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Where the Secret is Hidden Summary of the Article, Where the Secret is Hidden, by Serge Segay. Appearing in the October 1989 issue of Iskusstvo (Art), a monthly journal of the Ministry of Culture of the USSR. Translated from the Russian by Lloyd Dunn. Commentary by John Held Jr. Paragraph 1: (Italics) Mentions the January 1989 Mail Art Show held in Eysk. The Soviet Union was a blank space on the mail art map for such a long time. I remember David Jarvis of London, England, staging a pseudo-Soviet mail art show in the mid-eighties. Everyone was eager for Soviet artists to join us in creating a truly international network. And then Serge Segay and his companion Rea Nikinova came along, and were not only participants, but knowledgable collaborators who drew heavily on their knowledge of a branch of Russian Futurism called Zaum to make significant contributions within the mail art network. In 1989, Serge curated "The First International Mail Art Exhibit in Eysk", and Rea curated the "Scarecrow" mail art show. Other Soviet artists were drawn into the network. This was one of the bright new developments in mail art as the past decade came to a conclusion. Paragraph 2-11: (Each in quotes) Examples of Mail Art
announcements; calls for submissions. 1970-1985). Mail art shows have become the central meeting place for practitioners in the field. It is also the most important way in which mail art reaches out and attracts fresh interest. Besides which, the mail art show is a great way to support fellow mail artists, and gives the mail artist a chance to introduce his town to his preoccupation. A listing of mail art shows and projects is an excellent way in which to introduce the public to the concerns of mail art. Paragraph 12: Mail Art convention of "No returns, documentation to all". International character of the activity. Beauty less important than spreading new ideas. Much Mail Art is xerox. I haven't entered a juried show in years. I don't want
to pay the entrance fee and I don't like rejection. The structure of
the mail art show is one of the networks greatest triumphs. It provides
an open forum for communication on a given subject. "No returns"
just means it's a hassle and expensive to send work back to contributors.
Just don't send something you have to have returned. The main thrust
is sharing ideas and creating a community, not the creation of artworks
for capitalist consumption. Complaints of quick-copy xerox prints started
surfacing as least as early as 1972. Junk art. But there's no such thing.
It's all information. I don't know this theory, but I do know Guy Bleus. I
spent two days looking through his archive in Wellen, Belgium. He has
one of the largest archives in Europe. All very neatly filed away in
archival boxes. No one has informed themeself better then Guy Bleus.
And out of this comes one of the great theoreticians of mail art. His
writings published in the eighties have defined the form. People who think the avant-garde is dead just aren't
looking hard enough, or in the right places. I consider mail art a direct
descendent of Dada and Fluxus. Stuart Home has written a great book
covering post war avant-garde art movements called The Assault on Culture:
From Lettrisme to Class War. It covers Lettrisme, the Situationist International,
Fluxus, Mail Art, and even has a chapter heading entitled, "Beyond
Mail Art". Mail Art did exactly what the previous avant-garde talked
about: it integrated art and life, made the terms artist and non-artist
meaningles, and incorporated both social responsibility and poetical
considerations. Mail Art says that art is anything and can occur anywhere.
And so can the artists. There is no central nervecenter. Every individual
participant is a nerve attached to other nerves. The mailbox is a museum. Everyone has one and there
are complicated laws regarding the delivery of international correspondence
that compel nations to abide by agreed upon regulations. This serves
mail art well. I just wrote an article on decentralizaion in mail art.
