Chapter 3: Online Mail Art Message Boards

honoria madelyn starbuck dissertation

Effects of the Internet on the Correspondence Art Network

Chapter 3: Correspondence art online message boards

You enter an artist's studio outside of Paris to find an animated group of artists. A heated conversation is in full swing. A dramatic French woman looks around the room and passionately exclaims, "Mail art must move, change like the world. Mail art is just at his [sic] starting, we have to re-invent it[!]" (Shad, 2001) A gray-haired bearded man from Uruguay shakes his head and sadly replies, "Regarding the finish of art, we keep on [sic] mind that its evolution will produce its change or disappearance, when its natural cycle has ended. We have seen the track which mail art has gone through since it appeared until now, where the apparent institutionalization is damaging it. Thus, it is not difficult to predict that mail art will finish its cycle and will become integrated, late or soon, to the list of artistic expressions of 20th century" (Padin, 2001). A bald woman with tattoos peeking from her neckline vehemently asks, "Clemente, are you inferring that mail art will die? I just don't agree. I certainly plan on doing my best to keep it going in my life time…I find the Internet has increased many contacts and expanded my mail art world. I do not think the Net had been a determent as some folks believe. Long live mail art!" (Kitselman-Ames, 2001) A Belgian intellectual limps over to the tattooed woman and states with an air of authority, "The end of mail art is only a concept. As long as there will be "mail" or "e-mail" there will be "mail art" and "e-mail art" (Bleus, 2001). Finally, a tall Englishman with a dark stubble on his chin looks at the man from Uruguay and adds, "if mail art is to die out... well I'm not so sure that it will.........after all painting has not died ....the interpretation of what mail art might be in say 50 years may be radically different from what it is today....though i expect that the spirit of the eternal network shall remain intact"(Vaughn-Williams, 2001). This conversation did take place, but only the first sentence takes place in Reine Shad's studio outside of Paris. The mail artists in the conversation participate by visiting an electronic message board linked from a Web site in Spain.

At the end of 2002 there were 97 online message boards on the topic of mail art. During this research I was a participant on 6 of these message boards and a regular visitor to 10 others. The flow of correspondence art conversations on the message boards provides a chronicle of artists' changing attitudes to a variety of issues. The conversations on the message boards are sources of data on trends and patterns and provide a source of confirmation to information derived from interviews. In addition, the message boards provide an ongoing view of new artists as they first encounter the systems of correspondence art. During my observations misunderstandings arose and were solved, troublemakers tried to disrupt the conversations, and multiple threads were launched and faded. The message boards are observation posts to view the systems of mail artists actively using the Internet.

MESSAGE BOARD OPTIONS FOR MAIL ARTISTS

The most common configuration for message board software permits only registered members with passwords to post messages. Yahoo Groups is an example of this membership system and there are at least ten Yahoo Groups dedicated to correspondence art and more groups dedicated to other kinds of exchanges using the mail. Less common configurations allow any visitor to read and post messages such as provided by Boek 861, Reine Shad Factory, and Plexus.org. Finally, invitation-only message boards are restricted to invitees. These various levels of exclusivity can dictate the group dynamics and as you might expect from the democratic nature of the Correspondence Art Network, most correspondence art message boards reside on the free services such as Yahoo Groups where anyone with an email address can become a member. The most active correspondence art Yahoo groups include artiststamp mailing list, ma-network, and IUOMA (International Union of Mail Artists). The Yahoo message boards offer members a place to post mail art calls, give and receive technical advice, and exchange contact information. The software does not allow for the insertion of images directly into the messages. Thus, the Yahoo message boards present a text-heavy view of mail art. Artists on several message boards take advantage of auxiliary tools to build galleries of graphics, but the graphics are not integrated into the messages.

