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Reconsidering Mail Art: 1960-1980, a definition and brief history…

What is it?

Mail Art, or the term I prefer: Correspondence Art, was about communication, a shared discourse about experience. It was also a network, a complex of interweaving relations, which occurred among thousands of artists and individuals on an international scale. During the decades 1960-1980, ten thousand people or more may have participated, and among them were hundreds who were regular participants.

Correspondence Art was a lively search for communication forms that produced expansive, transformative models. Those models had recognizable effects on the aesthetic and psychological growth of participants, and provided options for realizing change and survival in those arenas. The network helped develop awareness and encouraged action(s). To some participants the very existence of a network symbolized all these possibilities. Over the years the network involved persons on all continents, save Antarctica, and stretched from Japan and Australia across the Americas all the way to Eastern Europe. This mailing activity expanded horizons beyond local or regional limits, and provided access to information unavailable elsewhere.

The network could be seen as experimental, especially when compared to market-based operations and interests (read galleries, museums, collectors and the “95% rule”). There was also much that was just a popular fad, a quick and easy way to make art. On the surface it seemed to embrace a rejection of art history, criticism, business functions and other aspects of the art world that were considered distasteful and oppressive to participants. Often the activity expressed concern with the crucial issues of the day, but without assuming the responsibility for producing real outcomes or responding to challenging feedback. Many have critiqued the activity for not realizing its more positive potentials—and while they may have existed, were not always constant or visible on a large scale, and tended to vary with the times, culture, settings and the moods, talents, spirit and determination of the participants. Much like other art.

For some, Correspondence Art was a serious activity, aimed toward establishing a community and participating in the life of the network. For others it was a fun and gregarious activity, something like pen pals. Some saw the phenomenon as a tool for injecting society with the means for realizing greater human achievements. Claims were made for the ability of the activity to effect widespread change—albeit from a grass roots or marginal level. Others considered their mailings as strictly personal or private.

Correspondence Art could be about aesthetic issues, or, as it was most often, mostly about sending aesthetic messages—or snail-mail twittering. Some saw it as a way to incorporate life into art, or vice versa, or didn’t care. Others saw the activity as a means to provide an international community with a sense of connection and to provide a form of psychological support—especially for those not living in an approved urban art setting.

During the years 1960-1980 this activity flourished and grew. In order to gain a perspective on what it was, it might be useful to consider what it was not. It was not new— this was an activity built upon images and texts for the most part—connected to the inventions of writing, the printing press, postal system and to a broad history and transformations in image making. It was not avant-garde. In an art world operating without overriding paradigms the notion of a rear guard that someone was defending had disappeared. It was also not an underground activity—because beginning in the 1970’s it began to go public and appeared in galleries, museums and art centers at exponential rates. Books, magazines and catalogues of this work achieved wide distribution and accessibility. Correspondence Art was not a movement or an “-ism.” The activity was pluralistic and diverse and defied easy classification. It cut across many historical traditions without subscribing to any one in particular. Finally, it was also not about the postal system, although it used those means for it ends. The postal system allowed the activity to occur and was the basis from which it operated, but the post office was not the object and was only rarely the subject of this art making.

In the book Correspondence Art, I approached a definition and overview of the activity by overlaying a variation on a basic theory of communication. This read: who says what to whom, by what channel, for what purpose, to what effect.

The “who” and “whom” in the model were easy. They were the senders and receivers of these aesthetic messages, whether intentional participants or not. Theoretically they were interchangeable, especially when using two-way communicating models though this was not always the case. Generally mailers kept things between themselves, and the majority of the works that constituted the field were sent and received between individuals. Later, emergent activities like mail art shows and publications revealed the activity to a more anonymous public, and helped it spread at the same time.

The “what” of the paradigm refers to the content, or meaning in the messages. This gets very unwieldy. Images and ideas about art, life, self, world, politics, relationships, gender, sexual orientation, philosophy, science, communication, time, space, gossip, mysticism, games and secrets and much, much more, proliferated and were bountiful. The proof in this pudding depended on the degree to which participants or viewers were informed, enriched, or nurtured despite the sheer volume and diversity of the content of the messages. You quickly learned to sort through a lot to find meaning—kind of like surfing the web.

