Mail art, also known as postal art and correspondence art, is an artistic movement centered on sending small-scale works through the postal service. It developed out of what eventually became Ray Johnson's New York Correspondance School and the Fluxus movements of the 1960s. It has since developed into a global, ongoing movement.
Characteristics
Media commonly used in mail art include postcards, paper, a collage of found or recycled images and objects, rubber stamps, artist-created stamps (called artistamps), and paint, but can also include music, sound art, poetry, or anything that can be put in an envelope and sent via post. Mail art is considered art once it is dispatched. Mail artists regularly call for thematic or topical mail art for use in (often unjuried) exhibition.
Mail artists appreciate interconnection with other artists. The art form promotes an egalitarian way of creating that frequently circumvents official art distribution and approval systems such as the art market, museums, and galleries. Mail artists rely on their alternative "outsider" network as the primary way of sharing their work, rather than being dependent on the ability to locate and secure exhibition space.
Mail art can be seen as anticipating the cyber communities founded on the Internet.
History
Artist Edward M. Plunkett has argued that communication-as-art-form is an ancient tradition; he posits (tongue in cheek) that mail art began when Cleopatra had herself delivered to Julius Caesar in a rolled-up carpet.
Ray Johnson, New York Correspondance School, and Fluxus The American artist Ray Johnson is considered to be the first mail artist. Johnson's experiments with art in the mail began in 1943, while the posting of instructions and soliciting of activity from his recipients began in the mid-1950s with the mailing of his "moticos", and thus provided mail art with a blueprint for the free exchange of art via post.Francesco Vincitorio, "Informalista o videoartista? Le tendenze artistiche dagli anni '40 ad oggi", L'Espresso n.44, 7 November 1982
The term "mail art" was coined in the 1960s. In 1962, Plunkett coined the term "New York Correspondence School" to refer to Johnson's activities; Johnson adopted this moniker but sometimes intentionally misspelled it as "correspondance". The deliberate misspelling was characteristic of the playful spirit of the Correspondance School and its actions.
Most of the Correspondance School members are fairly obscure, and the letters they sent, often featuring simple drawings or stickers, often instructed the recipient to perform some fairly simple action. Johnson's work consists primarily of letters, often with the addition of doodles and rubber stamped messages, which he mailed to friends and acquaintances. The Correspondance School was a network of individuals who were artists by virtue of their willingness to play along and appreciate Johnson's sense of humor. One example of the activities of the Correspondance School consisted in calling meetings of fan clubs, such as one devoted to the actress Anna May Wong. Many of Johnson's missives to his network featured a hand drawn version of what became a personal logo or alter-ego, a bunny head.
In a 1968 interview, Johnson explained that he found mailed correspondence interesting because of the limits it puts on the usual back and forth interaction and negotiation that comprises communication between individuals. Correspondence is "a way to convey a message or a kind of idea to someone which is not verbal; it is not a confrontation of two people. It's an object which is opened in privacy, probably, and the message is looked at ... You look at the object and, depending on your degree of interest, it very directly gets across to you what is there".
In 1970, Johnson and Marcia Tucker organized The New York Correspondence School Exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York, which was the first significant public exhibition of the mail art genre.
On April 5, 1973, Johnson declared the "death" of the New York Correspondance School in an unpublished letter to the Obituary Department of The New York Times and in copies that he circulated to his network. However, he continued to practice mail art even after this.
Although much of Johnson's work was initially given away, this has not prevented it from attaining a market value. Andy Warhol is quoted as saying he "would pay ten dollars for anything by Johnson."Stewart Home, The Assault On Culture, Aporia Press & Unpopular Books, London 1988
In his 1973 diagram showing the development and scope of Fluxus, George Maciunas included mail art among the activities pursued by the Fluxus artist Robert Filliou.Hendricks, Jon (1988). Fluxus Codex, New York: Harry N. Abrams, pp. 329–333. Filliou coined the term the "Eternal Network" that has become synonymous with mail art. Other Fluxus artists have been involved since the early 1960s in the creation of artist's postage stamps (Robert Watts, Stamp Dispenser, 1963), postcards (Ben Vautier, The Postman's Choice, 1965: a postcard with a different address on each side) and other works connected to the postal medium. Indeed, the mail art network counts many Fluxus members among its earliest participants. While Johnson did not consider himself directly as a member of the Fluxus school, his interests and attitudes were consistent with those of a number of Fluxus artists.
1970s and 1980s In the 1970s, the practice of mail art grew considerably, providing a cheap and flexible channel of expression for cultural outsiders. In Canada, the artist collectives Image Bank and General Idea have been heralded as instrumental to the early history of networking and social interaction as art. Correspondence Art was particularly widespread where state censorship prevented a free circulation of alternative ideas, as in certain countries behind the Iron Curtain or in South America.
