The Museum of Modern Art consistently attracts direct engagement—or what I call “messing with MoMA”—by artists, the general public, and staff. These actions take a wide variety of forms, from manifestos and conceptual gestures to protests and performances. “Messing” connotes the variety of these interventions, which question, play with, provoke, subvert, and comment on MoMA as an institution, and on the paradox of institutionalizing modernism.

Documents related to seven decades of interventions are shown here, selected from my ongoing attempt at a comprehensive chronology. (This related exhibition checklist has other examples.) The selections are organized chronologically, focusing on more intimate, less well-known interventions from which a common theme emerges: a consistent desire for inclusion in the messiness of the modern project, a drive to fully engage with the art of our time.

Even in its first decades, MoMA engendered debate and controversy. Much of the criticism came from journalists and concerned the nature and validity of modernism, but artists and staff sometimes joined the fray. The earliest example here is a satirical invitation to the 1939 opening party for the Museum’s new building. Miffed that some fellow staff members weren’t invited, Manager of Publications Frances Collins organized and circulated this official-looking card, complete with a deckled edge and engraving-style type. By opening the card, the front of which bore the phrase “Oil that glitters is not gold,” recipients were invited by hosts “Empress of Blandings” (a fictional sow featured in P. G. Woodhouse novels) and “Charles Boyer” (presumably the film actor) to the new digs of the “Museum of Standard Oil.”

According to Russell Lynes’s history of the Museum, Collins was especially irked that staff members such as telephone operator and “office boy” Jimmy Ernst weren’t invited.¹ (Ernst, a child of artists Max Ernst and Louise Strauss, later worked in the Museum’s film library). Lynes notes, “The staff, if not the trustees, were greatly amused by what their young colleague had done.” Indeed—Collins was promptly fired.

Today, Collins’s sardonic gesture would be called institutional critique—an analysis of the sociocultural context in which art functions. In fact, in 2007 the card was appropriated and incorporated into just such a work: R.S.V.P 1939 (2007–2009) by Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck and Media Farzin. Though the works were conceived seventy years apart, they show how questioning the role of oil-industry funding in philanthropy remains prescient.

A year after the new building opened, the American Abstract Artists (founded 1936) organized a protest, demanding more curatorial attention to contemporary American artists. This accompanying broadside by artist Ad Reinhardt asks, “How Modern Is The Museum of Modern Art?” Responding specifically to the exhibitions Art in Our Time (1939), Modern Masters from European and American Collections (1940), and Italian Masters (1940), the pointed text reads in part:

How Modern is the Museum of Modern Art? Let’s look at the record[.] In 1939 the Museum professed to show ART IN OUR TIME—

Whose time Sargent, Homer, La Farge and Harnett? Or Picasso, Braque, Leger and Mondrian? Which time? If the descendants of Sargent and Homer, what about the descendants of Picasso and Mondrian? What about American Abstract Art? [. . .] What about Towne and Ward—British cattle painters—turned loose on a Missouri farm? A Minnesota grain elevator painted by Daubigny? Bellows’ Stag at Sharkey’s done by Henri Regnault? The Nebraska prairies by Eugene Boudin? The Bowery by Eugene Carriere?

And MODERN MASTERS . . . Eakins, Homer, Ryder, Whistler. . . . Those are the only Americans included. Are they the grandfathers of the Europeans they are shown with? [ . . . ]
ITALIAN MASTERS—Caravaggio, Raphael, Bronzino! And such examples! How easy to justify a Praxiteles show! How revolutionary the Egyptians! [ . . . ]

Art in Our Time, a massive survey, was the first exhibition in the new 1939 Goodwin and Stone building (the opening party for which Frances Collins conceived her invitation). Italian Masters, a show of canonical Renaissance and Baroque art, was largely a historical accident: following their showing at the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens, New York, the works were stranded in the United States at the outbreak of war, and the Museum took advantage of the opportunity to put them on view. According to curator Dorothy Miller’s catalogue introduction, Modern Masters was intended to complement the Italian Masters show, demonstrating “the great indebtedness of the modern masters to the work of their ancestors. . . .”²

As it turned out, more than fifty peeved descendants of these “ancestors” signed the broadside, including A. E. Gallatin, Agnes Lyall, Louis Schanker, and Suzy Frelinghuysen—but also Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, and David Smith, who were already becoming integrated into MoMA’s master narrative.

In the late 1950s, the esteemed art writer Calvin Tomkins made a quieter intervention. The intimacy of his gesture, his insight into it, and the feeling of being alone in a peaceful gallery is conveyed in his memoir:

. . . when I was just starting to look at contemporary art, a painting at the Museum of Modern Art stopped me cold. It was an exhibition called “Sixteen Americans [1959],” and the artist . . . was Robert Rauschenberg. The painting—its title was Double Feature [(1959)]—was covered with a number of apparently unrelated passages of messy paint . . . along with several odd collage elements [including] part of a man’s shirt, with pocket. . . . Glancing around to make sure nobody was watching me, I fished a quarter out of my pocket and slipped it into the pocket of the shirt in the painting. It was a dopey thing to do, but I felt good afterward. I’d made a connection to something that would become, for reasons I didn’t even suspect, increasingly important to me. Marcel Duchamp claimed that the creative act is bipolar, in that it requires not only the artist who sets it in motion but also the spectator who interprets it, and by doing so completes the process.³

In contrast, the 1960s are correctly associated with political activism as museums and other institutions began to be aggressively questioned by artists. MoMA in particular became a site of active debate on topics such as the artist’s role in the exhibition and the sale of his or her work, emerging and historical art movements, and overarching social issues such as the Vietnam War, racism, sexism, and economic injustice. High-visibility activities well documented elsewhere include group interventions by the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC),⁴ Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG),⁵ Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), Artists Meeting for Cultural Change, and Angry Arts. Specific gestures such as Takis’s removal of his sculpture from the exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (1968) and Hans Haacke’s MoMA Poll (1970) are also landmarks in this period.

Organizing efforts by curatorial staff were also highly visible at the time, but it’s worth pointing out that work actions by non-curatorial staff, in particular Security and Housekeeping, have received far less attention. This press release regarding a strike by security guards is one of few traces, even though non-curatorial departments were some of the first to be unionized and their quiet but crucial work keeps the Museum functioning.

The selections here focus on individual artists’ activities, most of which are critical but quieter and often mischievous or elegiac. These involve artists Bruce Conner and Ray Johnson, Vern Blosum and William Anthony, as well as writer and curator Gene Swenson.

Conner and Johnson’s gesture is discussed by Anastasia Aukeman in her forthcoming monograph on Conner.⁶ She traces how his SUPERHUMAN DEVOTION sic was considered for the 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage, but the work was damaged during shipment to New York and declined for the show. In response, as the artist recalled, he put the assemblage back in the shipping crate and, along with Johnson, brought it to the opening:

I invited Ray Johnson to the gallery and we painted the box, drilled holes in it. I had previously asked Ray for 100 hands and he opened a box and scattered 100 watch hands in the box, set fire to part of it, glued things on it and made a rope handle to carry it. We caught a taxi to MOMA for the opening . . . and were refused acceptance at the check stand. The guard wouldn’t let me carry it inside the museum. The box sat in the center of the entryway and everyone walked around it. After the opening we took the Staten Island Ferry and Ray and I threw it off the ferry in front of the Statue of Liberty.⁷

Two years after Conner’s assemblage was hurled into New York Harbor, MoMA acquired Vern Blosum’s painting Time Expired (1962) as an early example of Pop art and displayed it in the exhibition Around the Automobile (1965), linking the parking meter image to the material culture of cars. Further research revealed the work to be, in fact, a critique of Pop, painted under a pseudonym, and one of several. Writer and artist Greg Allen and curator Lionel Bovier conducted in-depth research into Blosum and traced how the Museum came to understand (and misunderstand) the artist and his work.⁸ The theme of transience, embodied by the parking meter and time “expiring” in this work and echoed in others from the series, supported Allen and Bovier’s conclusion that the elusive artist was mourning the ascent of Pop at the expense of interest in Abstract Expressionism, to which he was committed.

In a similarly mischievous approach to the passing of art historical time, artist William Anthony’s Object Stolen, Circa 1965, by the Artist from The Museum of Modern Art (2011) incorporates a wall label “acquired” from a quiet gallery. His gesture is similar to Tomkins quarter-in-the-pocket move a decade prior, but using the strategy of removal instead of addition. In an e-mail, Anthony recalls:

[C]irca 1965 the galleries of the museum weren’t so populated as they are now. I had the gallery to myself when I did the dirty deed. After ripping the label off the wall I ran like hell out of there joining my girlfriend (now wife) Norma and some friends in a nearby gallery. I’m not sure but I think we all had dinner at the museum, shamelessly gloating over the stolen goods. Anyway I remember the gloating.

Ironically, Anthony “ran like hell” with the label for Abstract Painting (1960–61), by Ad Reinhardt, creator of the 1940 broadside objecting to the lack of artists like himself at MoMA.

A more mournful gesture from this period involves writer and (briefly) staff member Gene Swenson. According to a perceptive memoir in Artforum,⁹ recollections by Linda Nochlin,¹⁰and Swenson’s own writing in the New York Press, in the context of personal difficulties and alarm about social conditions he believed would lead to revolution, in 1968 Swenson began to picket the Museum, carrying a large question mark. Later that year he stridently objected to the exhibition Dada, Surrealism, and their Heritage (1968), arguing passionately that curator William Rubin’s formalistic approach trivialized profound, psychosexual, and revolutionary aspects of the movement, an interpretation Swenson called “The Other Tradition.” Again Swenson took it to the street, placing newspaper ads and instigating a protest at the opening. One of the ads reads:

Dada is Dead. MOMA is Dead. Celebrate! Mausoleum of Modern Art . . . Artists and poets! Do your thing! Join Les Enfands du Parody in: The Transformation! Tea and black tie optional.

Photographs from the event show Swenson in front of the Museum, in black tie, leading a cohort of costumed demonstrators. According to several accounts, at the time Swenson was likely undergoing a break with reality, adding a psychological dimension to his concern with Surrealism and its reach for the subconscious. Increasingly marginalized in the art community, Swenson died in a car crash in 1969.

Performance predominated messing during the 1970s, put toward a variety of expressive ends. These included political issues, responding to art world sexism and government repression in Brazil and Russia, but also lyrical and mischievous interventions, one involving a road trip and anothera prankster.

The poster Attention! Women Artists and Feminists! (1972), recently acquired by the library, embodies this spirit. Created under the auspices of the Conference of Women in the Visual Arts for a demonstration that year, the text demands that “Women artists must no longer be invisible” as a pattern of silhouetted women marches in the background. In a similar mode, as part of a 1976 demonstration, artist Joanne Stamerra placed erasers stamped with “erase sexism at MoMA” throughout the galleries, as documented in the magazine Womanart. More recently, the long-lived activist group Guerrilla Girls paid indirect homage to her gesture with their own series of erasers.

In her photographic series 100 Boots (1971–73), Eleanor Antin thoughtfully engaged public spaces at MoMA, and her project is an early example of collaboration with the Museum. Antin conceived a series of photographs showing one hundred pairs of boots installed in diverse settings. Photographed by Philip Steinmetz, the images were intended to function like film stills, suggesting a journey from California to New York. Antin printed and mailed the images as postcards. In the one shown here, the boots enter the Museum, engaging the sidewalk.

In a series of pranks likely intended to satirize the machine aesthetic and Minimalist sculpture, in 1971 one Harvey Stromberg placed “illegal art”—illusionistic photo-sculptures of fixtures such as an electrical outlet—in the MoMA galleries. A photo essay of examples in New York Magazine is shown here, along with an invitation to an unofficial opening.

Other interventions from this period addressed global politics. For example, artist Vagrich Bakhchanyan initiated his First Russian Propaganda Art Performance at Museum of Modern Art in New York (1978) by engaging with Russian avant-garde art in the Museum’s permanent collection from the perspective of an immigrant. According to fellow émigré artists Rimma and Valeriy Gerlovin, in his performance

Bakhchanyan walked around the Museum . . . dressed as a “walking propaganda center,” covered from head to toe with slogans like “Stalin is Lenin today,” “Beware, savage dog,” and “Why is there no vodka on the moon?”¹¹

Bakhchanayan documented the event in this modest, self-published artists’ book. In the wry linking of political propaganda and the persuasive language of gallery talks, as well as interest in the diaspora of early Russian avant-garde art, Bakhchanyan’s performance and book presage the activities of Goran Djordjevic and Yevgeniy Fiks, discussed below.

Similarly, Marta Minujín’s Kidnappening of 1973 appears playful at first sight, but reveals an equally somber political undertone. In her performance, enacted during a Museum gala, selected visitors were blindfolded by artists (whose faces were painted to resemble Picasso portraits) and driven around the city in taxis. On the one hand, the work enabled art worlders to enjoy a garden party Happening and “afterparty” adventure. On the other, by essentially enacting an abduction, Minujín was inviting the subjects to experience, in highly sanitized form, the disappearances and abuses of power under authoritarian regimes in her native Argentina.

Beginning in the 1980s, with politically engaged art practices ascendant, “messing” started to become an accepted practice at MoMA and other art institutions, with artists and curators collaborating on projects. Meanwhile, independent actions continued apace.

On the independent end of the spectrum, following completion of the Museum’s 1984 expansion, the group Women Artists Visibility Event [sic] protested the underrepresentation of women artists in the opening exhibition, An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture. The group organized a color-coordinated series of protests, of which this flyer was part. Demonstrating their expertise in institutional critique, the group subverted the Museum’s own promotional methods, incorporating rigorous branding, curatorial statements, and even a satirical version of pins worn by Museum staff.

In a collaborative but also critical gesture, in her show Projects 9: Louise Lawler (1987), the artist mobilized MoMA’s means of production to send a political message. She designed the exhibition brochure to include this paper airplane, intended to contrast the complacency of attending cultural institutions with U.S. military action in Nicaragua.

