On Trobriand Island

Thanks for kind words regarding my blog, Ruud. Appreciate you looking. When you do get to read my thesis, I think you will be surprised by how objective I have been about Mail Art. I take your point that most Mail Art research by Mail Artists is a bit biased, and useless in so being. I had to trawl through lots of that; people making mad, 'unacademic' claims for Mail Art! Though I thank Chuck Welch for his Eternal Network book, it is about the worse piece on Mail Art, and his essays are crazy pieces of self-promotion for the most part! I did none of that, I have to say. My thesis hardly mentions my contributions to Mail Art. My tutors wouldn't have let me get away with that; but I didn't want to anyway. My own activities feature only as part of case studies, as is unavoidable. The problem with non-participant research of an essentially private phenomenon such as the Mail Art Network is that participation of some kind is required a fortiori. How else can one really access the material, is one point? How else can one get a true feeling for the activity, physically, ideologically, emotionally, is another point? How else can one really discover the differences between Mail Art and artforms less directly and implicity reciprocal; thus feeding one's research into what Mail Art is and is not; thus, then, approaching an ontology of Mail Art, as one must? The real problem, as I see it, with critiques of Mail Art of the type produced by Welch et al is that they are happy to make all kinds of lofty claims for Mail Art without doing the less glamorous work of offering a workable definition! This is why all such essays are woolly, partisan, dismissable. I tried harder than that, and dedicated a good-sized chunk of my thesis to offering a workable - physical - definition of Mail Art. Because I did this, each subsequent mention of Mail Art and comparison of it to other artforms has meaning, because it can be related back to evidence-based work about Mail Art ontology. I see that as a main contribution I have made to Mail Art. It is for readers to judge whether what I have said in this way holds up for them. They can get back to me with criticisms and questions; which I will answer in turn. That mirrors the wonderful reciprocity of the ideal version of Mail Artworking. It is essentially dialectical. No bad thing, too! Let me know if you manage to obtain a copy. Cheers, Anthony