. . . The post card created by the artist himself and the altered commercial post card seem to have been the first vehicles of exploration of this essentially process-oriented art. The idea of mail art, meanwhile, gained major operational dimensions, and today it is a field that is continually expanding with transmission of messages utilizing the letter, the circular, the telegram, the bulletin, and other media that are adequate for postal circulation by virtue of format and weight. Specific publications, such as magazines that include these works and catalogues of creative mail art, serve as assemblings or momentary inventories, which incorporate themselves into the dynamic of the system. The same occurs in other sectors of conceptual expression, but in correspondence art the syntactic elements are less relevant than the continuous flow of semantic contribution that has shown itself to be of vast diversity. It can embrace practically everything, which gives it an anarchic characteristic. Mail art brings about a series of new inter-semiotic researches. Among the most assiduous identifying registers of mail art are to be found rubber stamps created by artists, although in these same signals the formal aspects of signification prevail. It is a communication that tends towards synthesis, and almost always irreverence and humor prevail, absorbing/embracing the tendencies of recent and current avant-gardes.

Mail art belongs to the class of systems that undo the strong barriers which have separated the levels of art from those of life. The motivations for this new expression are multiple and do not depend on any special circumstance. Artists in considerable numbers, breaking with the traditional concept of the "work," are removing themselves from the schemes of official and commercial exhibitions, having lost faith in the function of criticism and indifferent to the magazines of dominant art, or hostile to all the status quo that could seem indispensable to artists' careers. They have organized themselves in order to confront the entirely diverse situation, creating their own associations, their own exchanges, their own publications, and selecting locales for their exhibitions.

They have made themselves economically independent of the centralized mechanisms of art, to dedicate themselves to parallel activities. Then, communications through the mails become a significant element for the consolidation and expansion of this autonomous behavior. No one can doubt the great incentive that mail art represents above all for the new generations. It signifies a step to the front in the sense of a democratization of habits, of effective questioning of the bureaucratic exigencies, and will be able to be--if in turn it does not end by becoming bureaucratized--an always growing contribution to the formation of a new culture.

Although emerging two decades back, there has recently developed on the international level a system of distribution and circulation of artistic messages known as Postal Art or "Mail Art." Several hundreds--even thousands--of artists participate in this circuit, producers of graphic-visual arts, as well as other specialists in communication and research such as sociologists, anthropologists, linguists, journalists, professors, and students, or simply people who want to establish a direct communication.

It would be convenient, at the outset, to anticipate some considerations concerning mail art. In the first place, its potentiality to democratize production and circulation of the art works, which provides it, as we shall se, with determinations that this same adopted system of distribution and circulation imposes on its forms of production, as well as the aesthetic and ideological objectives that underlie the circuit.

With respect to such aesthetic-ideological suppositions, it is valid to situate mail art among the projects of rupture with the traditional artistic forms, expressly with those that box in art with qualities of "unique work, unrepealable, and genius." In reality within this project of rupture, mail art accompanies and recovers a substantial part of the intentions championed since the historical avant-gardes of this century, the intentions to "bring together art and life" and to the historical evolution.

Nevertheless, mail art in its turn distances itself from those avant-garde designs inasmuch as, as a system of human communication and interaction, it is fundamentally oriented to the problem of the circulation and distribution of artistic work, and less to the existence of the "work." Thus, it prolongs its intentions of rupture in an attempt to escape also from the traditional circuits of artistic "recognition"--museum, gallery, juries and critics, market, etc.--as from the great manipulative and standardizing apparatuses of the mass media.

In Parma, Italy, in June of 1982 the First International Manifesto of Mail Art was sent out. This document defines mail art as "an artistic circuit parallel to the official" and as "a multicultural cocktail" that makes use of collage, photocopies, stamps and rubber stamps, visual wrappings, hand- and typewriting, stickers, and many other means, and whose principal support is hundreds of archives from all over the world, closely connected among themselves, where these works are collected, accumulated, classified, and analyzed with the principal objective of spreading them further by means of exhibitions, magazines, and publications, events and mailings.

