Southern-Eastern Contact Zone

It is interesting to realize that, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, the zones of contact between Latin America and Eastern Europe, in what concerns the circulation of artistic information and the accomplishment of collaborative works by artists were far richer and more dynamic than today, despite the ease of communication systems provided by the World Wide Web.
This recent past reveals another synergy which moved open platforms of interchange and makes one think, by contrast, on the sense and direction of actual nets.
Some contact zones from the period that emerged interconnected by the postal net will be addressed here. They are the collective exhibitions and the collaborative publications.

[b]Collective Exhibitions[/b]
Some exhibitions in Brazil are relevant to this narrative, particularly those organized by Walter Zanini, during the 1960s and 1970s at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC-USP). As a vanguard scholar, Professor Zanini integrates a generation of Brazilian idealist intellectuals who intended to see his country in a close dialogue with the world, leaving behind the geographic and economic isolation. He was nominated director of the newly created Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo in 1963.
The exhibitions at that time were organized frequently through open calls, invitations distributed throughout the net. The mail was a great partner of MAC-USP, by enabling the participation of Brazilian artists in international exhibitions and allowing the Museum to receive and show works from all over the world. This strategy was particularly useful at that moment (the 60s and 70s), when Brazil, as well as several countries in Latin America were living under military.
By that time, Zanini was able to built a chain based on solidarity and trust and sought to create a territory for freedom at the Museum. By stimulating the experimentation he suspended the notions accepted and naturalized in a linear and excluding history of art, by interrogating the institutional places of creation and display.
As a public and university museum, distant from the market’s will, its program laid emphasis on the communication of contents and on the de-centered exchange of artistic information. The mail heralded not only a change in the circulation channels, but also in the profiles of institutions such as the museum, in its task of preserving, storing and exhibiting artworks. Mail art approached the museum to the archive and these collective exhibitions became an active public space of participation. Moreover, the international contacts, favored by exchange lists, boosted the internationalization of the collection, once the works sent from all over the world were not sent back to the artist, integrating the museum’s collection.
A catalogue or a minimal record of the exhibition, sometimes just a list of names and images should be sent back to every participant, filling the net’s motto: “no juries, no fees, no returns and catalogues to all participants”.
These exhibitions stood as a meeting point of an imaginary community that put together artists that never met personally but have projects in common. This sort of exhibition is an important moment for the public visibility of the net.
The artistic practices of Latin Americans, as well as Eastern-Europeans (artists from countries such as Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia) kept in MAC-USP’s collection reveal today the zones of contact of that time. It is possible to identify a common utopia launched in these points of connection, enabling, at least there, a society of free flows, despite the repressive situations experienced then.
Some strategies and tactics are similar. It is well known, for example, the use of the mail system to flow artistic information produced by easily accessible reproduction means. New techniques, at that moment, such as the photocopy machine, as a fast and cheap reproduction mean, aligned with the comprehensiveness and universality of mail art which multiplied itself outside the closed system of galleries and museums.
The use of the mail became an ideal device within this network, as it answered at least two urgent needs: first, it sidestepped the lack of economic resources of the Museum and increased its international collection. Of course that the demand for quality akin to the modern criteria is abolished from these exhibitions where the pluralism of propositions and nationalities involved was the finished expression of freedom.
The use of the mail as tactic for circulation and distribution sidestepped the censorship, making it possible for artists under dictatorships to make their works present, without the need to travel what was often forbidden.

