Existing comment:
Tony Lowes (b. 1944, American)
Mail art to John Held Jr., 1988
This work of mail art, created by artist Tony Lowes, resembles a propagandistic, wartime "call-to-action" poster. Lowes constructed this satirical manifesto in the long-standing tradition of art critique, painting art as the purveyor of starvation. By likening art making to drug use, with phrases "opiate of the people" and "art has become an addiction," he suggests that the world of art has become a hallucinatory world of "glamorous escape." An important component of mail art was the rejection of the institution and the elitism of the art world. While the manifesto vilifies art, it also stresses how it may alternatively be used to express the passion, humanity, and power. The piece appropriates the anarchistic authority of its propagandistic precedents while also staying true to the self-referential aspect of mail art.
-- Isabelle Martin |