 If I could just give some very brief background. You know, in 1968, there was a Flux's associated artist, Robert Filu, who concepted the idea of an eternal network. And he was working that summer with another artist in collaboration with George Brecht, another Flux's artist. And he came up with this idea of an eternal network of artists, a community of artists. Some would be coming into it. Some were there for a long time. Some were just coming in. But there was always someone there to kind of impart the knowledge of the network. And this gathering, this weekend, is so emblematic of that, because we've got these old school artists here that have been involved since the early 70s, late 60s, and a lot of new people who were just coming into the field. So this is truly an eternal network of male art that continues to go on and on and on. And I'm just so happy about that and everything. And the foundation for the eternal network, this community of artists, was built upon the foundation of Ray Johnson, an artist from Detroit, Michigan, who went to Black Mountain College. And instead of becoming famous, like his schoolmates, Robert Rauscherberg, Sy Twomley, started sending art through the mail for free. And then after some time, started putting Ed and Pass on his letters. And this is the way the network kind of rippled out and spread. And one of the first places it spread to was the West Coast. And that's what we're going to be discussing today, the evolution of male art on the West Coast. And we're so lucky to have Anna Banana here, who is active in San Francisco, as well as Vancouver. And she'll be talking about that aspect. Carl Chu, who's from Seattle. And he'll be talking about the Seattle scene. Leslie Caldera, or Creative Thing. He'll be talking about Los Angeles. And we're very pleased to have Lowell Darling here, who is a conceptual artist in the early 70s, also active in male art and the organizer of Decadence, which was the first real big gathering of male artists, which happened here on the West Coast. And he'll be imparting the history of that. So without further ado, Anna Banana. Thanks, John. I think you've given them several of the items that I had in my introduction. However, I did want to say about this weekend that this has been one of the most upbeat and enthusiastic gatherings and demonstrations of this networking process that Ray Johnson started. Because really what I see is the product of his work, aside from the postcards and the mailings and all the little things that we send back and forth to each other, it's the creation of this network, which is a community of creative people who believe in being creative without saying, well, it's going to cost you $500, or it's going to cost you thousands, or that there's none of that economic aspect to male art. You send out as much as you can afford to, and you get back. I can't tell you after 40 plus years of male art networking. I don't know what to do with it all. I've got so much, and people have given me banana items, not just banana stories and clippings. I have the history from the early 1970s. Anyway, I wanted to acknowledge and thank the organizers and John and everybody who contributed their energy to putting this weekend together, because it was truly an amazing get-together. So I'm going to start now with a 1968 issue of Art Forum, in which Michael Morris, who was the person, artist, in Vancouver, who started Image Bank, had a review. And they reproduced a painting of his called The Problem of Nothing. And Ray Johnson, he wrote Michael Morris, a letter, care of the Vancouver Art Gallery. And he said, well, nothing is what I've been doing during the time that every other avant-garde artist is doing happenings. He's been doing nothing. And so Michael Morris, and he conversed, Michael invited him to Vancouver for a show of concrete poetry that he had organized at University of British Columbia. Ray went, and they got together. And I guess there was a lot of exchanging of addresses. So soon after that came out the Image Bank request list, 1969, in which the artists that had been in this network had put out what things that they would like to receive. And there were things like clouds or 60s cars and so on. And that's how I got involved in the network. But I'm going to talk about a couple of other people first. What happened with the Image Bank request list was that File Magazine started publishing in Toronto. And that was a group called General Idea. There were three men. And File was in the format of a Life Magazine, but totally ironic and amusing. And what's the word? I want something like undermining a parody. A parody, sure. That wasn't quite. I wanted something that was like attacking the way that Life Magazine presents the world. Depressive. Depressive. What? It's aversive. It's aversive. Thank you. That's the word. OK, so then I'm just going to cover the Vancouver scene, because at the same time as these things were happening with Michael Morris and so on, Ed Varney, who was a conceptual poet, he participated in an exhibition in the Stedlick Museum in Amsterdam. And he got the contact lists of artists that were interested in doing that kind of thing. And then he saw the Image Bank postcard show at UBC in 1969. And so he got linked up both through the, and he started putting out the Intermedia newsletter. And in 1973, he got a pinhole perforator. Every male artist's dream come true. And of course, he began making stamp editions. And his first editions