“Channel” referred to the “how” of mail art activities. Since all the works eventually entered the international postal system, there were inbuilt constraints. Letters, envelopes, postcards and objects weighing less than 70 pounds predominated. Also abundant was a use of stamps and rubber stamps that approximated their bureaucratic counterparts, often with tongue-in-cheek, or other delightful results. And like I said before, eventually shows and publications also became carriers for disseminating these works. Some mail art was no different from ordinary mail—impersonal, and spam-like. But the works that embraced the spirit and intention of two-way communications, and, participating in a network helped define mail art as a distinct entity.

“Purposes” and “effects” were sometimes difficult to discern. This might have been the fault of the sender—ambiguous or obscure message(s); of the receiver—misperception, misunderstanding, lack of other language skills; or of the postal service—destruction, loss, or censorship. Some of the intended purposes senders stated were to amuse, delight, anger, shock, inquire, compare, confound, inform, signify, affirm, negate, record, satirize or destroy. Some of the effects reported to me included: gains in knowledge, vision, understanding, awareness, dialogue, feedback, growth, choice, change, survival, and even boredom. Communications today still retain all these features.

Where did it come from?

The short answer is: , and the French New Realistes. In that descending order.

Ray Johnson

Ray Johnson is the most widely known mail artist. There have been more exhibitions, articles, interviews and reviews devoted to him and his mailing activities than any other artist on the network. Not only was Johnson the most persistent and prolific mail artist, his involvement can be traced back to the late 1940’s. He was personally responsible for spreading the activity—starting from a small personal list and eventually gaining enough critical mass to evolve into the activity we are examining here. In most corners, Ray Johnson is considered to have been the father of the field. Johnson has been affectionately referred to as the Master, the Mr. Citizen, and the personage of mail art. His reputation does not end there. To some, Johnson is the “ Daddy” of mail art. To others he was seen as a grand eccentric, or a ‘monkish-type’ of person. His role and reputation were maintained in part by elusiveness, mystery and curiosity that surrounded the Johnson persona. He has been described as intimate, funny and hip—playing the role of the romantic avant-garde hero; not in a profoundly serious sense, but in a light and joking manner—good at words, associations, and game playing.

On the other side of the coin are those who found Johnson very difficult, even “the hardest fucking man to get stuff out of.” No matter the reaction to Johnson, his role and importance to the field has been established, documented and remains intact. Ray Johnson sought to bring extremes together. This notion was consistent in his work whether the approach he took was witty or seductive, of confounding and irritating.

The attitude of Johnson’s mailings ranged from entertaining, amusing or educational, to being negative and contrary. His works are clever and attractive, and his role as a communication artist was unique. Johnson’s content was typically imbued with loose associations and references about people and relationships, or between people and objects. His work appeared as drawings, , Xeroxes and postcard messages, which combined image and text to delightful effect (most of the time anyway).

In a 1976 show catalogue from the North Carolina Museum of Art, curator Moussa Domit explains: “The meaning of Ray Johnson’s art is to call attention to reference as such, as the meaning of his correspondence is to call attention to correspondences as such, as part of the fabric of experience.”1 This element of “reference” in Johnson’s work was often concrete or idiosyncratic, by as Henry Martin has stated, “he (Ray Johnson) assumes a relationship wherever he sees a possible mediation…Everything is part of some other something…Ray discovers the possibilities they contain, in which things can happen, in which things can get sorted out, (and) in which meetings can take place.”2 Johnson was a “moderator, a mediator, a man in the middle.”3 In the middle that is between the extremes of sending and receiving, be it through his method he called “on-sendings” (that is, adding to, building upon, or recycling existing materials and messages, or by sending a message through an intermediary--techniques that have been adopted and replicated by numerous mail artists), or, in bringing people together at his famous meetings. Since at least 1968, Johnson became notorious for arranging get-togethers of fictitious clubs or organizations, in which people circulated among themselves, as both references and referrers in a kind of party at which Johnson served as both host and referee. He has been called a “mild- mannered choreographer.”4

Johnson’s aesthetic was often purposely contrary. His art is at once empty yet filled, containing nothing yet containing reference and association to everything. This Zen-like approach is inclined toward dialectics—that is, if you think properly and deeply on anything you arrive at contradictions, at statements that seem to cancel each other out. Kind of like reading nonsense literature. In 1979, Fluxus master Dick Higgins stated “he (Johnson) assumes an all-knowing stance, which is in itself an exaggeration, but which at least describes the philosophical and aesthetic stance…he is more a postal communicator and dialectician than a mere epistle factory.”