[b]Mail Art and Exhibitions[/b]
Today, the ethics of mail art, which seeked to integrate each member in a larger group, ultimately transcending the individual, may sound weird to artists from younger generations.
The book ‘Grammar’ (1973), by Jaroslaw Kozlowski, for example, was sent by mail to Brazil for an exhibition in 1974 and it is an interesting example of the dynamics of this sort of exchange.
It is a testimony and living example of the SIEĆ/NET Manifest written and sent, in 1972, by Andrzej Kostołowski and Jarosław Kozłowski to hundreds of artists all over the world proposing a more ample and generous net of artistic exchanges beyond the limitations imposed by political or economical restrictions.
A few topics of the NET Manifest are clarified here: (...)
• Points of NET are anywhere
• All points of NET are in contact among themselves and exchange concepts, propositions, projects and other forms of articulation
(...)
In this manifest another cartography is announced, capable of drawing nearer artists in places distant in many ways, like Poland and Brazil, within a regime of artistic exchanges that found new territories by the proximity of purposes and a stakeholding in a kind of collective utopia.
These are artists that, in the words of Kozlowski, come together “on the fringes of the official scene, outside institutional circulation, in semi-shadow, there were other artists at work, artists who were not interested in careers, commercial success, popularity or recognition: artists who devoted more attention to the issue of their own artistic, and therefore ethical, stance than to their position in the rankings, whether the ranking in question was based on the highest listing on the market, or the highest level of approval from the authorities. These artists professed other values, and other goals led them onward, they were focused on art, conceived as the realm of cognitive freedom and creative discourse...” .1
This definition clarifies the meaning of the artistic practice and personal ethic of many of those artists, at least at that time. With such a project shared on the net, the artist is not defined by the kind of object that he creates, which we call ‘a work of art’, but principally by the nature of creative intervention that he is capable of performing in society. The net as a principle of open exchange is involved in cultural dynamics, closes distances, redefines and redistributes roles. In this measure, the solidarity for elective affinities becomes the principal operative beyond the privileged circles and social distinction allowed by the system of art.
In the book ‘Grammar’, the verb ‘to be’ is conjugated in all its variations. The declensions of the verb suggest a reflection on the meaning that one may give to words and to actions. The simplicity in the making of the crafted, quasi-precarious, book is revealing. Edited by the artist himself in Poznan, the quasi-Utopian character of the edition of ninety-nine printed copies is evident. The conjugation of the verb ‘to be’ is extended throughout the sixty-eight pages of the book as a result of the action of the artist to conjugate the verb ‘to be’ within a three-month period during the year of 1973.
The action expresses, to the limit, the performatic character of the language. It becomes a gesture that is expanded within the communication circuit of the mail art net and is completed upon the reading of its addresses.
Upon being sent by postal service to Brazil, the book strengthens the efficiency of other more open, extra-institutional, circulation channels for art, capable of welcoming, from beyond the economical or political imperatives, other declensions of significance.
In the same year that Kozlowski brought forth his enunciative catalogue of the verb ‘to be’, the Brazilian artist, Ângelo de Aquino circulated his ‘Declaration’ thru the mail art net. On a post card, signed by Aquino, reads in English “I am Jaroslaw Kozlowski” together with the stamped printing that belies this statement; ‘lie’.
Of course, if not in Polish nor Portuguese, the language of international exchange was English, which meant also a sort of false identity for the artists. A language that could turn possible some kind of communication, but not identification. The internationalism expressed here was not ideological but had an instrumental purpose.
Perhaps, inspired by his exhibition organized by Kozlowski in that same year at the Akumulatory 2 gallery in Poland, Ângelo de Aquino organized some exhibitions in the same period at a shopwindow in Rio de Janeiro.
The Akumulatory 2 gallery, created and run by Koslowski in his home, is the result of a process on the net, meaning, this possibility of an exchanging relationship among artists beyond the pre-established axes and the institutional structures. The precariousness of the means, allied with the urgency of communicating beyond the limited, excluding channels, at that point and time, related to the totalitarian political regimes, identifies many of the works that circulated within this net.
Beyond the canonical narratives of art, these exchanges denote the path of artistic relations between Brazil and Poland in those trying years and express the multiple and the most improbable manifestations of the verb ‘to be’ in the field of art.

