Baroni, Vittore (Editor) - Arte Postale! #54: The Cornucopia Catalogue (1985)

Vittore Baroni (Editor). Arte Postale! #54: The Cornucopia Catalogue. Forte Dei Marmi, Italy: Near The Edge Editions, 1985. Staple-bound softcover. 28 pages including covers. Edition of 300. English. Very good. Light edge wear. Minor surface tear front cover. Arte Postale! #54: The Cornucopia Catalogue documents a mail art exhibition that took place at Artestudio. "In June 1985, a first showing of Cornucopia was held at Artestudio in Pontenossa, Italy, as part of the 9th Neoist festival organized by Emilio Morandi: I pain- ted with giant marker-pen a big horn on large sheets of paper attached to one wall of the gallery, then I glued photocopied reproductions of all the contributions over the horn opening, in place of the fruits. Afterwards, the whole tabloid was rolled and hung outside in the street, for all the town to see, and remained at Artestudio as documentation of the event. This was just one way of utilizing the material collected, a proper exhibition of all the original pieces, now neatly piled up in a cardboard box, will hopefully take place in summer or autumn 1986 at the Museum Fur Fotokopie in Mulheim an der Ruhr, West Germany - run by artist Klaus Urbons, who expressed his interest. If others want to book the Cornucopia box for a showing, contact me at the usual address for details (Vittore Baroni, Via Raffaelli 2,55042 Forte dei Marmi, Italy.)." One artists' stamp by Helgi Sky Fridjonsson is present in each catalog. Arte Postale! #54: The Cornucopia Catalogue stamp supplement present. PCD(?), Martin Kvist, Dr.Piotr Aakoun, Guy Bleus, Eddy Devolder, Jean Pierre Devresse, Charles Francois-R.A.T., HP2 & co., Paridada, Guy Stuckens, Thierry Tillier, Johan Van Geluwe, Rudi Wilderjans, Paulo Bruscky, Guillermo Deisler, Mark Dicey, Drew Duncan, Gerald Jupitter-Larsen, Poul Esting, Mogens Otto Nielsen, Steen Møller Rasmussen, Hans Jurgen Hess, Birger Jesch, Philippe Billé, Michel Champendal, Bruno Charpentier, Daniel Daligand, David Dufresne, Horus, Alexandre Iskra, Pascal Lenoir, Pierre Longuet, Yves Maraux, Jacques Massa, Robert Morillo, Didier Moulinier, Lucien Suel, Costis Drygiannakis, Vlasis Rassias, Luciana Arbizzani, Franco Ballabeni, Vittore Baroni (editor), Piermario Ciani, Gaetano Colonna, Antonio de Marchi Gherini, Salvatore de Rosa, Marcello Diotallevi, Bianca Laccarino, Lamberto Lambi Caravita, Carmine Lubrano, Ruggero Maggi, Emilio Morandi, Enrico Oliva, MP Fanna Roncoroni, Mariella Soldatini, Giovanni Strada, Angelo Vitale, Ryosuke Cohen, Misao Kusumoto, Mauricio Guerrero, Ko de Jonge, TAM-Ruud Janssen, Joseph Semah, Helgi Sky Fridjonsson, VEC-Rod Summers, Sonja Van der Burg, Pier Van Dijk, Rafael Flores, Peter R. Meyer, Lukas Spao Mson, H.R.Fricker, Gunther Ruch, Ben Allen, Keith Bates, Monty Cantsin, Robin Crozier, Pete Horobin, Mark Pawson, Barry E.Pilcher, Roger Radio, Clemente Padin, Darlene Altschul, Gerard Barbot, John M.Bennett, Carolyn Berry, Mr.Bop, Edgard A.Bushmiller, Chambers, Dazar-Omahaha, Lloyd Dunn, Susan Dworski, K.S. Ernst, Mr.Fabulous, Arturo G.Fallico, Mark Givens, S. Gustav Hagglund, John Held, jr., Leavenworth Jackson, Eleanor Kent, Richard Meade, Elvin Moore, Don Morgan, Teresinka Pereira, Stephen Perkins, Carlo Pittore, Private World, Radio Free Dada, Steve Random, Joel Smith, Carol Stetser, Florence Weisz, Yrizarry, Ioan Bonus Aas, Graf Haufen, Joki Mail Art, Siglinde Kallnbach, Ulrich Kattenstroth, Jurgen Olbrich, Klaus Peter, Furstenau, Markus Reichert, E. Seifried, Rolf Staeck, Klaus Urbons, Tom Winter. Sorry if anybody has been left out, catalogue assembled in November 1985, last contributions arrived in Sept-October." ARTE POSTALE! POSTAL ART! (1979-2009) A Mail Art Magazine by Vittore Baroni The idea of creating a magazine entirely dedicated to mail art came to me in 1979, two years after my first contact with the world of mail art, thanks to a chance encounter with the renowned collector and mail artist Guglielmo Achille Cavellini. I called my self-published periodical simply Postal Art!, with an exclamation point at the end to indicate the exuberance and warmth of the "Eternal Network" (as Fluxus artist Robert Filliou had christened the rapidly developing creative network), a friendly and open circle of authors committed to the free exchange of all kinds of ideas and works, transcending racial, ideological, and linguistic differences. A sort of "social network" that anticipated the Internet with the simple use of letters, postcards, and stamps. Over the course of three decades, I published Arte Postale! with highly irregular periodicity and circulation, often adopting different formats and configurations. In the first two years, I managed to maintain an almost monthly cadence, with a somewhat rough cut-and-paste layout, in the vein of the punk fanzines of the late 1970s. Gradually, the releases became less frequent and more complex in structure and packaging. The first fifty issues of Arte Postale! were produced in limited editions of 100 copies, adopting the "assemblage" strategy pioneered in New York by experimental poet Richard Kostelanetz in his seminal publication Assembling: each participant sent one hundred copies of a single page, postcard, artist's