(APS no. 10)
A four-hour slide–audio show by György Galántai with three projectors about the use of artistamps (related to the World Art Post exhibition), accompanied by “mail art music.” A “joint show” of the Artpool Slide Bank, artistamp, postcard and envelope collection, and sound archive.
DOCUMENT: postcard-invitation for the exhibition, installation plan for the slide show, photo WEB-DOCUMENT: www.artpool.hu/
events/APS_10.html
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Installation design for the slide show:
1. Postcards with artistamps, 2. Envelopes and letters, 3. Artistamp publications
World Art Post exhibition interiors at Fészek Klub, 1982
A r t P o o L e V e n t s 1 9 7 9 – 1 9 9 1 71
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WoRld aRt poSt (apS No. 6)
Installation design for the exhibition
In the entrance hall: continuous slide projection showing the use of artistamps
WoRld aRt poSt (apS No. 6)
Source: Text on the back cover of the World Art Post catalog
The exhibition in April 1982 (APS 6) and the present publication are the first tangible results of more than two years of fascinating correspond-ence and organization work, following our decision to create a systematic and at least in the documentation, a complete collection of artists’ stamps in Central Europe.
The idea came up after Cavellini’s successful Budapest exhibition which attracted and provoked many Hungarian artists to participation. We thought then of organizing a large scale international exhibition, i.e. as far as that was possible under our present circumstances. We wanted the whole world to appear in one definite place at one definite time.
From this the project of asking for commemorating stamps evolved almost by itself and, subsequently, the idea of creating a collection of artists’ stamps. We mailed an enormous number of invitations, attempting to get in touch with everyone somehow connected with stamps. A lot of people helped us by publishing the news of our project, multiplying the invitation text, and supplying useful information. Here we wish to express our gratefulness to Hans Sohm for having enriched our collection with very valuable, older stamps.
We hope that this publication will, beside briefly surveying the history of artists’ stamps, give a taste of that marvelous picture that has opened before our eyes looking at the day by day arriving projects for memorial stamps – forming, with a disregard to any kind of geographical, political, or cultural boundaries, several meaningful series.
Our thanks are due to all participants.
J. & G. Galántai
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Cover and title page of the World Art Post catalog, 1982
WoRld aRt poSt (apS No. 6)
A r t P o o L e V e n t s 1 9 7 9 – 1 9 9 1 73
Our connection with Mike Bidner [Canadian artist and philatelist] dates from 1982, the year when he heard about the WAP catalog, which I sent him on his request. From that point on, we regularly received his long letters – all printed on matrix printer paper folds – and promotion materials. I always opened these letters in admiration (also somewhat enviously), as during those years the Hungarian secret service, for reasons beyond my comprehension, made it shockingly impossible for me to satisfy my interest in these innocent artists’ stamps. […]
It was not until five years later, in 1987, when I returned to artists’ stamps.
Commissioned by the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts (namely, Judit Geskó), I advertised a new call for entries under the title “Stamp Images.” At this point, I realized the magnitude of work that Mike Bidner had done during the previous five years in the world of what he called, the ARTISTAMP. What happened was that we received an inconceivable amount of stamp art works, all of various techniques, both unique pieces and copied ones. The collection housed in Artpool became multiplied, so that the Gallery of Prints and Drawings at the Museum of Fine Art proved to be too small to exhibit the entire material. That is why we were bound to select from the entries, quite contrary to the rules of mail art. Mike Bidner considered presenting his activities within the Budapest show, but his accelerating disease thwarted his plan. […]
Source: György Galántai: Thomas Michael Bidner (1944–1989) – A Commemorative Exhibition, 2005, www.artpool.hu/Artistamp/Artistampex/megnyito_e.html (English translation by Krisztina Sarkady-Hart).
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Advertising flyer for Stamp Film, 1984 Artistamps by Michael Bidner from the Mail Art Masterpiece stamp sheet, 1982
WoRld aRt poSt (apS No. 6)
Bidner was working on a huge artistamp catalog and already at the time had made lists with a computer, etc. In order to make the list accurate, a lot of correspondence was also needed. Once he sent us a photo of one of his acquaintances wearing a T-shirt with a stamp pattern on it. The stamp pattern of the T-shirt that had been bought in Paris was from stamps in our World Art Post catalog. It came as a surprise to us when at the end of 1987, Bidner wrote in a letter that his health had drastically deteriorated and he asked if we would accept his artistamp collection, since with the exception of Artpool, he hadn’t been able to find a museum that would have been happy to accept it and handle it with the respect it deserved. We regarded his offer as a great honor. Bidner died of AIDS in 1989. We got his collection and its documentation in 1990 after the change in the political system in Hungary.1 The ultimate goal of Mike Bidner’s artistic endeavor was to achieve the recognition of artists’ stamps as paraphilately. He never learned it – although he could have possibly been informed somehow – that, by mere chance, his desire had come true, albeit not in Canada, but in Hungary. In the year of 1988, the first comprehensive stamp encyclopedia of the world was published in Budapest, in which – owing to the “Stamp Images” exhibition as had been organized by the Artpool in 1987 – as many as six entries were devoted to artists’ stamps.2
1 Kata Bodor: op. cit. [pp. 90, 93].
2 György Galántai: Thomas Michael Bidner (1944–1989), op. cit.
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Michael Bidner’s Artistamp archive and collection (polaroid photos from the Bidner bequest)
Mark Dicey, Sandra Tivy, Mike Bidner, Don Mabie [Chuck Stake]
at the Correspondence Art Gallery in Calgary, Alberta, August 1986Bidner’s note on the recto of the photo: “Sandra is wearing a shirt of Artpool World Art Post stamps made in Paris on cotton material, silkscreened (I think)”
Artistamps by Michael Bidner from the Mail Art Masterpiece stamp sheet, 1982
A r t P o o L e V e n t s 1 9 7 9 – 1 9 9 1 75 9–15 June 1982 Artpool Studio, Budapest