Translation from Spanish into English, by Mervyn Samuel
In October 2003, using a postal copy and pass system with the explicit warning that it was not a piece of mail-art, Marc Florant Contemporary Art convened an auction of mail-art works in Paris with the challenging motto, We Dare, stressing the need to abandon a marginal existence to justify the moment for holding an auction of this type. This We Dare must certainly have expected to confront what had been the reaction of mail-artists on previous occasions, and an early reply came from the Spanish artist César Reglero, Coordinator of the Templo del Sol and of the site < http://boek861.com/>, and the Uruguayan Clemente Padín, <http://www.escaner.cl/padin/>, in a joint letter inviting a reply to this initiative; the different reactions can be seen in the site of CR.
Mail-art is generally attributed to Ray Johnson (1927-1995), when in 1955 he started to send postcards of his moticos, a term he employed to distinguish his collages. However, it was in 1962, as a result of the foundation of the New York Correspondence School (which soon changed its name to New York CorresponDANCE School), that mail-art was founded under the simple formula of reviving the old exquisite corpse, replacing the presence of the participants by a network of correspondents under the motto of add to and return to Ray Johnson.
Others attribute the start of mail-art to the Futurists, the Dadaists or to Marcel Duchamp, because he sent four postcards to his neighbours. It is rather cloying always to assign any important 20 th century art activity to Duchamp the Lad, simply to give it extra lustre, also with mail-art. However, mail-art is not just the sending of a work by post, but making use of the post to establish non-hierarchical communication networks between mail-artists, a phenomenon repeated with net.art, of which mail-art is a clear precedent. Therefore, though there are precedents of artistic activity using the post offices, only in cases where exchanges between peers take precedence over any other value can mail-art be considered part of Art History, and this happens when the NYCS eludes established artistic structures from a parallel network as accessible as the postal service.
This is an identical effort to that of some popis, plus all the fluxus and conceptuals, and though RJ started mail-art it did not attract my attention until On Kamara produced the series of postcards I got up where there is a confluence of the most intimate biography, an indication of the time when you recover consciousness, with the absolute impersonality of stamping the sender, destination and message (1968-1979). The telegrams insist I am not going to commit suicide – don’t worry, I am not going to commit suicide – worry and I am going to sleep – forget it (1969), or the series of telegrams I am still alive, six of them addressed to Konrad Fisher in 1970, one to Alfred Pacquement the same year, and thirteen to Yves Lambert in 1972, always sent after institutional-artistic invitations. Telegrams for which a precedent could be found in the one Robert Rauschenberg sent to Iris Clert: This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I decided (1961), shortly before the NYCS was founded and when RJ had been producing his moticos for years, which evolved to his add and return that are basic for an understanding of mail-art and the reason why in 1970 the Whitney Museum invited him to organise an exhibition of mail-art. In this case he merely indicated the museum’s address as sender, without mentioning the exhibition and subsequent cataloguing, exhibiting all the works received in a temple of art without the filter always applied by the curators, boards, juries, directors and other specimens characteristic of the environment.
The following year, in 1971, the 7 th Paris Biennial further institutionalised the phenomenon of mail-art, and it is not surprising that in 1973 the NYCS locked the door, though Eternal Networking of mail-artists had already been formulated by the Frenchman Robert Filliou (1968) and developed by the magazine FILE, published by the Canadians General Idea from 1972 onwards. In this way, mail-art became independent of its creator and turned into a mass movement that to be properly understood can be considered only under the widest terms of the style of Romanticism, Modernism or Postmodernism.
Therefore, it is fundamental to understand that in mail-art the networks of communication take precedence over their content. Anything can pass through the post and attain the grade of a mail-artistic work (from a motico to a videotape and passing through your own body if the postal services will accept it), as long as it occurs in a context of communicative parity beyond the institutional filters discerning the value of a work. And so, because the question of value is alien to the mail-art networks, at least among those faithful to the original NYCS who still remain operational under the principles of swapping or barter, the matter of the sale of works, something inflicting valuations based on variables unrelated to the pieces themselves, or the public auction of works received disinterestedly by those holding them in deposit, provokes the immediate contrary reaction of the mail-artists. This can be confirmed by visiting the site created by CR for his protest, where there is an abundance of opinions contrary to the auction of mail-art works or its acceptance for charitable reasons. Once again, the proximity to barter to establish value in relation to criteria of use, and not of exchange.
