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> contents / Mail-Art in Latin-America / Clemente Padin / Definition "Mail art" or "postal art" are those artistic manifestations transported through the official postal services which, in a certain measure, can change the meaning set by the creator. In terms of the science of information we would say that the innovation of "postal art" is the novelty of the "channel" of transmission which with its own characteristics colors the message sent and changes it with its "noise." Believe what you will, it does not have to do with a new artistic current in a formal sense, so that it does not correspond to any determined "ism." Above all, however, the novelty resides in the attempt to communicate person to person through the mail, which is revolutionary because of the false communication or monologue of the mass media--television, radio, the cinema, etc. Mark Bloch, New York mail artist, says pointedly on a rubber stamp: "the direction is revolutionary." If to this we add the anti-commercial and anti-consumerist character that mail art has had since its beginnings, we shall see that we are in the presence of an artistic phenomenon of disruption. Antecedents The historical antecedents of this form of artistic communication, as with many manifestations of modern art, must be sought in the experiences of the Futurists and Dadaists, the work of Marcel Duchamp being the most important precedent. They were precisely the motivators of the neo-dadaist movement "Fluxus" (George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Ben Vautier, Joseph Beuys, Ken Friedman, Ray Johnson, Vostell, etc.), who brought them back at the beginning of the 1960s, and since this date the movement (the Network) has continued to expand all over the world, totaling today thousands and thousands of practitioners in all the countries of the world, including the socialist. In Latin America, the first manifestations of this movement date from 1969 as pursued by Liliana Porter and Luis Camnitzer in Argentina and Clemente Padin in Montevideo (publication of creative post cards destined for mail art). Also, the activity of Pedro Lyra in Brazil is important; in 1970 he published a postal art manifesto. In fact, postal interchanges were being realized from earlier through intense exchanges among Latin American alternative magazines. An important early landmark was U.S. artist Ray Johnson's creation of The New York Correspondence School of Art in 1962, giving some basic rules and a directory of possible correspondents. The name was thus given ("correspondence art"), and some minimal instructions, which still characterize the system: to respond, resend, or intervene in the message, as well as the growing network of those interested in this system of artistic communication. The internationalization and concurrent multiplication of participants could be situated towards the first years of the 1970s. This was preceded by the explosion of "urgent strategies" unleashed in the 1960s: conceptualism, process art, ecological art, arte povera, body art, performance, etc. This escalation of isms would have to exhaust itself soon, but also it left a mark on the "de-objectification" of art, in subtracting it as object-value for conspicuous consumption, at least as an important tendency. A certain confrontation with the commercialization and fossilization of the art work is worth mentioning. The preceding reflects the "debt" of mail art. It is certain that this broadened the horizons of the participation of producers in the artistic circuit. But at the same time it ascribed a full spectrum of formalisms and epigonisms--post-Dadaisms, post-conceptualisms, etc.--that, moreover, short-circuited one's eagerness to respond to all type of events and convocations. Finally, at mail art's early high-water mark, the proliferation and saturation of events and invitations now brought about a production that distorted the minimal elements of investigation and information, causing artists "to send whatever" everywhere, basically for the desire to appear in the registers and catalogues. Causes Among the causes that generate mail art and the proliferation of related media such as rubber stamps and apocryphal stamps are counted the impossibility of artists acceding to the structures of mass communication, owing to the extreme monopolization and absence of response that generates genuine dialogue. This situation has caused alternative communication media to proliferate, among which are counted (apart from mail art) videoart, the art of proposals, super-8 movies, the underground press, street actions, performances, etc., making evident the artists' rejection of those forms of communication and expression banalized by a lack of dialogue and creativity, interested only in the manipulation of awareness. Other causes are to be sought in the intrinsic characteristic of the artistic activity of the avant-garde: the unpredictability of aesthetic information, changing the combinatory models of signs already known by others, relocating the same signs in new structures and processes of communication that slow down the entropy itself of fossilized languages or codes, favoring new relations and new knowledge of reality, creating openings that permit new models of behavior and an adequate and active relation with the medium and obvious social participation to bring about better life conditions that make accessible to all the privilege of creating and enjoying art. Description 1) Mail art has to do with a long-distance dialogue between persons who certainly would never come to know each other or to exchange ideas. This break with parochialisms, with narrowness of view, permits one to get to know other circumstances and other problems. It nourishes understanding and solidarity. 2) Correlatively, mail art has to do with a political, ideological dialogue, because of the nature of the system. If it stimulates escapist outpourings, it always signifies a free practice, which favors the possibilities of self-expression, one of the most productive and critical potentials for the dominant system. 3) Mail art originates a process of artistic decentralization, when from each neighborhood or province creative messages can be sent out and be known by many or transmitted toward many places, in contrast to the correct "centers" of art implanted since the second post-war period, where a network of galleries, museums, critics, and "merchants" control a closed apparatus of marketing and "prestige" that lords it over universal art. We would add that mail art is inscribed within the intent of originating "new processes of artistic signification," whose ideological project is summed up as: new objects for new subjects. Mail art is created through sending postal pieces: Within the first group fit all reproductions of works, be they classical or modern, announcements of exhibitions, invitations, notices, poems, drawings, etc., where the degree of aesthetic information results from the art object sent and not the art medium employed. In the second group we can detect various tendencies or forms according to the emphasis of the mail artist, even when in his works one observes the preoccupation with integrating the characteristics of the medium into the mailings. Thus, for example:
