At about the same time as I joined the Brixton
Artist's Collective I also began taking an active part in Mail Art.
"Mail art
shows (grew) from five in 1971 to seventy five in 1979. By 1983, this number
had exploded to one hundred and eighty-seven." (John Held Jr.1986)[1]
The 'International Postal
Art Network' became a worldwide mass movement by the early to mid-eighties.
Thousands of people from all over the world were sending each other artworks of
all kinds through the post. You could ignore what you found dull and reply in
kind to what you found exciting. Those who attempted to reply to everything
faced an escalating torrent of art through their letterbox.
This worldwide net had
inherited an elegant code about mailart projects, which quickly found a
consensus with the majority of 'mailartists', if only on the basis of its
self-evident utility. This code, which seems to have been developed by artists
in the early 1970's[2], had two
parts:
First, in stark contrast to
the conventional art world, all work is accepted without fees and no work is
returned.
Second, all participants
should receive documentation, the minimum form of which was a list of
participants. So apart from the pleasure of waking up to a doormat full of
unpredictable artworks, you could occasionally be surprised by some lavish
documentation featuring your own work.
With the code in place all
that you needed to do was announce a theme and you could run your own show. For
the many artists struggling with the double bind of poverty and obscurity this
was an energising and even liberating process.
It was open access, everyone
could participate, and there were no rejections. It could also be very cheap
which meant that wealth was not a qualification.
Looking back the ultra
democracy of the movement preceded and was probably a part of the great
democratic uprisings in Eastern Europe. Not that many projects were overtly
political but for people in the Eastern bloc countries such as Poland easy
access to an international forum was a powerful antidote to a debilitating
marginalisation and internal state censorship. I know of at least one
mailartist who became part of the new democratic Polish government after 1989.
Effective democracy depends
on an inclusive network of active communications. Ideas moved swiftly through
the postal art network engaging hundreds in a matter of weeks. This
international grass-root discourse may be considered one of its main strengths,
whether as model practice or symbol.
I started doing mail art in
1984. One of my first correspondents had started a project which has continued
unabated until the present. This is Ryosuke Cohen's 'Brain Cell'. To my mind it
represents the highest ideals of the global network. Cohen had a technique,
which was unknown in Europe, for printing A3 posters in multi-colours. The way
it works is that you send him a rubber stamp (mail artists were great rubber
stamp enthusiasts), or a logo, or a fragment of imagery. He takes this and
reproduces it along with forty or fifty other images in a range of bright
colours, along with stickers, rubber stamps and whatever gets sent to him. He
has kept this up from 1984 to the present day producing many hundreds of
posters which together comprise a remarkable image of the 'eternal network'.
Each 'cell' of our 'global brain' is represented with each autonomous artist's
chosen image.[3]
The IPAN was open to anyone
who wanted to communicate in any form. Rather than ending up lost in the crowd
it was amazing how quickly the process sifted out useful soul-mates. And this
was perhaps the greatest achievement of the net - putting you in touch with
people that you could have the most satisfying artistic discourse with. It
seemed to do this very efficiently, probably better that a computer
matchmaker... Many of the people I met through this media are now lifelong
friends. Some have even moved into the area I live in. Most of them are not now
doing mailart although they are still doing collective or network projects. The
process seems to have a half-life. After a few years of frenetic activity the
sound of the letterbox clattering can become more of a burden than a pleasure.
It is easy to throw away junk mail but much harder to bin someone's precious
artwork.
Although we often worked
alone in our bed-sits or squats the projects and shows were in essence
collective. Because most of the work was inevitably small in scale the effect
of a show was very much a sum of its parts, a collectivist and often motley
aesthetic. But aesthetics were just one aspect of this activity and as I have
said the relations formed through the interactions were probably more
compelling. In the late Eighties people started meeting in person. The
De-centralised World Mail Art Congresses first met in 1986 chalking up 80
meetings in 25 countries with the participation of over 500 artists.
There was excitement about
the potential of this full-on contact but its lasting result seemed to be an
extension of friendship rather than the new art movement which some expected.
In fact by the mid-nineties this interpersonal contact, which had its artistic
dimension in an obsession with 'body prints', was overtaken by its antithesis:
the highly disembodied and dematerialised Internet. Arguably no art movement as
focused and sensuous as mailart has yet occurred on the Internet. Although the
'web' is similarly 'open access' the threshold cost of participation is much
higher than the cost of a few stamps and still excludes many of the kinds of
artists who flourished due in part to the low cost of mailart.
Mail
art probably shaped destinies at least as much as most art colleges. The truly
remarkable thing about mail art was not that artists were using the postal
system, a practice which was popular from the 1960's if not before, but that
a massive network of people were having a ludic discourse on an international
scale without the mediation of the institutions and gate keepers which usually
manage culture.
[4]
Mailart was highly anti-commodity as a process. No ownership
was retained, you gave your art away, hoping to get worthwhile work in return.
So, on an economic or aesthetic level it was not Art in the usual sense. It
did however, realise important human needs to give and perhaps receive, to
call and await a response.
[1] Books sources include: John
Held Jr. International Artists Cooperation: Mail Art Shows, 1979 - 1985. (Dallas Public Library,
Texas, 1986) John Held Jr is one of the most active archivists of mail art.
Also, Geza Perneczky's The Magazine Network: the trends of alternative art
in the light of their periodicals, 1968 - 1988 (Edition Soft Geometry,
Koln, 1993).
[2] 'Mail Art' a show by
Jean-Marc Poinsot in Paris, 1971 & 'Fluxshoe' curated by David Mayor in
England, 1972.
[3] 'BRAIN CELL', Ryosuke Cohen,
3-76-1-A-613, Yagumkitacho, Moriguchi City, Osaka 570, Japan.
[4] There are however
collections of mail art in formal institutions. The National Art Library at the
V&A Museum and the Tate Gallery Library both contain collections of mailart
and related documentation.