighteenth and nineteenth-century institutions like the prison or the factory. Whereas those disciplinary institutions optimized the output of the individual within those spaces, the society of control seizes individuals as “dividuals,” in Deleuze’s coinage, or points in a flow of data. As an example of life in one of these societies, Deleuze describes a vision of one of these societies: a “city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighborhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that … effects a universal modulation.”

As Kienle recounts, the implementation of zip codes by the United States Postal Service to automate the sorting of mail in the 1960s made people nervous: what abuses might grow out of this kind of control and assignation of a number to one’s domicile and whereabouts. In Kienle’s interpretation, Johnson predicted the contours of Deleuze’s burgeoning control society in his mail art, which subverted the USPS’s surveillance of the 1950s and ’60s in a time of both suppression of and greater protections for what material could be ruled “obscene.” The USPS dedicated secret rooms in its mail sorting centers to FBI and CIA agents to monitor for the kind of homoerotic material Johnson sent in the Pop art style collages that he called moticos. However, unable to turn up evidence of the FBI having questioned Johnson through a Freedom of Information Act request, Kienle proposes that perhaps Johnson’s moticos had accomplished their queer trick, disseminating homoerotic material that was both legible to certain recipients and illegible to those surveilling the post. Her conclusion is not that Johnson critiqued networks in a nostalgic backward glance at a time of truer connection, but rather as a way of opening a queer space, in her words, “foregrounding how misconnection is a part of connectivity itself.”

Kienle builds on the queer indeterminacy that she identifies in Johnson’s mail networks to analyze how he destabilized, and queered, proper names and portrait images. In an example that allowed Johnson to make several interventions over time, he created a fictional art gallery, the Robin Gallery, for which he placed ads in periodicals like the Village Voice. These ads often included names from Johnson’s art world circles that referenced other names, including a misspelling of his own last name as “Johnston” to slyly redirect attention to Village Voice critic Jill Johnston. The gallery’s name was inspired by New York’s Reuben Gallery, punning on the name of the location of the first Happenings, as well as San Francisco’s Batman Gallery, introducing a queer resonance with Johnson’s reference to Bruce Wayne’s ward. These interventions allowed Johnson to create what Kienle calls a “counterpublicity” that, with other forms of camp parody in his work, critiqued networking and name-dropping. “Counter to the drive to capitalize on powerful connections,” Kienle writes, “Johnson’s networking also opposed attempts to consolidate, commodify, and control identity, offering instead gifts of indeterminate correspondences.” I find the power of Johnson’s work, and Kienle’s unfolding of his queer networks, in this kind of indeterminate transferability—in the possibility of the proper name or subject position that circulates freely of its referent, of, say, a historical artist, so that we might all perform in that role. As Kienle quotes Johnson writing about his collages, “Perhaps you [the reader] are the moticos.”

In today’s world of social media, dating apps, Amazon, and proliferating algorithms, the queer opacity of Johnson’s work still holds promise for how we can reckon with human connection. In this digital society of control, I thought of Johnson that morning in the vaulted hall of the Farley Building, where I have rare occasion to go in our world of online payments and signable PDFs. A series of digital barriers had been raised when I requested my refund by clicking a button online. That digital-analog process had compelled, or allowed, me to print out a return shipping label as a pass to enter the post office. If I had been willing to sacrifice my refund on that pair of pants, where might I have sent them, to whom might they have been forwarded?