Mail Art

For art historians looking for missing pages and documents, writings and personal correspondence of an artist are invaluable sources, pearls of great importance to reconstruct the profile of the suspect. The research is conducted as a police investigation through the papers aim to find an answer to their intuition, to discover new themes, unpublished links, secrets and proofs. Archives are the relics for archaeologists of sources. Contemporary artists learned to play with thosee proofs-writings-searches-words turning that match into an art form, the Mail Art [1] . Art is communication in its very nature: the message-content is the principle of creation. Mail art is both  message and medium.

Origins of this artistic operation, at least in its official form, can be traced around the fifties and sixties with the codification of Ray Johnson in 1962. The intent is making use of an artistic way outlined by Futurists, Dada and Surrealism [2] , but, also by William Mulready, in establishing the first stock of prepaid envelopes for the Penny Post's launch in Britain in 1840, and especially by the commercialization of photography.

The idea of ​​postal art finds its roots and its forms of expression in the contemporary vein of collecting: collage, found object's poetic, searching, hunting pictures, trivial's revaluation are the premises and the channels through which art takes the form of correspondence. Cropping and the fragment are the ancestors of the “attachments”.

The continuous exchange among the artists favored by the contact in cultural centers as museums, galleries, exhibitions, screenings becomes the culmination of “chance meetings” [3] among the protagonists that increase that message with their Art and personal experience. The densly correspondence between the twentieth-century artists becomes art, a work-a comparison based on the exchange of images-attachments, on the enrichment of the found object, on record, on personal filter by a feedback report.

Mail art is the proof of how contemporary it is structured according to a network of echoes that are rooted in the connection between the artists. The embryo of this artistic consciousness is the point of convergence between disparate personalities from the most distant art's lines: Joseph Cornell [4] .

Joseph Cornell's Post Box

The surrealist- not surrealist- “cacciatore di immagini” [5] is the Mail Art's Post Office: his art has to be red in a very special letter box, the Shadow Box, a box of convergences among found objects, clippings, fragments of the city's poetry.

Artist's creations are born by the association filtered by the inner harmonies that carries with it the internalization of the previous artistic experiences that are collected, selected, classified and carefully chosen, as the figurines of a child. Cornell's art is a dream's archive, a database of life itself sorted and coded according to emotion and memory [6] . The Shadow Box is Cornell's inbox, the collection of found-received images come from the exchange with the artists.

Joseph Cornell Papers of Smithsonian Institution Archives are not just the search space of art historians, but the tangible evidence of Cornell's method. Everything is organized into folders and dossiers: correspondence, diaries and notes account for his own personal code of rating.

The artist's passion for ephemeras, collected as images, is the beginning of his collecting: his Wunderkammer stems from the selection, from the choice of all images coming from newspapers, magazines, junk shops, flea markets and from the correspondence .

Basis for this artistic choice is the great interest of Cornell, around the twenties, for the Victorian cartes-de visite, nineteenth-century vernacular postcards that respond to the cult of Max Ernst: “Ernst’s collages, however, were not just inspirational in their own right. They also resonated with Cornell because his familiarity with the cult of vernacular images that he had grown up with and then encountered in mountains of discarded, out-of-fashion Victorian ephemera during the 1920s” [7] . Cornell's intrinsic collecting work come precisely from the commercialization of photography in daguerreotypes, tintypes and cartes-de-visite: “his eye for photography in the 1920’s, however, favoured the vernacular” [8] . These examples are forms of documentary and commercial photography: “thanks to technological advances in printing and photography after 1820, images abounded in inexpensive illustrated book and magazines, and mass-produced prints, trade cards, and sheets of die-cut ‘scraps’ to decorate scrapbooks and letters. All were intended for mass consumption as advertising or as educational and recreational accessories” [9] .

The taste for the rating is given by the New York raids of the “cacciatore di immagini” through the shelves of libraries and archives. In those years the work of Atget, the French photographer beloved by the Surrealists, is promoted by Berenice Abbott in the U.S. with the help of art dealer Julien Levy, a friend and an adviser for  Cornell. Atget has personal technique to classify his photographs that follows the order of the library catalog.

