TAM-PUBLICATIONS

New books by John Held - USA

2011-12-21T22:39:00.000-08:00

A set of two books have been published at TAM-Publications.

Part – 1 (page 1-439) and Part -2 (page 440-919) of the book “Where the Secret is Hidden” , Collected Essays, 1979-2011 containing 106 essays written over 30 years on the 20th Century cultural avant-garde including Duchamp, Cage, Mail Art, Fluxus, BiY, zine and artist publishing, international cultural networking, performance art, rubber stamps and other artistic mediums the mainstream considers marginal. Each essay is illustrated with the publication in which it first appeared or an associated item. (see: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/iuoma for more details of both parts)

Sample PR Products IUOMA 25 years celebration

2011-12-10T23:26:00.000-08:00

In 2013 the IUOMA will be 25 years old. To get funds for some special undertakings these PR-products were designed.

IUOMA logo's

2011-09-16T23:43:00.001-07:00

I collect all logo's that were made for IUOMA (see http://www.iuoma.org). They are published on a blog (see:http://iuomalogos.blogspot.com/ , but I intend to use them also in a book that is being prepared. If you have any logo's (and add the name of the creator), I am most happy to receive them at info@iuoma.org or http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifyou can also send prints and designs to:

IUOMA
P.O. Box 1055
4801 BB Breda
NETHERLANDS.

The IUOMA started in 1988 and has it's own Social Network at: http://iuoma-network.ning.com/ where almost 2000 members arrange their activities from that place. We expect two celebrations soon: The 2000th member, and also in November the 3 year on NING.

Thanks for your sendings!
Ruud Janssen

Credits logo beside this text: Wackystuff (Canada) made this in 2010.

6th Generation of Mail-Artists

2011-03-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

Brochure Fluxus and Mail-Art

2011-03-26T00:57:00.001-07:00

Brochure IUOMA PR

2011-03-26T00:56:00.001-07:00

Brochure 5 generations in Mail-Art

2011-03-26T00:52:00.000-07:00

Brochure : Mail-Interviews

2011-03-26T00:51:00.001-07:00

Brochure Mail-Art changed my Life

2011-03-26T00:49:00.000-07:00

Brochure Postal System

2011-03-26T00:48:00.001-07:00

Brochure Mail-Art Historification

2011-03-26T00:43:00.000-07:00

Brochure TAM Rubberstamp Archive

2011-03-26T00:42:00.000-07:00

Brochure: Mail-Art Websites

2011-03-26T00:40:00.000-07:00

IUOMA Mug Artistamps

2011-02-19T00:04:00.001-08:00

IUOMA 1988-2008 book

2011-02-19T00:02:00.000-08:00

Artistamp Sheet made to print out and distribute to celebrate the upcoming 25 years of IUOMA. Lots of artifacts are being produced now because there probably will be a large exhibition and celebration then.

TAM-Bulletin - 1985

2010-11-28T00:02:00.000-08:00

In the 80-ies I issued the TAM-Bulletin. A Mail-Art magazine that was sent out with lots of Mail-Art information about the network. Some copies now pop up on the Internet. Here is a sample from 1985, sent to Mr. Zan in the USA. :

He scanned it with the little note I added to it and published in on facebook. All originals of the TAM-Bulletin are still in the TAM-Archive. These pages were all typed on a typewriter. The pre-computer days were so much fun but also labour intensive....

Article in Broken Pencil - USA

2010-08-04T02:24:00.001-07:00

The Undying Art of Mail

We used to send mail, and there used to be an underground movement of artists who made mail art. Laura Trethewey tracks down the artists who made the postal system an integral part of their work to find out how mail art is faring in the age of the Internet.

see: http://www.brokenpencil.com

Some help for Beginners in Networking

2010-07-29T00:00:00.000-07:00

Drawing made by Ruud Janssen to explain some of the terms used in Networking. Not complete, but the essence of names used when explaining Networking.

Variation IUOMA-Logo

2010-07-05T22:33:00.001-07:00

IUOMA Webshop

2010-06-17T22:48:00.001-07:00

A sample of one of the intems form the shop : http://shops.cafepress.com/IUOMA the IUOMA shop with PR materials has opened. The small profit goes into the funds to keep the IUOMA platform online for free for all mail-artists.

IUOMA TV-Channel

2010-06-13T04:39:00.000-07:00

Yes, it is there. IUOMA's own TV-Channel, available at:

http://iuoma.blip.tv/

For you to see some of the videos that were made.

Free Download

2010-05-15T23:31:00.000-07:00

Only a selected set of books is free for download. Mostly because the other want the information just to be out there for free. Some new publications by TAM are in the beginning also available for free download but that option is removed after a few months to stimulate the sale of the real books which I hope will end up in collections, archives, libraries and museums. Sometimes printed versions of the books are donated to specific libraries (like MoMa Library New York, Schwering Museum Library Germany) to make the information available for the next generation too.

New book : Thesis Michael Lumb

2010-05-05T00:10:00.000-07:00

MICHAEL LUMB. MAILART 1955 TO 1995: DEMOCRATIC ART AS SOCIAL SCULPTURE. ABSTRACT. This thesis, written by Michael Lumb in 1997, evaluates the importance of mailart in the late 1990s, traces its development and examines the reasons for the changes that have taken place in the nature of mailart practice. Includes also an interview by Ruud Janssen (NL) with Michael Lumb (UK).

You can download the complete file for free this time. A hardcopy version is available at costprice for you.

For ordering: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/thesis-michael-lumb/10895521

Two new books

2010-04-25T06:52:00.000-07:00

On the Webshop from TAM-Publications (see besides this text) you will notice that two new books bave been published this month:

1. The lecture I gave at the Stendhal Gallery in New York was based on two sources: The essay I wrote for the Gallery and a slideshow I used at the Willem de Kooning Art Academy. I combined these two sources. The lecture was recorded on video by 3 sources (Mark Bloch, USA - Larry Miller - USA, Cecil Touchon - Canada). To make the sources available I made a 110 pages book out of these. Download of the files is currently for free.

2. The IUOMA was 20 years old. The period 1988-2008 is documented with a book containing texts by Ruud Janssen, Vittore Baroni, Wilma Duguay, Tulio Restrepo, Geert de Decker and John held Jr. Lots of illustration from the rich history of the IUOMA. Also for this book the material the download will be free for the first time.

see: http://stores.lulu.com/iuoma

New Book: Thesis Honoria

2010-04-11T09:16:00.000-07:00

Title: Thesis Honoria

ID: 8151869
Category: Arts & Photography

Description:

The Dissertation Committee for Honoria Madelyn Kim Starbuck Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Clashing and Converging: Effects of the Internet on the Correspondence Art Network.

Publisher: TAM-Publications
Copyright Year: © 2010 by Honoria Starbuck
Language: English
Originaly written in 2003

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/thesis-honoria/8151869

The book is FREE for download. A printed version is available on non-profit basis.

New Book: The first 500 IUOMA-members at NING

2009-06-13T12:30:00.000-07:00

As promissed the first 500 members are printed in a book. As hardcopy it is available at:

http://www.lulu.com/content/7247331

Details:

Paperback book €22.99 (205068 kb)

Download: 1 documents , 205068 KB

Printed: 305 pages, 20.99 cm x 29.7 cm, perfect binding, white interior paper (55# weight), black and white interior ink, white exterior paper (90# weight), full-colour exterior ink

Description:

The overview of the first 500 members that joined the IUOMA platform at NING. Al portfolios of the initial members are included and a complete list of names of all these members in order of joining the International Union of mail-Artists from November 2008 till June 2009.

The digital version of the book will be available for free. A hardcopy version is expensive but maybe worth the investment.

Found collectors item

2009-01-31T01:09:00.001-08:00

For people who are looking for this collectors item:

Description:: Picasso Gaglione and J. Held Jr. where editors; illustrated thru out with b&w rubber stamp images; attached to front cover is a rubber stamp titled " Fake Picabia Bros. and images of Picasso Gaglione and John Held; plastic black spiral spine; xiv, 58pp; size: 9 x 11-1/4in; "This is a special rubber stamp edition of the FAKE PICABIA Bros. tour of Europe from 1 to 11 May 1995"; text by John Held jr.; contributors: Sophie Nagiscarde, Sanja Radivovic, Michel Hosszu, Daniel Daligand, Guy Bleus, Rod Summers, and Ruud Janssen; in EXCELLENT COND.

L'Art Tampon. a Rubber Stamp Performance (illustrated Periodical with an origianl rubber stamp multiple )GAGLIONE, Picasso / John Held Jr.

I found out that someone is selling a copy for 35 Euro's :

http://www.abebooks.de/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=367286784&searchurl=kn%3Druud%2Bjanssen%26sortby%3D3%26sts%3Dt%26x%3D14%26y%3D10

I have my own signed copy received from Bill (Picasso) Gaglione himself.