The growth of a sizable mail art community, with friendships born out of personal correspondence and, increasingly, mutual visits, led in the 1980s to the organization of several festivals, meetings and conventions where networkers could meet, socialize, perform, exhibit and plan further collaborations. Among these events were the Inter Dada Festivals organized in California in the early 1980s and the Decentralized Mail Art Congress of 1986.
In 1984 curator Ronny Cohen organized an exhibition for the Franklin Furnace, New York, called "Mail Art Then and Now." The exhibition was to have an historical aspect as well as showing new mail art, and to mediate the two aspects Cohen edited the material sent to Franklin Furnace, breaking an unwritten but commonly accepted custom that all works submitted must be shown. The intent to edit, interpreted as censorship, resulted in a two-part panel discussion sponsored by Artists Talk on Art (organized by mail artist Carlo Pittore and moderated by art critic Robert C. Morgan) in February of that year, where Cohen and the mail artists were to debate the issues.
The night preceding the second panel on February 24, Carlo Pittore, John P. Jacob, Chuck Welch a.k.a. CrackerJack Kid, David Cole, and John Held Jr. crafted a statement asking Cohen to step down as the panel moderator. Welch delivered the statement whereby Cohen was asked to remain on the panel but forfeit her right to serve as moderator. Instead of remaining, Cohen chose to leave the event. After some give and take with both panelists and audience, Cohen left, saying, "Have fun, boys." Her entourage walked out with her during the ensuing melee.
The excluded works were ultimately added to the exhibition by the staff of the Franklin Furnace, but the events surrounding it and the panels revealed ideological rifts within the mail art community. Simultaneously fanning the flames and documenting the extent to which it was already dominated by a small, mostly male, coterie of artists, the discussions were transcribed and published by panelist John P. Jacob in his short-lived mail art zine PostHype. In a letter to panelist Mark Bloch, Ray Johnson (who was not a panelist) commented on the reverse-censorship and sexism of the event.
The rise of mail art meetings and congresses during the late 80s, and the articulation of various "isms" proclaimed by their founders as movements within mail art, were in part a response to fractures made visible by the events surrounding the Franklin Furnace exhibition. Even if "tourism" was proposed satirically as a new movement by , a Swiss mail artist who was one of the organizers of the 1986 Mail Art Congress, nevertheless mail art in its pure form would continue to function without the personal meeting between so-called networkers.
In the mid-1980s, Fricker and Bloch, in a bilingual "Open Letter To Everybody in the Network"Bloch, Mark and . "Phantastische Gebete Revisited" in Panmag International Magazine 6, ISSN 0738-4777, February 1984. p. 8. stated, "1) An important function of the exhibitions and other group projects in the network is: to open channels to other human beings. 2) After your exhibition is shown and the documentation sent, or after you have received such a documentation with a list of addresses, use the channels! 3) Create person-to-person correspondence... 4) You have your own unique energy which you can give to others through your work: visual audio, verbal, etc. 5) This energy is best used when it is exchanged for energy from another person with the same intentions. 6) the power of the network is in the quality of the direct correspondence, not the quantity." The manifesto concludes, "We have learned this from our own mistakes."Röder, Kornelia "H. R. Fricker, Mail Art and Social Networks", HR Fricker: Conquer the Living Rooms of the World, Kunstmuseum Thurgau, Warth, Switzerland: Edition Fink, 2014, p. 38.
1990s and the impact of the Internet era
In 1994, Dutch mail artist Ruud Janssen began a series of mail-interviews which became an influential contribution in the field of mail art.Ruud Janssen, Mail-Interviews, Tilburg 1994–2001
By the 1990s, mail art's peak in terms of global postal activities had been reached, and mail artists, aware of increasing postal rates, were beginning the gradual migration of collective art projects towards the web and new, cheaper forms of digital communication.Guy Bleus (Ed.), Re: The E-Mail-Art & Internet-Art Manifesto, in: E-Pêle-Mêle: Electronic Mail-Art Netzine, Vol.III, n° 1, T.A.C.-42.292, Hasselt, 1997. The Internet facilitated faster dissemination of mail art calls (invitations) and precipitated the involvement of newcomers.
Philosophy and norms of the mail artist network In spite of the many links and similarities between historical avant-garde, alternative art practices (visual poetry, copy art, artist's books) and mail art, one aspect that distinguishes the creative postal network from other artistic movements, schools, or groups (including Fluxus) is the way it disregards and circumvents the commercial art market. Any person with access to a mailbox can participate in the postal network and exchange free artworks, and each mail artist is free to decide how and when to answer (or not answer) a piece of incoming mail. Participants are invited by network members to take part in collective projects or unjuried exhibitions in which entries are not selected or judged. While contributions may be solicited around a particular theme, work to a required size, or sent in by a deadline, mail art generally operates within a spirit of "anything goes."