Postal Art Projects & Networks
Between 1973 and 1981, Ulises Carrión created several mail artworks and projects that challenged traditional concepts of authorship in favor of participatory projects that invited active intervention on the part of the addressee. These projects can be regarded as an extension into the mail of Carrión’s career-long investment in the study of language and communication structures: they were open-ended and emphasized process and dialogue over any single artist or contribution. Aside from such projects, Carrión also penned influential theoretical texts devoted to explaining mail art’s possibilities and limitations.
Feedback Pieces, 1981
Ulises Carrión and others
Courtesy of Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA)
Collages and assemblages received as submissions to mail art project
Feedback Pieces exemplifies the collaborative ethos and responsive mechanisms that animated mail art during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The call for responses printed by Carrión specified how “everyone, including you, is invited to participate.” Before sending this invitation, however, Carrión tore it to pieces, removing one of them, which ensured that his addressees would be prompted to reply to him in creative and unexpected ways.
Mail artists challenged foundational aspects of art such as authorship. Mail artists would often post their works anonymously or under a penname. Carrión received dozens of replies to his Feedback Pieces projects from artists scattered around Europe and the Americas. Artists who signed their work include Johan Cornelissen, Leif Eriksson, Aaron Flores, Istvan B. Geller, Jim Melchert, Marilyn Rosenberg, Willy Scholte, Jessica Strang, Ulrich Tillmann, and Endre Tot. Many others chose to remain anonymous.This visually diverse selection represents only a portion of the submissions that Carrión received.
On loan from Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA)
A Poem: To Be (or Not To Be) Erased, 1973
Ulises Carrión
Collaborative artwork consisting of handwritten and erased text on index cards
Courtesy of Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA)
Created for Carrión’s 1973 exhibition Texts and Other Texts at the In-Out Center, this participatory work was one of Carrión’s earliest forays into the collaborative practice of mail art. The piece consisted of index cards with the text “To Be (or Not To Be) Erased” handwritten in pencil, a reference to Hamlet’s classic soliloquy each participant was invited to erase or alter some or part of the text on a card as they saw fit, and mail the signed card back to the In-Out Center.
On loan from Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA)
Stempelkunst in Nederland, 1980
Aart van Barneveld (d. 1990)
Artists' book
Stamp Art in the Netherlands was the name of a series of exhibitions organized by Aart van Barneveld devoted to artists’ rubber stamps produced in the Netherlands. As van Barneveld explained in the catalog, rubber stamps had by the 1980s become a popular and even familiar art form whose playfulness made it inviting to all kinds of audiences. Artists’ rubber stamps both mimicked and mocked the bureaucratic logic and processes of the international postal system that enabled their circulation.
The "I-want-to-be-in-your-catalogue-no-matter-what-the-theme-of-your-project-is" card, 1982
Ulises Carrión
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Postcard
Mail art projects often operated by issuing a call for participation inviting all members of the network to participate by sending artworks made according to a prompt. Oftentimes these projects promised that all contributors would be entitled to a publication gathering the submissions received. This pledge encouraged participation, but also resulted in contributions that seemed to have no other goal than making their way into one of these exhibition catalogs. By the early 1980s, Carrión was increasingly dissatisfied with such contributions and more broadly by the material circulating in the mail art network, as he demonstrated with this tongue-in-cheek postcard.
Rob and Marta, 1983
Ulises Carrión
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Postcard for mail art project
In 1983, Ulises Carrión carried out his last mail artwork. The project consisted of sending a postcard to a broad number of randomly selected addresses requesting a reply from those named either Rob or Marta. Carrión sent dozens of these postcards, but only a fraction of responses abided by the sole rule of the project.
