ART CARS

The culture of the United States has been described by some as a "car culture." Unique in the world, the transportation infrastructure and urban form of the U.S.A. since the early 20th century has overwhelmingly been developed around a single mode, the private automobile. Owning and driving one's own car is a preoccupation of most teenagers here as a declaration of independence. In most metropolitan areas of the U.S., only 10% of all households do not have at least one car available. Advertising to induce new car purchases is incessant on commercial television. Dependence upon the car for individualistic mobility by most Americans is a given. The most popular weekly program on National Public Radio stations is a show called "Car Talk." So embedded is the automobile in the American psyche, one could characterize many Americans as car crazy.

Some people do not take their automobiles quite so seriously. They decorate their cars in imaginative color schemes and designs, sometimes affix figurines or toys to the bodies or dashboard, and often modify the original body into diverse forms such as a dragon, a telephone receiver, or a power boat. In 1974, a countercultural performance group named Ant Farm buried a set of big-finned Cadillacs nose-down in a field along Route 66 near Amarillo, Texas as a statement mocking "car culture." Nowadays, art cars do not seem so exceptional, but they still attract attention and comment. In the traffic congestion so prevalent in Seattle, it is always fun to see an art car on the street.

Cascadia Artpost honors the appearance of the art car in American life in the issuance of a sheet of 50 artistamps (only eight are shown here). The images appearing on the stamps were taken at the art car show held during the June 2008 Fremont Street Fair (Fremont is a city neighborhood in Seattle adjacent to the Ballard neighborhood that is the home of Cascadia Artpost), plus the Honda art car in the process of creation by my spouse. May you too enjoy these mobile images of artistic expression.

SORROWS OF EMPIRE SERIES:
OCCUPYING THE WORLD

Several years ago, while waiting at a bus stop across our city in the West Seattle neighborhood, we were simultaneously fascinated and shocked to see a large sign on the side of the American Legion Hall reading, “God Bless Our Troops, Thanks for Protecting the World.” A week later, we returned with a camera to document the sign. The sign is still there.

Shocked because of the blatancy of the expression of American exceptionalism, the underlying assumption being that the United States has a moral and divinely sanctioned right to occupy the world with over 700 military bases on the pretext of protecting the world’s peoples against… what, exactly?

Fascinated because so seldom do most Americans question why the United States has a larger military budget than the next 25 countries combined, or see this global military presence as anything other than a natural extension of military bases in Alaska and Hawaii, let alone as the enforcer of a global empire. The great American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr criticized “our dreams for managing history” as doomed to failure. Andrew Bacevich, in his 2008 book The Limits of Power, The End of American Exceptionalism, cites a widespread sense of entitlement for maintaining the American way for life, founded on material consumption and individual autonomy. The sorrow is the futility of this pursuit: militarily impossible, politically threatening to democratic institutions, and economically untenable. Yet, to question these premises is to be exiled outside the boundaries of allowable political discourse in the United States. What political commentator Tom Englehardt calls “the language of empire” works to undermine any attempt at discourse.

However, reality is conspiring to erode the ability of American political elites to continue the course. The global economic crisis and the disappearance of trillions of dollars of wealth are raising the specter of national financial ruin and accelerated economic decline.

Can we begin to see the world and define our own possibilities differently? The first step is to truly see differently what we so easily have taken for granted. In believing we are capable of doing so lies hope. That’s what this artistamp seeks to do.

S P R I N G 2009

It is the spring season in Seattle, though in many respects April still seems like Winter In America. Seattle's weather has been five to ten degrees cooler than the average, with snow falling this past week on the morning of the second day of April. The economy of the United States continues to contract, with official unemployment climbing to 8.5% and General Motors teetering less than two months away from probable bankrupcy. Activities on the street seem to be going on as before, yet daily conversations tend to veer toward some topic of worry and concern.

But pay attention - there is still beauty to note in the world. Here in Cascadia, the Pacific Northwest region of North America in the Northern Hemisphere, the cherry tries are beginning their bloom, bulbs are poking out of the ground and breaking out in colorful flowers, and the days grow longer.

Cascadia Artpost commemorates this season by reproducing four scenes photographed from past springs. The two pictures of tulips were photographed in 2005 on the street outside my apartment. One year ago, I was walking with my camera down the street of our current residence in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle (often I take a camera with me to document the environs as I walk) and noticed the childrens' chalk drawing on the pavement. Walking farther and crossing the street, I couldn't help but notice the accumulated flower petals in the gutter.

Seeing and perceiving shape our daily outlook on life. The Cascadian poet William Stafford (1914-1993) once wrote a poem about this:

Seeing and Perceiving

You learn to like the scene that everything

in passing loans to you - a crooked tree

syncopated upward branch by pre-

established branch, its pattern suddening

as you study it; or a piece of string

forwarding itself, that straight knot so free

you puzzle slowly at its form (you see

intricate but fail at simple); or a wing,

the lost birds trailing home.

