The Miraculous Rebirth of Trashpo Legend Mick Boyle (Conneaut Lake, Pennsylvania, USA)

 Mail art by Mick Boyle (Conneaut Lake, Pennsylvania, USA)

Mick Boyle was a veteran mail artist of repute even before Diane Keys, Trashpo & DKult swept him into the center of Eternal Network activity in recent years. 

An official "Legend of Trashpo," Mick Boyle has found himself in the position, along with other Trashpo peers, of further developing his art in the altered landscape of Trashpo Nuevo. Not satisfied like some of the Trashpoets with "cashing in" on the faux nostalgia currently associated with Trashpo, Mick Boyle is revisiting Fluxus & conducting thoughtful meditations upon the Trashpo genre, something he is ideally suited to do. GF viewers are likely to gain some new insights into Trashpo.

This wonderful mailing from Mick receives a warm welcome from Glam Faction. The work indicates our dear friend is producing exciting new art & we hope we can help share it in the days & weeks ahead. 

Mail art by Mick Boyle (Conneaut Lake, Pennsylvania, USA)

Mail art by Mick Boyle (Conneaut Lake, Pennsylvania, USA)

Mail art by Mick Boyle (Conneaut Lake, Pennsylvania, USA)

Tears of a clown by Sinclair Scripa

Mail art by Sinclair Scripa (aka Tara Verheide aka Tanya) (Ludlow, Vermont, USA)

What an exciting week it has been for glam fans everywhere & for your dedicated culture workers here at the glam factory! 

We've brought you blinding talent from rising Eternal Network stars as well as super nova spectaculars from longtime correspondence artists who have become part of our lives. 

Tonight we might well "break the bank" with this incredible package from the legendary Sinclair Scripa aka Tara Verheide & forever known to her MinXus-LynXus fans simply as "Tanya."  

Tanya's Glam Faction debut is extraordinarily inspirational with her exciting move into the clown art genre ("I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. Gacy!"), pandemic political satire (?) & Fluxus bucks. 

Perhaps all else is eclipsed by the unavoidable proof - at first unknown to us - that Tanya is one of mail art's greatest ranters. Excepting add & pass, rants just might be mail art's biggest contribution to culture. Tanya is mail art's greatest ranter (& now clown artist too). 

Our deepest thanks to Tanya! Welcome to the Glam Faction.

Mail art by Sinclair Scripa (Ludlow, Vermont, USA)

Mail art by Sinclair Scripa (Ludlow, Vermont, USA)

Mail art by Sinclair Scripa (Ludlow, Vermont, USA)

Mail art & the Minneapolis protests: Allison Anne's historic collage

Mail art by Allison Anne (Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA)

June 4, 2020 - "Historic" is a word often considered antithetical to mail art. But this collage I am so fortunate to have received from artist and designer Allison Anne in Minnesota USA already resides in the intersection where history and culture co-exist. 

She mailed the piece during the pandemic and, perhaps more relevant, when Minneapolis was shocked by tragic & horrific police brutality & racism. The protest movement that has expanded across the globe has touched all of us. The mail art community has responded to the isolation of the pandemic & the Minnesota tragedy in many ways.

Allison Anne has been a correspondence friend for several years & we share an interest in music. Her collage art is known and admired in the Eternal Network & beyond. I feel very fortunate indeed to have work by Allison Anne in my archives.

 

Mail art by Allison Anne (Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA)

Mail art is often viewed as "ephemeral." Correspondence artists, indeed, aspire to the temporal.  Yet in the case of this collage by Allison Anne, the sturdy cardboard & formal structure have endured (and promise to exist in perpetuity) beyond the physical structure of the Minneapolis post office where Allison Anne collected & dispersed her art. Seldom does the postcard (for instance) survive architecture.

Note Allison Anne mailed the piece on April 24, 2020. When I finally braved pandemic & social unrest to collect my own mail in a nearby town, I messaged Allison Anne to thank her for this Trashpoesque work that I adore. (John M. Bennett (Ohio, USA) has said this kind of corrugated cardboard is ideal material for an artist.)

In response, Allison Anne wrote via Messenger, "It's a bit of history I suppose because the post office where I mailed it, where my po box is located, was one of the two post offices burned down during the protest." Thus we have an unusual case of mail art that has survived beyond the physical space from which it was dispersed. Furthermore, I see the collage as a triumph of anti-art & thus revolutionary art that only Allison Anne could achieve with her unique perspective & style. 

Deepest thanks for this wonderful & memorable work!

Encore: Richard C does Fluxus

Mail art by Richard Canard (aka Richard C) (Carbondale, Illinois, USA)

 

 

Being in a Richard Canard groove ourselves, we noticed that at IUOMA-Ning several bloggers and/or Litter Richard enthusiasts recently posted mail art with classic Fluxus images they had been so lucky to receive from the Land of Carbon Illusion.

 

And then we spied in the mass of material in our opened Richard Canard File an envelope with a similar Fluxus logo (didn't George Maciunas create this one?) that we had neglected to document. So here it is along with the envelope's contents.

 

We do this because references to Fluxus are - to our knowledge - rare in the King Richard canon. Many mail artists - especially some of the veterans - like to celebrate and live in the spirit of Fluxus, which is, after all, intimately connected to mail art.

 

Let us present a theory about Richard's consistent, minimal references to Fluxus. Richard C is a "true believer" and longtime member of the New York Correspondance School and, thus, the Ray Johnson circle. These days in the growing exposition on mail art history you will often find the (badly mistaken) assumption that Ray Johnson was a member of Fluxus. He never was, although - according to accounts I have read - Maciunas warmly endorsed RayJo's efforts.

The venerable Mark Bloch told me - via digital communication - that Johnson was, in fact, somewhat skeptical of the Fluxers and was "too much of an independent thinker to join that group" (a reasonable reconstruction of Bloch's comment).

For whatever reason, Fluxus items by Richard Canard (Fluxus Illusion?) are rare and a curiosity.