Miss Noma Seeks Monty Cantsin Concerning the E Fan Club

[De Villo Sloan]

Mail art by Miss Noma for Monty Cantsin sent to my PO Box in Auburn, New York, USA. Point of origin seems to be France.

 

May 29, 2018 - I am receiving enough mail for Monty Cantsin that I think it’s time to start documenting and trying to solve the mystery.

In this particular case, I received an Add & Pass sheet from none other than Miss Noma concerning the E Fan Club. Most networkers are aware that the great E – Ambassador of Utopia (Guivry, France) passed away. A number of projects have been launched recently to recognize E.

I am assuming that – even if misguided – this Add & Pass is a sincere – even if fumbling – effort to honor E. He really was a close mail art friend of mine whom I admired very much. That is not a joke or posturing, if someone took it that way. Or thought I was trying to gain some unearned credibility by seeming to grieve over E who was one of the greats. It’s easy for a living person to claim great ties to a dead person because the dead person seldom denies it. But I insist that E and I were friends even though we never met.

The “Welcome Dead Mail-Artists to ‘E’ ‘s Fan Club” seems a bit ghoulish, but this entire surge of mail involving Miss Noma and Monty Cantsin is strange.

 

 

Whoever set this in motion is clever. I’ll give them that. Monty Cantsin and Miss Noma are two of the better-known mail art shared (fake) identities in all history. Monty Cantsin (along with Karen Eliot and Luther Blissett a bit later) arose from Neoism in the seventies. (I am honored to be associated with Monty Cantsin in this mailing!)

Miss Noma is a more recent multiple user identity that had a big popularity surge a few years ago. I received mail for Miss Noma. That is because I think some artists suspected I initiated Miss Noma. I assure you that I don’t have now nor ever did have any connection to Miss Noma. To this day, I cannot identify any of the people who were involved in the Miss Noma “performance.”

The envelope is confusing enough that I don’t believe it offers any clues. This appears to have come from France.

 

 

And the reverse:

 

 

I’ll have more information about this Miss Noma/Monty Cantsin outbreak. In the meantime, if you received this Add & Pass, I did not create it. That does not mean there is anything wrong with it, but this is not my project. You can decide what to do.