A similar tension between participating in and being critical of the institution emerged when artist Chuck Close found a clever means to identify and fill a gap he found in the collection: Chuck Close: Head On/The Modern Portrait (1991), one of a series of guest-curated Artist’s Choice exhibitions. Close chose to assemble portraits from MoMA’s collection and wanted to include a portrait by Ray Johnson, but the Museum didn’t own any of his work. As a work-around, a portrait from the library collection, part of an extended mail art exchange between Johnson and MoMA librarian Clive Phillpot, was displayed. As Chief of Library Milan Hughston often points out, this exemplifies how the work of many now-established artists first entered the Museum through the library collection.

Returning to the theme of populations underrepresented in the collection, in the late 1990s the Guerrilla Girls organized a postcard campaign to protest the exhibition Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life (1997). The card reads: “3 white women, 1 woman of color and no men of color—out of 71 artists?” Of the many cards received by the Museum, one in the MoMA Archives bears the note, “How embarrassing for you,” while another recommends “Fish, Murphy, Matthíasdóttir. Brady. Quintanilla. Rego. Celmins. Etcoff. Blaine. Neel.”

In a final example from this period, filmmaker Tony Kaye mobilized his objection to Philip Morris’s sponsorship of the exhibition Jasper Johns: A Retrospective (1996–97) by having a giant canvas erected across the street from the Museum. Perched in a bucket lift, Kaye hand-painted the quip “look at Jasper’s pictures / think we are nice / smoke our cigarettes and die.” A year earlier, when Kaye was at the Museum to receive an ad-industry award, his request to park his car in the lobby was declined. In response, he had a similar banner hoisted, reading “CON CEPTUAL.”¹² Both actions suggest a figure ambivalent about the power of commercialized communications, even as he mobilizes them.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, a millennial mindset prevailed at MoMA, taking the form of collection shows, a substantial expansion project, a staff strike, and a merger with P.S. 1. One of the strongest responses to the Museum’s expansion came from artist Filip Noterdaeme. Following completion of MoMA’s expansion project in 2004, Noterdaeme produced this flyer to protest high museum admission prices and to address the ongoing issue of homelessness. The flyer parodies an advertising theme created for the MoMA reopening and incorporates an image of Marcel Duchamp’s famously rejected Fountain (1917). A year later, Noterdaeme took the theme a step further with MoMA HMLSS (2005), a suitcase designed for on-the-fly display of miniature versions of objects in the Museum collection. Modeled on Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise (1935–41), the artist’s traveling miniature monograph, Noterdaeme added a critical dimension by taking the suitcase on the road, in particular to the sidewalk outside of MoMA, making his “collection” freely available to literal outsiders. Both works are part of his Homeless Museum of Art (HOMU), founded in 2002.

Returning to the theme of Russian avant-garde diaspora, artist Goran Djordjevic’s ongoing project The Museum of American Art in Berlin deconstructs the circulation of Russian modernist tenets in Eastern Europe during the Cold War via MoMA and other Western institutions. The exhibition catalogue cover shown here appropriates the design of a book by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., intended to popularize modernism. Barr’s What Is Modern Painting? (1943) was revised and reprinted for decades, and it was translated into several languages—but not Russian. Djordjevic incorporates in-depth contextual research into the MoAA project, which encompasses performance (taking on personae such as Barr and Gertrude Stein), gallery models, copies of artworks, texts, and numerous other interpretive forms.

Artist Yevgeniy Fiks explores a similar theme, but Fiks approaches the dissemination of early modernist tenets from the other direction, critically (and humorously) examining the circulation of Communist tenets in the New York City context. Through the form of a 2011 gallery tour, Fiks explored complex relationships among Western artists, the Museum, and leftist ideas during the contentious Cold War period, deconstructing how they were leveraged by the Museum (at the time, MoMA often resisted Red Scare pressures by positioning modernism as apolitical—emphasizing individual expression independent of sociopolitical context). Fiks’s ongoing project seeks to reestablish the connections, bringing out nuanced attitudes among left-leaning Western artists and their Eastern counterparts as their works mingle in the permanent collection galleries. As seen in his reinterpretation of a printed map available to MoMA visitors, Fiks’s tour articulates leftist attitudes among and between artists whose political activities are often downplayed in Modernist narratives. For example, while Diego Rivera and Pablo Picasso are readily associated with Communism, Fiks brings out less well-known artists’ relationships with leftist ideology, such as Henri Matisse, Rene Magritte, and Lee Krasner.

Another recent intervention is Maria Anwander’s The Kiss (2010). By giving the wall of the Museum’s atrium gallery a big smackeroo, the artist embodied both aggressive and affectionate attitudes toward the institution: she both kisses off and kisses up. Intervening during a point of transition in one of the Museum’s main galleries, she took advantage of the flux to make a gesture both outsized and intimate, political and personal. She marked the spot with a label, appropriately written and formatted in institutional style (reappropriated here in this institutional-style post), articulating the idea of kissing as a power dynamic:

Anwander uses art institutions as forums where hierarchical, social and economic models can be tested and reimagined. The piece is part of a series . . . which Anwander has developed since 2004, playing with the link between art institutions and the market . . . “The Kiss” was given to the MoMA without asking for permission . . . Kissing in some cultures and religions symbolizes the exchange of souls and powers.¹³

The elegance of the work lies in this contrast between the cool remove of the label copy and the visceral nature of the kiss itself—a conceptual gesture with a phenomenological jolt. We can’t help but imagine ourselves in her place, the touch of our own lips on the wall—and feel a shock similar to encountering Meret Oppenheim’s Object (1936) for the first time, or to entering a steel-and-glass museum building in 1939.

The kiss up/kiss off tension of Anwander’s gesture brings us to the present and future of messing with MoMA. In particular, consider these decades of messing in light of current art world interest in participation, performance, and social practice art, in which critical intervention has been largely institutionalized. What is the nature of “messing” in the fully participatory museum? How do contemporary ideas about the social role of art museums change relationships between participant and observer, between collusive and critical actions, between what can and can’t be messed with?

I conclude with two examples that show this tension. Thilo Hoffmann’s video series 30 Seconds (2010) falls on the sanctioned end of the messing continuum. The artist initiated a practice of brainstorming and executing brief videos about the MoMA experience. The prevalence of playful behavior in these individually imagined videos is striking: visitors and staff enjoyed cartwheeling, skipping, bicycling, play-fighting, making music, and even bathing in otherwise highly controlled Museum spaces.

On the other end of the continuum are surprise visits by Occupy Museums in 2008, part of the Occupy Wall Street movement objecting to economic recklessness and inequality. Here, music-making in the galleries was considered disruptive, even as it reflected contemporary social conditions to which most gallerygoers could relate.

These types of messing are characteristic of our very participatory present. Where will they take us? With hashtags, selfies, sleepovers, kimono-wearing, and tastings the norm, where does messing sit on the participant-observer fan-critic continuum? Will the pendulum swing back toward encounters at new levels of remove, or perhaps emerge into other forms of even more intense participation not yet anticipated? I look forward to chronicling the future of “messing,” in which artists, public, and staff continue to creatively manifest diverse forms and attitudes toward the Museum and the art of our time.

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The Poema Colectivo 2014 project invited a group of artists from Mexico to create a new “collective poem” for today based on the 1981 project Poema Colectivo Revolución. Each invited artist was asked to nominate another friend to join the project.

With many thanks to the artists: Jonathan Hernández & Philippe Hernandez, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Gabriel Escalante, Vincente Razo, César Cortés Vega, Juan Caloca, Demián Flores, Silvia Gruner, Richard Moszka, Guillermo Rosas Sánchez, Maris Bustamante, Magali Lara, Laureana Toledo, Txema Novelo, Javier Dario Canul Melchor, Jazael Olguín Zapata, Jorge Méndez Blake, David Miranda, María Sosa, Noé Martínez, Luis Urías, Ramiro Chaves, Yollotl Alvarado, Camel Collective, Mauricio Marcin, Monica Mayer & Victor Lerma, Fernando Caridi and Beyond the Mexique Bay Orchestra.

Additional thanks to Mauricio Marcin, Maru Calva, Regina Tattersfield, and Julio García Murillo.

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Edgardo Antonio Vigo (1928–1997) of La Plata, Argentina, was one of the preeminent pioneers of mail art in South America and the founder of this phenomenon in Argentina.¹ By day he worked in La Plata’s Ministry of Justice, while in his free time he was an editor of avant-garde magazines, a poet, a printmaker, a creator of Neo-Dada objects he called cosas (things), a performance artist, and a professor at La Plata’s Colegio Nacional. Vigo began his mail art activities in the mid-1960s, when he began sending “mathematical poems” to the French poet Julien Blaine and his circle. This circle soon widened to include artists from the United States, the Eastern Bloc countries, Japan, and all over Latin America. Vigo cultivated these contacts through the dissemination of his journals Diagonal Cero (1962–69) and Hexágono ’71 (1971–75). The latter, an “assembling” magazine composed of numerous artists’ mailings compiled by Vigo, was particularly effective in broadening his network of mail art colleagues, since contributions came in from around the world. Vigo’s diverse projects position him at the forefront of vanguard artistic activities in Argentina during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, although he rarely engaged with the avant-garde artistic scene centered in Buenos Aires during this time.

Doubly marginalized as a South American artist working in the small city of La Plata, which was, as he described, “known for its tranquility bordering on inertia,” a city “always betrayed by its large-town character,”² Vigo relied upon his mail art practice as a lifeline to artists around the globe. Yet, despite his leading role in the development of mail art in Latin America, he seems to have stumbled into its history almost by accident. As he expressed in a letter to the London-based artist Julia Tant on August 9, 1995: “The same thing happened to me as to you. I created envelopes for my mailings of exchanged materials, postcards, and stamps and used rubber stamps without knowing that since 1960 the SCHOOL OF CORRESPONDENCE founded by Ray Johnson—recently tragically disappeared—had begun to create the foundations for such practices.”³

Vigo was one of the most prolific writers on mail art in Latin America. Three texts will be considered here, written in 1975, 1976, and 1981. Vigo’s first musings on mail art appear in a 1975 article titled “Arte-Correo: Una nueva forma de expresión” (Mail Art: A New Form of Expression). Written in collaboration with Argentine artist Horacio Zabala,⁴ this article was first published in 1975 in the magazine Poetas Argentinos and subsequently reprinted in January 1976 in the first issue of Venezuelan artist Diego Barboza’s broadsheet Buzón de Arte (Art Mailbox),⁵ and widely circulated in Latin America and beyond.⁶ The article frames the definition of mail art in terms of two complementary operations. First, by creating works intended for mailing, mail artists co-opt the postal system as an aesthetic space and alter its “conventionally not artistic” character. Second, this space newly appropriated for art becomes an integral part of the works at a structural level, conditioning both their creation and their reception. According to Vigo and Zabala, mail art also fundamentally alters the role of the “receiver,” who becomes an “incidental custodian” of the work, as well as a “source of information” upon sending works to third parties or including them in exhibitions. The authors make a useful distinction between mailed art (such as a finished sculpture transported through the postal system) and mail art (pieces destined for mailing from their inception, in which “the fact that the work must travel a set distance is part of its structure, is the work itself”).⁷ In the remainder of the article, they list numerous mail art shows from around the world. Their omission of the activities of the New York Correspondence School and of Fluxus during the first half of the 1960s manifest their incomplete knowledge of international events.

Vigo titled his subsequent text on mail art “Artecorreo: Una nueva etapa en el proceso revolucionario de la creación” (Mail Art: A New Phase in the Revolutionary Process of Creation). Dated January 1976, this article was published in the second issue of Buzón de Arte, in March 1976.⁸ Here, Vigo anchors mail art practice in the writings of Jean-Marc Poinsot and the theories of Baudrillard in order to address the relationship between this art and the mass media. He underscores the notion that the impossibility of any personal response to communications received via mass media makes “REAL INTERCOMMUNICATION” a “NECESSARY NECESSITY.” He then positions mail art in the context of “AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF ART,” also emphasizing its practitioners’ committed resistance to the “siren song” of museums, galleries, and commercial art venues. Perhaps the most revelatory aspect of this article is Vigo’s insistence on the sociopolitical potential of mail art. He calls for mail artists to be revolutionary by “CONTAINING WITHIN THEIR MESSAGES the appropriate dose of inconformity, subversion, and both international and private relationships that turn them into a CRITICAL TESTIMONY OF ‘SOCIO-POLITICAL-ECONOMIC’ REALITIES, creating the means of eluding the “Official,” the principal agent of all the traps and difficulties imposed upon Creation.”⁹

This call to arms reflects the revolutionary spirit of the times in Argentina. It is not, however, an about-face for Vigo: his growing political engagement can be charted both in his magazines and in his mail art over the course of the early to mid-1970s, as the violent tensions that would lead to General Jorge Rafael Videla’s 1976 military coup reached a fever pitch. But Vigo’s very personal connection to Argentina’s sociopolitical crisis—the “disappearance” of his son Abel Luis “Palomo” Vigo, who was taken by the military police in July, 1976¹⁰—would color all aspects of his production for years afterward. Palomo was never recovered; he joined the list of the estimated 30,000 people who disappeared between 1976 and 1983, during Argentina’s “dirty war.”

The final text considered here, Vigo’s 1981 “Mail Art Statement,”¹¹ clearly elucidates the author’s politics, and by extension the political potential of mail art. Subtitled “DO NOT ACCEPTE [sic] CONFORMITY BUT REFUSE PROPOSALS MADE BY SYSTEM,” this text was never published but instead circulated through the postal network along with works of mail art. Beyond transgressing postal regulations, Vigo argues, mail artists should take a militant stance, becoming “ACTIVE COMBATIVE PARTICIPANTS” on the front lines of the fight against persecution and the violation of basic human rights. In the “LATIN AMERICAN GHETTO,” this battle should be waged against the “RISING AND SUFFOCATING FASCIST SMOG,” a term that handily evokes the pervasive climate of terror under oppressive military dictatorships. Although such forces try in vain to quash creativity, the “underground” continues to thrive, Vigo asserts, keeping “alive the fire of ideological thoughts that nullify paternalistic police control.”