IUOMA-Member list January 2009

2009-01-12T22:09:00.000-08:00

B&W and Colour-Version of the IUOMA Member list. This book contains an overview of all members that joined the http://iuoma-network.ning.com/ platform from November 13th 2008 till January 12th 2009. The IUOMA is now 20 years old. On this electronic platform the old and new IUOMA-members have joined in again. Each member created his/her own page with its own look. A screen capture of each member is included.

IUOMA-MEMBERLIST - JANUARY 2009

Two versions of the IUOMA member list are published. A colour-version and a B&W version. The download-version is available for free for all IUOMA-members. A printed version costs money but supports the IUOMA. The money will be used to donated these books to archives and museums. A future publication with historic and new material (both visual and text) are being planned and will be available later in 2009.

Details at : http://stores.lulu.com/iuoma for both books. Download for FREE.

Hardcopyversions:

B&W version: http://www.lulu.com/content/5669512 for € 19,98 (256 pages)

Colour-version: http://www.lulu.com/content/5669228 for € 49,98 (256 pages)

This overview of IUOMA-members has been made on January 12th 2009. As a first celebration of the 20-years that the IUOMA is alive a screen capture has been made of every member of the online Platform located at: http://iuoma-network.ning.com/

A book with texts and visuals connected to the 20 years on IUOMA is in preparation and will follow later this year. If you would like to send in a text or visual, just let me know.

New BOOK!

2008-12-30T08:54:00.000-08:00

Paperback book €19.99 Printed: 280 pages, 20.99 cm x 29.7 cm, perfect binding, white interior paper (55# weight), black and white interior ink, white exterior paper (90# weight), full-colour exterior ink

Description:

B&W Version of Statements Collection on Mail-Art by Ruud Janssen. Reprint of statements written in period 1993-2008 on the subject of mail-art. These statements were first published as pamphlets. Later on the Internet, and now as a collection in one book. Some statements and texts were also published on the Internet first and later as print-out sent into the network. The last part of this book contains visual statements made when the Millennium came about and most recent is an overview of the slides used at a lecture at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam explaining the concept of mail-art. In the past 28 years Ruud Janssen has intensively written about how E-mail and Internet would change mail-art, and it has.

A colour-version of the book is also available. See an overview of all publications at:

http://stores.lulu.com/iuoma

Enjoy reading this book!

2008-11-29T23:41:00.000-08:00

French postcards

2008-10-24T09:18:00.000-07:00

THE NEW YORKER

September 24, 2008

French Postcards

A blogger on Libération?s Web site, Agnès Viard, reports that, in June, in Cahors, in the southwest of France, the mail artist Philippe Pissier (pronounced piece-Y¥) was being subjected to criminal investigation for having mailed a postcard of a bare-breasted woman, a nipple pierced with a safety pin, to a German exhibit of erotic mail art that had invited him to participate. After the assistant prosecutor Isabelle Ardeef began the investigation, Pissier was informed that he risked three years in prison and a fine of 175,000 euros for the crime of ?disturbing public order and mentally endangering children by means of a pornographic work.? The following month, his computer and many of his works were confiscated, but the artist has remained without official word since then. As Pissier remarked,

I am an adult, the mail sorters are adults, the mailman is an adult, and the addressee is an adult. I don?t see what the problem is.

The local press has weighed in, heaping scorn on Ardeef for the inquiry. Giard reminds readers that such paintings as ?Gabrielle d?Estrées,? by an anonymous French artist of the sixteenth century, is on open display at the Louvre, including to minors. ?Le ridicule ne tue pas? (?You can?t be killed by ridicule?), the French say; but officials there would do well to remember that, in 1966, Charles de Gaulle?s regime was shaken by its (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to ban Jacques Rivette?s movie ?La Religieuse,? a misstep that definitively revealed the aged President?s incommensurable distance from modern life.

Posted by Richard BrodyIn
Goings On
Art Movies
Interact:
Print E-Mail

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/goingson/2008/09/french-postcard.html

http://pissierarchives.canalblog.com

The Art of Communication - Mail Art Madness

2008-10-05T03:54:00.000-07:00

The Art of Communication - Mail Art Madness was the title of an article about Ruud Janssen published in the magazine Rubberstampmadness, written by Nancy Brook Mandell (Issue January/February 1999).

I have also high-resultation scans if you can't read these images.

Queens Library Gallery : Transmit

2008-10-04T00:42:00.003-07:00

These are the invitation and the first pages of a catalogue of the exhibition TRANSMIT held in 1999 at the Queens Library Gallery in New York. The theme: Fluxus, Mail-Art, Networks.

Interview with Ruud Janssen by Kate Lanxner for Rubberstampmadness

2008-10-04T00:25:00.000-07:00

This is the interview with Ruud Janssen by Kate Lanxner for Rubberstampmadness done in 1985.

Books for Fluxus Heidelberg Center : Fluxus Performances 2003-2005

2008-09-17T11:20:00.001-07:00

http://www.lulu.com/content/3996203

http://www.lulu.com/content/4108181

Interview for Livraision - Swedish Magazone

2008-07-14T11:53:00.000-07:00

Interview that Litsa Spathi and Ruud Janssen gave for Livreaison, A Swedish Publication.

Mail Art Archives

2008-06-29T05:01:00.000-07:00

An article about mail-Art archives I wrote back in the 90-ies. It dealt with how people then were building up their mail-art archives. Nowadays we are 20 years further. Some mail-artists have donated (or sold) their collections to archives, but some collections have vanished. It always is an interesting topic. Maybe should explore this a bit more in the near future.

Thoughts on Mail-Art

2008-06-29T00:24:00.000-07:00

A hard-copy version of the first 10 thoughts I wrote for the Internet. The online version is still available at: http://www.iuoma.org/overview.html and a direct access to all the texts you can find though: http://www.iuoma.org/secret_9.html. All the texts are hyperlinked, so you can jump from one text to another. Realize that the texts are old ones. They are my views from back then.

First IUOMA Magazine 1991

2008-06-28T08:11:00.000-07:00

TAM Rubberstamp Archive Address List

2008-06-28T07:46:00.001-07:00

Some historic TAM-Publication booklets for you:

1996-version

1994 version

1995 version

Over the years I have kept a database with all the addresses of mail-artists that contributed to the TAM-Tubberstamp Archive. The list grew over the decades and contains also the historic addresses. I printed the list every month and send old versions into the network. Some versions I kept in the TAM-Archive and above you find three old versions. The 1996-version was 50 pages thick....

IPM - Magazine 2nd Issue

2008-06-28T07:12:00.000-07:00

IPM - Magazine 1st Issue

2008-06-28T07:08:00.000-07:00

A copy of the cover of the first issue of IPM (International Poetry magazine) as I issued in september 1993. From this magazine only a limited edition was sent out into the mail-art network.

Historikal Panel - USA

2008-06-11T09:41:00.000-07:00

An Authentik and Historikal Panel on the Phenomenon of Mail Art
June 10, 2008

We are pleased to welcome five major figures in the Mail Art movement to speak about this unique and vital art form at a panel discussion on Friday, June 13, 2008, at 6:30pm.

The panel discussion is entitled: "An Authentik and Historikal Panel on the Phenomenon of Mail Art," and will focus on the origins of this art form and how it continues to be a critical and subversive medium in a society where modes of communication are undergoing rapid upheavals.
Panelists will include:

John Held, Jr. (Moderator) has been involved with Mail Art since 1975. He has written extensively on Mail Art and is viewed as a leading historian of the art form. He has had dozens of solo and group exhibitions in America and Europe, has appeared in multiple Performance Art pieces, has guest-curated and lectured widely, and has direct connections and long-term collaborative partnerships with many major figures in Mail Art.

A.A. Bronson is an artist whose work has spanned multiple genres and various modern media. He is currently Executive Director of Printed Matter, an organization in New York that is dedicated to the cultivation and dispersal of the artist’s book. He was also a founding member of General Idea, an artist collective from Canada.

John Evans has collaborated with almost every major Mail Arts figure of the last thirty years. His involvement with the movement began in the mid-1960s, and he continues to show in New York and in Europe. Evans uses the tool of collage and the philosophy of inclusion to express his personal sense of irony, humor and shifting aesthetic and socio-political ideas.

Barbara Moore is an art historian, writer, and former rare-book dealer specializing in avant-garde art of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. She was first editor at Dick Higgins's seminal Something Else Press. Since then she has written essays on and curated exhibitions of artist's books, multiples, and alternative media. She curated the first Fluxus exhibition in New York.

Martha Wilson is the Founding Director of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc., an artist’s center in New York which since its inception in 1976 has presented and preserved temporal art: artists’ books and other multiples produced internationally after 1960; temporary installations; and performance art. Trained in English literature, Ms. Wilson was teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design when she became fascinated by the art field in which text and image intersect.

