Susan Dorothea White Bibliography

The catalogue is being mailed to (most of) the participants. Just as (most of) the entry forms had been mailed by the Club of Young Artists and the addressed mailed their answers in drawing, graphic, photo or collage form of 10 x 15 cms at the least and 15 x 22 cms at the most. So the restrictions in a size easy to mail have become the only organizing principle of the exhibition (not to speak of deadline as an organizing principle).

Necessarily, the pile of expeditions coming together has proved to be no subject for a “jury” in a traditional sense. It is a unity not to be broken, as it is based on the principle of its elements equally taken for granted. That is involved in its being called mail art, i.e. mail art is something socially controlled by nothing else but the postal services. (The jury is the post office.)

Originally, when that kind of mail art was born in the 60s, postal services meant its only “gallery space” as well. Free flow of mail art works in an international mail traffic was regarded as substantial by many. Their l’art pour l’art mail, so often challenging postpeople’s patience, was just the arsenal for a communicative theatre being the very mail art itself. (It was called correspondence art i.e. an art of communication, too.) Then the name was extended to that arsenal itself. Just anything could be a mail art work, and anybody could be a mail artist simply by joining that theatre, and the name then could be used even after the named went no more to the mail box.

Thanks to the tools required for putting things on the mail /such as an envelope, wrapping paper, strings, cellotape, stamps etc.), collage and assemblage became the par excellence mail art forms, but even the faintest possibility for associating something with any form of the mailing services could make it qualified as mail art. Drawing limits for this category is as impossible as useless: something called mail art in one connection might stay as well what it is. Say graphic work created by a deep, personal necessity, independent from any mail occasion even if playing mail art role at the moment, or say occasional mail art, mail art as nothing else.

Differences, of course, are worth realizing.

— György Somogyi