Networking the Peripheries / World Art Post: International Artist Stamp Exhibition
At OFF-Biennale Budapest
György Galántai (1941), artist and organizer of the Balatonboglár Chapel Studio (1970–1973), has been continuously expanding his international mailing list since the 1970s, through which he initially sent his own publications. In 1973, the exhibition Text(s) (organized by Dóra Maurer and Gábor Tóth) featured works by Uruguayan artist Clemente Padín (1939), as well as works by Western and Eastern European artists. Galántai institutionalized his growing archive of art documents he received from all over the world largely through the mail art network when he founded Artpool in 1979 together with Júlia Klaniczay. From this point on, in the spirit of the "active archive" concept, the Artpool collection, as well as its network, was systematically and strategically enriched through projects and “Art Tours” in Western Europe. This decentralized network not only facilitated communication with the art scene in capitalist countries, which was coveted due to limited travel opportunities, but also allowed for self-organized contacts with artists from the Third World, independent of official diplomacy.
Artpool’s World Art Post project, launched in 1981 with a call for participation, had the explicit aim of creating a collection that would provide information about the whole world in a small place at a time. In contrast to the stamp, which was subject to a state monopoly, the artist’s stamp as a sovereign, par excellence traveling, translocal, miniature art object was a genre of mail art of declared marginality—independent of the art institutions serving both the art market and state representation. György Galántai designed a unified stamp template into which each participant could insert their own commemorative stamp design, “which were assembled into meaningful series, regardless of geographical, political, and cultural boundaries,” write Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay in the introduction to the catalog.
Artpool organized an exhibition of the stamp designs received from 550 artists from 35 countries at the Fészek Club in April 1982, which made visible the transcontinental, contingent, and with blind-spots, but nevertheless utopian, network of gift culture that the project had set in motion. Many dispatches provided news and information from beyond Europe, with a large number of Latin-American artists, including Jorge Glusberg, Graciela Gutiérrez Marx, Edgardo Antonio Vigo (Argentina), Paulo Bruscky (Brazil). In addition to humorous, self-reflective, ars poetic or simply life-mark gestures, many have used the genre of the artist stamp to disseminate their critical art and socio-political stance, based on the openness, interest, and solidarity that binds the network together.
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