Correspondence Art (Mail Art): Term
applied to art sent through the post rather than
displayed or sold through conventional
commercial channels, encompassing a variety of
media including postcards, books, images made on
photocopying machines or with rubber stamps,
postage stamps designed by artists, concrete
poetry and other art forms generally considered
marginal.
- John Held, Jr. The Dictionary of Art,
edited by Jane Turner, Macmillan Publishers
Limited, 1996.
Precedents for mail art are easy enough to find. More
than half of the New Testament of the Christian Bible
consists of letters circulated throughout an international
network to propagate a participatory order. A major
factor in the organization of the American Revolution
came from the Committees of Correspondence.
Newspapers originated in correspondences regarding
current events. The letters of Héloïse and Abelard take
their place in a long string of letters that make
correspondence an art form, and many letter writers have
included poems and graphics for as long as there have
been people who kept in touch with each other over
distances by signs or marks. Outside what we generally
consider "literacy," the quipus of the Andean
civilizations, letters and books made of knotted colored
string, and used to carry messages to and from the far
corners of the Inca Empire, may seem more avant
guardish to us today than they would have in their native
environment. As with most arts, the qualities that
separate mail art from its precedents and parallels may
seem elusive upon close structural examination, but none
the less we can distinguish mail art from other forms of
artful or inclusive message sending by context and a sense
of the style of participants more easily than by any purely
formal properties.
During the first half of the 20th Century, several artists
and writers, including Duchamp, Schwitters, and the
Italian Futurists created art using the mails. During the
Great Depression and the World War that followed, this
small scale activity seemed to come to a halt. Oddly or
serendipitously, the development of an expanded
international postal system prepared the way for
something else. So did the Cold War.
By the 1950s, any number of artists and writers availed
themselves of the postal services to circulate their work,
at times incorporating the mailing process into the work
itself. Wallace Berman, for instance, mailed assemblages
and other art-objects unwrapped to see what the postal
system would do to them. In the Soviet Union and its
colonies, the Samizdat network began to cohere as a
distribution system for censored work. Similar networks
began to form in right-wing military dictatorships and in
the more insidiously repressive atmosphere of the "free
world." These networks remained relatively small and, of
necessity, closely guarded by participants.
Most mail artists credit Ray Johnson as the first major
instigator of mail art as an expansive phenomenon. An
alumnus of Black Mountain College, Johnson's early
work foreshadowed and perhaps influenced that of
Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and others. As
marvelous as much of his early work was, it didn't satisfy
him. His pop iconography and droll collages needed to
escape easel painting and interact with the social and
artistic environments from which they drew their basic
elements. Johnson strikes many as an enigmatic
character, remaining aloof, inscrutable, seeming to do
everything he could not simply to torpedo his career as
an artist, but to create something like an "anti-career."
This may have been a type of performance art for him.
Johnson took the union of word and image as a given. He
often found this union as integral parts of standard icons,
such as the circle and name in the Lucky Strike cigarette
logo. Many of the instalments in his large Lucky Strike
series used the words in the name in different ways.
Outside the works that formed the precursor of Pop Art,
he integrated layer on layer of hand-drawn and printed
texts and icons. He disliked the idea of selling art, and his
correspondents claimed that works by Johnson couldn't
be bought, only received. He avoided consistency
in sales as in all else. When selling work, he demanded a
strict protocol from the purchaser. This usually included
such rituals as meeting him at a predesignated spot on
the New Jersey Turnpike, where he showed the work
offered in a precise sequence. If the potential purchaser
distured the sequence, he usually packed up his kit, got
into his car, and drove away without completing the sale.
