> contents / John Held Jr. - U.S.A. / interview by Sztuka Fabryka (2000) /

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

Stamp from John held Jr.

(From the Tam Interview-Part One) My first trip to Europe was in 1975. I went to France, Italy, Greece, Austria, Germany, and Holland. In Amsterdam, I came across a rubber stamp store by chance. They sold sets of visual rubber stamps (flowers, animals, fairy tales). I bought several, and talked to the director, Mr. Van der Plaats, about his business. When I returned to New York, I began to use them in my artwork (I was then doing pen and ink work). I never heard of artists using rubber stamps in the context of fine art before. I thought I had discovered a new art medium. But as a professional librarian, I began to research if this was true or not.

One day in the New York Times newspaper I saw an article about the Bizarro Rubber Stamp Company. They published a catalog of visual rubber stamps. I wrote to the director, Kenn Spicer, and he informed me that there was an underground art form called mail art, and that they used rubber stamps to decorate envelopes. He gave me the names of two New York artists who were involved in this work: Ray Johnson and Edward Plunkett. Ray Johnson had started this artform in the fifties as a way of distributing his pop art imagery. Ed Plunkett gave a name to Johnson's activities in 1962: The New York Correspondence School of Art. Plunkett sent me dadaesque "free tickets" that were rubber stamped with odd names and images. Johnson sent photocopied works, which he encouraged me to "add and send to" persons unknown to me. They turned out to be other members of the NYCSA, such people as Anna Banana and Richard C. But it was with Johnson himself that I had the greatest correspondence.

Ray Johnson not only introduced me to people through the mail, but gave me the addresses and introductions to well-known artists like the painter Arakawa and his poet wife Madelyn Gins whose work I admired. For a young person not yet thirty, this was a fantastic way to participate in the contemporary art of my time, and actually meet the participants.

I accumulated more rubber stamps and made more and more mail art contacts. In 1976 I returned to Amsterdam to have a show at Stempelplaats, the rubber stamp gallery and museum that Mr. Van der Plaats had just started with the encouragement of myself and Ulises Carrión. While there, I spent one week with Carrión, a Mexican artist who had started the Amsterdam bookstore and gallery Other Books and So. Carrión was at the center of the European mail art scene and exhibited and sold postcards, rubber stamp works, artist's books, photocopy work, artist publications of all kinds; in short the only public distribution point for this very underground art form. From Ulises I learned the conceptual side of mail art and the philosophy behind much of my future activity.

Stamp from John Held Jr.:

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

John Held, Jr. 15 Greatest Hits

1. Author. Mail Art: An Annotated Bibliography. 1991.
2. Curator. "Mail Art," Museum of Fine Arts, Havana. 1995.
3. Author. Rubber Stamp Art. 1999.
4. Exhibition. "Stampworks," Stempelplaats Gallery, Amsterdam. 1976.
5. Lecturer. Victoria & Albert, London. 1993.
6. Performance. "Shadow Project," Hiroshima and Kyoto.
7. Exhibition. "Artistamps." Tartu, Estonia.
8, Curator. "Bay Area Dada," Printed Matter, New York.
9. Curator. Stamp Art Gallery, San Francisco.
10. Author. "Dada to DiY," Factsheet Five.
11. Interview. John Cage.
12. Interview. Ray Johnson. 1977.
13. Performance. "Shadow Project," Montevideo, Uruguay.
14. The Fake Picabia Bros.
15. Collection. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 1999.

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

Artistamper, Apologist, Archivist
Bibliographer, Back Slapper
Curator, Collector
Documentor, Dealer
E-Mail Artist, Essayist
Fake Picabia
"Historian"
Interviewer
Jokester
Lecturer
Participant, Patron, Performer
Rubber Stamper
Tourist
Vaudevillian
Writer

4. You say you started Mail-Art with rubberstamping, but when did you started making artistamps?

This must have been around 1985. At first I used a perforator from a print shop in an old reconstructed village, "Old City Park," in Dallas, Texas. Then I got married and my wife bought me a perforator as a wedding present. I still have the perforator-but not the wife. My stamps are usually of images I find in the Network; kind of like Ryosuke Cohen's Brain Cell project, but one image (multiplied) at a time. I've done over 200 stamp sheets since then.

5. Can we say that you started with rubberstamping, but that now artistamps are the main focus of your work?

I think the main focus of my work now is DOCUMENTING 20th century Mail Art, rather then DOING 21st century Mail Art. But I still make artistamps from time to time. I found a machine in San Francisco's Japan town, a Sega machine that makes rubber stamps. You can take photos with different borders. I always pick the postage stamp border and put in my face. I have around 20 at the present time, and it's the thing I enjoy doing the most.
Self-historification via Japanese pop technology.

6. Why do you do Mail-Art?

After twenty-five years of involvement with the Mail Art network, the question is not why I participate, but rather, what drove me to it? It seems like I found something that suited me. Something that could hold my interest for over a quarter century.

I was young, interested in contemporary art, and had no one in the neighborhood to share it with. On my first trip to Europe in 1976, I found rubber stamps (in Amsterdam, Holland, at Posthumus Rubber Stamps), and being a librarian, began to research the use of them by artists. This lead me to Ray Johnson and E. M. Plunkett. A bit more research, experience, and continuing interest, lead me to Jean Brown and her archive of Dada, Surrealist, Fluxus and Mail Art. I was hooked. Over the years, I found a way to combine my interest in Mail Art with my professional life, and I've been a tireless bibliographer of the field.

At this point, I feel like Mail Art does me, rather than me doing it. I've devoted my life to it, and the alchemical change it has wrought, as been both wanted and welcomed. There is no John Held, Jr. without Mail Art. The pre-Mail Art life of Jonathan Held, recent library graduate, isolated and fledgling artist disappeared, and a new person crept towards his uncertain future.

7. Why Do You Do Mail-Art?

I have an archive composed of all the Mail Art I received since I began in the field since 1976. I have also bought reference materials over the years. Other materials has been donated to me from other Mail Artists, because they know I have an interest in this. And in the process of my many travels to meet Mail Artists over the years, I have accumulated additional materials.

Since my storage situation is not the best, I have decided to arrange for other institutions to preserve the materials. I donated correspondence to the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C., USA, and will continue to do so in the future. I have also placed a collection of "Mail Art Exhibition Documentation," including catalogs and posters, in the Getty Research Center, Los Angeles, California. I am currently working on cataloging and annotating the Mail Art periodicals in my collection.

I feel I am in a somewhat unique position to do this type of work, since I have a Masters Degree in Library Science (Syracuse University, 1971). Before I give the materials to institutions, I put it in an order so that the institution will have some art historical context for the material. It is one thing to possess the materials, another to frame the materials, so that they become understandable to researchers of the future.

So at the moment, I am cataloging my archive so that it can become a source of research for future scholars interested in the field of Mail Art. It is the most enjoyable work I have ever done. Not only because I think it will have some value for the future of art research, but because it gives me the opportunity to look closely at the materials that I have assembled over the past 25 years.

My friends are beginning to die, and I want to do this work before I also have to leave. I consider my archival work my last and greatest testament.