Ray Johnson and Nam June Paik, Incommunicado

Ray Johnson is known as the “father of mail art” due to his establishment of a global mail art network in 1962. Nam June Paik later referred to Johnson as the “first communication artist,” crediting him with developing a networked mode of artistic production and distribution that would characterize much of 1960s artistic experimentation with new media. Yet the relationship between these two “founders” of communication art was not without conflict. Take a mailing distributed by Johnson in 1978 entitled “Ray Johnson’s History of Video Art.” Part infographic, part family tree, it assembles a list of early video art luminaries, including Paik, Joan Jonas, Shigeko Kuboto, and Stan Vanderbeek (as well as less obvious influences like Lao Tze), each name assigned to one of Johnson’s signature icons, the bunnyhead, an analog precursor of the digital emoji. Notably, all of the bunnyheads with East Asian names--Paik, Kubota, Tze—are drawn with thin, downward slanting eyes, presumably a reference to the epicanthic fold and the racist epithet “slant-eyes,” a commonplace in a Cold War American context bracketed by the Korean and Vietnam Wars. This peculiar “History of Video Art” signals a breakdown in the playful, utopian spirit often attributed to Johnson’s work, and reveals the dysfunctional side of communication networks—namely, their potential for racist trolling. This paper will compare Johnson’s and Paik’s network aesthetics by considering how their practices intersected and diverged during the Vietnam War era, and particularly, how a Cold War cultural politics of race and nation inflected their approaches.