acoolsha
The Ray Johnson Videos
This website has been launched at www.rayjohnson.org.
The videos are comprised of over seven hours of rare video footage of Ray Johnson, a conceptual and visual artist who is considered to be the founder of the Mail Art movement.
The painter Chuck Close in A Panel Discussion on Ray Johnson:
Ray was a much more important artist than was generally recognized by the art world. He was an idiosyncratic figure. I think he was very inventive in bringing his work, through his collages, and things that he's known for, actually, predating Pop Art with the use of pop subject matter before Lichtenstein and Warhol. But, probably, he is best known to the general public as the inventor of the Correspondence School and of mail art.
Alice Miller, Kafka 31 January 05
Section: rayjohnson
Categories: Mention
In connection with a recent entry here (under: “A Reading”) in which Kafka comes up: last week I finished Alice Miller’s newest book Die Revolte des Körpers (The Body Rebels) and found the following passages (pp. 159/160) on Kafka of interest. Miller has written extensively about Kafka in other books as well. The sentences below are my translation from the original German, I don’t have the English version.
Miller is writing on anorexics and bulimics here (Kafka himself essentially died of starvation, by the way, according to the Wikipedia).
The Hunger Artist by Kafka said at the end of his life that he starved himself because he could never find any food that tasted good to him.
[...]
Kafka’s Hunger Artist never named it [what food he needed] because Kafka himself wasn’t able to name it: in his childhood he never knew what true communication was. But he suffered unspeakably under this deprivation and all of his works describe nothing other than failed communication: The Castle, The Trial, The Metamorphosis. In all of these stories his questions are never heard, or answered only with strangely twisted answers, and the characters feel totally isolated and incapable of getting someone to listen to them.
- Title: Alice Miller, Kafka