Johnson has made numerous significant contributions to the development of mail art. Some scholars have associated Ray with . In this sphere he is known for what he called “moticos,” or collages, which he made in the 1950’s. Johnson has also been associated with , though with varying degrees of importance ascribed to him. In one case, Johnson is placed in this arena for his approach to mailings as “the major and most consistent exponent of correspondence as the object.”5

Elsewhere Johnson’s relation to conceptual art was considered “proto-conceptual” and his work described as “impressively eccentric manifestations” that were however dissimilar to mainstream or classic conceptual art.6 The link between Ray and concept art, no matter the evaluation, reinforced his relationship and attractiveness to a younger generation of artists who were discovering mail art, particularly in the 1970’s.

Ray has also been discussed in relation to —especially for his “Nothings” performances that began circa 1960, and which paralleled both the of Alan Kaprow, and the “events” being staged by Fluxus around that time.

The New York Correspondence School however, was Johnson’s most important contribution to mail art. Rather than a formal organization, the NYCS was a label and ID for Johnson’s mailings in the early 60’s. As Johnson described it “The only way to understand something of my school is to participate in it for some time. It is secret, private and without any rule.”7 Ed Plunkett, a charter member of the school and a very active mail artist, claims to have coined the name in 1962. However, the name and the concepts associated with it, caught on and spread until eventually the NYCS became synonymous with Ray Johnson through use and popular consensus. Over the years the name was appropriated for activities like ’s (a second generation Fluxus artist) publication The NYCS Weekly Breeder, and another transformation called The New York Corres-Sponge-Dance School used by the Western Front in Vancouver. However, whatever occurred along the NYCS network, Ray was always at its center.

In 1972, critic Thomas Albright identified the NYCS as “the oldest and most influential of correspondence networks.”8 Albright continued, “the school consists solely of its head…Ray Johnson, and a corporate charter; and it teaches nothing. On a process level it encompasses hundred of persons.” Often Johnson personally introduced these hundreds to mail art. And those introductions comprised another major contribution to the field.

The NYCS lived until 1973. In a letter to John Willenbecher dated April 5, Johnson announced, “The New York Correspondence School died.” Johnson had killed it with a “dead letter” to the obituary column of the NY Times. But it didn’t really end. As Johnson pointed out, it had an “instant rebirth and metamorphosis as ‘Buddha University.’”

Ray’s book The Paper Snake (Something Else Press, 1965) includes typical Johnson correspondences, poetry, references and discovered resemblances, all messages to the publisher Dick Higgins. Reading the book is like looking through Higgins’ mail, although mail from Ray Johnson is unlike any other. The book was a landmark for mail art, as it was the first to be comprised solely of correspondences-as-art. In an indirect way, this book foreshadowed a flood of publications that appeared along the network starting in the 70’s.

Ray Johnson is also responsible for launching the era of the mail art show. In 1970 Johnson and Marcia Tucker organized the New York Correspondence School exhibition at the Whitney Museum. This was the first show of correspondence art in a major museum, and it lent credibility to the activity and the network. This beginning was, within ten years, followed by mail art exhibitions in every other kind of art space literally around the world.

Johnson was born in Detroit in 1927, and his body was found floating in Sag Harbor, NY on January 13, 1995. He had presumably jumped off a bridge. Little else is known about the circumstances of his death. For additional information online, visit the wiki page devoted to Ray.

Fluxus

Many significant contributions to correspondence art prior to the 1970’s have come, directly or indirectly, from artists associated with Fluxus. Fluxus contributions were made across the board in all channels and media, from individual mailings to shows and publications. Fluxus impacted both the general development of the field and the personal work of many peers and younger artists.

Fluxus was a loosely organized collective. Their common opposition to a perceived mental, moral and financial wasteland in the art world held the artists together. Fluxus accentuated a fusion, or an interface, between art and life. It sought wider accessibility and social responsibility for art. The artists aimed to stimulate new forms for art, even seeing their Fluxus works as a form in-itself, a “meta-form.” Often this form was elusive and transitory, and contained no coherent ideology, though it sought to transform both culture and art. In their approach to making these transformations, Fluxus artists looked for the linguistic commonalities among things, the world, and themselves.

The results of Fluxus works and experiments were primarily in the realms of and conceptual art, two complementary and often inclusive arenas.

At first Fluxus was centered on (1931-1978), as leader, organizer and theorist. The invention of the name Fluxus in 1961 is attributed to Maciunas, and was originally intended for a magazine of sorts, with the title being a clue to their focus on the arts in a state of change or flow. Though the magazine never appeared the name Fluxus (from the Latin, fluere, to flow) caught on.

