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mail art

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Mail art is something which a person makes, considering it art, and then sends to someone else through the postal service. The sent object can in theory be of any size or dimensions, but most mail art is sent in envelopes (often themselves decorated) or as a postcard (10cm by 15 cm). People also make ATCs (Artists Trading Cards) which are homemade versions of the football club or Cabbage Patch Kids cards swopped by children.

Mail artists work in many ways, which can include the techniques of pencil drawing, charcoal, collage, oil paints, computer imagery or watercolours. Found art is often employed as a base material. There are also subgenres of mail art such as rubber stamp makers who collect stamps from various sources and even make their own, or artistamp makers, who make fake stamps (which have been known to be sent through the post on letters performing the function of real stamps).

Mail art has certainly been going as long as people have been sending each other mail, but in the 1960s it became a recognised phenomenon. The prolific Ray Johnson with his New York Correspondence School is regarded bysome as the father of mail art. Avant garde groups suchas Fluxus in the 1960s and the closely connected network of artists involved in the 1970s industrial movement (such as Genesis P. Orridge from Throbbing Gristle and COUM Transmissions)