MinXus Mail Bag: Triple Feature w/ Mars Tokyo, Richard Canard and Thomas Brown (USA)

Mail at by Mars Tokyo (Baltimore, Maryland, USA)

We are thrilled to be able to share more pieces from Mars Tokyo’s breathtaking Fluxus series. We are deeply appreciative that she was kind enough to send us more wonderful pieces. The detail is extraordinary.

And the second card:

The reverse:

Now we unveil two pieces recently received from Richard Canard:

Mail art by Richard Canard (Carbondale, Illinois, USA)

Richard Canard has been lobbying for a Ray Johnson stamp for a long time. Then a second piece, which is a form of recycled mail art:

Note the time delay on this piece.

Always FAB to hear from Richard. Thomas Brown, working through some Freudian stage, sent us an interesting variant on another piece recently received:

Mail art by Thomas Brown (Baltimore, Maryland, USA)

Thanks to the artists for sending this wonderful work!

Mail Art Call by Jim Leftwich for Roanoke/Collab Fest – Deadline Approaching! (Roanoke, Virginia, USA)

Some Tenderfoots know him simply as “Jesus Jim,” inventor of Trashpo.

Others know him as Jim Leftwich, a visual poet and theorist of great distinction. Regardless, if you visit our humble blog then you are called upon to send mail art to this year’s event in Virginia, which is associated with the former Marginal Arts Festival.

Note that the deadline is June 27, 2015!

MAF

422 Walnut SE#2

Roanoke, VA 24014-USA

For more information:

http://postneoabsurdism.blogspot.com/

MinXus Mail Bag: Thomas Brown More or Less (Baltimore, Maryland, USA)

Mail art by Thomas Brown (Baltimore, Maryland, USA)

Thomas Brown is fast becoming an Eternal Network master of ceremonies for minimalist poetry and pithy event scores, territory inhabited – for example – by such stalwarts as Richard Canard (Illinois, USA). Luckily, minimalism is a field that inherently eludes crowding.

We are opening this humble blog of work by Thomas Brown with a very interesting add & pass sheet he sent us. This is definitely not minimal, but it has some asemic-suggestive glyphs that are begging for further mystification. The sheet came in this envelope:

We are also thrilled to share some new, trademark Thomas Brown cards received:

While the self-reflective text is minimal, the reverse side is crowded with information:

And another, equally self-referential:

This piece does include a visual element. And the reverse:

Many thanks to Thomas Brown for sending us this new work!

MinXus Mail Bag: Metasemics by Moan Lisa (Iowa City, Iowa, USA)

Mail art by Moan Lisa (Iowa City, Iowa, USA)

We have received two missives from Moan Lisa (aka Maria Morisot) directed toward our asemic subsidiary. Whether the work is asemic, about asemics or in actuality has no connection to asemics is a decision we will leave squarely with you, dearest Tenderfoots. We will not quibble with your choice. We will ask you, though, for a moment, to consider asemics.

We will tell you Moan Lisa was a member of the Martha Stuart School of Asemic Wallpaper. Moan Lisa engaged very actively in highly theoretical discussions concerning the nature of asemics. We will tell you we believe Moan Lisa (Maria Morisot) has highly complex theories concerning asemics that diverge considerably from mainstream Asemia or what we have named The Asemically Correct.

To go further would involve interpretation and even judgments involving Moan’s theories. We do not want to go that far. However, we will suggest that what Moan Lisa has so kindly sent us should, among other perspectives, be considered – even if briefly – as theoretical statements concerning asemic writing even if you do not view them as asemic writing proper. Thus, we can consider them metasemic: asemics about asemics. Then we consider what it is that Moan Lisa might be proposing, or not.

The second envelope is even more compelling, we think:

Many thanks to Moan Lisa/Maria Marisot for enriching the asemic conversation.

Bob Grumman’s Essay on Minimalist Poetry

The sad news of Bob Grumman’s passing is sweeping through the network and vispo community.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Grumman

(The entry has not been updated to record Bob’s passing.)

For us, Bob Grumman’s writing about vispo is foundational. We believe history will recognize him as one of the earliest and most influential writers in the vispo area. Bob was an active networker for many years. Many will remember his tenure at Factsheet Five, and he was a huge presence in the zines. That is not even including his own creative work and his more recent work with mathematical poetry.

To date, one of Bob Grumman’s best known works is his essay on minimalist poetry. He covers the field extremely well, ranging from Aram Saroyan to John M. Bennett with a lot in between.

To honor and remember Bob Grumman, we hope you can take some time and (re-)read the essay then perhaps share it.

http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/grumman/egrumn.htm

MinXus Mail Bag: (Part III D-Kit Series) – Trashpo by Diane Keys (Elgin, Illinois, USA)

Mail-art by Diane Keys (Elgin, Illinois, USA)

We conclude our documentation of a D-Kit from Diane Keys in Elgin with the remaining Trashpo and DKult promotional materials that were stuffed in this epical mailing.

