25 July 2018
"Active Marginals & Swarm Art / Inside and outside the body"
The Mail Art was born more than 50 years ago, in 1962, since the American artist Ray Johnson, founded the "New York Corrispondance School of Art" occasionally at the same time with the "Fluxus" movement of the Lithuanian-American George Maciunas (1961 ) and the Pop Art by Leo Castelli in New York (1962). A sort of school of correspondence art in which the graphic works with the insertion of stamps and collage were for the first time sent by mail to acquaintances and even unsuspecting recipients, giving complete autonomy to communication and making this new way of expression totally free and outside any scheme imposed and prefixed by cultural power and consequently by the official art market. After Ray Johnson, also Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, in the early 70s (1971), he had invented "self-employment", creating home shows and using the catalogs he sent to the network artists. These two artists, first of all, had only hinted at this new and possible crisis strategy of the cultural system that did not allow any intrusion if not supported by a strong power that conditioned and controlled the proposals and choices in order to regulate the flow and oxygenate the art market. It was above all Cavellini (GAC), who made "the big step"; that of opposing a now monotonous system; a further development towards the crisis in the traditional art system. In the 80s, precisely in June 1985, the Japanese artist Ryosuke Cohen once again puts the cards of experimentation into play, in an antiquated cultural system that prefers the work created specifically to be commercialized. It does so by proposing a particular project "Brain Cell" (Brain Cell), which has seen him involved for over 30 long years, along with thousands of members spread in over 80 countries, where the individual artists collaborate by sending by post to Cohen drawings, stamps, stamps, stickers or other. Using an old silkscreen system, called mimeograph (now out of production), it makes 150 copies of A3 (29.7x42). It is a still active project that is printed every 7-10 days and sent back to the respective collaborators, attaching a list of addresses of collaborators coming from some countries (55 on average per work). More than 30 years have passed and the BRAIN CELL N ° 1000 has been passed on November 20, 2017. For a long time the artist Cohen refuses the unique work and customary concepts such as originality, preferring more the game, the research and the freedom of the artist deliberately placed on the margins of an antiquated and passatist cultural system.
In the practice of postal art there is not a single solid ideology or "ism" capable of surviving and prevailing over the others. According to Ray Johnson, "Mail Art is not a single art movement, but it is not a single artistic movement but rather a great movement" transversal "to all other proposals and artistic experiences that concretely urges us to become aware of ourselves. As a result, fragments of ideas are shared with other artists in a "copyright" free relationship, using and transforming even the works of other authors into a relentless collective "add and send by mail". In the elitist practice implemented by the official institutional system of art, competition rather than cooperation and experimentation is preferred. In Mail Art these concepts disappear to give space to creativity and spontaneous research carried out in the field in an equal way.
Born in 1948 in Osaka, Japan, Ryosuke is not the first and only Japanese postal artist, even before him Shozo Shimamoto had shared the Mail Art, however, it is certainly the most long-lived Japanese author and in some ways, even the most interesting and active in the international network of anyone else for the widespread dissemination of the practice of artistic mail. After "Brain Cell", in August 2001 he started another project called "Fractal Portrait Project", started in Italy in order to more profitably realize the concept of "Brain Cell", making portraits and Silhouette (face and body) to friends artists met in these years in different meetings (Meetings) all over the world. According to Cohen, "Brain Cell" is like the structure of a brain seen under a microscope, it appears to us as the network scheme with thousands of accumulated and branched neurons together just like the postal art network. The Mail art - writes the artist - "is dynamic", and then you are free to create works of art with a new mind, and then fragments of the entire network and sharing snippets of many other artists , "The network expands from A to B, from B to C, from C to D, from D to A, from C to A and so on, it is like a single body with a cerebral construction made of a large number of cells structured and complex nerves, arranged in a non-linear order. That's why he defined this kind of experience "Brain Cell (brain cells)". Basically it is the result of a complex interweaving of nerve cells in the brain, an endless project, adding, "what comes from the" flow "Dada, Fluxus and Mail Art is the only way to realize the new art of tomorrow".