William S. Wilson is a historian, art critic, and novelist. He has written extensively on Mail Art and is regarded as an authority on Ray Johnson, a major figure in the New York artistic community. He received his PhD in English Literature from Yale in 1961.

source: http://www.centerforbookarts.org/news/2008/06/authentik-and-historikal-panel-on.shtml

THE ASSAULT ON CULTURE CHAPTER 14

2008-06-11T09:38:00.000-07:00

THE ASSAULT ON CULTURE CHAPTER 14 (pages 74-79)

BEYOND MAIL ART

The conceptual similarity of Mail Art (MA) to aspects of Dada and Fluxus has led certain members of the MA Network to take up and develop ideas that had made appearances within the framework of these earlier movements. (1) It would be fruitless to try and make an inventory of all such historical developments, the sheer volume of material passing through the MA Network makes this an impossibility. Instead, I propose to look at two specific examples: first, multiple names and second, agitation against art as a bourgeois paradigm.

Multiple name concepts - the idea that a single name should be used by a group of individuals, several magazines or music groups - did not play a starring role in the history of Dada. But Hausmann, Grosz, Baader, Herzfelde and Herzfelde's 'Christ & Co. Ltd' achieved more than footnote status in the standard histories of the Berlin avant-garde. Hausmann recollects the founding of this society in "Courier Dada"(Paris 1958): "I took Baader to the fields of Sudende (where Jung then lived), and said to him: 'All this is yours if you do as 1 tell you. The Bishop of Brunswick has failed to recognize you as Jesus Christ, and you have retaliated by defiling the altar in his church. This is no compensation. From today, you will be President of The Christ Society, Ltd, and recruit members. You must convince everyone that he too can be Christ, if he wants to, on payment of fifty marks to your society. Members of our society will no longer be subject to temporal authority and will automatically be unfit for military service. You will wear a purple robe and we shall organise an Echternach procession in the Potsdamer Platz. I shall previously have submerged Berlin in biblical texts. All the poster columns will bear the words "He who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword".'"

The idea re-emerged, in a very modified form, more than fifty years after Hausmann made his suggestions to Baader. In the mid-seventies, the British correspondence project Blitzinformation (Stefan Kukowski and Adam Czamowski) circulated a leaflet on 'Klaos Oldanburgshi':

"Since the discovery that Oslo Kalundburg, the radio station, is an anagram of Klaos Oldanburg (sic), it has become one of BLITZINFORMATION's foremost projects to change everyone's name to Klaos Oldanburg. WE THEREFORE INVITE YOU TO BECOME KLAOS OLDANBURG. The advantages of such an action are too numerous to go into here. IF YOU WISH TO BECOME PART OF THIS INTERNATIONAL PROJECT, PLEASE FILL IN THE FORM BELOW ... Please note: SIMPLE KLAOS OLDANBURGSHIP IS ENTIRELY FREE (+ S.A.E.) FILL IN FORM."

Those who filled in the form were given a number of descent to use with the name - i.e. Klaos Oldanburg XXI (prev. Derek Hart). The use of numbers and indication of a previous name weakens the concept if it is viewed as a means of attacking traditional beliefs about identity.

However, both the term multiple names - and their use for political subversion - didn't occur until a group of anarcho-art punks from the London suburbs launched a 'movement' called the Generation Positive in October 1982, with a call for all rock bands to use the name White Colours. In February 1984 the movement launched its magazine Smile, and by the second issue (April '84) were calling for all magazines to use this name. In the fifth issue (October '84) the term multiple names was coined as a description of the concept and launched in a manifesto entitled "The Generation Positive Presents The Multiple Name Aesthetic".

In 1977, a multiple name concept had emerged among a group of mail artists gathered around what was known as the PORTLAND ACADEMY (Oregon, USA). At the centre of this group were the founder of the Academy, Dr. Al 'Blaster' Ackerman and his drinking buddy David 'Oz' Zack. In the Autumn of 1977 Zack announced his plan for an 'open pop-star' called Monty Cantsin. The idea was that anyone could use the name for a concert and that if enough people did so, Cantsin would become famous - and then unknown performers could take on the identity and be guaranteed an audience. Through the haze of alcohol and dope that permeated the Academy, Zack won converts to his plan to democratise the star system. The first person to perform under the Monty Cantsin banner was the latvian acoustic punk Maris Kundzin. After Kundzin had done a few concerts as Cantsin, the idea caught on and while the Academy continued to exist many of those associated with it used the name for performances. Zack and Kundzin mailed post cards to cultural workers around the world inviting them to become Monty Cantsin; Ackerman kept the 'Fourteen Secret Masters of the World' (his prioritised contacts in the MA Network) in touch with what was going on.

As more people got involved, the project took off. It is now impossible to say who contributed what. Indeed, to attempt to do so would be misleading, since - despite Zack taking credit for making up the Cantsin name - the development of the idea was practically, theoretically and organisationally collective. By the summer of 1978 the concept of ISM was added to that of Cantsin. ISM stood for an incorporation of all the previous movements (isms) of the avant-garde. However, fluxus seem to have been the influence that predominated. In the excitement generated by these projects, songs were written, concerts performed, exhibitions held, with no attempt to document what was going on.

While Monty Cantsin didn't put numbers after his name, it was not unusual for a legal name to be placed in brackets beneath the 'open pop-star' identity (for an example of this see the printed matter which accompanies the 1978 Monty Cantsin EP on Syphon Records). Through the interventions of Blitzinformation and Zack, we can see multiple names beginning to take on the form they would assume during the eighties In a letter to the author, dated 7/5/87, the Italian mail artist Vittore Baroni explained the genesis of his own multiple name project:

"... My Lt. Murnau project (1980-1984) was an attempt to study how ... musical myths are built... today, all these cult-underground bands, how far you can push an Image without a Sound. I started with spreading a lot of leaflets and announcements using the image of film-maker W.F. Murnau in his army uniform and the name Lieutenant Murnau that I found mysterious and evocative enough. I did the first cassette for VEC- Holland "Meet Lt. Murnau" just mixing, breaking, manipulating all the Beatles and Residents records. The idea is that Lt. Murnau uses existing music without having to use instruments or compose notes. Then I tried to confuse ... the audience having Murnau cassettes and records released in different countries by different people: Jacques Juin in Germany ... the 7" EP "Janus Head", with Grafike Airlines in Belgium the cassette package "The Lt. Murnau Maxi-single" (C30). Then there were several more cassettes, contributions to compilations, graphic works in magazines, etc ... A lot of texts etc are enclosed with the various packages ... I also did a concert-performance as Lt. Murnau, with mask, cutting and playing different records + crucifying a Beatles record etc. And I did in 1980 a programme ... "La Testa di Giano" for national Radio One in Italy, using Murnau materials. I printed and circulated hundreds of life-size cardboard masks of Lt. Murnau, that people could wear. Anybody could do Murnau music and become Lt. Murnau, and a few people did it. At the concert I distributed masks to the audience and then filmed them ... as they "become" Lt. Murnau as well. The main problem I found is that very few people were interested in working for a project that they felt belonged to myself, even if I tried to keep it mysterious in its origins. So in the end I always did 99% of the work, even if Jacques Juin did a lot of Murnau work in 1980 -81 and a few others contributed nice work (Michael Vanherwegen, Roger Radio, among others). The whole project was focussed on a very limited area, that of underground music, so it did not have the more varied overtones of the Monty Cantsin philosophy. Yet, I think the problems are the same ... The fact is that to participate you had to really work collectively, and this is something few in the art circles like to do without having their name in big letters ... "

During the 80's, Baroni was not the only person to initiate a multiple name project: by 1985 the names 'Karen Eliot', 'Mario Rossi' and 'Bob Jones' had also been put forward for multiple use. They were seen as means of subverting the star-system and questioning bourgeois notions of identity.(2) Two distinct camps emerged about how they should be used. One faction insisted that there should be a complete identification with the name used, while the other asserted that this would lead to the names being over identified with specific individuals, and so there should be a clear separation between personal identity and use of the concept. This argument has yet to be resolved and has led to hostilities between individuals 'sharing' a multiple identity.

If multiple names are an assault on art by inference, via their attack on the star system which sustains the notion of genius, there are other more direct attacks being made on art from within the MA Network. Tony Lowes's "Give Up Art/Save The Starving" campaign represents the more extreme wing of this tendency:

"Seeing and creating an image are the same activity. Those who create art are also creating the starving. Our world is a collective illusion. It is a great irony that the myth of the artist celebrates suffering, while it is those who have never heard of art, those enduring famine and drought and endemic diseases, who are the true poor and wretched of our world. And in this perversion of once a religious quest, today's artists deny that they are more than labourers, deny art itself, and so move to close off to man the light inside him.

"Art is now defined by a self-perpetuating elite to be marketed as an international commodity, a safe investment for the rich who have everything. But to call one man an artist is to deny another the equal gift of vision; - and to deny all men equality is to enforce inequality, repression, and famine.

"Everything that is learned is alien. Our histories are built on the heritage left by men who learned only to replace one concept with another. We strive to grasp what we do not know when our problems will be solved not by new information, but by the understanding of what man already knows. It is time to re-examine the nature of thought. Fictions occupy our minds and art has become a product because we believe ourselves and our world to be impervious to fundamental change. So we escape into art. It is our ability to transform this world, to control our consciousness, that withers on the vine.

