My Pre-Mail-Art, Mail-Art Phase

 

Me, the red truck, and Winston-Salem in the background. 

I’ve officially been making mail art since 2009, that’s 14 years. I’ve been consistent throughout that time. It was rough going those first few years since I hadn’t really found my voice. I did a lot of terrible things, awful creations, and while I still make terrible things, there’s some good in there. In the past ten years I’ve sent hundreds of things each year. Projects come and go, and I simply move from thing to thing.

How to Draw a Bunny is where I learned the phrase “mail art.” I didn’t see the movie when it came out in 2002, but I did a few years after that. I sent some stuff around 2005 (I’m taking a guess here) and then stopped, a pattern a lot of mail-artists seem to follow. And then, for no reason, I picked it back up in 2009.

But that’s only part of the story. Mail-artists often have a pre-mail-art, mail-art period. I had one of those. My mother-in-law brought some pictures for my wife. Most were of my wives’ friends in high school. One was a polaroid with me in it. Written in my handwriting was a note thanking my mother and law for a chair…it was the one I was sitting in. The picture was a thank you note. A nice and somewhat creepy thank you, but a thank you note, nonetheless. The other picture in the pile was a little more telling, it was my pre-mail-art, mail art.

The last picture was me leaning on my first car, a 1993 red Nissan pick-up truck. In the bottom right corner are the words “True Love Lasts.” The picture was taken by my friend Will Parham. The occasion was to commemorate the car right before I bought a new one. I drove that truck for over ten years, from high school, through graduate school, and into my first job. Will and I took a few pictures of me in the car, some of them posed, and some of them with me driving. It was one of those ideas probably thought up one drunken night after playing foosball, or maybe after a night of trivia.

The back of the picture shows the print date as 2008. This was after I knew the phrase mail-art but hadn’t officially immersed myself in the network. Clearly, I was making mail-art before I was using the term.

I printed the pictures off at a local drugstore and then mailed them to friends and family, no mail-artists.  They didn’t ask for them, but they got them. It was a mildly amusing photo shoot, one that was predicated on the viewer connecting me to the vehicle. This sort of thing wasn’t stand-alone. I’d make weird postcards for people that I knew appreciated them for years. Whenever the phrase was applied to what I had been doing for some time, I then became that. In no time the pool of potential viewers grew, although the joke of connecting me to a small pick-up truck might have been lost on them.