An initial collaboration among Maciunas, Nam June Paik, and Wolf Vostell, resulted in the “Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik” at the Hoersaal Stadtischen Museum in Weisbaden, West Germany in 1962. This was a series of fourteen concerts of new music and “events” and was the first use of the term Fluxus as an official title, as well as the first action organized by the emerging collective, which then included Emmett Williams, , Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, and Arthur Koepcke. Eventually films, object multiples, publications, and mail art grew out of the actions and interactions of Fluxus.

The parallel between centers of Fluxus and mail art activity was not coincidence, but a result of Fluxus travels, performances, encounters, and communications. Most of the Fluxus group carried on mail art activity among themselves, friends and collaborators. The mail allowed artists to exchange scores, notes, and instructions as well as graphic works and “unobjects” for exhibitions, reproduction as editions or multiples, or assorted printed pieces. By 1966, publicity, increasing numbers of participants, and frequency of actions saw the establishment of centers for Fluxus activity. Fluxus North was in Copenhagen and Per Kirkeby was director; Fluxus South was in Nice with heading it up; Fluxus East was in Prague headed by Milan Knizak; and Fluxus West was in San Diego with Ken Friedman at the helm. These centers, along with having headquarters in New York, gave Fluxus an organizational, if not a quasi- or tongue-in-cheek corporate, image. One effect of this aspect of Fluxus, and the NYCS, on the emerging mail art scene was to initiate what became a flood of fictitious organizations with official sounding names, eccentric archives, and non-existent galleries and museums. Concurrently, the Xerox machine made everyone an instant publisher.

Much of Fluxus publishing set direct precedents for subsequent artists’ books, visual artists’ alternative publishing, periodicals and dadazines. Other two-dimensional work included , rubber stamps, postage stamps, postcards, and copy art. Some Fluxus members, especially Emmett Williams, Jackson MacLow, Daniel Spoerri, Diter Rot and Dick Higgins, were particularly influential in the identification, development and spread of concrete poetry. Many were involved in what is now known as visual poetry (in Fluxus especially, visual scores for music) and sound poetry (explorations into the aural and conceptual potentials for the spoken or recorded word). Fluxus year-boxes and kits were a bridge between 2D and 3D objects. The sculpture of Fluxus artists made use of everyday materials, while the assemblages paralleled similar work by the Nouveau Realistes, Pop artists, and Robert Rauschenberg. Particularly active in this arena were Spoerri, Vautier, Vostell and Joseph Beuys.

The Fluxus contribution to the development of correspondence art is two fold: pushing evolutionary systems and processes further, and making input via direct participation.

“Ken Friedman, one of the most energetic of the Fluxus artists, and a member of the New York Correspondance (sic) School as well, has perhaps done more than anyone to foster mail art, and , in fact, to bring artists together generally in the awareness that the artists’ position is one of great social responsibility.”9

After joining forces with Higgins and Maciunas for a few months in New York, Friedman returned to California in 1966 as director of Fluxus West—and he was still just a teenager. At first this organization was a center for receiving mail and messages, but during 1967- 1968 it became a real focus for festivals, performances and publishing. From 1967-1971 Fluxus West moved several times between San Diego, San Francisco and Berkeley. Sometimes the base of operations had a roof, offices and equipment, and sometimes it existed in the back of Friedman’s’ van. Since Friedman also never threw anything away he developed a substantial holding of contemporary ephemera, artists’ books, assorted other publications, and of course, mail art too.

Friedman’s most important contribution to mail art was to help take it out of the private realm, which in the 60’s included roughly 300 active participants with Fluxus and the NYCS, and to make it public via the creation of models for individual mailings, exhibitions and print. In 1972 he published the International Contact List for the Arts, containing some 1,400 names and addresses of artists and interested individuals. Revised and updated many times, this list has included as many as 5,000 names and addresses and was used along the network to expand its audience and potential users. In the early to mid-1970’s, most correspondence exhibitions drew from this list and complementary lists such as those of Image Bank in Canada and the International Artists Cooperation in Germany. Friedman’s list was used in early formative stages by such magazines as File, Flash Art and Art Diary (itself a compilation of contact info’s), and for reference tomes like Who’s Who in American Art or the American Art Directory. These hardcopy lists were important for establishing and maintaining the mail art network, remember that this was taking place years in advance of a World Wide Web, personal cell phones or email.

