Reviews

New City
Stamp Act
By Margaret Wappler
May 30, 2001

Not many of us notice the safe and inoffensive imagery of the postal stamps that decorate the right-hand corner of our correspondence. If you can't recall the last time you said to yourself in glee, "Oh look! It's a stamp depicting the dazzling flora of North Carolina," you're not alone.

But, what if one day you got something a little different? Would you notice, in the corner of the envelope, a stamp of a condom in a clear package, that said across the top, "Pit it On, Lube it Up & Hold on Tight"? Of course, you say. But would you? Certain members of the U.S. Postal Service didn't notice this stamp, despite its illegitimacy. It was a fake, an image artist Michael Hernandez de Luna copied from a condom package and glued onto the corner of an envelope. Hernandez sent the envelope to himself, and it came back, hand cancelled, the term for when a postal employee stamps the letter personally approving it. Somebody didn't notice the racy imagery, and let it sail through the system. Or did they notice, realize it was a fake, and with a good inward chuckle, let it go through anyway?

"It would be nice if the people in the post office do laugh, since they are collaborating with this project," says Hernandez. The project is the one that he and fellow artist-in-crime Michael Thompson, have been doing for almost ten years now: making fake stamps and seeing if they pass through the USPS and other international postal systems.

"I absolutely feel like the postal service people are collaborators," says Thompson. "There are so many cancellations. To see where this person is going to put the thing, they've got to be looking at it. I think, truly, these guys are with us. I've had some of them write on the envelopes, 'What?'"

Of all the stamps Hernandez and Thompson have sent, they estimate 40-50 percent of them have made it back home. The rest? Lost. Confiscated. Sent to postal inspectors who now have a file with the duo's philatelist activity. The other boys in blue are watching them.

One day, Thompson was expecting a building inspector to stop by his small studio on Cermak. Instead, he invited in two friendly postal inspectors, a man and a woman, who first said to him when he opened the door, "You've been expecting us, haven't you." The two showed Thompson their Ids, and despite warnings from a lawyer friend about this very type of encounter, Thompson gave them a tour of the place. "I was curious to find out what their intentions were. They wanted to see the scope of the operation, they wanted to see if I had thirty guys working on this. They were charming; I really liked them. I'm sure they sent these two over because they were young and personable." The inspectors stayed for two hours, alternating between compliments to his work and warnings. "They said to me, 'One day we're going to come back and we're going to confiscate your computer, your perforator, your stamps. Anything we want, we'll take. And we're going to charge you with five federal felonies."
Unless Thompson and Hernandez cooperate with the "cease and desist" orders both have received from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. So far, the self-addressed, stamped envelopes the USPS provided with the forms Thompson and Hernandez are expected to sign- thereby ending their project- have gone unmailed. In part, the letter reads: "As you are aware, this office is investigating the possible violations of federal and state laws regarding the depositing of your 'stamp art' into the U.S. and foreign mail systems. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service considers the intentional avoidance of paying proper postage a serious matter. Once a person has been notified certain conduct is illegal, continuing the activity could provide legally sufficient evidence the activity was intentional."

Neither artists has tried to pass fake stamps through the system for more than a year, but don't think it's because they're scared of a scuffle with the law. It's simply that the project, Hernandez explains, "has turned into something else for right now, perpetuated into a whole different thing." The two artists have put together a book of their work, "The Stamp Art & Postal History of Michael Thompson & Michael Hernandez de Luna," released by Bad Press Books (www.badpressbooks.com), their own imprint. It features essays from both artists, Simon Anderson, Associate Professor at The School of the Art Institute, contemporary artists Jas W. Felter, creator of the first exhibit "artistamps" in 1974, of whom both artists are rabid fans, and Rob Haeseler, Linn's Stamp News, the world's largest publication for stamp collectors. And best of all, more than 100 pages of the artists' work.