came out of Intermedia Press, which became a commercial enterprise. And it was a collaborative sheet of stamps with the artists that he knew in the network. So that was Ed. He's also been very active all through the years in organizing exhibitions and male art shows. He's done one on Elvis. He did a Mona Lisa show. And the more recent years, he's done a series of exhibitions on works, which is a labor movement thing. So that is Ed's early participation in the network. And then, of course, we have in 1968, Lowell Darling here was nailing cities down and doing urban architecture. And he connected with the network through Dana Ashley, who had taught at University of Victoria and became friends with Eric Medcalf, who became part of Image Bank in Vancouver. I mean, it's all just like these connections going on. And Dana actually, after his, I think he had a row with University of Victoria, and he quit. But then he had a van. And he went around to various university circuits. And he was presenting his assembly magazines. Now, I imagine most of you know what an assembling magazine is. Is there anybody who doesn't? OK. An assembling magazine is one where, say, I decide I'm going to do one. I send out, I want 50 sheets of your work at a certain size. And you send me the 50 sheets. I collate them with everybody else's 50 sheets. Bind them. You get a copy. Everyone that's in it gets a copy. And then it goes out through whoever is in my network that I want to bless with that particular publication. So that was Dana Ashley's things. It was called Spates Atlas. And he traveled around in his van. And then in 1971, we had Ken Friedman, who was a young upstarter, so to speak, in the flexes movement. And he came to Vancouver to do an installation at the Vancouver Public Art Gallery. And he also started a little publication called The Weekly Breeder. And I received a copy of that early on. It's a Sock of the Month Club, sort of a pun on the Book of the Month Club. And it was a sock with an announcement that this was the Sock of the Month Club. So here's Ken Friedman. In 71, 72, I had declared myself the town fool of Victoria. And I got a mailing of the Image Bank request list from friends in Vancouver. And I had started publishing the banana rag to sort of try to clue the Victoria audience into what the heck the town fool was up to, which was always mysterious to them. Anyway, so I get the Image Bank request list. I thought, well, this is fantastic, because Victoria was a real uphill climb. I can tell you, if I did what I was doing in Victoria in San Francisco, I'd have been, oh, yes, of course. Come on, yeah, let's do it. In Victoria, it was like, what? You want to do what? Anyway, so I connected with the Image Bank request list. I took it and said, oh, this sounds interesting. I sent everything to everyone that they wanted and said, I am interested in anything and everything about bananas. And believe me, it has not stopped. I have a basement full of it. And it's just amazing the generosity of this network. I mean, it's just mind blowing. So anyway, I came to San Francisco in 73 after touring around, visiting a number of my correspondents, including Lowell Darling at one point. I was looking, where am I going to go next? And it became very apparent very quickly that San Francisco was the place. And this is where I met the Bay Area Datists, which was Bill Gaglioni, Tim Mancusi, and Charles Ciccadelli. And at that time, they had taken over the weekly breeder as a publication. And that became sort of Tim's baby, although the three of them collaborated on it. But there were other publications called Quo's, the West Bay Datist, and then Tim and Bill and the Banana Olympics made the data brothers' costumes for the Banana Olympics. Now, that was an event I staged in Embarcadero Plaza. But I also received race suggestions, because it was a parody of the Olympics, race suggestions from the network. And I also had three people from the network came to San Francisco, Klaus Groh from Germany, Merak Konewski from Poland, who sadly missed the event by about five hours, because he didn't speak much English. And he got a bus from New York, and he arrived in town after the event was over, which was sort of the Polish joke of the Banana Olympics. Anyway, how are we doing for time? I got five minutes. OK, we're going fast here. Take my time. No, I won't take your time. Never take your time, Lowell. Let's see. Oh, and Tim also was into rubber stamps. From having seen Ray Johnson's work, his actually, I missed something about Tim. He was told by his teacher at art school when he was 18 years old, find out about Ray Johnson and get involved with his work. And so Tim went and looked up Johnson's gallery. And, low and behold, he just fell in love with the collage techniques that Ray was having and began corresponding and probably continued until Ray's death. So that was a big influence on Tim. And then the rubber stamps became a thing that he liked. He had some of his illustrations made into rubber stamps. And then later on, he became an illustrator for Stamp Front, no, it wasn't Stamp Francisco. It was personal exchange stamps. And he worked for them for a number of years, designing stamps. And so Tim has been very much involved in the network. And we had Gaglione, who was my then partner for a while. And I had started Vile Magazine when I first came to San Francisco and put out my first issue in 1974 as a parody of Vile, which was a parody of life. And the thing about