Transgressive Matter: Mail Art and Embodiment in and out of Latin America
Mail art is a mode of artistic production that relies on the postal service for the circulation and exchange of artworks, a practice that began during the late 1960s and reached its height in Latin America in the 1970s and 80s. The material form of these works is diverse and includes visual poetry, drawings, prints, performance, video, photocopy art, photography, rubber stamp art and collage, to name only a few mediums artists employed in its production. While the range of aesthetic experimentation is extremely varied, mail art allowed artists in repressive societies, such as those living under military dictatorships in Latin America, to evade strict censorship measures and provided a platform for political protest. Existing outside of state-supported cultural production and therefore mostly outside of state surveillance, these works had more freedom to circulate internationally, creating their own networks of transnational and translocal exchange well before the widespread use of the Internet. The practice and artwork of mail art has been historically difficult to classify. Practitioners of mail art took advantage of newly available commercial printing technologies, like photocopy machines, to create abundant copies of works to send out to the network. The art form has been employed for its economic accessibility for practitioners, its flexibility and openness in terms of content, its portability and ability to cross long distances, and, most importantly, its ability to perform the act of communication and connect sender and recipient(s). Mail art’s status as ‘art’ proper has been under question since the movement’s inception, and today museums still struggle to understand its position in art history, and/or have difficulty shoehorning it into conventional cataloging systems. In Latin America, artists often appropriated everyday and accessible materials and reproduction techniques.
Latin American women artists used the postal system to transgress a varied set of restrictive systems, ranging from gender expectations to authoritative regimes and censorship. While the male artists in the international postal network are increasingly well-documented, the roles of women artists in this forum have not been as readily accessible and thus are often absent from existing accounts. Indeed, the mail art network has been described as a “boy’s club,” and accounts of sexism and exclusion abound. However, it was also a forum in which long-distance anonymity and playful pseudonyms allowed artists to circumvent gender roles and expectations through play and experimentation.
By focusing on an exchange between Argentine artist Edgardo Antonio Vigo and Mexican artist Magali Lara, this paper will focus on materiality in relation to corporeality in the mail art network, and explores translocal communication, the transculturation of ideas, and the ways in which artists used unconventional materiality to explore embodiment and communicate across distances.
Keywords: canonical narratives, circulation, Latin America, translocal production, corporeality
Dr. Zanna Gilbert is a senior research specialist at the Getty Research Institute. Her research focuses on transnational conceptual art, feminisms, concrete art and poetry, Xerox art, and the international mail art network, with a particular focus on Latin America. She holds a PhD from the School of Philosophy and Art History at the University of Essex, UK, in collaboration with Tate Research. She was previously Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, where she led research on Latin America and was founding co-editor of MoMA’s online publication post. She has curated a number of exhibitions, including Intimate Bureaucracies: Art & the Mail and Contested Games: Mexico 68’s Olympic Design Revolution (Arts Exchange, University of Essex 2011, 2012) Daniel Santiago: Brazil Is My Abyss (Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães and Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói, 2012, 2014); The Unmaker of Objects: Edgardo Antonio Vigo’s Marginal Media (MoMA, 2014); Home Archives: Paulo Bruscky and Robert Rehfeldt's Mail Exchange (Chert, Berlin, 2015). She contributed a section on artistic exchange for the exhibition Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980 (MoMA, 2015). She was co-curator of the PST: LA/LA exhibition Making Art Concrete: Works from Argentina in the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros at the J. Paul Getty Museum (2017). Gilbert’s texts have appeared in Art in America, Art Margins, Fillip, OEI, Arte y Parte, Caiana, Blanco Sobre Blanco, and Art in Print, as well as in numerous exhibition catalogs and books.
Mail art is a mode of artistic production that relies on the postal service for the circulation and exchange of artworks, a practice that reached its height in Latin America in the 1970s and 80s. Latin American women artists used the postal system to transgress a varied set of restrictive systems, ranging from gender expectations to authoritative regimes and censorship. This paper will focus on materiality in relation to corporeality, gender and transcultural dialogue in the work of Magali Lara and Virginia Errázuriz.