Ray Johnson & ABAD Newsday: Article [117]

Click the article to enlarge and read.

Call Ray Johnson! [116]

"Hey Ray! It's for you!"

As a special preview to the CW Post exhibition Ray Johnson & A Book About Death opening on November 3, 2010, Joan Harrison has set up a Ray Johnson phone-in line.  Yes, call Ray Johnson!

In the United States, you simply dial the following number and follow the prompts to hear Ray talk about A Book About Death, Correspondence Art, Making a Rectangle, How to Become A New York Correspondence School Member and other wonderful things from the iconoclastic artist.

Call 1 516 299 9472. 

When prompted, enter the stop number listed. The Stop Numbers are as follows:

63 Ray Johnson and A Book About Death
64 Cut 1 Correspondence art, Kings, Making A Rectangle
65 Cut 2 A Correspondence School event
66 Cut 3 The Charlotte Moorman Avant Garde Festival
67 Cut 4 How To Become A NYCS Member
68 Cut 5 Ray Johnson/Will Farrington Phone Messages.

As a footnote, I still have some of Ray's messages recorded from 1990-1992. One of my favorites is: "Hello Matthew, This is Andy Warhol calling from Heaven...."

Have any Ray Johnson phone messages? Let us know... 

Photo of Ray Johnson and Richard Lippold, 1954, thanks to: Mondo.

CLICK THE BUTTONS BELOW TO SHARE ON FACEBOOK, TWITTER, YOUR BLOG. TNX.

ABAD Texas Fluxhibition Posters [115]

Angela Ferrara's poster for ABAD Texas, curated by Cecil Touchon. See more posters, here.

Fluxhibition #4 and A Book About Death Article - Fort Worth Weekly [114]

http://fwweekly.com/ Article Click Here
(Please write a comment while at the Fort Worth Weekly site.)

Fort Worth Community Arts Center

Hanging through the end of October at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center will be Fluxhibition #4: Fluxus Amusements, Diversions, Games, Tricks, and Puzzles, a collection of more than 120 Fluxus artworks from 23 countries and five continents. Fluxus is a movement from the latter half of the 20th century defined by multimedia artworks that
explore the gray area between camp and high art and that are diagrammatic, collagist, often text-heavy, and often satirical. Fluxus has roots in the work of such Modernist luminaries as Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, and John Cage and is perhaps more relevant today than ever: In an era of seemingly limitless information (visual, literary, and sonic), Fluxus art sharpens viewers’ bullshit detectors.

At the center of the international Fluxus movement today is the Ontological Museum, a virtual place founded and curated by Fort Worth’s Cecil Touchon, who came up with the idea after forming the International Post-Dogmatist Group as a student at the University of Texas-Arlington in 1987. “The International Post-Dogmatist Group intended to be totally inclusive of virtually everyone, and you have to exclude yourself from it to not be a member,” Touchon said with a laugh. “It’s not about creating a new power circle of insiders, and everyone else is out. It’s more like a sponge that absorbs everything that’s attracted to it.” Group members are also “20 minutes ahead of everybody else,” Touchon said, “which is the length of time it takes to explain post-dogmatism to anybody.”
The Ontological Museum has a wing, the Fluxmuseum, whose permanent collection is about 20,000 pieces strong –– except when they’re on exhibit, they reside in a Fort Worth storage unit.

Which brings up Touchon’s current project: achieving tax-exempt status. The hope is that by becoming a bona fide nonprofit, the Ontological Museum will be able to find a permanent home. “The museum is an experiment in global communication, cooperation, and coordination and the idea of capturing across the contemporary moment whatever’s going on within as far as our network can reach out,” Touchon said. “So in the future, if anybody ever goes back and looks over this collection, they’ll see this constantly expanding influx of new people into the thing, and I think that alone is extremely fascinating. But the whole thing is, you’ve got the internet, you’ve got global culture, you’ve got the idea of a museum and artists running it themselves as an alternative to the typical older-style wealthy collectors who go out and buy whatever they like, and later they make a museum out of it. This is more like a working anthropological idea, like gathering bugs or something like that. It’s not about the value of the individual works but about the artistic value of it, its cultural value, its value as a piece of intellectual property as opposed to its preciousness as a collectible object.”

The birth of internet culture gave rise to the Ontological Museum. “The internet created this wonderful playground for these ideas,” he said. “The internet was a tremendous leveling device, because no matter how big or powerful any museum is, you only look at it through a screen that’s the same size as everybody else’s web page. Because of that, if you make your web page look more or less like a museum web site, to anybody coming to it, it looks the equal to any other museum. I mean, how would anybody know just from looking online?”

Before founding the Ontological Museum, Touchon started an e-mail group for collage artists. It eventually became another wing in the museum, the International Museum of Collage Assembly and Construction. Collage artists began collaborating with one another via snail-mail and were encouraged to donate works to the museum. Touchon quickly amassed about 1,000 pieces.
Eventually, Touchon discovered Fluxus via the internet. “Wow, a lot of what these guys are doing, I’ve been doing since the 1970s,” he said. “I realized I was pretty much a Fluxus artist.” He started the Fluxmuseum about four years ago.

The first Fluxhibition, Party in a Box, didn’t go so well –– one of the collaborators refused to return the package that had been mailed to him (and still hasn’t, to Touchon’s great dismay). The second Fluxhibition, New and Improved Fluxus, was a statement group show and fared much better. “A lot of us have been working since the 1970s on Fluxus ideas, but we weren’t connected to those original guys,” Touchon said. “And so there’s been sort of this transition of the old first-generation Fluxus guys and now all of us, but we’re claiming to be that same group as opposed to all the artists who are working with those same ideas but are totally independent and don’t think about a group. Part of Fluxus is group activity. That’s a big element of it.” The membership in the core group is “very elastic,” Touchon said. “It might be 10, or it might be 50 to 100” artists.

