Friends Don’t Let Friends Become Fake Postmen
How a letter-based art project inadvertently taught me a lesson in communication skills.
Arnaud Maggs. He was a real artist. I was painfully aware that I was not. He was an intelligent and prolific photographer whose career spanned several decades. He spoke with grace and candor. I was a young artist who wondered how to get to do what he did. His passing in 2012 caused me to think of a few things that his work inspired after his visit to my university in 2002. His artist talk covered what was then a relatively new body of work, “Notification XIII.”
His touring exhibition included photographs of “death letters,” which were beautifully arranged in a grid-like pattern, something which had been an on-going pattern in his installation work. Painful, stark, and individually framed, these pieces were interesting reminders of a bygone era of communication.
Popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, these letters were a means of notifying friends and loved ones of someone’s passing. Companies would often manufacture “mourning stationery” with black ink beautifully lining the edges of the paper. I can only imagine the strange, or maybe not-so-strange practice of having an object like that at the ready for its inevitable usage. I’m also certain the black lining was a way to prevent those ever-important messages from getting errantly lost in transit.
As Mr. Maggs spoke to us, I listened intently. I got it in my mind to somehow emulate the idea and make the death letter active again. Letter writing had died (well, not died, but sort of died — much less popular than now), but how else might these pieces be used? I hope you see where this might lead. My brain was churning. I was enthusiastic. I was going to do something really cool and subversive.
As luck would have it, I also had to complete an assignment for my print media class, a class which I hated deeply. My instructor and I clashed constantly. Every three hours spent in there was three I would never get back. I still wanted to impress my instructor — who only seemed to be impressed by students they personally liked — so I thought of this really cool subversive letter thing. It was going to be great. Maybe my instructor would also stop being so mean to me? Not being able to see the gaslight for the trees — I soldiered on.
My concept involved a found-object-and-multiple approach, and I intended to use leftover pieces from another art show to complete it. I would hand stamp brand new death letters, with their black x’s brazenly printed on the back, and tuck the flattened, found objects inside.
The envelopes themselves looked fine enough, but the process by which they came to fruition felt like I was, to borrow a delightful British phrase, smashing from one cock-up to the next.
At the time, I was also an assistant with the Blackwood Gallery. The gallery had just launched a massive retrospective of the art collective General Idea — who was also very clever and that I aspired to be like. Art stars made me nervous. Art stars were allowed to be weird and also had houses and maybe if I worked hard enough — I could be weird and also have a house, too.
One of the three founding members, AA Bronson, was on hand to help install the show. In consideration of the rapport (I thought we had) developed over the course of the installation, I thought some of his discarded post-show pieces might fit the bill for my print media project, whose unhappy deadline loomed after the Christmas holidays.
Part of the GI installation included red and green pill shape mylar balloons that covered the gallery’s ceiling like a shiny canopy. The original intent of the GI installation was to have individual visitors take the balloons away once they lost some of their height — that part of the traveling installation was always changing.
The initial effect was stunning, though some of the taller visitors got the (literal) upper hand as they were able to reach their prizes more easily. There were still dozens left over that hadn’t come low enough to catch. When we took the show down, we were instructed to climb up on scaffolding and pierced the balloons that still remained. I tucked some away in the hopes that AA would let me use them for my project.
Equipped with a decent amount of naivety and a-lot-to-be-desired-in-the-way-of-communication skills, I then sheepishly wrote an e-mail explaining my intention for the discarded pieces. After some coaxing on my part, and on the proviso that they were only to be classified as found objects, AA graciously agreed. However, it wasn’t before he mistakenly thought that I had taken some of the pre-inflated balloons home with me.
I was an undergrad and very badly wanted to be a “real artist,” whatever that meant to me at the time. The paralyzing fear of actually asking a “real artist” such a delicate question about his work made me breeze over my original intent, neglecting to tell him that the balloons I wanted to take with me were already pierced and ready to be thrown away.
A few confused messages later, I sorted out my diction, with the hope that AA wrote me off as a harmless idiot and not an art thief.
I finished the project: A dozen hand-stamped death letters with a pierced balloon neatly folded inside each one. The idea was to signify the death of the contents, not death itself. But, like a lot of contemporary art, or maybe just art in general, if you don’t have the context for what’s in front of you, reaching the thesis can be sketchy at best. The envelopes were then dropped off anonymously to friends of mine whom I knew across the city. They probably should have known it was me? Turns out, they did not.
Naturally, it ended up freaking out mostly every recipient. To top it all off, one friend of mine was being stalked at time. She thought my balloon letter was a parcel from the guy who was following her. I don’t remember what I did to sort that situation out. If drinks weren’t purchased, they probably should have been. We aren’t in touch any more, but I still feel like apologizing to her to this day.
All in all, the project managed to irritate one prominent artist, compromise several personal friendships, and took a lot of explaining and apologizing before it came to a close. I don’t even remember if my print media instructor gave me a good grade, but my guess is most likely not.
I my mind, I still partly blame Mr. Maggs — though he can hardly be held accountable for my complete lack of social graces.
He will definitely be missed.
