=mail art received from Borderline Grafix, Austin, Texas=

At first glance, I thought this envelope was from some official city agency or other—the water bureau, perhaps, informing us of the importance of saving water, or the sanitation department, warning us to curb our dogs. I thought it was a serendipitous example where art is made accidentally in the course of some nameless, faceless entity doing something mundane, ie. such as sending out a mass-mailing that almost every recipient is guaranteed to ignore. My first instinct—simultaneous to my first glance—was that in this case I could use those Warholian photo-booth style fire hydrants in my mail-art. I was about to go for my scissors. Then a closer look at the envelope revealed that what I held in my hand was already mail-art.

And that is the crux of the genius behind these pieces from Borderline Grafix. They look like art that has come about unintentionally, by accident or chance, art that no one has actually made, never mind contemplated beforehand. They are a manifestation of Fluxus, which, in short, is a way of erasing the line between art and life, so that an envelope from the water bureau or the sanitation department can be as much art as anything hanging in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's supremely difficult to make art that looks like no one has made it at all. One has to be a kind of invisible magician working behind the scenes, bringing together elements while erasing his or her own hand in the conjuring. BG makes it look easy in these pieces, which is the hardest thing of all. 

Here is a page of stickers featuring entirely ordinary objects which, lifted and isolated from their normal contexts, are reinvested with a numinous strangeness. I am reminded of what Max Beckmann wrote about his own work: "I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting." Or what Jesus said in the Gospel of Thomas: "Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed."     

Next comes a collage featuring an encore appearance of the repeat image of the fire hydrant on the envelope. 

These gritty, faded shots, taken from five different angles, suggest a series of crime scene photos. But what is the crime? Does it have to do with the two women in the photo above? The compass gives us a direction, but a direction to where? There is someone present behind the scenes—the guilty party, perhaps?—we can see his or her legs from under the curtain, so to speak, but who do they belong to? And why the fire hydrant? It's an important source of water, especially in the city, both for cooling off in the summer and, of course, for putting out fires in an emergency. It's a place where you can't park, where your dog lifts its leg, where drunks vomit. The fire hydrant is suggestively cruciform; it gives life-saving water as the blood of Christ from the cross is said to save souls. This collage doesn't just tell us a story—it tells us an infinite number of stories.

Finally, here are some "Fluxus bucks"—an ironic conjoining of art and money, a purely imaginary currency that is perfectly beautiful and absolutely worthless. In a culture that commodifies everything it can possibly make a buck on, including what should be beyond commidification, art and love and revolution, to name a handful, Fluxus artists don't wait for their work to become worth something on the market. Like good capitalists, they cut out the middle man. They literally make their art money. They're counterfeiters, and, like all counterfeiters, they undermine the system.   

Again, as the envelope mimicked an official correspondence, so these Fluxus bucks play with the idea of authorized legal tender. At first glance, you might easily mistake these bucks as real foreign currency, something you might be able to spend overseas somewhere... maybe Freedonia? You have to take a second, closer look to see that there's nowhere on the planet you can buy so much as a pack of gum even with a purse stuffed with this paper.

Taken as a whole, this is a fantastic, thought-provoking collection of materials from a talented "invisible" artist. Before now, I hadn't received anything else quite like it and that's saying a lot. Thank you Borderline Grafix!