the reason that I started it was because Vile Magazine started getting snotty about the newcomers to the male art and the quick copy crap that they were getting. It was so lame, it couldn't hardly limp into the waist basket. And so I thought, well, I happen to think this is a wonderful network and process. And so that was the origin of Vile. And I published four issues myself. And I allowed Gaglione to edit three. And he changed the format each time, and I got worse and worse. But anyway, not the magazine, the relationship. Anyway, we did finally part ways. But we did do a tour of Europe in 78 that took us to 29 different cities around Europe on the basis of our male art connections. And it was me who set that trip up, not Bill. I couldn't write this way out of a paper bag. I shouldn't be belating my ex on the stage. But anyway, in 1974, Esquire Magazine wrote, it was a photo story on called Their Arts Belong to Data. And there was a huge number of photographs of a number of us. Lowell Darling was one of them. Irene Dogmatic was one. I had a list that doesn't really matter. There was probably about a dozen of us, Dr. Brute and so on, in our various ridiculous, well, some are more ridiculous than others. I was in a banana costume. My first banana costume was hard to recognize as a banana. Just on my winding down here. The other thing I really must mention, a couple of things. Lama Mel in 1980 was involved in organizing the Interdata 80 Festival. And they also published the first anthology on correspondence art, called correspondence art in 1984. It was eaten as a part of the dinner of the Interdata 84 festivities by Buster Cleveland, who went off to New York after that. And the last person I really would like to mention, because she's going to show up, I believe, this afternoon in Skype, Ginny Lloyd, who first learned about mail art by looking after Mayan Bill's mail while we did a cross-canada tour in 1980. But she got into it big time and she published. She also organized Interdata 84, which was a major thing, sort of something like what Ginny's doing for this, except on diverse locations. She also published a copy edit, copy art exhibition, Blitz Kunst, and she had a storefront down on something like 7th or 6th Avenue. And she called it a storefront exhibition. I slept there one night downstairs in the basement, and I was like, we were on the floor. And I'm going, is this really OK? Anyway, Ginny isn't able to come here to San Francisco, but she did want to be present. And I wanted to make sure that you knew about her. She now has an artist stamp museum in Florida. If you ever are heading that way, you should check it out. So I shall hand this over now to whoever's going to be next. I guess you'll do an introduction. Thank you, John. Thank you, Anna. Next up, Leslie Caldera, also known as Creative Thing from Los Angeles. We'll give us a bit of history of Los Angeles, male art. OK. Leslie. OK, so I discovered male art in 1976. I was attending Cal State Fullerton, and somebody had put a display of male art in one of the kind of a bulletin board behind glass display windows. And I was just absolutely taken with that idea. And I started making things right away. I was already a collage assemblage artist, so that connected with me on a number of levels that I really liked. But it wasn't until about 1978 that I actually figured out there were other people I could send this stuff to. And I started entering male art shows in 78, I think. And by 1982, I organized my first male art show, Paper Ambassadors at Whittier College, which is where I was living at the time. And shortly after that, I started corresponding with other Los Angeles male artists, such as Michael Millett and Lon Spiegelman primarily. And it didn't take long to get invited to a male art gathering at Lon Spiegelman's house. Lon was kind of the hub of Los Angeles male art. He was very outgoing, very open and welcoming of everybody. I felt totally kindred-ship with him immediately. And most of the activities in Los Angeles happened around him, and it his home. He had a really glorious, large, old craftsman house in Silver Lake. So central location, big space, and a willing host. So that was kind of the center of Los Angeles activities. And everything that went on in Los Angeles from the very early 80s when I started getting involved with them to at least 1987 was centered around Silver Lake and Lon's home. I guess I just saw my opening remarks here, which I completely skipped over. I guess I knew even back then that if you stuck with something long enough, you'd become some kind of authority or historical figure in the activity. And definitely if you live long enough. And I think that that's just starting to happen for me as far as male art. At that time in all these years, I felt like I was a willing participant. I entered as many male art shows as I found out about. I was very active and corresponded with a lot of male artists all around the world. But now it's become history. And it's taken to another level. Lon Spiegelman experienced some personal issues that forced him to withdraw or step back from male art in the late, in the early 90s, I guess. And sadly, he passed away in 2002 at the age of 61. And as soon as Lon stepped back from his activities, all the air seemed to be taken out of the Los Angeles male art community. Some of us, like myself and Scooter and John Tostado and others, continue to correspond and do exhibitions and activities. But we didn't have