# MAIL ART AND THE BIG MONSTER

This was my contribution to the International Artists Meeting that took
place in April 1977 at the Remont Gallery in Warsaw. My performance
consisted of the reading of this text and the opening of my E.A.M.I.S. or
Erratic Art Mail International System.

This text has been published in Yournal No. 20, The Los Angeles Institute
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1978. A Dutch translation appeared in
Winscherm No. 9-10, Gouda, 1978. It was also included, in English and
Danish, in the catalogue, The Erratic Art Mail International System,
published by the Egmont Hoskoien, Hou, 1979, on the occasion of my visit
to the Festival Kunst og Kunstnere that Niels Lomholt organized.

I’ve used this text as a basis for lectures at the Galerie s:t Petri,
Archive of Experimental and Marginal Art, Lund, in 1979, and at the
Universidade Catolica de Pernambuco, on the occasion of the First Winter
Festival, Recife, 1978, organized by Paulo Bruscky.

The moment has come to declare that mail art has very little to do with
mail and a lot to do with art.

In the expression “mail art” the word “mail” can be replaced by
multiplicity, by expediency, by distribution, or by many other words. On
the other hand, in “mail art” the word “art” is there for art,
for art and for absolutely nothing else.

Mail art uses the mail as support in the sense that nonmail arts use
canvas, paper, iron, and wood as support.

Many individuals using these supports never thought of “canvas art,
wood art,” “paper art.” Words, pieces of paper, envelopes, and
colors are media. When an artist utilizes one or several of these media,
and chooses the postal system as their means of support, then mail art
comes into existence.

Mail art uses as support the postal system — a complex, international
system of transport, including thousands of people, buildings, machinery,
world treaties, and God knows what.

The proof that the post is not the medium is that to use it, an artist
doesn’t need to understand how it functions. Even in the utopic
possibility that the artist reaches complete understanding of the system,
he cannot control it. What he controls is the “work,” the “mail
piece” that he shall post. That is his creation.

Most artists and the public seem to have lost themselves in the game. They
have come to think that making mail art means producing postcards.

Those artists use mail art as they would use paint, since they believe
that mail is a medium that allows one to produce art works in postcard
format.

Only a few people realize that in mail art the terms of the equation
have reversed: what in daily life functions as a system of communication,
as means for conveying messages, as medium, has become in the hands of
certain artists the support of all sorts of different media in order to
produce mail art pieces.

When I send by post a letter that is only a letter, I am using the mail as
a system that allows the transmission of my message. This system includes
two sub-systems — on the one hand the sub-system of written or visual
language, on the other hand the sub-system of the postal services.

The relationship between the two sub-systems is permanent but not
rigid. The accent can be laid on one or the other according to the
motivation or intent.

When you receive a letter from your lover you are not so interested
in what is written on it. You are mainly interested in receiving
something from him or her. Your lover could have sent flowers instead
of words — you would have understood very well. He/she may use words
or flowers as long as he/she mails something to you. In this case the
accent lies in the sub-system “mail.”

Something very different occurs when we get a letter from the bank
or from the police. Then, who does not care about the content of the
envelope? Then it is not important if we got the message from the postman
or from a heavenly spirit. In this case the most important sub-system
is the written language and not the mail.

When I say that in mail art the mail is not the medium but the support,
I don’t mean to say that the mail is not important. It is extremely
important. But it is first necessary to recognize and define its role
in the process implied by a mail art piece.

Let’s imagine a piece of mail art that uses a substitute for the
post system. For instance, we can give letters to a number of friends
that set out in different directions. We can give these friends precise
instructions regarding when and how and to whom our messages should be
delivered. All this is perfectly possible, is it not? But normally we use
the post office because it happens to be the most convenient and widely
used network. If we utilize the post office for our imaginary piece,
its meaning would not change essentially.

On the other hand, we cannot imagine a piece of mail art that does not
use words, or drawings, or paper, or plastic. These are thus the media,
the significant elements with which we construct our message in mail art.

The question now arises: What about if an artist conceives of a piece in
which mailing, the act of using the post office, postage stamps, one or
several post office clerks, or any other element of the postal system
play an important role? In this case we all would agree on calling the
postal system the medium or at least an element of the medium.

Further, it can be that only by incorporating the mail system as an
essential part of the piece we are able to make a real mail art piece. It
is actually so — the best mail art pieces use the post as an integral,
functional element of the work.

In order to realize this, it was first necessary to prove how marginal
mail, as such, can be to mail art. Only then can we appreciate the role
that mail should play and does play as an element of mail art, which is
to say, of art.

The question now arises: How does the adjective Mail affect the noun Art
in reality? All sorts of platitudes have been given as answer to this
question. It has been said that mail art is easy, cheap, unpretentious,
and democratic. All this is rubbish.

Is it easy for an artist to send a postcard? Yes. But, as we have seen,
an artist does not become a mail artist by sending a postcard, no matter
how “beautiful” this card might be.

