Ephemera, 1-12 (1977-78)

Ephemera: a monthly journal of mail and ephemeral works was an artists’ magazine edited by Ulises Carrión, Aart van Barneveld and Salvador Flores, and published in 12 numbers by Other Books and So, Amsterdam, between 1977-78. Ephemera published contributions that the editors received daily through the international network of mail art. The magazine is a key example of the ‘assembling’ genre of mail art: compilation-style publications that emphasize the networked nature of mail art within their production process. As Guy Schraenen writes, Ephemera testifies to Carrión’s idea of mail art as a “cultural strategy” that rejects notions of subjectivity and authorship, “revealing an immense diversity in the aesthetics, conception, and geographical origins of the works”. (More)

Publisher Other Books and So, Amsterdam, 1977-78
via srrrh

PDFs

Ulises Carrión: Dear Reader. Don’t Read (2016) [EN, ES]

“A key figure in Mexican conceptual art, Ulises Carrión (1941–1989) was an artist, editor, curator, and theorist of the post-1960s international artistic avant-garde.

Texts by Guy Schraenen, Felipe Ehrenberg and João Fernandes, among others, illustrate aspects of his artistic and intellectual work. From his early career as a young, successful writer in Mexico to his numerous activities in Amsterdam where he cofounded the independent artists’ run space In-Out Center and founded the legendary bookshop-gallery Other Books and So (1975–79), the first of its kind dedicated to artists’ publications.”

Catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition at Reina Sofia, Madrid, March-October 2016.

Edited by Guy Schraenen
Publisher Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2016
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License
ISBN 9788480265393, 8480265396
267 pages

Exhibition
Publisher
WorldCat

English: PDF, PDF (19 MB), Issuu
Spanish: PDF, PDF (23 MB), Issuu

Chuck Welch (ed.): Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology (1995)

“This book is the first university press publication in academia to explore the historical roots, aesthetics and new directions in mail art. The essays of Eternal Network were written and assembled during the early 1990s by mail artist, writer, and curator, Chuck Welch. The edition contains forty illustrated chapters surveying an international community whose mailboxes and computers were a proto internet bridging the analog and digital world of art and communication. Eternal Network includes numerous photographs of mailed artifacts, performance events, congresses, stampsheets, posters, collages, artists’ books, visual poetry, computer art, mail art projects, zines, copy art and rubber-stamped images.

The book is divided into six parts: Networking Origins, Open Aesthetics, New Directions, Interconnection of Worlds, Communication Issues and Ethereal Realms. Appendixes include mailing addresses from the 1990s, mail art exhibitions, a listing and location of over 350 underground mail art magazines and a comprehensive record of public and private international mail art archives. The late Judith Hoffberg, founder of Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS) and editor of Umbrella Magazine, wrote an astute and prophetic review of Eternal Network in March 1995. “Some might think that this is the last gasp of a paper-orientated group of artists, but it is more a testament to the future of alternative art and the role of artists as networker”.”

With a Foreword by Ken Friedman
Publisher University of Calgary Press, Calgary, 1995
ISBN 1895176271, 9781895176278
xxiii+304 pages
via Chuck Welch, (2)

WorldCat

PDF (147 MB)