Reconstructing Intimate Family Relationships as a Survival Strategy: Graciela Gutiérrez Marx's Marginal Mail Art Collective Networks

This presentation considers the collective mail art activity of Argentinian mail artist Graciela Gutiérrez Marx from the late 1970s and early 1980s as a conceptual, marginal family structure activated through mail art interactions. Her reassembled mail family (an assembly of genetically unrelated networkers, non-artists, and children across the globe) reconstructed the modern myth of human intimacy through mail art magazines, artist books, and stamp assemblings, functioning as a survival mechanism during Argentina’s "Dirty War" from 1976 to 1984. This paper analyzes and considers Marx’s theoretical and artistic groundings as detailed in her 1984 essay "Por Un Arte de Base Sin Artistas." I draw from her own theoretical tendencies as well as Hannah Ardent, Lucy Lippard, J.L. Austin, and Paulo Freire to position her overlooked collaborative work within the art historical canon. Although her projects align with Argentinian avant-garde mail art tendencies, I consider her methodological mail assemblings and her artistic oeuvre as a countercultural energy that differed from other mail art developments of the 1970s. This presentation investigates three of Marx’s collaborative mail projects through a chronological approach to underline the progressive development of her conceptual marginal mail art family. I analyze her construction of the mail art family through her collaborative publications assemblings and platonic ‘postal-marriage’ with Edgardo A. Vigo under the alias G.E.MarxVigo, her pedagogical postage stamp exchange with her son Martin Eckmeyer, and the final culmination of the collective marginal mail art family centered on the mail art quotidian hero archetype, "Mamablanca," based on Marx’s own mother.