IS ART STRIKE ART? A dialogue between Bern Porter and Joachim Frank

November 18, 1989  in Albany, New York

 

Bern Porter: BP
Joachim Frank: JF

BP: This is Bern Porter speaking on the eighteenth of November, 1989. With me is Joachim Frank.  We have been confronted by two problems: whether mail art is art or Art Strike is art? Somehow I would like to read one or two Chinese poems in translation because I feel they set a tone for us. The first is called “From the Most Distant Time” [it is actually called “From the Most Distant Time: Emperor Wu of Han (III),” and was translated by Kenneth Rexroth –JF] and the poem goes on like this:

Majestic, from the most distant time,
The sun rises and sets.
Time passes and men cannot stop it.
The four seasons serve them,
But do not belong to them.
The years flow like water.
Everything passes away before my eyes.

Included in this passing before my eyes is the phenomenon of mail art. I claim to have invented it in 1913 [he was 2 years old at the time –JF].  Marcel Duchamp invented it independently and unknown to me in 1916 [aged 29 –JF] in France. And today we have an established art form of very high level of effectiveness. Some participants are from as many as forty countries on any given theme. What they express for a theme through the mail is indeed an art.

Now we have the question, Is Art Strike an art? And the answer is, yes, it is. Why is it? Well, it’s a form. It has invented some interesting words which could be spelled out here: noisms, neonics, neoism. And we have the problem before us: are these conjectures of words art? The answer is yes, they are.

The originator has suggested that they will fail, implying that things go through cycles and in these cycles, there is growth and there is much to be concerned. With that I will ask Mr. Frank to carry on.

JF: yes, this is Joachim Frank on the same day sitting next to Bern Porter. I’m very happy that Bern is here with me for a few days.  And what I’d like to say I want to preface with a text that is from a synopsis of the classification of the animal kingdom from 1882.

“Subkingdom, Type 1, Protozoa; Animals composed of undifferentiated protoplasm or at most, a protoplasm which is so far differentiated as to have developed a consistent external layer or wall and a central nucleus or endoplast, the organism in the latter class becoming a cell. And in the most typical protozoa the organism remains unicellar and in no case are definite tissues developed by the differentiation of a primitive cellular aggregate.”

The reason why I read this text into the record is that we’ve been asked to elaborate our opinions on Art Strike and express a sentiment about this. My point is that when Art Strike would go into effect, this text would still be around among many other texts and there would be minds like mine still being confronted with it. And to me, it is in the process of this confrontation where art happens. Which means that by making a call for an Art Strike we cannot simply undo the existing reality that inspires the creation of art. So, Art Strike is a concept that is doomed for failure. Now why would I get involved in a project that is stillborn? But maybe I don’t need to be involved in the project but just think it through.  In the same way as we think through an action before we carry it out.  We could, for instance, think about getting water in a pail from a well and then, before we even get to carry out this action, we notice that the pail is too small to have a significant effect on our water supply at home. So, in the process of discounting the small pail we may switch to a real bucket, or we decide to tap into the municipal water supply or something else of that nature.

In the same way I can deal with Art Strike as a concept. Just thinking it through, pail-to-bucket, I come to the conclusion that it is a sort of funny concept; it fails [right at the start], though phrases have been coined, minds have been moved, some buttons have been printed. With that we can put it on the shelf at rest … 

My point is that art is both perception and introspection. If you have reached a certain level of introspection, you arrive at art. For me this is a completely necessary end of a process. If it’s not an end, it is still the most fulfilling way of going through the world … I think with this I’m going to bring us back to Bern. Except I just want to say that the tape recorder itself participated in the Art Strike just moments before. We were having this elaborate conversation sitting in front of a moving tape, and now I’m sure that we had a number of ideas and associations that we will never be able to repeat or complete for as long as we live [Bern died in 2004 –JF]. The tape recorder ran in front of our eyes and didn’t record a thing. So there has been some conspiracy between the tape recorder with proponents of Art Strike …  

BP: I think that we’re very fortunate that we went through a series involving cats in the background [Sparkle and Isis in my kitchen –JF] while we were expressing ourselves. And in the act of expressing ourselves we were creating art. Whether we’re for or against doesn’t matter.  Here’s a phenomenon sent away; it will go its course, and in its course will produce some ripples, some variations, some further thoughts ... And [how many] we have, whether they’re for or against, negative or positive, doesn’t matter. What matters is that we have a concern, that we have a reaction, that we have an emotion. And all of those combined reduce to the simple word ‘art’. There is no other word that can summarize creativity of whatever nature. There is no other word that can bring about a revolution. So, I applaud the fact that there was an apparent stoppage of the machine, a non-recording.

I noticed that the cats who were so active at the first start of the interview are now at rest, and I feel that a period of ‘at rest’ and a period of tranquility are of great importance. I see motion pictures and I wonder, why there’s sound in the background? Would they not be more powerful if there was no sound? I am aware that in silence there is great growth, so … I’m certainly in favor of three years, 1990-1993 in [silence in] which we summarize our variations and thoughts and concerns. I generally applaud the total effort.

JF: Some thoughts came to my mind when the cats did in fact involve themselves in a fight. And that was happening at the time when the tape recorder stopped. It occurred to me that when the cats started fighting, they did it precisely to give me a cue and offer me a clue [at the exact moment] when I was looking for words to express my ideas. In fiction there is the concept of Magic Realism where [pieces of our] reality interact in ways that transcend physical laws. I think that this process just happened here in front of our eyes … The cats performed for us. So, one of two things could be going on here: either that they started fighting because my mind was so urgently occupied with its quest for an expression. Or the other possibility is that with a searching mind one tries to pick up clues anywhere one can find them. Looking around randomly, as one is want to do when searching for words, I see these cats getting into a fight. But however it happens, there seems a powerful interaction among all different elements in the universe. 