In the same years Cornell passionated about found photography on the model imported by Bresson in the U.S.A: “The antithesis of the clinical precision of  photography championed by Stieglitz, Cartier-Bresson’s gritty images of international urban scenes and people were ‘snap- shotty miracles’, according to Levy, the young French photographer’s new champion” [10] . It is not surprising that Cornell remained severely affected by that:“in the 1934 it also paralleled Levy’s concept and installation of ‘anti-graphic’ photography-examples from the medium’s journalistic, commercial, and scientific realms-that the dealer first presented simultaneously with Cartier Bresson’s work” [11] . Bresson offers Cornell a different approach to photography than the mainstream dictated by Stieglitz, “Cornell recognized a kinder curiosity about street life and humanity in the photographs, and chose a mix of black-and-white and color images of Italian street urchins” [12] .

The idea of ​​ephemeras collection related to shipping, exchange and communication finds hints in the writings belonging to one of the photographers loved by Cornell, Gaspar de Félix Tournachon, known as Nadar [13] . In his autobiography titled Quand j'étais photographe [14] , the photographer foretold the fate and guidelines of twentieth-century: “Nous sommes à une époque de curiosité esasperée qui fouille tout, hommes et choses; à default de la grande histoire que nous ne savons plus faire, nous ramassons les miettes de la petite avec un tel zèle que notre considération en est venue à ouvrir ses grands yeux devant un collectionneur de timbres- poste” [15] .  

The postal echoes of Cornell's art derive from his professional and family experience : the father, in fact, was a salesman [16] . Cornell did the same job [17] , a premise that has surely influenced the creation of the boxes as kit-set of objects: just think about Solar Sets, Soap Bubble Sets, L'Egypte de Mlle Cleo de Merode cours Elementaire d'histoire naturelle, 1940.

The visionary archivist created, by his art, the conditions of the Mail Art [18] : all his creations are the natural consequence of his method. Art is a product of the mind and, as such, it responds to a large machine that stores images. This paper aims to review Cornell's art as an efficient software for managing e-mail: Outlook [19] .

Outlook's King

Microsoft Outlook [20] is a program for managing e-mail structured as system to organize your correspondence as to the commitments through a series of specific tools such as the address book, diary, calendar and notes.  The program allows you to schedule appointments, meetings, meetings in conjunction with your “contacts”. In his own terminology, Outlook recalls looking out, look out, to emphasize the common and connective  aspect among the users in an electronic exchange, but also the outlook, the point of view, personalization.

Cornell is the best example for this concept: the poetry of his visual art come from experience, from research of image by his flâneurisme [21] in New York's streets, an act that allows him creating an interior psycho-geography looking for a chance meeting with an object, an artist, a madeleine. The real is collected and classified by the fragment, a piece of experience, ephemera of daily life that meets its look through the markets, the pages of books and magazines, film and post.

Cornell has a great passion for postcards and receives a large amount of it by friends and artists in a match that is the premise of his own art: the gift of a gift of a gift [22] . Postcards, newspaper clippings, fliers are exchanged  among Cornell and his “contacts” as the poetry of souvenirs: the object is converted to a crop of reality as a gift, a gift that the same Cornell recycles in compositions, classifying it in singular thematic dossiers as if they were folders to sort incoming mail, or “forward” these fragments to other artists. “Cornell mandava in regalo pezzetti di carta e strani oggetti alle ballerine di cui era innamorato” [23] .

The collected material is sorted by topics filtered by the personality of the artist in a huge file, “un laboratorio- diario- giornale di bordo- deposito, galleria d'arte, museo, santuario, osservatorio, chiave... il cuore di un labirinto, una camera di compensazione per sogni e visioni... la fanciullezza riconquistata” [24] .

With this action, the artist re-contextualizes the cutouts as if they were evocative ready-mades. Cornell's classificatory and meditative components differentiates his art from that one of his friend Duchamp because the image is not viewed as a single work, but as base for a profound reflection on the artistic piece that will reach another one by a specific emotional choice. The “inbox” is put into a sort of temporary storage, a POP3.

