St Petersburg — By Ivan Stupachenko on January 31, 2010 at 11:59 am

Art By Mail

In my previous post I told about the exhibition dedicated to functionality in the guise of art or art per functionality, as you please.

There is another story of that sort, now it’s about Mail Art. Rather funny and a bit weird business I’d say, as you can see at a special exhibition which I write about below.

But now what it is. It’s about both collecting stamps, envelopes and creating your own stamps, envelopes and postcards and sending them to an addresse. Not just to create something, but to use it then according to its function. Or maybe not use.

But you send not just a post-related thing such as a stamp made by your own design, you send something more, an idea, a bit of your vision to another person.

Generally accepted that Mail Art was born in USA, the founder of the movement is thought to be Ray Johnson who re-invented post as a way to exchange ideas, thoughts, vision and so on, not just information, yearly congratulations or advertising spam.

As you may guess this “alternative” stamp is dedicated to Mr Johnson.

The greatest collection of items of Mail Art in Russia is held by the A. S. Popov Central museum of communications, happily located in St. Petersburg. In 2001, it founded a center for studying Mail Art, exchanging of items with other centers.

Till February 16 the museum conducts the exhibition “Mailartissimo-2009″ which is divided into three departments:

– 100 works of an artist from Georgia (not the US state, but a country on the Caucasus) Mikhail Shengelia, postcards are really little paintings created by oil on canvas. Themes are very diversified. Well, I found this one, below:

– Part 2 represents a collections of works of about 50 artists from 20 countries including USA, Germany, Australia, Belgium, Sweden and more.

(It’s Shengelia’s again, you can see the signature).

– and one of the most interesting is a collection of caskets for keeping postal items. The caskets are made by juwellers of St. Petersburg. This section is called “Postart”.

The A. S. Popov central museum of communications, Pochtamtskiy pereulok, 4. Till 16th of February.

Opening hours: 10.30-18.00, ticket office closes at 17.00

Every day except Sunday, Monday and the last Thursday of every month.

The postcard credit: www.rustelecom-museum.ru