In this way, then, even though on a limited and selective scale, mail art is oriented to establishing localized circuits of communication -- of direct treatment and without intermediaries in the message--through which it is viable to recuperate an authentic communicative relation, that is, dialogue, dialogic communication: a proposal and a response. Peculiarly, in these last decade of the century, decades of informatics and telematics, mail art appeals to one of the most archaic systems of distribution of messages: the postal service.

What are the achievements of this particular "union of contraries"--avant-garde and archaic--in communication? We consider, at first sight, that it entails in effect an alternative artistic and communicative practice, if it is necessary to also evaluate its limitations.

Mail art must be considered as one of the most acute phenomena of the current international avant-garde. A growing number of adepts, especially youth, have freed themselves all over the world, not being able to deny that this activity awakens communication and new structures for artistic language. Included among the most suggestive aspects of the tendency are the de-objectification and anonymity that much contemporary art shows.

. . . The post card created by the artist himself and the altered commercial post card seem to have been the first vehicles of exploration of this essentially process-oriented art. The idea of mail art, meanwhile, gained major operational dimensions, and today it is a field that is continually expanding with transmission of messages utilizing the letter, the circular, the telegram, the bulletin, and other media that are adequate for postal circulation by virtue of format and weight. Specific publications, such as magazines that include these works and catalogues of creative mail art, serve as assemblings or momentary inventories, which incorporate themselves into the dynamic of the system. The same occurs in other sectors of conceptual expression, but in correspondence art the syntactic elements are less relevant than the continuous flow of semantic contribution that has shown itself to be of vast diversity. It can embrace practically everything, which gives it an anarchic characteristic. Mail art brings about a series of new inter-semiotic researches. Among the most assiduous identifying registers of mail art are to be found rubber stamps created by artists, although in these same signals the formal aspects of signification prevail. It is a communication that tends towards synthesis, and almost always irreverence and humor prevail, absorbing/embracing the tendencies of recent and current avant-gardes.

Mail art belongs to the class of systems that undo the strong barriers which have separated the levels of art from those of life. The motivations for this new expression are multiple and do not depend on any special circumstance. Artists in considerable numbers, breaking with the traditional concept of the "work," are removing themselves from the schemes of official and commercial exhibitions, having lost faith in the function of criticism and indifferent to the magazines of dominant art, or are hostile to all the status quo that could seem indispensable to artists' careers. They have organized themselves in order to confront the entirely diverse situation, creating their own associations, their own exchanges, their own publications, and selecting locales for their exhibitions.

They have made themselves economically independent of the centralized mechanisms of art, to dedicate themselves to parallel activities. Then, communications through the mails become a significant element for the consolidation and expansion of this autonomous behavior. No one can doubt the great incentive that mail art represents above all for the new generations. It signifies a step to the front in the sense of a democratization of habits, of effective questioning of the bureaucratic exigencies, and it will be able to be--if in turn it does not end by becoming bureaucratized--an always growing contribution to the formation of a new culture.

Another theoretician of mail art in the southern cone is Clemente Padin--visual poet, graphic designer, and propagator, as well as participant in mail art events. In this summary of key texts, one of his must be included, the following from the exhibition catalogue "Festival of Creative Post Cards" (Gallery 'U,' Montevideo, Uruguay, October 11-24, 1974):

Frequently art comes from the cultural entropy that officialized art generates and these superannuated artistic forms that sustain the order of systems by virtue of reaffirming already known things or "those already given in art," changing the function of the media of communication that are changing the information that they transmit, whether using the properties of the "channel" for the transmission of their own messages: this is the case of the post cards that have been converted from a commercial object. . .into a principal means of artistic broadcast thanks to the rapidity and amplitude of their communication to whatever point, to the facility of their fabrication, storage, and consumption, and above all to their expressive possibilities whether utilizing them as a simple support for verbal, iconic, communcation, etc., or as an artistic object in themselves, creating their own language.

In the annual exhibition "Experiences" sponsored by the Di Tella Institute (Buenos Aires, Argentina), especially in that of 1969, the visual artists Liliana Porter and Luis Camnitzer developed by means of the mail an experience that could perfectly frame the theories of mail art. By this medium of communication and in successive mailings (four in all for each one) they shared with those in the Institute directory envelopes containing a proposal based on a questionnaire. Later, the day of the inauguration, these questionnaires were addressed in the making of the works, directly based on the cards, facsimiles of which had been distributed.

