> contents / Vittore Baroni - Italy / interview by Sztuka Fabryka (2000) /

1. How and when did you become involved in Mail-Art?

In 1977 I saw in a issue of Flash Art magazine a full page ad with this funny old man sitting on a bizarre bicycle, offering his art catalogues as a gift to anyone who was interested. I was intrigued enough by the ad to write to this artist, Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, and I was even more intrigued by his publications ("home exhibitions" he called them) that I soon received in the mail: one of these in particular, titled "Nemo Propheta in Patria", contained correspondence from international artists sent as an homage to Cavellini's "self-historification". There I got to know about the existence of "mail art" and there, copying the return addresses of some letters and envelopes included in the booklet, I picked up my very first mail art contacts (Anna Banana, Bill Gaglione, Buster Cleveland, Jerry Dreva, Michael Scott, Paul Carter, Genesis P-Orridge, etc). Most of them replied to my rather naive early mailings, and I immediately bought from Anna Banana some back-issues of Vile magazine, where I found many other addresses of cool "mail artists", so I was hooked... and after some 24 years, I'm still here involved in all kinds of postal exchanges and projects.

2. Can you give us a short C.V. of your Mail-Art activities from the beginning till now?

Uh, that would make quite a long (and boring) list! In almost a quarter of a century I have organized several projects every year, so instead of listing all 100-200 shows and publications (I don't keep a complete list myself) I'll just mention those that first come to my mind, probably the most important for me. The first mail art show is hard to forget, in my case it was "Political Satire:Post Scriptum" in 1979, for the town library of Forte dei Marmi, the town where I lived then, as part of a big annual "Political Satire Prize" that is still going strong today. The catalogue of the show, that I printed in 500 copies and mailed out to ca. 300 participants with the help of the prize organization, was also issue n. 23 of Commonpress, a mail art magazine started by Pawel Petasz in Poland, with rotating directorship. Another early project I have fond memories of is the "Badge Show" of 1980, for which I covered a white dress with badges sent by international artists and did a "walking performance" wearing this costume-exhibition. Then many other small and big exhibitions followed, some of them organized in partnership with Piermario Ciani (like the big artistamps show "Alternative Philately" in 1989), leading to the big retrospective show of avantgarde movements of the XX century "Sentieri Interrotti/Vanished Paths" held in the Summer 2000 at the town Art Museum of Bassano del Grappa, Italy, where I curated a section of Mail Art (next to sections on Fluxus, Gutai, Visual Poetry, etc.). I see this big show linking together the mail art phenomenon with other art "tribes", provocateurs and eccentrics of the century that just ended as a peak of my involvement in mail art as a practitioner and/or historian. In so many years of activity I did relatively very few one-man-shows, and only when specifically asked, as I prefer to work in a "networking" perspective rather than individually. Your own personality is always reflected by the way you prepare a catalogue or install an exhibition anyway.
Apart from public exhibitions and performances, I also did a LOT of private, "postal only" projects. Among these, the most consistent and long-lived are the Trax international group (that existed from 1981 to 1987 and produced several publications and recordings: magazines, art-boxes, cassettes, vinyl records, etc.), and Arte Postale! magazine, started in 1978 and still being published sporadically (just out is issue n.85), a "home made" publication I send out to my network of correspondents (circulation varies from 100 to 500 copies). Another time consuming project I started in 1996 with my friend Piermario Ciani is AAA Editions, a small publishing firm that has released some 25 books in five years: this is not a mail art project, but through AAA we had the chance to document the postal art network through books like my own guide to correspondence art "Arte Postale", John Held Jr.'s "Rubber Stamp Art" and James W. Felter's "Artistamps".
All this said, I cannot suppress the feeling I always maintained that the most TRUE mail art experience happens in the direct, subterranean, invisible, private and intimate exchange and interaction with other individuals, rather than in collective projects involving hundreds of contacts and aimed at public presentation. I see mail art shows as a sort of "secondary" activity, that in my case must always follow an intense "primary" activity of intense, bizarre, illuminating interaction with other networkers on a ONE TO ONE basis, open-hearted and soul to soul. When this intimacy and community feeling is lost in the mechanical repetition of a invite-show-documentation routine, where works are circulated and reproduced without any personal message or feeling attached, I feel the mail art experience loses a lot of its value and attractiveness.

3. What are your specific activities within Mail-Art?

I do not have a routine procedure, so really my approach has changed a lot through the years and every time a different mailing or invite will stimulate a different kind of response. Also, I never specialized in a single "branch" of mail art (rubber stamps, artistamps, postcards, postal poems, etc.) but rather tried to experience ALL the different facets by adopting different media at different times, without a strict plan to follow. This said, I am not much gifted in hand drawing, so I always prefeared to work with words (I also work professionally as a rock journalist), photographs and collages rather than painting and drawing. I guess my "typical" mail art work is then a "mixed media" piece, partly visual poetry, partly collage, partly conceptual wordplay, partly pure postal oddity.