Vigo’s writings on mail art from 1975, 1976, and 1981 effectively mirror the rising tide of revolutionary fervor to which he was a witness and in which he himself participated. While he sent news of the Argentine people’s plight through the international mail art network, his own strategies of resistance hinged on the clandestine operations of the underground. As evidenced in his archives in La Plata, his urgent calls for solidarity were answered by artists around the world. The escalation of political rhetoric that can be charted in these texts reflects Vigo’s own increasing outrage at the rapid deterioration of Argentina’s social fabric as a result of clashes between military and paramilitary troops, and his insistence on accountability for his nation’s descent into chaos and terror.

Vigo’s decision to use the mail as a vehicle for his work was political in and of itself. Mail art, the most democratic of art forms, predicated on principles of international collaboration and exchange, could be practiced by professional and amateur artists alike. Vigo embraced this medium as a means of circumventing both institutional and commercial art circuits vulnerable to censorship and as a powerful instrument for making his voice heard far beyond La Plata during the darkest era of his nation’s history. As Fluxus and mail artist Ken Friedman expressed in an interview: “Edgardo Antonio Vigo seems to me to be one of the important figures in mail [art]. His work had political dimensions in a difficult time and place that made it the voice—and for many people—the face of mail art from artists who lived in nations governed by right-wing dictatorships.” Further, Friedman continues: “Vigo was an extraordinary human being and an important artist in a time that made extraordinary art difficult. Simply to function as a voice, simply to survive in his situation while remaining connected to the world outside, was heroic. In this sense, I admired his work and respected his spirit . . . .”¹²

Vigo continued to create mail art for the rest of his life, and he helped others to join the network by sharing addresses and exhibition invitations. The great variety of his production is remarkable, as is the breadth of his contacts within and outside Latin America. Despite the hardships he suffered, he never lost his passionate commitment to mail art as a vital system for connecting and collaborating with like-minded artists living worlds away. As he wrote in his diary:

Perhaps the practice of MAILART will not bequeath to the future a different means for giving dimension to reality, but we recognize within it the possibility of a NEW CIRCUIT of communication at a distance. MAILART has effected connections between international marginalities, the expansion of their interchanges, the distribution of their multiples, the exchange or the polemics of their theories, inviting profound dialogue.¹³

For Vigo, art was life, and mail art, a potent means for connecting with the world beyond La Plata.

He marshaled his geographic marginality into part of a tactical, political stance centered on the dissolution of boundaries between the center and the periphery, the international and the local, privileging art created and circulated outside official infrastructures. The “cry of freedom” Vigo mentions repeatedly as the basis of his mail art practice is present throughout his varied works, which, despite being crafted on the margins of the international art world, journeyed and made their messages heard around the globe.

The post Mail Art as “A Necessary Necessity”: Edgardo Antonio Vigo’s Writings, 1975–1981 appeared first on post.

Clemente Padín, Carta a Mauricio Guerrero
Montevideo > México DF, 8 de enero de 1985

“ARTIST ARM YOURSELF!”

Vlado Martek (Yugoslavia), en Poema Colectivo Revolución, 1981

Hace ya más de tres décadas y la propuesta del Colectivo-3 sigue provocándonos, haciendo surgir nuevos interrogantes y herramientas para la práctica artística y activista. En 1981 el Colectivo-3 diseminó desde México su primer proyecto. Se llamaba nada menos que Poema Colectivo Revolución. El formato era simple: una hoja tamaño carta con un gran recuadro que trataba de invitar a la intervención. En el borde superior, los datos del proyecto: POEMA COLECTIVO | COLECTIVO III | tema: revolución. En el inferior, solamente el señalamiento para incluir el nombre del artista/inter(in)ventor.

¡Qué provocación tan sencilla o, en todo caso, tan compleja! Hoy mismo, frente a las movilizaciones que vienen ocurriendo alrededor del globo y las expectativas de transformación tan deseadas, las iniciativas para la formación de nuevas comunidades y grupos de resistencia urbana transnacional detonan las ganas de reactivar esta “bomba”¹ (de tiempo) para saber cómo responderíamos colectivamente a esta interpelación. ¿Cuál sería el poema colectivo de la revolución que queremos hoy? ¿Correspondería en algún plano al conjunto diverso de las más de 300 intervenciones² de 45 países que en ese momento se devolvieron a México para componer el Poema Colectivo Revolución?

Es posible pensar que en caso de que la respuesta sea “sí” es porque tenemos todavía temas pendientes por resolver, y que nos toca activarlos con la energía vital que moviliza esta generación. Si “sí” nuevamente, es porque hay una ineludible correspondencia entre estos distintos momentos y aquella red artística alternativa que conectaba a la gente transgeográficamente y ahora ya conecta nuestras demandas en un plan transtemporal. Si “no”, es porque definitivamente podemos creer que estas estrategias artísticas, creativas, marginales y colectivas fueron efectivas en su momento y no nos queda más que aprender y apropiarnos de ellas, traducirlas a este tiempo, transluciferarlas³ (definitivamente no queda tiempo para simplemente dudar de la iniciativa).

Estos cómplices –incitadores que ya estaban preparando este terreno de acción– eran los artistas mexicanos Aarón Flores, Araceli Zúñiga, Blanca Noval y César Espinosa, quienes habían decidido en 1981 formar el Colectivo-3.⁴ En ese momento la agrupación trataba de replantear el trabajo iniciado en el anterior grupo El Colectivo, que tenía demandas mucho más conectadas a otros grupos mexicanos, como el Suma, el TAI o el Proceso Pentágono, los cuales integraron el Frente Mexicano de Grupos Trabajadores de la Cultura. Ya no se trataba de discutir colectivamente los proyectos individuales, tampoco de posicionarse frente a la arbitrariedad institucional y estatal con los “trabajadores de la cultura”.⁵ El reto era generar demandas que pudieran enlazar interrogantes críticos a nivel planetario, aprovechando la plataforma que todos los participantes de la red de arte correo (más o menos activos) habían tratado de constituir durante toda la década de los setenta.

El Poema Colectivo Revolución provocó una de las más amplias contribuciones a una convocatoria impulsada por estos colectivos. La propuesta fue luego seleccionada como aportación a la Jornada de Solidaridad con la Revolución Sandinista promovida por el Frente Mexicano de Grupos Trabajadores de la Cultura en mayo de 1981. Este fue el motivo que llevó a presentar como “elemento didáctico” y contra-informativo un poema colectivo elaborado por el conjunto de los miembros del Colectivo-3 dedicado especialmente al triunfo de la Revolución Sandinista en Nicaragua en aquellos primeros años de la década de 1980.

Nicaragua: punto de partida y traslación.

En el contexto de la Guerra Fría, la renovada experiencia revolucionaria que se estaba llevando a cabo en Nicaragua ponía al país bajo un constante intento de intervención estadounidense con el objetivo de frenar las transformaciones que se estaban llevando a cabo allí. Su programa político, social y cultural no se alineaba ni con la ideología de la ex Unión Soviética, ni con la de los Estados Unidos. La Revolución Popular Sandinista mezclaba economía con una política pluralista y logró inaugurar la democracia en Nicaragua: el Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN), y su organización literalmente de vanguardia, que estableció hasta 1990 –cuando perdió las elecciones y cedió pacíficamente el poder a otros partidos– un importante precedente democrático en los 170 años de historia de una Nicaragua independiente.

La revolución significó culturalmente el encuentro, por así decirlo, de Nicaragua con Nicaragua, con sus raíces profundas, sus fuertes tradiciones, y sus formas más auténticas de expresión. La gente nativa del país comprometida con la justicia y los movimientos sociales, sobre todo Augusto César Sandino y Carlos Fonseca, anteriormente estigmatizados como bandidos o terroristas, pasó a ser aclamada subvirtiendo el símbolo de “héroe nacional”. Los campesinos, trabajadores urbanos y la clase media ya no eran solo sujetos de la historia de Nicaragua, sino que se transformaron en sus propulsores. El país empezó a verse como multilingüe, multirracial y multicultural. Había la más alta consideración a todo lo nicaragüense tras el renacimiento nacional. Danza, teatro, literatura, pintura y música nicaragüenses tomaban gran parte de la agenda; formas de arte popular previamente vistas como mera artesanía ahora eran reconocidas por su valor intrínseco respetando la modernidad local. Nicaragua, una pequeña nación inmersa en la primordial tarea de rescate y reclamo de su propia identidad y soberanía, en ese momento, se transformó en un tema y un paradigma tanto en su territorio como para artistas internacionales.

Para mantener vivas las propuestas que tuvieron lugar allí crecieron los reclamos por la soberanía del país, su real independencia y autogobierno tanto al interior como en el extranjero. Es por estos y otros motivos que la memoria de esta experimentación política nos pertenece a todos. Y a pesar de los intentos de destruirla,⁶ se encuentra diseminada y registrada en el imaginario y en los trabajos de los artistas que se vieron afectados por esta experiencia alrededor del mundo.⁷

Aunque el Poema Colectivo Revolución tomara como tema para intervención estética la situación nicaragüense, estaba claro para el colectivo que lo que se podría leer como una experiencia revolucionaria alrededor del mundo desbordaba este hecho. En realidad todo elemento de la propuesta (meta) señalaba e incorporaba esta compleja cuestión. Para empezar, el mismo hecho de que el poema fuera colectivo ya incorporaba una revolución, pues rompía frontalmente con los principios de autoría y de todo el paradigma individualista al que se vincula. El sentido de comunidad, el precepto solidario, la entrega del tiempo a algo no funcional, la demostración de una unión posible más allá de las fronteras geográficas, nacionalistas, clasistas, raciales, pensado para realizarse dentro de las lógicas de la red: con la contribución de muchos, a partir de la multiplicidad de voces. En cada lugar una consigna, tan diversa y por eso mismo tan unificadora. Una multitud de singularidades.

Este “modo de hacer” colectivo se volvió recurrente en el arte correo, sobre todo en la década de 1980. Un individuo o un grupo invitaba a los miembros de la red a participar en un proyecto con tema específico; de este modo se establecían diálogos de trato directo y sin intermediarios. Las convocatorias defendían un principio democrático: por norma se incluían todos los trabajos recibidos sin distinción de “calidad estética”. A su vez, la multiplicidad de diálogos conformaba en conjunto lo que se podría considerar una “obra” de arte correo. Con ese tipo de convocatoria cualquiera que entrara en contacto con la red de arte correo de inmediato se volvía parte del entramado que la constituía.

Esta, como innumerables otras experiencias de las redes artísticas de comunicación marginal de los años 70 en América Latina, se une a otra estrategia de movilización: la formación de colectivos. La propuesta coincidía con muchas otras que surgieron en la red de arte correo, sobre todo en América Latina en la década de 1980. Muchos de estos colectivos pusieron en marcha ejercicios poético-políticos que apoyaban movimientos populares de resistencia y denunciaban situaciones de tensión y hostigamiento que se vivían en países como Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras y los países bajo gobiernos dictatoriales en el Cono Sur.

Es el caso de producciones como Poema Colectivo Revolución, con las que artistas y activistas de países que “oficialmente” no estaban sometidos a dictaduras se sintieron interpelados, atravesados o afectados no sólo por la situación del otro, sino por situaciones que les afectaban a todos y que tenían que ver precisamente con la insatisfacción, la inquietud y la crítica a los sistemas económicos, sociales y también artísticos. El pronunciamiento colectivo desde sus propias prácticas poéticas y activistas tenía como fin ampliar la manifestación pública, el reclamo por la toma de actitud en diferentes contextos. De este modo, manifestarse en ese espacio supuestamente ajeno acaba constituyendo un territorio común que enlaza circunstancias entre distintos espacios de forma más o menos directa.

Tocaba, entonces, observar aquella colectividad que podría parecer dispersa y apenas conectada por tener como base el mismo canal de comunicación a distancia. La voluntad de transformación internacionalista, y a la vez local, se enlaza en esta propuesta para vincular contextos, historias y compartir modos de hacer singulares a través de conceptos políticos fundamentales e interdependientes tanto en un nivel macro como micro-político, en este caso: revolución. Para César Espinosa y Araceli Zúñiga el Poema Colectivo Revolución encarnaba las siguientes ideas-fuerza:

“Creemos que el Poema Colectivo Revolución como cuerpo semiótico, conjunta un mosaico ideológico internacional, cuyas variantes pueden ser de utilidad para matizar criterios y estrategias en torno al internacionalismo artístico y cultural. En México, hoy, consideramos que la poesía visual puede significar un acto revolucionario, tanto en términos estéticos como para potenciar las capacidades significantes de las mayorías trabajadoras, en su gráfica, su prensa y la comunicación popular”.⁸

La declaración de los artistas da cuenta de una supuesta crítica que sigue vigente: el control de la circulación y dispersión de imágenes que van a contramano del orden social impuesto, el pensamiento y las formas de vida instituidas. La potencia de la poesía visual radica precisamente en la posibilidad de producción exhaustiva de contra-imágenes, es decir, de aquellas producciones visuales capaces de proponer rupturas en el orden de pensamiento, en la construcción epistemológica establecida, en las políticas de circulación permitidas, en las subjetividades dóciles.

Poesía: forma de resistencia marginal utópica.

La propuesta colectiva del Poema Colectivo Revolución fue dispersada a un directorio de setecientos contactos de la red de arte correo. Muchos de ellos respondieron al llamado desde América, Asia, Medio Oriente y Oceanía entregando sus trabajos para componer esa voz colectiva y múltiple capaz de registrar gráficamente aquellas revoluciones deseadas.