Friedman’s own mailings included discarded 3D objects likes socks, shoes, plastic lemons, bottles, keys, painted boards, and guitar necks. Often stamps were fixed directly to the item or to an identification tag. Sometimes these objects were gessoed in order to draw cryptic images and messages on them. Other times they were sent out raw. His mail art had a humorous and punning spirit, much like the Fluxus multiples. His most famous of object correspondences was the Sock of the Month Club, (circa 1970-on) co-founded and run with Fletcher Copp. The series consisted of a sometimes-yearly mailing of used socks along with printed info detailing who or what each mailing eulogized, like Chairman Mao or Elvis Presley. Friedman also mailed out postcards, rubber stamp impressions and postage stamp versions of the Fluxus West logo. This image was also used in the “Fluxus Zone West” stamp created by Joseph Beuys.

In the publishing sphere Friedman was actively involved in helping initiate a form that has become known as the “dadazine.” In 1971, he founded and edited the first twelve issues of the New York Correspondence School Weekly Breeder, a precursor of ‘.

Dick Higgins, an original Fluxus and Happenings participant, was mail art’s self-proclaimed maker of “literary cognates.” His theories and practical applications—especially regarding intermedia—were significant contributions not only to mail art, but to all art. In addition to his graphic works he was a poet, playwright, filmmaker, musician, composer, scholar and publisher. Whew. Higgins was a role model for making constantly innovative and intelligent work. His works invited the viewer in as a participant, and he raised allusive and challenging questions, which were more catalysts for thought, rather than being finite statements. Richard Kostelanetz identified five fundamental aesthetic strategies employed by Higgins: “collage, representation, permutation, aleatory, and .”10

Dick Higgins saw mail art as a fusion between poetry and the mail. In 1959 he wrote a play/ titled Thank You that incorporated the real time of the postal system into the action. Imagine the relief when the mailman showed up! Through the years Higgins was an active correspondent via letters, postcards and poems, generating content that mirrored his intellectual pursuits, reflected his perceptive insights, plus added pertinent dialogue, feedback and/or criticism to the activities occurring along the mail art network.

In 1964 Higgins founded Something Else Press, which until its demise in 1974, produced some of the most beautiful and fanciful books by artists to ever appear.

Ben Vautier has been been associated with Fluxus, the Nouveau Realisme and correspondence art since the early 60’s. His highly personal works were both funny and conceptually acute. He mostly produced hand-written texts that functioned as poems, labels, signs, or direct social-political statements. His works examined the structure of art and politics, as well as the role of the artist in relation to society. He addressed issues of originality, rivalry, or fame, and in so doing turned his own signature and life into self- parody and art.

Vautier organized festivals, performances, street theater and even ran a second-hand record shop and art gallery called Galerie Ben Doute de Tout. As a mail art participant he published small books, posters, brochures, and postcards. His mailable object assemblages took off from the editions and kits he produced with Fluxus. Ben also helped foster the use of rubber stamps, with some of his dating back to 1949. Two of his postcards, Postman’s Choice (1965) and Your Thumb present now… (1966) were among the most famous and frequently reinvented works to appear along the network, a testament to the vision and perception of Ben.

Fluxus poet Robert Filliou coined the term Eternal Network in 1963 to refer to the notion of the inseparableness of art and life. As Filliou saw it, the two were exactly alike at the dawn of man’s appearance more than a million years ago, so he proposed a celebration of art’s 1,000,000th birthday to put an end to the paradox of modern art, and to begin renewal of the union between art and life. The term also refers to the lasting interconnection of spiritual events, whether animal, vegetable, mineral or thought-energy. As a name, Eternal Network has been substituted for or used as a reference to mail art. While this use may be somewhat out of context, it is an appropriate reference for the positive, spiritual qualities and communication potential of correspondence-as-art that Robert embraced and promoted.

Filliou’s work included performances, action poems and “No plays”; he produced articles, pamphlets and books, especially Ample Food for Stupid Thought (Something Else Press, 1965); the creation of an art gallery that travelled under his hat; and Flux Boxes that contained everyday items like hair, dust, rocks or photos. Filliou’s work has been described as Zen-like—absurd, optimistic, and delicate. Although his researches did not yield answers or solutions in an applied scientific sense, they did yield imagination as both science and art. Filliou was significant to mail art for the subtle but lasting effects of his poetic consciousness.

