Kunst, Poesie, Websites
Born in Puerto Montt, Chile, Canadian citizen, José Mansilla-Miranda studied Theology at Holy Family Seminary in Santiago, 1967/75. Diploma Engineering Design, R. R. C. C, Winnipeg, 1983. Diploma Program in Fine Arts, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, 1988. Diploma Graphic Design, Algonquin College, Ottawa, 1991.
Started on: 3-12-1994
RJ: Welcome to this mail-interview. First let me ask you the traditional question. When did you get involved in the mail-art network?
Reply on: 31-12-1994
CP: My first experiences in Mail Art date from 1967 when with my latin-american friends Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Guillermo Deisler and Dmaso Ogaz we started to exchange our reviews : Diagonal Cero, Ediciones Mimbre, La Pata de Palo & Los Huevos del Plata (Diagonal Zero, Osier Editions, Leg of Wood and The Eggs of the Silver) and our mail-art works. The Uruguayan review OVUM 10 published 6 post- cards with my visual poems in 1969. Later, in 1974, during the Uruguayan military dictatorship, I organized the First Latin-American Mail Art Exposition documented at the Gallery U, in Montevideo and I was editing the second epoch of OVUM, about which Géza Perneczky says: "The periodical and private publications that had midwifed in the birth of the network (File of Canada, the American Weekly Breeder and Mail Order Art, Poland's NET, Padin's OVUM, etc) displayed, to different degrees, motives that emphasizes the need for social contacts or were based on more commercial interests." (A Halo, 1991, p.232).
After the history continues…
December 16 of 1999 was inaugurated the exhibition MAIL ART TOWARD THE NEW MILLENNIUM in the premise of the Museum of Philately (MUFI) of Oaxaca, Mexico. The Museum of Philately is the first in its gender in Mexico and has been opened for the conservation of the philatelic collections and their diffusion to the public, apart from constitute on a point of encounter of all the lovers of the world of this art- science (like it has been called).
Biographical Background
My experiences in Mail Art date from1967 when Edgardo Antonio Vigo,Guillermo Deisler,Dámaso Ogaz and me exchanged our respective publications :Diagonal Cero (Diagonal Zero),Ediciones Mimbre (Osier Editions),La Pata de Palo (leg of Wood) and Los Huevos del Plata (The Eggs of Silver).From these publications we later assembled the testimony of our propositions.I officially began creating Mail Art in 1969 when the Uruguayan magazine OVUM 10 published my postcards and visual poems.
In 1974,during the Uruguayan military dictatorship,I organized the First Latinoamerican Mail Art Exposition at Galeria U,in Montevideo,Uruguay.My edition of apocryphal mail art stamps denounced the dictatorial regime for its brutal suppresion of human rights and this eventually led to my incarceration from August,1977 to November,1979.But ,in October,1983 I resumed my artistic activities with the "1st.of May" Exhibition at the Association of Banking Employees of Uruguay.Thereafter,I proposed and organized the Latin American and Caribbean Association of Mail Artists which was formed August 3l,1984,in Rosario,Argentina.Since then,I have participed in hundreds of Mail Art Shows throughout the world with combinations of my poetry,performances and video art.
Slowly,but surely internet asserts itself all over the world,being every day greater the number of connected people to the web of nets Latin America is not the exception,from Punta Arenas in Chile to Mexicali in Mexico, the entities electronically united in the infoway of superhighway are thousands and thousands,which through the cyberspecial waves reach the most far away corners of the world.
The Mail Art between the one which was and the one which will be. The iron law of the system in operation: first the symbolic activity of the towns creates the artistic movements in order to mark absences and imperfections in the social texture and, then, the system, once past the iconoclast rage of the first moments, return them to its service, by means of the institucionalization and transforming in mercha
by Clemente Padínndise that had been created in order to attack it, subjecting it to the laws of the market.
Meine ersten Erfahrungen mit mail art stammen ungefähr aus dem Jahr 1967, als Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Guillermo Deisler, Dámaso Ogaz und ich unsere jeweiligen Publikationen austauschten. Von diesen Publikationen ausgehend, montierten wir schließlich unsere künstlerischen Grundsätze. Offiziell begann ich mail art im Jahr 1969 zu machen , als das Magazin OVUM aus Uruguay meine Postkarten und visuellen Gedichte veröffentlichte.
Mail Art by emphatizing communication,i.e.,the character of use -not of change- of the artistic product and networking,by enhancing the co-operative forms of creation and diffusion opposed to the ideology generated by the individual forms of production and against the cultural dictac of the official system of the Fine Arts and their coryphaeus,the critics and curators are both situated outside the habituals codes used as legitimazing screens of well known social structures.
"Reading the commendations of nowadays to the Internet and investigating the individual websites, we remembered that the mailartists has been making the same activity 10, 20 and, sometimes, from 30 years ago. The decentralization of the art and the communication to distance from the art centers of the world, in charge of the artist-s-mail, they happened many before the World Wide Web".
Fagagaga, 15 of Nov.´99, personal letter
The things don't happen scatteredly, all are linked. The art in the Net of nowadays is not casual and it is originated, certainly, in Mail Art. Who have been the objectives of the art mail from its beginnings in the first experiences of Ray Johnson of half-filled of the 60s, but the communication and the interation? Ray sent unconcluded works to his friends so that they ended them. Born from that original project, nowadays the Mail Art, already at the end of century, preserve with great difficulty its force and its impulse in spite of the changes caused by the scientific and technological advances and the foregone absorption of the market. It is true that so much years of validity have weakened that
remotion of values and that today a growing institutionalization, absorption and banalitization are attended, on the part of the stablisment, of the principles that consecrated to the communication like only representative of our art, above the inconstant and whimsical artistic fashions, the more than the times imposed by the market of the art. The decentralization of the art is an implicit phenomenon in the art mail because a current of artistic specific expression centralized in an is not "ism" (like Surrealism or Abstraccionism, etc.) but of an artistic form that admits any half or support and any aesthetic well-known current and by knowing: "The Eternal Network" of Robert Filliou, the utopian project, perhaps unreachable, of the permanent communication of all through all the available means.