In the 1970s, the release of information about atrocities committed by the military regimes, moved the mail network, causing a strong public pressure and even the review of lawsuits against artists persecuted by the dictatorships. The information on the exile to which the Chilean artist Guillermo Deisler was forced with Pinochet’s coup d’état, the torture and prison of the Uruguayans Jorge Caraballo and Clemente Padín, as well as the disappearance of Palomo Vigo, son of the Argentine artist Edgardo Antonio Vigo, to name just a few circulated in the mail art network.
Some German artists, for example, enabled publications of booklets made by Latin American artists as the Uruguayan Clemente Padín, which frequently denounced the situation experienced during the Uruguayan dictatorship (1973-84). Therefore, Instruments74 (1974), Omaggio a Beuys (1975) e Sign(o) Graphics (1976) were published in Olbenburg due to the contact with Klaus Groh through the IAC (International Artists Cooperation). Klaus Staeck, from Edition Staeck, in Heildelberg published the book Instruments II (1975). As such, various decentered communities of artists where created apart from the market and oblivious to the institutions' imperative, geographically apart, though united by communal survival tactics in oppressing environments. When his country reenters democracy, Clemente Padín, retrieved his passport which had been forfeit by the military junta. In 1984, invited by Dick Higgins, who was living there at the moment, Padín traveled to Berlin. At this opportunity, he met artists from the Eastern Germany such as Joseph Huber, Ruth and Robert Rehfeldt, to name just a few. On his return to Montevideo, Padín organized the exhibition “El Arte Correo en La Republica Democrática Alemana” (Mail Art in German Democratic Republic) in 1986, at the Uruguayan National Library, with works by 56 Eastern German artists. This relation between the artists from the Eastern Europe and Latin America is worth mentioning once it clarifies the context experienced in that period. The transversality South-East, establishes relations beyond the dominant political and ideological poles. Despite the different orientations in the totalitarian regimes (military dictatorships in Latin America and Communism in Eastern Europe) the mail art network functioned as a field to shared poetic/politic action. Similar utopias and communal ideals of freedom, rather than the affirmation of local identities, predicts in the mail art network an exchange system, beyond national boundaries somehow, anticipating a geopolitics of traffic and flow.

[b]Collaborative Publications[/b]
Beyond the exhibitions, the collective and collaborative publications, like assembly magazines, have also a central place in this sort of subterranean network. They functioned as opened and mobile platforms of exchange. In this sort of collective publication the emphasis moves from the magazine’s contents to the ritual of editing it and distributing them throughout the network, having assured the democratic access to reproduction means. Today, these publications compose the fragmentary reports of this subterranean history. Absolutely articulated by postal circuits, the assembling magazines present still today a snapshot of the network in a particular moment. That is to say they reveal its connections as well as some aspects of the work done by each one of its members.
In these handmade publications, the precariousness of the materials, such as an off-set leaflet or a post-card suggests the dynamism of the proposition, opposed to the auratic artistic value. The artists’ intervention at a magazine page or conventional newspaper, for example, was not enough within this logic. It was necessary to somehow intervene in the media itself, opening other channels to artistic circulation and distribution.

In the end, mail art and artists publications mingled at that moment and, of course, there were many hybrid projects that joint mail art with artist books. Upon assembling magazines, for instance, an artist-editor or a group of artists would organize the publication. The print run was determined by the number of participants who would send their works in the format and quantity previously arranged, in response to an invitational letter. Loose sheets in envelopes, plastic bags clipped or spirally bound together confers the character of precariousness to these publications. The Uruguayan artist Clemente Padín is an important bond to this network. He edited five experimental poetry magazines which reached diverse parts of the world through the mail service in those decades: Los Huevos del Plata (1965-1969), OVUM 10 (1969-1972) and OVUM (1973-1976).

