Now, THIS is a mail art catalogue

Once upon a time, paper ruled mail art. People wrote letters (imagine that), didn’t know what a computer was, and all the project documentation was in paper form, ranging from simple lists of participants to thick catalogues. Nowadays most people opt for posting all the works in a blog, mainly because it’s less labor intensive and definitely cheaper. Still, once in a whole I come across an old school doc, and the zine that Mujinga produced for his project Utopia is very well worth mentioning.

Inside you will find a brief description of the works he received, the usual list of contributors and, most importantly, a discussion on what mail art is and an interesting piece on how and why he embarked in this project, including the problems he encountered and the lessons he learned. All in all it’s a very useful primer for people who are thinking about doing the same thing, or are interested in the subject, and even includes a handy list of mail art-related web sites.
$2/Digest/20 pgs
Mujinga/Edward, 1 Delves Cottages, Church Hill, Ringmer, Lewes BN8 5JY, UK
spaceman@mujinga.net or http://wemakezines.ning.com/profile/mujinga

AP!

If you are a mail artist, I don't need to explain who is Vittore Baroni. If you don't know him, I guess the easier thing to do is to google him and see for yourself all the things he has done since joining the mail art network in 1977. His zine Arte Postale! has been for 30 years a focal point for all the network's activities.

Unfortunately Vittore has decided to pull the plug on this project: AP! 100, that should be published later this year, will be its last issue.
The cover you see above is AP! 96, a magnificent catalogue Vittore produced last year to document an exhibition devoted to artists' books.
I believe that Vittore still has some back issues left, plus copies of some of his other publications (books, etc.). For a list, you can contact him at:
vittorebaroni (at) alice (dot) it

Xerox

The book you see below was published last year by German copy-artist Klaus Urbons to document his exhibition/project on xerography.

2008 was the 70th anniversary of the invention of the photocopier, a machine which has played a pivotal role in dramatically expanding what (mail) artists and zine makers can do, and both Klaus and I decided to make a tribute to its inventor, Chester F. Carlson.
My contribution was yet another two-issue set of KAIRAN (#14 +15) that features works by some 90 copy-artists and several articles on the subjects.
A few copies are still available. If interested, please send US$6.00 for the set (or US$4.00 for one issue) to my address.

In the world of contemporary art, everybody only seems interested in talking about marketability, auctions and the rising price of paintings. Long cherished words such as “creativity” and “self-expression” have been replaced by the new catchphrase: “art = investment.” And yet there are still people who reject the dog-eat-dog attitude of most professional artists and emphasize instead the communicative, collaborative aspect of the artistic practice. I’m talking of course of the international mail art network that for almost 50 years has mostly flied under the radar of the art establishment. While in the art world everything seems to have a price, mail artists embrace trading and gift culture. And while the pompous rites of the art with a capital $ are consumed in ever bigger, cathedral-like museums, the mail artists are satisfied with much more modest, intimate spaces. Among them, one of the more peculiar and interesting “places” is the Museum of Temporary Art (MoTA) that you can find… in the living room of Benjamin and Debby Böhm in Tubingen, Germany.

“The idea for the museum was born by chance in 2000,” Benjamin explains, “when I found in a supermarket a 50 x 40 x 10 cm box with 33 small drawers that immediately reminded me of those Fluxus kits from the 60s, and decided to give it to Debby as a birthday present.” Debby suggested they may use it as a “guestbook” – visitors could take something from the box and replace it with something they carried on them. But that was only the first step: Benjamin’s other great love is Dada – the European group of anti-art terrorists who at the beginning of the 20th century turned many traditional artistic assumptions on their head – and their playful, iconoclastic attitude. So he proposed to turn it into a full-fledged museum, with a director (Debby), its logo, rubberstamps and other museum-related paraphernalia.



Then they decided to go global and started posting calls in the Internet, making this an ongoing project. As Benjamin explains, “anybody is invited to send us a contribution – by mail, of course. There are no juries and everything is accepted, in typical mail art fashion. The only condition is that the object cannot be bigger than 4 x 4 x 8 cm – otherwise it wouldn’t fit into the drawer. “Also,” adds Benjamin, “don’t forget to send along the exhibition sheet that everybody can download from the museum’s Web site http://www.museum-of-temporary-art.com/, because the stories behind the objects are as important as the objects themselves.” The MoTA’s collection currently amounts to nearly 800 pieces (they are thinking of organizing a great retrospective exhibition when they reach 1000) and includes both traditional artworks and found objects that remind us of the infamous Marcel Duchamp’s “ready mades.” “Most of the contributions,” Debby points out, “are linked to a memory or a particular occurrence. This gives them a special value, and that is what we love about the whole project.”



