Existing comment:
György Galántai (b. 1941, Hungarian) and Julia Klaniczay (b. 1954, Hungarian), aka Artpool (formed in 1979)
Mail art to unknown number of recipients, 1981
In 1979 György Galántai and Julia Klaniczay founded Artpool in Soviet Hungary, which served as an archive for international avant-garde art that was officially prohibited by the government. Artpool was what Galántai called an "active archive," in that it not only collected "unofficial art" and information about it, but it also acted as a creative space, generating material that itself would be archived. The benefit of this kind of archive, according to Galántai, was that "the interrelation of historical and art research methodologies improves one's ability . . . to perceive problems and to venture into new, previously unknown, research methods." With Artpool's "memorial-stamp-project," the duo demonstrates how such a dynamic and future-oriented archive might operate. Soliciting and documenting "unofficial artistamps" from participants in the international mail art network, they disrupt the patriotic rhetoric of official stamps and imagine a world beyond the intense nationalistic divides of the Cold War era.
-- Mary Savig |