ULISES CARRIÓN: POST/MASTER
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
Post/Master
By María Paula Varela
After he abandoned a promising career as a writer, Ulises Carrión (1941, Mexico–1989, Holland) became a key figure in Mail Art, a prominent international movement of the 1970s and 80s. He used Mail Art to integrate the visual arts and written words and to investigate how alternative forms of distribution affected the messages themselves. Carrión thought of the postal system as a form of oppressive surveillance he called the “Big Monster.” Consequently, the artistic interventions he made with Mail Art transformed post offices into spaces that subverted state bureaucracies. Carrión termed this destabilization “knocking at the Monster’s door.”[1]
