The MAIL INTERVIEW newsletter,
TAM Publications, Tilburg, March 1999. (Ed. by Ruud Janssen)
Ruud Janssen initiated the Mail-Interview Project in 1994 as a long-term investigation into how Mail Art participants understood their own network, practices and motivations. Rather than imposing a single medium on the interviews, Janssen deliberately used the communication systems already operating within Mail Art: postal correspondence, fax, e-mail, exchanged computer disks, telephone conversations and personal meetings. His surviving online introduction describes, for example, the Klaus Groh interview as largely conducted by fax, Michael Leigh by conventional mail, Arto Posto and Ken Friedman largely through e-mail, and Michael Lumb through exchanged diskettes.
The precise beginning is documented differently by the surviving sources. The March 1999 newsletter in the Artpool documentation dates the start to October 1994, while Géza Perneczky’s Network Atlas describes The Mail-Interview Project as a series of A5 photocopied brochures “started Nov. 1994.” Perneczky subsequently lists individual TAM interview publications from 1995 onward. Lomholt gives the broader active period as 1994–2001, stating that Janssen conducted interviews with Mail Art and Fluxus artists using mail, e-mail, fax, personal meetings and telephone, publishing the results both in handmade booklets and on the Internet.
By January 1996 the project had already expanded considerably. The newsletter preserved in the present documentation reports that Janssen had invited 60 mail artists, 47 of whom had responded positively; 17 interviews had been completed and 13 published. An updated online project introduction dated 14 May 1996 demonstrates how quickly these figures changed: it reports 66 invited artists, 52 positive responses, 23 completed interviews and 20 published interviews. These numbers therefore document stages in an expanding project rather than a fixed final roster.
The project was also closely connected with the rapid adoption of digital communication within the Mail Art network. The January 1996 newsletter states that Janssen had begun distributing interview texts as ASCII files by e-mail in October 1995. The March 1999 documentation records a subsequent Web phase and credits Jas W. Felter with helping to make interview texts available online. The surviving JCM Museum Library mirror is particularly important today because it preserves a large group of these interviews as individually indexed, full-text HTML documents. The index includes Al Ackerman, Anna Banana, Vittore Baroni, John M. Bennett, Mark Bloch, Anna Boschi, Ken Friedman, Klaus Groh, John Held Jr., Dick Higgins, Ray Johnson, Clemente Padin, Carlo Pittore, Edgardo-Antonio Vigo and many others.
These searchable HTML versions preserve not only the completed interviews but also the experimental and unfinished character of the project. The surviving Ray Johnson page, for example, explicitly identifies itself as “THE UNFINISHED MAIL-INTERVIEW” and dates the beginning of that exchange to 4 November 1994. The Ken Friedman interview states that it was conducted entirely via the Internet between May and December 1995, demonstrating that the communication technology was not simply a later means of disseminating the material but an integral part of the interview method itself.
Publication took several forms. Individual interviews circulated as TAM-Publications booklets, while some were republished through other Mail Art publications and publishers. Perneczky’s bibliography records numerous individual TAM numbers and formats and lists the series continuously through the late 1990s. The March 1999 newsletter further documents experiments with translations, visual interviews, special editions incorporating material generated during correspondence, and publication arrangements involving other network participants.
The project also moved into exhibition contexts. The March 1999 newsletter refers to the presentation of the Mail-Interview material in Hasselt in December 1997 and to its inclusion in a New York exhibition in 1999. These presentations underline the hybrid status of the project: it was simultaneously correspondence, interview research, publishing activity, network documentation and an accumulating archive of original material.
Janssen later consolidated a substantial part of the project into book form. Lomholt states that the interview texts were bundled into a five-book series in 2008. MAILART.PT currently makes all five volumes downloadable: Mail-Interview Project by Ruud Janssen – Part 1 (362 pages), Part 2 (354 pages), Part 3 (301 pages), Part 4 (343 pages) and Part 5 (176 pages). Janssen himself emphasized in April 2008 that the information in the printed books remained freely available online, explaining that the books were intended for readers who preferred a printed and archivable form.
For research, the surviving digital corpus is consequently unusually rich. The JCM Museum Library index is presently the most useful searchable reading version of the historical interviews, because the individual interviews survive as browser-searchable HTML rather than only as image scans or PDFs. (JCM Museum Library — TAM Mail-Interview Project) The later five-volume compilation is most conveniently accessible through MAILART.PT. (MAILART.PT download archive)
Artpool preserves material relating to the project. Its 2013 acquisitions record lists Janssen’s Newsletter for Participants and Other People Interested in the Mail-Interview Project, TAM-Publications, Tilburg, 1996, 5 pages, as well as Mail-Interviews. Part 1, TAM Publications, Breda, 2008, 362 pages. (Artpool — New acquisitions 2013)