In some instances, he made work for specific buyers as
long as they didn't commission it. When the work was
complete, he instructed an agent to offer it to the
intended recipient. If the recipient declined to buy it, the
work could no longer be sold. In such instances, the
choice of recipients followed something like a program of
pop celebrities. We should probably see these projects as
performance art rather than genuine attempts at sales, in
which the non-sale became the object of the
performance. At a time when "happenings" were
fashionable, Johnson called his exhibitions, many of
which he canceled at the last minute, "nothings." Some
people speak of him sabotaging his career. Actually, what
he seems to have been doing is staging a non-career as a
work of art. Needless to say, the cogent nature of the
works that critics and buyers might catch a glimpse of set
the stage for this nullification of a career. Mark Bloch, an
artist with strong affinities to Johnson, began going to the
kind of social events the reclusive Johnson avoided,
passing himself off as Johnson. When Johnson found out
about this, he was delighted and started arranging
appearances for Bloch to make as his impersonator. Andy
Warhol comes across as an impersonator of Johnson
throughout his career. However, the two seemed to share
an odd synchronicty. On the day when Valerie Solanis
shot Warhol, three men mugged Johnson at knife-point.
Even in this, Johnson connects with the world at large,
while Warhol simply takes part in a bit of courtly
intrigue.
As part of his rejection of the mainstream art world,
Johnson began sending the shreds of his early work
through the mail. He also revisioned the exquisite corpse
game as the "add to and return" or "add to and pass
on" practices that became mainstays of mail art. As he
worked through the mails, Johnson became more
fascinated with the numbers of correspondents this
process could involve. His projects during the 1950s
included hundreds of participants. This network grew
larger and spread around the world in succeeding
decades. Johnson made efforts to efface himself, and to
remove art from any kind of valuation as to quality or
content or economics or career-building. Perhaps Mark
Bloch's comments on Johnson as Taoist sage coexisting
with Johnson the oppositionalist come closest to the
mark. However his work gets evaluated, it seems
important in this context to note that its range
foreshadowed most of what went on in the network,
particularly the combination of text and graphics, the
range of pop icons and arcane historical references, and
the patterns of free association taking precedence over
any other form of logic.
In the mid-50s, Fluxists entered into Johnson's
network, and outside Fluxus, mail art began to find a few
avid practitioners in Europe, Latin America, and Japan.
The network was growing and one of its primary features
was that it was out of anybody's control. Johnson himself
became something of a cult figure, and others in the
network became prominent in it, but the movement
never produced a boss or regnant cabbal. Many mail
artists adamantly rejected any kind of worship or
canonization of individuals, and many advocated
complete anonymity. Some took on new names as a
means of self-effacement or as a means of using their
mail art names as part of what they had to say or out of a
sense of whimsy or humor or provocation. In some parts
of the world, mail art pseudonymns had more to do with
self-preservation and avoidance of police harassment.
During the late 1950s and well into the 1960s, the basic
practice of mail art consisted in people making art and
sending it to others in the network. The mail art name
assumed by Chuck Welsh describes an essential aspect of
the genre. He called himself The Cracker Jack Kid after
the fun of looking for the prize in the bottom of a box of
Cracker Jack. In the mail art milieu, the prizes became the
art that arrived in the mail, never on any precise
schedule, but always sure to arrive sooner or later - more
often for those who extended the network farthest. In this
stage, virtually all mail art was personal, carrying a sense
of the artist's hand, and avoiding the impersonality of art
as seen in galleries or reproduced in books. This
remained a basic pattern throughout the succeeding
decades. As the 60s moved on, photocopiers became
readily available, and many mail artists availed themselves
of these tools to make multiples and to document
projects. Some mail artists felt this was perverse, since
artists no longer had to make one-of-a-kind pieces to
send. Similar reservations arose during succeeding years
with the advent of other technologies.
By the 1970s, mail art became socially and politically
engaged at various levels and to various degrees. Some
saw it as a form of counter-culture, a rejection of all
conventions, social and artistic, that cut as deeply to the
root as any act of rebellion could manage. Some saw
parallels between the growing network's exchanges and
community building as related to such phenomena as
The Whole Earth Catalogue. It implied that a body
of skilled workers existed outside mainstream society and
political control, simply needing access to tools and links
to other like-minded outsiders to build a new social
order. If the art didn't take part in the creation of an
alternate society, it could still function as a form of
subversion or protest.
