Eternal Networks
“Giving Peace a Form” was the headline of the flyer inviting artists to submit their mail art contributions in the run-up to the Art-of-Peace Biennale. The form in question was intended to be an affirmative one: “What are we for?” asked Fluxus artist Robert Filliou in the accompanying manifesto, not ‘’What are we against?”.
Many responded to the call, so that in the end 150 entries could be selected and exhibited in display cases, in folders on reading desks and on the walls of the Kunsthaus Hamburg: represented alongside Hamburg-based artists such as Barbara and Gabriele Schmidt-Heins were the Uruguayan mail-art pioneer Clemente Padin or Robert Rehfeldt and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt who had played a key role in the development of the mail-art scene in the GDR. Andrea Tippel sent the work 9 Postcards and from On Kawara came four telegrams from his series I am Still Alive.
Emerging in the 1960s, mail art describes art created in various media and sent by mail, with a central focus on dialogue and egalitarian exchange beyond established (art) systems: „The network is everlasting”, Robert Filliou and George Brecht wrote as early as 1967.1 In the spirit of the Fluxus movement, this pre-digital network idea was of a metaphoric nature, referring more to day-to-day experiences in the sense of a fluid, globally networked and collaborative community than to a concrete art practice. With mail art, in turn, this social concept also saw its practical artistic realization. The postal system — supplemented over time by other communication channels — provides the logistical and formal basis for an explicitly process-orientated, close-to-life artistic practice in which collaboration and exchange are of greater importance than the resulting works themselves.
Politics of Love engages in an inclusive, polyphonic togetherness — in place of power clashes and the drawing of boundaries — and explicitly seeks examples of alternative forms of networking and collaborative action. With its equally local and global participatory approach based on the ideals of multiperspectivity, discourse and collectivity, mail art combines various conceptual, aesthetic and practical aspects that are likewise pertinent to the context of the exhibition.
This is why, with an open call, Politics of Love is also picking up on this special action from the Art-of-Peace Biennale and thus bringing it into the present. Under the question “What is a politics of love?”, professional and amateur artists were invited to participate by designing a unique mail-art piece in postcard format. The submitted works can be viewed at the Kunsthaus during the exhibition period. You can also find selected examples documented here.