These three key texts, selected by Vanessa Davidson, Shawn and Joe Lampe Curator of Latin American Art at the Phoenix Art Museum, outline Argentine experimental artist Edgardo Antonio Vigo’s understanding of mail art. Vigo explores what he calls “distance communication” as a new form for the development of art, communication, and political action. Arte-Correo: Una…
In this short essay on the writings of the Argentine experimental artist Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Vanessa Davidson, Shawn and Joe Lampe Curator of Latin American Art at the Phoenix Art Museum, explores how the artist positioned his mail art practice in three key texts. post has commissioned translations of these texts, now newly available in English. Edgardo…
El arte correo, sabemos, es una excusa, a nosotros nos interesan cosas más importantes y que tienen que ver con nosotros mismos, nuestras familias, nuestros pueblos. Si aceptamos esto, las diferencias se diluyen; después de tanto drama y tanta sangre tenemos que discernir quiénes son nuestros verdaderos enemigos. Clemente Padín, Carta a Mauricio GuerreroMontevideo > México…
Mail art, we know, is an excuse, we are interested in more important things that have to do with ourselves, our families, our people. If we accept this, differences are dissolved; after so much drama and so much blood we must discern who our true enemies are. —Clemente Padín, letter to Mauricio Guerrero, January 8,…
The word feminism was the subject of a public conversation that took place on November 18, 2014, at MoMA. Under the heading “Translating Feminism,” Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Agata Jakubowska, and Gayatri Sinha discussed the term’s implications for artistic practice in their respective areas of scholarship. In Latin America, Fajardo-Hill argued, feminism has often been regarded as a bourgeois…
“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”…
Mail art celebrates a fissure in the system and, in fact, mocks its methods of silencing and control, creating opportunities for direct communication without manipulative intermediaries. This text, authored by Colectivo 3, was disseminated as part of the ongoing project of the Poema Colectivo: Revolución, in 1982. It sheds light on the strategies and ideas that…
Curator Mauricio Marcin sketches a brief history of mail art, as told through a variety of archives in Mexico City, arguing that these remnants demand that we “keep on thinking.” This essay is an adapted and translated version of the article “Arte Correo en un Libro,” originally published in Mauricio Marcin (ed.), Artecorreo (Mexico City: Museo de…
“Poetry must be made by all” – Count de Lautréamont Maurico Marcin provides a brief introduction to the Poema Colectivo: Revolución, considering its challenge to the laws of private property, the words of liberation it continues to whisper and its place in a new kind of network, here on post. A collection of 350 sheets of letter-size…
“La poesía debe ser hecha por todos” – Conde de Lautréamont Mauricio Marcin ofrece una breve introducción, aquí en post, al Poema Colectivo: Revolución, donde se le considera como oposición a las leyes de la propiedad privada a partir de las palabras libertarias que susurra y de las nuevas formas de trabajo en red que postuló. Un…
El curador Mauricio Marcin esboza una breve historia del arte correo, a partir de diversos archivos ubicados en la Ciudad de México, argumentando que los remanentes del arte correo nos obligan a “seguir pensando”. Este ensayo es una versión adaptada y traducida del texto “Arte Correo en un Libro”, publicado originalmente en Mauricio Marcin (ed.), Artecorreo (Ciudad…
Published two years before the Poema Colectivo Revolución, these texts give an impression of the landscape of the Mexican cultural scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They appeared in the cultural supplement Testimonios de Latinoamérica, which accompanied the eponymous exhibition at the Carrillo Gil Museum in Mexico City from September 19, 1978. Five years earlier,…
