Mail Art Alphabet

John Held Jr.

A is for AAA Edizioni
The Something Else Press of Mail Art. Vittore Baroni and Piermario Ciani have published key contemporary works on Mail Art, rubber stamps, artist postage stamps and other aspects of alternative art. They are dedicated and endearingly self-effacing. Baroni provides the theoretical muscle, while Ciani supplies state of the art graphics. Together they are creating a legendary series of publications.

B is for buZ blurr
Been around since 1972. Never stops. Has built up an impressive body of artistamps, many chronicling his travels in Netland. In the mid-seventies Ken Friedman took blurr's Hoo Hoo Archives to task for producing "quick-kopy-krap." It is a lesson showing that a Mail Artist should never be judged too early in his apprenticeship. blurr is also an accomplished land artist (Papercide Park) and graffiti artist.

C is for Correspondence Art: Source Book for the Network of International Postal Activity (Contemporary Art Press, San Francisco, 1984) Still the best book on Mail Art, although out-of-print for many years. I just (August 2000) had dinner with one of the co-authors, Mary Stofflet, who is currently working at the San Francisco airport on their exhibition program. The other author, Mike Crane, has long since left the field, driven from it by the criticism he received after the book came out. I was at the publication party for the work at La Mamelle artspace in San Francisco in 1984. As a protest, some Mail Artists that were present, ate pages from the book. But, it remains the substantial document of Mail Art Activity in the sixties and seventies.

D is for Duchamp
He's the father of it all. His premonition that the artist of the future would go underground, completely validates contemporary Mail Art practice.

E is for the Eternal Network
Fluxus artist Robert Filliou envisioned a continual rebirth of the creative spirit among an international community. Mail Artists love his Utopian vision of a poetic future.

F is for Fluxus
The emergence of Fluxus in the early sixties signaled a new way of art making: intermedial and indeterminate. Fluxpost Kit was a summing up of their Mail Art activities: postcards by Ben, rubber stamps by Friedman, and postage stamps by Robert Watts.

G is for Gaglione
Daddaland, Picasso, Jerk-call him what you will, but he was in the first generation of Mail Artists, who were devoted to Mail Art, not painting and Mail Art, or conceptual art and Mail Art. Just Mail Art. Along the way he has become adept at rubber stamps, artistamps, and neo-fluxus.

H is for Higgins
The late Fluxus artist Dick Higgins conceptualized the theory of intermedia.
He was one of the very first artists of note to pay any attention to me. Through him I felt accepted into a community of artists. For that I will always be grateful.

I is for the Internet
Which has transformed Mail Art for better or worse. It's all about communication, of course, and if anything, the Internet extends the reach of the Mail Artist. But think of all those lost letters.

J is for Johnson
A legend, not just among Mail Artists, with whom he had a love/hate relationship, but with scores of artists both known and unknown. Johnson seemed to know instinctively that fame was more curse than blessing. His domain was the underground, and we just players in it. Since his death, the art establishment has gathered him to their breast, and attempted to re-make him in their image. His Mail Art activities take a back seat to his more expensive collage works. Johnson is sold as a Pre-Pop artist, not the father of a new underground. The twisted legacy of his work propagated after his death, reminds me once again, why I distance myself from the corrupting world of the gallery and museum system.

K is for Kairan
Which joins a growing list of Mail Art innovations in periodical publishing. Commonpress, started by Polish artist Pawel Petasz, changed editors after each issue. Smile magazine was a magazine of multiple origins, in which various editors published under the same title. Now Wilfred Nolde has passed on Numero to Gianni Simone, who has retitled the magazine Kairan, but has kept many of the same features, of which this Mail Art Alphabet is one.

L is for Letters
Lets not forget them. They don't have to be long, but they should be included in your Mail Art. For me, the joy of Mail Art is meeting others from afar. I want some sense of who the person is behind the postmark. It's about communicating, and what better way then to spend some minutes at a desk focusing on another person a continent away. Of course, I love to receive art from others, but not when I get the feeling that I am just one of many persons receiving the same thing in the mail. I want a personal connection that goes beyond a name on a mailing list. That's why I like to travel and meet my correspondents, as well as linger over a comforting letter from a friend.

M is for George Maciunas
The pack leader of Fluxus. I met him shortly before he died, when the late collector Jean Brown arranged for me to stay overnight with him at his farm in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. I remember mostly his flipping through the pages of a book on medical curiosities. It seemed bizarre to me at the time, but I was thirty, and he near the completion of a life. Our interests at the time, could not have been more distant, but I feel that I have grown to understand him. Above all, Maciunas was a utopian thinker, making plans for a Flux Island, starting cooperative housing in Soho, and most of all, gathering an international band of artists, and almost forcing them to collaborate on various publications, multiples, performances and events. His detractors (for example Alan Kaprow) saw him as manipulating, wanting to co-opt their talent, but Maciunas hated the ego-artist, wishing to channel various talents into a cohesive unit, bigger than themselves.

N is for Netland
That space beyond national boundaries that connects Mail Artists. Mail Art has made the world a more rewarding place for me. I feel a kinship with an international community of artists, reaching out like I do, to others in spite of borders. My travels in Netland, have brought me to South America, Japan, the Soviet Union, all over Europe and throughout the United States. And when I travel, I feel like I've reached another knot in the web. This world is so big, yet so interconnected. Mail Artists have realized this fact through their art, like the alchemists that changed themselves as they sought to turn lead to gold.