The third group is less populous but more careful to achieve works of a high degree of unpredictability and, therefore, generating better aesthetic information owing to the medium employed, such as, for example:
As a consequence, mail art's means of material production recover artesanal practices combined with modern technological ingenuity, but under the control of the producers. That is, on acquitting oneself in terms foreign to the market and to official subsidy, these manifestations make use of economical materials and multiple reproduction: office offset, photocopy machine, instant photography, video and audio recording, mimeography, serigraphy and etching, collage and rubber stamps, etc. This has to do with the fact that many people, including social groups, can make things with the resources in their reach, which leads to an economic and formal democratization of production. First Mail Art Show in Latin America After the 1970s, exhibitions, magazines, and declarations regarding mail art have occurred rapidly in Latin America. We believe that the best way to demonstrate the richness and dynamisms of this movement is to let the principal protagonists speak for themselves. The following statement comes from the First Exhibition of Mail Art realized in Latin America (in October, 1974, Gallery U, Montevideo, Uruguay): "Frequently art comes from the cultural entropy that official
art generates and these superannuated artistic forms that sustain the
order of systems by virtue of reaffirming already known things or
"those already given in art," changing the function of the media
of communication that are changing the information that they transmit,
taking advantage of the properties of the "channel" for the
transmission of their own messages: this is the case with post cards that
have been converted from a commercial object. . .into a principal means of
artistic broadcast thanks to the rapidity and amplitude of their
communication to whatever point, to the ease of their fabrication,
storage, and consumption, and above all to their unpublished expressive
possibilities, whether using them as a simple support for verbal, iconic,
communication, etc., or as artistic objects in themselves, creating their
own language. The following excerpt of the article "Mail Art, New Form of Expression," by the artists Horacio Zabala and Edgardo-Antonio Vigo, appeared in the Argentinean magazine Argentinean Poets, no. 370 (September-October, 1975): "Men communicate among themselves exchanging messages, utilizing
distinct signals with different meanings. Man, on saying "his
word," says it for other men. It is not our intent to enter into this
ample and complex theme but to analyze how two systems of communication
interact with delimited functions and in distinct spheres. The sending of
a letter through the mail implies the development of a message, and it is
an act of communication between two people. The postal system intervenes,
making this possible over distance: it connects a transmitter with a
receiver. The artist realizes his work in the same way that man "says
his word." In art we find also a transmitter and a receiver,
necessary in all acts of communication. Just as the artist, on expressing
himself does so seeking multiple channels, the artist channels his
creativity through multiple forms. Both organize a language and continue
their creation in search of new codes. An example of this is offered by
the visual artist who works in the area of research, who uses the media of
communication "conventionally not artistic," altering their
function. And proof of this is the synthesis that this new form of
expression has arrived at, MAIL ART. Here there exists a confluence of two
communication systems: the artist uses the mail to spread his message, to
arrive at the recipient of his work. "The elementary act of communication implies the existence of a
transmitter who elaborates a message with signs taken from a repertory
(code), through a channel through which the message is transported through
space and time, and a receiver, who receives the message and deciphers it
(decodes it) with the help of signs that he has stored in his own
repertory. The transmitter can be an individual, a group, or a diffuse and
distant organism. For communication to exist it is necessary that the
transmitter-channel-receiver- repertory chain function correctly at all
its points. This presupposes, in the first place, that the transmitter and
receiver speak the same language that they have in common, at least
partially, the same repertory. In this complex chain of thought is found
mail art as an artistic vehicle constituted by one or more supports, with
which it involves the change of set messages with implications of
linguistic and semantic order. In Mexico this system of artistic communication remains almost unknown. Its best known precursors have been Felipe Ehrenberg and Pedro Friedeberg, but in fact it wasn't until 1979 that the first exhibitions dedicated expressly to mail art took place, first with the "Expocorreográfica" and the "First International Show of Post Cards" of Aarón Flores, followed in November of that year by the exhibition "Mail Art Mexico," organized by Sebastián in the Carrillo Gil Museum. During the last four decades new practitioners emerged on the domestic scene, such as Manuel Marín and his project Aquí; the groups and magazines Marça;ão, Algo pasa and Colectivo-3, the latter of which has created the collective poem "Revolution," and during the months of September to November of 1984, a marathon of "Utopias Realizable by Mail Art" under the theme "1984 in 1984: What Future Are We Looking For?" Throughout 1982 some of these groups and individuals were brought together to analyze and put forth actions that would give a more circumscribed meaning, including the political, to mail art. The promoting commission of Solidarte was commissioned--Mail Art/Mexico of International Solidarity--which sent out a declaration and a communiqué to the group of mail artists on the international scene, obtaining a satisfactory response. This collective project represented an important contribution of Mexico to the great network of mail art, in the fight for disarmament, the liberation of peoples, and world peace. On the occasion of the First Biennial of Havana, the Solidarte group obtained an honorable mention for their project "Political Disappeareds of our America," testifying thus to the potential for international solidarity and artistic communication of which the world circuit of mail art is a vehicle and driving force.
Copyright © by Clemente Padin Clemente Padin - C. Correo Central 1211, 11000 Montevideo, Uruguay. SIGNOGRAPHIC & TEXTS: http://www.concentric.net/~Lndb/padin/lcppro.htm |
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