anna boschi-mail Art 50 2012 - Boek 861

The performance art in Mail Art
What interests me is the cultural value of having invested in mail poetry the same poetic inspiration that drives my work in
other artistic communications mediums, such as theatrical performances, video art , photography, visual poetry, etc.. The
distinction between these different modes is minimal, if we consider the primal value of expressing one's true self in an
interdisciplinary manner, in a process inversely correlated to the final outcome.
I mean that, the more esthetic values are marketed, the less chance there is to make a judgement or to derive esthetic pleasure,
and that this disparate logic is exactly and proportionately inverse to that of mass-produced culture. Mail Poetry is more what
you do than what you see. This is why, even historically, no one risks being alienated by international consumer good: even
in a performance sense, the main body of the work's creation has already been consumed, has already taken place, theatrically,
before it is mailed out: it has even avoided the exchange value. This is the reason why mail poetry existed before fluxus, dada
and futurism: like all human expression necessitating physical communication, it is a performance of life.
A supremely ironic commodity, because it no longer means anything. A "mystery nocturne", like being trendy in an exclusive
setting, in which nothing is distinct, the morning paper after dinner, lost and yet at rest , thus moving even more rapidly and
all sent by mail, or by fax, or by other means that could diminish the unusual thrust of mail poetry, even more meaningful
when divorced from its meaning and point of reference. Like a means of registering muscular poetry, like tactile desire in
which nothing is distinct ( the body's rhythm , the risk of the game ), as the composer writes the score, the imagined poetry
is born. The performance of mail poetry doesn't come to an end when the envelope is closed, the postcard written, the
package sealed . It continues in a situation-environment , though no longer controlled by the author-performer. The mailing
takes place and everything enters a different dimension.
It takes on the properties of shock , strangeness, surprise, liquidity, as well as self-destructing, speed of message and unreality;
the properties of a consumer society. In the first stage, the mail poetry constructed and composed using different materials
at different times, but constituting an organic unity of representation. The poet prepared, arranged a sacrifice, operated on
the poetic art . The word was not discorporated, had not yet been separated from the body. At first it used the medium in
the purest sense, refined and repugnant: the muscles and nerves of the body, in a characteristic ritual of initiation into the
subsequent phase, the surreal and imagined journey after mailing. The body and hand of the artist release the object of art
, the new triumphal fetish. (Vittore Baroni)
The artist must work and deconstruct his mastery of illusion by himself. He knows where the message should arrive, but not
in what manner, by what means or in how much time, and what it will be like in the receiver's hands. It could be resplendent
with the obscenity of true consumer goods. Its familiarity could be obliterated, becoming monstruously alien. But this oddness
is no longer that of the forgotten object , or of one put aside, that shines only for the loss or absence; it shines with the true
seduction of something from far away; it shines because it has gone beyond its form as a pure object, a pure event. Every
word or image conceals an abyss, living its song in the poetic body, that from sender becomes receiver. This totality of language
distances the Godlike ego of the artist and suspends it in Utopia, towards the objective irony of one's own disappearance.
In mail poetry, and after all, in any artistic medium, the content should not be separate from the esthetic, and I believe that
the conquest and vision of new worlds comes about through a journey which begins internally, through mental mirrors. The
scream , which belongs to the history of humanity, has transcendent the representation of life because of an excess of images.
The performability of these postal operations involves vicissitudes difficult to describe esthetically and hard to circumscribe
because, by definition, esthetic judgement is intended as the progressive emptying of the limits of everyday life, as the
disconnection of mutually closed space.
Nicola Frangione
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