I think the openness of the mind to perceive new constellations is something that Bern started very early in his life, and he’s certainly showed many other artists how to open their eyes. He showed other people how to become artists without actually having to take a drawing pen or paint brush or any particular tool. We have our mind as a universal tool for art [creation and] perception, and there are many processes of meditation that bring it to the outside.

BP:  well, I would like again to read from my poem:

Majestic, from the most distant time,
The sun rises and sets.
Time passes and men cannot stop it.
The four seasons serve them,
But do not belong to them.
The years flow like water.
Everything passes away before my eyes.

Included in mail art are innumerable developments, innumerable variations, themes with countless persons working, reacting, responding. Then … what emotions, what feelings do they have? How can we summarize these? We could only say that this is art. Now we’re called upon to give it up for the years 1990-1993 and it may very well be a desirable thing to do, to just reassess what we have been doing, what has been going on, what has passed before our eyes. And in this context what we are talking about is an artform. Noism, neonics, neoism – it does not matter how we call it. It is an expression, it is an emotion, it is an incentive, it is a direction, it is pointing to a concern and is for that reason important. The poem says “the sun rises and it sets and time passes and men cannot stop it. The four seasons flow like water and everything passes away before our eyes.”

JF: I have here with me a whistle that I propose should be used to mark the start and the finish of the Art Strike. This is just a rehearsal and of course I cannot in any way represent the three years that are passing. But between start and finish I’d like to put a one-minute break of silence that symbolizes the complete rest of activities. 

[Joachim blows whistle and one minute of silence transpires before it is ended with another blast of the whistle]

JF: This is the end of the Art Strike rehearsal and as far as I could tell there was actually little that happened during that time except that my daughter claimed the whistle. And she is still doing it right now as I speak. This brings me to my second text:

“Subkingdom, Type 5, Moluscia: Soft-bodied, unsegmented animals usually provided with an exoskeleton. Alimentary canal shut off from the body cavity. Nervous system in the form of three principal pairs of ganglia which are reduced to one in the lower types. A distinct heart and specialized organs of respiration may or may not be present. Distinct reproductive organs are present in all, though among the lower forms of the subkingdom, the production of colonial organisms by continuous germination is not uncommon.”

There is one statement I’d like to make in connection with the Art Strike. I think it’s become clear from my position, which I have elaborated before, that I’m not enthusiastic about it. In fact, I’d like to offer myself as an Art Strike scab, an Art Strike breaker in the sense that if any individual who feels deprived by the stop in production of art has the urge to obtain artworks during that period of time I’d like to offer them my services. I would come up with some ersatz art, and the details of these services could be worked out. For instance, the ersatz art that I make available could later be exchanged for real art after the Art Strike is over and the Art Strikers go back to their normal business.

BP: Well, I’m interested in your offer. I, in turn, can offer the spaces at the Institute of Advanced Thinking in Belfast, Maine. They are available through the months of May through November and persons are certainly invited to come there with their sleeping bag, air mattresses and tents and park on the open lawns and platforms. They can converse with others who are concerned with these operations, whatever they may be, to resolve and find out where we are in the field of art. I continue to maintain that mail art is an art of highly developed form and I continue to maintain that Art Strike is also an artform and I wish both the strikers and the non-strikers the greatest success in their undertakings.

 

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Bern G. Porter (1911 – 2004) was a physicist trained at Colby College, with an MS degree from Brown University, who was involved in the Manhattan project during WWII.  After the murder of some 250,000 civilians in Hiroshima and Nakasaki by nuclear weapons dropped from the sky on August 6 and 9, 1945, he quit his job and pursued his many literary interests. He is best known for his Found Poems.  In the words of art critic Peter Frank, “Porter is to the poem what Duchamp was to the art object, a debunker of handiwork fetishism and exemplary artist-as-intercessor between phenomenon and receptor.” Porter was among the first to publish Henry Miller’s writing, and he was a major influence in the development of mail art. His best known protegee was Carlo Pittore (1943 – 2005).  A comprehensive overview of Porter’s life is found in a statement released by the Bowery Poetry Club on the occasion of a tribute to him on Sunday October 17, 2004: http://www.panmodern.com/pressrelease.txt.
A very good picture depicting him the way he looked back then appears in an article that came out in Nova Scotia on August 13, 2025, on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima/Nagasaki:“La poésie comme antidote au nucléaire” ("Poetry as an antidote to the nuclear bomb")

The Art Strike, intimately related to the mail art movement, was conceived as a protest against the commercialism surrounding modern art and promoted a vision of art and the role of artists in society that would be transformative and revolutionary.  The Art Strike proclaimed for 1990 – 1993 was only one of several attempts to put these ideas into practice.

In 1989 the Artist collective WORKSPACE invited Bern Porter for a week to do performances in Albany. (The very origin of WORKSPACE in 1976 can be traced back to the vision of art as transformative force in society and to the “Found” ideas of Bern Porter and his contemporaries). The interview was arranged on that occasion.  In many events associated with the Fluxus and mail art movements, the interviews, manifestos and press releases have an element of tongue-in-cheek.  

I found the long-forgotten transcript in my recent attempts to put order into my literary material.   Joachim Frank, August 16, 2025.