Fractal (fractal), literally means similar figures, the new concept was first used by the French mathematician B. Mandelbrot at the IBM Watson Institute. The main characteristic of fractals is "self-similarity", the repetition of the same motif to infinity, characterized by the temporary and temporary indeterminacy of its existence, such as, for example, the trees of the Amazonian forest of South America which consists of numerous species that cohabit together. In 2006 Ryosuke Cohen, writes: "Nowadays I have a piece of that fractal, and that I can create art, in a way that extends beyond myself as an individual, in communication with infinite mail artists' ideas ", (today I realized that we are all part of a fractal and that I can be a piece of that fractal extending as an individual beyond myself in an infinite communication of ideas with postal artists).
This particular concept personally I prefer to call it "swarm intelligence" translatable as: "intelligence of the swarm", is a term closer to all living beings first coined in 1988 following a project inspired by robotic systems. It takes into consideration the study of self-organized systems, in which a complex action derives from a collective doing, as happens naturally in the case of insect colonies, flocks of birds, schools of fish or herds of mammals. According to the definition of Beni and Watt, swarm intelligence can be defined as: "Ownership of a system in which collective behavior interact in a collaborative way producing functional responses to the system", is clear, not understood in a speculative sense and as a function of a economic result, but a participatory response to a concrete creative contribution "non-authoritarian", just as it happens in the collaborative practice of the movement of Mail art.
Cohen is today the contemporary artist who no longer represents the one who produces a work of art according to the old classicist ideas of tradition, but plays the role of mediator and intermediary between the realization of a project idea (his) and those who participate in the project. Practically, he promotes a "doing" becoming director of a temporary intervention that comes from the contribution of others and materializes in collective collaboration in which everyone can participate and be positively involved. The various prints of the Brain Cell project realized by Cohen can not be considered "finished" works, understood as works that are completed in the realization of the graphic copy, but of a work characterized by the indeterminacy and provisional nature of its existence inherent in its DNA. Of course, if the final result of each print was really "a finished work", I think that Cohen would suddenly stop making other copies of "Brain Cell", precisely because it would greatly weaken the sense and the generating philosophy of this particular artistic practice.
A dutiful consideration to be made of Cohen's work is that he has once again put the old official system of art out of the door, relegating ambiguous characters such as gallery owners, art critics and even collectors of works of art as the exchange of the works produced takes place among the artists of the Network. Therefore, the works created are not retained and kept by the artist in view of a customary profit but sent to their respective collaborators. With the mailing of the prints the collaborators, use their own archives, becoming also collectors of the received works Often, with the works "Brian Cell" realized in the various tours that every year the artist makes around the world exhibitions are organized as for example, the exhibition realized and still visitable in Pontassieve on the occasion of the "XXVII International Exhibition" Incontri d'Arte ". It is even more complicated and difficult to organize traditional exhibitions with the "Fractal Portrait Project" because of the real difficulty in finding and collecting the various works donated over time to the friends represented. Moreover, when it comes to the "Fractal Portrait" projects carried out by Cohen for more than 18 years in the field of performance, we want to highlight a side that is still little known, especially to the knowledge of the "Body" works and the series of the slhouette of the body created since 2001 up to now, created by the Japanese artist in particular collective moments by joining together several Brain Cell sheets in which the subjects, the friends met in the various tours are invited to have a portrait done by Cohen or to lie down on the ground above these sheets Brain Cell , with the artist engaged for the occasion to draw and detect the immediate contour of the body. A sort of "collective performance", before proceeding with the usual realization of the work. A "provisional" performance according to the realization of the work. All this, albeit with the due differences of work, indissolubly links it to his dear friend Shozo Shimamoto, becoming the natural active continuer of the art of research today in Japan. For this International Collective exhibition, 164 works by important international artists are exhibited in a total corpus of over 281 graphic works received. Sandro Bongiani
Biography / RYOSUKE COHEN
