Reviews

by Christina Huntington, March 2001

There exist certain affinities between stamp collecting and the art market: both are cultures of collecting, focused on monetary value and objects produced for an exclusive audience. Somewhere between and beyond the two lies the work of Chicago artists Michael Thompson and Michael Hernandez de Luna, creators and dispatchers of fraudulent postage stamps.

"ImPosters" documents the artists' near-decade-long prank on the postal services of various nations. With a laser printer and a perforating machine, they have been producing sheets of "stamps" since the early 1990's. they use these to mail letters to themselves from around the country and the world, achieving a return rate of about 25 percent. The topics they address on the stamps range widely- from political to erotic to simply humorous- but they are all equally unlikely to appear on, say, an official United States Postal Office commemorative series. Each pane of stamps is exhibited alongside an envelope that was successfully delivered to its destination using one of those particular stamps.

Thompson's images often mimic the iconography of traditional stamps- the portrait of historical depiction- but with a twist. Fords Theatre borrows the classic image of a seated President Abraham Lincoln, but with the cartoonish addition of a hand holding a gun behind his head. Anniversario de Inquisition, mailed from Spain, features a set of four bleak Gothic drawings illustrating trials and torture. A sepia-toned image of Chairman Mao Zedong celebrating "Better Red Than Dead Day" decorates an envelope printed with the return address "Office of the Clerk, U.S. Supreme Court."

Whereas Thompson goes for subtle jabs at political history by tweaking the familiar, but de Luna packs a visual and thematic wallop. His designs speak the language of Modern art, as in a collaged black-and-white cutout of screaming Janet Leigh from Psycho superimposed on a flat red background. A stamp mailed from Cuba features cropped images of John F. Kennedy smoking cigars, with vertical blocks of text suggesting a grid. Even de Luna's appropriation of traditional images brings out their potentially lurid wickedness. In the over-sized, Technicolor Meet the Hunts, a squeaky-clean, Norman Rockwell-esque couple bonds by pointing their hunting rifles skyward, as if al their happiness and virtue lay in the weapons they cradle.

These tongue-in-cheek treatments examine an overlooked medium for building myth. Stamps distill patriotism, values, and national identity into a currency we must consume if our mail is reached to its destination. Beyond the ironic treatment of philatelic commemoration and the subversiveness of defrauding a government department, the work demonstrates the performance element of collaboration with the audience- for a stamp does not entirely succeed until it passes through the mail. We may find ourselves cheering for the letter that has seduced, cajoled, or merely hoodwinked its primary viewer- whether automated mail sorter or, often, human postal employee- into completing the process with a mark of cancellation. In this way, the artists transform the mundane act of mailing a letter into a narrative of suspense and adventure. Will the fake be rendered "official" on its trip through the post office? Will the artists be arrested for cheating the government in increments of 30 to 50 cents? As long as Thompson and de Luna continue the process, these possibilities will remain open.

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