databases vs. ornaments

[anna balint]

[first a short answer outline to the 'what is an artist database' innocent question. it took some days, and it is still not complete, I 
gladly accept comments, and correction of my english also. i guess next should come a reply to the Arns-Broeckmann apology.]


	Database: Virtual Ornament or Interface of a Networked Culture

 		In the beginning there was no network.
			   		                 		 Anna Banana




The art database and contact list as a meta form of communication originates from Fluxus and correspondence art 
networks from the 60's and 70's. Italian Futurists, Kurt Schwitters, Duchamp, the Nouveaux Réalistes mailed art and 
introduced the postal format in their work, Daniel Spoerri even continued to post his ephemeral works for more than a 
decade. But it was Ray Johnson who turned the paradigms of the mailed art to practice by founding in the beginning of the 
sixties the New York Correspondence School, denominating this way the correspondence of a highly private and 
personal network that comprised artists in both loose and strong contact. The number of NYCS members varied from 75 
to 300, they were mainly centred around Ray Johnson, but the correspondence included outside him many intersecting 
relationships independent of his involvement. 
Besides Ray Johnson, Fluxus was the first group of artists to understand the potential of the postal system as a world-
spanning, cost-effective art distribution system. Daniel Spoerri, Ben Vautier, Robert Filliou, Joseph Beuys, Robert Watts 
actively participated in correspondence art, some of them were Nouveau Realistes, others took part in NYCS, others 
mailed their works in small artist circles, or included correspondence in their art practice along festivals, projects, 
concerts. In the early Fluxus years George Maciunas regularly compiled the Fluxus mailing and membership lists. Ken 
Friedman took over this task and started to publish annual compilations of the Fluxus lists from 1966, permanently adding 
to the list like-minded international artists whom Fluxus members were able to identify.
Dick Higgins was the first to reach a broader audience by creating the Something Else Press Newsletter in 1965 as an 
inexpensive media for sharing art of a new mentality and broadcast idea both to fellows and the public. This printed 
newsletter also published address lists and brought them to a larger public. The address lists spread among Fluxus 
members and their audience were however not a mere conceptual idea, but an autonomous reality: they were based on 
and they generated a considerable inner circulation, they had an important social potential, organizing in a few years 
publication forums and a large network of magazines and zines creating the Fluxus movement's own publicity.
The Fluxus member list was completed with the additional addresses of Image Bank database from Toronto, and it has 
grown to a point that it published 1400 names, addresses and phone numbers in 1974. It was distributed for free to 
artists, organizations and publishers. Later this list became the core of the FILE magazine artist's directory (published by 
General Idea). 
The North American directories stem from the mainstream, as a parody or a non-commercial imitation of the commercial 
and mass culture. The Image Bank of Gary Lee-Nova, Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov was a collection of 
commercial images and their Image Request List was an address list of akin artists collecting commercial images and 
motives, completed with the address list of Ray Johnson in 1971. Fluxus, mail art, performance and action art circles also 
established a highly critical, politically and socially engaged network.
Giancarlo Politi, the editor of Flash Art realized the international importance of the Fluxus list and also its commercial 
potential. From the mid-seventies he published in Milan the Art Diary, which included East European artists lists as well, 
and also addresses of critics, curators, museums, galleries, printing houses, and hotels, restaurants, even addresses of 
police stations. When the martial law was introduced in Poland, the whole East European register was removed, and the 
rest of the list also slowly lost its actuality.
East European mailing lists rose apparently independent from the American lists. They originated in the isolation of the 
neo-avant-garde artists, and they were motivated by their social needs. With the raise of concept art artists started to 
share with each other not only photos, and documentations, but original works as well, and they used for this purpose the 
post. The postal system and mail art were the first functional means to cross the borders of the cold war.
Jaroslaw Kozlowski and Andrzej Kostolowsky multiplied the Net in 1972 in Poznan. This magazine set up the rules of a 
contact net in nine points, and spread an address list of 200 artist names and addresses from East and West European. By 
establishing a contact list available for everybody, the Net's purpose was to help the circulation of original works and 
documentation on an exchange basis.
Since the sixties the international correspondence art scene never stopped circulating and publishing works, information, 
theory, reports, interviews, manifestos, and project-related address lists. Artists magazines, underground zines, 
newsletters appeared one after another - the V TRE of George Brecht, the Umbrella of Judit Hoffberg, the Box Water of 
Steven Perkins, the Banana Rag of Anna Banana, the OU of Henri Chopin, the Fandagos of Raoul Marroquin,  the 
Happening News of Panamarenko, the CAYC publications of Jorge Glusberg, the Tango of the Lodz-Kaliska group, the 
