mail art
Mail
Art is more and more considered an artistic movement which
uses the mail to produce and spread Art. The mail is the
basic concept on which the mail-Artists create their works.
Mail-Art was born on 1st
October 1869, when the Royal Austrian Mail issued the very
first post card (Corrispondenz Karte). This new means of
communication did not allow to write down long messages but
let short messages be matched to the image printed on the
card…that meant a real revolution in the way of using the
mail.
The
art of the late XIX Century was concerned about the future
of Mankind, on the new scientific innovations and on the
great industrial development. So it dealt with a changing
World which would lead, in the following Century, to face
the great human and social dilemmas like the World
conflicts, the use of nuclear energy, the standardization
of Society, Consumerism, solitude, incommunicability. In
such a different Society from that of the past, Art is
stimulated to explore the new languages and the innovative
expressive means. The use of the mail is very well inserted
in this new context. Forerunners of Mail Art can be found
in the actions of the Futurist Movement (postal cards of
Balla, Marinetti, Congiullo and others…) as well as in
those of the Dadaist Movement (creations by Marcel
Duchamp). Guillaume Apollinaire, too, contributes to
develop this new means of expression with his
“Calligrammes”, poetic inventions in which words create
images. All these first experiences are still unaware of
the big potential they contain.
Only
in the Sixties, Ray Johnson, an eccentric American Artist
belonging to Fluxus Movement, realizes that it is possible
to turn the postal communication in an independent
expressive form. His idea consists in sending his own works
to other artists all over the World suggesting them to swap
works of art by mail, in which the envelopes, the stamps
are part of the work. This project was really successful
and let Ray Johnson to found the "New York Correspondence
School of Art” (parody of the "New York School of Abstract
Expressionist Correspondence”), in which he collected all
the works from all over the World. Thus, the modern
Mail-Art was born, a proper network capable to generate a
worldwide chain of contacts where the Artist is finally
unbound from the rules of the market and he is free to
show, express and spread his creativity everywhere. A
recent and important evolution of Mail-Art is E-Mail-Art,
made with the latest artistic technologies and widespread
through the web. But it cannot be classified as “Mail-Art”
as the use of the computer makes it belong to what is
called Digital-Art.
Day by day, Mail-Art has developed different areas of
research like the book of the artist, the review, the
writing of letters, the visual poetry, the artistic stamp,
the audio and video production and little art objects. This
differentiation has not affected the Artist’s
creative-expressive freedom at all. The only limits are the
rule of the postal system. Thanks to the mail, Art does not
know boundaries limits, shortens the ideological and
cultural distances and becomes a dynamic element of
recovery and promotion of what is local, in the effort of
avoid a complete disintegration and flattening of the
different and diverse realities. Correspondence among
Artists from different Countries also lets to get in touch
with one another and to collaborate to the organization of
very peculiar international Exhibitions on specific themes
which often deal with nowadays’ social problems and which
let visual messages to be spread respecting the artistic
freedom and the no-profit attitude to life. In the last
decades, the great success of such events meant the
creation of proper archives containing all the documents
regarding a great variety of projects. But the lack of
specialized areas to collect the Mail-Art works, to promote
Exhibitions, conferences and events is still a
problem.
