Unsolicited Art Project - Part 1

Project Brief:

Send out the most interesting and intriguing pieces of art I reasonably can to semi-randomly-chosen recipients around the country. 

Goals:

Get my work into the hands of people who may or may not appreciate it.

Re-inject a little whimsy into the act of receiving mail.

Connect with interesting people who decide they like my style.

Experiment with my particular mixture of written-word/illustration/zine-culture.

Restrictions:

Recipients - ‘Semi-Randomly-Chosen’ - This bit is important. I find the idea of just winging these off to the actual homes of unsuspecting strangers to be funny, but also kind of rude or creepy or intrusive. It also feels a little wasteful--what are the odds that a particular random address is home to someone who is just the right kind of weird. Therefore, the focus will be on interesting businesses and organizations: bookstores, art studios, museums, non-profits, music shops, arthouse movie theaters, flea markets, etc (Have an idea about where to send these? Let me know!) 

Cost - I intend to spend a good deal of the next few years simply giving art away for free, but it does cost money to make. Ideally I’d like to send out around 10 envelopes each week. That’s about 500 for the year. Suddenly the difference between $3/unit and $5/unit matters a great deal.

Labor - Less important to me than overall cost, but still a necessary consideration. Each piece I send out needs to have some element of hand-work, that’s part of the appeal of this whole thing for me. However, if it takes 3 hours to craft and assemble each individual unit, I’ll never do anything else with my life!

Phase 1 - Testing on Family and Friends

Before I start sending out as many envelopes as possible, it feels prudent to do some testing. What do I want to include? How do I want to execute each element? Will my chosen methods be able to travel through the regular letter-mail processing systems of the USPS? How much will it all cost? There’s no real way to answer those questions without simply going for it, so I started small-scale.

Start With the Envelope

I want the UAP packaging to be distinctive, to stand out in the sea of assorted junk-mail that people have come to anticipate. It needs to catch the eye of the recipient and let them know there’s something different about it. This package is here, not to sell you something, but rather to give you something and ask nothing in return. Given my personal disposition and general artistic style, the obvious choice here is to have some element of it be hand made.

It’s labor intensive, and may prove impossible to scale the way I’d like, but no one goes through the trouble of adding handcrafted touches to marketing materials. My theory here: if you can obviously tell the packaging was hand-finished, you know it’s not just some advertising slop. Also, I would think those who are interested in my kind of art wouldn’t be able to resist opening the weird envelope…

After a little trial and error I landed on rattle-can overspray. It’s cool, it’s quick, it adds loads of texture. That combined with the infamous flying-W stencil and some unnecessary thermal-printed stickers nudge the whole thing into the right territory. 

What did we learn? 

Still pretty labor intensive - Making a small batch goes pretty fast. Experience tells me that making a large batch is likely to get complicated/highly repetitive and be a major pain in the trigger-finger. I suspect much of that can be mitigated with technique but… see next problem.

Wasteful - I can’t shake the feeling that doing this wastes most of the paint and propellant in the can. Don’t love that. However, I’ve experimented with a number of ‘intentional splatter’ techniques over the years, mostly using brushes, and they’re way less predictable and a lot slower than overspray. 

Paint dust - Handling the envelopes after resulted in paint dust raining over everything. It’s super-fine and hard to notice until I take a look at my stained fingers, then I can see it’s all over the desk… This probably has to do with a combination of the application method and the material choice (current envelopes are coated on the outside, which likely keeps the paint from absorbing as much as it otherwise would).

Next Consider What Goes Inside

I fully intended on shipping out legions of Trade Rag copies all over the country, assaulting unsuspecting weirdos with my prose and illustrations. So that’s where we started. Accompanying them with a brief write-up explaining the UAP and who/why I am would have been ideal, and still will be in the future. Maybe throw in a sticker and a handmade business card? In the interest of action over stagnation, I decided to forego anything but the magazine for now.

What did we learn?

Zine Too Heavy - At a voluptuous 1.7oz, the Trade Rag brings the overall weight of the envelope up to 2.4oz. In the grand scheme, that’s nothing, roughly ⅛ of a pound. But in postage terms that’s 3 ‘forever’ stamps, a total of $2.34 for a single unit. Or so I thought… Turns out, with proper postage, I could send anything 3oz or less for $1.36. Still, if I can keep it to 2oz or less, we’ll be looking at only $1.07 to mail each unit. That we can definitely handle.

Now We Stuff and Ship

Maybe a hundred hours to craft a handful of printed pages to be shipped to less than half a dozen friends and family. What surprises me is how worthwhile it all feels. The silly little pictures embedded in just the right paper with a genuine selection of the best words I could find at the time. And every time we tell more friends about it, more friends ask for their own copy. 

For now that makes this the Very-Solicited Art Project, but it has to start somewhere. Shit, maybe that’s more meaningful. I guess we’ll find out. As we speak, the first batch is arriving in the mailboxes and on the doorsteps of friends and family from coast to coast, and the next round will go out soon. That feels like something.

Hope someday I find out what it is.