that hub anymore. And that's something that I think I still miss to today. Lots of good memories and great times with all kinds of different people. Whenever a male artist came to Los Angeles from someplace else, they would invariably stay with Lon. And Lon would throw a big party for them. I remember going to Lon's house for gatherings for Wally Darnell, Al Lackerman, Peter Kusterman, John Hale Jr. from Dallas, Texas, among others. But as I said, we become part of history because time has gone by now. And unfortunately, part of that time going by is us losing some of the people who are very involved, are very integral to the Los Angeles male art community. Another person that we've lost recently about five years ago was Judith Hoffberg. And her focus was artist books. And her magazine, Umbrella, was pretty much dedicated to that. But she always had space for male art in Umbrella magazine. I know that myself and a lot of other male artists subscribe to it just for the male art exhibit listings. In a time before the internet and the digital technology that runs our lives these days, that was a vital link for male artists to the outside world and who was doing what and where to send work for exhibitions that were coming up. And I think that Judith, all the time, despite what she might have told you, she had a real sincere love for male art and even for male artists. And that came through very clearly in her including male art in Umbrella and the parties and activities that she participated in and organized for us in Los Angeles. I wanted to mention a couple of other artists who we've lost over the years. Rudolph and Jimmy Evans were very active in the 1980s. Unfortunately, they succumbed at a time when there was very little that could be done for AIDS. And they did not survive that. And more recently, another artist who was very active in the 80s, Menoie, passed away a few years ago from just getting old like the rest of us. So in retrospect, it seems like it was a short period of time, even though I've continued doing male art and other Los Angeles artists have continued producing male art and participating. But a very short time that's now kind of sealed in the amber of history that I'll never forget and I suppose in the future it'll be talked about and recorded. But as Anna said, the eternal network goes on and more people come in as others exit. And it's something that I hope that will continue for us as long as we can see into the future. Thank you, Leslie. I might add that after Alon's death, his family contacted me to do something with his correspondence. And I was able to place it in the Getty Research Library. So I was very happy to do that as a tribute to Alon who was an inspiration to me. Could I add something? Sure. I'm sorry to butt in. I was at the Getty recently and those papers and that collection is available for viewing. You just have to call ahead and make a reservation. But any weekday, anybody can go there and look through the Spiegelman collection. Yeah, and I think these new archives are going into libraries and museums are making a big evolution in male art because now academics have places to go to research the field and it's becoming more and more mainstream, talked about, whatever. It's become like a social practice aspect of contemporary art. So it's getting more and more attention. Next up, Carl Chu, probably the Dean of the Seattle Artist Amp School. All right, a few of you have these posters so I'm gonna just encourage you to unroll them and follow along with me. I think if you roll them down from the top and then you can kind of roll them up from the bottom as we go along. But I wonder, this poster right here is called an Evolutionary Bow Bob of Artist Amp Correspondents. And it really is an example of what everybody at this table has said that the network starts in a place and expands outward. And that's been the total story of my involvement in male art. So I'm gonna sit down now and go ahead and talk a little bit. And so if you're following along, I made stamps as a child. I used to paint tickets and I'd made little things. I love, I thought of myself as a counterfeiter. And I was fascinated by counterfeiting. My mom used to tell me stories about how during concentration camps people used to carve rubber stamps that look like a Nazi passport stamps and things like that. I could not imagine how that was possible. So I began trying it myself. And I did all kinds of things all the way through high school. Once a postal inspector came to my middle school science class and hauled me up because I had made a United States stamp. I'd actually drawn it on the paper. I had tried perforating with my mom's sewing machine, but it made these squiggly little lines and they weren't very satisfying. So I learned that to actually do the perforations right, I had to draw them perfectly. So I drew the stamps, made all the little shadows just right, made all the little perforations just right. And this was a particular stamp that was a worm commemorative. And U.S. worm commemorative. And the worm actually came out of the stamp and went into the envelope. And I mailed it to my dad, but the postal service got it because it said U.S. postage on it. And so they came to my school and the guy was really nice. He was really tall. He had very shiny black shoes. And they sat me down in the boy's dean's office and he just said, he had the envelope. And he said, did you do this? And I said, yeah. And he said, well, we really