Why Mail Art? Read On And Find Out...

[Hilary Konrad]

Mail Art: Why?

Because reality is as real as it is top shelf. Connectivity blooms out of the most pitiful pit falls and the most meagre of entities the elemental fly by nights the fleshy true grits ever and all aglow moving tidally flush up against the skin of the just now and the never before it’s all this that and more.

Here lies before our imagining minds a grain, an indivisible cellular thing, a flowerless language, a body of matter composed of one or two words only those two in living color and interminably related and relative always standing alongside all the molecular matter. Language lives with mice men and art it balances time space and history atop its head always before and never after, straddling congruent parallel worlds within worlds within eggs within girls inside huge hulking burls torn from some renegade off course and wandering tilter whirl. A world for that flower is a reality, a day in and day out miracle, the grass growing taller all the while. An art, an article, the genuine article and that article a particle.

A part of something = being a member of a club, a cog in a wheel, a pendulum swinging, sand grains sifting and settling. A part of a thousand wholes, without which our universe would implode, disintegrate into nothingness, disappear in the blink of an eye, a vital organ which keeps things circuitous, flowing, synapses fire and vessels contain things. It’s a good thing to get your blood pumping and the endless night music thumping. It is an act of kindness and a gestural filling of the holes within the wholes as a whole; holism follows. To keep the system in check the minions must be cauterized. All of the tiniest most triangular or tragic and tired out littlest concealments of parts-they must be harnessed harvested invested in and out west or inland during outward bound or in the house, out of doors or standing in doorways waiting just waiting for a little rain. These parts sing together apart each a part of the other impartial to the stars shooting space detritus massive sparklers we to are parts we have parts and we are parts of any body its just gravity work is a process of procession and all things are bodies be they naked bodies works of naked truth the essential human body in two hundred parts, the body of evidence or astral bodies all of them bodies.

Work. Of what? Of art? Or, this: machinations enveloped in a cloaked embrace. Nuts, bolts, wires, all alongside genuine language, human thought, thinking systems, systems of all kinds, kinetic energy, all systems: going-going-going-gone. Resurrected, remembered, regathered, recollected, and then: gone. Coming back into fashion, falling out of fashion like some petty item, a trinket, a pebble eroded off some blue and lonesome cliffside, the pile-up, the melt-away: this is the art I seek, this is what engages and informs me. Work: a priceless artifact created with artistry skill know-how and talent. A thing of genuine beauty, works come in many different forms, but all share one thing: a work is unmistakably art. Even if it has little or nothing to d with painting or beauty or symmetry or color, but still: work is art. Research is a part of the experiment, reading is an arm or an eyelash, information access freedom, it is relevant and alive, the idea of art as a work of labor and labor as a proxy to work. This all aside, artlessness is also work and it goes without saying that a hard day’s work is better sipped at slowly than swallowed in one gulp.