Intimate Bureaucracies Site 3: Jann Marson's Bedroom

The most recent incarnation of Intimate Bureaucracies: Art and the Mail has taken place in Fulbright Scholar Jann Marson's bedroom.

Intimate Bureaucracies - Opening Night

James Barnard putting the finishing touches to the installation.

Lovely flowers given to me by Art Exchange Director, Jess Kenny, become part of the exhibition.

Che Kevlin.

Milena Galli, designer, and Joanne Harwood, Director of UECLAA (University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art).

Sarah Demelo, UECLAA.

Priscilla Bushinelli, James Barnard and Sarah Demelo.

Jess Kenny, Zanna Gilbert.

David Horvitz, Some Cut Flowers.

Drawing envelopes on the paving slabs.

Milena Galli's poster for the exhibition.

Zanna Gilbert, Milena Galli, Jess Kenny.

A nice man Milena and I met on the way home, looking at his copy of the Intimate Bureaucracies catalogue.

Intimate Bureaucracies catalogue, designed by Milena Galli

'Intimate Bureaucracies' text by Craig Saper

The catalogue for Intimate Bureaucracies is more than a mere record of the exhibition; it contains one hidden work and other works that do not appear in the gallery. The catalogue was designed as a package or a gift-parcel for our visitors. Designed by Milena Galli, it subverts and plays with the postcard format and hopes to keep the works in flux. The cards can be extracted and sent as postcards, to your loved ones or future friends and they can be accessed in the Downloads section on this blog.

Milena Galli, who designed the very special catalogue, with her Animated Gift, the 'hidden work' she created especially for the catalogue. See more of Milena's design and artwork, 'influenced by street signs, medicine packaging and bureaucratic application forms', at http://www.milenagalli.com/

Also, see Milena's intervention in an abandoned flat in a modernist housing complex here: http://vimeo.com/5037812

Sponsored and printed by Palladian Press http://www.palladianpress.co.uk/

'Today more than ever love in its multiple forms is a space of living resistance'

Last week Miguel López, an art critic and cultural agitator from Peru, wrote about the ‘Kisses Against Homophobia’ demonstration in Lima for the publication Peru21. His analysis of events shows how protest using affectionate gestures has a deep symbolic resonance. The brutal police reaction to ‘Kisses Against Homophobia’ was widely reported precisely because the affectionate nature of the protest exposed the unmoving and unmoved face of the state. Many of the works in Intimate Bureaucracies have this kind of resistance at their heart – a personal, poetic and stubborn refusal to accept the terms and logic dictated to them by those who are, ostensibly, in control. I’ve translated Miguel’s article, but you can see the original in Spanish at: http://peru21.pe/impresa/noticia/cuerposy-afectos-politicos/2011-02-16/297195

See also:

http://www.passportmagazine.com/blog/archives/2341-Peruvian-Police-Violently-Break-Up-Valentines-Day-Kiss-In-Against-Homophobia.html

Political Bodies/Political Emotions by Miguel López

Last Saturday, a group of students and gay activists, various integrants of the Lima Homosexual Movement (Movimiento Homosexual de Lima/MHOL) took part in the action ‘Kisses against Homophobia’ on the Cathedral steps in front of the Plaza de Armas. An activity organised for the forth time in Lima, which aims to give visibility to non-normative sexualities, and to reassert emotions and the body as crucial political spaces.

Nevertheless, the courageous and poetic performance (that tried to demonstrate in public what is apparently ‘permitted’ in private) was savagely repressed by a group of police who beat the activists, to the point of abusively driving them out of the central square by hitting and shoving them, without any explanation whatsoever.

Such brutality deserves our maximum repudiation and we demand sanctions against the aggressors. That the police should aggressively violate such a pacifist action is a sign that insubordinate emotions and bodies are still vehicles that are too dangerous for a political order that hopes to dominate everything. And where our total liberty is also the most dangerous dynamite.

To go out armed with kisses is also to fight against the discrimination and the prejudice that they want to impose uselessly with blows and kicks. Today more than ever love in its multiple forms is a space of living resistance.

Installation

Posties on their bikes on the morning of the installation.

Opening Walead Beshty's FedEx tube - a glass tube cracked and broken by its journey. The tube is made to fit the specifications of the FedEx packaging.

Our reflections in Walead Beshty's FedEx tube.

Picture taken by Matt Bowman as we try to remove the glass tube from the FedEx packaging without anyone getting cut by fragments of glass broken during the journey to the gallery.

Cristiano Lenhardt's Abraço Coletor/Hug Collector, 2002.

'The moments that I come into contact with postboxes are the moments that I send letters to people that I love'.

Ray Johnson works, with Carlos Ginzburg's CAYC (Centre of Art and Communication) yellow information sheet underneath, showing a work by Ginzburg called Piedra/Rock - a photograph of a large rock with the word 'rock' written on it. Ray Johnson received this publicity by mail from Argentina and drew a little cartoon figure masturbating on the rock of Ginzburg's work. Now a collaborative work by Ginzburg and Johnson, it is very fitting - another of Ginzburg's works was called Semen on the Ground. He took a vat of semen from the local hospital, poured it on the ground and photographed it.