stamp, or other contribution. I then collected the materials together with the addition of a cover and some editorial pages. Many issues of the magazine had a dominant theme (music, badges, poetry, stickers, photographs, Neoism, etc.) or were dedicated to individual mail artists, living or dead (Ray Johnson, David Zack, Lon Spiegelman, Piermario Ciani), while other issues had a free theme but required contributions in specific formats (e.g., no. 24 was a special 3D issue, with small objects contained in a cardboard box; no. 49 was dedicated to miniature works, with the small works collected in an audio-cassette case). After no. 50, I stopped the assembly process and usually printed the entire periodical independently, by photocopy or offset, always adding various manual interventions, making each copy a sort of "collector's piece". The print run varied from the single copy of no. 53 (a special issue prepared by Mark Pawson as a tribute to my publication) to the 600 copies of no. 63, containing a 7” vinyl single by the group Le Forbici di Manitù with the anthem of the 1992 Decentralized Networker Congress. Over thirty years, around a thousand authors from sixty countries have participated in the magazine. Although regularly available to the public by subscription, Arte Postale! has mostly been exchanged free of charge for similar materials or publications by other mail artists, in keeping with the "free exchange" and anti-commercial spirit typical of mail art. The publication has also been sent to a select number of archives, museums, and libraries around the world: a complete collection is held in the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry (Miami, USA), as well as in the VEC Archive (Netherlands) managed by Ros Summers, and in the Guy Bleus Archive in Belgium. A variable number of copies are also included in many other important museums, public libraries, and private collections in Italy and abroad. In 2007, to celebrate my thirty years in the mail art circuit, I produced five issues of Arte Postale! connected to five different projects and group exhibitions, thus providing a new impetus to the magazine's circulation. Despite all its practical limitations and its persistent underground status, mail art remains a powerful affirmation of creative collectivism, a viable model of do-it-yourself cultural activism based on cooperation and solidarity. Not even the rapid spread of the Internet in the 1990s dissuaded thousands of practicing mail artists from continuing to use envelopes and stamps in favor of more immediate (and often cheaper) electronic communication. Email, along with cell phones and other new technologies, has become an invaluable aid to creative networking, but the rampant commercialism of many art-related websites has made veteran mail artists rather wary and wary of the digital medium. Many mail artists believe that online art projects still can't replace the surprise and pleasure of receiving unexpected gifts in your mailbox every day, with letters and packages to touch, open, and smell. So mail art survives into the third millennium, even though my magazine, probably the longest-running mail art publication ever, concluded its journey with issue no. 100 (December 2009, documenting the audio art festival Klang!), which appeared exactly three decades after the completion of the first three issues (October-November-December 1979), a trilogy also themed around music. Vittore Baroni biography — Vittore Baroni was born January 17, 1956 in Forte dei Marmi, Lucca, Italy. He is an Italian artist, critic of music and explorer of countercultures since the mid of the 1970s, who now lives and works in Viareggio. In 1977 he discovered Mail Art through Cavellini, became heavily addicted and participated in numerous international projects and shows. Since 1978 he has been organizing exhibitions, events, publications and collective projects based on the correspondence exchange and the networking cultures that anticipated the internet. He published the first issue of “ARTE POSTALE!” (now at #85) in 1979. Furthermore he published various books on radical music and art, amongst them the Mail Art Guide: “Arte Postale – Guida al Network della Corrispondenza Creative” (1997). He is active in the fields of visual poetry, sound art, street art, and comics as well. Since the mid-1970’s Baroni is also one of the most active promoters of the planetary circuit of mail art. He has written or edited various books on aspects of the “networking cultures” that anticipated Internet, including the mail art guide Arte Postale - Guida al network della corrispondenza creativa (AAA Edizioni, Bertiolo, 1997). He has organized many exhibitions, events, publications and collective projects in the fields of mail art, audio art, visual poetry, underground comics and street art. He self-published and distributed 100 issues of his Arte Postale! mail art magazine (1979-2009) and was the originator of seminal networking projects such as the TRAX modular system (1981-1987), the multiple names Lieutenant Murnau and Luther Blissett, the Stickerman and F.U.N. (Funtastic United Nations) projects, the Art Detox campaign (2010), the assembling magazine BAU Contenitore di Cultura Contemporanea (since 2004).