We are not going into the intention of the artists. Perhaps they did it in response to the exigencies of the characteristics of the "Experiences" salon. Also we suspect the Director of the Institute, Jorge Romero Brest, may have participated, modified, added, or taken out ideas from the artists' original work, as we already knew for certain his modus operandi. For a better illustration, we transcribe the texts proposed by each artist's cards:

Liliana Porter

Content: Exhibition No. 1 - text: Shadow for two olives

Content: Exhibition No. 2 - text: Shadow for group ticket

Content: Exhibition No. 3 - text: Shadow for a glass

Content: Exhibition No. 4 - text: Shadow for a folded corner

Luis Camnitzer

Content: Exhibition No. 1 - To use a mirror and bow

Content: Exhibition No. 2 - To stop the song and aplastar as an exercise of power

Content: Exhibition No. 3 - To chrome, file, and cut medals

Content: Exhibition No. 4 - To whittle in the form of a gamada cross and use it as patria of concentration

Directed by Jorge Glusberg, the Center of Art and Communication of Buenos Aires (Argentina)--CAyC--distributed newspaper supplements through the mail. Today the high number of issues (about 750) testifies to a true history of contemporary experimental art (these contained as well theories, tendencies, and other very important information). Towards January, 1974, CAyC published the series Post Cards of the CAyC (unfortunately cut short). The six that were printed were related in general to conceptual art theories. On the reverse side each carried a text telling about the author and the work. The authors were members of the so called "Group of the Thirteen." Here we mention their names together with the sequence of the cards: Luis Pazos (1), Edgardo-Antonio Vigo (2), Victor Grippo and Jorge Gamarra (3), Jorge Gonzalez (4), Alberto Pellegrino (5), and Juan Carlos Romero (6).

Exhibitions

The first South American exhibition was put up in Montevideo, Uruguay. Clemente Padin organized it under the title "Creative Mail Art Festival," in the Gallery U, from May 11 to 24, 1974. As a branch of mail art the post card brought forth an extensive, almost exhaustive creativity where all possible variations were found within the limit of the term "post card." Viewing the show required a new kind of "reading," given that the cards hung from the ceiling, very simply fastened. The spectator, in addition to "touching" the work without any hindrance, if he wanted could boldly take away his "souvenir." We insist on the notion of "reading" the show, because we understand this to be one of the fundamental bases, along with others, of the "language" itself of this art. This kind of observation demands a distinct time, if graphic, visual poetry will be able to work on the spectator with its images in "different tempos." Also mail art requires this "different tempo," as well as a distinct intellectual background, in addition to an orientation toward the socio-political information of the day; the possession of these "data" will facilitate a better comprehension of mail art. Of course we include those artists who address themselves towards the asethetic level. . .

Brazil cannot be absent from the body of mail art pioneers, and it was in the city of Sao Paulo that Ismael Assump‡ao organized his "First Internationale of Mail Art" from September 7 to 15, 1975, in the Duke of Caixas College. It was an exhibition limited to selected practitioners on the international level in contact with the organizer. Without doubt in the catalogue list there appeared names important for the later development in those countries that make up the southern cone of the Americas. Assumpça;ao defines mail art thus: ". . . This art is not closed, nor a system; it is an open art, to be completed, subject to constant revision. . ." [It manifested] in his words all the enthusiasm and faith in its future development.

Horacio Zabala and Edgardo-Antonio Vigo are the co-organizers of the "Last International Exhibition of Mail Art," which took place December 5, 1975, in the New Art Gallery, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Its organization demanded the whole year of 1975. 24 countries with 199 participants were represented. All the communications media were utilized, giving the show important publicity. The results were meager, however, because the exhibition was put up in an "inadequate environment"--an art gallery. This eliminated surprise, as much for the artists as for the public. Included in the Argentinian section, by imposition of the Gallery director, Alvaro Castagnino, there appeared names that were possibly participating only once in their lives in an exhibition of this genre.