Others didn't care about socio-political discourse or
action. In fact, many were as tired of this kind of
engagement as they were of elitist notions of art. They
were tired of art that perpetually harped on the sad, slow
music of humanity with all its responsibilities and angst
and sought something that liberated the spirit and
allowed for play. They didn't want an art that had lost its
sense of humor and its sense of fun. Others simply
wanted to contact people without the hindrances,
protocols, status games, pecking orders, and aesthetic
preconceptions of art in the mainstream. With expanding
resources in art and literary history, and with greater
ability to watch the way reputations grew or were stifled
by irrelevant forces, this was a time when artists learned
more deeply than ever to distrust external authority. The
carefree nature of much of the work produced with this
attitude could reach through endless possibilities outside
what had previously been considered art materials or art
concerns. How much can you get out of a simple rubber
stamp set or the deluge of images that came from pop
magazines and television? As people in the network
demonstrated, these resources proved as rich and viable
as those ignored by the precincts of the mainstream art
world.
Mail art tended to galvanize around themes. Individual
artists could make themes a sort of personal signature.
Anna Banana, for instance, could focus her work on
bananas. This included publication of a lively, amusing,
and useful zine for many years, not only exploring her
banana themes but also providing lists of addresses and
events in which people could participate. Aside from the
personal value of such themes for individuals who
explored them intensely, they provided a constant
stimulus for other people, including invitations to
consider the theme and to join in related projects. If you
haven't thought much about bananas or any other
theme, why not see what you can make of them? Themes
could act as gestalt breakers, or at least loosen up some of
the tightly wound springs in the arts of the time.
Different practitioners naturally took different
approaches to what might seem whimsical. The constant
stylistic shifts, from casual to meticulous, made along
theme lines turned mail and exhibitions into loose
collages, where differences in method and tone created
dynamic juxtapositions, whether seen together on a wall
or in the random sequence governed by the rate of
receipt through the postal system.
As mail art grew, its participants put different spins on
it, used it for different purposes, saw it in different ways,
and merged it with other art forms. Unlike the art sent
through the mails in the first half of the century, mail art
took on an aggressively populist, inclusive, and
antihieratic cast.
By the mid 1970s, mail art had taken on a few basic
rules: it should depend as much on interchanges between
practitioners as anything else. Although it should allow
maximum creativity on the part of each participant, it
should not be simply the expression of one individual.
Mail art should not be sold or have any commercial or
career value. When distributed in clusters through the
mail or mounted as shows, it should not be subjected to
any process of selection whatsoever, not based on quality,
content, or any other criteria. Whoever received it was
obliged to pass it on or to exhibit it without judgment of
any sort. Anyone who wished to participate should be
free to do so. Participants must share their lists of mailing
addresses and extend them as fully as possible.
Turned into dogma, some of these simple rules could
become as draconian as those against which they arose.
The call for anonymity, for instance, becomes liberatory
only if it's voluntary. When anonymity results from
curators effacing names or feeling too lazy to make them
known, it becomes an act of bad faith. Where anonymity
arises as a means of avoiding persecution by police, the
need to publish addresses defeats one of its purposes.
Prohibition on sale of all work created by an individual or
group could become stifling, and in some instances could
limit the amount of mail an artist could send. For those
posting as many as 500 pieces during an average week,
mail art could become expensive. Art made to circulate
forever without coming to some sort of resting place
becomes a Flying Dutchman, a form of damnation. The
total exclusion of galleries and other institutions makes it
difficult to mount shows. But a broad-based movement
dedicated to pluralism, with no external authority
controlling it, will inevitably bring in a wide variety of
attitudes and needs. Given the group nature of the
network, it's not difficult to assume that members would
seek to moderate problems. Different currents and
tendencies which at times contradicted each other
flourished together in the network, and resolved some of
these problems, though not always without squabbles
among participants.
