Encarted It Collapses

from Aristide 3108

When I was really active on IUOMA we had conversations about whether mail art was about the imagery or the meaning. I prevaricated.  I certainly respond most passionately to imagery that moves me or surprises me, or is very beautiful, quixotic, arresting. But I also love to get inside the correspondent’s head and understand a piece. I could make a spreadsheet and tell you why I like or love the mail art I receive from each person.  I can recognize a piece as it arrives and some I save for a long time before I open, just to make the mail art last.

What I find irresistible in Aristide 3108’s mail art is the conceptual nature of it, the beauty in it’s execution and it’s pocket size.  He certainly has ‘handwriting’ and a style. I can’t really ‘read’ Aristide’s mailart, though. I mean that figuratively and metaphorically.  It is another language in all senses of the word.

I can pick out the English words, ‘it collapses’ and appreciate the care with which the cordon of words has been expertly stuck under the woman’s hand, but who is she? Is she that footballer’s wife who was fighting that other footballer’s wife? Aristide is so cool I feel a little out of the loop, but that’s my problem, not his! I put his text into google translate and I realise I am looking at a poem, but do the words really matter, does it need decoding? Look at the shape of it, the colour… I unwrap it and delight in it.  Aristide 3108 has his own language and I can say, without a doubt that it is not lost in translation.