In December, 1975, in Recife, Pernambuco (Brazil) Paulo Bruscky and Leonhard Frank Duch organized the "First International Exhibition of Mail Art," which stayed up until January 15, 1976, free to the public. Because of those accidents which always affect distinct stages of art, the works in the show did not fit the traditional locales--museums, galleries, etc. Occasionally, we repeat, the presentation was made in a public place, where the lack of information about who usually participated produced the "aesthetic of suprise;" moreover, for the first time in South America an appropriate place was found for the new expression, that is to say, a new environment.

This environment will not be the definitive one, but its value is rooted in this opening. We cite the testimony of one of the show's organizers, Leonhard Frank Duch, who in a letter postmarked January 22, 1976 (Recife, Duch-Vigo correspondence), refers to the fact that ". . . the exhibition was based on the idea of bringing together all the material received from many friends in mail art, although they weren't abundant. We wanted to do the exhibition through the mail, but we did not receive permission. Then we put it up in a large room of the Barco de Lucena Hospital, a government hospital. There was an immense table with glass, and we put the works under glass. . ."

To conclude with this summary of exhibitions thus far mounted in South America, we mention that entitled "International Exhibition of Mail Art," organized by Paulo Bruscky and Daniel Santiago in Recife, Brazil. The date of the inauguration was set for August 27, 1976, and it was to run until September 11. Surprisingly, those excluded from the exhibition received a circular in which it was noted to the exhibitors and public in general that, ". . . The exhibition. . . was suspended for reasons against our will." These foreign motives were then revealed. Put simply, censorship had begun. Mail art sustained its first confrontation. Paulo Bruscky explained it by letter on March 2, 1977, sent to the author of the present work: ". . . it was prohibited and censored by the police, and even we (the organizers) were prisoners for three days. The exhibition was closed one hour after its opening. . ."

This same Bruscky in a letter of March 3, 1977, insisted on the theme, and claimed that the works seized by the police were returned a month later ripped, semi-destroyed--those by domestic as well as foreign artists--and many of them beyond restoration because they formed part of the collection initiated by the participation of the police. A sad destiny awaited this youthful expression, because unfortunately these examples increased. . .

Finally in summary we will locate the practitioners of mail art, identifying them by country. They are, from Argentina, Carlos Raúl Ginzburg, Juan Carlos Romero, Horacio Zabala, Graciela Gutiérrez Marx, Luis Iorcovich, Luis Catriel, Reni Levy, and sporadically some members of the group The Thirteen (CAyC); from Brazil, Unhandeijara Lisboa, Paulo Bruscky, Ismael Assumpça;ao, Gastao de Magalhaes, Luis M. Andrade, Samaral, Leonhard Frank Duch, Odair Magalhaes; from Chile, Guillermo Deisler, currently exiled in Germany; from Colombia, Jonier Marin; from Uruguay, Haroldo González, Jorge Caraballo, and Clemente Padin; and from Venezuela, Diego Barboza, Dámaso Ogaz, Luis García, Oscar Sjostrand, Villasmil and Luis Viyamiser.

Mail Art, Postal Art, Correspondence Art, Long-Distance Communication, or however your prefer to call it, is a difficult artistic phenomenon to define with exactitude, whether because these terms are employed with more than one meaning, or whether because within it there coexist multiple artistic forms. In any event, we can say that it is a movement in which hundreds of artists from all over the world participate, one of whose essential characteristics is that of dedicating much time and energy to communicating with itself, making use of the mail. In effect, mail artists distribute their works through the international postal services and not through art galleries or other similar institutions.

Mail art appears, then, utilizing the words of Guy Bleus, as "an international exchange of art, ideas, and friendship, a human instrument of communication." This communication consists, according to Ulises Carrión, of a series of actions, among which two can be separated as most important: the production of the work, upon which the artist exercises a total control, since he already has liberty to choose the materials and mode of using them, and sending of the work, action in which there is almost no control on the artist's part and in which he does not move freely because, in addition to being submitted to preestablished norms, he must pay a price that depends on the volume and weight of the work sent and, as Carrión says, "either we pay, or there was once upon a time a beautiful work of mail art."

Mail art is thus essentially an art of interpersonal communication, in which the exchange between artists is direct, without the presence of the merchant or gallery, thereby creating a new mode of the circulation of art and making it regain one of its principal functions: information/ communication.

