“In Alphabetical Order”: Organization as Artistic Strategy
In addition to stewarding the Other Books and So Archive, Carrión created numerous works that examined the logic and strategies of archiving, indexing, and knowledge organization. From tables, to index cards, to archival storage boxes, these works make reference to archives on both an aesthetic and structural level. Carrión pointed out how archival systems were used within bureaucratic contexts to establish order and control, but rather than reject these systems, he playfully reworked them to spark new creative possibilities.
Table of Mail Art Works, [between 1978 and 1980?]
Ulises Carrión
Postcard
With this postcard, Carrión outlines his own taxonomy of the different types of mail art project, divided into the categories of Format, Scope, Subject, and Anomalies. The “Anomalies” section, which ends with the subdivision “Alteration of the table,” underlines the impossibility of designing a definitive classification system that encompasses the diversity, playfulness, and unpredictability of creative activity.
Archive: Concentration, Registration, Exhibition, Distribution, [circa 1980?]
Ulises Carrión
Postcard
Created during OBASA’s early years, this postcard reflects on the contents and potentialities of Carrión’s archive. One bracketed set of words, “Books, Mail, Recording, Video,” points to the kinds of materials housed in the archive. The opposing set of words, “Concentration, Registration, Exhibition, Distribution,” points to the kind of activities that the archive performs. Carrión’s postcard suggests that rather than a passive storage facility, the archive is an active system for compiling and re-circulating knowledge.
In Alphabetical Order, 1979
Ulises Carrión
Artists’ book
Each page of this 1979 bookwork features a photograph of Carrión’s personal “Address Archive," with selected cards turned upright and a caption underneath. The captions – “My Best Friends, People I Love,” “There Has Been a Change in Our Relationship of Late,” “I Detest or Despise Some People” – point to challenging-to-quantify feelings and relationships. Carrión gestures beyond the purely utilitarian functions of the card index, demonstrating instead the range of emotions and memories that this collection of names and addresses is capable of evoking.
Box, Boxing, Boxers [Commonpress No. 5], 1978
Ulises Carrión, editor
Assembling magazine, photocopied and side-stapled
Carrión edited this mail art “assembling” magazine, which prompted each contributor to respond to the theme, “Box, Boxing, Boxers.” While some artists’ responses referenced the sport of boxing, others referenced the physical and conceptual “boxes” into which they placed the large amounts of mail art they received through the network. Carrión gives his collaborators the opportunity to play with the oppositions between order and disorder, meaning and nonsense, that are inherent to mail art.
The Muxlows, 1979
Ulises Carrión
Artists’ book
“The Muxlows is the history of an English family from Yorkshire. I found it in 1972, in the city of Leeds, in the last pages of a badly damaged bible,” Carrión writes. By recontextualizing this genealogical fragment, Carrion points to the simultaneous sense of ephemerality and permanence in an archive. While dull on its surface, this list of family births, deaths, and marriages is ripe with narrative potential if one reads between the lines.
Namen en Addressen
Ulises Carrión
Stichting Agora, Maastricht
September 5-27, 1980
Exhibition announcement card