Basic mail art involved individuals sitting in rooms
making art to send through the mail. That's all. Although
many practitioners continued to work contentedly this
way for decades, many others wanted and needed more.
The most dynamic form of resolving problems grew up
quickly in the form of MAPs, Mail Art Projects. A MAP
could consist of invitations to send work to an exhibition.
The first exhibitions were held in practitioners' homes,
and this continued to morph into other MAPs. In some
parts of the world, mail art shows mounted in people's
homes stayed up until the police shut them down. Mail
art came of age with performance art, and the two
movements continually interacted with each other. One
of the tendencies in performance art worked towards
audience participation, and this naturally formed a bond
with the inclusiveness of mail art. Meetings of mail
artists, whether in artist's homes or in the congresses that
flourished in the 1980s, as often as not included
performance pieces, and performances often took place
as part of mail art exhibitions. At times, the artistic
content of projects could be minimal to non-existent, the
patterns of interaction becoming the work of art.
As the movement progressed, practitioners found ways
to accommodate gallery and institutional venues. The
most important means of avoiding compromise came
from the criteria that works shown could not be sold, nor
could they be mounted with work meant for sale. This
made it seem initially difficult for galleries whose
proprietors had to pay rent, maintenance, salaries, etc.
For gallery proprietors with extended vision, the "no
sale" rule could pay off indirectly by generating attention
for shows held in the same building, or by bringing
attention to the gallery that would at other times sell
work outside the network. Artists may not have been able
to sell their work at mail art shows, but nothing
prevented them from doing so in non-mail art venues. In
some instances, networkers themselves ran galleries, such
as Jurgen Olbrich's Kunstraum in Kassel, Germany, and
Carlo Pittore's Galleria Del'Occhio in New York City.
These galleries also hosted conventional shows, at times
including the work of mail artists when they were not
working in mail art mode. Institutional venues have at
times angered purists, but most mail artists have simply
let these absolutists rage alone in their corners. As long as
the institution observes the basic "No judges, no rejects,
no fees required of the artist, no sales of work exhibited,
no work returned, documentation to all participants"
rules, there should be no problem with the venue. Some
argue that mail art is a process rather than a finished
product, and that any kind of show goes against the spirit
of ongoing collaboration. In shows that I've curated, I've
tried to make sure that there were writing and drawing
materials and envelopes available to viewers so they could
continue the process as they saw fit. Perhaps most
importantly, exhibitions introduced people to the
network, keeping it from being hermetically sealed. It
seems appropriate that post offices have provided the
most frequent venues for mail art shows. From a
participatory point of view, even if the curator doesn't
provide materials, what's to stop viewers from availing
themselves of the resources of the building in which they
find themselves? At times, mail artists effectively banded
together when someone violated the spirit of an
important principle of the art. A major example of this
came in February 1984, when Dr. Ronnie Cohen edited a
mail art show at New York's Franklin Furnace, clearly
violating the "no censorship, no rejections, no returns"
principle. Pressure from the mail art community forced
Cohen to step down as curator, and forced her out of
panel discussions and other curatorial positions. As much
as this became a symbolic victory for mail artists around
the world, there have been other instances where mail
artists have taken less drastic action to counter similar
infringements on the art. Problems arising from the sale
of mail art archives continue, however, and there seems
no complete solution for this. Some mail artists carry
grudges, but as of the turn of the millennium, this
problem area seems to find partial solutions through the
nature of the archivists.
The late 1970s through the beginning of the 1990s saw
the widest expansion of mail art activities. This included
a large-scale burgeoning of the network throughout the
world. From the hundreds of participants in networks
twenty years earlier, MAPs could now include thousands.
Performance art grew stronger, as did political
engagement. This period saw the emergence of
congresses of mail artists, and radical rethinking of the
nature of the movement. In August, 1977, Uruguayan
mail artists Clemente Padin and Jorge Carabaillo were
imprisoned for their art work against the military
dictatorship of their country. U.S. mail artist Geoffrey
Cooke mounted a letter writing campaign among mail
artists to secure their release. After two years, they were
paroled as a result of the campaign. This was not done
simply through letter writing, but also required the
skilled diplomacy of Dick Higgins in negotiating with the
Uruguayan government. Still, Higgins could have done
little without the letter writing campaign. This campaign
clearly demonstrated that mail art networks could bring
about tangible results.
