Existing comment:
Stephen Varble (1946–1985, American)
Mail art to Gregory Battcock, ca. 1975
Stephen Varble was a playwright, fashion designer, and performance artist who mailed confounding press releases and newsletters to notable figures in the art world as an extension of his performance practice. Varble's early work was informed by queer performance artists like Robert Morgan and the Pagan Babies, whom he knew while living in Lexington, Kentucky, during college, as well as the radical underground cinema of Jack Smith and the Fluxus performances of Geoffrey Hendricks that he encountered after moving to New York about 1970. Through his intimate relationship with Hendricks, he became connected to the mail art scene. Inspired by mail artists like Ray Johnson, who used camp aesthetics to produce subversive publicity, Varble created press releases -- like this one mailed to the art critic Gregory Battcock -- with hyperbolic language and queer erotic imagery to lampoon art world elitism and mainstream consumerist spectacle. |