Go ahead and send them mail, they make great food.
There’s a consistent feeling of futility in mail art.
Often mail artists create projects that no one is interested in. That includes other mail artists. The more excited I am about a project, the less interest I receive. Proud of something you’ve made, want to share it with the world, collective shrugs all around. Mail artists send out four or five times the amount of mail than what we receive. (At least the super active ones). What’s sent back to you consists mostly of pictures cut out from ten year old magazines. Although mail artists relish the correspondents that imbue their work with personality and creativity, these are few and far between. I still send to the magazine cutters with regularity, though, it’s what I was taught to do.
While I never feel like I’m going to quit making things, I often have the feeling of quitting mail art. Not sure what that means, not sure who I turn in my resignation letter to, but I have that feeling at least once a year. I do nothing about it. Since 2009 I’ve never stopped creating and then sending more and more stuff. Each year I mail at least 300 things to mail artists, not including random mailings to weird addresses or to friends and family. In a given year I send at least 500-600 individual pieces that cost me hundreds of dollars, most of which are just pissed into the wind. Spending hundreds on stamps is still a lot more respectable than engaging in some midlife crisis activity. Golf...for example.
It’s the mail artist’s paradox. When you send things out you cannot expect much of a response. You cannot expect anyone to engage with the thing in any public way. If someone finds joy or excitement in your creation, you rarely know about it. This is fine 90% of the time for me. I know the game. I know how things work. I know what to expect but that 10% will always creep back in.
And then you walk into a Mexican restaurant in Mocksville North Carolina and that feeling of mail art futility is completely erased.
Let me back up. I teach at a community college. We have a main campus in Lexington North Carolina, where I spend most of my time, and then a campus at a smaller town called Mocksville North Carolina. The latter is most famous for being the final resting place for Daniel Boone’s parents, Squire and Sarah, and also the birthplace of my paternal grandfather, James. It’s a town of 6,000 people. In Mocksville, I like going to a couple thrift stores and this one Mexican restaurant. No idea how I found it, but I did and started going every time I was teaching in town. It was a surprise gem. During one semester, I went through most of their menu, thinking their verdes enchiladas were the best thing on the menu. I told anyone about the place that I could. I made my wife go. I made friends make a special trip. It was that good. One day, while sitting at in my office, I made a quick broadside. I printed off a ton of these and then mailed them over the course of a few months.
When I walked in the Taco Shop this week, they had taped one of the broadsides I made to the wall directly behind the cash register. Some delightful mail artist, a solid human, sent them that broadside through the mail. It could have come from anywhere. It might have been mailed from Kansas or Japan, I don’t know and I never will.
At first I didn’t notice that it was there, I was too focused on the electronic menu to the right. When I saw it I smiled. I tried to take a picture of it on the wall but I didn’t want to get caught. Getting caught would have taken away some of the fun. I can only imagine what they thought about it when they received it. The mail artist might not have put it any context to their mail. If it showed up without a note, without a reason for it being sent, the people at the shop might have shook their head in confusion. All of those questions, all of those thoughts immediately evaporated the futility I felt that exact moment in making and then sending piece after piece.
No comments:
Post a Comment