The intensification of the nuclear arms race during the
1980s brought about grass roots responses from people
around the world. The mail art network played an
important role in this upwelling of protest via Shadows
Projects. Most effective among these were the
performance pieces in which people went around their
cities in the early morning hours of each August 6, the
date of the bombing of Hiroshima, drawing or painting
outlines around each other on buildings, sidewalks, etc.
The image of the shadow comes from the way people
near the epicenter of nuclear blasts were vaporized,
leaving only faint "shadows" on nearby objects, which
were outlined later by survivors. Ruggero Maggi and John
Held, Jr. became indefatigable in propagating Shadows
Projects, and joined them with performance pieces. Held
had himself shadowed so often (over 150 times) that he
wore a skin diver's wetsuit in performances to keep from
being harmed by the paint. Probably the most important
of these MAPs took place in Hiroshima in 1988. This was
a thoroughly international program, organized by
Mayumi Handa and Shozo Shimamoto in Japan, Maggi
in Italy, Serge Sergay and Rea Nikanova in the USSR,
Held and Gerard Barbot in the U.S. I was active in
setting up Shadows Projects from 1989 to 1995. As
perhaps the most wide-spread new art form of the Cold
War era, it seemed appropriate that these projects should
go to the root of the War itself.
On August 6, Hiroshima Day, 1990, native American
activist Dennis Banks, who had played a major role in
demonstrations at Wounded Knee in 1973, began a
"sacred run for peace" between London and Leningrad.
Ryosuke Cohen, Shozo Shimamoto, and Mayumi Handa
were among the mail artists who accompanied Banks on
his run. At some points along the route, members of the
mail art network organized mailings and provided Banks
with housing and other amenities. Some members of the
network supported the run indirectly. In Estonia, for
example, Ilmar Kruusamae and John Held, Jr.
coordinated a Shadows Project with Banks's run.
An important characteristic of socially and politically
oriented MAPs is that they usually stay outside of
ideologies and concentrate on issues that have no party
lines or affiliations. Individual mail artists may adhere to
one doctrine or another, but avoid proselytizing them in
MAPs. Projects against nuclear weapons, racism, spouse
and child abuse, in support or sympathy with famine
victims, people infected with AIDS, people held in
prisons for crimes of conscience do not collectively
advocate an ideologically based response or solution, but
rather solutions that address the problem instead of using
it as propaganda for something else. This marks a healthy
advance over much of the activist art throughout the 20th
Century, during which much issue-oriented art acted as
veiled agit prop for a political position, exploiting
whomever may be involved to advance an ideology rather
than alleviate a problem. As there was a strong tendency
to avoid artistic "isms" in mail art, so too was there a
strong tendency to avoid their political counterparts,
concentrating on human needs and desires as opposed to
dogmas.
As a Cold War genre, some forms of mail art have held
a symbiotic relationship to politics. Most networkers see
a marked decline or corruption of the expansive form of
mail art, as it appears in shows and in widely spread
networking, after the mid 1990s. As Joel Lipman puts it,
"mail art ended when the Berlin Wall came down." The
Cold War environment contributed to the movement on
many levels. At times participation could become
dangerous. In more blatant police states, the dangers
seem obvious enough. In "free" countries such as the
U.S., France, and England, mail artists frequently found
their mail scrutinized. Some people in the network
deliberately tried to provoke authorities, and some sent
messages to them in packages that they designed to look
suspicious. Many claim that agencies such as the FBI were
watching their homes. Whether this was true or not
doesn't matter in the context of the movement. The
practitioners perceived it so, and this helped create a
sense of solidarity between them and other artists,
including those with whom they had aesthetic and
political differences. Giving them a common enemy, the
sense of being watched gave them the creative stimulus
that oppression creates often enough.