We and other awestruck Tenderfoots following the series have noted the conceptual nature of many of the pieces.

The work also has a strong anti-art quality and is very spontaneous.

Classic (found) Trashpo (above).

No DKult mailing of this nature would be complete without the stamps.

The reverse side:

And the envelope:

And the reverse:

Many thanks to Diane Keys for opening the year with this FAB material. Here are links to the other entries:

MinXus Mail Bag: The Dream of DKult Norway (Part II D-Kit Series) by Diane Keys (Elgin. Illinois, USA)

MinXus Mail Bag: Trashpo DKult D-Kit from Diane Keys (Part I) (Elgin, Illinois, USA)

MinXus Mail Bag: MinXus-Lynxus – Too Big To Fail by Moan Lisa (Iowa City, Iowa, USA)

Mail art by Moan Lisa (Iowa City, Iowa, USA)

We are receiving a steady flow of wondrous material from the prolific Moan Lisa, and we want to share these minimalist shreds that (among other things) offer commentary on the current big bank situation. Moan Lisa mailed these in three separate envelopes:

As ever, thank you, Moan Lisa! Congratulations on your new post-mail art movement too.

MinXus Mail Bag: Minimalism Less than Zero by Richard Canard (Carbondale, Illinois, USA)

Mail-art by Richard Canard (Carbondale, Illinois, USA)

Richard Canard has ridden many successive mail-art waves. As a result, he has acquired a useful tool box of avant techniques and has even managed to contribute a few. His forays into minimalist poetry are always of interest, and this example we share with you today might well be an outlier – even for Richard Canard. He pushes the envelope of the minimal into the domain of absence so that we are confronted with the unadorned materials of mail-art. We might consider this a “Nothing” as opposed to a “Happening,” although good conceptual art has a way of raising complex questions with complicated answers.

So we submit this unusual item to the formidable Richard Canard canon and add many thanks to him for sending.

MinXus Mail Bag: Richard Canard, Annette Kesterson & Maria Marisot

Mail-art by Richard Canard (Carbondale, Illinois, USA)

Today we are pleased to share with Tenderfoots a triple mail-art feature. Richard Canard and Annette Kesterson have appeared recently upon our humble blog, and we add these two new works as a sort of encore in appreciation of the generosity they show as well as talent.

Mail-art by Annette Kesterson (San Francisco, California, USA)

We adore this postcard Annette sent us from sunny California because it represents, for us anyway, a kind of asemic minimalism using the concept of configuration. The key comes from comparing the two sides:

Thoughtful, funny and aesthetically pleasing – this work has it all!

Mail-art by Maria Marisot (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, USA)

We are also thrilled to share a mysterious, minimalist piece received from the enigmatic Maria Marisot. Maria seems connected to the labyrinthine and protean concept of Moan Lisa, but she shows much evidence of being a real person as well. For instance, she has written a lot of excellent poetry that is very distinctive.

It’s very possible this work by Maria Marisot is meant to be an add and pass. We will likely use it for that purpose.

Thanks again to Richard Canard, Annette Kesterson and Maria Marisot.

 

MinXus Mail Bag: Post-Itpo by Moan Lisa (Iowa City, Iowa, USA)

Mail-art by Moan Lisa (Iowa City, Iowa, USA)

Especially given rumors of a birthday, we thought it would be a great time to share some recent work received from the brilliant and enigmatic Moan Lisa. Moan dropped off the digital grid for a time, but we do not see that the prolific output of snail mail ever lessened. (We were gone from the grid ourselves in September, and Chris Reynolds (Arizona) is staying true to his vow to return to the underground.)

As you can see, Moan Lisa sent us a series of Post-It Notes in October (among other things). There are probably some more at the bottom of the mail bag still.

This could be Trashpo; but we are also thinking they are meant to be performance scores, although that doesn’t work entirely.  They are indeterminate to a high degree. The fact that they were mailed in a series makes them even more intriguing; it’s possible there is a missing puzzle piece somewhere.

Moan Lisa’s Post-Itpo does remind us of the “discrete series” concept we encountered when studying the poetry of George Oppen. The idea is, if we can trust recollection, which means sounding a note of caution, that a “discrete series” involves creating a structure based on some obscure or subjective knowledge possessed by the poet (and not necessarily communicated clearly to the reader) which is likely unknown or unfamiliar to most readers and might not even matter in terms of understanding the poem yet provides an unseen structure. For instance, again if memory serves, Oppen used stops on the New York City subway system (or was it on the West Coast?) as a structure of a poem: Point A, Point B, Point C each defined a section of the poem and determined the content. It all made sense if you cracked the code based on words and numbers. On the other hand, even more possibilities of interpretation were present if you did not crack the obscure code. In this sense, the “discrete series” involves absence. We wonder if we remembered any of this accurately or, in fact, we have created a fiction. Moan Lisa does that to us. In this case, we would rather not fact check because we like our own understanding of the “discrete series” regardless of how true to George Oppen it is or isn’t.