Chuck Welch

I named my Eternal Network Mail Art Archive in 1985 after the late Robert Filliou, the Fluxus conceptualist, performance artist, and philosopher. "Network" is in the title because it mirrors the metamorphosis of mail art towards collaborative networking during the 1980s. My 1985 text, NETWORKING CURRENTS, studies the relational aesthetics shared among mail artists who created collaborative projects before digital communication via the Internet. As I was assembling transcripts for my second networking book, ETERNAL NETWORK, a 1995 anthology published by the University of Calgary Press, I focused on chapter essays by mail artists whose artworks demonstrated a shift of identity awareness from "I" to "We."Years later, mail artists demonstrated how mail art and emailart offered an escape from the global pandemic lockdown. Mail artists revived letter writing and satisfied a longing for an authentic, engaging community.

"Mail Art in Cyberspace" by Chuck Welch explores how analog mail art merged with the digital world of telecommunication and the Internet between the 1980s and 1990s. While at Dartmouth College's Kiewit Computation Center, Welch initiated global emailart projects and collaborated in Bulletin Board Services, electronic mail art zines, webpages, and projects within the 1991-1992 Sao Paulo Biennial..

Mail Art Articles is a 46-page document with nearly 400 annotated listings from newspapers, magazines, and journals gathered between 1978-2000 by mail artist, publisher, and curator, Chuck Welch. The periodicals and news clippings appear in 147 files gathered from Welch's exchanges with Bern Porter, Ray Johnson, Dick Higgins, Jean Brown, Clemente Padin, Robert Rehfeldt, Anna Banana, Shozo Shimamoto, and other Fluxus, Neo-Dadaists, Neoists, and Mail Art networkers. Welch recently donated these files to Alternative Traditions in the Contemporary Arts Archive, University of Iowa Special Collections, Iowa City.

Brazilian and Latino American mail artists used rubberstamps in the 1960s and 70s as subversive acts of defiance against repressive militaristic regimes.The dire consequences included confiscation, censorship, torture, imprisonment, execution, or exile. Slogans, street graffiti and one's own body, shoes, and clothing became rubber-stamped prints, portable marks to express anguish through protest and confrontation.

This essay by Chuck Welch, has been published in the current exhibition catalogue, Keep Art Flat! Mail Art and the Political 1970s, Kunsthal Charlottenburg, Denmark, 15 September - 06 November 2016. Welch, a mail art networker, writer, and curator wrote the essay as a survey of mail art objectives and networking during the 1970s. The text has been illustrated with artworks by Niels Lomholt, Robert Rehfeldt, Bill Vazan, Istvan Kantor and Guglielmo Achille Cavellini. All works are found in the Niels Lomholt Mail Art Archive, Denmark. Text is in English.

Part II & III of Networking Currents by Chuck Welch includes an enormous international peace project, a concept quilt of artist made flags stitched together in a banner that was unfurled at Nagano, Japan by AU. Welch's project was also presented in 1985 at Tokyo Metropolitan Museum by the famed Gutai artist, Shozo Shimamoto. Part III includes radio transcripts form the New York City radio talk show. "Artists in the City. The interview features a broadcast form March 1985 that included Carlo Pittore, Buster Cleveland, John Evans, Mark Bloch, David Cole and J. P. Jacob; six NYC mail artists actively involved with international mail art activities. issues present here concern mail art shows, magazines, and historical events.

Networking Currents: Mail Art Subjects and Issues was published in 1986 as Chuck Welch's MFA graduate dissertation at Tufts University. Networking Currents is a book that was widely recognized in the 1980s and 1990s as the first critical survey of mail art to present pioneering studies of mail art networking aesthetics and issues. The book was printed in a limited edition of 500 copies and was acquired by The Tate Gallery, MOMA, NYC, Chicago Art Institute and fifty other Special Collections in Fine Arts Libraries around the world.

ETERNAL NETWORK: A MAIL ART ANTHOLOGY is the first university press publication in academia to explore the historical roots, aesthetics and new directions of contemporary mail art. The essays of ETERNAL NETWORK were written and assembled during the early 1990s by mail artist, writer, and curator, Chuck Welch. Published in 1995 by University of Calgary Press (Calgary, Alberta, Canada), the  edition contains forty illustrated chapters surveying an international community whose mailboxes and computers were a proto internet bridging  the analog and digital world of art and communication. ETERNAL NETWORK includes numerous photographs of mailed artifacts, performance events, congresses, stampsheets, posters, collages, artists’ books, visual poetry, computer art, mail art projects, zines, copy art and rubber-stamped images.

The book is divided into six parts: Networking Origins, Open Aesthetics, New Directions, Interconnection of Worlds, Communication Issues and Ethereal Realms. Appendixes include mailing addresses from the 1990s, mail art exhibitions, a listing and location of over 350 underground mail art magazines and a comprehensive record of public and private international mail art archives. The late Judith Hoffberg, founder of Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS) and editor of “Umbrella Magazine,” wrote an astute and prophetic review of ETERNAL NETWORK in March 1995. “Some might think that this is the last gasp of a paper-orientated group of artists, but it is more a testament to the future of alternative art and the role of artists as networker”.

ETERNAL NETWORK: A MAIL ART ANTHOLOGY is the first university press publication in academia to explore the historical roots, aesthetics and new directions of contemporary mail art. The essays of ETERNAL NETWORK were written and assembled during the early 1990s by mail artist, writer, and curator, Chuck Welch. Published in 1995 by University of Calgary Press (Calgary, Alberta, Canada), the  edition contains forty illustrated chapters surveying an international community whose mailboxes and computers were a proto internet bridging  the analog and digital world of art and communication. ETERNAL NETWORK includes numerous photographs of mailed artifacts, performance events, congresses, stampsheets, posters, collages, artists’ books, visual poetry, computer art, mail art projects, zines, copy art and rubber-stamped images.

The book is divided into six parts: Networking Origins, Open Aesthetics, New Directions, Interconnection of Worlds, Communication Issues and Ethereal Realms. Appendixes include mailing addresses from the 1990s, mail art exhibitions, a listing and location of over 350 underground mail art magazines and a comprehensive record of public and private international mail art archives. The late Judith Hoffberg, founder of Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS) and editor of “Umbrella Magazine,” wrote an astute and prophetic review of ETERNAL NETWORK in March 1995. “Some might think that this is the last gasp of a paper-orientated group of artists, but it is more a testament to the future of alternative art and the role of artists as networker”.

"Envelope Art by Seven" includes mail art envelopes selected from 5,000 annotated letters appearing in Chuck Welch's Eternal Network Mail Art Archive. Envelope Art is one among twenty other categories digitally mapped by Welch in his 1,600 page Mail Art Archival Index. Juri Gik, Moscow art critic and curator, commissioned Welch to research the topic of envelope art and this fourteen-page essay includes artwork that will be published July 2019 in Gik's first issue of Dadahomeya Review.

STRANGE LETTERS is a series of correspondence chapters selected from over 4,500 annotated mail art letters appearing in Chuck Welch's 1,600 page Eternal Network Mail Art Archival Index. Each chapter in STRANGE LETTERS is devoted to an important mail artist who exchanged ideas and artwork with Welch (a.k.a. Crackerjack Kid) between the years 1978-2000.