Networking Beyond Happy
Hour:
Using a Government System to Connect Artists
By Maureen Murphy
The term "networking" usually conjures up images of Kenneth Cole-clad
young professionals (read yuppies) juggling embossed business cards and
shiny cell phones while making important career connections over
martinis. However, networking in the mail art realm is considered a
collaborative effort; and when the concept first evolved in the 1960s
the U.S. Postal Service proved the most accessible and cheapest method
for artists to exchange ideas across the country.
The Fluxus group, a loose organization of artists distinguished by
their desire to consider anything as art, helped set the mail art
movement in motion by employing the postal system as a public means of
transmitting private art. Boundaries of the postal system were tested
when artists would attempt to send each other physically impractical
objects, including Ken Friedman's disassembled, unwrapped chairs. (USPS
restrictions weren't as strict in the 1960s as they are today.)
The use of postal communication as a mode of uniting artists was
expanded into a public broadcast when Fluxus artist Dick Higgins
created a newsletter sent to thousands of peers that assembled ideas of
art and featured contemporary works.
Since then mail art has evolved into a broad category; rubber stamps,
photocopies, postal stamp art, and decorative envelopes have found
themselves under this umbrella. And the concept is not limited in
geography to the U.S.; the Russian Futurists experimented with rubber
stamps in the first quarter of the century and mail art remains an
active movement in Japan. Mail art exhibitions have appeared in Italy,
Uruguay, Poland and the U.S.
The Joan Flasch Artist's Books collection, in SAIC's Flaxman Library,
owns a substantial part of artist Dorothy Patrick Harris' correspondences
collected during the 1980s and early '90s. Among the 360
artists' pieces represented in the collection, one finds envelopes
crafted out of brown paper bags, postcards, and magazine images sewn on
recycled envelopes.
Fernand Barbot's correspondences are often mailed in various types of
paper bags, many featuring rubber stamps of lunch bags with bug
antennae and legs inked on. The mailings include art clippings and
fliers of upcoming shows.
A self-described rubber stamp enthusiast, Susan Farm-Heumann stamps and
sews hearts onto her envelopes containing a baby announcement, family
pictures, and lengthy letters. A Judy Dennis piece involves a Chevy
Caprice Classic magazine ad fashioned into an envelope with photography
of a gallery inside.
Although mail art didn't at first address any conscious political
issues, the use of postal stamps guaranteed that someone's feathers
would be ruffled. The earliest known example of postal stamps created
for an art exhibition is Robert Watts' "FBI Most Wanted"
stamps.
Robert Watts' stamps also were present in the Fluxus Postal Kit,
printed in 1966 and 1967. The kits all included sheets of Watts' stamps
and the Official Fluxus Cancellation Stamp by Ken Friedman packaged in
a box with an image of a mailbox on the front.
The iconic quality of the postal stamp translated well into Andy
Warhol's series-oriented paintings. More literally, George Maciunas'
"Fluxpost" sheets featured, on perforated paper, portrait heads that
progress by age and whose denomination increases stamp by stamp. The
tactile, utilitarian properties of the artist stamp separate it from
the "high-art" Warhol paintings intended for a gallery.
Although artist stamps vary in political tone, they share physical
characteristics in that they are printed on a perforated adhesive
paper, possess a denomination and a country of origin, and are affixed
to an envelope.
When it comes to conceptual qualities, artist Patrick Marchand points
out in Timb! res d"artistes that "postage stamps are by nature
commemorative." It is this politically charged quality that artists
like the Crackerjack Kid (aka Chuck Welch) take advantage of. Welch"s
"Boycott Exxon" stamp sheet bearing a skull and crossbones (similar to
Michael Hernandez de Luna"s "Anthrax" stamp) with an Exxon ship leaking
oil into a dead-fish littered ocean took on a performative quality when
a former Exxon stockholder affixed the stamps to his cancelled stock
certificates and sent them to the venerable oil giant. The stamps were
also placed on gas pumps by the artist.
Of course, legality is an issue when an artist's stamp makes it through
the postal system. Pierre Restany writes in Timbres d"artistes: "When
[the postal office employee] is submerged by an abundant flood of mail,
he gets to the point where acute awareness is replaced by the
instinctive gesture. It was as a result of this that during the preview
to Yves Klein's Epoque Bleue exhibition in Paris in 1957 a whole group
of invitations stamped with a small blue square marked IKB arrived at
their destinations without being stamped with the official postage
seal."
Whether using faux postal stamps to test the fine line between fraud
and free speech or rubber stamps to give the sterile business envelope
a decorative flair, mail art is a reciprocal concept that goes beyond
the art as object aesthetic.
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