Mail Art News #49: Weekly Review 8/2/2023

 

from Joel Cohen, aka Sticker Dude

Greetings. What shape is this time? Will you tell me? Perhaps the mail art will tell me. 

Incoming mail from Sticker Dude, Keith S. Chambers, and Jason Motsch. 

from Joel Cohen, aka Sticker Dude

from Joel Cohen, aka Sticker Dude

from Keith S. Chambers

from Keith S. Chambers

from Jason Motsch, with a note: "Long live Humphrey
Chickenhorn, Ambassador of Gluten-Freedom Fry Land!"

Maxima Strange has published Chapter 2 of LETTERS TO MONSTERA, a serialized epistolary novel. You can read it here.

As I finish reading Kenneth S. Brecher's Too Sad To Sing, a candid autobiographical look at a life lived in relation to post cards, I ponder if I should reach out to him for an update. How to reach him? Obviously, any contact would have to be in postcard format. An internet search reveals that he retired from his role as President of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles in September 2021. 

Recommended listening: Jennie Hinchcliff's mail art podcast Senders Receive. 

And here is Ken Miller's Instagram which is how I found out about the podcast in the first place, in a roundabout way. The Instagram account has a link to his blog Shouting at the Postman, which had a link to the podcast. 

Also, a big thank you to Mail Art News media specialist Ariel Greenwood for sending me a link to a page about Hiroshi Yoshimura's Music for Nine Postcards. 

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Reader Mail from Sarah Roe: 

Here's my thoughts for the day, just mail art adjacent enough that you might count it as news? You be the judge:

Back in the 90s and early aughts I printed things off the internet all the time, saved them in a file where they languished for later, recipes mostly. But that was dialup service days. Sometimes I print things out for Cameron since he doesn't have access. The world wide web is daily now and in my pocket so seeing parts of it on paper is discordant.

Did I ever send you the google home page? The printer repairman at my job printed it as a test, it made me laugh out loud to see. It has different connotations as a mail art network query -- so I made some copies and sent them around a few places as an add and pass. No one has sent me an answer yet. I'll have forgotten about it entirely by the time I get one - that daily www consumption sure does wear down a brain's attention span. Or maybe I'm just getting older.

The internet was so much easier to print out back then - these days there are some web pages that aren't even worth the time you have to invest in reformatting for paper. I am impressed by Wikipedia (lots of reasons) - they have made a "download PDF" button right at the top of every article - increasing access is a priority and it shows. Crass commercial takeover of the web has ruined so much of it, I think, that it's made humanity dumber when it was supposed to be both an enhancement and an equalizer (or so my idealistic younger self wanted to believe.) I hear that the dumbing down effect is showing on the AI, too. 

Signing off for now, with a copy of my very fresh very new very first drawn artistamp - Two Cents from Sarah, we'll call it. I had fun and came away with ideas about how to do the next one better, so hang on and I'll have a better version in the mail for you.

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Let us see what's on Facebook. For starters, there's the group called Early Mail Art, where you might find some interesting pieces of mail art history. 

posted by Joel Lipman

Chuck Welch: Mail Art TNT mailed in 1981 by a student from Gala High School,
Galva, IL. An entry in the Third National High School Postal Art Exhibition.

Elsewhere on Facebook, there's the following hothead artistamps by La Toan Vinh, posted by Maya Lopez Muro.

Then, onwards to the Australian Mail Art group, Adam Blackshaw has posted the following piece:

When the Child Was a Child (2023) 150mm x 100mm Gouache on paper  (Text: "When the child was a child, it didn’t know that it was a child, everything was soulful, and all souls were one" - Song of Childhood, Peter Handke)  For KRAFTQUELLEN at Stadtteilzentrum Weststadt, Hamm, Germany. 

And one more piece that I saw on Facebook. It's not mail art, but I copied the image and printed it on cardstock and will be mailing out (postcard sized). Just like that, it's mail art! And don't bug me about copyright. It's for personal use and I wrote the artist's name on the back of it. 

Galen Gibson-Cornell's work magically converted into mail art

But that's not all I'm sending out. I have these two cards to include. The first is a mixed media collage, finished off with the help of some label stickers from work and a piece of washi tape. The second is a found card, edited to bring it more in line with modern sensibilities. 

Can you tell what I added to the second card? (Answers: "RUBBER", "MAIL ART NEWS", and "ART")

From the Archives

Melissa Hughes, aka Starry Eyed Stamper, sent me several zines in 2022, documenting her research into the origins of various rubber stamps you may have seen floating around in the rubberstamp-o-sphere. 

And if you're still Hungary for more mail art, here's a Chronology of Hungarian Correspondence Art. Hungary like the wolf? Then here's a little article for you from 2017: The Mail Art Archive of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and Robert Rehfeldt.

But this blog post isn't ober yet. We still have to visit the Oberlin College Mail Art Collection. 

Visit the collection.

See you next time. Thanks for reading.