Open World of Netland

John Held Jr.

In Belgrade, Yugoslavia, mail artist Dobrica Kamperelic publishes a magazine called "Open World" listing contacts between participants of an international network of artists. Correspondents from Cuba, Japan, Uruguay, Belgium, Australia, the United States, and other countries, write to Dobrica about their projects, and he in turn shares the information with and even wider circle. Borders are being crossed on a daily basis by this group sharing art and ideas, and not just by mail and small self-published magazines, but by audio, video, fax, and Internet.

The curious thing is that much of the time Kamperelic was publishing "Open World," Kamperelic and his fellow Serbian artists were under a cultural embargo by the United Nations. But as Kamperelic has proved, it is impossible to stop the flow of information between countries. There are just as many people determined to communicate with one another at a grassroots level, as there are those trying to control information at the top.
This network did not begin by planning to link cultures, but to communicate art in a direct manner; not through the traditional channels of galleries and museums, but from artist-to-artist. These early pioneers of mail art were determined to show that art was a gift among friends. That there was in fact, no distinction between artist and non-artist. Art was more then a commodity or an investment.

The most prominent of these early mail artists was Ray Johnson (Born Detroit, Michigan, USA, 1927), trained as a painter, but who began sending poetic messages through the mail to a number of New York artworld intellectuals. Johnson's letters were hip, amusing, and often contained instructions his to add to the work and send on to another, often unknown, third party.

Johnson began to weave a web of connections through the mail that spread from New York to California, up to Canada, across to Europe and Japan, and down to Latin America. Each area added their own contributions to the medium.

North American mail art tended to be playful and drawn from the activities of Dada, and Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters (especially his use of rubber stamps), and the neo-dada Fluxus movement. Europeans followed in the tradition of the Italian Futurists, Nouveau Realism, and other conceptually centered artists like the Situationists, who used popular forms to convey complex ideas. From South American Mail Art gained a social and political consciousness, and rallied around the arrest of Uruguyain visual poet Clemente Padin, who was arrested in the mid-seventies for satirizing the military in his artist postages stamps. In Japan the Gutai art group showed how an isolated culture could reach out through the postal system to inform the rest of the world of their activities.

Different artistic mediums became associated with mail art. They were alternative mediums (to painting and sculpture), just as mail art itself became an alternative to commercial art structures. Rubber stamps, photocopy, artist books, artist postage stamps, zines (of small self-published magazines), all were used in creative ways to forge a world-wide communication.

This communication began to occur not only person-to-person, but in public through the organization of mail art shows. As opposed to juried shows, where artists are charged fees to compete against their fellow artists, the mail art show demanded no fee, was open to all, everything entered exhibited, and for their participation, the contributor received a catalog containing the names and addresses of all the persons sending work for the show. In this way, the exhibition process became a cooperative process, not a competition, and mail art grew wider as more people were able to see the work, grow interested, and begin communicating with those in the show who's work they found of interest.

Mail Art was never about quality, but participation and communication. That's why as the medium has matured, it has been able to escape it's initial postal format and continue on to Fax and Internet exchanges. In truth it is no longer Mail Art at all, but International Networker Culture.

Another medium that Networkers use is personally contact. While mail Artists have always been curious to meet their correspondents, and have since the beginning, in 1986 there was an organized effort to meet in the form of the Decentralized Worldwide Mail Art Congresses. During the year, over 600 mail artists joined together in 80 meetings held in over 25 countries. Another, larger, series of meetings occured in 1992, when the Decentralized worldwide Networker Congresses were held to share information a on different artistic networks such as zines, computer bulletin boards, fac, flyposter, rubber stamp, and mail art.

One important project that took place during the Networker Congress year was the Traveling Netmail service provided by Peter Kustermann and Angela Prather. Dressed in antique German postal worker uniforms, these two Networkers delivered mail from one mail artist to another completely ;free of the official postal system - some halfway across the world. In one unusual case they took the hip bone of a kangaroo from Tane in Australia to Roxy Gordon, an American Indian living in Dallas, Texas. Mail Art had become a poetical back and forth without bombs on a scale unimagined by Ray Johnson when he first began his postal experiments.
This ability to join people of different cultures in an open structure of creative interaction is the greatest contribution of mail Art. As I write this essay, I am in Havana, Cuba, to help organize the first ail art show in a National Museum of Fine Art. Just before I left for Havana, word reached me of the death of Ray Johnson on Friday, January 13, 1995.

With the death of it's founder, and an exhibition in a national museum, mail art seems of the verge of a new turning point in the continuing story of it's forty year history. The sheer size of the National Museum show, with the participation of 800 artists from 44 countries, is surely a sign of the growth of the medium.
No less telling is the manner in which this exhibition has been organized. When Abelardo Mena, Curator of Foreign Art for the National Museum, first wrote to me in August 1993, we began a show march toward the realization of this project. Because of the political situation of our two countries, there is no direct mail service Between Cuba and the United States. Going through a third country, the mail can take from six weeks to six months. But by the end of our collaboration, we had made contact on Internet, and our communication became almost instantaneous.

Surely we are living in Netland. Because of the new communication technologies and the continuing desire of individuals of different countries and cultures to reach out to one another, borders are becoming obsolete. The object is not the creation of one world culture, but a respect and understanding for each other in our fragile shrinking world.