Reviews

By Rob Haeseler, May 18th 1998

They're not licked yet.

Michael Hernandez de Luna and Michael Thompson, two Chicago artists, have for years been mailing envelopes with creations that look utterly stamplike, aside from subject matter.

A condom. A handgun and the words "Kill All Artists." The shower scene from "Psycho."

De Luna has made a Prozac stamp, a Batman stamp and a Fidel-Castro-with-Cigar stamp. Thompson made a stamp that says "Return Fake Stamps."

Stamp collectors know that this type of thing is against the law. Thompson and de Luna know it, too.

"We're pranksters. We're punks," de Luna, 41, says.

As such, the Chicago Art Institute graduates have managed to mail a couple hundred envelopes to themselves with anti-art the size of a Wheat Thin.

Until Now.

Two Chicago postal inspectors with badges and guns paid Thompson a visit in February. Commit felony mail fraud again, they warned, and your next address will be a federal prison. Inspectors also served a cease-and-desist order on de Luna.

The investigation is continuing, de Luna said last week, and the United States Postal Inspection Service is keeping the seized artwork- about 20 percent which doesn't make it through the mail- as evidence in a potential criminal case. "They're probably our biggest collector," de Luna says.

"They asked me if I'd ever copied one of their stamps," Thompson, 47, recalls. "I said, 'Nah, you guys have your style and I have mine.'"

"I'm done," Thompson adds. "The feds can really mess up your life."

There is a positive angle to the crackdown, the men note. For unknown reasons, no one took action against them until now. And there were plenty of opportunities.

Thompson started mailing his art print stamps in 1991 and de Luna in 1994. For a while, the men kept quiet. But in 1995, the impulse to share their work became overwhelming, and they had their first two-man show at a Chicago gallery. StampArt featured 74 stamped envelopes that the postal service had canceled and sent into the mail stream.

There were stamps of bare-breasted women and Congressman-turned-convict Dan Rostenkowski (who went to prison after a Capitol Hill post office scandal); there were stamps made for France, Germany, Italy, Mexico and Norway (which were used to write home).

One Thompson creation, successfully mailed from Paris to Chicago, declares "Paris" on the bottom, but shows the Leaning Tower of Pisa. A de Luna stamp, "Meet the Hunts," portrays a husband and wife out hunting with their dog. "It's like, guns make a happy family," de Luna says.

The artists' days of obscurity were over. The show made Page 1 of the Chicago Tribune.

At the time, postal officials told reporters they did not intend to prosecute- perhaps showing "a bit of implicit critical respect," as the Tribune put it. According to Linn's Stamp News of Sidney, Ohio, the world's largest philatelists' publication, postal inspectors admired the Rostenkowski stamp, which was mailed on an envelope resembling a $1,000 bill.

Postal workers may have admired the stamps, too.

Some handed the envelopes to supervisors. But others were willing accomplices: They canceled the envelopes by hand and sent them on their way, silently endorsing anarchy. Which was Thompson and de Luna's goal.

In their view, the postal service's Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee, the arbiter of stamp designs, forces moral controls on the public, dictating what is right and proper.

De Luna sees the postal workers' cooperation as not only a political statement, but a final step to his print making. "They are included as a cohort in the art process," he says.

The men's inspiration lies in the Dadaist movement, which reportedly owes its name to a pin stuck randomly in a German-English dictionary. Born in protest over the mass bloodshed of World War 1, Dadaism evolved into Pop Art and the Happenings movement and, finally, the European-based Fluxus school, with its concept of shocking the public out of complacency. Dadaists use paradox and blasphemy; with art, they wage peaceful war.

The feds, meanwhile, may have declared a war of their own. But they've also ignited the men's careers. Friday, Thompson and de Luna's art will appear at their first, real stamp show: Compex, held outside of Chicago. They have also been in demand at art galleries nationwide, from Santa Fe, N.M. to Portland, Ore., and, most recently, the Susan Cummins Gallery in Mill Valley (where their pieces can still be purchased, for $900 to $2,000 each).

And how is the art world reacting?

"The response is phenomenal," said Mija Riedel, one of the Cummins gallery directors.

De Luna recently visited his local post office to buy some real stamps to mail invitations to an upcoming show.

A clerk showed him the new commemoratives of American artist Alexander Calder, with their tiny images of free-form sculpture set against a stark white background.

"I couldn't believe it," de Luna said, "I said, 'Hey, these really look like fake stamps.'" The clerks didn't recognize the compliment.

Among the scores of stamps successfully mailed, some from Michael Hernandez de Luna include:
* "TV Will Affect your mind" - a 60's woman holding a black-and-white television showing a sex act.
* "Le Gigi" - a diamond-shaped tribute to Bridget Bardot.
* "I am a Creature of God"- House Speaker Newt Gingrich's head on a collage-made baby.

Michael Thompson's include:
* "Aphrodisiac" - showing a rhino, and mailed from Kenya.
* "Ford's Theater" - Abe Lincoln, an outstretched hand with a gun behind his head.
* "Wanna Ball" - a semi-naked woman holding a translucent toy ball.

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