Art for the masses outside frames or book covers
by JAMIE CRAIG

The Vancouver Sun: Friday, September 10, 1971

It’s a small package, fits in the palm of your hand. Like a flip top pac of cigarettes. You open it up and you see it’s full of cards, and the first one says JUNK MAIL. Staring Henry Rappaport, Ed Varney, John Macdonald and 31 other names.

Way down at the bottom of the card, in letters almost indistinguishable they are so small, are the words: images for the evolution of man. Get ready for a trip.

Junk mail takes art out of its frame in the art gallery and words out from under the covers of a book. Junk Mail deals in mass production, it is art for the people, democratic art, 100 images on cards any of us can understand and feel.

And Junk Mail is a give-away, it hardly costs you anything. Paintings, poems, sculpture, comics, photography, collages — reduced to the same size and packaged for human use. Each of the 1000 decks costs 55 cents.

Imagine picking up a flip-top cigarette package and finding a pack of images! You flop through and your wondering, well, how come? So what? But they grow on you. You shuffle through again, deal yourself another. The odd card stops you, fascinates you, makes yoiu remember, something. It reaches through your personal experience. Here on a little card:

A photograph of an old wooden mansion with a picket fens e out front: above the house, the words: it is a sleep from which OI will awaken/it is a dream i will not dream again

Four grinning mounties, the barrels of their guns aimed straight at you.

A highway receding into a stormy sky.

A representation of an open clam, pearl dropping into it.

A simple poem: The sky turns a bright blue/in the day sun on snow/we sit around the wood stove/so centred this place is.

Like other Inter-media projects, Junk Mail combines different media into a new medium, and presents the finished art in ways unheard of: through the mails, from an airplane, a cigarette machine, hand-outs in the street, any way at all. Inter-media makes the technology available for creation available to everyone— confronted with a variety of outlets, new forms are constantly turning up.

“I feel liberated,” said Henry Rappaport. “Instead of using just one fissure of my brain for poetry, I can do a little video on this side and something else on that side mix them up and become a whole head. It’s fun, it’s fun”

“Junk Mail was a trip for the post office too,” said Varney. “It took us four hours it took us to mail out the 300 packs we gave away. I went into the postoffice and the guy didn’t want to talk to me because I had an exception and he didn’t want to know about it.”

“But after I got going he was calling other people over to listen. And then he asked: “This isn’t that stuff there getting mad about in Ottawa, is it?’ But he started to get off on it, he was really interested. So later I sent him a pack. Through the mail.”

“Its called Junk Mail cause in this case we were mailing it out unsolicited and it has no implicit purpose,” said Rappaport. “Its not a bill or a letter. Its just a gift. We protect ourselves by calling it Junk Mail.”

“Our aims are lofty — but if we came on as if they were lofty we’ed scare a lot of people away or turn them off. But if your saying its junk then nobody is going to be afraid of it. If they want to they can just dump it in the garbage”.

The individual cards, taken one by one, are not artistic, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. But Junk Mail does something towards expanding the meaning of the word “art”. The cards are more documentation than creation, more information than pure fantasy. They attempt to document the psych of the west coast through images.

Varney: “Its information thats digestible it becomes assimilated into the body of the viewer .” And theres art food fit for everyones palate

“I wouldn’t say we are interested in destroying the barrier between art and life, or even blurring it,” says John Cage, foremost spokesman of the avant garde in North America. “I would say that we are interested in observing that there is no barrier between the two.”

“The art gallery audience ia a cultural elite, and support from a gallery through exhibition is fickle and depends on politics and personal involvement with the people in the art gallery scene, a scene which doesn’t necessarily appease to the public.

“I’ve always felt that the public is responsible to support both art and the artist. But the artist on the other hand has to make his statement to the people in the best way he can. So having such a minimal price on it is appealing to the public for a vote of confidence. Great art has always somehow got a response from the public, because it fills a human need.

Rappaport said:

“Most artists here go to the Canada Council which is a kind of indirect public fund, but I would prefer to gain support from the sale of thing i do because thats direct public support and doesn’t involve a kind of artistic bias. And it doesn’t put me in a subservient relationship to some artistic barons”

“Its a question of getting art out of books into something else,” he went on “:Theres written information here that has never been found in an art gallery. We have to get visual and poetic art out of books and into something unique< something that really communicates with people. This makes it literally within everyone’s grasp. It removes art from small groups of patrons and opens itself like a flower to the public at large. The essence is getting it out.”

Getting it out. The content of the individual cards is not more important than the way they are presented and distribute. The medium is half of the message, the package is the point . . . because the packaging made it possible.

The American art critic Harold Rosenberg, in a recent issue of the New Yorker, writes: “Whether as objects, events or information art is now note-worthy only if it succeeds in agitating the existing art-world aggregation. In its desire to come closer to life, art has enmeshed itself in public relations. (The sacred word is ‘communication’). All art now invites audience participation, even if this involves no more than the act of looking.

But the corollary too audience participation is artist participation; the artist undertakes to lead his public to a collective experience. This continuous interchange between the artist and his audience has destroyed the notion of ‘high art’ and rendered meaningless the old bohemian anathema against ‘selling out’.”

