Mail Art

One assault on the gallerisation and capitalist nature of creativity in art is Mail Art networking. Mail Art is simply where individuals send letters or graphics in varying formats through the postal system to other people.

There are two important to Mail Art: the sending of the material and the content of the work. Mail Art is communication art and, as such, assaults alienation. It is the distance which unites the mail artists, giving confidence to the isolated by giving them time to consider responses. Mail Art creates a consciousness of collaboration and participation. Mail Art is teamwork.

The postal artist is, or should be, aware of their place in what is an international network of Mail Art. Mail Art is internationalist – it crosses national, geographical and cultural borders.

An important feature of Mail Art is that the items exchanged generally have no monetary value and so cannot be considered as art in the accepted capitalist sense.

Of course, some work may be later reified as a commodity or given a monetary value e.g. Andy Warhol once said that he would pay 10 dollars for anything by Ray Johnson. Organised Mail Art exhibitions in galleries should be bombed.

Mail artist should not have to justify themselves within the context of the art world, although there will always be pressure for them to do so. Mail Art is what it is, nothing else. There is no philosophy of Mail Art – it is not an art form, but a method of communication.

Mail Art’s aims are “friendship, individualism, democracy, peace, diversification, sister/brotherhood, pluralism, tolerance, co-operation, acculturation, freedom, and liberation, decentralisation, no leadership (horizontal instead of vertical communication) and recipricol relationships”.

Some artists, e.g the Fluxists,dreamed up ways of subverting the postal system by involving postal workers, notably Ben Vaultier’s postcard “The Postman’s Choice” which had several addresses on it and it was left up to the postal system to decide which of the addresses to send it to. Other options include sending abusive/weird mail to people in high office, apparently sent from their business rival. A number of political campaigns have been waged by mail, such as prisoner support and ecological protests. I support that letter bombs are Mail Art, though they are a bit indiscriminate for a liberal like me!

Rubber stamps and fake certificates have often been used in Mail Art e.g. Processed World’s Certified Bad Attitude, but the network has never taken on a distinct style. Mail Art seems to proliferate with the development of Performance Art and the increased numbers of art school students, very few of whom become fine artists. Contact lists begann to appear in the 1970s. The main attraction is that Mail Art is personal, on a one-to-one basis, and is very cheap.

There have been a number of well-known mail artists such as Anna Banana and Pauline Smith’s “Adolf Hitler Fan Club”. Mail Art has extended to sexuality/sado masochist areas with Cosey Fanni Tutti, Genesis P. Orridge and Gerry Dreva (who sent works to his friends with the pages stuck together with semen). But these people are only taken seriously because they too Mail Art seriously (and have had a number of run-ins with the police).

The democratic nature of Mail Art puts it completely apart from the elitist art world; the sheer number of people involved prevent it from becoming part of High Art, which is just fine. The potential for Mail Art has not yet been fulfilled by a long chalk; it is only restricted by our imagination. Anyone who wants to send AntiClockWise mail is welcome – the more obscene and bizarre the better!

AntiClockWise Issue 3