For New and Improved Fluxus, “We were introducing ourselves as, ‘We are Fluxus guys, and that’s just the way it is, and if you don’t like it, tough,’ ” Touchon said with a laugh. (Photo: Right).

The third Fluxhibition, Thinking Inside the Box, was also a success. Consisting of boxes and drawing from both the Fluxmuseum and collagist wing, the group show featured a piece by Yoko Ono and was “really well received,” Touchon said, noting that it also got a “thumbs up” from Picasso Gaglione, an early Fluxus artist who happened to be in town and caught the show, at UTA.

One of the few times that contemporary Fluxus members have met in person was in New York City a couple of years ago. The occasion was the opening for A Book About Death, a massive collection of postcards inspired by the work of early mail-artist Ray Johnson. The celebration was capped by a couple of Fluxus performances, including Requiem for Rubberbands, in which a cantor sang the first few lines of Mozart’s Requiem (inserting “Fluxus” in certain parts) while Touchon and the audience played rubberbands strapped to their fingers like mini-guitars. “At the end we shot them up into the air, and rubberbands were raining down on everyone,” Touchon recalled.

(A Book About Death Installation View at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center)

Touchon has concepts for shows scheduled through 2016 and is confident that he could rotate Fluxus exhibitions every month for years “and that’s even if no one sends me any more art.”
Notable Fluxmuseum pieces include “Soul Fart,” a red-and-white-striped handheld object that is placed to the butt (and then preferably photographed) and also “The Key to the Lock is the Box,” a small box made out of keys, including the key that unlocks the box.

Upcoming Fluxhibitions include the Fluxcase Micro-Museum and Fluxface in Space, a part of Face in Space, a NASA program in which fans can upload photos of themselves to be launched into space as part of the two remaining space shuttle missions. Fluxus artists will be taking photos of themselves and their art. A group exhibition will follow, everything leading up to the Jubilee Jamboree, the Fluxmuseum’s celebration of Fluxus’ 50th anniversary.

Touchon, who is represented locally by William Campbell Contemporary Art, could focus only on his own work, but he is driven by a curatorial spirit. “I’m in galleries all over the country,” he said. “I make a living [via my artwork], which is actually kind of hard to do in the art industry, and I do pretty well. So for me, you can promote yourself, but how far does that go? You can promote your career only so much. I want to include a whole lot of other people in my process and my experiments in life.”


International Fluxhibition #4 and A Book About Death: Both thru Oct 30 at Fort Worth Community Arts Center, 1300 Gendy St, FW. Free. 817-738-1938.

Fluxmuseum ABAD Opens in Texas [113]

The Fluxmuseum opened up in Texas today with a massive exhibition devoted to games and gew gaws as well as the A Book About Death archive set and new works.  A truly amazing exhibition, spearheaded by Flux Meister Cecil Touchon. 

Take a moment to check out the initial installation shots and since Cecil paid for this out of his own pocket, please consider tossing $10 or more towards defraying his costs. You will see the PayPal button on the link page (to the right).

Photo: Fluxhibition #4 - Table with catalogs for sale and a Book About Death installation in the background.

Caterina Verde: The Lucretian [112]

Caterina Verde, the artist who designed the ABAD Wall featuring all works in the original exhibition, opens her exhibition The Lucretian at White Wash Studio in Amagansett, New York, October 9, 2010.

The exhibition will include drawings, watercolors, texts, photos and video.

The Lucretian is the embodiment of the Epicurian poet's master poem - "De Rarem Natura" or, "On The Nature of Things".  The Lucretian holds in his gaze the thoughts he expounds in his poetry: that nothing comes from nothing; that the natural world is made up of atoms and void and no more or less.  He holds an abhorrence of superstitions and cruelty justified by religion, yet he is devotional in his adoration of Venus.

The Lucretian is the minuteae of movement that allows us to place our thoughts and projections on him and this is determined by the meaning based on our understanding.  For more information see the gallery here: http://whitewashstudio.net/

Matthew Rose Is Scared But Fresh At The Orange Dot Gallery London [111]

SCARED BUT FRESH: An Exhibition of Collages and Terribly Unusual Objects from Matthew Rose opens at The Orange Dot Gallery, in London Tuesday October 5, 2010. The exhibition runs from October 6 through 31 2010.

OPENING : TUESDAY 5TH OCTOBER / 6PM– 9PM, PLEASE RSVP (ESSENTIAL): danielle@theorangedot.co.uk

THE ORANGE DOT & SCARED BUT FRESH will also participate in the BLOOMSBURY FESTIVAL. DATES: Saturday, 23 October, all day; Sunday, 24 October, all day.

Along with the works on display and the exclusive prints, signed exhibition posters and copies of Masters: Collage will be available to purchase. Plus, as mentioned, there will be terribly unusual objects. "Some are made of wax," says Matthew Rose.  "Some are made of wood and have batteries."

Keep Calm Gallery will also debut a new print, Anglais, a signed and dated unlimited edition in conjunction with the exhibition.

The Orange Dot Gallery
54 Tavistock Place Bloomsbury 
London, WC1H
 

For a preview of works and details on the exclusive prints created for the exhibition, please visit the gallery website: http://www.orangedotgallery.co.uk

IMAGE: ABOVE, POSTER OF L'ORANGERIE.  LEFT: FRESH, COLLAGE ON BOARD, 2007. RIGHT: JOSEPH CORNELL, COLLAGE ON BOTTLE, 2007.

DOWNLOAD & PRINT THE POSTER FREE (15MB, PDF).