UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation focuses on Eastern European mail art practices from 1971 to 1994. In particular, it explores how the intermedial mail art work in Eastern Europe can be studied as a Network performance, how the isolation of Eastern European mail artists catalyzed the formation of collaboration rituals and community-building through participatory projects, and how specific mail art practices corresponded to the cultural and political situations of artists in each country. The chapters focus on works that are grouped according to their practices: performative works that use language, collaborative works that apply Network participation as part of their concept, rubber stamps and artistamps that involve the body, and concrete poetry in assembling magazines. Considering mail art’s disinterest in the production of aesthetic objects, this dissertation explores mail art’s hybridity as object, documentation, and performance. It intervenes in current scholarship to study the temporal qualities of mail art, including eventual archivization: duration, process, collaboration, and activation through an audience. The Deleuzean lens of the deterritorialized rhizome helps in understanding the mail art network’s resistance to the Eastern Bloc’s purposeful geo-political isolation. Groups of nonofficial artists in the Network built self-sustaining publishing projects, including the assembling magazine Commonpress, which featured different editors for each issue and functioned in a way that reflects a decentralized model of distribution. This dissertation consists of a series of case studies of archival materials from collections in Santa Barbara, Plovdiv, and Berlin. These case studies will analyze mail art actions like Paweł Petasz’s intermedia booklets and conceptual crowd-sourced textile projects from Poland, Ewa Partum’s kiss-print stamped images, also from Poland, J.H. Kocman’s stamp activities from the former Czechoslovakia, Vesselin Sariev’s visual poetry assembling SVEP from Bulgaria, and Rea Nikonova and Serge Segay’s performances and magazines, from the Soviet Union, which allude to the historical Russian avant-garde. The mail art themes of somatic experience, unrealized travel, officialdom, and bureaucracy emerge in these studies where artists employ inventive communication strategies that prove that the Iron Curtain, to a great extent, was a permeable barrier and that connections to the rest of the world were established despite the presence of some surveillance and material condition challenges.