About Making "Fart Cards"

My summer was mail-art productive. I spent a lot of time making “larger” things that I sent out mostly friends. Some of them said some nice things and some of them said nothing, no worries, to make was the goal. The summer is now over for me that I’m back in school. Time is something that I have to steal. When I have little pockets of time I take out the materials and create something. This pattern will happen throughout the semester and more often on the weekends. It’s times like these that I wish I had a spot to go to, a place where everything was set up- a place where I could just find myself working without any or much effort. Soon this will become a reality, but until then I have to make do with the well-worn Ikea coffee table in the living room.

Mail-art sent to other mail-artists has completely slowed at this point. I only count mail-art as “official mail-art” (in the yearly count) when it’s sent out to people in the network. Rarely do my friends send me stuff, so I don’t count them in the tally. Maybe I should do this but I just don’t. All of the work I send to friends it the only work that is designed just for one person. Stuff sent to the network is done in one fell swoop without much thought about the recipient. Here is what is what I made this week, and now I’m going to send it out. Honestly, I’m not sure how to personalize the network mail-art when I don’t know the people all that well?

Right after getting back from NYC I decided to flood one person with mail, this person being Bruce. I know the man well, he just moved into a new place, so why not? My goal is to send out twenty pieces just to him. I enjoyed doing this so much with Andy earlier in the summer that I’m going even further with Bruce. I’ve sent out three or four things (one being a giant bag of magnets) to him, and have even more waiting in the wings. Most of them are cards with weird images on them and then a short phrase attached to the card. I really love doing this but I don’t want to send them to random people in the network because some of them are slightly off. Some even may call them “offensive” while others would laugh at the joke. Bruce will laugh at the joke.

A co-worker gave me an old book about yoga so of course I made a whole selection of fart-themed cards. I cut out the images and then attached short phrases about farts. Sure this was juvenile but it was also fun. People respond to the immediacy of the asinine a lot more than the stupefying collection of images and colors I normally send out. People pause with things like the “fart cards” while my larger collages get easily passed over. I like creating both. I like the differences in interpretation and attention they receive.

I made a mildly blasphemous card from a book a friend gave me. That card is already in the mail. I made a bunch out of a few medical books I bought for a dime just yesterday. The other card was of a child nine months in utero (I always think of Nirvana when I see this in print) that I sent to two friends that are having a baby later this month. The card is about how much the child wants out. All of these are juvenile and stupid and will elicit a chuckle form the people that receive them, and that’s exactly the point.