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Dodo not Dada
Summer reflections on a shiny mailbox

So, is mail art still alive or (almost) extinct? Though I never stopped swimming in the correspondence flow since I first entered the postal network way back in the late Seventies, this question is becoming more and more difficult to answer. The mail art community, if there ever was one, from my observation point seems to be receding into utter obscurity or melting into (Inter)net-art, which is a wonderful but rather different kind of experience. Yes, there are still mail art shows and "festivals" being organized around the (Western) world, but the medium has become a bit stale and tired, the original feeling of excitement and discovery is long gone (and this is understandable for a phenomenon that spans four decades, no small feat in itself!) but it has not been replaced by the wisdom and maturity that old age usually brings forth. I perceive a forced mood of "eternal youth" for a medium that has had its days. The very symbols of correspondence (artists' postage stamps, rubber stamps, postcards, envelopes, etc.) are being gradually abandoned, they are not the main focus of postal activities anymore, or they have become rare practices pursued by a dwindling number of veterans. Artists' Trading Cards might be a cute new twist to the old game, but it never really spread out and conceptually I find it a bit weak, missing a precise link with the postal medium (and art history). Mail art lost a centre of gravity, its identity fragmented into a myriad of individual projects, and not many seem to care much anymore about a communal "philosophy". Old mail artists die - too many to mention, r.i.p. - and the newcomers are often unaware of mail art's tradition (yet there are books available to be read, just check Google or Amazon!), so the dream of a global and peaceful community of artists sharing experiences is fading away into underground myth and urban legends. Something you will tell to your grandchildren, and they will smile and shake their heads in disbelief…

I find rather telling the fact that one of the few "signs of networking life" - messages that are not aimed at individuals but rather addressed to the entire circuit of postal artists - that I noticed in the past few months is a series of loosely connected mailings (from Lumb, Bates, Brignull and others) comparing mail art to the Dodo, the notorious exotic bird that has come to represent the endangered animal species par excellence. So I am not the only pessimist networker feeling the ground shake under his feet. Things have changed a great deal in the almost thirty years I spent inside (and outside) the postal net: riding on the crest of the new wave/punk energy in the Seventies, but still maintaining the positive ideals of the Hippie era, resisting the boredom of the Eighties and Nineties clinging to the collectivist Utopia of a free-for-all and open trading system, entering the new Millennium to find out that, after all, maybe those cynical punks were right, this is a "no future" situation for the planet. Evil forces prevail, the model for global cooperation that mail art so well exemplified proved inapplicable to the big numbers. Maybe all the money we dumped in postage stamps and photocopies would have been better invested in some charity project, maybe a little voluntary social work would have been less wasted time. But just see what millions of people reunited by music with the "Live8" event has been able to obtain by the powers that rule the Earth: next to nothing. Contemporary popular culture has touched an unprecedented low, the new generations have got used to a diet of heartless blockbusters and mindless bestsellers. Mail art is not the only endangered Dodo around.

The Dodo was a mild bird with a hooked beak and a gentle spirit. When the Portuguese sailors first discovered the friendly bird on the shores of the island of Mauritius in the year 1598, they called it "dodo" ("simpleton") mistaking his child-like innocence and lack of fear as stupidity. Being also unable to fly, the bird was easily killed by men and by other new animals introduced in its environment, like dogs and pigs. By the year 1681, the Dodo had been completely wiped out from the face of the planet. We do not even have a complete skeleton, so the bird only lives today through the rare descriptions of the time and the pictures of artists, such as the drawing made by Sir John Tenniel for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Maybe the same will happen to mail art in a near future, when postage rates will have become even more expensive: artistamps and such ephemera will survive only in the description and catalogues of a few devoted bibliographers and scholars. Mail art is not only endangered by sky-rocketing postage rates though, I think the most perilous risk factors are not those that come from outside but those that spring from its own ranks. I notice a widespread lack of interest in mail art history (taking at face value Ray Johnson's pun "mail art has no history, only a present" may have fatal consequences!), so there is a consequent scarcity of magazines or forums for a collective debate on the relevant issues related to networking (there are a few newsgroups on the Internet, I peeped into them, but it is mostly small talk and unrelated projects). Ultimately, mail art is folding on itself for the general inability to come up with new networking concepts, different from the worn-out "theme show" format, the ageing "assembling" zine, the never ending chain-letter-like add-to-and-pass-on formula. I am not just whining and preaching, I try to do my bit: with the participation to the Funtastic United Network concept (SUN of FUN convention organized by Piermario Ciani coming up in early September), with the When the Saints show of alternative "holy images" (the second "station" opening in Pisa at the end of September), with the planned Luther Blissett multiple name decennial commemoractive dvd, just to mention three recent projects in progress, I try to take networking tactics into new grounds. The doomed AAA book on artists' postcards may finally see the light one of these days, and there are other publications placing mail art in a historical perspective bubbling to be published soon (by John Held Jr., Mark Bloch and others). I may be one of the "last dodos", but I will not be crushed down so easily and without reaction. Wanna join the fight?
Vittore Baroni @ E.O.N. - July 2005

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