Solid gold creativity

Friday is World Post Day.  It marks the date on which the Universal Postal Union was established in 1874 in Switzerland.  Nowadays, the day is used to announce new stamp issues, or initiate letter-writing competitions with what must be an increasingly retro constituency.  But I’m a retro woman myself, so I’m going to celebrate the day by a spot of mail art.  Want to join me?  Don’t know what mail art is?  Read on …

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You can describe mail art, as Wikipedia does, as art which “uses the postal system as a medium.”  But this doesn’t begin to convey its attractions.  In fact, you’re probably thinking just one thing right now, “Why?”  Why would anyone want to use the postal system as a medium? 

There are as many answers to this question as there are practitioners.  For me, a lapsed practitioner, it’s about four ideas:

• co-opting the postal system
• revelling in chance
• prizing the ephemeral
• cocking a snook at the art “establishment”

Co-opting the postal system

I’m a former employee of the Corporate Affairs Department of Royal Mail in London so co-opting the postal system is my favourite aspect of mail art. 

Co-opting the postal system is to use it for purposes other than those for which it is intended.  And the idea of using an ultra-utilitarian, mundane service like the postal system to practice something as non-utilitarian as art is deeply, deeply satisfying.

Another aspect of co-opting the postal system is to challenge the system itself.  For example, mail art practitioners may send strangely-shaped objects like an unwrapped plastic fish, or clumsy, bulky objects like a plastic pipe filled with cement bearing only an address label. 

Personally, I never like to send a letter without directly addressing on the envelope the mailman who’s delivering it.  Unfortunately, begging and cajoling seems my natural mode with posties.  What I’d like to say instead is, “Hey you, in the orange vest there, what do they pay you?” 

Revelling in chance

The idea of chance is a second important aspect of mail art.  Mail art is against pre-destination, against the suspension of disbelief most of us adopt about the world that certainty, fate, teleology prevail.  Instead, mail art says, the world is full of random, chance events.  It’s possibly as “meant” for you to receive a postcard from a person you don’t know, as it is for you to receive a bill with your name on it from the gas company.

Hence, a mail artist may look up an unknown person in the phone book, and send them a piece of visual art, or maybe a letter or a postcard.  Or, as I once did, mail a series of postcards, each containing one part of a story, in different mailboxes around Florence in Italy, a country renowned for its casual relation to mail. 

The point is not to see what happens, which postcards turn up or in what order.  The point is just to do it; to commit one’s “precious” words or art to chance.  And in the process, to make overt something that’s carefully overlooked.

Prizing the ephemeral

Postcards are a favoured vehicle for mail artists.  Because they’re open and on display.  Because they’re slim and modest and thus, oh-so-ripe for the vicissitudes of chance.  And because they represent the ephemeral and evanescent.  “All this will pass,” is the message of the postcard, regardless of what’s written on it. 

Postcards also have the advantage of constraint: so little can be said or shown that one’s words or pictures count for more than they would in a larger setting.  As Nietzsche said somewhere, the thoughts at the tip of his pen are as valuable or profound as those any longer cognition might produce.  Of course, those who regard Nietzsche as a mere aphorist, a philosopher without a system, might remark “how convenient.”  But the idea that truth is only associated with depth and exhaustiveness is as much as conceit as the idea it isn’t associated with the surface and the partial.

Cocking a snook

Finally, the most common appeal of practising mail art is that it’s a way of cocking a snook at the art “establishment.”  At the whole machinery of exhibitions, curators, catalogue essays and reviews, built and tended by those within the inner cultural sanctum, and closed to most artists. 

Mail art says instead, “you too are an artist.”  It says just because you haven’t got a picture hanging on a white wall doesn’t mean anything.  It says, “If you like subversion and chance and the evanescent, here’s the perfect thing: mail art!”

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So, want to join me on Friday?  On making World Post Day, World Mail Art Day?  Great!  Get out your stamps.

Images: from www.upu.int (top) and www.mail-art.de (middle and bottom)