Quite simply, but inviting a mass audience, the artist has not necessarily deserted the principles of his calling. Nor has he sacrificed the quality of this product. Besides, the art project has been replaced in importance by the performance itself, and particularly by the effectiveness of the medium in attracting a large audience.

Varney offers a provocative raison d’être for that new reality:
"when the artist distributes his wealth he gets more in return. That's why Junk Mail is such a rich package. If you horde your poems or your images or your ideas, you just freeze around them. You don't get more. And you feel good when you get more."

"I think anything can work if you use a new approach to enliven it, to turn people on," rappaport said." If you keep doing the same thing without any shot of newness people will get tired of it, it won't work.

“That's how I feel about the art gallery. I know pretty much what to expect. Surprise is the essence of art no matter what the form. But I would stop short of producing, say, placemats for restaurants. That would be getting across, sure, but at what price? You'd have to leave room for the words.

"when you do something commercial like that eventually the commercial aspect rules what you're doing. When you're an artist, what you want to do is what you want to do. Who wants to leave room for the spaghetti sauce?"

It is part of a long-range goal of the creators of Junk Mail to establish themselves as a “west coast experimental prototype printing press.” They will create the new print form and hand it over to others. If another deck of cards seems called for, someone else can pick up the idea.

Rappaport:
"I think what is lacking in publishing is new approaches that make sense, I think Canadian publishers would have less trouble if they stopped concentrating on very high class, high-quality books of poems and prints and got common. Junk M callail doesn't appeal to any elitist attitudes. It's common, it's junk, Junk M meail."

Meanwhile, they're into new forms. The most ambitious has the tentative title Inter– media experiment and will be composed of the history and progress of Inter– media with artistic documentation– “ A book in as many different ways as one can make a book."

Ideas for different editions of Junk Mail seem infinite. A postcard edition and a poster addition are in the offing. Rappaport talks about the notion of "Commando art" – bombarding Vancouver from the air with art for everyone: a Junk Mail bomb. And an art menu – no food on it, Just art. Food for the eye.

“One thing we did," said Varney, "Was to print out 100 copies of an 8 x 11 page with simply the words MIND GOOK on it. We handed them out on the streets. I don't know, it was just so great to do, the reactions we got. We went into the art school with them and got kicked out. That was the best part.

“I’d like to see Junk Mail in cigarette machines too,” he said. " Put in your $.55 and out comes Junk Mail. And recently I've really got hot on stamps. I'd like to do whole sheets of them, each stamp having a different image, And stick them on letters beside regular stamps, mail them out."

It should be said about the cards are not print perfect. Some are crystal-clear, some are a bit blurred, Depending upon the original from which the photographs were made. Inasmuch as the printing process was virtually the whole exercise, consider some of the problems involved:

"About a year ago," said Rappaport," John McDonald convinced us there was a great press out at Empire Music, So we went out there and bought it for $350. We managed to get it about 29 feet. We left it tilted over at about a 30° angle, with wire ropes around it to the telephone pole outside and since then that's pretty much where the press is.

“We've it just been standing behind it and pushing, pushing. We need something simpler, more modern. Whenever something went wrong with it, We consoled ourselves by thinking, well, it's only Junk Mail anyway, but we sacrifice what we really wanted by using it. Having the equipment to use yourself is important because you get a lot of ideas just through the process of using it."

Said Varney:

“It was a question of reducing the large originals and seeing what droped out. It was the play of light and dark, a yin-yang kind of thing. Taking all the different possibilities and twisting the printing process."

Photographs, poems, collages and sculpture– all were put under the copy camera.

“But each was treated as an individual item, it was in no way a factory," said Rappaport. "It took us two months just to make the negatives, eight people three months to produce the 1000 completed copies of the pack." They spent a total of only $150 on materials.

“What is so amazing about sophisticated printing is the fact that the really good things are infinitely reproducible," said Varney. "One time during the Blake show at UBC we were required to reproduce a Blake drawing, an original etching reproduced in a book. That book had been photographed and reprinted in another edition, a page of which had been photographed and printed on a poster. We took the photo of that poster and printed on the Roneo (duplicating machine), which is one of the grossest printing processes of all. And it came through. It turned out very well.

“If the image is good to start with, most of the manifestations will be good too." For the reproduction of the images on these newspaper pages, photographs were taken of cards, negatives made and new plates burn. Yet another manifestation, thrice removed this time from the original.

“That's what it's all about," said Varney."It took 16 of us three months to do all that. You’ll do it in about an hour "

A final word. There was virtually no editing, almost every image proffered was accepted, until there were a total of 100. "It's heavy and unnecessary when you get artists editing other artists work,” said Rappaport.

The result:
A Xerox self-portrait. A bearded man stuck his head in the xerox machine and got a portrait, Which was half-tone. Document at its rawest

A GET OUT OF JAIL FREE card. " This is a statement from all our pasts, and usable as a business card. ‘don't bust me, here's my card’.”

The clear, stellar spaces the GalacticResearch Council investigates." They're concerned with what's going on up there," said Rappaport, "and yet the reproductions maintain a human, old world, Renaissance warmth.”

A trip out of the surreal: a hand emerging from a pile of blankets.

A bit of sex here and there—“Just for what it is."

And much, much more.

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