While reading about some of the amazing mail art and Boggs’
bills in Networked Art, I was
reminded of the National Park Passport book I own. The park system sells a
small passport book for people to buy and have stamped at each National Park,
Historic Place, or Monument they visit, exactly as one would stamp a passport
when visiting a country. Each park or monument has their own unique stamp that
mirrors the type of stamp one would get while going through customs (looking
exactly like the canceling stamp of Guy Bleus on page 15). I have collected
hundreds of these passport stamps over the years during my travels. In fact,
the National Park passport program seems like it derives from (or at least is
parallel to) the mail art movement.
However, I would argue that these stamps are not mail art,
but pure kitsch, precisely because they do not fit Craig Saper’s theory of
intimate bureaucratic art. While these passport stamps are directly based on
the bureaucratic passport system of international customs offices and are a
part of a collective endeavor by travelers, they are not conspiratorial, do not
share a new language, do not destroy the origin of the international passport
system, and do not depend on an individual artist’s craft. In other words,
these stamps are merely kitsch: mass produced imitations designed to appeal to
the largest number of tourists.
I find it interesting that a bureaucratic entity has turned a
mail art element into a kitsch product that advertises its own governmental
program. To me, this idea of an “intimate bureaucracy” is what separates mail
art from kitsch. It seems like a very fine line—many of the mail art examples
in the book seemed “kitschy.” However, the ultimately subversive qualities of
this art that resists the label of kitsch can be found in the idea of the
intimate bureaucracy, which the National Park Passport program fails to have.
(But I will still collect those stamps!)
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