|
|
||||
|
/ home / art / archive / event / encyclopaedia / shop / about us / contact / |
||||
|
|
||||
|
|
> encyclopaedia / |
|||
|
|
|||
|
> Add to / |
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z |
|||
|
"Add to" is a much used artistic medium within the Mail-Art network, which highlights the philosophy of creating an artwork in a collective process through communication. Also "add and send on", "alter and pass on" or "add and return to" are used to name this artistic process. The collective process starts when an artist send his/her correspondent an incomplete artwork with the instructions to add his/her creativity and to pass it on to another artist or to return it. In an "add and return to" the receiver is asked to add his/her creativity and to return it to the sender. The process of adding to and passing on has various variations. A variation much used is, when the receiver is asked to pass on the artwork but to send a copy to the artist who started the chain, to have a view upon the changing artwork. The artist Ray Johnson (U.S.A.) has not only been acknowledged for starting the Mail-Art movement, but also for the "add and pass on" concept. He did not asked to return the unfinished artwork but to pass it on to another participant in the network. By doing this he created and introduced artists into the first networks of artistic collaboration through correspondence. These mails seems to begin in 1961, but did not started to weave a network until July 1962, which emerged only because of the relation of paper objects from one person to another.
Later the artistic possibilities which an "add to" offers has been picked up and explored by several Mail-artists in long running projects. One of the early projects was from Plinio Mesciulam, a Turkish artist living in Italy. For his artistic activities he used the name 'Mohammed Center of Restricted Communication' (Centro di Communicazione Ristratta). Mesciulam sended out blank letterheads with the message for the receiver to create an image and return it to the 'Mohammed Center' with a list of twelve names and addresses. Mesciulam would then colour photocopy the mailing, assign a unit number, and distribute it to the twelve designated receivers. A complete documentation of the Mohammed project is available for study at the 'Jean Brown Collection' of the 'Getty Center for the Arts and Humanities' (Los Angeles, U.S.A.). Another long running kind of "add to" project was the 'Memo(random)/Memo(ry)' project from Robin Crozier (England). In this project he did send to his correspondents an A4-size blank paper with a hand-written heading containing the question "What do you remember about" followed by a past date. His correspondent was asked to write down or express in an artwork what he/she remembered of that date, and return the sheet to Crozier. He made a copy of the completed sheet and passed it on, each contributor received in such way the completed sheet of another artist. This project started in February 1983 and lasted till his death in December 2001. Earlier in 1980 Pawel Petasz (Poland) started with a project that was inspired by Herman Hesse Glass Beads Game. A game for which a synthesis of aesthetics and scientific arts such as mathematics, music, logic, and philosophy is needed. Petasz sended out a numbered piece of bristol paper (32 by 23 cm) folded in four as an envelope with the open sides sewed, which made it more difficult for control by censors. Unfolded in landscape size there was printed in the middle of the upper half a large instruction explaining the project "Fall Ortodox, Mail Art, reorganise the ingenuity of assembled below materials into promising junk mail message to Pawel Petasz . . .". The philosophy behind the project was that the artwork was no "original" but a "form" collecting traces of subsequent interventions and circulation, according to complicated thematic or personal patterns. The inside became soon covered with messy collages and letters, while outside folds bore subsequent addresses, stamps and cancellations. The encouragement was to keep the "original" and replace it with a copy, an idea which fits only the digital media as it was originally designed with computer support in mind. Yet, to which he had no access at that time. Therefore Petasz started around the end of 2002 to send out CD-ROM's to which artists can add their data to a copy and keep the original. So that each time it is passed on, new data is added. For his 'Rubberstamp Archive', Ruud Janssen (the Netherlands) have been sending out from 1983 on more then 23000 single sheets. In his case the "add to"-sheets did not had the purpose to start an artistic process, but to collect prints of rubberstamps or carved stamps used by Mail-Artists. In the beginning of the project artists was asked just to print on the sheets and return it. At the end of the project a single sheet had the size of 10.5 by 21 cm, with space for the artist to add a print of a stamp. The contributor was asked to write his/her address in a numbered list on the top and to send it to another artist. When five artists have added their stamps to the sheet, the last one was asked to return it to Janssen. By the time when the project was closed, in the year 2000, the 'Rubberstamp Archive' contained thousands of sheets and was well documented in several publications. By the beginning of the twenty first century there is only one long running "add to" project active and this is the BXA project of Bruno Capatti (Italy), circulating in the Mail-Art network from 1990. It is a classic "add and pass on" project, Mail-artists can alter their artwork on an A4 sheet with an illustration of Capatti's face inside a photo negative. The original or a copy can be passed on or returned to Capatti, who collect the artworks and report the progress of the project in his Bnetzine. Sometimes a project turn spontaneously into an "add and pass on" project such as the 'Fluxus bucks' from Ex Posto Facto (U.S.A.). In 1994 she started to make artistic money and send it out into the Mail-Art network. She thought that it would be a little collaboration, an artist decorates a buck and returns it. Yet, after a while, artists altered the bucks and started to send it on to other networkers. Even some made their own 'Fluxus bucks' for altering or just as plain artwork. Beside long running projects far more Mail-artists has send out single "add to" xeroxes or artworks in small projects or in single situations. Even "add to" booklets have circulated through the network. Not every receiver of an "add to" participate to the collective process, so that mostly the chain gets broken when it ends up in an archive. By the end of the nineties the artistic medium was also performed through e-mail by means of attachments to add to and return. Related Topics: References: Date last update: 3 June 2003 |
||||
|
|
|
|||
