I would like to explain what Mail Art is, but the task is not easy. I can, at least, to say that it works without commercial spirit, without censorship nor selection and that it comes from the fact that all human being is creative by nature.
These premises turns this movement into a highly spontaneous system of communication between artists, where the communicational creation outweighs the perfeccionism of the academic art.
Mail Art vehicle is the mail, but any other system is not rejected. This fact allows the approach between human beings. It’s for that reason that its current dynamics includes electronic mail, wich coexist pacifically with the ordinary mail.
For emphasizing one of the main characteristic of the mail-artist, I choose solidarity and creativity. The creative act at the service of solidarity and coexistence between the different nations.
The basic ideas in the Mail Art are the communication and the creativity. This is an obvious fact when Mail Art is analyzed, but another important aspect is the capacity to push all people to participate in that creativity without barriers, putting their own work on the same level as the creations of the established artist in hundreds of exhibitions. This way, they dares to express themself for the first time, breaking the barrier wich is imposed to all adults in some stage of their life. And creating with freedom is to feel free.
For artists, with other creative options, the human communication between people of all continents supposes an enrichment for their own capacity for creation. Visual poetry, alternative music, videoart, electronic art, underground editions, mixed media for printing... Many combined possibilities wich appears in the mailboxes, surprising and recycling the imagination of the one who receives the Mail Art.
And, above all, the chance to come together in solidarity, with people who becomes friends in any place and any time.
This call is organized from Mail Art but goes to everybody, who, artist or not, feels and thinks that freedom of speech cannot be limited nor censured. Freedom of speech is vital for the individual growth, with which the growth of a society is developed. Great ideas arises through free thinking and allows us to advance in the cultural and social development. It was in this way that AU MA + Gom@ was born; five individuals with freedom of ideas and different nationalities who join to develop a common idea and a global project: the freedom in the education of the arts.
I would like to finish with a statement painted by the Artrat group (Buenos.Aires, 1985), a group of students of fine arts, in a mural made in one of the walls of their school wich was soon censured: "fear to the Freedom / Censorship will not make us to go down the flags of the imagination. " André Bretón.
This call was born of something that would not have to be an utopia: the right to the freedom of speech. If in all its years of running and experience, the mail art has been able to abolish the barriers from its network, it must continue working to open doors to dialog, the change and the creativity, to demythologize art and to rescue its collective function, to leave the mere aesthetics contemplation of works and to offer the possibility of acting, to imply the observer as participant, and to make possible the expression of the majority to opposite to these social events that violate the elementary rights of the humanity.
The Internet is an instrument and as such influences our lifes. Wether it is used for liberation or oppression does not depend upon its very nature, but on the societal structure that determines its use. Therefore the demand of the situationists to make the media (including the Internet) accessible to everyone must be taken into consideration. Only then does the Internet acquire a democratic character. The mostly transnational telecommunication companies in poor countries could sponsor access to the Internet for schools, universities and public libraries.
To illustrate how the Internet creates a new dimension in the area of communication and exchange, I would like to mention the following: within two days of Pinochet´s arrest in England, a collective of five artists (Clemente Padín, Uruguay; Fernando García-Delgado, Argentina; Tartarugo and César Reglero, Spain and myself) developed by e-mail and was later named GOM@ (Global Organization of Mail Artists) to launch a communiqué. In it we demanded justice for Humberto Nilo and the extradition of Pinochet to Spain. Humberto Nilo, ex-director and ex-professor at the School of Fine Arts of the Universidad de Chile, was victim of the still existing mechanisms of the ex-dictatorship. In march this year, while still director, he organized a mail art exhibition titled;Freedom, Pluralism and Diversity in the Production and Teaching of the Arts;. Within two weeks we culled over 300 signatures towards our cause, through e-mail. We sent these to the governments in Chile, Spain and England and international organizations. We are still receiving signatures, even by regular mail!
Art has been one of the fundamental basis of our progressive " humanization", in the symbolic registry of the values that our activity is generating in all the areas of doing. The art work, from its condition of " communication product ", when demanding the participation of interlocutors in situation of "active dialogue ", emphasizes one of the fundamental characteristics of the human nature: the social relationships. Mainly in the cases in wich the products remain in the zone of "use" and not merely in the zone of products of "change ", that is to say, as much they are "communication products" and not "products to "interchange" via money.
Without a doubt, as much we do not advance and we grow in our development towards better levels of humanity, understanding and knowledge, and as much our conditions of life do not improve to the point that it will possible a right distribution of goods anywhere in the world and makes a normal life possible without hunger; an even-tempered world in where all can read, study and communicate; a world without wars, armies, manufacturers of arms, that is to say, as much we do not surpass these adverse circumstances, will be intrinsically injustices.