The MoTA, of course, can house only 33 exhibits at a time (hence the term “temporary art”). This means that every time a new contribution arrives in the mail, the oldest one is replaced (on the Web site, you can always have a look at what currently is in the museum, together with all the descriptions). So what happens to all the pieces after they have had their 15 minutes of “fame”? Debby reassures us that “we don’t sell them but keep the whole lot in our archive.” Like most people who are active in the mail art network, they are not professional artists (Benjamin is a computer programmer; Debby works for a book publisher). They are into it only because they like it, and the MoTA can be considered a labor of love. They are always open to collaboration and welcome anybody, regardless of his or her artistic skill. To contribute to the project, you only have to send something (you can check out the Web site for inspiration) together with the exhibit sheet (please write in English or German) to the following address: Museum of Temporary Art, c/o Debby Böhm, Lange Gasse 25, 72070 Tübingen, Germany. In exchange you will receive a copy of your exhibit sheet and one of the object your contribution has replaced. Not only that, once every 100 exhibits, they send to all the participants a beautiful full-color catalogue (I just found one in my mail box). All this, of course, is for free, in the best mail art tradition. Have fun!

,Mail Art and Politics
One thing tha many mail artist always like to stress when talking about their activities (although many others don't seem to agree) is that the communicative aspect is far more important than art for art’s sake, and collaboration is one of the key words in the Network, whose ultimate goal is building a sort of alternative approach to culture. This is a practice that the advent of the Internet has amplified to enormous proportions. All these different but often overlapping networks share many strategies and the common principle that “if the Establishment ignores us, we can easily do without it.”
One notable consequence of this approach is that many mail artists are socially and/or politically committed and strive to include these issues in their activity. Here are two examples of the innumerable projects that are constantly being organised. Both of them where started by me (you will excuse me for showing off a little bit …).
Fighting Back - Stop Violence against Women was born because I’m a member of Amnesty International, the worldwide voluntary activist movement working for human rights. At the end of every year, AI Japan reports on its state of health, and the recurring theme in recent years has been that we are constantly losing members and in this country, AI has become more or less an invisible entity. So we felt the need to enhance our public image, trying, in the process, to lure more people into our ranks.


When another member pointed out that the 2004-2006 worldwide campaign would have focused on domestic violence against women, as well as violence in conflict and post conflict, we decided to ask mail artists for help. This, by the way, is by no means the first time that AI and the Network have joined hands to address specific problems (other topics tackled in the past have been torture and the death penalty). A task group was formed, with me concentrating on the mail art part of the project (writing the call, spreading the word, and instructing the others on how to collect and catalogue the incoming works) while other people looked for a suitable venue for the exhibition, invited experts and activists to talk, and organised other collateral activities.






















All in all we were able to gather more than 250 contributions from all over the world, including postcards, collages, drawings, photographs, etc, and even local artists, who usually are not active in the mail art network, lent or donated paintings, sculptures and embroidery. The show was a huge success and it travelled to several cities.
Now that this part of the project is over, we are left with hundreds of copies of the catalogue. This is a beautiful, full-color, full-sized 24 page booklet, printed on glossy paper, containing a wide range of the works received, plus brief introductions to Amnesty International, mail art and the theme of the exhibition. If you are interested in visual arts and/or violence against women, or you simply want to help AI Japan to recover at least a part of the expenses, please contact me (jb64jp@yahoo.co.jp) One copy costs $5 to $7 on a sliding scale, postpaid worldwide. Please pay what you can afford and remember that it’s for a just cause.
Mail artists usually interact either by participating in big international exhibitions or on a one-to-one basis. The AI project was an example of the first type. The next project I’d like to describe belongs to the second and is a perfect example of what I like most in mail art: the many possibilities to collaborate and interact with a wide network of like-minded people.
It all started in 1998, when – as a contribution to Vittore Baroni’s Year of Incongruous Meetings – I made a couple of fake election campaign posters (it was election time in Japan) and briefly put them on the same billboard near my house where all the local candidates had put their ugly faces. The idea behind this action was that political elections have become a farce and are almost useless to really change society. It’s a rat race in which every candidate only aims at joining the elite and share power and money. The election posters they make in Japan are particularly cheesy and phoney and you can often see the horrible truth behind the candidates’ smiling masks. After that isolated performance, I decided to start a project, that I called The True Face of Politics, in which I invited some of my friends to make and send me their posters. I collected several works, but once it came to put them on the billboards, I realised I couldn’t do everything by myself, and the people who had offered to help, suddenly became unavailable. I can’t really blame them: after all, what I wanted to do was illegal, and to challenge authority while you live in a foreign country isn’t really a sane thing to do.
This way, the project became a sleeper, and has been kept on hold until now. A couple of years ago I finally found the time and energy to start working on it again, and was lucky to find a group of networkers who were all too happy to collaborate. So I made copies of the posters and sent them to Australia, China, Uruguay, and the US, where each one of my friends did what he or she wanted (or could do: the Shanghai part of the project was for obvious reasons a more private/secret thing).
When everything was over, my collaborators sent me the documentation they had produced (reports, photos, etc.) and now I’m finally putting everything together and producing the final doc, that will be included in my zine KAIRAN. Let me know if you want to order a copy of the forthcoming issue #13.