It's so much a part of the network that even mail artist themeselves
are decentralized. By this I mean artists using multiple names. For
instance, I write to one fellow who is equally the Blaster, Eel Lenord,
Harry Bates, and one of the 14 Secret Masters. Then there are open names
like Monty Cantsin or Karen Eliot. Anyone can take those names. Or anyone
can edit a magazine under the title of Smile. That is a very mail art
sort of thing to do. Ther are two books about Futurist postal activity; one in French and another in Italian. The Futurists did things like send postcards of tin , paint on their envelopes and design extraordinary letterheads. I'm alot less clear on Dada mail art activity and never heard about a mail art show at the Cabaret Voltaire. There is,of course, the well-known postal activity of Marcel Duchamp when he attached four postcards to one another and sent it down the block to his patron, Mr. Walter Anneberg. But these are precursers of mail art, not mail art as we know it, because above all, contemporary mail art can be defined as the process of relating to an international network of artists. Paragraph 17: History of Mail Art really begins with Johnson, Cavellini, and Shimamoto Sure, why not? As my friend Guy Bleus says, "Mail
Art is Collective Mythology." In the very first issue of the Village Voice in 1955, there was a story about New York artist Ray Johnson, who was a creator of "moticos", and he would send these "moticos" to a network of correspondents which included museum professionals and celebrities. Johnson was, and is, an artworld cult figure seemingly connected to everyone. In 1962, this web that he had wove was given a name, The New York Correspondance School. A waltz upon the postal mailstream. Paragraph 19: Non-"serious" materials and
techniques used in Mail Art. Johnson has a very serious art side, but in his postal
activities information seemed to be the most important ingredient. Collage
is Johnson's main interest, and what better way to bring different facets
of life and art together then upon the glass of the xerox machine. A
machine that flattens everything out. Makes it all one. John Evans and
E. M. Plunkett were among Johnsons' earliest and staunchedst allies.
The first mail art contact I ever made was E. M. Plunkett. Paragraph 21: Explanation of how add-to forms work. As examplified by the short list above, add-ons can take many forms. But they all stress the collaborative nature of the medium. It's funny that one specific form of add-on, the chain letter, does not enjoy a very good reputation in the medium. It just seems a very tacky way of gathering material and has little to do with communication. I think my favorite add-on project was when someone sent out a fully loaded camera and asked participants to take a picture and then pass the camera on to another. It did get returned and excellent documentation was produced as a result. Paragraph 22: Slogans are another Mail Art genre. Fricker and Mail Art is Tourism. Emphasises the collective nature of Mail Art. The main slogan going around right now is "Art Strike, 1990-1993". There are plenty of others, like Spiegelmans' "Mail Art and Money Don't Mix", Frickers' "After Dadaism, Fluxism, Mailism, Comes Tourism", Jokis' "Gina for President", Monty Cantsins' "Neoism Now". They serve as mail art touchstones and bring the network into harmony with itself. Paragraph 23: Cavellini made a gesture toward Duchamp's LHOOQ by putting his name under a Leonardo self-portrait. Cavellini is a wealthy Italian collector and artist who has been actively involved with mail art for two decades and is well known for his projects of "self-historication". I don't know this particular project, but Cavellini is disposed to linking himself with the great artists of the past to give the public the correct perspective of where he belongs in art history. At first glance Cavellini appears to be a self-centered egotistical publicity hound. And he is. But in a manner which stresses that all artists are vain and are disposed towards "self-historification". Cavellini has turned to the dark side. He is both perfect in what he does and a warning. Paragraph 24: Cavellini and the horizontal hierarchy of Mail Art (the mail art bull). Italian artist Carlo Battisti created the first "mail art bull" in honor of Cavellini. It shows the diagram of various cuts of beef on the outline of a cow with great artists, including Cavellini, in the different sections. Over the years this diagram has been modified by many mail artists to express their special relationships with particular artists. Paragraph 25: Cavellini's rules on how to become famous. "1. Kill Cavellini, or have Cavellini kill you. 2. Be included in the Cavellini Museum. 3. Publically praise Cavellini's process of self-historification. 4. Wear the suit or the overcoat on which Cavellini has written his biography. 5. Have Cavellini write on your body. 6. Organize a Center for the Study of Cavellini. 7. Have yourself appointed chairman of the Cavellini Centennial Celebration. 8. Write a book or an essay on Cavellini. 9. Receive a Cavellini 'Round-trip' in the mail. 10. Own a work by Cavellini." Paragraph 26: Chuck Welch makes Mail Art on paper made out of Mail Artists clothing. Chuck Welch, also known as the Crackerjack Kid (a surprise in every envelope), is a papermaker as well as a mail artist. I think this is one of the great strengths of mail art: that artists can bring their own particular interests into the network. For awhile, Chuck was making artist postage stamps out of exotic fibers. He also did a project where he requested mail artists to send in their clothing so that he could shred them and turn them into paper envelopes. Paragraph 27: Shimamoto's "Art on the Head" project. Just before Cavellini came to Japan for a Cavellini
Festival, Professor Shozo Shimamoto, one of the grand old men of the
Japanese avant-garde, went to a temple and had his head shaved so that
Cavellini could write his history on him. This worked out so well, that
Shozo continued to keep his head shaved and encouraged artists to "network
on his head". Artists were also encouraged to send Shozo slides
that could be projected on him. And in one of the more successful "add-on
projects" of the past several years, images of the back of Shozos'
head have circulated throughout the network and have been sent to central
points for compilation. Paragraph 30: Cohen uses images and symbols from other
Mail Artists and rubberstamps his mail with them. Paragraph 31: Rubber stamps, stickers, etc. are part of the palette of Mail Art. Ah, rubber stamps. It's what got me involved in mail
art in the first place. I just had to see if other artists were using
this underrated medium and boom! I fall into a small circle of international
friends that have kept me occupied for the past fifeteen years. Don't
regret a moment of it either. Rubber stamps have been involved in mail
art right from the beginning. Ray Johnson had a small arsenal of them
and most mail artists do. In the early seventies and throughout the
decade, rubber stamps were the hot medium in mail art. Herve Fischer
of Paris France, wrote a book on the artistic use of rubber stamps and
anthologized the rubber stamps that were being used in the network.