El proyecto pone en evidencia que la importancia de esta intervención artística radica en el acto comunicativo, más que en la existencia misma de una obra-objeto. Este es el motivo por el cual Blanca Noval y Aarón Flores resaltan que en definitiva lo que representaba (meta)críticamente una revolución en términos amplios era la misma red de arte correo, por toda la transformación, la producción y la circulación descentralizada y la alternativa del trabajo artístico, al margen de los cánones de la obra única, genial e irrepetible, el mercado, las galerías, los jurados y demás, lo que implicaba a su vez una demanda fundamental por el diálogo y la participación.⁹

Entre estas manifestaciones llegan mensajes tan tajantes como el de la artista argentina Graciela Gutiérrez Marx. El 21 de junio de 1981 inscribía en aquel papel carta: poetry is our utopian marginal resistance, desbordando su margen. La fuerte consigna insiste en el riesgo de reducir el impulso singular que la vida impone a una simple mano de obra de un sistema capitalista que funcionaliza, homogeniza y normaliza las singularidades para alimentar su ciclo implacable de producción y consumo. El mensaje recuerda aún la condición colonial no solo latinoamericana sino de todas aquellas geografías construidas como “margen” global. El que resiste e insiste en vivir “con poesía”, o dicho de otro modo, que produce un discurso poético de f(r)icciones en/con estos contextos, es ya un “héroe”.

Para citar ejemplos puntuales, aparecen el irónico mensaje de César Espinosa “How to make a revolution” que acompaña pequeñas siluetas de cuerpos homogéneos y banderas; las consignas del artista correo chileno Guillermo Deisler, en ese entonces exiliado en Bulgaria: “- Revolución es una perspectiva de la historia, – Revolución es una medida de higiene social, – Revolución es un ingenio no-lógico, – Revolución son muchas evoluciones, – Revolución es el ‘Fly-Tox’ de la sociedad, – Revolución es un dar vueltas de las páginas de la historia, – Revolución es tú y yo, sin fin”; el señalamiento del territorio en disputa en el diagrama bipolar del mundo, que tiene su punto de mira en América Latina, difundido en diversas oportunidades y temporalidades por el artista brasileño Paulo Bruscky; símbolos como los del trotskismo y la Cuarta Internacional o centenas de otros que componen esta amplísima y consistente evidencia de que un cuestionamiento es siempre colectivo, aunque parezca enunciado por una sola persona.

Los nombres de los países mencionados en los trabajos siempre trastornan la idea tradicional de Estado-nación homogéneo o definido de antemano, para crear cierta colectividad inmediata basada en la solidaridad con los pueblos de estas regiones o como forma de denuncia contra el imperialismo de otros Estados-nación. Es el caso, por ejemplo, del trabajo enviado por Jesús Romeo Galdámez señalando la Revolución armada FMLN (Farabundo Martí Liberación Nacional) en El Salvador con una aclaración imprescindible: “El pueblo opta por la única alternativa que le queda para reivindicar la más justa aspiración, la libertad: la voz, la lucha armada. El Salvador vencerá!”.

El imaginario de la revolución en una voz colectiva, diversa, que dispara en diferentes direcciones. La revolución en una voz, con una bandera aquí es verdaderamente un hecho imposible, utópico. Su concreción depende de las múltiples voces que la activan. Hay un proyecto común, un deseo común, un diálogo, un espacio común para intervención, enunciaciones múltiples, materiales variados, modos de decir singulares, modos de hacer diversos. La propuesta del Colectivo-3 no quiere despertar la conciencia de los que reciben estos materiales. Su labor no es representar lo que ocurre, sino generar imágenes conflictivas, traer la interferencia, la intervención, el ruido en la circulación masiva oficial. La pulsión de vida. El Poema Colectivo Revolución elabora un proceso complejo y se configura por/en el tránsito mismo: recibiendo, interviniendo, intercambiando –más que objetos– discrepancias, posiciones, conceptos y formas de vida. Dicho esto, es innegable que importa menos la formalización estética de la obra, que el impulso de acción que la propuesta representa, impulso que a la vez trata de democratizar la producción y circulación de trabajos poéticos, de aquella gráfica que rompe con la estética tradicional y sus ideologías adjuntas, y las formas tradicionales de enunciar y de hacer política.

En un mundo de imágenes e imaginarios controlados para que no generen afección es necesario crear canales de circulación de contra-información visual. La red de arte correo logró así romper con la censura y el control de la información y desregular la producción de imágenes y su espacio previsto de circulación, interfiriendo en los órdenes de lo que puede ser visto y conocido. Pleiteando en su presente una forma de visibilidad colectiva para tomar el riesgo de generar un territorio de debate y de toma de posición que lleva al límite las normas y normalizaciones, lo instituido, los esquemas perceptivos y los conocimientos e informaciones de circulación “permitida”.

El Poema Colectivo Revolución presenta gráficamente lo inesperado, lo imprevisto, las expectativas que sobrepasan la macro-política. Su medio de acción nunca será arcaico –basta preguntarse cuánto tiempo hace que utilizamos la superficie del papel para mover la información de un cuerpo a otro–. Los medios y las herramientas comunicativas solo tienden a complementarse. Y es obvio que no se trata sólo de un tema de medios, sino primordialmente de voluntades. Así, no existe superación formal en este diagrama temporal en red.

El “modo de hacer” presente en esta propuesta se replicó con los colectivos que se fueron transformando a partir de éste, caso por ejemplo del colectivo Solidarte (Solidaridad Internacional por Arte Correo),¹⁰ que a su vez generó la formación de varios otros brazos locales en diferentes países, como un contagio viral productivo (al estilo de lo que vemos hoy con la multiplicación de los Anonymous o de los Black Blocks). El Colectivo-3 años después concibe la memorable propuesta internacional Maratón de Arte Correo 1984 en 1984: ¿qué futuro buscamos? exhibido en varias sedes en México, entre ellas la Sociedad Mexicana de Artistas Plásticos y la Casa del Lago de la UNAM, y concluye sus actividades como colectivo en 1985 participando del Salón de Espacios Alternativos del Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA).

El Poema Colectivo Revolución se exhibió por primera vez en la Pinacoteca de la Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (1982) y en el plantel Xochimilco de la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana en la Ciudad de México (1983). Hoy estos materiales siguen cuidadosamente almacenados por Araceli Zúñiga y César Espinosa. Y se vieron públicamente una vez más en la reciente exposición Arte Correo organizada por el curador mexicano Mauricio Marcín en el Museo de la Ciudad de México del 2009 al 2010.

Para rematar aquí, puntearía la principal enseñanza de esta experiencia artística: no importa cuales son los instrumentos o herramientas de los cuales hacemos uso, lo que interesa realmente es en qué se basa este impulso, a qué necesidades responde, desde qué urgencias posiciona la práctica estética y, al fin y al cabo, qué campos de batalla establece.

*This is the third in a series of texts written by the author about mail art. The first two are as follows:

Nogueira, Fernanda and Fernando Davis. “Gestionar la precariedad. Potencias poético políticas de la red de arte correo” [Managing Precariousness. The Poetic-Political Power of Mail Art Network]. Madrid: Artecontexto 24 (2009): 34–41. Available online, https://artecontexto.com/hemeroteca/revista-24/

Nogueira, Fernanda. “El cuerpo político más allá de sus límites. Clemente Padín y el flujo postal” [The political body beyond its boundaries. Clemente Padín and the postal flows] in Arte Correo [Mail Art], edited by Mauricio Marcín, 77–92. Barcelona: RM Verlag; D. R. Museo de la Ciudad de México, 2011.

Read the text in English here.

The post Revolución: Un Poema Colectivo. Potencias Poético-Políticas de la Red de Arte Correo III* appeared first on post.

ARTIST ARM YOURSELF! Vlado Martek (Yugoslavia), in Poema Colectivo Revolución, 1981

In 1981, Colectivo-3 disseminated its first project, Poema Colectivo Revolución  (Collective Poem Revolution), from Mexico City to an international network of mail artists. The format was simple: an invitation in the form of a letter-size sheet with a wide border framing a blank rectangular space that served as an invitation to intervention. Printed at the top were the words “COLLECTIVE POEM / COLLECTIVE III / theme: revolution.” At the bottom was a space designated for the name of the artist/inventor/intervener.

What a simple provocation, or rather, how complex! Today, in light of the demonstrations that have been happening around the world and the hopes for strongly desired transformations, initiatives for the formation of new communities and transnational urban resistance groups have sparked the urge to reactivate this (time) “bomb”¹ that, after more than three decades, continues to provoke, giving rise to new questions and new tools for artistic and activist practice. What would the collective poem of the revolution we want today be like? Would it correspond on any level to the diverse ensemble of the more than three hundred interventions² from forty-five countries that, in the early 1980s, were sent to Mexico to compose the Poema Colectivo Revolución?

If we imagine that the answer is “yes,” it is because we still have pending issues to resolve with the vital energy that mobilizes today’s generation. Again, if “yes,” it is because there is an ineluctable relationship between these two distinct moments and because mail art, the alternative artistic network that once connected people trans-geographically, now connects our demands on a transtemporal plane. If “no,” it’s because we believe that these artistic, creative, marginal, and collective strategies were effective in their time and that we should learn and appropriate from them, but definitively translate them into the present—or, in Haroldo de Campos’s term, to transluciferar them.³

The originators of Poema Colectivo Revolución were the Mexican artists Aarón Flores, Araceli Zúñiga, Blanca Noval, and César Espinosa, who in 1981 decided to form Colectivo-3. At that time, the group tried to reestablish the work begun by their former group, El Colectivo, whose demands were closely connected to those of other Mexican collectives that emerged in the 1970s, among them, Grupo Suma, Taller de Arte Independiente (TAI, Independent Art Workshop), and the Grupo Proceso Pentágono.⁴ Together, these associations constituted the Frente Mexicano de Grupos Trabajadores de la Cultura (Mexican Front of Cultural Workers Groups).⁵ By the early 1980s cultural workers’ collective discussions focusing on individual projects or on individual positions opposing institutional and state policies and dictates had given way to the challenge of generating demands that would connect critical issues worldwide, taking advantage of the platform that the mail art network had developed in the 1970s.

The Poema Colectivo Revolución elicited one of the largest responses of any invitation generated by these mail art collectives. Included in the program of the Jornada de Solidaridad con la Revolución Sandinista (Solidarity Conference for the Sandinista Revolution) promoted by the Mexican Front of Cultural Workers Groups in May 1981, the Sandinista Revolution was presented by members of Colectivo-3 as a “didactic element.” They had conceived the entire project as a collective poem dedicated to the triumph of the revolution then taking place in Nicaragua.

Nicaragua: Point of Departure and Translation

The revolution in Nicaragua placed that country under the constant surveillance of the United States, which, in its engagement with the Cold War, was determined to stop the revolutionary movement. If the new Nicaragua’s political, social, and cultural agendas were not aligned with those of the former Soviet Union, they were even less so with those of the United States. The Popular Sandinista Revolution mixed economics with a pluralist politics and managed to initiate democracy in Nicaragua: the Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, FSLN) established an important democratic precedent in the nation’s history when it peacefully ceded power after losing the elections in 1990.

The revolution signaled the cultural encounter of Nicaragua with Nicaragua itself, with its deep roots, its strong traditions, and its own forms of expression. Nicaraguans committed to social struggles and justice—above all, Augusto César Sandino and Carlos Fonseca, formerly stigmatized as outlaws and terrorists—became celebrated, subverting the symbol of the “national hero.” The campesinos (peasants), urban workers, and the middle class were no longer merely subjects of Nicaraguan history; instead they had transformed themselves into its driving force. The country began to see itself as multilingual, multiracial, and multicultural. Through this rebirth, everything Nicaraguan was held in the highest regard. Nicaraguan dance, theater, literature, painting, and music were a large part of the new political agenda; popular art forms, previously seen as humble crafts, were now recognized for their value and relevance for local modernity. The small nation, immersed in the task of freeing itself and reclaiming its own identity and sovereignty, transformed itself into a paradigm as much within its own territory as internationally.

To preserve the dynamism of the changes that were taking place, calls for reclaiming Nicaragua’s status as a self-governing nation grew domestically as well as abroad. As a result of this international reach, the memory of the country’s political experiment belongs to us all. And despite the efforts to destroy its traces,⁶ its memory has been disseminated and registered in the collective imaginary and in the works of artists around the world who were affected by this experience.⁷

Even though the Poema Colectivo Revolución took the Nicaragua Revolution as a topic for aesthetic intervention, it was clear that revolutionary experience around the world went beyond this reality. Actually, every element of the project (meta)signified and incorporated this wider view. To begin with, the very fact of the poem’s collective creation constituted a revolution, as it blatantly broke with the principles of authority and the attendant paradigm of individualism. The feeling of community; the precept of solidarity; the use of time to non-utilitarian ends; the demonstration of a possible union beyond geographic, national, class, and racial boundaries, were thought to be realized within the logistics of the mail art network—from the contribution of many, through the multiplicity of voices. There was, from each place, a disclosure, a unifying multitude of singularities.

This collective “way of doing” occurred frequently in mail art, especially in the 1980s. An individual or a group would invite members of the network to participate in a project with a specific theme; in this way, dialogues were established directly and without intermediaries. The invitations defended a democratic principle: as a matter of course, all works received were included in the final collective piece without concern for aesthetic quality. In turn, the multiplicity of dialogues made up what could be considered a “work” of mail art. With this type of open call, anyone who received an invitation from the mail art network or simply desired to interchange their artistic/political productions could immediately become part of its constitutive framework.

This, as well as innumerable other experiences of artistic networks of marginal communication in 1970s Latin America, would become part of another strategy of mobilization: the formation of collectives. The Poema Colectivo Revolución coincided with many others that emerged in the mail art network in Latin America. Many of the artists’ collectives that had formed in the 1980s as a strategy of mobilization initiated poetic-political projects with popular resistance movements and denounced the tension and harassment experienced in countries such as Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, as well as in countries with dictatorial governments in the Southern Cone.

Even artists and activists from countries not officially under dictatorships felt themselves questioned, held in contempt, or affected not just by the situation of others but also by situations that affected everyone and were the cause of the dissatisfaction, unrest, and critique of the economic, social, and artistic systems. From its origins in poetic and activist practices, the Poema Colectivo’s collective pronouncement called for the broadening of public manifestations and actions in various contexts. In this way, by becoming manifest in a foreign territory, the project came to constitute a common place that more or less directly connected these different historical and political circumstances.