Cornell's Mail

The material of Cornell's tank has an infinite variety of objects-images coming from disparate eras and media. “Qualcun altro, non conoscendo il metodo e l'intento di Cornell, descriverebbe quanto racchiuso nei suoi schedari come il contenuto di un cestino dei rifiuti, concedendo, forse, che si tratta dei più strani rifiuti immaginabili, perché lì ci sono cose che potrebbero essere state scartate da un parigino del diciannovesimo secolo così come da un americano del ventesimo” [25] .  Cornell's images are taken by an hunt that owes much to the artistic practice of recycling: it is evident in the records, as in boxes and in the films made using the technique of found footage whose inventor is the artist.

It is a “rag artist”: “Tutto ciò che la grande città ha gettato via, tutto ciò che ha perso, tutto ciò che ha disprezzato, tutto ciò che ha schiacciato sotto i suoi piedi, egli lo cataloga e lo raccoglie.. Egli classifica le cose e sceglie con accortezza; egli accumula, come un avaro che custodisce un tesoro, i rifiuti che assumeranno la forma degli oggetti utili o gratificanti tra le fauci della dea industria” [26] .

Seeing that as the contents of an Outlook's basket of “Deleted Items” is not entirely true: the operation of Cornell's Art re-evaluates the object from the semantic point of view raising element in the fragment to bind to other minutiae according to their own inner harmonies.

Cornell's works are like the junk mail box: this is a folder that stores incoming materials, especially advertising. It's a group of daily email that you recive in storage and that the user selects as “spam” through a specific procedure that identifies messages as belonging to this category. Cornell's Art, likewise, is made  by items that the city rejected and abandoned: Cornell become “l'uomo sulla discarica” [27] choosing ephemeras according to a personal filter.

His inner choices, which classify those images, are the equivalent of “rules” [28] that you use for the management of junk post. These “filters” are created by the user allowing a selection of incoming messages:  rules are associated with actions that allow you to move, delete or otherwise manage email by specified operation chosen by the user.

The concept of spam approaches Cornell's work also in the terminology: the amount of material received and channeled as advertising is called spam. The term comes from the Monty Python sketch, a British comedy group active in the sixties and eighties, which ridicules the constant advertising of a meat-packing type. Cornell is the king of art inside the box.

Today his art would be able to circumvent the spam filter: the controller acts on the large posts, but Cornell's creations advantage of an “avantgarde” technique, the poetry of  miniature.

Outlook's features

The Microsoft software is not just about e-mail (Outlook Express), but also about a number of user's issues related to personal or business. The software allows you to “gestire un calendario per pianificare e  memorizzare appuntamenti, riunioni ed eventi” [29] .

The operation that allows you to put your commitments in the calendar is a customization: those “time boxes” are associated with personal events or something about the user. The planned activities are continuously updated by the user that assigns to each one a state of completion. The same happens in the daily lists of things done or to do.

In Cornell's archive there's the same “intervention” in his own hand with erasures, lines, symbols like check marks. Pages collect a large amount of annotations: they are the “sketches” [30] of the artist that creates his “notes” [31] as the ideas for his art. These writings are the customization of “attachments”, found or received by the “contacts”. The word enhances the found  image through a personal filter: it is the same thing that makes Duane Michals [32] adding their own “notes” to providing photographs impression given by the handwriting. The photograph, as well as the image, collects his evidence: “Photograph is my proof” [33] .

Outlook also provides a diary “to track” [34] activities. Joseph Cornell Papers contain groups of pages belonging to Cornell's diaries: the papers are records of the artist's events or commitments. Thanks to those words and sketches fragments, art historians were able to relate the artist's life and his works: in those pages the artist noted projects (realized or not),  ideas, Cornell's meetings that allow to the series of chance meetings, contacts, movements. All of his “steps” could be translated into a Cornell's map of New York, a psycho-geografic [35] customization of the map that you can link by msn [36] in one click.

The art of Cornell is always looking out because it gets outside the fragments of existence upgrading them as art: it is his personal “robbery” of urban images to keep as precious booty in the world of the box.

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