In Argentina, Edgardo Antonio Vigo published the magazines Diagonal Cero (1962-68) and Hexagono (1971) which were important vehicles for the dissemination of the so called “New Latin American Poetry”. Guilhermo Deisler in Chile published Ediciones Mimbre, a periodical of graphic arts and visual poetry and later on exile, presenting the avant-garde of Latin American artists, published also UNI/vers (1987-95).
The exile of many artists also is one possible explanation for the need, during those years, to search for other possibilities to creation and circulation of works. The physical displacement combined with a proscription, a sort of marginalization, increased the desire for alternative paths for communication. Against this background, some artists have used art as a means of communication, carrying out projects as editors of artists' books, constituted archives generated by this network of exchanges and created alternative art galleries.

Ulises Carrión, a Mexican artist, who lived several years in Amsterdam is one among several other names. He was also librarian, poet, and editor, organizer of exhibitions and of his own catalogues. He published several books (novels, short stories, plays) before starting to work with the use of language outside the literature context. He also funded “Other Books and So” (1975), which hosted in the Netherlands an international network of exchange of ideas, a sort of headquarter of an international network of postal exchange. He commented on this mix of book shop/gallery/archive: “Why should an artist open a gallery? Why should he keep an archive? Because I believe art as a practice has been superseded by a more complex, more rigorous and richer practice: culture. We’ve reached a privileged, historical moment when keeping an archive can be an artwork.”2
The documental character of mail art also produced personal archives of artists fed by the fluctuating network from which came the dialectic among museum, library, home and archive; public domains in private spaces where a significant parcel of contemporary artistic memory resides.
Many of these works were not carried out for being exhibited in galleries and museums, but of being circulated hand-to-hand in networks alternative to the official system. Private space touches public space and the personal and political sphere mingle. It was not by chance that this type of tactile ensuing, collective manifestation escaped from the legitimating circuits; situation which is rapidly changing.
It is important to notice how the growing interest and the resulting rescue of many of these propositions have arisen in the last decades. It emerges, from the point of view of the contemporary art memories, as a sort of return of the repressed. The presence of such works at the museum represents the passage from the autonomous object to processes. They are, therefore, uproars against the hegemonic narrative and the traditional museological procedures of documentation, conservation and exhibition. Thus it is not enough to preserve the objects in its physical precariousness, but, overall, provide visibility to the processes underlying its circulation, beyond predictable routes.

The task of preserving these other works frequently carried out with precarious, short-lasting media involves the reconstruction of intricate symbolic mesh that engenders them and in which they are inserted and includes the historical, political, cultural and social context. Thus, preserving is reconstructing these meanings, attributing significance and, finally, providing intelligibility.
The current attention driven at alternative strategies and tactics of production and distribution in the 1960s and 70s, let us think about what feeds this interest today, when the concept of network is globally spread every single day by technocratic cultural premises, many tactics of artistic resistance are quickly assimilated as marketing operations and the potential critique of some artistic propositions is neutralized by the market and by cultural institutions converted into businesses guided by neoliberal policies.
This sort of mobilizing art of those decades, critique, strictly contrary to economic interests, which was moved away from the hegemonic poles of exchange, may bear witness nowadays of a utopia that throbs and might still throb, some place, in the subterranean.

CARRIÓN, Ulisses, “Bookworks Revisited”. In: Print Collector’s Newsletter, vol. 11, nº.1, March-April, 1980.

FREIRE, Cristina. Poéticas do Processo. Arte Conceitual no Museu. São Paulo: Iluminuras, 1999.

______. e LONGONI, Ana (Orgs.) Conceitualismos do Sul/Sur. São Paulo: Annablume; MAC-USP; AECID, 2009.

KOZLOWSKI, Jaroslaw. “Art between the red and the olden frames”. In: GILLICK, Liam and LINDT, Maria (Org.), Curating with light luggage. Frankfurt AM Main, Revolver Books, 2005.

KOZLOWSKI, Jaroslaw. Grammar (Gramatyka). Poland: Ed. Galerii Akumulatory, 1973, 99 copies, 23,5 x 16,6 cm.