want to encourage you to design stamps, but you always have to not put U.S. postage on them. So they were very, very sweet to me, you know? Like, it was cool, okay? When I was in college, I was a zoology major. I had no idea about art. I didn't ever even think about art until I was a senior. And then I met a professor at UW in the art school. I'd wanted to be a marine biologist, but I started hanging out with him. And the reason I hung out with him, his name was Bill Ritchie, was because I went to a gallery and saw his work and he was making etchings of stamps, his own stamps. He was actually making a little beautiful little prints. And he inspired me to get back in school in the art department, not become a zoologist, and actually pursue a career in printmaking and video. And the minute the color Xerox machine was invented, the little wheels in my head just spun like crazy. And I said, color stamps. And I heard there was one in New York. It's probably one that Ed Higgins used, Todd Jorgensen's, I don't know, but I sent my friend there to New York. She was going to New York with my first chicken issue and she couldn't find it and came back and gave it to me. And I was very disappointed. But a week later, a color Xerox machine ended up in Seattle and somehow they called me. They knew I was looking for it when they called me on the phone, invited me to come over and use it. And that was my first sheet of stamps and it was the beginning of, right at the beginning of 1975. So immediately I knew that I had, I also get a perforating machine and I called a use printing equipment company and a half hour later they called back and they had located one in a guy's garage and it was $75 and I was like, oh, well imagine me, that was so much money. I was like, I don't know. And then my friend Bill said, you wanna make stamps, you better go out and buy it. So I drove out and I bought it and I can't tell you where that perforating machine has taken me. It's a lathe of manufacturing perforator. It's called the monitor. I think it's named after the like the Merrimack and the monitor, you know these things. They're like made of steel or pig iron. They are so heavy and I've perforated a million things and have a million other people perforate things on it. Okay, so I'm making stamps in my studio in Seattle. I enter an art show in Seattle called Footprint and I win a prize. Wow, I won a prize in an art show. And so about a day before the opening of the show, I'm in my studio and there's this huge smashing on the door and I hear this voice that says, Carl Chew, I'm Ed Higgins. I'm from New York and I make stamps too. And hold your hand up, it's over here. And now this was news to me because in Seattle, no one had ever heard, I'm serious. You talk about anybody in Seattle, any curator, gal, no one had ever heard of anybody making stamps before. And here was this upstart kid making his own postage stamp. But then I met Ed and Ed was like, you make stamps and you don't know who Ray Johnson is and you don't know all these people. He's like, he couldn't hardly believe his eyes. And because of Ed, I was like, all of my correspondence just took off. So like the big bang, it went like that. And if you look at this poster, you can start seeing right away, I was corresponding with Buster Cleveland. Ed turned out there was another person in Seattle who very quickly started making stamps. His name was Robert Rudine and some of you know him as Dogfish. And my friend Bill Ritchie started making stamps. So Bill and I were making stamps and then I began corresponding with people. The first big people I corresponded with were Harley. He was here, that was in the late 70s. Cavalini started sending me round trips. I didn't know who this guy was. And George Matunas actually came to my studio and spent a week at my studio making fluxes things like ping pong tables with holes in the paddles and a bathroom where if you wanted to pee, you had to climb up eight feet and try to aim down through this long thing. That really was mind boggling because George had made stamps. And so he traded stamps and we did a little collaborative piece together. Then a lot of people were starting to mention to me, there was somebody up in Vancouver named Jazz Felter and you're gonna get to see him later. Oh, you make stamps? Well, you should contact Jazz Felter. He's already had a show of artist stamps up in Vancouver. So then I had to get to know Jazz. And through Jazz I met Anna Banana, Ed Varney and it just took off. So then what happened in Seattle? Because I was making stamps and Dogfish was making stamps. Anything like that spawns a whole bunch of other people wanting to make stamps. And pretty quickly a whole little group of Seattle artist stamp makers formed. And if you look on the poster, Dominic is over on the left side with his number 70 tax paid stamp. And he's also known as Bugpost and he was exceptionally active in the 80s and 90s. The neatest thing about Bugpost is many of us have tried sewing machines as a perforator. Bugpost is a genius. So Bugpost said, I don't need to spend $3,000 on a perforator or 1,000, whatever it was back then. I'm gonna turn a sewing machine into a real perforator. And he redid his sewing machine so it had places to feed the stamps. He shaved off the needle so that it was a flat and he made a little template for it to go through. So it punched one hole at a time perfectly through this. You couldn't move the sheet sideways. So the perforations were