Balaam

I am an active node in the Mail Art Network -- for the past 25 years at least -- and also a network node via the Internet since 1992. The world-wide post- or mail-art network is a rich forum for expression that, despite it's institutionalization in recent years (and now, what with the Death of the so-called Father of MailArt, Ray Johnson, this trend will probably accelerate), it remains a vital, anarchic, and complex entity. I stumbled onto this ethereal network of beings by accident, but basically as a direct outgrowth of my love of sending and receiving post (a tendency rooted in my familial background).

I can remember the enjoyment I got from sending out requests for information to almost every address listed in the original Whole Earth Catalog! This postal-fascination started with my father's and subsequently my own interest in stamp collecting. Seeing the microscopic evidences of an exotic culture showing up magically each day. The local postmaster, Mr. King, lived in a big house in the middle of huge fields of daffodils -- the remains of a nursery that also provided our lawn with these spurts of white and yellow flowers as the earliest manifestation of springtime. Trips to the post office, next to the small General Store, had the character of entering a known space that contained a portal to all other spaces, exotic and otherwise. And enfolding, a clear example of space-time folding and the nature of the universe.

With a postcard one can never be sure what is most important, the image or the text; the legend, the message, or the address. In this sense it has no distinct outside, and it is usually turned inside out in order to be pinned on the wall. But on the other hand, more than other texts, it has neatly proscribed borders, limits to what it can contain. Similar paradoxes occur with respect to a postcard's readability. Because it can be read by anyone, it adopts various devices and varying degrees of illegibility. It inevitably becomes the apology and the substitute, a sign of deferral, for the letter one never gets to write, being entrusted with the task of informing its addressee that one is still alive, conveyed in French by the vaguest of phrases which marks the limit of signification and the beginning of a destination: faire signe, to make a sign. -- David Wills (in “Post / Card / Match / Book / "Envois" / Derrida," SubStance, Vol. 13, No. 2, Issue 43. (1984), pp. 19-38)

I find the postcard to be one of the most spontaneous and direct ways of mediated communication with an image/text combination. During the past 20 years, I have sent out around 2000 different postcards. Postage was frequently my biggest monthly expense when I was based in Ice-Land (with the US Postal Service being the cheapest in the western world by far...)! I like using unusual stamps, reusing envelopes, and making strange packages, but I think most people know me for the photographic postcards which are printed from my own image archive. This archive serves as a source, a quelle, for objects, constellations, ideas relevant to the moment. Routinely, I make a box full of proof prints from recent photographic negatives -- usually only one print per negative -- on 5x7 inch fiber-based photographic paper. Fiber-based paper is best because it is heavy enough to withstand the rigors of international post and it takes pigments well. As the need arises to make contact, I will go through this box of images and select a special one that fits both the occasion and the person. I frequently use transparent colored art markers and india ink to modify the image and add a text on the image itself as well as the text on the reverse side. It is only in the last few years that I realize this form of directed expression is the most powerful in my material oeuvre. Occasionally I have the fantasy of collecting all the postcards I have sent and having a retrospective exhibition. It would be a fascinating overview of what has become a massive body of work. Although I have made photocopies or slides of some outgoing cards and several friends have faithfully kept archives, the vast majority of the cards have gone undocumented. Here is a selection of some relatively recent cards turned loose on the snailmail network...

Retroactive reflections. So few if any cards go out these days. One, for lack of material -- I have not done any of my 'master' printing since 1996. Two, for the substitution of remote communications by the Internet. The snail in snail-mail is going extinct. Someday I will set up the darkroom again, but but until then, it is digital attachments only.