"We need to control our own minds, to behave as if the revolution has already taken place. Paint all the paintings black and celebrate the dead art. We have been living at a masqued ball: what we think of as our identity is a schooled set of notions, preconceptions that are imprisoning us in history. From our own belief in our own identity flows ceaseless misery - our isolation, our alienation, and our belief that another man's life is more interesting that our own.

"It is only through valuing all the world equally that any of us will find liberation. An end to history is our rightful demand. To continue to produce art is to addict ourselves to our own repression. The refusal to create is the only alternative left to those who wish to change the world. Give up art. Save the starving,"

From his farmhouse in Eire, Lowes (born New York, 1944) mails out manifestoes, badges, stickers, and balloons bearing his slogans. They receive a mixed reaction in the MA Network, some people agree with him, others see his work as a joke, a few get upset. This reaction cannot be dissimilar to the way in which Richard Hulsenbeck's attacks on art were received by his Dadaist colleagues. Mail artists, like the dadaists and fluxists before them, are divided over the status of their work. Some see what they do as art, others don't. From a materialist perspective, mail art is not art because it is not commoditised by the bourgeoisie. On the whole, it remains outside the social process that gives an activity the status of art. It is possible that the activity might be elevated to the status of art at a future date, but even if this were to happen, only a very limited number of mail art products would actually be granted such a standing. And such an elevation in status seems unlikely while mail art continues to be practised.

At first sight this makes Lowes's propaganda efforts within the MA Network appear misdirected. But if his campaign is viewed as an attack on individualised creativity ('that unique place inside us where we possess art'), his work effectively addresses those in the network most given to such tendencies. He is using a language which is accessible to those who might not be artists, but perceive themselves as such. Lowes's activities highlight the contradictions of mail art. Obviously, those who coined the term did so because they identified their activities as being art based. Starting from an idealist perspective they presumably concluded that real art (universal human expression?) should not be sold but must be given as a Gift. As the network developed, a second group of individuals with a materialist perspective were attracted to it. This second group participated precisely because they saw MA as a support system within which they could engage in cultural exchange free of the essentialist conceptions of gallery art. Such individuals can use the network while ignoring its name. What confuses the issue is that Lowes uses the mail art network as a distribution system for an idealist attack on art. Reappearing here are all the contradictions of anti-art, unresolved since Pere Ubu made his stage debut.

From The Assault On Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War by Stewart Home (original edition Aporia Press/Unpopular Books, London 1988, new edition AK Press 1991).

Footnotes

1. Since the origin of their network in the sixties, most mail artists have viewed mail art as a direct development from dada and fluxus, and thus have always exhibited a deep interest in these previous movements. For examples of this see "Correspondence Art" edited by Michael Crane & Mary Stofflet (Contemporary Arts Press, San Francisco 1984); in particular see "Thoughts On Dada" & "Mail Art & Dada" both by Klaus Groh.

2. Most critics of multiple names have, to date, taken the claims made for them over literally. For example, Waldemar Jyroczech in "Re.Distribution" (included in "Plagiarism: art as commodity and strategies for its negation" edited by Stewart Home, Aporia Press, London 1987) has the following to say: "No one nowadays need rely on, say, the use of multiple names 'to create a situation for which on one in particular is responsible'. The very existence of the law implies a generalised absence of responsibility, one reinforced in the realm of 'the arts' by the 'death of the author' (cf. Barthes) and the 'liquidation of originality' (cf. Warhol). Indeed part of the problem is that this state of affairs seems to belong to the past, to an accepted but not understood history; a plagiaristic repetition of the issues will tend to result in the erection of a facade of ahistoricity; a kind of fetishisation."

Jyroczech assumes that those who "rely on ... the use of multiple names 'to create a situation for which no one in particular is responsible' " are unaware that such a situation already exists. I would suggest that those involved in such activities are aware of this fact and use the conscious creation of similar situations to bring this state of affairs to the attention of those who do not wish to perceive it. If Jyroczech understood such intentions, he would see that what is in dispute is his assertion that such problems 'belong to ... an accepted but not understood history.

From "The Assault On Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War by Stewart Home (original edition Aporia Press/Unpopular Books, London 1988, new edition AK Press 1991).

source: http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/neoism/preneoass.htm

THE ASSAULT ON CULTURE CHAPTER 13 (pages 69-73)

2008-06-11T09:36:00.001-07:00

THE ASSAULT ON CULTURE CHAPTER 13 (pages 69-73)

MAIL ART

During the sixties, while many cultural workers were moving away from the
production of art objects towards violent political agitation, others were moving into the realms of non-art. Fluxus is the best known and most typical example of this trend. From the liberating climate created by the fluxworkers' assault on the dominant culture, mail art was able to develop. Indeed, the mail art network counts many fluxus members among its earliest participants. Although Ray Johnson (born 1927), considered by many as the founding father of mail art, never joined fluxus, his work is aesthetically close to that of the fluxus group. Indeed, Johnson often exchanged work and ideas with the guiding lights of the fluxus movement. Some of the correspondence he sent Dick Higgins was eventually published as a book, "The Paper Snake" (1965), by Higgins's Something Else Press.

Johnson's work consists primarily of letters, often with the addition of doodles, drawings and rubber stamped messages. The work is lightweight and humorous; rather than being sold as a commodity it is usually mailed to friends and acquaintances. Although much of Johnson's work is given away, this hasn't prevented it attaining a market value. The late Andy Warhol was quoted as saying he would pay ten dollars for anything by Johnson (presumably meaning his letters, since Johnson is also known in the straight art world as a moderately successful pop artist).

In the early sixties Johnson adopted the name "The New York Correspondence School" (NYCS) as an umbrella term for his mailings. He'd already spent some years building up a list of people with whom he could exchange letters and other oddities. This network, with Johnson at its centre, was the NYCS. The name was a parody of other more formal organisations. In 1973, the New York Times received a 'dead letter' from Johnson, which killed off the NYCS. However there was an 'instant rebirth and metamorphosis' as the Buddha University.

Johnson was not the only aesthetic contact fluxus had with the mail system, the fluxworkers themselves used the postal system for aesthetic purposes. The fact that the movement was spread between North America, Japan and Europe, forced its members to use the mail to exchange scores and ideas. But fluxus turned necessity into advantage and were soon churning out rubber stamps and artist's stamp sheets with which to adorn their letters and envelopes. The artist's stamp sheets were gummed and perforated like ordinary postal stamps, but their use was entirely decorative. They couldn't be used in place of any official postal issue. Individual Fluxists also dreamed up methods of subverting the postal system and increasing the involvement of postal workers in their mailings. The best known example of this is the Ben Vautier postcard "The Postman's Choice" (1965). This was printed identically on both sides with lines ruled out for different addresses and space for a stamp. It was left to chance and the postal authorities to decide which of the two possible addresses it should be delivered to.

Throughout the sixties the number of cultural workers exchanging ideas and small oddities through the post - and to a lesser extent the number creating works that took their meaning from being mailed - increased. This trend was fueled by the growth of conceptual and performance art, the main public residues of which were documentation in the form of notes and photographs. Using the postal system, such works could be sent around the world at very low costs. By the early seventies various groups were publishing lists of contact addresses for people interested in exchanging such ideas and works. The best known of these lists were those compiled by Image Bank, International Artists Cooperation and Ken Friedman (the latter published the "International Contact List Of The Arts" in 1972). What had been a few hundred people mailing each other slightly crazy messages suddenly mushroomed into several thousand individuals engaged in a new cultural form. The mail art network was born.

As the network grew, so various sub-genres developed within it. However, it never created a unique style of its own. Most of those participating used the new 'hot medium' of xerox alongside old fashioned rubber stamps. Certificates were produced in great number, which, like the rubber stamps, were used to parody officialdom. Typical among these certificates is Anna Banana's "Master Of Bananology" award. Banana herself typifies the fun side of the mail art network. Much of what she does - and this varies from post card collages to events like the 'Banana Olympics' - is based on the humorous connotations of her assumed name. She has also produced vast quantities of printed matter, varying from the ephemeral "Banana Rag" to the more substantial "Vile", one of the network's better known magazines. However, although she has not lost her sense of humour, Banana's performance work has recently taken on a much more serious tone - she's ceased her well received recreations of futurist and dadaist theatre; her live work is now primarily concerned with the global ecology crisis.

While Banana's activities would be suitable as family entertainment, Pauline Smith's "Adolf Hitler Fan Club" resulted in police raids on her home.
In her 1983 CV, deposited in the Tate Gallery Library, Smith describes the reasons for her interest in Hitler and how she launched the 'Fan Club':

"The ADOLF HITLER FAN CLUB was intended to be an analogy for the week-kneed (sic) British Governments since 1945 and was stimulated by local Chelsea politics regarding landlords/tenants/development/tourism, in which I was interested in the early seventies. Of course, this was not the only factor involved but it was the most pressing. The country is a mess and nothing gets any better. What I feel about the current situation will take several years more to express through my art. For the immediate present I am preoccupied with Adolf Hitler's involvement in the occult, the mediumistic nature of his public speaking and the mystery of his charismatic appeal to the multitudes. He may have been a bad man but he knew very well that people do not live by bread alone - a fact our leaders seem to have forgotten, and probably forgotten precisely because Adolf Hitler thought so deeply about meeting a people's need for inspiration... Adolf Hitler remained the subject of my painting as he had been of my Mailart and I continue to paint about him because everything that has happened in this country since his death has been a reaction against him. He is the biggest influence on this country this century."