4. Why do you do Mail-Art?

Yep, you got me cornered. Why still do mail art? After falling into a heavy networking mode for almost 25 years, and with the Internet so much cheaper to keep in touch with the world, it would be the right time for me to retire from snail mail. I guess I still get some sort of kicks out of it. The real thing: opening the mail box in the morning to see what's inside, maybe a nice postcard or stamps-sheet, maybe an interesting magazine. It's the collector's instinct at work. The server is never down (unless there is a postal strike). No, not only that. Without mail art I'd feel many invisible threads being severed, like losing so many "family ties" at once. It's probably just a fantasy, most correspondents maybe do not care a dried fig about community spirit and that sort of sugary goody-goody feelings. And beware, I also have to take my small dose of shit by living in the postal net: for publishing books about mail art and (Net God forbids!) even trying to sell them to networkers; for offering to print artistamps and postcards in exchange for bloody money (am I such a stupid DJ? Mail art and money do not remix!); for being (unwillingly) a mail art "guru" (been around far too long: so shut up you bald old bore!). Yes I agree I should stop, definitely. I should have stopped long ago. But I am addicted, see. My metabolism won't function if I don't lick a stamp a day. So you'll have to put up with me for yet a little while...

5. Seems that it feels hard to be a famous Mail-Artists after all your years of networking. How do people write to you or react on your mail? What do you think about this, see as a famous Mail-artist?

Well, honestly I never tried to be a "famous" mail artist, I simply enjoy networking in all its forms, I try to write my name in small letters when I do projects etc., I am modest in life and so I am in art activities, but it's inevitable that after 25 years of my name ricocheting around in the network I have come to be seen by some as a mail art "guru" or "maitre a penser" (very un-mailartish concepts), while I tend to see myself just as a "veteran", on the same level of any other new or old networker (of course). Since horizontality ("all voice counts", "all voices are equal") is the very core of the mail art experience, I see it as rather foolish to reason in terms of mail art stardom (I have a rubberstamps that says "every mail artist is a star"). But sometimes, not too often luckily, I get the impression that some (young) networkers bear some resentment for the fact that my name appears in too many catalogues, etc. I can count on the fingers of one hand the openly "negative mail" I have received on this matter through the years, and it would not be fair to name names here, but yet it hurts me because I know that ego-boasting is not the spirit that guides my activities in the network. Oh, well... on the other hand, we also get the "positive" letters!

6. Do you get some negative reactions that you publish books about Mail-Art?

It started even before AAA Editions. Whenever you publish a magazine, book, etc. and, besides trading it in the network, you also try to sell copies to cover some of the costs, you are bound to receive some enraged letter from someone explaining you that "mail art and money do not mix". It usually comes from someone who has never tried to publish and distribute something at his/her own expense. It happened with me since I offered copies of Arte Postale! magazine for sale to those interested in it who had nothing to send as a trade, it got even worse with the TRAX cassettes, records and audiovisual publications in the 80es. So I was not surprised when it happened again with the few AAA books dealing with mail art (3 over 26 we published). I just don't understand some people's reasoning. Books do not grow on trees, we spend thousands of dollars every time we print one, and we need to cover at least the costs to go on publishing. We always send free copies of the books to those who have even a tiny illustration reproduced in it, we sent out even 100 free copies of 800 published, something that no other small publisher I know of cares to do. And yet, we seldom get a simple note of thanks from people who receive a book with their work in it: they probably think we are millionaires getting rich on these books, and of course nothing could be more removed from truth. But that's life, and I love to proceed onwards with new projects. A FUN-box will be published in February. The AAA Editions web site is under construction. A book on artist's postcards by Enrico Sturani will appear before the summer. Other projects will follow (and you know John Lennon's answer: "where there is a lot of love for something, there is also hate").

7. What happens with the Mail-Art you receive? Do you have a Mail-Art archive?

Ideally I'd like to keep my E.O.N. (Ethereal Open Network) archive in order, but I never have enough time to work on filing the correspondence, never mind attempting any kind of written classification, so the materials are in a state of constant "flux". I try at least to separate the printed documents from the original correspondence, keeping all the catalogues in one library case, arranged for nationality, and the same happens with magazines and reference books (books about mail art, bibliographies, monographies, address-books, etc.).

Regular correspondents have a personal paper bag or cardboard file(s) with their name, alphabetically ordered per nation, while other mixed correspondence is arranged for nationality in large boxes. But I have at least 20 big cardboard boxes of correspondence that is waiting to be filed (I am approximately ten years behind!), also the archive gets trashed a lot when I research materials for a book (like the AAA books on artistamps, rubberstamps, etc.), I need to select, extract, move around, so I have now a wide selection of artistamps and rubberstamps materials separated from the rest of the archive, also most postcards are kept in separate boxes. It's a disorderly kind of order where you need a lot of luck to find a certain item, but I can't do more. Maybe, if I stop starting new projects and answering the incoming mail, I'll find the time to put the archive into shape...