It was, then, necessary to demonstrate a collectivity, one seemingly so dispersed and only connected by the same long-distance channel of communication. The desire for international and, at the same time, local change, is interwoven in the Poema’s proposal to link contexts and histories and share modi operandi through fundamental and interdependent political concepts of revolution on macro- and micro-political levels. For César Espinosa and Araceli Zúñiga, the Poema Colectivo Revolución incorporated the following powerful messages:

“We believe that the Poema Colectivo Revolución, as a semiotic entity, brings together an international ideological mosaic, whose variants could be used to map criteria and strategies for artistic and cultural internationalism. Today in Mexico, we maintain that visual poetry can signify a revolutionary act, as much in aesthetic terms as to empower the signifying capacities of the worker majority, in its graphics, its press, and in popular communication.”⁸

The artists’ declaration takes note of a critical assumption that remains valid: the control of the circulation and distribution of images that run counter to the imposed social order and established modes of thought and ways of life. The power of visual poetry is rooted precisely in the possibility for the exhaustive production of counter-images, that is, visual images capable of rupturing the order of thought—the established epistemological structures—in the politics of permissible circulation and in docile subjectivities.

Poetry: A Form of Marginal, Utopian Resistance

The Poema Colectivo Revolución proposal was dispersed to seven hundred contacts in the mail art network. Responses were received from the Americas, Asia, the Middle East, and the islands of the Pacific. The project demonstrates that the importance of this artistic intervention lies more in the act of communication than in the creation of an art object. This is why Blanca Noval and Aarón Flores highlight that what was revolutionary—(meta)critically, in broad terms—was the mail art network itself. In its transformation, production, and wide circulation of the artwork at the margin of the canons of the unique, unrepeatable work of genius, the market, the galleries, the juries, and others, the network demonstrates a fundamental demand for dialogue and participation.⁹

Among the responses to the Poema Colectivo Revolución’s invitation were some strikingly trenchant messages, such as that from the Argentinian artist Graciela Gutiérrez Marx. On June 21, 1981, she wrote, “Poetry is our utopian marginal resistance,” her handwriting spilling into the margin. Her words signal the crucial importance of resisting the pressure to devote one’s life to a capitalist system that functionalizes, homogenizes, and normalizes singularities in order to feed its implacable cycle of production and consumption. They also recall colonial conditions not only in Latin America but also in all places construed as global “margins.” One who resists and insists on living “with poetry,” producing a poetic discourse of f(r)ictions within these contexts, performs a heroic task.

Other contributions to the Poema Colectivo Revolución include César Espinosa’s ironically titled “How to make a revolution,” which depicts small silhouettes of generic bodies and flags; the slogans of the Chilean mail artist Guillermo Deisler, who was at that time exiled in Bulgaria: “Revolution is a perspective of history, Revolution is a measure of social hygiene, Revolution is an illogical ingenuity, Revolution is many evolutions, Revolution is the ‘Fly-Tox’ of society, Revolution is a page-turner of history, Revolution is you and I, endlessly”; Brazilian artist Paulo Bruscky’s signaling of disputed territory in his bipolar diagram of the world, which has Latin America as its focal point, spread across various situations and temporalities; symbols of Trotskyism and the Fourth International; and hundreds more supporting the supposition that questions are always posed by collectives even when they are articulated by a single person.

The countries mentioned in the works did not fit the description of nation states; rather, their names evoked conditions of internal struggle and elicited international solidarity with the people of those regions. An example of this is Jesús Romeo Galdámez’s piece referencing the armed FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) in El Salvador. The artist’s text gives an indispensable explanation: “The people opt for the only alternative that is left to vindicate the most just aspiration: liberty, the voice, the armed struggle. El Salvador will triumph!”

The revolutionary imaginary is a collective of diverse voices that shoot out in different directions. Revolution in one voice, under one flag is, in this case, a truly impossible, utopian undertaking. Revolution depends on the multiple voices that set it in motion and sustain it. There is a common project, a common desire, a dialogue, and a common space for intervention, multiple articulations, varied materials, singular ways of speaking, and diverse ways of doing. By inviting people to contribute to the Poema Colectivo Revolución, Colectivo-3 did not intend to heighten the consciousness of those receiving these materials. Its purpose was not to represent what was happening in local or world events, but rather to generate conflictive images, to bring interference, intervention, and noise—life drives—into official mass circulation. The end result embodies the many stages in the realization of the piece, from its initial mailing to hundreds of individuals to the reception of their responses communicating positions, concepts, and ways of life. Given this complex process, it’s undeniable that the works’ formal aesthetics are less important than the call to action that the proposal represents, a call that succeeds in democratizing the production and circulation of poetic works, eliciting graphics that break with traditional aesthetics, received ideologies, and traditional ways of conducting politics.

In a world of images and imaginaries that are controlled so as not to generate affect, it is necessary to create channels for the circulation of alternative information intended to counter that distributed by the mass media. The mail art network thus managed to evade the control and censorship of information and to deregulate the production of images and their designated space of circulation, thus interfering with the dictates of that which could be seen and known. By its very presence, mail art argued for a form of collective visibility that takes on the risks of generating an arena for debate and of taking to their limit normative, instituted, perceptual constructs and the circulation of “permitted” knowledge and information.

The Poema Colectivo Revolución graphically presents the unforeseen and unexpected. Its medium will never be outmoded—one need only reflect on how long it has been since paper was first used to carry information from one person to another. The means of communication and tools tend only to complement one another. And it is obvious that it is not only a question of medium, but rather, primordially, of will. Thus, formal improvement is less important on a temporal diagram of the network.

The “way of doing” that is manifest in this project was later replicated by the collectives that were transformed by it. Solidarte (Solidaridad Internacional por Arte Correo [International Solidarity by Mail Art]),¹⁰ for example, based in Mexico City, served as the model for branches in other countries. A few years later, Colectivo-3 conceived the memorable international proposal Maratón de Arte Correo 1984 en 1984: ¿qué futuro buscamos? (Mail art marathon 1984 in 1984: what future are we looking for?), which was shown in various Mexican venues, including the Sociedad Mexicana de Artistas Plásticos (Mexican Society of Plastic Artists) and Casa del Lago of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Colectivo-3’s final activities as a collective took place in 1985 at the Salón de Espacios Alternativos del Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (Salon of Alternative Spaces of the National Institute of Fine Arts).

The Poema Colectivo Revolución was first exhibited at the Pinacoteca de la Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (Art Gallery of the Autonomous University of Puebla) in 1982. In 1983 it was shown in the Xochimilco center at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana en la Ciudad de México (Autonomous Metropolitan University of the City of Mexico), and from 2009 to 2010 it was displayed in the exhibition Arte Correo (Mail Art), organized by Mauricio Marcín in the Museum of the City of Mexico. Today the work is archived under the supervision of Araceli Zúñiga and César Espinosa, former members of Colectivo-3.

To conclude, the main lesson of this artistic experience is that it doesn’t matter which tactic or tools one employs. What is really important is what the impulse is based on, which necessities it responds to, through which urgencies it implements aesthetic practice, and finally, which battle grounds it establishes.

*This is the third in a series of texts written by the author about mail art. The first two are as follows:

Nogueira, Fernanda and Fernando Davis. “Gestionar la precariedad. Potencias poético políticas de la red de arte correo” [Managing Precariousness. The Poetic-Political Power of Mail Art Network]. Madrid: Artecontexto 24 (2009): 34–41. Available online, https://artecontexto.com/hemeroteca/revista-24/

Nogueira, Fernanda. “El cuerpo político más allá de sus límites. Clemente Padín y el flujo postal” [The political body beyond its boundaries. Clemente Padín and the postal flows] in Arte Correo [Mail Art], edited by Mauricio Marcín, 77–92. Barcelona: RM Verlag; D. R. Museo de la Ciudad de México, 2011.

Lea el texto en español aquí.

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“Let’s convert all the systems into poetry and visions.” Felipe Ehrenberg, Telegraphic Work, 1970.

In this text, Zanna Gilbert explores the Work Secretly titled Upwards and Onwards…whether you like it or not by the Mexican artist Felipe Ehrenberg, considering how mail art works continue to provoke even years after their inception.

“Let’s convert all systems into poetry” was the ludic proposition stated in Felipe Ehrenberg’s 1970 Telegraphic Work.¹ At the end of that same year, this strategy of exploiting an official system for artistic purposes found expression in one of Mexico’s first major mail art works: Obra Secretamente titulada Arriba y Adelante . . . y si no pues tambien (Work Secretly titled Upwards and Onwards . . . whether you like it or not). The work signaled an appropriation of media and communication systems for artistic purposes and a commitment to collective production that would be developed in the mail art network in the next decade, reaching its zenith in the Poema Colectivo: Revolución more than a decade later. Like the Poema Colectivo, the work’s resuscitation today raises questions about the relationship between these early forms of collective networked artistic activity and our contemporary hyper-networked condition, about the reproduction and reconstruction of these works for exhibitions or for sale, about ways of resisting surveillance culture and censorship, and about how artists and thinkers might be “polled” for their ideas on societal transformations.

Arriba y Adelante, as it has come to be known, was an ambitious work whose chosen system for conversion into poetry was the postal service. Conceived as a conceptual puzzle, it was made up of two hundred prestamped postcards, on each of which Ehrenberg painted an unrecognizable shape. When later assembled in a given order, the postcards formed a painting depicting a larger-than-life topless woman proffering one of her breasts with one hand and holding a soccer ball branded “Mexico ’70” in the other. The image was copied from one of a collection of nude photo shots published in England on the occasion of Mexico’s hosting of the World Cup. Ehrenberg converted this celebratory soft porn photograph into a Pop-influenced, black-and-white, stylized art piece. However, unlike a Pop work, Arriba y Adelante traveled through the media and communications circuits that it commented upon: On November 15, 1970, Ehrenberg sent the two hundred postcards from three different post offices in London. Each was addressed to the Mexican Independent Salon, which was about to hold its third exhibition at Mexico City’s University Museum of Science and Art (MUCA).

1970 was also a year of presidential elections in Mexico. Ehrenberg took as the title of his work Luis Echeverría’s campaign slogan, a maxim denoting a politics of desarrolismo (“developmentalism”) closely tied to Mexico’s role as host of the 1968 Olympic Games and the 1970 World Cup, events that offered up a commodified image of a country ripe for international investment. Interior Minister since 1964, Echeverria was widely considered responsible for the Tlatelolco massacre of October 2, 1968, in which government forces opened fire on a peaceful student protest just days before the opening of the Olympics. Hundreds are thought to have been killed.² Ehrenberg and his family decided to leave Mexico for England in the wake of that state-perpetrated violence.

Why did Ehrenberg choose to construct his entry to the Independent Salon in such a way? On one level, his strategy solved the practical problem of his dislocation: he was far from Mexico, and his participation in the exhibition necessarily required a journey of some sort. The disembodied journey he devised was part and parcel of the work’s meaning. Moreover, the Mexican postal system refused to carry pornographic material of any sort, and, as Ehrenberg pointed out, criticism of the government was a risky business.³ Not only could the multipartite piece, illegible in its fragmented state, evade moral and political censorship, but also the critique of government systems was redoubled by the postcards’ passage through the mail service, a branch of the very thing the work criticized.

Ehrenberg’s written instructions for installing Arriba y Adelante were as follows: “During the opening night of the Third Annual Exhibition of the Independent Salon, and after a respectable amount of citizens are gathered, my duly appointed representative shall begin by tacking up each card in order. . . . Members of the public are happily invited to help.”⁴

Just as Echeverria’s sloganeering concealed a pernicious, violent approach to politics, Ehrenberg’s lighthearted directions for assembling the work overlay a deadly serious point. Arriba y Adelante was to be mounted on a red backing, so that any failure of the postal system to deliver a postcard would be represented by a crimson gap, effecting a visual correlation between the inefficiency of the postal bureaucracy, specifically identified by Ehrenberg as “a government institution,”⁵and the violent means pursued by the government to control the student movement. At the same time, the work playfully mocks the British postal system’s reputation for impersonal efficiency as well as its figurehead, Queen Elizabeth.⁶ The monarch’s profile on each of the stamps is overwhelmed and rendered ridiculous by Ehrenberg’s outsized, overtly sexualized figure.

More than forty years later, in 2011, Arriba y Adelante was included in the exhibition Intimate Bureaucracies: Art and the Mail, at the University of Essex (U.K.). Since the whereabouts of the original work is unknown (the piece was presumably destroyed after being exhibited at the Independent Salon), it was decided that the work would be re-created for the show with Ehrenberg’s help. Some twenty-first-century issues were provoked by the work’s ephemerality. The Royal Mail no longer produced prestamped postcards, and so a facsimile produced by Mauricio Marcin for his 2010 exhibition Arte Correo en Mexico (Mail Art in Mexico) at the Museo de la Ciudad in Mexico City would be used. The file was sent by email and printed by the university’s printer. When we came to assemble the work, the logic of its reconstitution was unclear; somehow the order of the postcards had been lost in the translation from digital file to printer. A long afternoon was spent puzzling out how to assemble the pieces, showing just how effectively the work must have concealed its meaning in its original transit. We constructed the copy with the original work’s ephemerality in mind, paying attention only to the immediate challenge of mounting the exhibition.

After many mail-related adventures, the exhibition closed, and we had to decide what to do with this version of Arriba y Adelante. Doubts over the status and value of the work began to emerge: Was it a facsimile, an exhibition copy, or a replica? Should it enter the Essex Collection of Latin American Art (ESCALA), or be stored in the archive? Should it be destroyed in order to assure the integrity of the edition then being produced by Ehrenberg’s gallery in São Paulo?

I had a fascinating exchange with Ehrenberg over these matters, and he kindly offered to produce a new iteration of the work as a gift to ESCALA. We decided to destroy the version that had been made for the exhibition and to accept Ehrenberg’s offer of a new one, which would be sent by post from São Paulo. While all of these questions were being considered, and long after the other works in the show had been safely shipped back to their owners, Arriba y Adelante languished in the gallery.

