See here the audiovisual poem interpretation from Clemente Padin´s "Pan y Paz"  (Bread and Peace ) at Pan-Paz.Crosses.Net: Pan Paz

STOP CENSORSHIP

The censorship always present, this time in México. A group integrated by zealots, the clergy and the government authorities stoped a performance feautered by Rocio Boliver, alledgling "morally offensive conduct". This claim what headed by Mr. Francisco Torres Marmolejo, president of The Comunal Meeting and various local religious extremist. Rocio Boliver -a.k.a. The Frozen grape- performed "Close the Legs" in the First Encounter of Counterculture.

Se conoce como Mail Art o Arte Postal a las manifestaciones artísticas transportadas por los servicios postales que, en cierta medida, puedan alterar el sentido dispuesto que el creador, correspondiéndole dicha operación a los avatares del medio empleado en la trasmisión de los mensajes desde el emisor al receptor. En términos de ciencias de la información diríamos que la innovación del Arte Postal es la novedad del "canal" de transmisión que con sus características propias tiñe el mensaje enviado y lo altera con su "ruido". No se trata, tal cual pudiera creerse, en una nueva corriente artística en sentido formal, po lo cual no corresponde a ningún "ismo" determinado. La novedad reside en el planteo comunicacional, la relación persona-persona a través del correo que se manifiesta como revolucionaria frente a la falsa comunicación o monólogo de los medios de comunicación masivos: la televisión, la radio, el cine, etc. Si a ello sumamos el carácter anticomercial y anticonsumista que tuvo desde sus comienzos veremos que estamos frente a un fenómeno artístico de disrrupción.

Antes y después de Lyotard

El Network es el arte alternativo que pone el acento en la comunicación. La comunicación es su mensaje. El Network enfatiza el arte en cuanto producto de comunicación, fruto del trabajo humano (el work) y en cuanto trama de relaciones entre los comunicadores, unidos en la red, el circuito que les permite la interconexión (el net). A la manera de una red de computadoras, sin central única, en la cual cada networker (artista de la red) actúa como una centralita de reciclamiento y creación de comunicación.

Celebrating his 68vo. Anniversary, the artist Clemente Padín want to share his happiness by having arrived so far and invite his

Started on: 3-12-1994

RJ: Welcome to this mail-interview. First let me ask you the traditional question. When did you get involved in the mail-art network?

Reply on: 31-12-1994

CP: My first experiences in Mail Art date from 1967 when with my latin-american friends Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Guillermo Deisler and Dmaso Ogaz we started to exchange our reviews : Diagonal Cero, Ediciones Mimbre, La Pata de Palo & Los Huevos del Plata (Diagonal Zero, Osier Editions, Leg of Wood and The Eggs of the Silver) and our mail-art works. The Uruguayan review OVUM 10 published 6 post- cards with my visual poems in 1969. Later, in 1974, during the Uruguayan military dictatorship, I organized the First Latin-American Mail Art Exposition documented at the Gallery U, in Montevideo and I was editing the second epoch of OVUM, about which Géza Perneczky says: "The periodical and private publications that had midwifed in the birth of the network (File of Canada, the American Weekly Breeder and Mail Order Art, Poland's NET, Padin's OVUM, etc) displayed, to different degrees, motives that emphasizes the need for social contacts or were based on more commercial interests." (A Halo, 1991, p.232).

After the history continues...

Biographical Background

My experiences in Mail Art date from1967 when Edgardo Antonio Vigo,Guillermo Deisler,Dámaso Ogaz and me exchanged our respective publications :Diagonal Cero (Diagonal Zero),Ediciones Mimbre (Osier Editions),La Pata de Palo (leg of Wood) and Los Huevos del Plata (The Eggs of Silver).From these publications we later assembled the testimony of our propositions.I officially began creating Mail Art in 1969 when the Uruguayan magazine OVUM 10 published my postcards and visual poems.

In 1974,during the Uruguayan military dictatorship,I organized the First Latinoamerican Mail Art Exposition at Galeria U,in Montevideo,Uruguay.My edition of apocryphal mail art stamps denounced the dictatorial regime for its brutal suppresion of human rights and this eventually led to my incarceration from August,1977 to November,1979.But ,in October,1983 I resumed my artistic activities with the "1^st.of May" Exhibition at the Association of Banking Employees of Uruguay.Thereafter,I proposed and organized the Latin American and Caribbean Association of Mail Artists which was formed August 3l,1984,in Rosario,Argentina.Since then,I have participed in hundreds of Mail Art Shows throughout the world with combinations of my poetry,performances and video art.

by Clemente Padín

The Mail Art between the one which was and the one which will be. The iron law of the system in operation: first the symbolic activity of the towns creates the artistic movements in order to mark absences and imperfections in the social texture and, then, the system, once past the iconoclast rage of the first moments, return them to its service, by means of the institucionalization and transforming in mercha

by Clemente Padínndise that had been created in order to attack it, subjecting it to the laws of the market.

                                                                      Fagagaga, 15 of Nov.´99, personal letter

The things don't happen scatteredly, all are linked. The art in the Net of nowadays is not casual and it is originated, certainly, in Mail Art. Who have been the objectives of the art mail from its beginnings in the first experiences of Ray Johnson of half-filled of the 60s, but the communication and the interation? Ray sent unconcluded works to his friends so that they ended them. Born from that original project, nowadays the Mail Art, already at the end of century, preserve with great difficulty its force and its impulse in spite of the changes caused by the scientific and technological advances and the foregone absorption of the market. It is true that so much years of validity have weakened that

remotion of values and that today a growing institutionalization, absorption and banalitization are attended, on the part of the stablisment, of the principles that consecrated to the communication like only representative of our art, above the inconstant and whimsical artistic fashions, the more than the times imposed by the market of the art. The decentralization of the art is an implicit phenomenon in the art mail because a current of artistic specific expression centralized in an is not "ism" (like Surrealism or Abstraccionism, etc.) but of an artistic form that admits any half or support and any aesthetic well-known current and by knowing:  "The Eternal Network" of Robert Filliou, the utopian project, perhaps unreachable, of the permanent communication of all through all the available means.