Guglielmo Achille Cavellini

I'm so glad that Cavellini & I corresponded. He wd've been in his late 60s when we did. He made objects prohpesizing & promoting a centennial exhibit of his work. If this were to happen, it wd be in 2014. I hope it does. I was told that Cavellini cd afford to make these bks & to send them out so promiscuously b/c he owned a sausage factory. The ubiquitous Cavellini stickers that were once so prominent in mail art were supposedly based on the labels on the sausage he sold. Using the colors of the Italian flag.

Cavellini created artifacts promoting himself as an artist - a flier for a show at the Chicago Art Institute in 2014, eg. Postage stamps w/ images of him on them, eg. All very funny & charming & neatly executed. The variety of styles he used is remarkable. The postage stamp commemorating Cezanne & himself. I reckon he must've been filthy rich & that's something I'd often resent but the extreme sociability & imagination & good humor of his work won me over immediately. If you're going to constantly re-invent yrself thru portraiture why not a series of folkloric paper dolls? Or a portrait of yrself covered in sausage stickers w/ yr name on them?… (meer)

If you like Cavellini (I do) & think of him as an energetic & talented man who was an active figure in mail art of the late 1970s & early 1980s (as I do), then any of his bks are of interest. The added bonus here is that since he was touring California & Budapest there're plenty of photos of mail artists & diary entries about them in both those places from that time. The front cover shows Bill Gaglione & Buster Cleveland - 2 Bay Area Dadaists. It's noteworthy to me that Cavellini's self-historification project can be interpreted as egomaniacal but that, at the same time, the extremely widespread mail artist support of it can be taken to be 'selfless'. On the cover Gaglione & Cleveland are wearing clothes covered w/ Cavellini stickers & Cleveland wears a Cavellini shirt. So many funny, interesting folks.… (meer)

Until I started digging thru my artist's books box I'd forgotten about how many Cavellini "living-room exhibitions" I have. This, "Cimeli", is, apparently the 1st one [although I see 2 earlier catalogues listed online]. "Cimeli", if I translate correctly, means "relic, memento, souvenir". Cavellini's text is in Italian, French, English, & German - in a spirit of internationalism common to mail art. The introductory paragraph reads:

"We live in a dynamic age, among busy and distracted people. So I decided to start with this catalogue, a series of private exhibitions. Thus, it will be possible to follow simultaneously all over the world, the development of my self-historicism."

Of course, Cavellini's project of self-historification can be cynically dismissed as being the egomania of an artist who might not've gotten much attn otherwise, it can be dismissed as the project of a well-to-do art collector who wanted to join the ranks of those whose work he collected, etc.. But I think that, even if the preceding were true, the reason why so many mail artists embraced Cavellini's project is b/c they admired the spirit of not relying on the kudos of art critics to develop one's reputation. After all, most mail artists are marginal - usually philosophically by choice. A later paragraph reads:

"Generally the gifted artist is recognized and appreciated as such only after his death. From that moment onwards, the interest for his work and his personality becomes general. Researches are made among the papers and photographs of his existence. I don't want this to occur for me and my work, I myself am therefore collecting and presenting all that concerns me. These documents, unfortunately incomplete, might have been totally lost or destroyed, were it not for this indexing effort on my part."

&, indeed, Cavellini has survived post-mortem: http://www.cavellini.org/… (meer)

I liked this one but not as much as the ones w/ more pictures. This being one of Cavellini's earlier bks I don't think his style, or his networking, is as interesting as it became over the next few yrs. Many of the tales are of interest to me nonetheless - such as his description of the creation of a Daniel Spoerri dinner table - a table at wch various people sat & ate & placed objects so that they cd ultimately be taken away to be fixed in place on the table as a Fluxus art object:

"And finally we were all told to stop doing whatever we were doing and to leave the table just as it was, the table was picked up and carried out and nobody was supposed to touch it again. At the last moment I just barely managed to slip two of my catalogs on to it, for posterity. Viviana told me later that on one of the earlier evenings one of the guests wanted to substitute a silver fork with a cheap one, and another wanted to get a cheap lighter to leave instead of the one he had brought with him made of gold. Spoerri got quite angry about it."… (meer)