perfectly straight and he got very good at putting it through. And the thing I liked about his stamps were the perforations were actually a little bit bigger than normal perforations. And I kind of always have liked bigger perforations rather than smaller ones. Then over on the right hand side, there was a Exotica post, Sheba de Kitty. And she tended to make stamps with people in very compromising positions. Bugpost introduced me to Francis Hall. Francis was a kite enthusiast but he made his post office was kite post. And so he made all these hundreds of beautiful stamps about kites and he would go to all the kite conventions and have his stamps at the conventions. Sadly Francis took his own life in about 1990 or a little bit before and so he's not with us. Over on the left hand side, the love stamp, the take-off on the love stamp is Jeff Dixon. And he's still active in Seattle, makes a sheet of stamps every once in a while. Then going up a little farther, there's some other people who are here. There's Eleanor Kent. I've got one of her fractal crochet pieces. And Eleanor, are you here Eleanor? Yeah, there she is back in the back. Yeah. I met Eleanor when I came to Interdata 84 and met Ginny Lloyd and a bunch of other people. Met Mike Millett. Scooter, who is here. Scooter, raise your hand. Scooter was already a stamp artist and he and I had already been corresponding. So, but that was an event here in San Francisco just like this event where people come and you meet people that you may have never met but you may have corresponded a few times with. And today, you know, yesterday I met John Tostado and I met Nico and I met a bunch of other people who I had never known, the sticker dude. It's really great to come to something like this and meet people for the first time. Up in the upper right-hand corner, I'm sure I'm just about out of time, there's a whole group of people that then started making stamps and they all came to my studio to use my perforator. So, there was never a day at my studio where there weren't one or two people perforating like hundreds of sheets of stamps. Tisha, who is still very active but she's really more of a book artist now. Beth Sellers was the curator at a local museum. Sandy Jackson, Bimbolonia Post, is still lives in Seattle and Tim Lord actually came over from Spokane to perforate his stamps. Elizabeth Zoz, Zoz, Z-O-I-S, now lives in New York. And Marvin Johnson, he had actually been somebody that had come to my shows for years and years and just, you know, he's one of those people who came to your show and just looked up in your eyes like, Carl Chew. And I was so glad when he started making his own stamps. Because then I could like be on a more level playing field with him. So he became a Bufo Post and his stamps are just absolutely gorgeous. And the last person, there's two more people I'm gonna recognize here on this. Jerry Smith, another commercial artist in Seattle, began making stamps. But then in about 2009, I met Jack Latiman who is Cascadia Art Post and Jack's here too. He was here yesterday. So that's a brief history of artist stamps in Seattle and the stamp art scene in Seattle. And well, it's still incredibly rich. I enjoy now, for many of the first years, I actually thought I could make my living off of selling artist stamps. And I did actually sell a lot of them back in the 80s. I think the price eventually went up in a gallery to $125 a sheet. Then the tech bubble burst. Galleries all went out of business in Seattle and I stopped being able to sell anything. And it's actually led to a much healthier attitude. I went back to school, became a teacher. So now I'm a teacher, I earn my money from that and I can make all the mail art I want and send it out and I don't even have to worry about it. And as I told John, I am so much happier. Paul Chu. You know, Anna mentioned previously that a Tim Mancusi of the Bay Area, Dada's found out about a mail art in New York from his teacher who told him to go visit Ray Johnson. And that teacher was Stephen Caltonback who's a noted California conceptual artist who left New York and went to Sacramento for a long time. And it was instrumental bringing Ray Johnson to Sacramento. Another conceptual artist of that period was Lowell Darling. And he's our next panelist, Lowell Darling. I'd actually rather listen. You know, I didn't realize that since the topic I'm supposed to talk about, the Deca Dance, which was for myself and a lot of artists that I was involved with, a sort of end of correspondence art. And I realized that it was also like everybody calls themselves mail artists. And as I recall, before the Deca Dance, it was correspondence art, you know. And I think that the mail artists seem to have had more fun than the correspondence artists. But I think that the reason is that mail art grew out of correspondence art. And correspondence art grew out of far too serious an art world for them, and which is why they turned to creating their own networks and systems and taking charge of essentially what they did with their work. And so anyway, I made a note here, something, oh, my introduction to the mail. I thought I'd add that quickly. I was 14 years old and I had heard that Norman Rockwell didn't do commercials. And then the Rock Island Argus, I grew up in Rock Island, Illinois. I saw a Norman Rockwell drawing on a four roses or three roses, a whiskey ad. And so I knew that he lived in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. So I wrote to