Commonpress of Pavel Petasz,  the Ephemera of Ulisses Carrion, the Libellus of Guy Schraenen, the Doc(k)s of Julien 
Blaine, the various publications of Ben Vautier, the Décollage of Wolf Vostell, the Arte Postale of Vittore Baroni, the 
TRAX of Piermario Ciani, the Signal of Miroljub Todorovic, the Smile of Monty Cantsin, the TAM Bulletin of Ruud 
Janssen  are just a few of the hundreds of small press publications which promoted Fluxus, mail art, conceptual art, 
performance and action art, audio- and visual poetry, copy art, neoism. Klaus Groh's list of „Mini Press all over the 
world” which was published in his Info enumerated already in 1972  84 titles. 
Besides mail art works, articles, project reports, documentations, publications, interviews, the address lists and the Fluxus 
and correspondence art diagrams are the most valuable databases and resources of the underground art scene of the 60's, 
70's and 80's. These time-lines reminding the family trees and the synchronic visual maps of contacts originate in the 
historical awareness, respectively in the idea that the perception of the art work is not based only on its absolute, formal 
marks, but also on its relational value, in its constituting an element of a process or evolution, and/or on its position in a 
network. Since George Maciunas' Fluxus. (Its historical development an relationship to avant-garde movements) diagram 
from 1966, the Fluxus and mail art network generated hundreds of art diagrams, some of them abstracting in a visual map 
the network communication as such, like  'The basic structure for a self-organizing network' of Vittore Baroni (in: Arte 
postale. Guida al network della correspondenza creative. AAA Edizioni, Bertiolo, 1997).
Following the model of Giancarlo Politi's Art Diary, with the raise of the electronic culture CHAOS (Centre Histoire Art 
Ordinateur Science)an organisation based in Paris published the IDEA (International Directory of Electronic Arts) address 
list in 1990. IDEA  was conceived  to cover the whole range of artistic activities in the broad domain of electronic art, to 
become a resource tool for  the players of all kind in the field of electronic art, science and technology. The French-
English bilingual online edition started in 1996, curated by Annick Bureaud,  as a database with entries about 
organizations, artists, people, periodicals/TV/Radio contact information, a short description of activities, and links to URL, 
when they exists http://nunc.com/index.phtml. 
In 1997 a project related media art database was conceived at the Documenta's Hybrid Workspace in Kassel. The 
Hybrid Media Lounge was hosted and published on a CD-ROM by the Society for Old and New Media in Amsterdam, 
1999. It was distributed only with the Mute Magazine, so that it was very difficult to get a copy in East Europe. The 
Lounge of Hybrid Media was an interactive directory of the art-political-cultural-digital activities in Europe, mapping the 
European networked institutions, foundations, organisations from country to country, and also searchable by the areas of 
characteristics, areas of interest, resources, members, relationships (network). The CD-Rom, selecting from the hundreds 
of submissions, was a frozen print of an ever-changing media related network. Besides the database the Media Lounge 
consisted also from the archival material of the Hybrid Workspace of the Documenta X festival in 1997. Though the old 
Media Lounge is still accessible at http://www.medialounge.net/lounge/intro.html,  the new online version, linked to the 
European Cultural Backbone, is now only a listing database presenting some statistics and entries about 107 institutions 
http://www.medialounge.net/.
Postal communication was a technique of the underground networks of the 60's, 70's, and 80's, which with all the 
circulation, with the accumulation of the exchanged materials automatically created smaller and bigger archives at each 
communication node all over the world. Archiving as well became a type of communication, a natural aspect of  the 
dialogue in progress between networkers, it started a discourse between the networker and his archives, and as an 
undirect communication it mediates the present to future generations. Some of them specialised, others collecting all assets 
of the network, archives gradually became reference spaces, where young artists and researchers can look up the history 
of the network: the 3VITRE Polypoesia Archives of  Enzo Minarelli, the ASA Performance Archives of Boris Nieslony, 
the Intermedia archives of Hans Sohm, the Sackner Fluxus archives, the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus collection, the 
Arhiva Zona of Maurizio Nanucci, the EON Archives of Ray Johnson of Vittore Baroni, the Small Press Archives of Guy 
Schraenen, the neoist archives of Monty Cantsin in Montreal, the Franklin Furnace Archive of performance and artist 
books of Marta Wilson, the Something Else Press Archives of Dick Higgins, in East Europe the Artpool Archives of 
György Galántai, the Sator Visual Poetry Archives of Piotr Rypson, and the archives of Pawel Petasz are most well 
known. Some archives still are independent; others were included in museum collection. Jean Brown sold her 
underground archives piled up in her Shaker Seed House in Massachusetts to the Getty Foundation, Marta Wilson sold 
her artist books collection to MOMA, Hans Sohm's archives went to Staatsgalerie in  Stuttgart, the University of 
California in Los Angeles bought the artist books and magazine collection of the Umbrella archives…