Is it cheap to produce and to send a postcard? No, certainly not. You
rarely produce one postcard, you produce an edition of several hundreds
or thousands of copies. In fact, many artists are forced to produce one
postcard because they do not possess the financial means to produce a
thousand copies.

Is mail art unpretentious? This is difficult to answer. It depends on the
artist. I would not care to say that mail artists are unpretentious. I
for one, am very pretentious. And there are those who state “I am a
mail artist”? which almost always means “The other artists are no
artists at all.”

Is mail art democratic? I doubt it. For an art that pretends to be
widespread, 200 correspondents is very, very little. And these 200
names are chosen with great care. And some answers are with no doubt
more valued than others. Artists do not answer every letter from a not
well-determined sender, sometimes because of time or economy; more often
because they do not deem the letter worthwhile to answer.

Whether mail art is or is not easy, cheap, unpretentious, and democratic,
is not very essential. A more important question is: can you make good
art with mail art? An even more basic question: What is and what is
not mail art?

A mail art piece consists of a series of actions, of which two are
the most important—the production of the piece and the posting of
the piece. There exists however a radical difference between these two
actions. Namely, our control of the first is almost absolute, but we
have almost no control at all for the second, the actual posting.

When we are producing the piece to be mailed we are free to choose the
materials and how to utilize them. We can choose the dimensions. We
decide on the outside and the inside. In other words, when I write a
letter I am free to write whatever I want.

What about the mailing? Then we are not free, we are subject to certain
rules established beforehand. Not only that, we have also to pay a price
that is calculated with precision concerning size and weight. There is
no question of bargaining or being talented. You pay, or forget about
your beautiful mail art piece.

Seen from this point of view, mail art is no longer something easy, cheap,
unpretentious and unimportant. Mail art knocks at the door of the castle
where the Big Monster lives. You can tell the monster anything you like,
according to your experiences and beliefs. But the fact is that the Big
Monster lives and oppresses us.

Every invitation we receive to participate in a mail art project is
part of the guerrilla war against the Big Monster. Every mail art piece
is a weapon thrown against the Monster who is the owner of the Castle,
who separates us one from the others, all of us.

What or who is the monster I am talking about? Do I mean
the postmaster? Post office clerks? Do I mean the minister of
communications? Or, do I mean the technology they use and control? Do
I mean those little, colorful pieces of glued paper that we must buy
every time we post something? To tell you the truth, I do not know exactly
what or whom I am talking about. All I know is that there is a Monster,
and that by posting all sorts of mail pieces, I am knocking at his door.

When we were making painting we could talk about sensibility, beauty,
vision, and craftsmanship. But when we are knocking at the Monster’s
door, what does it count? The answer is simple: It counts how hard you
are knocking. How can we measure the intensity of our knocking? By the
echo we produce, obviously.

I know that the eternal skeptics won’t like this. First they found mail
art was too small, too petty. Now they are going to say that you cannot
judge art with arithmetics. They do not see that, when we talk of numbers,
it is not arithmetics we are talking about. We are talking about harmony.

When someone posts a mail art piece and later gets an answer—that is
harmony, agreement, accord. We could judge the beauty of the answer,
yes. But as far as the mail art piece is concerned, the only thing that
really counts is getting answers.

What about mail art pieces that require to remain unanswered in order
to exist?

The answer is as follows—we still don’t know how to measure the
response. We count them one, two, three and so on because we still
don’t know any other way. This is only a temporary, provisional sort
of measuring. However, this imperfect method gives us an idea. .

We need more ideas for mail art. We are receptive to more ideas. Why
don’t you give some ideas? Only do not say them: Mail them, please.

(Immediately after having written this phrase I got the idea for my
mail art project, the foundation of the E.A.M.I.S. or Erratic Art Mail
International System, that delivers messages “by any way other than
the official post offices.”)

(Yes, it would change essentially. But here I’m underlining the idea
of the postal system as a means of distribution.)

(To my knowledge, the only person who has ever written of mail art with
understanding is Jean-Marc Poinsot. His introduction to the catalogue Mail
Art: Communication, A Distance Concept is brilliant and even visionary. On
the basis of his analyses of the works in the Section Envois of the Paris
Biennale 1971, Poinsot accurately predicts the ulterior developments of
mail art.)

# TABLE OF MAIL ART WORKS

1. Format
1.1 Total

Postcard
Letter
Package
Telegram

BON

wl.
gls
wl
al,

pt ek pees

1.2 Partial

1.2.1 Envelope
1.2.2 Post Stamp
1.2.3 Rubber Stamp

2. Scope
2.1 Individual

2.1.1 One sender, one mailing
2.1.2 One sender, serial mailing
2.1.2.1 One addressee

2.1.2.2 Several addressees

2.2 Group

2.2.1 All the invitations to participate plus
all the answers

2.2.2 The answers alone are part of the
work

3. Subject

3.1 Free
3.2 Given

4. Anomalies

4.1 Alteration of format
4.2 Alteration of scope
4.3 Alteration of subject
4.4 Alteration of the table



This table was drawn by me to go together with the text Mail Art and the Big
Monster. This is a somewhat modified version of the original.

Ulises Carrion