O is for Open World
The magazine edited by Dobrica Kamperlic, which runs to over 100 issues. It is, without a doubt, the best record of Mail Art activity over the past 15 years. In it you will find notices of upcoming projects and Mail Art shows, news and notes on various Mail Arts, photographs of various Networking events, and all of it collaged together in such a way as to mirror the jumble of activity in Mail Art. It is sadly ironic, that this great proponent of an Open World, is currently trapped in the political situation that has overrun the Balkans. Invited to Minden, Germany for the Time of Change Festival, Kamperelic is trying for a visa to attend. It doesn't say much for the present state of an Open World.

P is for Performance Art
Which for me has always complemented Mail Art. Letter writing is such a solitary activity. The counterbalance of performance art is a good way to get one's art out to the public in a more direct manner. Almost all my performances are related in some way to my Mail Art involvement. The first performance I did, was to read a weeks' worth of mail in public. Then I collaborated with other Mail Artists in the Shadow Project. My most recent performance was in San Francisco with fellow Mail Artist Jokie X. Wilson, who I rubber stamped while he was naked, and his girlfriend was whipping him. If Mail Art is a powerful art medium, which I believe it is, it should be able to hold up in a public venue, as well as a mailbox. Judith Hoffburg once said that. "The Mailbox is a Museum." I say that the mailbox is a starting point for action on an international stage.

Q is for Quarrels
Of which I have had many. I suppose it is inevitable since I write, and others will take offense at not mentioned enough, or not mentioned to their satisfaction, or not mentioned at all. One mark of a writer is that they not get distracted by too much outside influence. Those with a thin skin should not apply. Mike Crane dropped out of Mail Art after authoring Correspondence Art. Crackerjack Kid fled soon after his Eternal Network was published. My philosophy has always been that if someone is taking you to task, at least they are paying attention to your work. If they don't like what you've written, well, they can write their own version. I try not to respond to these attacks, My best advice is never send negative energy through the post, as it always comes back to bite you.

R is for Rubber Stamps
The door through which I entered Mail Art. Authored L'Arte del Timbro in 1999. Although I own literally thousands of stamps, I only have thirty or so on my desk, and they tend to stay there for years. They are my arsenal of signs and symbols. Relics of my past outlasting friends and wives. Clement Greenberg once took me to task for using rubber stamps in my artwork, calling them a "novelty." But more and more they feel like an authentic art medium to me, and one that has escaped the formalist structure of the art world, which Greenberg epitomized.

S is for the Situationists
Their blend of art and radical politics, still serves as a model for pushing the art/life model. "Think Globally, Act Locally," is one of their slogans written on the Paris streets during the 1968 student riots. One wonders if Mail Art could have been more effective if it contained more concerted direct political action. The Padin/Caraballo affair of the mid-seventies comes closest to a Situationist action, but on the other hand, the informal contact that occurred between Eastern European and Western artists during the "Cold War" may have been one of the most effective means of breaking down international barriers in art history.

T is for Tisma
I have a Tisma postcard on my wall reading, "Keep this and feel the transmission of my art." It constantly reminds me of my many Yugoslavian Mail Art friends Tisma's rubber stamps chronicle his life, especially his touristic exchanges. His carved eraser stamps are charged with social, cultural and political meanings, and are masterpieces of the form. Today, he mostly limits his exchanges to the Internet.

U is for Uruguay
The home of Clemente Padin, and because of him, a constant presence on Mail Art documentation lists around the world for over thirty years. The Dean of South American Mail Artists, outliving his other pioneering Latin American contemporaries, Vigo and Ogasz, Padin was arrested in the mid-seventies for his Mail Art activities. His release was secured by an international letter writing campaign, which became mail Art's finest moment.

V is for Ben Vautier
One of my favorite Fluxus artists. He never takes himself too seriously, but there always seems to be some deeper truth buried in his wit. An artist who has always balanced on the edge of art and life, Vautier lived in a gallery front window for one week, which always struck me as the perfect way to express the fine division between living and creating. His Postman's Choice postcard, having an address printed on both sides of the card, so that the mailman would have to choose where it was delivered, is a Mail Art classic .

W is for Wallace Berman
Berman was a West Coast artist, living in both Los Angeles and San Francisco, who was a pioneer in propagating artist communities. His Semina magazine was one of the first assembling projects. His use of the verifax duplicating machine, was a precursor of photocopy art. He was a correspondent of Ray Johnson's in the fifties. Read all about him in his biography, Support the Revolution (ICA, Amsterdam, 1992)

X is for Xerography
The process by which I make the majority my artist postage stamps. Mail Art is about the exploitation of cheap technologies. Photocopying is one of the marvels of the twentieth century, and something we take for granted. Yet, think about the difference this process has made in our lives. What a splendid artist tool it is. It brings any collage together into a united whole. It can be combined with other mediums, as well. I like to blow up images on the copier and then go over them in oil stick. It flattens the image, giving it a particular look: photo realistic, yet somehow washed out and dreamy.

Y is for Yves Klein
Creator of the first significant artistamp: the Blue Stamp of 1957. Even better was his serving of IKB cocktails at a gallery opening that had the guests pissing blue the following morning. Or his staged jump out of a window and into The Void. Dragging nude women on canvas. It just goes on and on. His work is a conceptual goldmine.

Z is for Zaum
My recent passion. Pre-revolutionary war Russia circa 1913 was a gathering of avant-garde geniuses. And fun ones, who painting their faces in public, plotting the overthrow of language, and aspiring to the conquer the very fundamentals of their medium. Zaum, or "transrational" poetry, were first published in inexpensive, mimeographed and rubber stamped editions, staple bound on pages of wallpaper. The first rubber stamps used creatively by the avant-garde. I owe my knowledge of Zaum to Serge Segay, who used to write me about the movement when he was living in Russia. It's taken me ten years to fully appreciate the important impact they made.

August 2000
San Francisco