Similarly, a precision is necessary: not all art sent through the mail is mail art. Obviously if the Museum of Paris sends a work of art through the mail to the Museum of Washington or of New York, it is not engaging in mail art. The Argentinian artists E. A. Vigo and Horacio Zabala are clear enough in this respect when they say, "when a sculpture is sent through the mail, the creator is limited to using a medium of transport determined by transferring an already created work. On the contrary, in the new artistic language that we are analyzing, the fact that the work must travel a determined distance forms part of its own structure; it is the work itself. The work was created to be sent through the mail, and this fact conditions its creation (dimensions, postage, weight, nature of the message, etc.)."

Now then, what are the criteria to judge whether something is or is not mail art? Undoubtedly, strict norms don't exist. As Julio Plaza well observes, "Mail art is a complex space-time structure that absorbs and transports whatever type of information or object" (post cards, notices, catalogues, magazines, books, records, cassettes, slides, photocopies, rubber stamps, films, photographs, envelopes, diverse objects, etc.), media in which, as C. Padin indicates,

it is possible to trace all the artistic currents of the time: from those that use the visual-verbal expression itself of concretism and visual poetry to those that register events made of a language of actions; from the neo-Dadaist explosions of Fluxus art to the more rational of constructivism and computer art; from those that utilize the vehicle--the post card--as work in itself to those more orthodox realizations of conceptualism; from those that preoccupy themselves with awakening processes of agreement with the repertory of the spectator to those that testify to the access of the human body to a category as activating source of aesthetic processes (body art); from those that solicit the participation of the spectator through proposals and projects to those that recover those aspects of daily life overlooked by habit and alienation; from those that are mere register of the artistic activity of the avant-garde to those that pirate commercial post cards, altering the original information; from those that broadcast attitudes of pop art, minimal art, arte povera, junk art, etc., to those that use all the tendencies, applying formal innovation, seeking to r re signs and tex‰ in n urses not given in art"), "generating confusion about what is and what is not mail art."

Out of all this there has emerged the complexity of the communicative phenomenon in mail art and the difficulty of being able to define it with exactitude. In this connection Guy Bleus tells us, "the lack of an exact definition of mail art reinforces its ambiguous situation: both its strength and its weakness; its strength, because the enormous liberty is only limited by the 'mail' medium (in the broadest sense of the work), its weakness, owing to the impossibility of identifying a work as mail art."

Why has mail art come about?

There are various reasons why this artistic practice has come about.

In the first place, we discern discontent with the traditional schemes of the official artistic-cultural system. Within bourgeois society, art appears linked to determined institutions, such as the market, criticism, galleries, art schools, etc. This institutionalized system of art reproduces the dominant political, economic, and cultural system. In addition to reflecting situations of power, art transmits them. This we see, for example, in the myth that places the artist outside of society and in which he causes the artistic product to appear as the work of a genius.

The market, the galleries, criticism, art schools are institutions that are at the service of official ideology. Therefore, they control cultural production and try to recuperate it for the system. They try to eliminate its true sense and to make it appear in agreement with the class society. This is done in diverse ways. Either they specialize and discipline the artist for formalism, compromising his production with social reality; or on revealing the artistic avant-gardes that always have a contestatory significance of rejection of the established order, they neutralize them, ripping them out of their real context; or they conveniently forget that the art object is ambiguous and cause a conventional reading to circulate, which suits the system, castrating the social meanings and true intentions of the artist. The ruling class, then, centralizes cultural production in the mentioned institutions, to which only an elite has access, and in exchange it manages artistic concepts that transform the work of art into merchandise that can be sold and imposes on the spectator an emotional observation of the work, in opposition to a critical reading.

The contemporary artist, conscious that art is a medium of producing knowledge and that this medium, centralized in the cultural institutions, is the property of the bourgeois class, reacts and attempts to know better the mechanisms of the dominant cultural circuit in order to question and to deconstruct them. As A. L. Andrade indicated, the artist vies "not only to produce, but also to manipulate tactics to cause his production to circulate." To this end, mail artists use the mail as a medium to spread their works; they create thus a new mode of the circulation of art; they do not use galleries and the like.

