> contents / Network, Mail-Art and human rights in Latin-America / Edgardo Antonio Vigo /

Mail Art is a part of the Network and is defined as the artistic tendency which carries about its production by post services. These services may sometimes change the special intention of the author, depending on the means of communications. It is not a new way of expression, therefore it can not be included in any "ism".

What is new in it is the way of communication: the personal relation (including the feed-back which allows a real dialogue) in opposition to the one-way communication, offered by the massive means of communication; TV, radio, cinema, etc. In the same way, the main premises of Mail Art: the works are neither returned or sold, the discriminating "dictac" of the jury is excluded, the documentation of the events with the postal addresses of the participants in order to guarantee and enlarge the network of artistic, etc., are dispositions against consumerism and commercialism.
These premises have returned art to its social function, that is to say, they have returned the artistic production to its condition of communicating object, instead of being an object of commercial exchange.

Mail, as other artistic manifestations such as alternative press, cinema "Super 8", video art or video fiction, fax art, etc. , including street performances, not only settles against the masive means of (in)communication, but also actualizes the characteristics of vanguard artistic activity (if it is possible yet): the unexpected condition of the aesthetic information, the exchange of the combining patters of signs, the localization of signs in new structures of significant, the inauguration of the new processes of communication which may stop the natural entropy of languages and/or fossilized codes in already accepted forms, defied by the present canon, etc. , all the "items" which propitiate new relations and new apprehension of reality, opening the new patterns of behavior and a proper and active relation with the social environment and the participation of people in order to solve their own problems, trying to obtain better conditions of living so that they may have privilege either of creating or enjoying art.

Mail Art procedes from Conceptualism and at the beginning of the 60's adopted many of its proposals: privilige the idea or project rather than the object; emphasize the way reality is expressed rather than how it is expressed; the interest in the acting mechanisms of the representation rather than in those which promote it, that is, consider the production as an object itself and applied to the dismythification of the creation as a meta-language; give no importance to the "pathos", mystery and "aura" which surrounds the "miracle of art", giving back to society an instrument of interrelation.

It has been precisely that turning to its primitive condition of instrument of social communication, and not of simple object submitted to the regulations of market, handled by interests which are not of social concern, what has transformed Mail Art in the suitable vehicle for the transmission of revolutionary messages. In our countries, Mail Art has not been able to feek apart from the conditioning of our pecularities and traditions anfd it has generally become an instrument of struggle and denounce of abuse, in addition to the unlimited effort of our people to obtain better and more human conditions of life, within the frame of peace and social justice.

To understand this point you have nothing else to do but read the names of our expositions, in most cases dedicated to the struggle for human rights. Above all in those places where these rights have been repeatedly violated:

• 1rst. May: the artist is at the service of community
• Politic Missings in our America
• Nicaragua: native-land or death
• Chile will overcome
• The right to be born
• El Salvador: testimonial graphic
• No to the International Monetary Fund
• No to Apartheid, save Mandela
• We love you Paraguay
• For freedom in Latin America and in the Caribbean
• Africa: colonialism or freedom
• No more excuse

Undoubtedly the permanence of Mail Art for many years has weakened the strength of the primitive rebellion, when it quesioned the rest of the artistic disciplines, forcing them to recompose their structures taking in consideration its controversial proposal. Nowadays, although its process of institutionalization has greatly increased and it is almost integrated to the cultural frame of legitimation of the social status, it still keeps its power of calling and its ethical strength.

The emerging generations based on the critical reading of Mail Art and its use in both graphic and distributing means, that new times offer them, will know how to revive this international artistic instrument deeply involved in its time and what is human.

August, 1991
Edgardo Antonio Vigo