Mail art

Mail art is art made to travel: small works posted through the postal service, freely exchanged, with no jury, no entry fee, and no market. It grew out of Ray Johnson's New York Correspondance School - his mailed 'moticos' and bunny-head letters of the mid-1950s - and the Fluxus circle, whose artists filled the network with artistamps, rubber stamps, and postcards. The term settled in the 1960s, and by the 1970s the network spanned the globe, thriving wherever censorship blocked other channels. Shows are unjuried: everything received is exhibited and documented in a catalogue sent back to participants. Its ethos of direct, egalitarian exchange anticipated online communities, and since the 1990s much of the traffic has migrated to email and the web, though post remains the medium's heart.

Defining characteristics

• Small-scale works on postcards, envelopes, and paper, dispatched through the regular post
• Rubber stamps and self-made artistamps turning the machinery of the post into imagery
• Collage and photomontage of found or recycled images, often in Dada or pop idioms
• Painted and decorated envelopes where the address becomes part of the work
• Reproducible media - photocopy, print, add-and-pass sheets - suited to wide circulation
• Unjuried, uncensored exhibitions: everything received is shown and documented

Key figures

• Ray Johnson (1927-1995) — American founder of the New York Correspondance School and the first mail artist
• Robert Filliou (1926-1987) — Fluxus artist who named the mail network the 'Eternal Network'
• H. R. Fricker (fl. 1980s) — Swiss mail artist and organizer of the 1986 Mail Art Congress

Example works

• Moticos mailings — Ray Johnson (mid-1950s)
• Stamp Dispenser — Robert Watts (1963)
• The Postman's Choice — Ben Vautier (1965)

Sources

• Mail art - WikiArt institution
• Mail art - Wikipedia encyclopedia

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