In the second place, mail art is possible, in large part, because of the profusion of media of communication in our time, which place diverse systems of reproduction in the artist's reach, such as photocopiers, cassettes, videos, etc. Mail art appears, then, as a logical consequence of a long process that began with the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution effectively caused the mechanization of man and culture. This process was notably described by Carlyle, who wrote that "the machine has no end"; that "the machine manipulates not only what is external and physical but also what is internal and spiritual"; that "nothing is any longer made with the old natural methods"; that "culture has been mechanized: books are not only impressions, but also they are written by machines"; and that "all this caused a powerful change in our way of thinking and feeling, in our existence."

In this process is produced the multiplication of languages and techniques of reproduction. Thus it is that lithography appeared in 1796; around 1810 steam-driven presses began to work, which made possible the production of books and periodicals in until then unimaginable numbers; in 1829 the first photograph was produced; in 1832 the Morse code was invented; in 1849, Braille; and in this epoch, the negative was also invented, which would make reproduction possible.

All these technological advances and new languages would exercise a great influence on art, causing important changes. The influence of typography and photography on literature, for example, we see in the work of Mallarmé: "Un coup de dés" (1898), in which it is noted at first sight that the characters are of different sizes and are grouped with the end of forming ideograms. In the field of music it is also possible to see the influence of technological advances. The invention of metals for valves sufficiently augmented the utility of [musical] instruments; the systems of Bohm keys applied to wind instruments greatly increased their efficiency, etc.

Now then, arriving at our epoch, we find a great variety of techniques of reproduction, such as photocopiers, amplifiers, and reducers of images, cassettes, videos, etc., that in another sense are easy of access and of reduced cost, which makes possible--as MacLuhan indicated-- instantaneous publication. Anyone can be a publisher. It was obvious that these media would influence contemporary artistic production.

The mail artist, with the world of information at his disposition, manipulates it through these media placed within his reach. In this way, he introduces multiplicity or diversity of media and languages into art, mixing them in a single work, with operative techniques that are no longer sequential but simultaneous. This predominance of a spirit of mixing media and languages is one of the essential traits of mail art.

Finally, another reason that contributed to the development of mail art we have in the fact that the artist sees as expanded the possibilities of spreading his works and of communicating with the international artistic community, and he sees his liberty as augmented. In effect, mail art exhibitions and publications are open to all those who want to participate, they permit the artist to send the work that he wants to, without limitations of media and sizes, and no juries exist.

In summary: mail art has come to be, then, a parallel, alternative, and marginal art, by emerging outside the normal channels in which the work of art is produced and distributed; an art that shakes up the old schemes with reference to the unique work of art, with the signature of the author, owing to its consumption and diffusion permitted by these new media, that make it massive; and a democratic art, because anyone can make it and participate in the movement.

History

To determine the origins of mail art is complex. In general, it is thought that Marcel Duchamp, with his work "Appointment Sunday February 6 1916, the Philadelphia Museum of Art," done on post cards with a typewriter, is one of the pioneers. In any event, in spite of the fact that other, isolated experiences followed this--as also they preceded it--mail art emerged in the 1960s with the works of the Fluxus group of the United States, of the Frenchman Robert Filliou, of the North American Ray Johnson, of the Japanese Chieko Shiomi, etc.

The Fluxus group were the ones who first used the postal system as an element of creative communication: Arman, one of its members, sent a tin of sardines through the mail as invitation to his show "La Plwin," brought to completion in the Iris Clert Gallery in October, 1960. The following year, Robert Filliou sent his "Study to realize poems at a slow speed" from Paris, inviting the addressees to subscribe to receive, in the future, a series of poems which would make possible the realization of the type of works announced by him.

in 1963, Ray Johnson wrote a card on both sides of the envelope, breaking the private character of correspondence, which took on public status on being able to be read by third parties. This work is considered as a classic of the current. In 1965 Chieko Shiomi sent a proposal through the mail that had to be responded to and returned by the addressees with the end of composing, with these responses, a work titled "Space Poem No. 1." Thus we arrive at 1970, decade in which mail art took off, the first publications appearing dealing with the movement and numerous exhibitions taking place each year.