Ray Johnson on the top of the case containing work by Edgardo Antonio Vigo, waiting to be hung on the wall. The work on the right says: 'Mail art is not a square, a rectangle or a photo, or a book, or a slide. It is a river'. Plus a mystery work, bottom left.

Hanging the first panel of Eugenio Dittborn's 22nd History of the Human Face (Truque), 1998

Dittborn's work + the envelopes it was sent in and those that will return it. See my post 'Installation - Dittborn's envelopes' for more information.

Assembling a replica of Felipe Ehrenberg's Arriba y Adelante...Y si no, pos también/Upwards and Onwards, whether you like it or not, 1970. The work is made up of 200 postcards that were se from London to Mexico City for the Salon Independiente in 1970. 'Arriba y adelante' was modernisation programme slogan of President Luis Escheverria, associated with the 1968 Olympics and 1970 World Cup. Shortly before the Olympics, government forces massacred over 300 student protesters at Tlatelolco square and due to increasing repression of the student movement Ehrenberg left for England. By separating the elements of his work, Ehrenberg ensured that the critical tone and risque subject matter were not censored.

David Horvitz, Some Cut Flowers, 22 February 2011 4 bottles have arrived so far, all with flowers.

Reproduction

Some great news from Dr Matthew Bowman at the Colchester Institute today: the art students have decided to set up a parallel site for Send Me a Flower, etc at the Institute. In order to document their submissions they will photocopy their work and displaying it before sending it to us, multiplying the exhibition space.So I have to add an ‘Element’ to my previous post:

6) Colchester Institute art students off-site project for Send Me a Flower, etc.

I hope I can add to ‘Elements’ as time goes on. That is the beautiful thing about this show and mail art generally – it as an open source approach to everything: instead of an exhibition being closed, with a narrative only defined by its curator or organisation, the exhibition takes on a life of its own, the ideas spread and get reproduced in different ways.

MAIL ART CALL: Send Me a Flower, etc.

for the exhibition Intimate Bureaucracies: Art and the Mail

Friday, February 25 - March 26

Send your poetic, loving, tender gestures - mail art, photographs, poems - for our exhibition Intimate Bureaucracies: Art in the Mail. The exhibition is an investigation into the intimate artistic gesture within bureaucratic structures. You don't have to be a professional artist to participate, all submissions are welcome.

The exhibition will run for a month, and during this time the display of mail art works will be in constant flux. The exhibition begins on 25th February and ends on 26th March 2011. Please send your entry at the earliest possible date and pass on this call to your networks.

‘Bureaucracy, as a mode of governmental or corporate organization, depends on officials rather than elected representatives or charismatic leaders. It usually connotes a cold, faceless, and excessively complicated system of administration. It epitomizes the distance between a governing body’s procedures and the needs and desires of its citizens, subjects, or customers.

Intimacy, the close familiarity of friendship or love, by definition depends on a small-scale system of communication. Its warmth, face-to-face contact, and fleeting impact has it often the subject of art and literature.’
Craig Saper

The submissions will be exhibited as part of the exhibition Intimate Bureaucracies: Art in the Mail.
All works will be exhibited
No returns
Size: maximum 21 x 30 cms (A4)

David Horvitz + Milena Galli = Beauty

A shot of David Horvitz's test for Some Cut Flowers, alongside Milena Galli's typewriter/flower image for Send Me a Flower, etc. Beautiful! Also, pictures of Milena's feet on her business cards underneath.

Intimate Bureaucracies Art and the Mail

This is the blog for the exhibition Intimate Bureaucracies: Art and the Mail at Art Exchange, University of Essex. I’m the curator of the exhibition, which developed out of my PhD research on mail art, art circulation, networks, Fluxus, Latin America and net.art. I’m going to be posting information about mail art, the art and artists in the exhibition and any other bureaucratic goings-on that amuse me.

There are several different elements of the exhibition:

1) Artworks by ten artists whose work engages with the mail system and circulation in interesting ways, to be displayed at Art Exchange. These are: Felipe Ehrenberg, Carlos Ginzburg, Walead Beshty, Cristiano Lenhardt, Eugenio Dittborn, Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Cildo Meireles, León Ferrari, Ray Johnson

2) Send Me a Flower, etc: an open call for mail art works that anyone can participate in. I’ll be posting photos of the work submitted. See the call for works on this blog.

3) A catalogue that will be accessed here as a PDF or sent as a gift-parcel. Designed by artist Milena Galli, it is a little exhibition itself.

4) Some Cut Flowers by David Horvitz is a project done especially for the exhibition in which David sends a flower in a bottle each day. The bottles travel from Brooklyn, New York and will accumulate in the gallery but perhaps they will confiscated by customs officers - a gift for the bureaucrats.

5) Events!

Thursday 24th February 2011:

Carlos Ginzburg's Talk-Performance-Quotation, 1pm

Exhibition Opening, Art Exchange, 6pm

Tuesday 1st March 2011:

Curator's talk, Art Exchange 1pm

Wednesday 23rd March 2011:

Circulatory Strategies, Art Exchange 6-8pm

Guy Brett, Gabriela Salgado & Alex Sainsbury

Admission free, booking essential. Email: arts@essex.ac.uk

+ Closing Party drinks!

Artist Talk: David Horvitz, date & venue tbc