When I questioned the promoters of the protest against this auction of mail-art works, they reminded me of the primacy of swapping over sale, and the perversion represented by the introduction of sale into the processes of communication between works that should be dominated by equity and parity, transforming the communicative fact into a market phenomenon in which the reverence of value is imposed over the significance of the action.
I must disagree with this general proscription of economic valuation in mail-art, and I shall refer to examples of net.art which I consider to be the direct heir of mail-art, without forcing the History. Indeed, mail-art suffered a phenomenon as characteristic of net.art as spam.art, the quick-kopy . When, during the 70’s, mail-artistic exchange became directed towards sending works to postal lists published in the fanzines produced by the mail-artists, and the add to and return turned into more of the same, some mail-artists made use of the resources of the photocopier (and entered the world of copy-art) to bombard the distribution lists, a phenomenon identical to what has happened with spam.art: this occurred at the start of net.art against the lists of specialised e-mail and, like the quick-kopy, anticipates all the junk saturating our mail and electronic post-boxes.
Net.art insists on egalitarian communication and the elimination of distinctions between artists, curators, citizens and any other typology one may wish to apply to those involved in it. Many net.artists operate as curators and organise their own shows of net.art, following the example of the mail-artists. Due to the fact that maintaining certain types of web-sites is not expensive, they become their own promoters without any intermediaries, as the mail-artists did previously, and they again take part in events against historic developments (recently, the Wartime Project against the invasion of Iraq <http://offline.area3.net/wartime/>). Similarly, many of the founders of net.art have abandoned it on receiving the recognition implied by its presentation in society at the Whitney Museum, this time in 2000.
However, the net.artists face the phenomenon of commercialisation with fewer prejudices than their elder brothers. It is true that there were contrary reactions, but apart from authors such as Fred Forest, Auriea Harvey & Michael Samyn or Mark Napier, who sell access, John Klima who produces limited editions, or Joshua Davis and 0100101110101101.ORG who sell fetish CD’s, an image of the author’s hard disk or containing a computer virus they themselves have developed, it is a general rule not to take part in any exhibition of net.art organised by an art institution, public or private, if it does not pay royalties for exhibition and link. This solution allows sites to be kept open and in no way militates against the parity between net.artists, or against their relationship with citizens approaching works of net.art, while it allows the net.artists to receive income for the maintenance and hosting of their works.
This could be the path forward for mail-art to resolve its relations with the art trade without losing its characteristic accent in the relationship of parity between participants: the demand for an institutional fee, if the institutions take the initiative in an exhibition, and the total absence of a fee in events convened between mail-artists, while the fee would never be charged to the person who enjoys the art.
Stewart Home: El asalto a la cultura. Corrientes utópicas desde el Letrismo a la Class War. Barcelona. Virus Editorial. 2002. Page 152.
John Held, Jr.: Tres Ensayos sobre Arte Correo. <http://www.merzmail.net/held.htm>
I recognise my temerity in situating Fred Forest among the net.artists, but as he was the first to sell access, the countersign in his case, to a work hung in the e-net, and he takes pride in this, I bring him in as a precedent. Information is available on this event in <http://www.imaginet.fr/forest/> , and see the appearance of the work Parcelle/Réseau when you do not have it in <http://www.imaginet.fr/forest/consult.html.
Situated in <http://www.entropy8zuper.org/>, where we find the work in pay for viewing, Skinonskinonskin, <http://www.entropy8zuper.org/skinonskinonskin/>. In the same site we can find a work acquired by these artists from the foundational Olia Lialina <http://www.entropy8zuper.org/possession//>, and even witness the closing of the deal between the artists, the buyers and the seller, in <http://www.art.teleportacia.org/office/btw/contract.html>.
His site is the well-known < http://www.potatoland.org/>; anyone who wishes acquire one of his works can choose between Waiting Room <http:www.bitforms.com/artist_napier4.html> and Tower <http://www.bitforms.com/artist_napier5.html>.
Situated in <http://www.cityarts.com/Imno/inddex.html>; his limited-edition work Earth can be consulted in <http://www.cityarts.com/earth/>.
Located in <http://www.joshuadavis.com/>; anyone wishing to acquire a fetish from his work Praystation can key in to <http://www.eastgatge.com/catalog/Praystation.html>.
I am not going to indicate its site which is implicit in its name, but I will give the reference to acquire a CDRom infected with its work biennale.py <http://www.0100101110101101.org/home/biennale_py/infectedcdrom.html>.
Finally, there is the case of the net.artist and collector of net.art works Doron Golan <http://66.240.176.74/>; I invite anyone who would like to visit this collection to go to <http://www.computerfinearts.com/>.