The following week, the porters charged with clearing out the gallery space removed the work and disposed of it in the bowels of the university. A few days later, one of the gallery staff members came across it, weather-beaten and vandalized, resting unobtrusively against a skip. There, the logic of its insistent ephemerality, of its belonging to a space other than the gallery, was more apparent than ever, even so many years after its original inception. Just as the Poema Colectivo is redeployed here on post with a renewed significance, Ehrenberg’s work also spoke once again to a new moment. Mail art and its archives continue to provoke, to make us consider and reconsider the politics of art and the potential for collective action. This performative aspect of mail art confers a continually evolving meaning, hinting at a journey that is as much temporal as it is geographic.

This is a revised version of a text published in Spanish in the magazine Blanco sobre Blanco.⁷

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Preamble

An anonymous mail artist once said that mail art arose from the coming together of the words mail and art. The term designated a postal dispatch as a vessel for art, or rather, as art—a twist to the proposition of a famous Frenchman who converted a urinal into imaginary gold.

Certainly, mail art exists by its very enunciation, but it is also inseparable from an action that is neither conceptual nor imaginary, but instead physical and real: the mailing. Mail art is not only a new logos; it is also matter in motion, transit, and reciprocity.

All works of mail art have one thing in common: they were sent from one place to another.

I myself hold that two rivers flow through mail art: memory and oblivion. These two rivers run through each work.

Some Facts (Papers in Flight)

In March of 1966, the Aristos University Gallery at UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) inaugurated the exhibition Poesía Concreta Internacional (International Concrete Poetry). The exhibition catalogue reproduces the following remarks by Professor Max Bense, which first appeared in the preface to the anthology International Concrete Poetry, published in Stuttgart in 1965: “Concrete poetry has nothing to do with the word’s grammatical or syntactical linear relations, either from a semantic or an aesthetic point of view.” By contrast, he affirms: “Concrete poetry is based on the visual relations among its various elements and their deployment in flat, two-dimensional space.”

This concept of space that Bense refers to in the context of concrete poetry would also show up in mail art, where it can be considered an influence and an antecedent.

At the same time, we might remember that concrete poets (especially those of the Brazilian group Noigandres) reread Mallarmé’s poem Un coup de dés (A throw of the dice) published toward the end of the nineteenth century. The verses showed them another way to visualize, read, and occupy space on the page.

As Borges said of Edgar Allan Poe, “The detective novel has created a special type of reader. This tends to be forgotten when we judge Poe’s work; because if Poe created the detective story, he consequently created the reader of detective fictions.”

Concrete poets also created a new type of reader and a new way of reading and looking at images.

The ancient form of epistolary writing is limited to the law of progression, that is, to that of time. An epistle encodes its meaning in the succession of words on the page; meaning arises from the sequence of words. An epistle, to state it plainly, is written and read from left to right, and from top to bottom, over time. The same is true of a literary text.¹ Mail art, by contrast, has no center, and it has neither left nor right. Its meaning boils down to the relations produced by the various signs contained in the whole space; these are neither linear nor successive relations as in epistolary and literary texts, but are rather multidirectional and simultaneous. Mail art proposes the impossible: a vision of infinite time.

Another particularity of the Concrete Poetry exhibition influenced the practice of mail art in Mexico. To explain it, we need to mention Mathias Goeritz, guest curator of the exhibition. During the late 1960s, Goeritz had a network of correspondents in Europe and America (which precedes his arrival in Mexico), with whom he exchanged letters, photographs, graphic objects, collages, documentation of works, postcards, magazine cuttings, photocopies, seals, stamps, etc.—all by mail. Suffice it to imagine the possibilities of an envelope and a jar.² Goeritz’s correspondence was sent back and forth, dispersed throughout Europe and America.

During the years preceding the exhibition, Goeritz was already receiving materials by mail that must have shaped it. This is how he first established contact with the Brazilian concrete poets Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, the Swiss poet Eugen Gomringer, the German typographer Hansjörg Mayer, the Swiss artist Dieter Roth, and many other artists who were involved in the mail art movement. This model for exchanging art opened a new way for Mexican mail artists.

Goeritz did not consider himself a mail artist even when he established communication with so many people who took an active role in the creation of the network, such as Clemente Padín and Edgardo Antonio Vigo.³

In 1974, under the Uruguayan military dictatorship, Padín organized the Festival de la Postal Creatíva (Creative Postcard Festival) at the Gallery U in Montevideo. In 1975, the Brazilians Paulo Bruscky and Ypiranga Filho held, in Recife, the Primeira Exposicão Internacional de Arte Postal (The First International Exhibition of Mail Art). That same year, Vigo and Horacio Zabala organized, not without humor, the Última Exposición Internacional de Arte Postal (The Last International Exhibition of Mail Art) in the Gallery Arte Nuevo in Buenos Aires. It does not matter which exhibition came first and which followed, because together they show that, within a decade, many artists from distant parts of the world were exchanging art by mail. The mailings are evidence of these exchanges, which in turn reveal the existence of the network.

The Last International Exhibition of Mail Art gathered works by 199 artists from 25 countries. Among them, the only submission from Mexico was from Pedro Friedeberg, who met the show’s organizer, Edgardo Antonio Vigo, through Mathias Goeritz. When Goeritz moved to Mexico City – after a brief stay in Guadalajara – he taught architecture at the Universidad Iberoamericana, where, in 1955, he met Friedeberg in his classes. From that moment on and for many years to come, they exchanged a copious amount of correspondence. Sometimes their letters brought news of personal or familial matters, together with opinions on sculptural or architectural projects. At other times their exchanges contained artworks. In 1988, Goeritz wrote to Freideberg’s daughter Diana: “Today I am sending you a paper sculpture and a drawing.”

In a letter from 1982, Friedeberg sent Goeritz diagrams for three yoga poses (Sarvangasana, Halasana, Mayurasana), suggesting that he practice them before going to bed: “They will help you get thru life plus facilement.”

Friedeberg’s letters were beautifully decorated with drawings and seals. His pleasure in painting and sending letters remained constant over fifty years. I calculate—and this is a very subjective estimate—that he has sent approximately two thousand in the last days, from a big palace with labyrinths and gardens.

Dispersed Memory

I’m not aware of the way in which many artists started corresponding with each other. In any case, Friedeberg somehow knew Ray Johnson, who was described by Grace Glueck in the New York Times as the most famous unknown artist in New York.⁴

In 1962, Johnson initiated a series of mailings instructing the recipient to add something to the work received and send it on to someone else, who would follow the same instructions. That same year, he founded the New York Correspondence School, a fictional entity that served as a conceptual base for his mailings over the next three decades.⁵

The first meeting of the New York Correspondence School took place on April 1, 1968. To all appearances, nothing happened. Since 1961, Johnson had held events titled Nothings in a stance of opposition to Happenings. He organized various meetings (such as the Seating-Meeting) about which he wrote reports and chronicles that he then photocopied and distributed by mail to those attending as well as to unknown recipients (making it possible for an unexpected audience to receive his work and participate in future events). This non-exclusive, random form of distribution became a recurrent model for mail art.

In 1972, Johnson invited Friedeberg to participate in the First New York Correspondence School Spitting, to which Friedeberg contributed by spitting on the avenue known as Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City. Johnson also invited him to the First Meeting of the Marcel Duchamp Club, but Friedeberg did not attend. They corresponded for years; these exchanges enabled Friedeberg to participate in the activities of Johnson’s fictional school and in those of the Fluxus group, with which Johnson was affiliated.

Neither Gift nor Barter: Cheers!

After the repression of the student movement in Tlatelolco, Felipe Ehrenberg and Martha Hellion leave Mexico, pass through New York, and arrive with their two children in London in 1970.⁶ That same year Ehrenberg sends two hundred postcards from England to Mexico. They are addressed to Alberto Híjar and are painted irregularly with black stains.

Híjar and those attending the third Salon Independiente (Independent Salon) at the UNAM’s Museo Universitário de Ciencias y Artes (University Museum of Arts and Sciences) mounted the two hundred postcards on a wall, following instructions to paint by number. The mural-size image that resulted showed a woman with slightly parted lips, her neck arched in ecstasy. In her left hand she held a football, alluding to the World Cup that took place that year in Mexico. With her right hand she squeezed her breast, offering invisible milk.

The work’s title, Arriba y Adelante (Upwards and Onwards), alludes to the campaign slogan of Luis Echeverría, who would become president of Mexico that same year.⁷ The collaboration of the public in assembling the painting/postcard installation also recalls another slogan, “Together we are the solution,” used by José López Portillo six years later for his presidential campaign and which, much later, would be parodied as “together we are the corruption.”

Many of Ehrenberg’s works at the time were multiple reproductions that he sent by mail. In this manner, he lived simultaneously both in exile and proximity. In 1971, Ehrenberg and Hellion moved from London to Devon to establish the Beau Geste Press with David Mayor and Chris Welch. The name of the publishing house came from the contraction of beautiful and Gestetner, alluding to the handsome German mimeograph machine they used to print the works of visual poets, conceptualists, and Fluxus artists. The press, housed in a twelfth-century cottage, allowed Ehrenberg to collaborate with numerous artists based in Europe. Upon his return to Mexico, his address book would supply the means for redoubling contacts among Mexican- and European-based artists. One can imagine the consequences.

No Desire for Genealogy

Among the early practitioners of mail art in Mexico, we find Aarón Flores, who in 1979 presented Expocorreográfica (Expomailgraphics), a show of postcards that he duplicated with a photocopier to send to friends, museums, galleries, and magazines. Some documents attribute to Flores the creation of the CRAAG (Centro Receptor de Arte y Archivo General [Central Repository of Art and General Archive]), which consisted of a cardboard box for storing received mailings.

Also in 1979, the exhibition Arte-Correo México (Mail-Art Mexico) took place in the Museo Carrillo Gil. Organized by the Mexican artist Sebastián, the show presented approximately two hundred mailings from Mexico, Brazil, Italy, Holland, the U.S, France, England, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Bulgaria, Austria, Japan, Cuba, China, Argentina, Colombia, and Poland.

Some Mexican artists were very active in the network, among them Mauricio Guerrero, Manuel Marín, Magali Lara, Felipe Ehrenberg, Helen Escobedo, José Luis Cuevas, Mathias Goeritz, Grupo Março, Pedro Friedeberg, Aarón Flores, Sebastián, César Espinoza, Araceli Zúñiga, Blanca Noval, Marcos Kurtycz, Maris Bustamante, Mónica Mayer, and Alberto Gutiérrez Chong.

I don’t consider this a pointless listing of names. Each of the artists mentioned constitutes a link to other mail artists, and these to others who have not been mentioned.

A thesis on mail art presented by Mauricio Guerrero at UNAM in 1986 gives a penetrating account of the movement in Mexico between 1970 and 1984. In it there are lists of participants in the network, interviews, directories, dates, and chronologies. It also includes statements by the artists discussing mail art. Some refer to the movement as Postal Art, Art by Mail, Art as Correspondence, Eternal Network, or the Big Monster. Each artist has a particular conception of the movement.

Guerrero writes: “In general it is agreed that thanks to chance [mail art] has yet to be defined; the moment this happens, it will become trapped and cornered, ceasing to be what it still is today: an alternative.”⁸

In 1990, the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (Autonomous Metropolitan University) reprinted Guerrero’s work with a foreword by Juan Acha. The theorist celebrates the book as being at the forefront “because it dwells on non-objectualism. As we know, mail artists do not consider the meaning of their works to reside in their materiality as objects. They locate meaning in the effect of the works on its recipients. The lack of a conventionally neat and lasting work, in fact, contravenes the present overvaluation of the object propagated by our consumerist societies. Today, the work of art in its status as object has become an end in itself, whereas in antiquity it was always a means of enriching our daily aesthetic relationship with nature and our fellow beings.”⁹

Mail artists attempted to de-objectify creative work in order to extract it from the cycles of consumption and alienation. They also emphasized the prohibition to commercialize mailings. The works were sent on the condition that they not be sold.

Today, the art market has managed to court certain artists who violated this principle. Many others still abide by it and do not to profit from their mailings; they continue to disseminate them and make them public.

A statement by Bourriaud comes to mind: “That which cannot be commercialized is destined to disappear.” I also recall Camille de Toledo: “Everything that the State and the market haven’t diminished, they will nevertheless end up destroying.” Finally, I recall lines from Borges’s “For a Version of the I Ching”:

But don’t lose heart. The slave’s dungeon is black, / The way of things is iron, cold and hard, / But in some corner of your prison yard / There may be an old carelessness, a crack. / The path is like an arrow, deadly straight, / But in the cracks is God, who lies in wait.¹⁰

Deaths and Impermanence

The 1980s was the most eventful decade in the development of the mail art movement in Mexico; it was a moment of intense exchange and flux. Yet toward the end of the decade mail art fell into disuse, becoming extinct. Some have suggested the growth of the network and its saturation as probable causes.

According to César Espinosa and Araceli Zúñiga, initiators of the Poema Colectivo: “It’s true that [mail art] broadened the horizons of those producing it in the artistic circuit, but at the same time it engendered a whole range of formalisms and epigonisms that eventually made it short circuit, given the zeal to respond indiscriminately to all kinds of invitations and thematics.”¹¹

A work by Ulises Carrión prefigures the end with some humor. On a blank postcard he wrote in lower case letters: “I don’t care what your project is about, I just want to be in it.”

Some artists moved on to new practices and media that allowed them to continue the artistic decentralization to which mail art aspired.

“When from each village and province creative messages can be sent and be known by or transmitted to a multiplicity of places in opposition to the dominant art centers established since the Second World War, where a plot of galleries, museums, critics, and dealers control a closed circuit of marketing and prestige that dominates art worldwide, then they are no longer marginalized in their expression. It would be fitting to use the possibilities of this system and orient oneself toward the proliferation of these localized circuits of communication—controlled by the same emitters and receptors—with the effect of interweaving and flowing through all social strata on different terms and counter to the intrinsically repressive normative codes of the dominant culture and communication [systems].¹²

Addicted to Ruins

Researching mail art, we may want to compile everything, to track every mailing and each response, an impulse similar to those of cartographers in a memorable poem by Suárez Miranda (based on one by Lewis Carroll).