Ryosuke Cohen, born in 1948, Osaka, Japan, is a Mail Artist. The family name is Kouen but on the advice of Byron Black, he adopted the English name 'Cohen' as in Hebrew. Cohen discovered the mail art in Canada. Ryosuke is the son of a well-known haiku writer in Japan, Jyunichi Koen. Cohen's early works are the result of a mixture of Japanese tradition and imagery, contemporary numbers and icons as is his signature, the letter "C". He shared the Dada and Fluxus experience and was in contact with the artist Shozo Shimamoto and with the members of the Gutai group, sharing a new way of doing contemporary art in a spontaneous and natural way. Ryosuke is not the first Japanese postal artist, but he is surely the longest-running Japanese author in the international network. After Ray Johnson and Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, Ryosuke Cohen once again puts into play the cards of experimentation in an antiquated cultural system that prefers the work created specifically to be commercialized. He does so by proposing a particular project "Brain Cell" (Brain Cell), started in June 1985 with thousands of members spread in over 80 countries. a work that collects the images of many Mail Artists on a single page every 7-10 days by attaching a list of addresses of collaborators coming from some countries 55 on average per work, which involved him for over 30 long years together with thousands of members scattered in many countries, rejecting the unique work and customary concepts such as originality and therefore, preferring more the game, the research and the concrete freedom of the artist deliberately placed at the edge of a monotonous and passatist cultural system. For this way of doing, he is perhaps the most interesting and active in the network of anyone else for the organizational capacity of the project and for the dissemination of Mail Art. In August 2001 he started the project "Fractal Portrait", making portraits and Silhouette of the body to his friends artists on the occasion of the meetings held in different parts of the world; United States, Canada, England, Northern Ireland, Spain, Yugoslavia, Germany, Holland, Korea, Italy and France. Cohen is the contemporary artist who no longer represents the one who produces a work of art according to the old classicist ideas of tradition, but plays the role of mediator and intermediary between the realization of a project idea (his) and those participating in the project. Practically, he promoted a "doing" by becoming director of a temporary intervention, which arises from the contribution of others and materializes together in collective collaboration in which everyone can participate and be positively and passionately involved in the creation of the work. In over thirty years of work he has exhibited with exhibitions and participation in projects in various geographical areas of the world. (Biography written by Sandro Bongiani)
Vive e lavora a:
2-5-208 Niihamacho
Ashiya-City Hyogo
659-0031 Japan
E-mail : braincell@k6.dion.ne.jp
The Mail Art was born more than 50 years ago, in 1962, since the American artist Ray Johnson, founded the "New York Corrispondance School of Art" occasionally at the same time with the "Fluxus" movement of the Lithuanian-American George Maciunas (1961 ) and the Pop Art by Leo Castelli in New York (1962). A sort of school of correspondence art in which the graphic works with the insertion of stamps and collage were for the first time sent by mail to acquaintances and even unsuspecting recipients, giving complete autonomy to communication and making this new way of expression totally free and outside any scheme imposed and prefixed by cultural power and consequently by the official art market. After Ray Johnson, also Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, in the early 70s (1971), he had invented "self-employment", creating home shows and using the catalogs he sent to the network artists. These two artists, first of all, had only hinted at this new and possible crisis strategy of the cultural system that did not allow any intrusion if not supported by a strong power that conditioned and controlled the proposals and choices in order to regulate the flow and oxygenate the art market. It was above all Cavellini (GAC), who made "the big step"; that of opposing a now monotonous system; a further development towards the crisis in the traditional art system. In the 80s, precisely in June 1985, the Japanese artist Ryosuke Cohen once again puts the cards of experimentation into play, in an antiquated cultural system that prefers the work created specifically to be commercialized. It does so by proposing a particular project "Brain Cell" (Brain Cell), which has seen him involved for over 30 long years, along with thousands of members spread in over 80 countries, where the individual artists collaborate by sending by post to Cohen drawings, stamps, stamps, stickers or other. Using an old silkscreen system, called mimeograph (now out of production), it makes 150 copies of A3 (29.7x42). It is a still active project that is printed every 7-10 days and sent back to the respective collaborators, attaching a list of addresses of collaborators coming from some countries (55 on average per work). More than 30 years have passed and the BRAIN CELL N ° 1000 has been passed on November 20, 2017. For a long time the artist Cohen refuses the unique work and customary concepts such as originality, preferring more the game, the research and the freedom of the artist deliberately placed on the margins of an antiquated and passatist cultural system.
