When art travels by post: Cards from the world

In 1973 Ugo Carrega organized Cards from the world at the Centro Tool (Tool Centre) in Milan, the first ever exhibition of Mail Art in Italy. The postcards that were part of this pioneering exhibition project are now on display at Museion Passage in the Poetry in the Box exhibition. In this contribution to Museion Bulletin, Duccio Dogheria (curator and researcher at the Archivio del ‘900 at MART in Rovereto) retraces what was an extraordinary adventure in verbo-visual art.

Ugo Carrega (1935-2014), the artist at the center of the Poetry in the box exhibition was not only one of the leading figures in the verbo-visual art movement in Italy, he was also a poet, translator, a champion of artist’s books and experimental magazines, as well as a promoter of various artist-run spaces in Milan that acted as both galleries and artistic-creative workshops. The first of these, the Centro Suolo (1969-1970), was followed by the Centro Tool (1971-1973), the Mercato del Sale (1974-1991) and Euforia costante (1993; 1996).

If the Mercato del Sale represented the most prolific experience, with over 200 exhibitions to its credit, the Centro Tool was undoubtedly the most experimental space. In addition to hosting avant-garde art groups for the first time in Italy, such as the Yugoslavian Signalist poets, the Japanese Vou group, or the first exhibition of international female verbo-visual artists, the space in Via Borgonuovo 20 also hosted exhibition events that were bizarre, to say the least. These included Opus demercificandi, where visitors to the exhibition could take home the works on display by artists, such as Dadamaino, Mirella Bentivoglio, Maurizio Nannucci and Ben Vautier, simply by filling in a form. The three exhibitions organized by Carrega in June 1973 to close the space, are of particular interest as they informally involved all the artists who had taken parts in its activities in various ways. These exhibitions were: Cards from the world (artists’ postcards), Bodies (artists’ body fragments) and Moments (artists’ statements). Carrega introduced the three impromptu shows as follows: “We wanted to create a sort of party/final event at Centro Tool by inviting all those who have had contact with the Centre in one way or another. But for obvious economic reasons this has not been possible. Even if operators cannot come, though, they can send their presence.” So, in fact, all the works came by post.

The first of these events, Cards from the world, was the first ever Mail Art exhibition held in Italy, as confirmed by Vittore Baroni, one of the leading experts on the subject. Mail Art or Postal Art is nothing other than a free and easy exchange of artworks through the postal service. This involves the artist playing with the idea of correspondence (like the artist’s postcards here, or by creating artwork on envelopes), and sometimes includes disrupting the official nature of the postal system using artistamps and artists’ rubber stamps. This egalitarian, market-free creative art form operates through a networking system. It usually involves an artist promoter - in this case Carrega - launching a call through their network of contacts (in this case, those who had exhibited at the Centro Tool), promoting a specific event, i.e. the closure exhibition, indicating a theme on which to intervene (the artist postcard) and a deadline by which the works must be sent.

The 90 or so artists who took part with one or more submissions, totaling 165 artists’ postcards, clearly show through their works - created with a wide variety of techniques - the close connections between Mail Art and verbo-visual art. The artists involved were, on one hand, some of the leading names in world Mail Art, like Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, David Zack (transparent postcard), Monte Cazazza (postcard with photo self-portrait), Amelia Etlinger (postcard covered with threads and sequins) and Robin Crozier (hand-painted postcard). While, on the other, there were numerous international verbo-visual artists, like Carrega himself, Ketty La Rocca (collages), Eugenio Miccini, Luciano Caruso (collages and handcrafted additions), Ewa Partum, Mirella Bentivoglio (two postcards with collages and handcrafted additions), Luciano Ori, Giulia Niccolai (embroidery on cardboard), Herman Damen and Adriano Spatola (perforated postcard). Alongside these names, a number of Fluxus artists, such as Ben Vautier and Wolf Vostell, and eclectic figures such as Pablo Echaurren (who glued together the front of two commercial postcards, so the postcard-object could be sent to two different recipients), Ugo La Pietra and Bruno Munari, who, started from a postcard-portrait of Queen Elizabeth and then erased her face with a black card.

The unique set-up of the exhibition, designed for the occasion by Carrega himself, looked to the egalitarian spirit of Mail Art and sought to put the public directly in contact with the works, without any barrier separating them. To reinforce this directness, visitors were obliged to ‘pass through’ the works with their body, moving them as they went. In fact, a hole was made in each artist’s postcard and they were then hung from the ceiling using different lengths of nylon thread. This created a visual show that did not cover the gallery walls but took over the whole physical space.

The entire exhibition of postcards is preserved in its original box at the Archivio del ‘900 at Mart in Rovereto’s research center, in the Fraccaro-Carrega collection. It is accompanied by two other boxes containing the remaining two exhibitions designed by Carrega to mark the closure of the Centro Tool.

Poetry in the Box

The Poetry in the Box exhibition, curated by Frida Carazzato, Museion’s scientific curator, and Duccio Dogheria, curator and researcher at the Archivio del ‘900 at Mart in Rovereto, recounts the twenty-year-long connection between Mart and Museion, the two museums that share the extraordinary collection of the Archivio di Nuova Scrittura (New Writing Archive), donated to them by Paolo Della Grazia in 2020 and in which Ugo Carrega plays a key role. The exhibition revolves around the concept of the box, that is sometimes a work of art in itself and sometimes a container for Carrega’s works, and pays tribute to the history of the Mercato del Sale, the space in which the artist was both curator and director. Between 1974 and 1989, countless artists involved in visual poetry - many of whom appear in this exhibition - gravitated around this artist-run space in Milan.

Until 01.09.2024