There seem to be other related dynamics at work that
complicate this view. Cold War tensions become difficult
to explain to younger people who have never experienced
them. They even fade quickly in the minds of many
people affected by them. After the fall of the Soviet
Empire and the compromises that seemed to make China
a place where the worst of two worlds pushed everything
else out, an odd sort of ennui seemed to spread through
the world. For the most part, mail artists saw neither
competing system as adequate, but, curiously, when the
two demonstrated their failure, it seemed more difficult
to focus attention on any type of opposition. A big
damper on mail art came from wider awareness of what
the world was like. Theoretically, this was an art open to
everyone, yet many people throughout the world cannot
afford paper or postage. This became particularly clear to
me in discussing mail art with a teacher in East Africa. I
offered to send money and international postage coupons
so that his students could join the network. He
responded that this was generous of me, but how long
would I continue doing so, and what would the students
and their friends and family do after I stopped? Well,
there I was, another Bwana offering trinkets without
seeing the larger picture. For many networkers, the sense
that the art wasn't as egalitarian as they had believed took
much of the idealism and optimism out of the process,
leaving it as yet another activity for a privileged elite.
During the late 1980s - early 1990s, some exquisite book
art from Cuba circulated through the network. Among
other salient features of these books was the ability of the
artists to make something positive out of severely limited
resources. I haven't seen any books of this sort in recent
years, though some flashier and less inventive book art
has come from Cuba during that time. There may be a
paradigm in this, though I'm not sure what it is. It could
be that the network has become sluggish in getting things
around, or that the Cuban artists no longer produce the
kind of work they did under harsher conditions, or that
the artists no longer get the kind of external interest and
support they had during the Cold War.
Some networkers see the rise of e-mail and the world
wide web as detrimental to the art. E-mail definitely takes
three major components out of mail art. First, e-mail
arrives randomly throughout the day and night, and thus
the patterns of anticipating the daily mail delivery
dissipate. Second, they eliminate an important group of
participants, the postal carriers. Given the emphasis on
making the envelope or package part of the art, mail
deliverers become part of the network. The range of their
responses could be large. Some might ooh and ahh over
the envelopes, and even ask where they could get
envelopes like that. Some could growlingly ask why you
got all this junk. Some could be surprised by post marks.
Comments such as "I've never carried a letter from
China before - I wasn't sure we could do that!" or "I've
always wanted to go to Switzerland!" or "I was born in
Argentina!" became good openers for conversation,
initiated not by the recipient but by the postal carrier's
response to the envelope itself. Finally, at least for people
of my generation, e-mail can seem less personal than
letters on paper. Perhaps e-mail will find ways of
replacing these benefits, though it doesn't seem likely.
Still, MAPs continue via e-mail, and the web is an ideal
place to exhibit work. It can reach anyone in the world
who has an internet connection without the restrictions
of judges or juries and often without censors. And it does
so without charge. A few mail artists, perhaps most
notably Texas-based Honoria, have devised means of
extending the art in directions appropriate to the new
medium. But so far, such exploration has been small.
This may change. Or it may not. I generally don't like the
custom of naming tendencies as "post" this or that,
taking Jackson Mac Low's "I ain't post nothin"' as a
more or less definitive statement. Still, if there is a "post
mail art," I'd be thoroughly amused at the
appropriateness of the pun.
