RECEIVED: Trash Talk from Richard Canard and the Limits of Cerealism (Carbondale, Illusion, USA)

[De Villo Sloan]

Mail-art by IUOMA member Richard Canard (Carbondale, Illusion, USA)

 

August 31, 2011 - Mail-art friends might remember I recently received material from Richard Canard, which I blogged here at the IUOMA, including the page of New York Correspondence School icons, the wonderful visual poem for Ray Johnson, and a piece of a cereal box.

http://iuoma-network.ning.com/profiles/blogs/received-ray-johnson-n...

Mr. Canard then sent me this delightful card filled with wordplay that also addresses my contention that mailing cereal boxes (or pieces of cereal boxes) is a mail-art tradition, which I thought deserved the title cerealism (as in surrealism). He is a wonderful correspondent (although the dialog remains one-sided as I still ponder in a kind of semi-paralysis what to send him). Here is the note he wrote on the reverse of the piece above:

 

I shall continue to research cereal boxes in mail-art. I believe my sources are reliable. Mr. Canard has carried on a wonderful correspondence with Batgirl (aka Elaine the Librarian (NY, USA), that I have followed with great enjoyment. In the fall of 2010, Batgirl sent me the most complicated cereal box mail-art I have ever received and ultimately could not decipher or assemble properly. 

 

http://iuoma-network.ning.com/profiles/blogs/received-batgirl-dumpster

With the growing popularity of Trashpo in the network (first introduced by visual poet Jim Leftwich (Virginia, USA) in 2005) I have grown accustomed to people from all parts of the world mailing me their trash in unaltered form. Mr. Canard's cereal box further confused me because many FluXus artists these days have reduced the movement's name, as a form of shorthand I assume, to a simple X. When I saw Mr. Canard had scrawled not one but two Xs on his cereal box, I wondered if this was an expression of some affiliation with the movement, although I had not placed him squarely in that territory.

 

With all these isms and the mixing of art and life, must mail-art now go in the direction of T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland"? In other words, should I have hoped Mr. Canard attached footnotes and a bibliography to his work? Certainly not, of course. I always look forward to receiving his missives and exceptional art and look for to an active correspondence in the future. Many thanks

[De Villo Sloan]

Right, I didn't even get into the WalMart thing. They should get an award for flooding the world with trash.

[DKeys]

Uncle Sam Walton-I love it--speaks volumes.