What Are Artistamps?

Mail Art (also known as "Correspondence Art"), is sent through government postal systems rather than displayed in museums or sold through conventional venues such as art galleries. Mail artists use a wide variety of formats and media, often considered marginal, such as photocopies, impressions made with rubber stamps, postcards, books, artistamps (e.g., postage stamps designed by artists), photography, letter press, found objects, collage, and other forms of ephemera. The Mail Art movement has aesthetic roots in Dada and its founders, especially Marcel Duchamp. Marcel Duchamp was an early proponent of Dada, a chaotic, outrageous, and intentionally irrational art movement reacting in part to the horrors of World War I. Duchamp also originated "ready-mades," art work created by artistic fiat (i.e., "this is art"). Dadaists confronted viewers with chaos and meaninglessness in order to shock them out of "bourgeois complacency." Dada was primarily an idea rather than a style and thus formed the groundwork for Conceptual Art as well as recurring attempts to integrate artistic creation with the quotidian "Artistamps" – postage stamps privately made by artists – are integral to the Mail Art movement and used on many Mail Art envelopes. Examples of postage stamps produced by artists predate the 1982 coinage of the term Artistamp by mail artist Michael Bidner.

The following stamp sheets sent to State of Being show phrases defining mail art and artistamps:

"Mail art is a global culture jamming, a community spirit in action, a shattered state of mind."

—Vittore Baroni

"(mail art) should not only transgress or elude postal rules and regulations, but make an 'alternative information system.' Each person ought to be an 'active participant in struggle' against national and international problems, which embarass us all."

—Edgardo-Antonio Vigo

"Networking art means to eliminate all kinds of hierarchies from the world of Modern Art. In contemporary art, individual creation has reached its limits. Therefore, we may produce new opportunities through networking."

—Shozo Shimamoto

"Art today has no value if it is not a game that we all play together."

—Vittore Baroni

"I always considered the single artworks circulated in the mail art network to be less important than the process of exchange and the benefits for all the participants that spring out of this process."

—Vittore Baroni