In the practice of postal art there is not a single solid ideology or "ism" capable of surviving and prevailing over the others. According to Ray Johnson, "Mail Art is not a single art movement, but it is not a single artistic movement but rather a great movement" transversal "to all other proposals and artistic experiences that concretely urges us to become aware of ourselves. As a result, fragments of ideas are shared with other artists in a "copyright" free relationship, using and transforming even the works of other authors into a relentless collective "add and send by mail". In the elitist practice implemented by the official institutional system of art, competition rather than cooperation and experimentation is preferred. In Mail Art these concepts disappear to give space to creativity and spontaneous research carried out in the field in an equal way.
Born in 1948 in Osaka, Japan, Ryosuke is not the first and only Japanese postal artist, even before him Shozo Shimamoto had shared the Mail Art, however, it is certainly the most long-lived Japanese author and in some ways, even the most interesting and active in the international network of anyone else for the widespread dissemination of the practice of artistic mail. After "Brain Cell", in August 2001 he started another project called "Fractal Portrait Project", started in Italy in order to more profitably realize the concept of "Brain Cell", making portraits and Silhouette (face and body) to friends artists met in these years in different meetings (Meetings) all over the world. According to Cohen, "Brain Cell" is like the structure of a brain seen under a microscope, it appears to us as the network scheme with thousands of accumulated and branched neurons together just like the postal art network. The Mail art - writes the artist - "is dynamic", and then you are free to create works of art with a new mind, and then fragments of the entire network and sharing snippets of many other artists , "The network expands from A to B, from B to C, from C to D, from D to A, from C to A and so on, it is like a single body with a cerebral construction made of a large number of cells structured and complex nerves, arranged in a non-linear order. That's why he defined this kind of experience "Brain Cell (brain cells)". Basically it is the result of a complex interweaving of nerve cells in the brain, an endless project, adding, "what comes from the" flow "Dada, Fluxus and Mail Art is the only way to realize the new art of tomorrow".
Fractal (fractal), literally means similar figures, the new concept was first used by the French mathematician B. Mandelbrot at the IBM Watson Institute. The main characteristic of fractals is "self-similarity", the repetition of the same motif to infinity, characterized by the temporary and temporary indeterminacy of its existence, such as, for example, the trees of the Amazonian forest of South America which consists of numerous species that cohabit together. In 2006 Ryosuke Cohen, writes: "Nowadays I have a piece of that fractal, and that I can create art, in a way that extends beyond myself as an individual, in communication with infinite mail artists' ideas ", (today I realized that we are all part of a fractal and that I can be a piece of that fractal extending as an individual beyond myself in an infinite communication of ideas with postal artists).
This particular concept personally I prefer to call it "swarm intelligence" translatable as: "intelligence of the swarm", is a term closer to all living beings first coined in 1988 following a project inspired by robotic systems. It takes into consideration the study of self-organized systems, in which a complex action derives from a collective doing, as happens naturally in the case of insect colonies, flocks of birds, schools of fish or herds of mammals. According to the definition of Beni and Watt, swarm intelligence can be defined as: "Ownership of a system in which collective behavior interact in a collaborative way producing functional responses to the system", is clear, not understood in a speculative sense and as a function of a economic result, but a participatory response to a concrete creative contribution "non-authoritarian", just as it happens in the collaborative practice of the movement of Mail art.
Cohen is today the contemporary artist who no longer represents the one who produces a work of art according to the old classicist ideas of tradition, but plays the role of mediator and intermediary between the realization of a project idea (his) and those who participate in the project. Practically, he promotes a "doing" becoming director of a temporary intervention that comes from the contribution of others and materializes in collective collaboration in which everyone can participate and be positively involved. The various prints of the Brain Cell project realized by Cohen can not be considered "finished" works, understood as works that are completed in the realization of the graphic copy, but of a work characterized by the indeterminacy and provisional nature of its existence inherent in its DNA. Of course, if the final result of each print was really "a finished work", I think that Cohen would suddenly stop making other copies of "Brain Cell", precisely because it would greatly weaken the sense and the generating philosophy of this particular artistic practice.