Daniel Spoerri, lead dancer with the Bern Opera in 1954 and collaborator on much experimental theater in the 50’s, also participated in mail art. In 1960, when the French Nouveau Realisme group was founded, Spoerri was among them. He was also a major force in the second Fluxus manifestation, The Festival of Misfits, in London during 1962.

Spoerri shares many affiliations and aesthetic notions with correspondence artists. In 1957 he started a magazine, material (sic), the initial issue of which was the first international anthology of concrete poetry.11 In 1967 he published four issues of The Nothing Else Review, another forerunner of ‘zines. Spoerri’s direct mailings included suites of postcards and rubber stamped images. His best known stamp read Attention Oeuvre d’Art (Caution Work of Art) and was widely recognized and included among the stamps associated with the Nouveau Realistes artists.

Robert Watts contributed editions of postage-like stamps to mail art. His Fluxpost and other series of stamps from the 1960’s were among the earliest produced by an artist involved with the network.

Nam June Paik was another Fluxus artist and active mailer of one-of-a-kind, hand altered and mass-produced postcards through the 1960’s. In 1963 he published Post Music, the Monthly Review of the University for Avant-Garde Hinduism. The first, and only, issue contained an essay on the new ontology of music, a call for an objective and nonself- conscious revolution—no fanfare, no noise, just action.

Flux composer and event artist Mieko Shiomi was another fixture on the network, circa 1965-1975 especially. Every year she added another global event to her series, Spatial Poem. In 1976 she published the entire collection of responses as a book with the same title, and it contained works from over 200 artists drawn literally from around the world.

Other Fluxus artists used the mails for communicating among themselves: Eric Anderson, Joseph Beuys, , Bici Forbes, Geoffrey Hendricks, Milan Knizak, Alison Knowles, Arthur Koepcke, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Tomas Schmidt, and Wolf Vostell. In a 1972 article titled “The End of Art, the Beginning of Art,” British writer David Mayor assesses Fluxus as being directly involved in most of the trends that emerged during the 60’s and 70’s. According to Mayor, the success of Fluxus was in releasing art from itself, allowing a relaxation in the excessive baggage that surrounded the art world.12

Although official Fluxus activity subsided by the end of the 1960’s, it continued to give impetus and identification to many younger artists. There was a resurgence of interest in Fluxus in the 70’s, brought on by shows and publications such as Fluxus and Happening (1970), and the Fluxshoe tour in England (1972-73). And then again in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, artists once again turned to Fluxus for the ideas, spirit, and transformations they brought to the arts.

For mail art, Fluxus has proved to be a significant and lasting influence.

The Nouveau Realisme and other influences

On Thursday, October 27, 1960 the Nouveau Realisme group was formed in France. Critic Pierre Restany coined the term, and the collection of artists who signed the original manifesto include Arman, Francois Dufrene, Raymond Hains, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, and Jacques de la Villegle. Later, Cesar, Christo, Piero Manzoni and Niki de St. Phalle joined the group. Their position was simple and straight forward: “Nouveau Realisme = nouvelles approches perceptives du reel.”13 Their subject matter became the world of mass production, consumption and throwaway culture. Everyday life and the manufactured environment, with its attendant problems of ugliness, banality and boredom, were attacked by the Nouveau Realistes artists with fatalistic and dark humor. The life of the group was short, until 1963, yet the work during and after the formal period was significant. It paralleled the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and preceded the appearance of the related Pop in the US.

Daniel Spoerri and Ben Vautier were active in both Fluxus and the Nouveau Realisme. As well, Ben, Arman, Yves Klein and Martial Raysse were all from Nice, and constituted what has been called the School of Nice. Ben was particularly influenced by the work of Piero Manzoni—who along with Arman, Klein and Tinguely produced works c. 1958-61 that embraced a sensibility very similar to that of Fluxus.

The Nouveau Realistes made a two-fold contribution to mail art: they elaborated on the dissolution of the boundaries between art and life, and, they integrated the rubber stamp into .

Among the other influences on the history of mail art was Conceptual Art, including process, systems, earth and body art. The basic premise is that “Concept Art is first of all an art of which the material is concepts, as the material of such as music is sound.”14 The foremost characteristics are dematerialization and ephemeralization. Conceptual Art challenged traditional aesthetics by rejecting the virtuosity of artworks based on physical qualities, style, technique or permanence as a masterpiece. It also challenged the marketplace by producing more ideas than objects. The traditional role of critics as mediators and interpreters of art was challenged by fusing intentions and content in art propositions that were essentially self-referential, which communicated directly to a viewer without need for an intermediary. All of these qualities are either implicitly or explicitly embraced in much mail art.

