Transnational Histories and Non-aligned Networks

Milan Knížák and Ken Friedman: Keeping Together Manifestations in a Divided World

One of the many intercontinental relationships to arise from Fluxus in the second half of the 1960s was the one between Milan Knížák and Ken Friedman, the two directors of Fluxus East and Fluxus West, respectively. When, in the 1980s, Dick Higgins and Ken Friedman outlined the basic ideas of Fluxus,1Dick Higgins, “Fluxus: Theory and…

“Revolution Not Only In The Arts, But In Connection.” Interview with Vytautas Landsbergis

Professor at the Lithuanian Conservatory of Music in Vilnius and scholar of the early 20th-century composer and painter Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, Vytautas Landsbergis connected with the international Fluxus community in the 1960s via his childhood friend George Maciunas. As a result, he corresponded also with Ken Friedman in California and Mieko Shiomi in Tokyo, and…

Tomislav Gotovac: “When I open my eyes in the morning, I see a film”

Tomislav Gotovac—the influential avant-garde filmmaker, conceptual artist, and anarchist leader of Croatian performance art—occupies an authorial position within the alternative New Art Practice of the late 1960s in the former Yugoslavia. After studying film directing at the Academy of Theater, Film, Radio, and Television in Belgrade, Gotovac made his first experimental films, inaugurating the golden…

Poema Colectivo 2014

“Would you have participated in this activity if it was truly revolutionary?” 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…

An Art of Flight, an Art of Pursuit: Notes on Mail Art, Fugitiveness, and Bombs

A few months ago, Mara Polgovsky responded to Mauricio Marcin’s essay “Mail Art from Mexico (via the world): An Erratic Investigation.” The post editorial team liked her response so much that we decided to translate it to make it available in English. Please enjoy, and contribute your own discussion piece. Mail art in Mexico in the 1970s was the…

Mail Art as “A Necessary Necessity”: Edgardo Antonio Vigo’s Writings, 1975–1981

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…

Revolución: Un Poema Colectivo. Potencias Poético-Políticas de la Red de Arte Correo III*

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 from Mexico (via the world): An Erratic Investigation

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…