These random pieces begin to dance at night

or when you look away. You cling to them

for form, the only way that it will come

to the fallible: little bits of light

reflected by the sympathy of sight.

F L U X U S

GEORGE BRECHT, FLUXUS ARTIST
(1926 – 2008)

We were generally aware of the Fluxus movement during our university years in the 1960’s, through the music of John Cage and the works of artists like Claes Oldenberg. The name George Brecht only registered in our memory because his last name was easy to associate with the German playright Bertolt Brecht. Mr. Brecht, born George MacDiarmid, changed his last name while a soldier in the U.S. Army in Germany around 1945, because he liked the way Brecht sounded.

George Brecht again came to our attention in 2001 when we were delving into the history of artistamps and mail-art. The Fluxus movement – the word “Fluxus” means literally, “to flow” – created art directly from the world and invited the audience to participate directly in perception, cognition, and creation. Postal art and communication publicly through the international postal system became one expression of Fluxus, documented by Chuck Welch’s Eternal Network, A Mail Art Anthology (University of Calgary Press, 1995).

Although Brecht did produce some rubber stamps, we are not aware that he ever created any artistamps. Nonetheless, as a transportation planner we were fascinated with one of Brecht’s early works, Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event) to John Cage (1959), involving a gathering of a large number of disparate motor vehicles in a public space. As part of a retrospective of George Brecht’s work in September 2005, Museum Ludwig in Brecht’s hometown of Köln, Germany held a reenactment of Motor Vehicle Sundown in Köln’s central cathedral square with the artist present and directing traffic, so to speak. An eyewitness, Anna Dezeuze, described the experience:

“A crowd gathered, attracted by the unexpected grouping, but wandered rather aimlessly as the drivers of each vehicle performed such mundane activities as blowing horns, opening and closing doors, operating windscreen wipers and switching headlights on and off: there was no apparent order, no climax, no clear beginning or end. This was one of Brecht’s more Cagean works, and the simultaneity of the actions and large-scale organisation required to stage the performance are uncharacteristic of Brecht’s later, more minimal, work, but the deliberate sense of uncertainty is certainly one of Brecht’s most radical achievements.”
(Excerpted from Anna Dezeuze, “Brecht for beginners,” Papers of Surrealism, Issue 4, Winter 2005)

In Brecht’s own words, his art was a means of “ensuring that the details of everyday life, the random constellations of objects that surround us, stop going unnoticed.”

Brecht left the United States in 1965. After settling in Köln in 1972, he maintained a low profile until the Museum Ludwig’s George Brecht “Heterospective” in 2005 (the exhibition subsequently was moved in 2006 to Barcelona’s MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona).

George Brecht died on December 5, 2008 in Köln. Cascadia Artpost honors Brecht’s life and work with a pair of artistamps. The orange posterization is based on a 1960 photo of Brecht taken by Scott Hyde, while the blue posterization features a scene with the artist at Museum Ludwig’s 2005 Heterospective, from a photo taken at the event by Pietro Pellini.

A note about the Fluxus postcard:

On a trip to an antiques store with spouse and a friend in early January, we made the unexpected finds of a set of arithmetic flash cards and game cards with an interesting arrow in a “shock wave” pattern. Turned on their sides, the flash cards become something more than mathematical functions. These found objects immediately became appropriate subjects for a Fluxus postcard. We’d like to think that George Brecht would have noticed.

P O E T R Y

A Postcard in Memory of Donald Evans
~ Robert Farnsworth, The Missouri Review (Vol. 11, No.1, 1988)

Walking past a boatyard full of cradled sloops

last night, I thought of you. Yellow portholes

yielded the shoulders of somebody doing delicate

work, floating perhaps, above a coast he hopes

he will explore, or stilting his compass across

the pale deeps. Three just-varnished blocks

beaded a rope across the cockpit. In the flat

surrounding fields, luminous local vegetables

hide beneath dark leaves, and on the pier at

evening, thousands of red-needled sea urchins,

swung from a trawler's hold, pour loudly

into a truck. But the stolid, mumbling, upwind

flight of the blimp each morning most brings

you to mind - outward bound for Nadorp,

Iles des Sourds, Mangiare. Most of your countries

had just achieved independence, or had steadily

reclaimed themselves from cold ocean and sky.

They linger at the margins of our maps.

