Description du produit

In this handsome and hilarious volume of knockoff postage stamps, artists Thompson and Hernandez de Luna have created a startling and unique work of art.

Since 1991, the artist-publishers of Bad Press Books’ clever and colorful collection have been creating fake stamps that are not only fine art, but have also been successfully sent through the mail—much to the chagrin of the U.S. Postal Service.

In their artistic venture, Thompson and Hernandez de Luna have turned philately on its head and, in the process, have been repeatedly warned to cease and desist by inspectors from the Post Office. But readers can enjoy the richly comic parodies and social commentary implicit in this renegade art without the danger of suffering any consequences.

Among the wide-ranging subjects included in this collection are politics, religion, sex and disasters. In their never-ending quest for the outrageous, they have created bogus stamps from a score of countries from Japan to South Africa, from India to Norway. Their art forms are splendid counterfeits of truly global proportions.

Their work has been shown in museums across the country and has also received the stamp of approval from the press.

Détails sur le produit

• Rang parmi les ventes Amazon: #64509 dans Livres
• Publié le: 2000-09-01
• Langue d'origine: Anglais
• Reliure: Broché
• 152 pages

From Library Journal
Fake postage stamps by Chicago artists Thompson and Hernandez de Luna, both of whom are under cease-and-desist orders from the U.S. Postal Service, are featured in this highly illustrated expos? of their lives, philosophy, and work. Introductory essays by philatelists and the artists themselves explain the history of mail art and its appeal to collectors. Beautifully made and reproduced here, the Pop-inspired stamps carry politically provocative themes and in-your-face sexual content. The artists go out of their way to cultivate controversy and bad-guy images. Their success in "fooling" the Postal Service two times out of ten is not so remarkable, given the widespread use of high-speed canceling machines. For comprehensive contemporary art collections only. Note: If you order from the publisher, you're promised a pair of original artist stamps but be sure to double-check the outside parcel postage as well. Russell T. Clement, Northwestern Univ. Lib., Evanston, IL
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Booklist
Sick to death of pop art and its aesthetic pranks a la Marcel Duchamp, who exhibited a urinal as a specimen of found art? Then give a gander to Thompson and Hernandez de Luna's playful fake postage, which the two artists proudly display not just in perforated-sheet form but also on pieces of mail, scored by the cancellation marks that indicate their successful transit through more than one country's postal system. The stamps' imagery is outrageous--a nude woman's crotch (Courbet's 1866 painting, The Origin of the World), a marijuana plant, donkeys copulating ("Bill's Party Train"), sequential depictions of the Titanic ("Going," "Going," "Going," and "Gone"), a man and a woman duking it out ("Support Domestic Violence"), penises ("Tom," "Dick," and "Harry"), and so forth--but highly amusing. If what it depicts doesn't bring a smile, then the audacity of sending real mail adorned with it should. Both artists discuss their works' raison d'etre, and a stamp collector, a fellow unofficial stamp artist, and an art historian weigh in, too. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the author
MICHAEL THOMPSON was born in Chicago and raised in Connecticut. He was introduced to the notion of becoming an artist while serving as a VISTA volunteer in Massachusetts. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago but left before graduating to pursue his career in the Arts. He has since worked in a variety of fields, including printmaking, painting, sculpture and kite-making.

MICHAEL HERNANDEZ DE LUNA lives and works in Chicago as a working artist, curator and navigator. This is his second publication, the first being a collection of sex-based art entitled SEXTABLOS.