Organised in different ways, but most archives shaped databases. Guy Bleus reported already in 1984 in his treaty 
'Exploring Mail Art' (in Commonpress 56, 1984) that he administered 42292 mail art projects in his famous 
Administration Center in Wellen (http://cemu.fmv.ulg.ac.be/bleus/). His metaphysics of archives and administration 
promoted the idea of the equivalency of all data, he concluded that 'sending no information is also sending information', 
that speech is mainly the misunderstanding of communication, and he conceived the dialectics of mail art as synthesis of 
understanding and misunderstanding.   
After exploring all possible media - printed media, photocopy, audio space, radio, fax, video, TV, computer - getting 
online was the natural ambition of the networkers. In the early nineties email art directories blossomed on the Internet, and 
artists immediately started to conquer the web. Sources appeared on the net, online projects were initiated, 
documentations of projects were published on the web, and very soon correspondence artists linked each others sites. 
Also some of the archives and content-related database got partially online, such as the Performance Index of Heinrich 
Lueber www.thing.at/performance-index/. 
The critical attitudes and approaches of the underground network and correspondence art pervaded the web from the 
beginnings. New generations appropriated or reinvented the aesthetics and attitude of the underground communication 
culture. The correspondence art scene knows that the godfather of Luther Blisset was Ray Johnson. This identity 
propagating communication guerilla showed up in mail art circles in 1995, and very soon became a hybrid online-printed 
media personality  (http://www.lutherblisset.net). The superfluous visual information and software on the web, the useless 
memory was discovered and activated by recycling, in works such as The Multi-cultural Recycler of Amy Alexander 
http://recycler.plagiarist.org/. Net.art diagrams also appeared first as historical affiliation in the History of Art for Airports 
by Vuk Cosic http://remote.aec.at/history/. Jodi not only constantly reminds of the nature of the computer and the internet 
as a medium – in the best spirit of communication art tradition -, but provided an excellent example of networked speech 
in the net.art contextual diagram http://map.jodi.org/. The assemblage technique of collaborative works was very soon 
assimilated by Alexei Shulgin's Refresh project http://sunsite.cs.msu.su/wwwart/refresh.htm, and both utopian perspective 
and collaboration is there Olia Lialina's Agatha Appears www.c3.hu/collection/agatha/. Street culture, information and 
technology guerilla, social engagement naturally transgressed on the internet,  for example in Heath Bunting's isolated 
Disinformation projects http://www.irational.org/heath/disinformation/, the Electronic Disturbance Theater's Zapatista 
Tactical Flood Net - a tool for multiple use - http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ZapTact.html, or the anticorporate Toywar 
of Etoy based on expansive participation http://www.toywar.com/ .  As parody of the commercial culture and its 
promotional manners there are RtMark's subversive projects http://www.rtmark.com. 
It took quite a while, but finally the Stirnerian artistic egocentrism, the enforcement of the dialogue by a total feedback 
showed up as well. Mouchette's 'found' personality and her presence http://www.mouchette.org/, accompanied by a 
parody of domain name disputes, orchestrates the world divided in the 'I love Mouchette' and 'I hate Mouchette' Fan 
Club. Netochka Nezvanova appeared with Sisyphean reiterated world interpretations, with collecting and rewording her 
daily news and correspondence. The repetitions and comments in her replies shape in an oppositional color the divers 
facts and aspects of the correspondences, grabbing this way problems and bringing them closer to the horizon of 
solutions. This procedure is basic method of all compilation philosophy from Paul the Apostle to György Lukács… 'It's 
very difficult to buck a whole set of values by yourself' stated Carlo Pittore in his magazine ME in 1980 – 'Machin3nkunst 
does it' could reply in the electronic age a 'How to Become Netochka Nezvanova' handbook, both of them producing in 
apparently paradox way the most networked phenomena of correspondence art, respectively net.art 
http://www.v2.nl/mail/v2east/current/index.html - http://anart.no/sympa/arc/syndicate and other  mailing list. 
All net.art is supposed to be on the internet. Though the link villages on the web mark the affiliations, connections and 
collaborations, web sites archive independently the media art projects, texts, the multimedia content that institutions and 
artists build up, and though the mailing lists embracing technology and media criticism, media culture, and media art also 
piled up content, and they trace to an extent the way some collaborations sprang up, they mediate the communication as 
the essence of the network - collaborative net.art archives did not raise so far. There is need of an open net archives 
which – unlike net.art collections - would make available and accessible the elements of the social, media and art history 
puzzle and would generate its own content-related database, as an interface making possible to read its content.  

Bibliography:
Friedman, Ken: The Early Days of Mail Art: An Historical Overview, in Eternal Network. A Mail Art Anthology, ed. Chuck 
Welch, University of Calgary Press, Calgary, Alberta, 1995
Pernecky, Géza: A háló. Alternatív mûvészeti áramlatok a folyóirat-kiadványaik tükrében 1968-1988, Héttorony Könyvkiadó, 
s.l., s.a [1988].