Cancelled on yellowed envelopes, or fixed

like stars to black collector sheets, tinctured

in the watercolor you said could not be labored,

their stamps commemorate our love of minor

beauties, perishable things. In the full panes

of your exotic issues, made of tiny, certain strokes

and pastel fogs, I recognize myself, the boy

who wanted everything arrayed, passed through

imagination's tender lens, orderly as the leaded

green and mustard meadows tilting on a wingtip,

where long archipelagos of shadows slowly drift.

INAUGURATION

The Cascadia Artpost commemoration of Barack Obama’s inauguration as the 44th President of the United States brings together two iconic images to capture the contradictory impulses of the moment. In the background is a portion of the pop poster portrait of Obama drawn by Los Angeles street artist Shepard Fairey. Fairey’s image, variously captioned with “HOPE” and later “PROGRESS,” has spawned a number of parodies of other political and cultural figures, but nonetheless has become one of the icons of the 2008 political landscape. In the foreground, we overlaid our own drawing inspired by Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” drawn in various versions by Munch between 1893 and 1910. Munch’s expressive image of manic anxiety captures perfectly the obverse popular mood in the face of dismal economic news and the global disarray of 21st century capitalism.

If the juxtaposition of these two contrasting images seems ambiguous, well, it is. Our suffering foreground image, drawn in an 8-inch by 10-inch size with color felt-tip and black drawing pens, has been portrayed in a cloak of white stars against a blue field, with two other watchful blue figures in the background. He/she is struggling with hands over ears to cope. Meanwhile, the steely centeredness of Obama’s image rises in the background. We have to admit that the feeling when we first combined the two images was pretty creepy. That’s one possible reaction. But an alternative response might be a possible tempering of the foreground panic by the reassuring solidity of the Obama image rising in the background.

Although originally prepared for an Inauguration Day (January 20th) exchange, the artistamp was mailed to a much wider list on a postcard satirizing a historic advertisement offering a free savings bank with the purchase of a toaster. A friend sent us the original image with the satirical coupons, which we modified to call attention to the TARP (the shabby acronym standing for Troubled Assets Relief Program) bailout of overextended banks and failing U.S. automakers using public funds (or, more accurately, public borrowing).

Our intent was not to saddle Obama with blame for TARP, but only to recognize the prior confining commitments (symbolized by a rubber-stamped vise) in place when Obama has taken office. Powerful financial and corporate interests are lobbying for continuing government financial support, while laying off thousands of workers as the unemployment rate climbs steadily toward 10 percent. Whether the Obama Inauguration may truly mark the beginning of a more hopeful era will depend on how well the rest of us lobby our own interests and the reaction to those efforts.

First Day of Issue

21 November 2008

Welcome to the blogsite of Cascadia Artpost. Cascadia Artpost represents the formalization of a personal postal art expression for the northwestern part of the United States and larger region that is my home. In view from Seattle, Washington, at times when the clouds lift is the Cascade Mountain range, extending from the Canadian province of British Columbia to the U.S. state of California. If you are within sight of these beautiful mountains, you can consider yourself in the region of Cascadia. Cascadia is the part of the world I mentally and physically inhabit.

When I was a teenager, I collected postage stamps, and twenty years ago acquired a book on the watercolor artistamps of Donald Evans. However, my own interest in designing artistamps and mail-art began in November 2001, when I was organizing a set of photos from a visit to Latvia and accidentally downsized an image on the computer. The panorama from the 27th floor of Hotel Latvia became an intriguing stamp-sized image. I printed a copy of the image on an inkjet printer. I decided to create a faux Latvian set of stamps to decorate the outside of a surprise birthday package for one of my co-workers.

The result was so well received that I decided to keep experimenting with photos and graphic designs in a stamp format. An internet search introduced me to the term "artistamp," and what has been called "the eternal network" of mail artists. Making artistamps was for me an excellent way to synthesize my personal interests in photography, art and graphic design.

Initially I simply used "Cascadia" or "Cascadiapost" in the corner of stamps I created. In August 2002 I chose the name "Cascadia Artpost" and in January 2003 recorded this name as a member of AML, the Artistamp Mailing List, a loose association of mail artists in the U.S. and Canada.

How have artistamps made a difference in my life? Just like any artistic expression, artistamps reinforce personal self-identity by sharing a vision and ideas with others. I value the contacts and the content of postal exchanges over the years, and especially meeting a few of my correspondents in person. The interplay of postal services and the internet have created an opportunity for a network of global democratic expression among at least those who can afford either postage or have access to a computer connection. It is my fervent hope and prayer that our exchanges can also create occasions that help give voice to the visions and ideas those who are unable, for various reasons, to contribute to the network.

There will be more to come at this blog, but for now I'll close with a quote taken from an essay on memory written by an acquaintance in the United Kingdom:

"The fight for a sense of self-identity becomes a fight to make personal memory have a place in the wider social consciousness."

~ Jack at CASCADIA ARTPOST