Thinking about mail art / alternative means of exhibiting my work.
Matthew Higgs, artist, writer and current Director of White Columns in New York, produced and distributed more than fifty works through his publishing project Imprint 93 between 1993 and 1998. An administrator at an advertising agency by day and influential curator by night, Higgs invited artists to create works of art that could fit inside an envelope to be distributed, unsolicited, by mail to an informal group of friends, artists, and curators. Financed by himself and printed on an office photocopier, Imprint 93 served as an ongoing curatorial project which did not require a space, circumvented traditional art world structures, and offered a unique platform and network for artists to distribute their work.
On Tuesday 12th April we had our first Stories Uncovered session with lead artist Nina Manandhar who introduced us to her project ‘What we wore’, an archive documenting people’s styles from 1950 to today. Her book on the project provided a fascinating snapshot of how radically people’s dress sense changes, and if you don’t document it you forget it.
We are one of several youth forums taking part in the ‘Stories Uncovered’ project, which aims to get young people to engage with London’s heritage by finding interesting material from the archive and making links between the material.
We’re also going to create our own archive project that will refer to the gallery and form our own contemporary snapshot of East London. We met Whitechapel Gallery’s archive curator Nayia Yiakoumaki, who gave us a tour of Imprint 93, the archive and current exhibition we’ve chosen to explore, where artists were invited to make work to fit inside an A5 envelope.
Inspired by a work in Imprint 93 we created the 7 wonders of the East End. We’ve decided to gather our archive digitally as it is 2016 and everyone uses social media! One idea was to create a ‘digital treasure hunt’ where participants would be sent round our ‘seven wonders of East End’ and document their journey through Instagram or Twitter. Locations are not certain yet but a definite is Brick Lane’s bagel store and they could even finish dancing at XOYO.
The other idea was to use colour as prompts for generating a digital archive. Each day for a week, people will be prompted to upload text, sound, images linked to a particular colour which will be collated onto a blog/ website. There could be options to look at only images, or just sounds or texts.
Whitechapel Gallery, London, is presenting an archive display dedicated to Imprint 93, Matthew Higgs’ collaborative mail art project from the 1990s. The display is being shown from 19 March to 25 September 2016, and the following text is from the Whitechapel’s press release.
“Matthew Higgs, artist, writer and current Director of White Columns in New York, produced and distributed more than fifty works through his publishing project Imprint 93 between 1993 and 1998. An administrator at an advertising agency by day and influential curator by night, Higgs invited artists to create works of art that could fit inside an envelope to be distributed, unsolicited, by mail to an informal group of friends, artists, and curators. Financed by himself and printed on an office photocopier, Imprint 93 served as an ongoing curatorial project which did not require a space, circumvented traditional art world structures, and offered a unique platform and network for artists to distribute their work.
The artists involved in Imprint 93 were often at the beginnings of their careers, working on the periphery of the then emerging 'YBA' movement, but would later be celebrated as some of the most important contemporary artists. The artists whose works will be exhibited include Fiona Banner, Billy Childish, Martin Creed, Jeremy Deller, Peter Doig, Ceal Floyer, Stewart Home, Alan Kane, Hilary Lloyd, Paul Noble, Chris Ofili, Elizabeth Peyton, Bob and Roberta Smith, Jessica Voorsanger and Stephen Willats, among others.
Highlights from Imprint 93 include Chris Ofili’s Black (1997), a series of cuttings from his local newspaper showing crimes attributed to black suspects, Elizabeth Peyton’s Untitled (1995), made from a sequence of video-stills of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain performing in 1993, and Martin Creed’s Work no. 88 (1994) a crumpled ball of A4 paper that Higgs and Creed sent to the Tate Gallery but was returned to them, flattened inside an envelope, 'rejected' as an unsolicited donation.
Imprint 93 was closely linked to influential and emerging artist-centered initiatives such as London’s City Racing and Cabinet Gallery. Exhibiting the full collection of Imprint 93 editions for the first time the Whitechapel Gallery’s archive display offers a unique insight into a period significant to the development of the British art scene of the 1990s, and beyond.”
Image: Imprint 93, selected publications and editions, 1993-97.