“In that Empire, the Art of Cartography achieved such Perfection that the Map of a single Province took up an entire City, and the Map of the Empire, an entire Province. With time, those Outsized Maps didn’t satisfy and the School of Cartographers raised a Map of the Empire that was the same size as the Empire and coincided precisely with it.”¹³

Sooner rather than later, we recognize the impossibility of recuperating and representing mail art; we leave knowing that each mailing nourished the network and that, with each mailing, it mutated. It had, one can only suppose, almost an infinite number of forms.

I recall Heraclitus’s river that we may never step into twice.

I think of time, and I will not extend this account.

Better to return to the ensemble of works and to the essays of those who study them.

Nevertheless, I suggest that mail art was. A beautiful interstice.

I hold that the works are (pardon the horrible metaphor) the remains of the cadaver.

Keep on Thinking

Mail art has ceased to exist. But the masters have spoken.

Just now I thought of the works as remains of a cadaver, and I am going to correct myself. The works are its memory. Their words speak to us even so, and in them we can hear the ocean.

I extend the invitation of an enlightened blind man: magister dixit (the master has spoken). This doesn’t mean that we need to repeat or imitate what the master has said; on the contrary, we need to take the liberty to continue to think the initial thought of the master.

As for us who now go into the river, it is our turn to keep on thinking. To fulfill the time of beauty. To continue thinking. And to stop.

Lea el texto en español aquí.

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Aclaratoria

Un artecorreista anónimo afirmó que el arte correo surgió de la unión de las palabras arte y correo. Denominó a un envío postal como continente de arte; mejor, como arte. Un giro de tuerca a la proposición de un célebre francés que convirtió un urinario en oro imaginario.

Ciertamente, el arte correo existe por su pronunciación, pero es además inseparable de una acción que no es conceptual ni imaginaria sino física y real: el envío. El arte correo no es sólo un logos nuevo; es además materia en movimiento, tránsito y reciprocidad.

Cabe reiterar que las obras de arte correo tienen en común un viaje: fueron enviadas de un determinado lugar a otro.

Tengo para mí, que el arte correo es los dos ríos, la memoria y el olvido. Estos dos ríos corren por cada obra.

Algunos hechos (viajan livianos papeles)

En marzo de 1966, la Galería Universitaria Aristos de la UNAM inauguró la exposición Poesía Concreta Internacional. En el catálogo de la exposición se reproducen unas notas del profesor Max Bense que aparecieron en su versión original como prefacio a la antología Poesía Concreta Internacional publicada en Stuttgart en 1965. Bense primero descarta: “La poesía concreta no se halla vinculada con las relaciones lineales gramaticales o consecutivas de las palabras, ni desde un punto de vista semántico ni estético”. Para luego afirmar: “La poesía concreta se basa en las relaciones visuales de los diversos elementos, y en su relación con el espacio plano bidimensional dentro del que se encuentran contenidos”.

Esta concepción del espacio, creada por los poetas concretos y expresada por Bense, se presentará también en los envíos de arte correo; puede considerarse influencia y antecedente.

A la vez, se puede recordar que los poetas concretos (especialmente los brasileños del grupo Noigandres) releyeron el poema que Mallarmé publicó hacia finales del siglo XIX. Los versos de Un tiro de dados (Un coup de dés) les enseñaron otro modo de ver, de leer y de ocupar el espacio en la página.

Dice Borges de Edgar Allan Poe “La novela policial ha creado un tipo especial de lector. Eso suele olvidarse cuando se juzga la obra de Poe; porque si Poe creó el relato policial, creó después el tipo de lector de ficciones policiales”.

Los poetas concretos crearon también un nuevo tipo de lector; una nueva forma de leer y observar imágenes.

La antiquísima forma de escritura epistolar se ciñe a la ley de la sucesión, es decir del tiempo. Una epístola cifra su sentido en la sucesión de las palabras contenidas en la carta; el sentido brota a partir de las secuencias de palabras. Una epístola, por decirlo de modo común, se escribe y se lee de izquierda a derecha y de arriba hacia abajo en un tiempo sucesivo. Un texto literario también.¹ El arte correo, en cambio, no tiene centro ni izquierda ni derecha. Cifra su sentido en las relaciones producidas por los distintos signos contenidos en el espacio total; estas relaciones no son lineales ni sucesivas, como en los textos epistolares y literarios, sino multidireccionales y simultáneas. El arte correo propone un imposible: la visión de un tiempo infinito.

Otra particularidad en la muestra de Poesía Concreta Internacional influye la práctica del arte correo en México. Para explicarlo hay que hacer mención de Mathias Goeritz, acreditado por la historia como Director Huésped de la Exposición.

Hacia esos años Goeritz gozaba de una red de interlocutores (fomentada incluso antes de su arribo a México) con quienes intercambiaba por medio del correo, cartas, fotografías, objetos gráficos, collages, documentación de obras, tarjetas postales, recortes de revistas, fotocopias, sellos, estampas, etcétera. Basta imaginar las posibilidades de un sobre y un jarrito. Los corresponsales de Goeritz se dispersaban por Europa y América. Enviando de ida y vuelta.

Avanzaré que en los años previos a la exposición, Goeritz fue recibiendo por correo los materiales que habrían de conformarla. De ese modo entró en contacto con los poetas concretos brasileños Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos y Décio Pignatari, con el suizo Eugen Gomringer, con el tipógrafo alemán Hansjörg Mayer, con Dieter Roth y muchos otros artistas que participaron del movimiento. Este modelo para intercambiar arte mostró un camino a los artecorreistas.

Goeritz nunca se acreditó como artecorreista, aun cuando sostuvo comunicación con mucha gente que impulsó la móvil configuración de la red, entre ellos Clemente Padín y Edgardo Antonio Vigo.²

Bajo la dictadura militar uruguaya, Padín organizó en 1974 el Festival de la Postal Creativa, en la Galería U en Montevideo. En 1975, los brasileños Paulo Bruscky e Ypiranga Filho, celebraron en Recife la Primera Exposición Internacional de Arte Postal. En ese mismo año, Vigo y Horacio Zabala, organizaron, no sin humor, la Última Exposición Internacional de Arte Postal en la Galería Arte Nuevo, en Buenos Aires, Argentina.

No importa tanto cuál exposición aconteció primero y cuál después como que en conjunto evidencian que, mediada la década, muchos artistas desde remotos lugares del mundo intercambian arte por correo. Se muestran los envíos, y como veladura, la red.

La antecitada Última Exposición Internacional de Arte Postal reunió obras de 199 artistas de 25 países distintos. Meses y livianos papeles en el aire. Entre todos, el único envío realizado desde México fue de Pedro Friedeberg, quien conoció al organizador de la muestra, Edgardo Antonio Vigo, por medio de Mathias Goeritz.

Al llegar al Distrito Federal –luego de su estadía en Guadalajara– Goeritz impartió clases de arquitectura en la Universidad Iberoamericana. En sus aulas conoció a Pedro Friedeberg, precisamente en 1955. A partir de ese momento y por muchos años intercambiaron copiosa correspondencia. Algunas veces las cartas llevaban noticias de asuntos personales o familiares, opiniones sobre proyectos escultóricos o arquitectónicos. Otras veces los envíos contenían obra. En 1988, Goeritz le escribió a Diana, hija de Friedeberg: “te mando hoy una escultura de papel y un dibujo”.

Pedro, en una carta de 1982, le envió a Mathias tres posiciones de Yoga (Sarvangasana, Halasana, Mayurasana) y le sugiere practicarlas antes de dormir: “they will help you get thru life plus facilement”.

Las correspondencias de Friedeberg van adornadas bellamente con dibujos y sellos. Su prolífica inclinación a pintar y mandar cartas ha sido constante durante cincuenta años. Calculo –es una estimación personalísima– que ha enviado aproximadamente dos mil en los últimos días, desde un amplio palacio con laberintos y jardines.

La dispersa memoria

Desconozco el modo en que muchos artistas comenzaron a intercambiar con otros.³ De algún modo Friedeberg conoció a Ray Johnson, a quien Grace Glueck describió en una página del New York Times como el artista desconocido más famoso de Nueva York.⁴

La primera reunión de la New York Correspondance School aconteció el primero de abril de 1968. Al parecer no sucedió nada. Johnson, quien desde 1961 celebraba eventos denominados Nothings (Nadas) en una actitud opuesta a los Happenings o Sucesos, citó a varias reuniones (como la Seating-Meeting) de las cuales escribía reportes y crónicas que fotocopiaba y distribuía por correo, lo mismo a los asistentes que a destinatarios desconocidos, haciendo posible que una audiencia inesperada recibiera su obra y participara de futuras convocatorias. Esta distribución no selectiva, azarosa incluso, constituyó un modelo recurrente en el arte correo.

En 1972, Johnson invitó a Pedro Friedeberg a participar en la Primera Escupida de la Escuela de Arte por Correspondencia (First New York Correspondance School Spitting), a la cual se sumó con un escupitajo desde Paseo de la Reforma. En otro envío, lo convidó a la Primera Reunión del Club de Marcel Duchamp a la cual Friedeberg no asistió. Ambos se cartearon por años; el correo permitió a Friedeberg participar en las actividades de la ficticia escuela y estar al tanto del grupo Fluxus cercano a Ray Johnson.

Ni regalo ni trueque: ¡la copa!

Tras la represión del movimiento estudiantil en Tlatelolco, Felipe Ehrenberg y Martha Hellion dejan México, pasan por Nueva York y llegan, con sus dos hijos, a Londres en 1970.

Ese mismo año Ehrenberg envió desde Inglaterra a México doscientas tarjetas postales pintadas – variablemente – con “manchas” negras, las cuales fueron recibidas por Alberto Híjar.

Híjar y los asistentes al tercer Salón Independiente en el Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Artes de la UNAM, montaron en un muro las tarjetas postales siguiendo unas instrucciones de armado: pintaron por número.

La imagen mostró, entonces, a una mujer con los labios ligeramente abiertos y el cuello en éxtasis. En la mano izquierda la mujer sostiene un balón de fútbol alusivo a la Copa del Mundo que se jugó ese año en México. Con la mano derecha aprieta su seno y ofrece una invisible leche.

La obra Arriba y Adelante alude en su título al lema de campaña de Luis Echeverría, quien se convertiría ese mismo año en presidente de México.⁵ La colaboración del público en el armado de la fragmentada pintura postal recuerda también otro eslogan, “la solución somos todos”, utilizado por José López Portillo seis años después para su campaña presidencial y que más tarde se parodiaría como “la corrupción somos todos”.

Muchos de los trabajos de Ehrenberg en la época son producciones múltiples que distribuye por correo. De esta manera, al mismo tiempo, vive el exilio y la cercanía.

Felipe Ehrenberg y Martha Hellion mudarían su residencia de Londres a Devon para fundar en 1971 junto a David Mayor y Chris Welch la editorial Beau Geste Press. El nombre de la editorial surgió de la contracción de beautiful y Gestetner, aludiendo al hermoso mimeógrafo alemán que utilizaron para imprimir trabajos de poetas visuales, conceptualistas y artistas del movimiento Fluxus. La editorial, ubicada en una casona del siglo XII, permitió a Ehrenberg colaborar con decenas de artistas radicados en Europa.

A su regreso a México, el directorio de Ehrenberg multiplicará el contacto entre los artistas radicados en el país y los artistas europeos. Las consecuencias son imaginables.

Sin ganas de genealogía

Entre los practicantes tempranos del arte correo en México encontramos a Aarón Flores, quien en 1979 realizó la Expocorreográfica, una muestra de tarjetas postales que multiplicó con ayuda de una fotocopiadora para enviarlas a amigos, museos, galerías y revistas. Algunos documentos atribuyen a Flores la creación del CRAAG, Centro Receptor de Arte y Archivo General, que consistió en una caja de cartón en la que almacenaba los envíos recibidos.

En 1979 aconteció también la exposición Arte-Correo México organizada por Sebastián en el museo Carrillo Gil, la cual mostró aproximadamente 200 envíos provenientes de México, Brasil, Italia, Holanda, E.U.A., Francia, Inglaterra, Canadá, Suiza, Alemania, Bulgaria, Hungría, Austria, Japón, Cuba, China, Argentina, Colombia y Polonia.

Entre los artistas mexicanos que fueron participantes muy activos de la red, vale la pena enlistar a: Mauricio Guerrero, Manuel Marín, Magali Lara, Felipe Ehrenberg, Helen Escobedo, José Luis Cuevas, Mathias Goeritz, Grupo Março, Pedro Friedeberg, Aarón Flores, Sebastián, César Espinoza, Araceli Zúñiga, Blanca Noval, Marcos Kurtycz, Maris Bustamante, Mónica Mayer y Alberto Gutiérrez Chong.

No considero vano este enlistado. Cada uno de los artistas referidos constituye una liga que conduce a otros artecorreistas, y éstos a otros que no están mencionados.

Una tesis presentada en 1984 por Mauricio Guerrero a la UNAM sobre el arte correo hace un recuento acucioso de los eventos del movimiento en México, entre 1970 y 1984. En ella se incluyen listas de participantes de la red, entrevistas, directorios, fechas y cronologías. Se incluyen también enunciaciones de los artistas sobre el arte correo. Algunos se refieren al movimiento como Arte Postal, Arte de Correo, Arte por Correspondencia, Eternal Network o como el Gran Monstruo. Cada artista posee una concepción particular.⁶

Dice Mauricio Guerrero en su tesis: “en general se coincide que ha sido gracias al azar que aún no se le haya definido; en el momento en que eso ocurra, quedará atrapado y encajonado, dejando de ser lo que es todavía: una alternativa”.