him and asked him, you know, what is this? And he wrote me back and said that when he was young, before he had a name, when he sold something, he couldn't control what the person did with it once they bought it because artists didn't have copyright laws like artists and musicians, I mean writers and musicians. And so this is 1956, I'm 14, and I was determined to become famous before I ever tried to sell any art. And I'm now 72 years old and pretty much stuck to that plan, which really being a pro bono public performance artist, which is actually what I call myself, is not a really wise business plan. And I was the decadence was one of several large events that I created primarily through the mail. And another one was called the artist and lawyers ball. And in 1968, because I wasn't making any money as an artist, the IRS declined to accept my deductions and said that I was not an artist. So I set out to prove that I was an artist without making, selling or showing art. And at the same time, I was sweeping the floors in Buckminster Fuller's office as my student job. And he was working on population crisis statistics and all the world resources inventory. And I decided that I would nail down Carbondale, Illinois, where Bucky was and I was, and to keep it from falling off the planet due to the excess weight of overpopulation coupled with the centrifugal force of the earth. And another student from the campus newspaper put it on the UP wire services. And the next morning, I was a caricature of an artist looking very much like Salvador Dolly, you know, with a great big hammer and a great big nail on a little teeny world on the front page of the Chicago Daily News or the Tribune I can't remember. And, you know, artists, you know, nails world. And I continued to do this practice from that point on. And so my mail was primarily the art of crank letters beginning in 1956 with Norman. And a lawyer, Monroe Price, was trying to start an organization called the Advocates for the Arts, which was the first pro bono public, you know, or pro bono legal service for artists. And he couldn't find any artists with, you know, that would come to lawyers to talk to them about their problem. You know, we like to solve our own problems our way, like driving the bureaucrats crazy. So anyway, he took my case and he did in, you know, five minutes, what it had taken me years to do. But during these years, I became kind of quasi famous because I made an enormous amount of news, nailing cities to the ground all over Europe, you know, in America, very hit and run. And so anyway, he had, you know, I'd gotten a teaching job at Otis Art Institute, which was next door to the Elks building where the decadence, now it's a connection finally. Anyway, I've been three years by myself. I'm no good at talking, you know, with any kind of logic. So anyway, this lawyer proved I was an artist and, but I'd been teaching, I was on a panel at the College Art Association with Bruce Nauman and Bruce had been offered this teaching job, teach video at Otis Art Institute. He already had Leo Castelli, he didn't really need the job. I needed the job, so I took it. They didn't have video equipment at Otis. So I was teaching video without video. So the first day of class, I asked my students what grade they wanted, they all said they wanted A's except one woman that said she wanted a B and I said, won't you take an A? And she said, I don't think I'm an A artist. At this point, they didn't know I was a teacher. We were sitting around waiting for the teacher. And I pulled my grade book out and I said, A, A, A, A, A, you sure you don't want a B? I said, I'm the teacher, you could have an A, no. Okay, all right, B. And I said, now we don't have video equipment, so let's turn this into a male art, correspondence art entity. So they decided to call themselves General Otis and I decided that I said I made them a promise to get them in art in America. As a teacher, it was the least I could do. So David Zach, the Canadian art writer and a friend of a lot of male artists and stuff, who absolutely went mad. He was the craziest human on earth. Anyway, David had written an article that a lot of the early correspondence artists hated and it was called male art, blah, blah, I don't know what all. But it was mainly about artists who were worked in clay like Clayton Bailey and people like this that were using the mail as well. So all the correspondence artists, the intermage bankers and everybody, they thought this was not the company they wanted to be in. But my students were very happy because the cover was a big mail of a bag of, postal canvas bag of mail with all the mail pouring out and there were a couple of them that were General Otis. So anyway, I quit teaching because of data actually, another correspondence artist in a space company were doing very well traveling around the country. Me is the Fat City School of Fine's Art and with the pseudonym Dudley Fines and he was a space and Dana would connect one artist with other artists and he was part of this network and I would give a master's degree to anybody that wanted one. Now when I got my MFA, they realized that I didn't have a bachelor's degree at the time but I was also more famous than anybody else in the faculty. And so they sent me the degree in abstention when I was in London nailing it down. So I got both of my degrees in the mail at the same time and there was a woman down the corner who was insane and she lost her legs but they were