When I began exchanging zines, tapes, and mail art with an array of correspondents, one of those I chanced upon was Mark Pawson. A friend had said to me that my envelopes were a bit boring (whatever might be said for the inside contents): his were always festooned with weird stickers and stamps. Fortunately, Mark P had the answer. He produced trapezoidal envelopes.
What the Royal Mail sorting machine made of these, I don’t know, but it struck me as a great idea to ask why envelopes had to be oblong. There was a hint in this re-imagining of the envelope as a crystal shard or meteorite fragment that suggested the uncanny geometry of a Lovecraft story. But that wasn’t all Mark Pawson produced: there were all kinds of strange, swirling paper objects, and he was amazingly prolific. You never quite knew what would fall out of the envelope.
The same Mark Pawson (it can only be he) at Disinfotainment is still offering a bewildering and bizarre array of publications and products. You can get, for example, Monsterama, a scrapbook of imagery from vintage SF and horror films and comics, now in its third issue. Recently announced are reprints of futuristic, apocalyptic graphic novels by cyberpunk artist Tetsunori Tawaraya.
Also in the shop is The Address Is the Art, ‘three decades worth of collected envelopes from family, friends, mail-artists from around the world, boring letters from the bank and more’. And surely only Mark Pawson could offer a book of holes, entitled ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, ‘a by-product of the badge-making process’.
Even his events page is a picturesque experience, with announcements for the London Tattoo Show, the Anarchist Book Fair, Table Top Museums of the Art Workers’ Guild, Zine Dream #13, Shake (‘some kinda art fair’), a Samhain Fayre, the Small Publishers’ Fair, the Lakes International Comic Arts Festival, and the Satanic Flea Markets.
Mark Pawson describes himself as’ a one-man production line creating and selling a constant stream of artists books, postcards, badges, multiples, T-shirts and other essential ephemera’, and ‘a self-confessed image junkie, photocopier fetishist, semi-retired International Postal Art Superstar and afficionado of accessible, affordable, low-tech hi-fi printing methods’. All that, and then some.
(Mark Valentine)
It's all true!
ReplyDeleteI remember in the 70s/80s the late Genesis P-Orridge was always getting mail-art chain letters through the post ... except when they were intercepted by the men in black. Sounds like something he'd have loved.
ReplyDeleteMy friend Paul Di Filippo--a well known and versatile writer of all sorts of fantastika--is celebrated for the mailers he decorates whenever he sends a book to a friend. He usually cuts up old magazines and creates surrealist collages a la Max Ernst in "Une Semaine de Bonte." I've even framed a fairy restrained one. It shows Lucille Ball--star of the 1950s sitcom "I Love Lucy"--at her breakfast table reading The Washington Post. This seems to be an actual illustration from a magazine that reproduced this scene from one of Lucy's shows. Paul has enhanced this image by adding a thought balloon coming from Lucy's head that reads: 'I never understand anything that Michael Dirda writes." --md
ReplyDelete