Addressing the History of Mail Art

Addressing the History of Mail Art

Depending on who your source is, the practice of mail art began in 1916 when Marcel Duchamp sent a series of artsy postcards to his neighbors ... or it really began later, in the 1950s, with American artist Ray Johnson. Johnson had a mailing list of hundreds, including people like Andy Warhol and James Barr of the Museum of Modern Art, and he'd send out collages and hand-stamped letters to all of them. Eventually, a loose network of such postal artists formed, with Johnson at the epicenter, and it came to be known as the New York Correspondence School of Art. This "school" became involved with the Fluxus group -- a wide-ranging crew of reactive, Dada-inspired pranksters -- and the numbers of its underground ranks swelled. In the autumn of 1970, Johnson and Marcia Tucker organized an exhibit of New York mail art at the Whitney Museum of American Art. There followed an international flourishing of mail art postings and exhibitions, fueled by articles in Art in America and Rolling Stone, until there were more networks and mail art shows than you could shake a rubber stamp at.

A bit of mail art's handmade glory died with the influx of Xerox technology in the late Seventies, but this advent also introduced the participation of people from the zine and audio cassette cultures. It was a mutual embrace between the art world and the underground, which helped to erase the borders between the two and birthed such movements as Neoism, Art Strike, and the many meetings of the Decentralized Worldwide Networker Congress. There were hundreds of mail artists all over the world -- some of them part of large and overlapping networks, some in smaller, isolated groups -- and each of them mailing their creations to everybody else. "The most important part of mail art," writes mail art historian John Held Jr. in his From Moticos to Mail Art: Four Decades of Postal Networking, "has not been in the products which have been created, but the structure of interaction which has evolved." These days, with e-mail and the Internet, you might think a lot of the impetus has been excised from this ever-changing body of work. And while it's true that some networking activity may have moved exclusively to cyberspace, it's also true that the World Wide Web is unbeatable as a convenient source for a much mail art information -- including lists of snail-mail addresses and calls-for-entries. This article -- which goes online soon after the Chronicle's paper edition comes out -- is a case in point.