There are mainstream, or classic, Conceptual artists who used the mails for making art. Often they explored technical or structural characteristics of the postal system, rather than engaging in direct personal communication. Some of these artists include Eleanor Antin, Carl Andre, Iain Baxter of N.E. Thing Co., Daniel Buren, Robert Cumming, Jan Dibbets, Gilbert & George, Douglas Huebler, Stephen Kaltenback, On Kawara, Les Levine and others.

Conceptual Art and mail art are not mutually inclusive. Mail art has a longer history and is not totally conceptual. All conceptual art sent through the mail is also not necessarily correspondence art. Without the spirit and intention of network participation, or the goal of communication and dialogue, conceptual artists have produced perceptive, engaging, or intellectually expansive works that may be only marginally correspondence art.

Concrete poetry and other variants—such as sound and visual poetry were other influences along the network. Especially when they fused images with text, or evoked the sound of the words being sent through the mail.

Pop Art addressed the problems of reevaluating man’s relationship to a rapidly changing world and reawakening dulled senses in a distinct manner. The highly conspicuous Pop images eulogized, satirized, imitated and exaggerated the superficial aspects of 20th century life. Much of mail art sought the same outcomes. Among the Pop artists who participated in the network were Richard Hamilton, Robert Indiana and K.P. Brehmer.

The Arte Povera movement also affected mail artists. In it anything could be used to make art, if used literally and not symbolically. Watch out for the guitar necks, old keys and bottles and such coming through the mail.

Performance Art had a relationship with mail art through cross-participation of artists. Copy art, Xerox or generative systems were employed along the network—especially because they emphasized cheap reproduction and were easy to mail.

And even historical precedents like Russian (use of rubber stamps) and Dada (letters, postcards, printed ephemera) played roles in influencing the art made along the mail art network.

The breadth and diversity of influences on mail art is noteworthy. The field enjoyed a vitality and richness due to the inputs it absorbed from virtually all of the experimental tendencies of the 60’s, 70’s and beyond. This lineup also underscores the contemporaneous nature inherent in a communication-oriented activity. It must be current. It must be open to all. It must remain involved with the moment, whether it is for fashion, or more serious intentions. And it is subject to radical alterations or change as time, technology, and the energy of artists demand.

Michael Crane Schneider Museum of Art Southern Oregon University 2010

The bulk of this text originally appeared in Michael Crane and Mary Stofflet, editors, Correspondence Art: Source Book for the Network of International Postal Art Activity, San Francisco: Contemporary Arts Press, 1984.

Notes:

1. Moussa Domit, ed., Correspondence: an Exhibition of the Letters of Ray Johnson, Raleigh, N.C.,: North Carolina Museum of Art, 1976. 2. “Send Letters, Postcards, Drawings and Objects (about Ray Johnson),” Art Journal, XXXVI/3, Spring, 1977, pp. 238-239. Untitled segment by Henry Martin. 3. Moussa Domit, op. cit. 4. Ibid. 5. Ellen H. Johnson, Modern Art and the Object: A Century of Changing Attitudes, New York: Harper & Row, 1976, p. 39. 6. Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: the Dematerialization of the Art Object, New York: Praeger Publications, Inc., 1973, p. 6. 7. Jean-Marc Poinsot, Mail Art: Communication, A Distance Concept, Paris: Editions CEDIC, 1971, Ray Johnson entry. 8. Thomas Albright, “New Art School: Correspondence,” Rolling Stone, no. 106, April 13, 1972, p. 32. 9. David Mayor, “The End of Art, the Beginning of Art,” Schmuck, England: Beau Geste Press, April 1972, p. 8. 10. Colin Naylor and Genesis P-Orridge, eds., Contemporary Artists, London: St. James Press, 1977, p. 406. Untitled statement by Richard Kostelanetz. 11. Emmett Williams, Anthology of Concrete Poetry, New York: Something Else Press, 1967, p. 340. 12. David Mayor, Ibid. 13. From the New Realist manifesto, October 27, 1960. 14. Henry Flynt, “Essay: Concept Art,” An Anthology, USA: Heiner Friedrich, 2nd edition, 1970. Flynt’s article was originally written in 1961.