The uncertainty about some types of MAPs may
continue to hover for some time, but others have
changed little. Continuity seems strongest in two areas:
visual poetry and correspondence art. For the former, the
mail art network has literally been its life's blood for
decades. In his definition of mail art, John Held, Jr.
mentions "concrete poetry and other art forms generally
considered marginal." Indeed, through three decades the
history of visual poetry has been virtually synonymous
with the mail art network. Distribution through the mails
was essential during the time when Kaldron was
the only reliable, international, widely-distributed,
and pluralistic print venue for the art in the
whole world. For many of the visual poets who have
circulated their work primarily through the network, the
network has never been much more than a distribution
system, and it continues to act as such today. Work under
this general term included the rigid, minimalist forms
most often called "concrete," but its spectrum has never
been rigid. Among those who think of themselves as
visual poets, the network essentially defended the
continuity of freer forms during the decades when the
backlash against the minimalism that most readers
overwhelmingly, and often rightly, dismissed as trivial
and refused to look at. Aside from those who identified
themselves as visual poets, others came to similar
practices through other channels. In one of the most
astute comments on mail art, Harry Polkinhorn
identified some of the basic needs that called such work
forth. Surveying the 1989 Shadows Project show he
curated on the U.S.-Mexico border, he wrote: "Another
locus of conflict and accommodation which a border
environment manifests is of course language itself. Visual
art does not transcend the level on which such problems
occur but substitutes alternative sets of codes for the
verbal. Interestingly, much of the work in the Shadows
Project features both visual and verbal systems, as if to
underscore a drive to overcome the loss of
communication which takes place between cultures,
languages, and media. In spite of these preconditions,
these works speak bluntly: the message is one of the
necessity for tolerance of difference if we are to survive."
The emphasis on survival is essential in a MAP such as
the Shadows Project. But the need to find multiple codes
that can reach across boundaries and obstacles runs
throughout mail art, and in some ways defines it. No
matter how whimsical or comic or playful mail art
became, that need to cross borders remained essential to
the movement's purposes.
Early in the mail art movement, many practitioners
began distinguishing correspondence art from mail art.
Writers on the subject could engage in all sorts of
definitions and distinctions, and, indeed, the differences
between correspondence art and mail art remain blurry
at best. You could see correspondence art as a type of
MAP, or as a separate but compatible tendency, or as a
network of a small number of people, often just two - or
as what mail art was about in the first place. Long-term
correspondences, without a large number of participants,
had been part of the movement since the beginning. At
present, when shows and other more public MAPs seem
in sharp decline, this form of collaboration seems to be
going as strong as ever. Some correspondence art remains
indistinguishable from simple letter writing except in its
attitudes and background. This was the case with some of
Ray Johnson's correspondence. Other work involves
delicate or unusual interaction between methods and
ideas which expands practitioners' abilities and capacities
and keeps them going through times when they would
otherwise find themselves painted into corners.
From about 1971 until I got my first computer in 1983,
I carried on a personal MAP. During that period I had
my own printing presses, and typed virtually all the mail I
sent to anyone, inside the network or out, on the backs of
sheets of paper that I had printed. Sometimes this
included work of my own or pages from whatever book I
happened to be printing at the time. I tried to make sure
that the print was fresh enough so that the recipeient
could smell the ink as well as see the text or image. In
printing, it's a good idea to save missprints and reuse
them to establish register, set ink ratios, etc. This creates
chance generated collages. After observing such pages for
a while, it becomes natural to intentionally overprint
some images to see what the results will be. I began
making books of pages that had been collaged by chance
or intention in the early 70s. As often as not in the mail
art environment, individual pieces of correspondence
and book art went hand in hand. I contributed some of
the books to mail art shows, but kept them distinct from
those I sold outside the network. In addition to making
sides of correspondemnce art sheets, some effects and
image types I discovered through the process gave me
ideas for visual poems, book cover designs, etc.
The longest collaborative correspondence art project
I've engaged in has been with Reid Wood, who also goes
by the mail art name State of Being. Now in its ninth
year, this MAP has at times included a number of other
people for periods lasting as long as a year, and has
intersected with other MAPs. In 2001, Scott Rouse
happened on some of these pieces used in The 1998
Biennial in Mexico City and animated them. The MAP
has gone into hibernation for periods of several months,
and thus been able to take advantage of both regular
stretches and of times when its schedules didn't constrict
us while we were involved in other things. It began as
something of a heresy - conducted originally by fax
transmission, then moved on to transmission by e-mail
attachments. For the most part, we have adopted the
"alter-and-return" approach. At the end of one year, we
made a composite of everything done during the last year
by photocopying everything onto one page. The
photocopy composite was almost completely black, with
toner so heavily deposited on the paper that it crackled.