Because most of those participating in the mail art network held liberal to left views, Pauline Smith was not only tolerated but defended by many.
While much mail art was inconsequential, the network - or at least parts of it - has conducted numerous campaigns for the freeing of political prisoners, and several against nuclear weapons. The flip-side of this is that, since the early seventies, there has been a sub-genre of mail art concerned with extremism, sado-masochism and pornography. The work of Cosey Fanni Tutti and Genesis P-Orridge has provided some of the best known examples of this. In 1976 P-Orridge was convicted of sending obscene collages thrown the post, and much of Fanni Tutti's cultural work has centred around her activities as a stripper and model.

Another sexual extremist working within the mail art network during the seventies was Jerry Dreva (born 1945, Milwaukee, Wisconsin). Dreva is best known for his artist's book "Wanks For The Memories: The Seminal Work/Books of Jerry Dreva". Dreva created these books by masturbating until his semen stained the pages. The completed works were mailed to friends. As a result of these activities, Dreva has been dubbed 'the man who had a thousand orgasms for art' .

Dreva is also well known for his manipulation of the mass media. One of his earliest media escapades was "Les Petites Bonbons In Hollywood", created in collaboration with Bob Lambert, Chuck Bitz and others. The Bonbons went to all the right places and thus became a famous rock group without needing to bother about music. The Bonbons received coverage in People, Newsweek, Photographic Record and Record World, on the basis of wearing the right clothes and knowing the right people. Dreva became 'so fascinated with the power of the media to create and define' that he took a job on a Wisconsin paper to 'research the entire phenomenon'. As Dreva explains in a feature in "High Performance 9" (Spring 1980):

"Eventually I began to document my own life/art performances (many of them illegal) anonymously on the pages of the newspaper I worked for."

So, for example, Dreva would graffiti the outside of a Milwaukee High School - just before its Festival of Arts - with the slogans "Art Only Exists Beyond The Confines Of Accepted Behaviour" and "Death To Romance", and then in his role as a journalist caption a photo-story about the graffiti for the local press. He would then send copies of the story to his contacts in the mail art network.

In his "High Performance" feature, Dreva is quite clear about his intentions:

".....what I'm trying to do is point to a future when art will no longer exist as a category separate from life."

Dreva's lucidity is unusual among mail artists. Although most of them perceive Dada and Fluxus as their precursors, they are on the whole unaware of the critique of separation than runs as a common thread through these two, and all other, utopian currents. Mail art's popular success was achieved at the cost of abandoning any theoretical rigor. The mail art network continues to attract the involvement of a growing proportion of the lumpen-intelligentsia from all parts of the Americas and Europe, and participants in lesser numbers from Africa, Australia, Japan and South East Asia. These networkers are - on the whole - looking for an activity which will reinforce their perception of themselves as creative and tend not to be particularly critical about their pursuits.

The phenomenal growth of mail art is partially tied to the expansion of higher education during the fifties and sixties. For those who perceive it as "art" it serves as a simulacra and substitute for the rewards higher education promised but failed to deliver. Of the millions of students processed by the art schools, only a very few actually pursue a career as a practicing fine artist.

From a materialist perspective mail art is not art, despite the insistence of many of its practitioners. The democratic nature of the mail art network clearly situates it in opposition to the elitism of art (if art is defined as the culture of the ruling class).

The sheer numbers of people involved in mail art preclude the movement from being 'officially' recognised as a manifestation of high culture for at least as long as it continues to be practiced on such a wide scale. Most art movements (Pre- Raphaelites, Impressionists, Cubists &c.) would seem to number between five and fifty members; mail art by comparison numbers thousands. For a formal and organised art movement to number even a hundred members would pose a threat to its elite status - art critics would resist elevating such a mass of individuals to the pantheon of genius simply because such an elevation would bring the category 'genius' into question. Such numbers can only be dealt with by art critics under broader umbrella terms such as Romanticism, Modernism and Post-Modernism.

As an open network the mail art system has enormous possibilities, but for these to be realised the majority of participants have to become fully conscious of the subversive current of which their mailings form an incoherent part.

source: http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/ass/ma.htm

The Present of Mail-Art

2008-06-08T01:35:00.000-07:00

Ray Johnson: The Present of Mail Art
by Ina Blom

Content Tags: Ina Blom, Ray, The Correspondance School

“Mail Art has no history, only a present”. These words, written by Ray Johnson, initiator of the international mail art movement, provide a key to one of the most complex and idiosyncratic art projects of the 20th Century. A painter associated with the New York School of painting, Johnson had started it all the mid-1950’s, slowly building up a network of correspondents who would exchange objects and messages through the postal system. Initially it was Johnson himself sending out small collage-like works to a mailing list, urging people to keep them, to add to them, to change them, to send them to others, to return to sender. In time others joined in this activity, and in the course of the 1960’s and 1970’s the network grew way beyond the immediate reach and touch of Johnson’s own mailing activities. The initial network was named The New York Correspondance School (sic) – a spin or pun on the idea of artistic schools and the concomitant idea of art history as a succession of such schools. But then the quip about the history of Mail Art was itself a pun, of the most serious kind. Like so many other avant-garde artists (who left painting and behind) Johnson was eager to cut through the historicist temporality that informed modern art history and art production, with its logic of continual succession and supersession of artistic tradition. Cutting through this logic meant placing the production and thinking of art within the immanence of an eternal present, an uncontrollable present of events, not unlike the eternally present liveness of television – a technology and a communication medium which was just at that moment appropriated for artistic purposes.
But then mail art was seen as one of the new “communication arts”, a form of media aesthetics that evolved alongside video art as well as the new questioning of distribution and public access that informed much of the new performative and conceptual art practices: A collage-like work by Ray Johnson even claims to present a “history of video art”, however idiosyncratic. It is in this precise sense that mail art could be said to only have “a present” – a present of communicational events, of uncontrollable exchanges, of things arriving and departing at unforeseen times and places, thanks to the medium of postal system, which, just like television, could be seen to distribute “signals” across the boundaries of time and space. However, the second (punning) meaning of “present” – present meaning gift – was just as important to the logic of Johnson’s postal system. Mail art had no history, since – unlike a modernist art that seems to reside in an independent realm of ever-evolving formal development – it could be seen to place itself squarely in the realm of social exchanges, that is the realm whose entire principle of circulation and reciprocity is kept in check by the system of gifts. Anthropologists see this phenomenon at work, with different ritualistic expressions, in every known culture: the phenomenon of gift exchanges (whose rules are both uncannily similar to and emphatically different from trade and barter) is what ensures the existence of true collectivity. The association of mail art with the rules and ambiguities of gift giving is present in Ray Johnson’s reflections on his artistic practice from the late 1950’s onwards. It is then also what makes it possible to see his artistic practice as a significant contribution to the 1960’s emphasis on situational or relational art practices, practices designed to intervene in social reality, to question existing social form or to try to form new types of collectives or to rethink collectivity tout court. And the emphatic return to these artistic concerns in contemporary art is among the things that accounts for the actuality of Ray Johnson’s lifelong artwork.
But to engage with this actuality is also to be confronted with the question of what exactly Ray Johnson’s present(s) consisted of, what exactly one got when one received a mailing by Ray Johnson and what it meant to be a part of his collectivity of mailers. The answer is complicated, to say the least. In contrast to the social contract set up by the international mail art movement as it evolved on its own accord (a contract informed by ideals of infinite sharing, of non-competition, of giving without thoughts of return, while resting assured that giver’s receive etc.), Johnson at every twist and turn seems to undercut the social ties seemingly established by his practice of gift giving, in fact to continually question the very concepts of communication, communion and community that are associated with it. Hyper-conscious of the ambiguities of gift giving (the difficult power balance between giver and receiver, the difficult distinction between coercion and voluntary action, between ritual and spontaneity and between gift and mere exchange), Johnson exploited the corresponding ambiguities of the modern postal system – a system founded on the premise that messages always reach their destination, but whose rich mythology is shot through with the anxiety provoked by the idea of non-received, displaced, returned and refused messages. At every level – from the semantic techniques deployed in his writings, to his organization of visual material, to the idiosyncratic pragmatics of his mailing practice – Johnson evokes the same reality of associations promised and associations unmade, ruptured, dispersed. His presents are, in other words, full of nothing, and his non-historical present fundamentally undercut by absence: with Johnson there is never any guarantee of community, of the perfect social immanence of togetherness and understanding. Johnson reciprocates, but only through interruption. He organized meetings and assemblies (of the NYCS members), but these meetings were without content or purpose, as if mere gatherings of names on a mailing list. But then concept of nothing informed his artistic project in so many ways, from his mailings to performance-like activities to his rare exhibitions: it organized his very thinking on art and on the role of art and aesthetics in relation to that entity called the social. Through this means continually opened up of the question of sociality itself, the very meaning of notion of “the social”. At a time when so much artistic work is once again focused on “social action”, on all sorts of community-oriented practices, this questioning is of the highest relevance.
Ina Blom, January 2008
About Ina Blom
Ina Blom is an Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo. She has written extensively on modern and contemporary art and is also active as an art critic.
Ina Blom curated the following exhibition:
2003 The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design Oslo ‘The Name of the Game’ (11 January-9 March, 2003), curator Ina Blom. The exhibition traveled to the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (April 2-18 May, 2003), Museum Het Domein Sittard (31 May-17 August, 2003)
[exhibition catalogue] Ina Blom (ed.), The Name of the Game. Ray Johnson’s Postal Performance / book edited and exhibition curated by Ina Blom (National Museum of Contemporary Art : Oslo 2003).

source: http://www.rayjohnson.org/Ray-Johnson-The-Present-of-Mail-Art/

Videos Ray Johnson Published

2008-06-08T01:26:00.000-07:00

Excerpt: The Ray Johnson Videos Sampler from Robert Rodger on Vimeo.

http://www.vimeo.com/598666?pg=embed&sec=598666

The Ray Johnson Videos Trailer from Robert Rodger on Vimeo.

