MAIL ART/NO MAIL ART

Mail Art Auctions & other crazy things

I have always thought Mail Art was a fantastic medium of creative communication, free from any mercantilism scheme for acquisition, sale, selection ... I have spent 30 years of my life in this apparent illusion. Today, some "network gurus" are pontificating on Mail Art, trying to trace new, delirious ways, participating in art biennials, selecting artists, asking money, promoting auction sales, citing the mayoral of the network ... all in the name of Mail Art! Luckily Mail Art transcends their raving statements. The problem is always the same: it's necessary to recognize real Mail Art from false. And to remember the old citation by Lon Spiegelmann: "Don't mix money and Mail Art" (better it would be: "Don't ever mix money and Mail Art" and "Mail Art uses institutions in the place of institutions against institutions". I'm inviting all to send by email or on paper to the organizers of eventual, future Mail Art auctions some sincere, genuine, unadulterated Mail Art Virus, which will contaminate and spread by its own networking creative imagination, real germs of salutary madness!

- Ruggero Maggi (with permission)




from Ruggero Maggi, Italy

http://www.camera312.it/
http://www.ruggeromaggi.it/

SHADOW PROJECT

Human beings are made up of a complex blend of several qualities; they are capable of noble transports and dark mean actions. They express themselves over a wide variability arc of actions, which are very different to each other, or rather antithetic, at the two ends. We can estimate the humanity level by looking at the oscillations between the two opposite poles of a hypothetical needle galvanometer, every cruelty, injustice, abuse of power, violence committed to others, and to the world, causes the needle shifting towards the negative extremity, showing the decline of values and the loss of existential sense. Such actions can be, as they have always been, of great historical impact (persecutions, wars, atomic energy used for destructive purpose), they can also attack one's everyday life and privacy dimension, and they can be very serious, even if not sensational. In any case, both in the little and great events, what is lost and difficult to restore, is the condition of harmony with oneself and the world, that one wins daily and that gives to all men the creative integration with the natural and social environment in which they live. In the final analysis, every negative event is a subtraction of humanity, it's a little or great, death act, that puts emptiness behind itself, producing a sort of shadow effect. The list of humanity subtractions is the alarming witness of present and past falls, whether demonstrated or foreseen, insidious or manifest, and can be meant as the synthetic and symbolic representation of man's history, or can be considered as a simple list, in its analytical, repetitive and discouraging systematic nature.

-Ruggero Maggi (with permission)