For that year we slowly reduced the dense, black page to
concluding pages with virtually nothing on them. During
our first two years, we sent three exchanges of faxes at
fifteen minute intervals every Tuesday night. This
required quick improvisation. When we moved to e-mail,
we worked at a slower pace. Some of the work we've done
has found its way into shows, been used on book covers,
and has had its share of other spin-offs. As with most
MAPs, this one has had no end goal other than to see
what we could do in the process. Reid is generally much
better at this art form than I, and if there's any need to
look for value beyond the process itself, the biggest
advantage for me has been to watch him work.
*
One of the main characteristics of mail art was its
tendency to eliminate a non-participatory audience.
More than any art form of the century or the movements
and genres since the middle ages, it tended to consist of
communicants alone. Most of the world outside it
ignored it and often had no idea that it was happening at
all. Participants saw their art as egalitarian. Yet it's easy
enough to see it as an inverse form of elitism. This kind
of thinking becomes a dog chaing its tail without the
posibility of resolution. Where it may become most
serious is now, when the genre has disappeared or
morphed into something else, and it is difficult to see or
understand or even document. Many art for throughout
the world have celebrated transcience. Mail art may have
been one of the arts that did most to leave little or
nothing behind it. Then again, it may not be over, and a
century from now it may come across as the foundation
of other art forms not yet within our ability to predict or
understand. If its transcience might be construed as a
failure, there still are elements to the genre that are hard
to avoid by anyone who takes a serious look at it:
Aside from imediately cognate movements such as
Fluxus, visual poetry, and performance art, mail art
makes direct or indirect critiques and responses to art
forms of the 20th Century. Dada-Surrealism vaunted the
liberation of the subconscious. From the whimsical to the
sinister, this kind of liberation moved more radically
through the network than it did in the salons and cafes of
Zurich and Paris - all the more so since practitioners took
lack of restraint for granted, in a much less self-conscious
and forced manner. Surrealists, like their comrades in
other movements such as Italian Futurism, could whip
themselves into frenzies at the thought of assaulting and
destroying museums and galleries. Mail Art simply
ignored and circumvented them. Early Mail Artists
(particularly Ray Johnson) may have laid the foundation
for Pop Art. Some might argue that Pop's process of
extricating images from mass culture and subjecting
them to the antisepsis of exhibition in consecrated venues
constituted its major feat. On the simple level of personal
taste, I prefer Johnson's Lucky StrikeÒ cigarette packs to
Andy Warhol's Campbel'sÒ Soup cans, and the cartoons
that followed the mail art lines of distribution seem more
robust and significant than those of Lichtenstein. Mail
Art's capacity to keep pop images close to their source
and part of a more active set of interchanges than those
of the mainstream art market may give it more depth
than Pop Art. During Mail Art's maturity, factions of the
inteligencia, following leads from semiotics, became
obsessed with referentiality and the relation between
signifier and signified - often seeing such relationships in
political terms. Mail Art dealt with the nature of signs on
a completely literal basis. The network explored,
reoriented, and redefined signifier and signified through
endless permuatations which did not become divorced
from the conduct of life. During Mail Art's formative
years, the existentialist theme of alienation occupied
much of the inteligencia. Political activism in the arts
emphasized the need to circumvent authoritarian
control, the problems created by commercialism, and the
need for universal relevance. In the mail art network,
artists who found themselves alone or isolated or silenced
didn't simply sit around picking their scabs: they created
an environment for themselves that overcame the
limitations decried elsewhere. You could see mail art
responding to Sartre's much quoted (and misquoted)
"L'enfer, c'est les autres" with Martin Buber's "All real
living is meeting" - even if that meeting takes place
through the mail, in a world where community no longer
depends on location.
____
2001
