Description
The chart is an interactive lineage map. Mail art sits at the center, on a timeline that runs from older movements at the top to newer ones at the bottom. The movements that influenced it appear above it, any parallel movements it developed alongside sit on its own row, and the movements it later influenced appear below. Every line is a real, cited connection between two movements: a solid line is an influence historians broadly agree on, and a dashed line is an indirect, parallel, or contested link.
For Mail art (1960s – Present), it traces two movements that shaped it, a mix of well-established and looser, indirect links: Conceptual art and Fluxus; it fans out to one movement it went on to influence, a well-established link: Neoism.
Mail art, also known as postal art and correspondence art, is an artistic movement centered on sending small-scale works through the postal service. It developed out of what eventually became Ray Johnson's New York Correspondance School and the Fluxus movements of the 1960s. It has since developed into a global, ongoing movement.
Media commonly used in mail art include postcards, paper, a collage of found or recycled images and objects, rubber stamps, artist-created stamps (called artistamps), and paint, but can also include music, sound art, poetry, or anything that can be put in an envelope and sent via post. Mail art is considered art once it is dispatched. Mail artists regularly call for thematic or topical mail art for use in (often unjuried) exhibition. Read more ↗