In early June 2022 I put together a twenty minute video to present via Zoom to that month’s ZMAG [Zoom Mail Artists Group] meeting of mail artist colleagues. After the zoom meeting I made it public at my Vimeo and at my YouTube sites. YouTube might be a better format for smart phone viewing. (?)
https://vimeo.com/718054491 or https://youtu.be/2Adr6kp3Leg
As such, it doesn’t provide much context for those not familiar with what mailart is, or the history behind mailart. In addition, more back ground information and identifying information for many of the earlier mages presented in the video can be researched at the following websites for anyone curious enough to followup:
To find the FaceBook group managed by Joey Patrickt & Ruud Janssenn, search for “The Mail-Art Cow”.
The U-Do-IT Make A Cow documentation (a mailart call by Joey Patrickt) is at http://make-a-cow-1984.blogspot.com After I’d made The Mail Art Cow video, he told me “U-D0-IT” is a phrase he appropriated from his grandmother.
And finally, https://youtu.be/fMDfoXm8Uis is the video created by Jim Andrews with his narration of text from my poem “Buffoon Quartet”, which I refer to in one of the slides because “Ask A Cow” is one of the lines in the poem… Jim used filler material for the text taken from a group of visual poetry jpegs I sent him, using his Alpha Null 3.0 software which he designed as a graphic synthesizer/ He explains more about it in this video from a art exhibit he had in 2019 at Massey Books when he was up to version 3.1 of Aleph Null: https://youtu.be/aK-8K4w52Qs
Those NEW to mailart will find MANY websites/blogs online which document mailart calls/exhibits, because today it is expensive to produce full color catalogues that include everything submitted to these exhibits (also, mailing catalogues overseas has become more expensive). There’s always the option to apply for a grant or find institutional sponsorship in order to document m.a. exhibits in print as it was traditionally done. However, today it is more practical to document scanned mailart online, and those websites can be shared with more people than just the participants. So just do an online search for MAILART or “MAIL ART” to learn about the results of world-wide mailartist network projects as far as mailart exhibition calls are concerned.
ABOUT ARCHIVING MAILART: Some of the younger generation of mailartists scan their incoming mailart & then post it online (though I’m not one of those peeps), and who knows what happens to the physical pieces pieces of mailart down the line. Other mailartists find a “home” for their physical archives at institutions like libraries or museums (my archive has a home at The Ohio State University Library’s Dept. of Rare Books & Special ollections). Some mailartists recycle the mailart they receive by resending it to others in the network. One of the ‘tenents’ of mailart exhibitions is that every mailart item received should be exhibited, so it follows that for a m.a. archive, everything should be saved, rather then only saving works of well-known mailartists, or only saving ‘curated by receiver’ mailart. At least, that’s the way I approach my archive. Some of the mailart envelopes in my archive might be emptied, however, especially if all that was sent were “Add & Pass” (A&P) pages or booklets, which I add to then pass on to a fellow networker. Plus I’ve also pulled out artist stamp sheets, which are often pin-perforated & only printed in limited signed editions, and archive them in plastic sheet protectors in alphabetized notebooks. Some artists might make copies of A&Ps and stamp sheets to archive with the original mailart envelope, but I don’t go that far.
Below is an international postage stamp from The Netherlands that features a cow silhouette – I added “Ask A Cow” & made a small edition of ATCs with this image (Artists’ Trading Cards are 2.5″ x 3.5″ and often exchanged in the mail in addition to the original intent which was for in-person exchanges).