Untitled (Letterbox) 1964

Curator: Well, this certainly has a certain... patina to it, doesn't it? Like stumbling across a time capsule coughed up by the city itself. Editor: It's… intriguing, almost melancholy. A lost language of paper and connection. But it also reads to me as bureaucratic, regimented by the uniformity of the boxes, overwhelmed by material waste. Curator: This is Ray Johnson's "Untitled (Letterbox)" from 1964, a mixed-media assemblage really, with collage and found objects. That letterbox is actually part of the artwork. Editor: Ah, Ray Johnson, so of course he’s repurposing what might be considered utilitarian, giving refuse the fine art treatment. A letterbox stuffed and surrounded by ephemera: letters, photographs, fragments of life… Curator: Precisely. I see Johnson here almost...channeling correspondence, imbuing these cast-off objects with his particular magic, the mundane elevates. He had a fascination for visual poetry and he made “mail art” through his New York Correspondance School. Editor: What strikes me is how prescient he was. Look at the sheer volume, now amplified exponentially with the digital realm. What does our physical mail reveal now? A shift from handwritten intimacies to marketing blitz? Curator: And yet there's a ghost of human touch even within that blizzard of "junk mail," right? Each piece, handled, sorted, carrying weight, literally and figuratively. Plus Johnson plays, always, in semiotics! He asks that we investigate our culture of communication with its beautiful secrets. Editor: Yes! And the physicality. The texture of the paper, the fading ink, the sheer bulk of discarded communications… all things so foreign now as we trade our bytes! I wonder too, looking at this thing assembled in 1964 and viewing it now, if this signals Johnson’s critique of a then-burgeoning culture of waste? Curator: Good thinking! Absolutely, he anticipates, but I think with affection not dystopia! He's playing with what is revealed, concealed, destroyed in cycles of consumption and communication… Do not discard history or your soul but turn it into art! Editor: So, both celebration and elegy then. Ingenious to capture it using tools and processes tied directly to mail streams and methods of organization, now themselves nostalgic artifacts! Curator: Ultimately, Ray Johnson always made works full of intimate gesture within our consumer society! This "Untitled (Letterbox)," is more of a quiet memento mori about life! Editor: And in that quiet hum, Ray Johnson transforms simple things, through the medium of material examination, giving us echoes and messages both intensely individual and inescapably universal.