6 kilo's of Mail-Interviews

2008-05-21T11:02:00.001-07:00

Today my order of books from LuLu arrived. 6 kilo's of Mail-Interviews. As you can see the books are quite thick. Some are 360+ pages thick. If you are interested, you can order one or all of them yourself at: http://stores.lulu.com/iuoma The copies that arrived in Breda now are for the TAM-Archive itself. The selling of the books goes quite well. About 50 are already sold and are now in some Mail-Art collections for sure. I am working on a new book as well. Details will follow when the time is right.

Mail-Interviews - PART 5

2008-04-13T22:38:00.001-07:00

The last part in the Book-series of the Mail-Interview Project has now been published. It contains only a few more interviews, but they are also quite interesting. Also the complete lists and details about the project are added with reprints of the hardcopy covers that were made over the years.

Printed:

161 pages, 6" x 9", perfect binding, cream interior paper (60# weight), black and white interior ink, white exterior paper (100# weight), full-colour exterior ink. Paperback book €12.07

Description:

A selection of 5 more Mail-Interviews conducted by Ruud Janssen with International Mail-Artists and Fluxus-Artists in the years 1994 till 2002. This time also unfinished interviews and an overview of all names of the interviewed persons! Includes interviews with John M. Bennett, The Unexpected, Jürgen O. Olbrich, Ko de Jonge, Michael B. Corbett and a reprint of the mail-interview Newsletter that explains the Mail-Interview Project. A part of the book is reserved for reprints of the covers made for the booklets in the 90-ies.

Order online at: http://www.lulu.com/content/2359294

For all books go to: http://stores.lulu.com/iuoma

Mail-Interviews - PART 4

2008-04-13T00:42:00.000-07:00

Yes, a next book with Mail-Interviews got published. This time a combination of complete mail-interviews and a collection of unfinished interviews. 21 mail-artists in total.

Printed: 343 pages, 6" x 9", perfect binding, cream interior paper (60# weight), black and white interior ink, white exterior paper (100# weight), full-colour exterior ink. Print: €16.96
Download: €2.50

Description:
A selection of 21 more Mail-Interviews conducted by Ruud Janssen with International Mail-Artists and Fluxus-Artists in the years 1994 till 2002. This time also unfinished interviews! Includes interviews with H.R. Fricker, Julia Tant, Raphael Nadolny, John Evans, Bern Porter, Birger Jesch, Patricia Collins, Daniel Plunkett, Patricia tavenner, Judith A. Hoffberg, Peter Küstermann, Robert Rocola, Rod Summers, Marie Stillkind, Roy Arenalla, Rudi Rubberoid, Stephen Perkins, Klaus Groh, Ruggero Maggi, Vittore Baroni, Svjetlana Mimica and a reprint of the mail-interview Newsletter that explains the Mail-Interview Project.

Orderdetails: http://www.lulu.com/content/2354626

All books: http://stores.lulu.com/iuoma

Because I know some people don't want to order online I will see how I can help there. When I order the books myself and send them out, postage is paid twice. Cheapest way is to order straight from LuLu. But when I have stock here in Breda I can determine how heavy a package is and what the extra postage is. Next month I will give the details.

Mail-Interviews in BOOK-FORM available

2008-04-11T10:14:00.000-07:00

You can order at : http://stores.lulu.com/iuoma

New Books available.

2008-04-06T08:27:00.000-07:00

On http://stores.lulu.com/iuoma you can have an overview of the publications that I have made available for you. This includes now two books with the complete texts of 28 interviews I did in the years 1994 till 2007. A selection of the most interesting interviews, including people who are no longer with us like Edgardo-Anonio-Vigo, Ray Johnson, Dick Higgins, Norman Solomon, but also some very active Fluxus- and Mail-Artists. Just have a look.

The information insides these books is always available online as well for free. These books are made for the persons who rather have the texts in printed form so it can be read and archived.

Available are:

Mail-Interviews - Part 2 Mail-Interviews - Part 2 (book)
Print: €16.23
Download: €2.50
A selection of 12 Mail-Interviews conducted by Ruud Janssen with International Mail-Artists and Fluxus-Artists in the years 1994 till 2002.

Mail-Interviews - Part 1 Mail-Interviews - Part 1 (book)
Print: €13.59
Download: €2.50
A selection of 16 Mail-Interviews conducted by Ruud Janssen with International Mail-Artists and Fluxus-Artists in the years 1994 till 2007.

25 Years in Mail-Art 25 Years in Mail-Art (book)
Print: €8.83
Download: €2.50
A book with Biographical materials connected to the the 25 years of active work by Ruud Janssen in the Mail-Art Network. Overviews, Interviews, Dates and events.

TAM Rubberstamp Archive TAM Rubberstamp Archive (book)
Download: €3.75
Hardcover Print: €21.48
This catalogue is made to support the exhibition of the TAM Rubberstamp Archive Collection at the L-Gallery in Moscow, Russia. The TAM-Rubberstamp archive started in 1983 and is currated by Ruud Janssen from the Netherlands.

honoria in ciberspazio - Mail Art Archives

2008-03-26T23:36:00.000-07:00

Every so often I am asked how to secure mail art archives. Crackerjack Kid seems to tell people I have this knowledge. Here is the sum of my knowledge as written to the most recent inquiry.

Dear Sheril,

Thanks for your letter about your mail art collection blues.

Chuck and David did contact me about David’s archive before he died. Then an archivist working with David's collection before and after he died also contacted me.

I do not have any personal information about collecting, donating, or securing mail art archives, although I think Chuck Welch thinks I do. When I was doing my doctoral research on mail art one of my main findings was that mail artists of a certain age were very concerned about the safety of their archives and wanted to find them a home in an institution.

Here is what I learned and it may be helpful to you.

John Held Jr. a professional librarian with a well-organized archive has sold parts of it to various institutions such as the Smithsonian National Archives and the Getty. John has received a lot of flack for selling mail art, but in fact, that’s a way to get a large institution interested. If you are giving away an archive then it has no actual value to the acquiring organization such as university library or museum.

Judith Hoffberg also a professional librarian donated her archive of artists’ books to her university's library.

I would start by talking to these two mail artists about their archives and how to get yours secured into an institution. Then publish how you did it on the web at mailartist.com. Send your solution to me and I will post it there.

Another avenue is to contact a school of information (formerly called school of library science) at a university. Offer your archive as a capstone project and let students research how to handle mail art archives. I think this is the best idea yet. Grad students get a unique problem they can 1) research 2) solve and then 3) write about in scholarly journals. A byproduct would be that you would secure the works you care about.

I wish you the best of luck in securing your archive or repurposing it into new art. I am a recycler myself so I don’t have an archive and I don’t have archive legacy issues that go with archives.