under her but she didn't know it. And every day she'd asked me if I'd seen her legs and I said there they are and she'd say thank you and go on her way. So one day she asked me where her legs at the time. Oh, the decadence, we haven't got to the decadence. What was the great big party? This woman, I gave her my bachelor's degree and then we had the decadence and we lived happily ever after. And well I had so many funny little stories. I know, we'll do a next panel. Next time, next time in Israel. Yeah, maybe we can have like five minutes. Oh Jerusalem. Questions and answers. Thanks, I'm on the court of Jewish. Yeah. Jenny, do we have time for questions? Okay, yeah. Anybody want to take it? I don't see the demise of the Postal Service to tell you the truth. The thing about the Postal Service do the only people that go around to every house in the fricking country. So I mean, why can't they take some social service action to look in on the elderly or this or that? I think the Postal Service just has to change a little bit and draw upon what it's so good at, which is communicating with people and everything like that. A lot of people also say that male art is dead. It was a force for social connection in the old days and now the internet does that. So who needs the Postal Service or male art? And I always say, have you seen the work that Carl Chew is doing? It's about the best male art I've seen in 30 years. So I mean, male art is not dying if there's people like Carl Chew and other people around the world doing what they're doing. I want to say something. In the back? Yes? Yeah, well fortunately not. Go ahead, Annie. It isn't easy to explain male art to people who aren't involved. I mean, it's almost inconceivable. Many people never even use the Postal System at this point and a letter writing, I mean, why would you write a letter? You can send an email or you can connect on Facebook or any of these other things. So I would suggest sending them to a website. Do you have a website that explains male art? Somebody have a, anybody? It's out there. What? Yeah, I mean, just Google male art and there it is. I mean, this used to be an underground art form that you could, yeah, but. Yeah, yeah. I-U-O-M-A. Yeah, and it's online. If I could just mention one thing that I'll turn it over to other people. You can actually find a lot of correspondence art there. Male art's like this pool. Whatever you say about male art, it reflects more on you than it does on male art. I mean, male art is just this big, you know, thing. Well, it's communication and it's using the Postal Service to communicate with other people who have like minds or not like minds who wanna share information, object, whatever you like. Sometimes they put together publications, sometimes they do their own work that they wanna get to you through the mail. Sometimes they wanna come to your town and just hang out. It's like, it's just a network. Like Anna said earlier. I wanna give everybody my address. I'd like to give back in the mail art movement. So, before you leave, take your pencils out. And the last thing we'll do is I'll give you my address. And I'll send you all an MFA. I don't know if this is on or not. Anyway, I just wanted to mention that this male art is so sophisticated. I think of Connie Wang, who we both used to work for Bard at one time and she had this wonderful, where she would cancel her stamp that she had made. And I remember this one time it was used in Marilyn Monroe also and then she had her address on it. And just that simple, humble statement, I still cherish it. And this was from the late 80s. But also I wanted to comment that since the 50s, I have kept in touch with my, we keep in touch my Japanese pen pal and I, I still have all the times we'd put on all these commemorative stamps and add to it. And that's just a humble form between two people. And I'm thinking, and really for quite a few years now, we'll aid that with youth today to encourage them to write a letter whether it's doing the teachers like how they have pen pals. But just to start writing and actually go to the post office and get a stamp and put on it that we can keep this going. And also I was just reading in the Daily Cal yesterday, somebody had written a column stating that we're soon gonna forget how to do cursive. And it's becoming a lost art. So I think just in our humble ways and spreading a buzz around besides here and the networking within to open it up. And I know I'm doing what I can in all sorts of classrooms as a substitute teacher, K through 12. So I encourage us all to do what we can besides here. And I'm just grateful for the examiner having that little blurb there to know it was here today. So thank you very much. Thank you. How about one more in the back? Or it's huge in it. Go ahead. I wanna know, you talked about that worm stamp. Did they give it back to you? Yes. And do you still have it? I think my dad has it somewhere. Yes, joking. And this is for Mr. Garland. I've actually been studying your work since I was in college. I was very inspired by your take on politics, combining not just art with politics, but human. And I've extended it into my ball, but the San Francisco Pride and the Magical Fairies. Much to some people's great annoyance. I never stop, I never stop talking. It goes on forever. Oh, thank you, thank you very much, appreciate it. Wait a minute. I was gonna give you my address. Instead, you can find it. Okay, 101 Rodeo Avenue, Rodeo, California, 94572.