Message board with graphic integration

portion of message board with blue floral postcard and artists' icons and white text on black backgroung

Illustration 4: Live Journal mail art community with images of participants and their art

In contrast to the all-text look of Yahoo Groups, Live Journal is an online community system that does incorporate graphics into the conversations as illustrated in Figure 1. Figure 1 shows the black background of the Live Journal mail art message board interspersed with bold blocks of color. The small blocks of color on the left side are artist-made graphics that member artists use to identify themselves. The larger blue block of color is a scan of a mailed postcard by one of the artists sent to another member. LiveJournal.com's message board software has the capacity to maintain personal journals, post images of yourself and your art in the messages, and join shared journals called "communities." Each of the 191 members of the mail art community provides a small graphic to display next to her posts. Some of the images are photos of the participant; some are cartoons or icons. Live Journal's ability to combine graphics and text means that the message boards can resemble the graphically cluttered look of traditional mail art zines such as Open World (Figure 2) published by Dobrica Kamperelic in Yugoslavia. Figure 2 is a typical page of the Open World zine (Kamperelic, no date (2002)) that shows the collage of images and text common to correspondence art publications.
images and text asymmetrically collaged on a black and white page

Illustration 5: Open World mail art zine from Yugoslavia
Like the communication on other message boards, posts on Live Journal generally publicize mail art calls, announce exhibitions, and facilitate conversations between members. Live Journal's mail art group focuses mailed exchanges primarily with other members of the group. Images of the members and the close exchange of artwork within the community creates a feeling of an artists’ community for members such as flea:

I can put a face to the names in some cases and interact freely as [in] an artist community. It is less isolated than sending and receiving mail and its a wonderful way to share ideas on mail art and get to see and hear others experiences. It is also a great way to introduce some to mail art who maybe just started with a postcard fetish. It really makes me feel like I am part of something instead of paper flying out in space….it allows us to have more of a dialog. (flea, 2001).

Live Journal's intimate atmosphere is partially caused by the fact that it is a more private community to which each new member has to be invited or has to pay a fee to join. Correspondence artists do not speak the same language, but the language barrier is overcome by sending artworks to express a message. In the future, graphic-friendly message boards like Live Journal may prove to be more attractive to correspondence artists as a way to conduct their graphical conversations. The dynamics of message boards includes the rapid spread of news and ideas from one board to another.

MESSAGE BOARD MOURNING

When a correspondence artist dies, the news of his or her death percolates throughout the network. Traditionally, the sad news is published in zines, included in letters, and memorial exhibitions are organized. Message boards dramatically change the dynamics of this distribution of sad news. In recent years, when a mail artist dies the news is posted across a number of the message boards, especially by artists who are active on more than one board. These artists quickly carry the news from board to board. It is not important that the dead artist was not a member of the message board; the key factor is that the deceased was a correspondence artist. The death announcements often stimulate members of the message board who knew the artist to publish their memories. Often the works by that artist will be pulled from archives, scanned, and posted online in very quickly-assembled memorials. Using Internet message boards to mourn artists is a dramatic change in the speed, intensity, and thoroughness of responses to the death of a fellow artist. The amount of information posted upon an artist's passing also serves to create an online record of history. New members of the community discover the fore runners of the network through this sad dynamic.

MESSAGE BOARD AS ART SUPPLY

Message boards are an art supply in the studio of the networking artists. Artists use message boards to achieve a continuation of correspondence art networking goals,. However, in many cases, artist feel that the real communication still takes place in the mail.
The World Wide Web, as a medium, imposes different restrictions on artists than the postal system. The message board software limits exchange of information to a filtered view of mail art communication, often reduced to only text. Limited resources of many networking artists restrict their capability to create and download graphics, sound, and video even when those functions are supported by message board software. In most current usage, message boards are a starting place for conversations that lead to the production of art beyond the computer as evidenced by the flow of physical objects between message board participants. The online conversations echo and reinforce the trends that surface in the interviews and in the art works.

MESSAGE BOARDS AS LITERATURE REVIEW

Message boards provide many of the same functions of the traditional zine scene. The term "zine" is short for fanzine, a term that describes small-circulation amateur magazines dedicated to a science fiction genres or other subculture niches. The "zine scene" is the exchange of these publications in many niches. Zines dedicated to correspondence art contain notices of mail art shows, examples of art works and poetry, contact information, essays by practitioners (artists and poets). Mail art zine publishers maintain a welcoming editorial policy, trying to present as much material that comes into the zine as possible. Like zines, the message boards draw mail artists to directly publish their mail art calls and state their opinions in a centralized place dedicated to a gathering of specific kinds of art. As a member of mail art message boards I observed the unprompted conversations for mentions of different strategies based upon digital functions and determined if these digital funtions were an adaptation of older mail art methods or new developments based on the options that the Internet offered. By using the constant comparative methods of grounded theory I observed message board interactions to back up the information from the interviews and from the artworks as well as point to new areas for inquiry. Another source of online literature is Ruud Janssen's TAM Web site.