Best wishes,
honoria

source: http://honoriartist.livejournal.com/370702.html

GUGLIELMO ACHILLE CAVELLINI

2008-03-07T22:28:00.000-08:00

Brescia 1914-1990

Guglielmo Achille Cavellini (also known as GAC, which is how he signed his name) was a genial, multi-dimensional character who created contemporary art for fifty years-- from the end of the Second World War to 1990, when he died. Through his work, he created a type of enlightened judgement, which justly brought the wavering old system back to individuals and their thoughts. An innovative artist of his time, it seems that most people still do not fully understand the scope of what he accomplished-- both in his professional and personal life.
At the end of the 1950s, GAC left his first expressive efforts and discovered a new type of art in Europe (abstract art.) This contemporary genre illustrated the latest direction in painting, and Cavellini fell in love with it. He became a major collector and offered his opinions freely. To many, his value could be limited to this. However, this was only a jumping-off point, which led him to create a cutting-edge concept of art as an individual choice-- an integral part of his life.
In 1960 he resumed abstract painting with force, after having been greatly interested in it for many years. This can be seen as a forerunner to his writing works, which subsequently took shape. He continued to experiment, and in 1965 he churned out a set of works which constituted a further step toward a diversified use of materials. He recovered everyday objects-- mainly toys, model soldiers, razor blades et cetera-- and mixed them with waste materials to create a kind of “dramatic theater,” laden with memories and social denunciation.
Crates with destroyed works followed (1966-1968,) where he incorporated his previous efforts along with pieces by other artists that he was most inspired by. Here the quotation-appropriation element first appeared (1967-1968,) a concept which took a more defined shape with work made from painted wood. In these pieces, he played with characters from art history and early postage stamps, starting an acknowledging process of celebration. Coal, which was a constant symbol for him (1968-1971,) contained the concept of burning-- to create something new by purifying oneself. It was here that he mixed, more openly, concepts that he had only touched on before. By experimenting with different media—and being influenced by other artists and the image of Italy in countless situations-- he developed symbols that acquired the status of “real works.”
In 1970 he created a series entitled Proposte (Proposals,) where he used other artists' most critical work on a historic and artistic level. Play and irony take on an even greater presence, leaving the uncertainty that this is an extreme, harmful act. In 1971 a crucial turning point occurred in his work: he decided to pay attention exclusively to himself to denounce a system, which he felt was filled with insurmountable envy and narrow-mindedness. He coined the term Autostoricizzazione (“Self-historicism”) as a way to put his judgement into practise. This term may seem like a narcissist escamotage, but this concept was so strong that it slipped into the art system and overflowed to its most vital ganglia, revealing all its contradictions.
His "Mostre a domicilio" (Home-delivery exhibitions) were a sort of “flag” for many young artists with whom he had a tight postage-art exchange. In fact, this exchange was so extensive that a remarkable and compelling archive museum was set up with works from all over the world. On several occasions, Cavellini defined that exhibition as his most important work. He then produced posters that would be used worldwide by countless museums to celebrate his centennial, and he included his name with dates ranging from 1914 to 2014. In this moment, the artist's fantasy goes wild. Free from any shame of self-celebration, he appears in his postage stamps with a grimacing expression.
In 1973 he wrote Pagina dell’Enciclopedia (“Encyclopaedia page,”) which starts with a simple autobiographical account and ends in a real hyperbole on the worship of personality. His writing thus became a “painting code,” which was maniacally and insistently used on any medium: columns, dummies, canvases and enormous clothes. This is how Cavellini should be seen: as a real innovator, forerunner and leader of a new way of communicating in art. He stepped over old canonical relations, giving a concrete answer and vitality to his message of provoking judgement within the territory of art.

Guglielmo Achille Cavellini

2008-03-07T22:27:00.000-08:00

Guglielmo Achille Cavellini works from 1960-1990

Catalogue with Essay by Sue Spaid

January 3 – February 5, 2004

Opening Reception: Thursday, March 20, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Florence Lynch Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of painting, photography, performance video and assemblage by Guglielmo Achille Cavellini. The exhibition is on view from March 20 to May 3, 2008. An opening reception will be held at the gallery on Thursday, March 20, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.
An innovative artist of his time Cavellini’s work is most frequently associated with Fluxus. Cavellini created art for fifty years—from the end of the Second World War to 1990. An influential collector, he produced many reinterpretations of concurrent artistic works and experimented with abstract painting and assemblage. He also engaged in an extensive postage-art exchange for which he became well-known. This exchanged turned him into the leader of a new way of communicating in art. He became a mythical figure for a generation of underground artists and was regarded as a liberator that would break the chains of a closed system that often excluded artists. In 1970, he invented the term autostoricizzazione (self-historicization) and started a long work of conceptual self-promotion, which sought to by-pass the roles of the critic and of the market, focusing on the mechanisms of the art system.
The exhibition includes the Italian postage stamp series a recurring theme in his work; the work dealt with the idea of celebration. He saw the stamp as a concrete representation of this idea and used it quite frequently. He examined the most common and appealing images in contemporary art and dramatically inserted them into massive wooden inlays. In the crate series, he destroyed works previously created, his and that of others, and put them into crates. By doing so, he broke an evolutionary constant that had been governing his artistic processes. In addition to the various series in different media, Cavellini produced a number of performance videos include From the Page of the Encyclopedia, The Cow, and A day in a Genius Life. Cavellini in New York will be on view for the first time in the US since its production in 1982.
His artist’s books are well-represented in the permanent holdings of New York’s Franklin Furnace and in the archive on 20th century art maintained by the Venice Biennale. Hi work can be find in many private collections and institutions including the Civiche Raccolte Comune di Milano, Museo Pecci Prato, Museo MART Rovereto, Museo di Cavalese Trento, Collezione citta di Pesaro, Civica Raccolta del disegno Sal, FRAC Nord Pas de Calais and Le Consortium Dijon in France.
Cavellini was born in Brescia, Lombardy where he lived and worked until he died in 1990.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 11:00 to 6:00 p.m. For further information and photographic material please contact Florence Lynch or Beatrice Campa at 212-924-3290.Catalogue with Essay by Sue Spaid
January 3 – February 5, 2004
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 20, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
Florence Lynch Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of painting, photography, performance video and assemblage by Guglielmo Achille Cavellini. The exhibition is on view from March 20 to May 3, 2008. An opening reception will be held at the gallery on Thursday, March 20, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.
An innovative artist of his time Cavellini’s work is most frequently associated with Fluxus. Cavellini created art for fifty years—from the end of the Second World War to 1990. An influential collector, he produced many reinterpretations of concurrent artistic works and experimented with abstract painting and assemblage. He also engaged in an extensive postage-art exchange for which he became well-known. This exchanged turned him into the leader of a new way of communicating in art. He became a mythical figure for a generation of underground artists and was regarded as a liberator that would break the chains of a closed system that often excluded artists. In 1970, he invented the term autostoricizzazione (self-historicization) and started a long work of conceptual self-promotion, which sought to by-pass the roles of the critic and of the market, focusing on the mechanisms of the art system.
The exhibition includes the Italian postage stamp series a recurring theme in his work; the work dealt with the idea of celebration. He saw the stamp as a concrete representation of this idea and used it quite frequently. He examined the most common and appealing images in contemporary art and dramatically inserted them into massive wooden inlays. In the crate series, he destroyed works previously created, his and that of others, and put them into crates. By doing so, he broke an evolutionary constant that had been governing his artistic processes. In addition to the various series in different media, Cavellini produced a number of performance videos include From the Page of the Encyclopedia, The Cow, and A day in a Genius Life. Cavellini in New York will be on view for the first time in the US since its production in 1982.
His artist’s books are well-represented in the permanent holdings of New York’s Franklin Furnace and in the archive on 20th century art maintained by the Venice Biennale. Hi work can be find in many private collections and institutions including the Civiche Raccolte Comune di Milano, Museo Pecci Prato, Museo MART Rovereto, Museo di Cavalese Trento, Collezione citta di Pesaro, Civica Raccolta del disegno Sal, FRAC Nord Pas de Calais and Le Consortium Dijon in France.
Cavellini was born in Brescia, Lombardy where he lived and worked until he died in 1990.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 11:00 to 6:00 p.m. For further information and photographic material please contact Florence Lynch or Beatrice Campa at 212-924-3290.

PR IUOMA-group

2007-11-17T00:50:00.001-08:00

Want to support the IUOMA? Just add this text to your blog or site:

Mail Art in the Mirror

2007-11-09T12:56:00.000-08:00

When one analyzes the word “Mail-Art”, the two components explain a lot of what it is all about.

The art-part means: “the ability to create something new” and the mail-part means “sent from one person to another one”, with all the variations the modern mail offers.

Originally in mail-art, like in the Fluxus-world, the participants knew how to produce art. They looked for new concepts to produce and show their creations. They made new things and after careful preparation the projects were done and the results were there. In today’s mail-art that still happens, but I notice that sometimes new participants only understand the mail-part, and still have to develop their art-part.

Mail-Art is a learning process and it starts when one gets in contact with “the Network”.

Creating something new is the most difficult part for most artists. If one IS an artist one has this possibility in oneself. If one isn’t an artist, one only can copy concepts and set them through. With a lot of success also, but nothing new is created.

Some contacts I have in the mail-art network have the same ‘drive’ as me and with them the contact has grown over the year. Not because we exchange letters on a frequent basis, but mostly because we understand the ways we both are going. Even when a letter comes after years of silence, one remembers the development of the communication, and new steps are taken (or not) to develop this further. One finds his/her own steps in the evolution of the art one wants to create.

Mail-Art at the mirror. What has one created and how is it seen by others? This is an interesting question.

If mail-art has become an addiction, one reacts to every piece one gets in and divides his/her energy over all the mailings one sends out. The result is there: a growing list of contacts and a decrease of the quality one sends out. Every mail-artist reaches this point; sometimes this even repeats itself over the years.

Making a good piece costs days, and that way one can’t answer all that comes in.