Nevertheless, to oppose to the abuse and to say "NO " to the injustice have been inherent characteristics to our nature from the dawn of the times. It has cost us very much -to us, the humans- to hold to us to the rules of coexisting. To legislate and to impose coexistence rules have been very onerous for the mankind, not only in lives but in resources, and whenever those norms are broken, via abuse of the power, it was necessary to reconstruct the state governed by law, trying to restore and to improve its effectiveness, arranging it through the dialogue and the consensus, that is to say, to impose our human nature hard in our relationship to avoid to fall in the survival of the fittest.
The laws and the regulations exists but, permanently, they are ignored by the power. The case of Humberto Nilo, brutally dismissed of its position of university professor to the School of Arts of the University of Chile, demonstrates it. For that reason our fight, the foundation of our group and the Mail Art call denouncing these facts aims to restore, not only Humberto Nilo in its position but, also, our consciences in the way of the overcoming of the mere animal nature for the sake of a " new man ".
From the end of seventies I did explore this moving land of arts called "experimentation" at that time and materialized beyond the bidimensional limits of the traditional artwork. Fateful days in wich, as well as the pro-government official censure, stated by a totalitarian government, (Pinochet’s régime in the country of my birth, Chile) we, frankly or secretly, encountered the rejection of some of ours own companions in fight. Because artworks or expressions out of the academic canon, or, at least, out of the recognition of the cultural establishment ?of any ideological position- ends up having a unavoidable seal of distrust and suspect.
Art actions, video-art, performances, body art, land art, mail art or "environments" -later called installations- almost constituted a crime in its exercise. There was many few people who thinks that all these expressions were the result of some historical motivations in a certain geographic context, rather than a mere formal evolution within the interior of the history of international art. More, the possibilities of artistical liberalization, arduously elaborate in those years, allow us, rigth now, to assume a practice of arts with a more free mind. In fact, a glance to the situation of the world-wide arts, confirms to us that much of which is being done today has a well founded-precedent in the "experimentations".of the sixties and seventies.
Of all of them, Mail Art, has survived to the attacks of the reaction of the system (social, economic, politic and cultural), wich has not doubted in using the strategies of assimilation and control to annul it. The ambition of freedom, intrinsic to all ruptural movements and avant gardes, together with the vindication of the utopia of "any man an artist" remains in this space of expression and communication that -I dare to foretell-could be more than a representative symbol of a fin de siècle aesthetics. And before the changes of the third millenium: Expand the fields of art... that’s the slogan!
The forecast that Hegel did about the death of the art due to his "excess of conscience" seems to be fulfilled in a form that parodies the forecasts of the Hegel himself with reference to the autodisolution and overcoming of the artistic activity in a stage of superior conscience. The appearance in this century -announced by figures as Jarry or Mallarmé - of the nihilist irony represented by Dadá supposes, perhaps, the active answer of the more conscious artists to the existential contradiction that the pretension of self-sufficiency faced with the lack of an order that validates the own selection of this self-sufficiency implies.
In this sense, the study of a whole current that crosses the history of the art of XX century and which we could denominate conceptual (without falling in the academic trap to exclusively identify this term like a "typical movement " of years 60-70, like usually they has come doing until now) and that, possibly, has its angular stone in the work of Duchamp and continues to the present time without interruption through Schwitters-Merz, the futurism, the Soviet Constructivism, the Letrism and the Situacionist International, Fluxus, Klein and the Nouveau Realism, Cornell, Cage, the minimal... A current that could be defined as an ontologic attempt of question the art and its necessity, as attempt of study on the relevance of this institution (" the name of "artist" is an insult, the denomination "art" demolishes equality between the men" declared John Heartfield and George Grosz already in 1919), to sum up, an attempt to break the barriers between art and life.
The rigor whereupon the Mail Art maintains the premises from which this strategy of confrontation remains (rupture with the traditional channels of the exhibition, socialization of the artistic practice, question of the authority of the critic...) as well as its assimilation of (and its relation with) "marginal" genres like copy-art, the artiststamp, the performance, the Web art... and the creation of some others wich have born and have even developed in their totality within Mail Art world, as in the case of the tourism (and is necessary to remember here the enormous success of the Incongruous Meetings 1998, when all the art critics are talking about the triviality of continuing to talk about Mail Art), contrasts dramatically with the ploy of the artistic institutions, wich continues doubting between if it’s better to officially certify the death of the "duchampian joke " - as they have not doubted in describe ? or to hold sacred the new "postconceptual " Rococó whose innovative credibility is inversely proportional to its mediatic splendor.
For that reason, an exhibition like this one, in which, once again, the mailartists assumes once more the appointment by John Cage in which he affirmed that the radicality of the art came more as a consequence of its disturbing capacity of the social, political, economic and psychological structures rather than its formal characteristics, acquires all its sense and its reason of being.
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