Post Office or Post-Medium? The New York Correspondence School and Ray Johnson’s Osmotic Systems

This thesis investigates American artist Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondence School (1962), hereafter NYCS, as a learning institution uniquely centred around extending the logic of osmotic processes – a biological activity involving concentrations and diffusions across a semipermeable membrane – to include image/text relationships and sign functions. Thus contextualised, this study will posit the NYCS as a new medium, quite separate from mail art, in dialogue with post-medium theory. Special emphasis will therefore be placed upon the ways in which the NYCS crowdsourced visual/verbal ambiguities as privileged forms of coursework through the mail, sometimes in the form of moticos, in an effort to register and reimagine osmotic processes operating at the level of media. An anagram for ‘osmotic’, moticos were an experimental medium and aleatory resource that Johnson produced alongside the NYCS. Read together, moticos and the NYCS prove mutually illuminating even while unlocking new possibilities for thinking of images and sign functions as living systems.

Chapter One formulates a critical framework for discussing the NYCS by placing the school in discourse with Rosalind Krauss’s “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (2000). Chapter Two extends this post-medium reading of the NYCS by focusing on Johnson’s systems aesthetics. Building on these discussions, Chapter Three turns more keenly to the subject of moticos and how they served as a material and aesthetic engine for the NYCS. Finally, Chapter Four explores how the NYCS was not bound by Johnson’s personal ambitions by turning more exclusively to the efforts of other school members. These third-party efforts, it will be argued, help us to understand more clearly how Johnson’s school was co-produced through an aleatory repurposing of discarded materials.