For a few years I’ve even stopped answering all the mail. Only the important things got answered. Also because the Internet has intensified communication in a certain time. How to deal with hundreds of e-mails each day and all those messages in that online groups? Stopping answering all and selecting, brings you back to the basics. Communication is what it is all about. Does the receiver understand the message of the sender or is this not important anymore? Look in the mirror and think of what the receiver will think of what you send out. What is your message? Also look at the message a sender sends to you. What does he want?

Try to answer these questions with each piece you send out and you get in, and try to be honest to yourself.

The best way to understand what you are doing.

The best pieces I send out are the pieces I actually find difficult to send out. I would like to keep them because I value them myself so much. After documenting things I might send it out, but only to someone who I think is worth it. The real mail-art is highly connected to life itself. The Life one has, and what one does with it, is the most interesting artwork one can leave behind for sure.

Ruud Janssen, February 1st 2004.

PIG Press 2008

2007-11-03T02:46:00.000-07:00

A new publication that is worked on. The cover-concept is made.

Onvious

2007-09-28T11:11:00.001-07:00

Street Sign

2007-09-21T10:23:00.000-07:00

Would you like to make another street sign?

Mail-Art

2007-09-17T11:08:00.000-07:00

Digital Publications

2007-09-17T11:03:00.000-07:00

More publications are in progress. Just have a look on the many sites I work on to find the links. A lot in the form of .PDF files which are free and available for everybody....

New businesscards

2007-09-03T11:29:00.000-07:00

The archive IUOMA Blog

2007-08-29T13:22:00.000-07:00

Because the Internet is a changing world I tend to archive also the digital things that I produce. The complete IUOMA blog is now archived at:

http://www.iuoma.org/iuomablogarchive.html

There you will find .PDF files of evey month that I have published. I will try to keep this archive up to date.....

Ruud

New Blog

2007-07-03T02:22:00.000-07:00

On the new Blog located at http://mailartprojects.blogspot.com/ several mail-artists will enter their projects. It is a self-publishing event there. If you would like to be a contributor there as well, just send an e-mail to info at iuoma.org and I will add you to the BLOG. The complete blog will become a digital publication of a list with mail-at projects. At the moment already 11 contributors. But I am sure it will grow quickly.

Ruud

New online publications

2007-06-04T06:19:00.000-07:00

Recently I made some brochures about my views concerning mail-art. I also published them online. See www.iuoma.org and go to the section where I mention the UPDATES of just go to the list of TAM-PUBLICATIONS to fins the link. The new files are PDF files which I also circulate in printed format.

Dreams stay Inside - Poetry

2006-12-10T02:50:00.000-08:00

A poetry publication published some years ago in Spanisch / English. Translation by Teresinka Pereira (USA).

Digital Publications

2006-09-30T10:19:00.001-07:00

The last year I haven't published that much in paper version, but lots of art & information that Litsa Spathi and I made is available online. A short overview to het you started:

Interested in Mail-Art?

IUOMA - Ruud Janssen - TAM Blog

Fluxus Heidelberg Center

TAM-Publications Blog

TAM and RUUD Findings Blog

Fluxus Heidelberg Center BLOG

Mail-Interviews Blog

Painted CD's

The TAM-Rubberstamp Blog

Nobody's Blog

Nobody, Litsa & the Men

Tomato Times

I Know, it is the new way the world works: digital publications. But still I have a problem with reading all that. I prefer reading from paper, like more of you....

Ruud

New Blogs

2006-08-02T07:57:00.000-07:00

Because the world is more and more moving into the digital direction, I have decided to make more digital publications as well. When you click on my profile at BLOGGER ypu can find the several digital collections that I am building these last months.

Mail from Alison Knowles

2006-05-28T02:45:00.000-07:00

Some historic material came in for the research for the new mail-interview. After the interview the link to the complete file will be published here.

New Interview in the making

2006-05-15T05:36:00.000-07:00

Guess what..... Yes, I have started a new interview with somebody out there. The interview is in progress and when the results are ready the booklet will be published. Since I am very interested in the roots of Fluxus I am happy to say I am now interviewing one of the 'founding members'. More info soon....

Ruud

2005-05-29T02:23:00.000-07:00

new address for TAM Publications.

Interview with Guy Bleus - Belgium

2005-04-29T12:13:00.000-07:00

Still have plenty of these booklets available here. Printed by The Sticker Dude in New York, the interview with Guy Bleus by Ruud Janssen. Available for the postage-costs only(inside Europe $2 , outside Europe $3).

2005-03-29T02:33:00.000-08:00

In 1996 these newsletters of the TAM Rubberstamp Archive were sent out (edition of over 200). The text of this newsletter is also in the latest CD that documents the archive as well. It was especially made because of the exhibition in Moscow last year.

New CD published of the TAM Rubberstamp Archive

2005-03-06T07:28:00.000-08:00

The CD of the exhibition at the L-Gallery in Moscow, Russia is ready. The CD contains lots of information about the TAM Rubberstamp Archive, including scans of the sheets by the artists that sent in, the posters, the catalogue and even a video made of all the works inside the exhibition. The catalogue is available on request. Ask for details.

Texts of the Mail-Interviews

2005-02-20T08:59:00.000-08:00

Just for your information: The complete texts of the Mail-Interviews can be found on: http://www.iuoma.org/interview.html . In this blog I only published the coloured covers that belong to nthe printed versions of the mail-interviews back in the 90-ies.

Ruud

Overview of IUOMA membership cards

2005-01-19T10:12:00.000-08:00

A card designed by Sean Woodworth (an IUOMA-member in the UK). He used a logo from tyhe iuoma-site as basis. Some logos of the past can be found at the site www.iuoma.org/iuoma.html . The fun is that the forms keep changing. When a new member makes a new card it will be used as well. If it is sent to me I will even publish it, and other members can decide which card they like. The IUOMA is quite flexible with all those creative members. Want to reach out to some? Just join at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/iuoma/

IUOMA

2005-01-19T10:09:00.000-08:00

The card used in the years 1998-2000

2005-01-19T10:07:00.000-08:00

The card published in 1988 (Those days the computers weren't that accessible)

IUOMA

2005-01-19T10:02:00.000-08:00

The card you can print and send in to the IUOMA. It will be returned after signing. And if I don't get too many, the signed version will be published on my blog.

2005-01-19T10:00:00.000-08:00

The FIRST IUOMA MAGAZINE that got published in June 1991. An edition of 300 , size A4, and about 40 pages doublesided.

New publications

2005-01-13T11:58:00.000-08:00

For my 25th year active in mail-art I am working on a few publications that will see the light somewhere in this year. As soon as they are ready I will let you know on this BLOG.

Ruud

2004-12-07T09:38:00.000-08:00

The catalogue of the African project "End Racism/Ethnic Hatred" done by Ayah Okwabi, Ghana. TAM-Publications sponsored the project by printing & distributing the catalogue. The layout was done by Ayah. - July 1996.

2004-12-07T09:36:00.000-08:00

The TAM-Bulletin, issue 1987.01 - cover.

2004-12-05T07:56:00.000-08:00

This special issue of Open wORLD (cLOSED wORLD) was issued by TAM-Publications during the war in Yugoslavia in 1999. Now over 5 years ago. Dobrica continued his magazine open world lateron.

2004-12-05T02:11:00.000-08:00

Mail-Interview with Patricia COllins, UK. Cover.

2004-12-05T02:10:00.000-08:00

Mail-interview with Henning Mittendorf - Germany. Cover.

2004-12-05T02:09:00.000-08:00

Mail-Interview with Rod Summers - Netherlands. He is a long-time mail-artist that specialises in Audio and published lots of good stuff.

2004-12-05T02:08:00.000-08:00

Mail-Interview with Mark Greenfield - UK. Cover.

2004-12-04T10:52:00.000-08:00

The mail-interview with E.F.Higgins - III (USA) - cover

2004-12-04T10:50:00.000-08:00

Mail-Interview with Gunther Ruch Switzerland (cover) 1997.

2004-12-04T10:49:00.000-08:00

Mail-Interview with Jenny de Groot (Netherlands) - cover.

2004-12-04T10:47:00.000-08:00

Mail-Interview with Ibirico-Spain. Cover 1997. Ibirico is a visual poet and artist

2004-12-04T10:46:00.000-08:00

mail-interview with Ayah Okwabi - Ghana (Africa). Ayah currently works and lives in Sweden.

2004-12-04T10:44:00.000-08:00

Mail-Interview with Rudi Rubberoid, USA - cover - 1996.

2004-12-04T10:43:00.000-08:00

Mail-interview with Jenny Soup, USA - cover

2004-12-04T10:42:00.000-08:00

mail-interview with Carol Stetser, USA - cover.

2004-12-04T10:40:00.000-08:00

mail-interview with Julie Hagan Bloch - cover.

2004-12-04T10:37:00.000-08:00

The mail-interview with Michael Lumb. His thesis is also availoable online at: http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/palace/62/index.html

2004-12-04T10:32:00.000-08:00

The mail-interview with Michael B.Corbett, hardcopy version. Text also available at: http://www.iuoma.org/interview.html