A dutiful consideration to be made of Cohen's work is that he has once again put the old official system of art out of the door, relegating ambiguous characters such as gallery owners, art critics and even collectors of works of art as the exchange of the works produced takes place among the artists of the Network. Therefore, the works created are not retained and kept by the artist in view of a customary profit but sent to their respective collaborators. With the mailing of the prints the collaborators, use their own archives, becoming also collectors of the received works Often, with the works "Brian Cell" realized in the various tours that every year the artist makes around the world exhibitions are organized as for example, the exhibition realized and still visitable in Pontassieve on the occasion of the "XXVII International Exhibition" Incontri d'Arte ". It is even more complicated and difficult to organize traditional exhibitions with the "Fractal Portrait Project" because of the real difficulty in finding and collecting the various works donated over time to the friends represented. Moreover, when it comes to the "Fractal Portrait" projects carried out by Cohen for more than 18 years in the field of performance, we want to highlight a side that is still little known, especially to the knowledge of the "Body" works and the series of the slhouette of the body created since 2001 up to now, created by the Japanese artist in particular collective moments by joining together several Brain Cell sheets in which the subjects, the friends met in the various tours are invited to have a portrait done by Cohen or to lie down on the ground above these sheets Brain Cell , with the artist engaged for the occasion to draw and detect the immediate contour of the body. A sort of "collective performance", before proceeding with the usual realization of the work. A "provisional" performance according to the realization of the work. All this, albeit with the due differences of work, indissolubly links it to his dear friend Shozo Shimamoto, becoming the natural active continuer of the art of research today in Japan. For this International Collective exhibition, 164 works by important international artists are exhibited in a total corpus of over 281 graphic works received. Sandro Bongiani
Biography / RYOSUKE COHEN
Ryosuke Cohen, born in 1948, Osaka, Japan, is a Mail Artist. The family name is Kouen but on the advice of Byron Black, he adopted the English name 'Cohen' as in Hebrew. Cohen discovered the mail art in Canada. Ryosuke is the son of a well-known haiku writer in Japan, Jyunichi Koen. Cohen's early works are the result of a mixture of Japanese tradition and imagery, contemporary numbers and icons as is his signature, the letter "C". He shared the Dada and Fluxus experience and was in contact with the artist Shozo Shimamoto and with the members of the Gutai group, sharing a new way of doing contemporary art in a spontaneous and natural way. Ryosuke is not the first Japanese postal artist, but he is surely the longest-running Japanese author in the international network. After Ray Johnson and Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, Ryosuke Cohen once again puts into play the cards of experimentation in an antiquated cultural system that prefers the work created specifically to be commercialized. He does so by proposing a particular project "Brain Cell" (Brain Cell), started in June 1985 with thousands of members spread in over 80 countries. a work that collects the images of many Mail Artists on a single page every 7-10 days by attaching a list of addresses of collaborators coming from some countries 55 on average per work, which involved him for over 30 long years together with thousands of members scattered in many countries, rejecting the unique work and customary concepts such as originality and therefore, preferring more the game, the research and the concrete freedom of the artist deliberately placed at the edge of a monotonous and passatist cultural system. For this way of doing, he is perhaps the most interesting and active in the network of anyone else for the organizational capacity of the project and for the dissemination of Mail Art. In August 2001 he started the project "Fractal Portrait", making portraits and Silhouette of the body to his friends artists on the occasion of the meetings held in different parts of the world; United States, Canada, England, Northern Ireland, Spain, Yugoslavia, Germany, Holland, Korea, Italy and France. Cohen is the contemporary artist who no longer represents the one who produces a work of art according to the old classicist ideas of tradition, but plays the role of mediator and intermediary between the realization of a project idea (his) and those participating in the project. Practically, he promoted a "doing" by becoming director of a temporary intervention, which arises from the contribution of others and materializes together in collective collaboration in which everyone can participate and be positively and passionately involved in the creation of the work. In over thirty years of work he has exhibited with exhibitions and participation in projects in various geographical areas of the world. (Biography written by Sandro Bongiani)
Vive e lavora a:
2-5-208 Niihamacho
Ashiya-City Hyogo
659-0031 Japan
E-mail : braincell@k6.dion.ne.jp
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