Baroni, Vittore (Editor) - Arte Postale! #26: Year Book 81 (1981)

Vittore Baroni (Editor).
Arte Postale! #26: Year Book 81.

Forte Dei Marmi, Italy: Near The Edge Editions, 1981. 
Staple-bound softcover.
16 pages.
Numbered edition of 100. 

Very good. 
Light unobtrusive creasing at edge. 

Arte Postale! issue 26: Yearbook 81 is a slim issue, largely dedicated to a list of Baroni's correspondents, and a listing of Arte Postale! issues to date, with visual art by Baroni, Bill Gaglione, Gustav Hagglund, Ginny Lloyd, Enrico Piva, etc. 

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).