why do people hate these things so much? i actually kind of like them: here's a few of the things they have going for them: 1) chaos! what self-respecting mail-artist doesn't love a little chaos? 2) collaboration! doesn't a sort of "group-mind" emerge on some of these? especially when you can't tell who did what? 3) series of gifts: mail-artist A sends out some work as a gift to mail-artist B who adds a gift and sends it on to C and so on 4) letting go: a) letting go control of the art work: when you send it on it's out of your hands what happens next b) letting go of the physical object (not easy for some of us archivers & collectors!) letting go to the point where the next person may very well destroy or round-file the work (i.e. throw it in the garbage) 5) karma! it strikes me as extemely bad karma to throw these in the garbage 6) random! who knows what the next person is going to put on the page or who it will go to next? 7) trust: you pass on the thing trusting the next person to do the right thing with it (whatever that may be) 8) history! every addnpass is a little history lesson: who's been active etc. some of them go right back to Ray Johnson (and before that there was the exquisite corpses of the Dadaists or maybe the Surrealists)
it strikes me that to be anti-addnpass is to be anti-mailart
these are the heart and soul of the network
so cheer up and get to work!
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