In Latin America, the first large exhibition of mail art was the "Festival of Creative Post Cards" put up in the Gallery U of Montevideo, October 11-24, 1974, organized by the Uruguayan artist Clemente Padin, who at that time directed and edited the avant-garde publication OVUM 10. This was followed, in 1975, by the "Last International Exhibition of Mail Art," organized by E. A. Vigo and H. Zabala; the "I International Exhibition of Mail Art," sponsored in Brazil by P. Bruscky and I. Filho; and the creation of "Other Books and So," a gallery dedicated to marginal and/or alternative artists' books, founded by the Mexican Ulises Carrión, where exhibitions, performances, etc. were put on. When this gallery was closed in 1978, Carrión--who now resides in Holland--created the "International System of Nomadic Mail Art," which transmits messages of whatever type for free.

Today numerous exhibitions are continuing to be mounted, and diverse publications exist dedicated to this medium, just as do also a large number of archives which show us--using the words of the Colombian C. Echeverry--that "Mail art is being slowly converted into a clear solution to the problem of art in countries like ours," among other things by "the economy of its production, the efficacy of its distribution, the facility to organize exchanges and to show without the scaffolding instituted by the commercial system that sustains the production of official art."

In any event, the practice of mail art in our Latin America is not easy; this type of art, to place itself at the service of the interests of our people, has been the object of the most absurd attacks and repressions such as was shown by the closing of the "II International Exhibition of Mail Art," mounted in Recife in 1976, and the imprisonment of its organizers, the artists Paulo Bruscky and Daniel Santiago; the jailing of the Uruguayan artists Clemente Padin and Jorge Caraballo; and the sequestering of the artist Jesús Romeo Galdamez Escobar in April of 1981, perpetrated by the dictatorial military force of El Salvador.

Since its definitive consolidation in the 1970s, the practice of mail art has consisted fundamentally of exchanges, publications, exhibitions, more or less innovative projects, converting itself into the usual for the international network, with the unique variation that the artists contribute in the creation of their works. However, in the 1980s, when mail art begins to lose some of its most characteristic traits (anti-commercialism, anti-museum) when already some of Ray Johnson's letters--one of the movement's founders--are in the hands of a collector, the XVI Biennial of Sao Paulo of 1981 included a section dedicated to mail art, and some artists and merchants have begun to commercialize shows, etc. That is to say, when mail art begins to be absorbed by the mechanisms of the system, in Latin America a series of actions begin to gestate that give a completely new twist to the world history of the movement and thus is initiated a new stage in the development of mail art.

These facts are: 1) the communication launched in January, 1982, by the Mexican artists A. Flores, B. Novala, C. Espinosa, M. Marín, M. Guerrero, C. Medina, and the Salvadoran J. R. Galdamez, in which is expressed the necessity of inscribing the mail art movement within the current problematic of Latin America. To these effects, they created, in a first instance, the "Solidarte" group, which has come offering help to all those cultural workers who have been the object of repression and attack in their own countries for ideological motives. Secondly, there was the realization of the "International Exhibition of Mail Art THE ARTIST IS AT THE SERVICE OF THE INTERESTS OF HIS PEOPLE," in the union site of the AEBU, in October-November, 1983, by the Uruguayans N. N. Argañaraz, Antonio Ladra, and Clemente Padin, whose theme was the "May Day," in homage to the Uruguayan working class who, after hard years of repression, ripped away from the military dictatorship the right to celebrate their day. This show, which counted on the support of the United Nations, was important not only for the quantity of artist participants (some 400 from 40 countries), but also because, at the time in which artistic practice was articulated with social practice, communicative spaces were gained for the Uruguayan people and thus was the fight for liberty advanced. Third was Clemente Padin's launching of the proposal to constitute an Association of Mail Artists, that would defend its rights and would contribute to the process of liberating Latin America, preceded theoretically by the article-manifesto "Mail Art: A Pretext for Unity." Fourth, in August-September, 1984, the "Latin American and Caribbean Assocation of Mail Artists" was formally constituted at the "First Conference of Contemporary Mail Art and International Exhibition of Mail Art," organized in the city of Rosario (Argentina).

After this, the Latin American Association has continued organizing itself, depending, as had been foreseen, on the work of the artists of each country. In this sense it is that we highlight the formation of the "Uruguayan Association of Mail Artists" (AUAC) as a first step towards this continental organization and the activity that developed during 1985.