Rubber stamps really took off though when Lowry Thompson and Joni Miller
wrote The Rubber Stamp Album. Then it took off, because for the first
time sources for visual stamps were listed in one place. Before that
it was word of mouth and luck to find new sources. This is one of the great contributions of mail art;
that different artist can gather together under a central umbrella and
communicate with one another. What mail art gives to each is international
contacts and exposure and the freedom for each participant to find their
own niche within the structure. Rather then fracturing into separate
components, mail art nurtures the different media and cross-fertilizes
them, expanding instead of then diminishing them. This is a great tradition in mail art and rivals the mail art show as one of the genres greatest contributions. Everyone is free to participate, there are no fees to enter, and everyone receives the resultant documentation of the project. All you need to do is create fifty or one hundred pages on a particular theme, send them to the organizer, and wait for the result to be returned to you. Again, it stresses the collective nature of mail art. It supports your fellow mail arists. And some really beautiful results can occur. Now isn't this a better way of building an art collection then going out and buying art? Paragraph 34: Examples of collated editions by Laport, Lenoir, Bogdanovich are given. These hand assembled editions can be either one-shot
affairs or a continuing project. Pascal Lenoir from France, for instance,
has a continuing project he calls "Mani Art". Bogdanovich
is from Yugoslavia, and I'm not sure I recognize the other name. Always
reasurring th know that there is something else out there to discover. Mail art has been all but ignord by mainstream art.
But mail artists know that something important is happening within their
medium. So they take it upon themeselves to curate their own shows,
publish their own magazines, do their own research, archive their own
collections. The goal is not self-historification or increased wealth.
It is building bonds between the artists and peoples of the world. Postage stamps are a natural for mail art (as are rubber stamps), because they are intrinsic to the postal system. The first artist postage stamp sheets (also called artistamps) were done by Robert Watts, who was a part of the Fluxus group. In the Fine Arts world, the late Donald Evans is widely recognized as a master of the field. But there are now literally hundreds of mail artists involved in this exciting genre. Several exhibitions of artist postage stamps have been held in major museums (the Budapest Fine Arts Museum and the Allen Art Museum of Oberlin College). If any aspect of mail art surfaces in the mainstream artworld, it is likely to be the artist postage stamp, for they are at once visually stimulating and instantly recall the postal construct. Paragraph 37: In Mail Art, Canada doesn't exist: it's
called Canadada. Canadada is a term used by prolific mail artist Michael Duquette. He is joined in the Canadian mail art scene by such notable participants as Anna Banana, Chuck Stake, James Warren Felter, Colin Hintz, and early pioneers of the medium, General Idea, who published the early networking magazine FILE. Yes, there is a Canadian Postal Museum, just as there is one in Paris and in Lisbon. The Paris Musee de la Poste held an exciting exhibition last year on the letter in art, which included an essay on mail art by noted European critic Pierre Restany. Paragraph 38: Stamp sheets are often perforated by some guy named John Held Jr. He also makes his own stamp sheets, collaging other people's work. I'm one of the lucky mail artists that owns my own perforator; the ultimate mail art tool. It's from the 1880s and is about waist high and is operated by a foot pedal. I'm happy to perforate sheets for mail artists and have done so for many of them. My own postage stamp sheets are composed of images I gather from the mail art network. It stresses the collaborative aspect of the network for me. I've exhibited them in mail art spaces in Belgium, Japan, Italy, Yugoslavia and will be doing so in the Soviet Union in July 1990. Paragraph 39: Money seldom changes hands in Mail Art. Collective, friendly nature is emphasized. Here's the main reason for the term, "Mail Art and