What is Mail Art - Brief Hystory

"An eternal network that has involved hundreds of people since the late 1950s, with the inspirational artist Ray Johnson as its father figure, made up of envelopes, stamps, and any self-produced objects or bits of paper turned into creative works and sent by mail. People bound by their membership in an informal network that, through a web of connections, are included in the network from time to time, characterized by exchanges of addresses and one-to-one or one-to-many shipments. An artistic process that harmoniously blends the dimensions of the public and the private, taking shape in a network of small works sent to all those who enter the collective postal circuit, simultaneously giving rise to friendly two-way relationships experienced in the intimacy of one's own mailbox. Most of the time, a mail art process takes shape when the current networker proposes themed projects and sends out a sort of call for participation to the people involved in the network. Those who wish to can accept the invitation and send their mail art works to the provided address. The sending of projects creates a collective collection that remains with the network operator, while participants are rewarded by the networker with the sending of a small publication at the end of the project or other forms of independent publication of the works obtained. Certainly, the circuit in which mail art has had the most significant influence is Fluxus, whose members operated in close postal contact. The newsletter of Dick Higgins, through which the activities of the Something Else Press publishing house and those of George Maciunas, aimed at the creation of his Fluxus diagrams, were widely distributed, is famous. Ben Vautier, Robert Watts, Mieko Shiomi were also advocates of interesting experiments with stamps, stamps, and artist postcards."