Flipping through, the eye can't help but fall on some of the more graphic images, like Hernandez' piece, "Tom, Dick, & Hairy." Hernandez is into "the [Marcel] Duchamp way of making images- appropriation," and is also fond of exploring the taboo by using sexual imagery. Unlike Thompson, who started his stamp experiment by making individuals, Hernandez has always made collages or editions of several images, using the punch of pop art's repetition to grab the eye. With "Tom, Dick, & Hairy," the collage features three different stamps. The first, "Tom.," is of a black dildo, jutting diagonally across a plain blue background. The second, "Dick," is a dildo pointing straight into the air and held by someone. On the side, in small print and next to an asterisk, it reads, "penis size does not include balls." The third, "Hairy," is perhaps the strangest: It's a dildo with balls, but it's limp and extracted from any setting, sitting alone on a brown foreground, as a hand comes out from the side, attempting to lift it.
"I cracked up when I first saw that one," Hernandez remembers. "I was flipping through a porn magazine, when I saw this advertisement for all these dildos. They were so strange, with that one sitting by itself and everything. And then, with the 'penis size does not include the balls,' I just had to include that. I couldn't stop laughing about it."

Hernandez' girlfriends at the time told him he was nuts, and it was never going to make it though the system. They placed a bet on it. Hernandez had his doubts, too, but "I took it on as a challenge." Soon, news spread amongst friends that Hernandez was trying to send an envelope with not just one penis on it, but three, and several bets were placed. "Nobody believed that I could get this thing through." In the end, "Tom, Dick, & Hairy," arrived in the spring of 1997, stamped from Carol Stream, IL. It had made it all the way to Frankfurt, Germany. Hernandez collected some $600, in the form of "rent, dinners, beer, money, you name it." And who says art doesn't pay?

Thompson's images use the collage style of pop art, but the stamps themselves are often mini-illustrations he has lifted from various sources, including, especially in the beginning, matchbooks and nudie cards. Although the artists say their project is about the commemoration of pop culture, some play with this aspect more than others. We've all seen commemorative stamps for presidents, poets, musicians, and movie stars like Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, but have you ever seen one for J. Edgar Hoover? Thompson made one; it's a straight-up-photographic portrait of the man- shiny forehead, sidelong glance, wrinkly jowls tucked into his collar- except diagonally stamped with the name, "j edgar homo."

"I woke up one morning to this panicked female voice on my answering machine," Thompson recalls. "It was my friend in New York, Evelyn, saying 'The postal inspectors are downstairs, what should I do?' So I call back and she says, 'I can't talk, they're pounding on my door.' The postal inspectors had an envelope with a whole row of J. Edgar Homos on top and they wanted to know who'd sent it to her, if she knew. She denied knowing, because you have deniability with these things. Anybody can mail you anything. She told them she had no idea who sent this thing. They asked if she wanted the envelope and she said no, and she's always kicked herself for it."

Thompson has also commemorated Pinochet, Aum Shinrikyo, the leader of the cult responsible for the Japanese subway gassing (this one made it through Japan), Lenny Bruce and Dan Rostenkowski. Thompson likes to be "as inappropriate as possible. I want to put on something that's the antithesis of what one would expect to see on a stamp." Unlike Hernandez, who likes to mail his stamps out to himself, Thompson likes to find a collaborative chain, piercing as many foreign mail systems as possible, often with the very imagery that would ignite the anger of the country's denizens. He's gone through Spain, Turkey, Kenya, Australia, England, Norway, France, India, Germany, and in a particular coup that took two years to accomplish, South Africa. Hernandez, whose background is Mexican and Catholic, has wiggled through Mexico, Hong Kong, England, Germany, France, and Cuba.

Now that the book is out, will the project turn back to its roots? Will the stamps, the "small statements," be back in circulation? It's hard to say. Thompson says he still gets a thrill of sorts from finding one in his mailbox, hand cancelled. "I haven't gotten over it. Some of these come back so beautiful, with hand cancellations that you can clearly read. I guess that's why we can still do it." Hernandez doesn't know how to react to the thought of the project ending, but then settles to this: "I'm an artist, and I do projects. This is just a project. We'll do it until it runs dry.

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