En 1990 la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana reeditó la investigación de Guerrero con una presentación de Juan Acha. El teórico festeja la publicación “en primer término, porque es investigado un no-objetualismo. Como es sabido, los artistas del arte correo no cifran lo substancial de sus obras en los atributos de la materialidad de ellas como objetos. Lo cifran en los efectos de éstas sobre los destinatarios. […] la falta de una obra convencionalmente pulcra y duradera, contraviene –de hecho– a la actual sobrevaloración de todo objeto, propagada por nuestras sociedades consumistas. La obra de arte en su calidad de objeto deviene hoy un fin en sí mismo, cuando en la antigüedad siempre fue un medio de enriquecimiento de nuestras relaciones estéticas diarias con la naturaleza y nuestros semejantes”.

Los artecorreistas intentaron la desobjetualización del trabajo creativo para sustraerlo del consumo y la enajenación. También enfatizaron la prohibición de comerciar con los envíos. Las obras se enviaban a condición de no venderlas.

En la actualidad, el mercadeo artístico ha logrado cortejar a algunos artistas que contravinieron el principio. Muchos otros aún lo respetan y cuidan los envíos sin lucrar con ellos; continúan difundiéndolos y haciéndolos públicos.

Recuerdo la sentencia de Bourriaud: “lo que no puede comercializarse está destinado a desaparecer”. Recuerdo a Camille de Toledo: “todo lo que el Estado y el mercadeo no han marchitado aún, terminarán por marchitarlo”.

Recuerdo, por último, unos versos de Borges para una versión del “I Ching”:

No te arredres. La ergástula es oscura, La firme trama es de incesante hierro, Pero en algún recodo de tu encierro Puede haber una luz, una hendidura. El camino es fatal como la flecha. Pero en las grietas está Dios, que acecha.

Muertes y mudanzas

En la década de 1980 se aglutinan la mayor cantidad de sucesos relacionados con el arte correo en México, el mayor flujo. A finales de la misma década se registra también su extinción y su desuso. Algunos sugieren como probables consecuencias el auge del circuito, la proliferación y la saturación.

“Es cierto que (el arte correo) amplió los horizontes de la participación de productores en el circuito artístico, pero asimismo prohijó una surtida gama de formalismos y epigonismos, que, por demás, hacen corto circuito dado el afán de responder a todo tipo de invitaciones y temáticas”.⁷

Una obra de Ulises Carrión previó con humor la saturación del medio. Sobre una postal blanca escribió con letra manuscrita: “No me importa de qué se trata tu proyecto, quiero estar en él”.

Algunos mudaron su quehacer a nuevas prácticas y medios que les permitieron continuar con la descentralización artística pretendida por el arte correo.

“Cuando desde cada aldea o provincia se pueden enviar mensajes creativos y ser conocidos o transmitidos hacia una multiplicidad de lugares, en contraposición a los centros rectores del arte implantados desde la segunda posguerra, donde una trama de galerías, museos, críticos y marchands controla un cerrado aparato de mercadeo y prestigio que se enseñorea sobre el arte universal, deja de haber marginados en la expresión. […] Cabría utilizar las posibilidades del sistema y orientarse a que proliferen estos circuitos de comunicación localizada – controlados por los mismos emisores y receptores – a efecto de que se entretejan y fluyan por todos los estratos sociales en términos diferentes y contrapuestos a los códigos uniformadores, intrínsecamente represivos, de la cultura y comunicación dominantes.”⁸

Adictos a las ruinas

Temprano, en la investigación, deseábamos compilarlo todo, encontrarlo todo, rastrear cada envío y cada contestación.

Nos guiaba un impulso similar al de los cartógrafos de un memorable poema de Suárez Miranda (que se basa en otro de Lewis Carroll).

“En aquel Imperio, el Arte de la Cartografía logró tal Perfección que el Mapa de una sola Provincia ocupaba toda una Ciudad, y el Mapa del Imperio, toda una Provincia. Con el tiempo, estos Mapas Desmesurados no satisficieron y los Colegios de Cartógrafos levantaron un Mapa del Imperio, que tenía el Tamaño del Imperio y coincidía puntualmente con él.”⁹

Más pronto que tarde, advertimos también la imposibilidad de recuperar y representar el arte correo; fuimos comprendiendo que cada envío nutrió la red y con cada envío mutó de forma. Tuvo, es de suponerse, casi infinitas formas.

Recuerdo el río de Heráclito al que nunca bajamos dos veces.

Pienso en el tiempo, y no dilato esta versión.

Remito, mejor, al concierto de las obras y los ensayos de quienes las estudian.

Aun, sugiero que el arte correo fue. Un bello intersticio.

Tengo para mí, que las obras son (disculpen la horrible metáfora) restos del cadáver.

Seguir pensando

El arte correo ha dejado de existir. Pero los maestros hablaron. Recién consideré que las obras son restos de un cadáver y voy a corregirme. Las obras son su memoria. Sus palabras aún nos hablan y en ellas resuena el mar.

Extiendo la invitación de un ciego iluminado: magister dixit (el maestro lo ha dicho). Esto no significa que debamos repetir o imitar lo que el maestro ha dicho; por el contrario, afirma la libertad de seguir pensando el pensamiento inicial del maestro.

A nosotros, quienes bajamos ahora al río, nos toca seguir pensando. Colmar el tiempo de belleza. Seguir pensando. Y cesar.

Plunkett precisa sobre la NYCS: “Nunca reclamó ser una innovación. En todo caso, si intentaba algo, era continuar una tradición que se remonta a tiempos primordiales. Pueden citarse ejemplos de comunicación como forma de arte a lo largo de la historia. Cleopatra se hizo enrollar en un tapete para presentarse a Julio César.” (Art Journal, Spring 1977)

Read the text in English here.

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To most people, a file is merely a collection of objects, mostly papers, stuck into folders and saved in cases, ordered and stored in such a manner that one may consult them at will. A file, of course, is that and then much more. Files have existed for a very long time and in many shapes, and if you stop to think about it, you’ll notice that we humans still use most of the devices for storing and remembering that we’ve invented through the ages: mnemonic rote and chant, carved wood and monoliths, clay tablets, knotted ropes, papyrus, parchment and paper, and now, with the advent of computers, electrical impulses.

Corporate files share a certain logic. They exist as an accumulated series of decisions and moves that, as they expand to meet specific needs of the group, eventually gain control over not only the original group’s behavior, but also that of other groups, not necessarily kindred ones. Microsoft Office, as it gradually cuts and pastes itself across the world, is a perfect example of this.

Archives and filing systems may be invaluable aids for conducting life, be it collective or individual. But we must beware: we cannot allow them to become a restrictive burden. Tools, if misused, can all too easily turn into weapons, as may be happening in the U.S., a society whose complexity is forcing it to lose sight of its parts. That country has gradually developed the art of filing into what is now, in all probability, the largest, most efficient information-gathering system ever conceived on earth. Therein lie the deepest, darkest dangers, to the U.S. and to all of humanity.

Corporate archives are very different from personal ones, but both are pristine reflections of the persons or the group of people that keep them. What a person or a group chooses to save or throw away depends on very specific conceptual frameworks that may or may not vary according to specific circumstances. Changing the system, for example, can become an almost impossible task to undertake. Indeed, corporate filing systems can adjust to meet the corporation’s ever-changing needs much more often and rapidly than personal systems.

The framework that shapes and sustains a personal archive can be quite mysterious. A personal file can, and most often does, acquire a life of its own. It can achieve such strength that its existence may actually determine how one leads one’s life. One of my great discoveries was realizing that my file was not merely an extension of my profession, but that it was in fact an extension of myself. For example, I’ve reached several “tripping points” along the way—moments when I felt either paralyzed by my mind’s inaction or caught up in the chaos of the file’s disorder. At such moments, the only solution was to stop, reclassify all my papers, and of course, buy more and more folders and file cases. Naturally, one of the folders, the one tagged “Ideas to Decipher,” has become a section of its own. It contains “Ideas ’84… ’92… ’99…” and so on. I’m still missing the folder called “Deciphering my own Codes.”

I’ve spent more money on my file, on my various files, paying several salaries to keep them in order, than on art materials. I delved so long into what was called Conceptual art that my files became my principal work tools. As I grew and developed, so did my tool file. In time it also became an information bank; then, by its sheer size, a burden (changing addresses always required a lot of thinking); then perhaps a legacy; and finally, a hiatus, a mark in life.

I never questioned the need to create a file and took it for granted that I would have to sustain it forever after. I don’t believe I ever thought about its value—the value it could then have or later acquire, beyond serving as a tool to help me in my day-to-day existence. My father, who never actively dissuaded me from being an artist, always insisted that we be, all eight siblings, absolutely formal, punctual, and orderly. In my teens especially, he repeatedly mentioned the need to order my papers. Though he never expressed any enthusiasm over my choice of profession, my father would sporadically send or hand me news clippings that mentioned my name, and these, like all his letters, I duly filed away.

It may well have been shortly after the Great Earthquake of September 1985, but at a given moment I began thinking that my files could, in fact, be considered a work of art very much akin to other works of mine of a conceptual nature: an installation, perhaps, or better yet, a performance, so that by logical extension it would require special care, the care one gives to an oeuvre d’art (as opposed to an objet d’art). So I proceeded to give it yet again a new order, not quite knowing how best to frame the idea, how to convince the powers that be to perceive it—that ordered mass of papers—as art. It wasn’t until a decade after the earthquake that I met Issa Maria Benitez Dueñas. Her dissertation was, precisely, on documents as works of art, and after we discussed her subject matter, she confirmed and honed the concept. I’ll always be thankful to her for this.¹

South of the Rio Grande we know Milton Friedman, who proposed a new world economic order at the IMF as one of the principal ring bosses of the so-called Chicago Boys, a gang that’s been stomping up and down the streets of this wide world blandishing a doctrine that goes by different names: free-market capitalism, neoconservatism, neocon, whatever, and which among us is known as neoliberalism. Well, when in 1994 the Mexican branch of the Chicago Boys set up NAFTA (which, as it benefited a sliver of the new rich, blew the strangest smelling gases into our perpetually ignorant art market), when these people’s doctrines began shining (?) on our horizon, I woke up one December morning and found myself totally broke. Me and who knows how many other Mexicans. With the brutal devaluation of our currency, we had all of a sudden lost properties, businesses, cars (I lost my newly purchased home), and faced unimaginable debts.

The economy of a country manages to affect art in so many complex ways that are difficult to imagine, especially by artists. Though I had until then lived almost exclusively from my art, I had never produced—nor do I expect to do so in any near future—what you call market art, and thus I found myself in the direst of straights. To date, not a single private art collection in Mexico has work of mine. Some friends of mine who knew about my file suggested that I try to sell the letters of my famous friends. So I proceeded to spread the word via e-mail. Several people wrote back, a couple of them from Europe and some from the U.S. Describing themselves as “collectors of trivia,” they asked if they could travel to Mexico and visit, which of course they did. I still have no real idea of what these people took (invites, mail art, homespun hand-printed things, handwritten notes, typed letters and handmade cloth envelopes, and what-not by friends and acquaintances). Many of them were from Fluxus people, such as Carolee Schneemann, Dick Higgins, Takako Saito, Wolf Vostell, but also others like Ulises Carrión, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Clemente Padín, Michael Nyman, etc. Nor do I have any idea of what, if anything, such trivia fetched for these collectors later in the market.

It pained me so to feel that the file was being dismembered. Disemboweled might be a better word! But the money afforded me a respite, and this breathing space allowed me, sometime in 1996, to come to terms with the idea of offering up my whole accumulated file, letting go of it as a whole. Now, relinquishing property and control of a personal file is neither simple nor easy. My first thought was that it would be best if it stayed in Mexico. So I started making the rounds, writing letters and visiting institutions. I first approached the Institute for Esthetic Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), then the faculty of art history of the Iberoamerican University (UIA). Then I sounded out the museums that belong to the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA). I also visited the National Council for Culture and Art (CNCA). I even wrote to Ernesto Zedillo, then the country’s president (if I remember correctly, there’s a letter somewhere that curtly declines the offer). Two or three people in high places mentioned that file keeping in Mexico is still an unexplored concept, but no one—nobody—showed even a glimmer of interest in purchasing files, let alone those of a visual artist. I did find several interested institutions abroad, among them the Tate Gallery, which keeps a surprisingly complete record of my life in England and of the Beau Geste Press.

I might mention here that Mexico is not—or is no longer—an archival culture, an archive-oriented society. The country’s upper echelons, its governors and its business people, naturally, but also those who work in its learning institutions, depend more and more on filing systems created in the U.S., by mostly young but mostly uncultured North Americans, surely brilliant minds cyberwise but lacking knowledge of the world’s different cultures. This is to me very alarming because it means that Mexico, and for that matter, most of the rest of world, is ever more dependent on the thought patterns that determine the shapes, uses, and applications of filing systems.

The greater part of my file ended up in the U.S., at Stanford University. Perhaps one of the reasons why I decided to deal with Stanford, apart from the splendidly careful and respectful way it stores knowledge and its generosity in acquiring it, was the fact that the file would be in California, not far from Mexico, at hand in case any Mexican scholar or researcher might eventually show an interest in exploring it. Since then, in 2010, another portion of my archive was acquired by the MUAC (University Museum of Contemporary Art) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico as part of the museum’s archive-building project, Arkheia.

On a personal level, there are aspects of these exchanges which I haven’t learned to deal with. For example, the fact that a file could be considered a work of art and thus might one day appreciate in value differently from a collection of papers. I must remind you that in a case such as the MUAC, one cannot simply surrender everything. Of course, I kept a lot of material for my own use and reference: photographs, correspondence with my family, and such. But also all the notes, texts and scripts, photos, messages, business letters, contracts, receipts, and sundry records related to the administration of my past production and of my work in progress, which includes not just art but art theory and journalism, artists’ books and mural workshops and diplomacy.

Once in a while I ask myself whether my various archives’ contents, all of them, are truly public. Will I get anyone into trouble? Will I get myself into trouble? Apart from letters that record the life I led and shared, we all led and shared, in the troublesome 1960s, there’s also the matter of how much truth epistolary literature contains. As I mentioned at the beginning, I truly have no idea what value this collection of facts and personal opinions, carefully stored by a reasonably informed and pretty well-traveled citizen, could have, other than offering the opportunity of deciphering a part of Mexican history.

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