Money Don't Mix": if you want to do something and share it, just do it. Don't expect your fellow starving mail artists to support you. They have a hard enough time supporting themeselves. Besides which, when you have hundreds of correspondents and each is asking for a dollar here and a dollar there, it adds up. But the main thing is that the money factor just stops communication dead. No pay, no play. But play is what it's all about. In mail art, you get what you give out. It always comes back to you. So if you are publishing a small magazine and giving it away for free, your good karma comes back to you in the form of unexpected gifts. Paragraph 40: Homage is another Mail Art genre. Held pays homage to Duchamp by gluing hair in a star on Shimamoto's head in Dallas. I mentioned the "mail art bull" before where friends are gathered together on a diagram of cuts of beef; that's a form of homage. So are the stamp sheets I do in honor of my mail art friends. And when Shozo and Ryosuke came to visit me in Dallas on Duchamps' 100th birthday, we did a performance to pay homage to this great artist of the past who precursed so many contemporary artforms. Ryosuke cut off my hair, and I pasted it to Shozos' shaved pate in the shape of a star, which mimicked an action of Duchamps'. Paragraph 41: Mail Art has a social conscience, too. Exhibitions and performance in support of Mandela, and against nuclear war. Mail art avoids money and the star system because these
things tend to divide people, not bring them together. And we would
propably be wise to avoid politics as well. But some things can't be
avoided; they're just too important. But it's not really politics that
mail art concerns itself with. It's social responsibility. Pollution,
racism, oppression and war; these are things you can't turn your back
on and mail artists don't. Paragraph 43-44: Fricker's list of Mail Art members. A rubber stamp of H. R. Fricker reads, "After Dada,
Fluxism, Mailism, Comes Tourism". On a take off on that he produced
another stamp which reading, "After Einstein, Duchamp, Lenin, Comes
Karen Eliot". Paragraph 47: Diotellevi makes up fictional addresses and sends envelopes out around the world, a kind of collaboration with the world postal organization. Marcello Diotellevi of Fano, Italy, has done several mail art related books. The first was the documentation of a project he did whereby he addressed envelopes to fictional characters and undeliverable addresses. What the postal system did with the letters before returning them to Diotellevi was then illustrated. His second project did much the same thing, but this time he enclosed carbon paper within the envelope so that the markings made by the postal service became the artwork. Both of these projects are inventive examples of the use artists can put their postal system to. Paragraph 48: Guy Bleus mailed stuff to people from the past in his remarkable project., "Mr. Vasily Kandinsky, International Mail Art Center, Aqarellestr. 1910, Munich, West Germany". I'm not aware of this project by Bleus. Guess I'll have to write him about it. Paragraph 49: These actions are creative uses of the postal mechanism. My personal favorite: the Mohammed Centre for Restricted Communication, which flourished in Genova, Italy, circa 1978-1982. Letterheads containing the name and address of the Mohammed Centre were circulated in the mail art network, and one could do anything one wanted on the page, in black and white or in color. You would then attach a list of twelve names and addresses and send both sheets back to the Centre. Mohammed would then color xerox the contribution, assign a unit number to it, and add the twelve names and addresses to the composition. Over 2000 units were eventually mailed out, not only to the contributors, but to the persons the contributor named. People would receive these beautiful color xeroxs out of the blue, which obviously contained a highly complex system behind it. It produced just the type of effect mail artists strive for. Paragraph 50: Mail Art in the USSR has only appeared since 1985, We need Mail Art to participate in the international artistic progress. Here are a list of Soviet mail artists you can write to (to insure delivery, send by registered mail): Serge Segay Rea Nikinova Jonas Nekrasius Ilmar Kruusamae Boris Konstrictor A. Zhigazov |