Post Haste
Curated by Jayna Swartzman
May 4 – 27, 2012
Reception Friday, May 4, 7 – 10 PM

MacArthur B Arthur is pleased to announce Post Haste, a group show featuring works by Calcagno Cullen, Alicia Escott, Nate Milton, Beverly Rayner, Elizabeth Ribera, Schuyler Robertson, Gabrielle Tigan, and Patrick Wilson. Curated by Jayna Swartzman. Post Haste examines the value of civic infrastructure in the digital age by looking at the United States Post Office as an analogy for decaying public institutions.

It took a considerable and pitiful effort to convince my friend not to steal Ray Johnson’s sunglasses from Tables of Content… at the Berkeley Art Museum. Most of that effort was coming up with a persuasive rational beyond “thou shalt not” and “who do you think you are”. This episode is pertinent to Post Haste in two ways: 1) it illustrates our fickle relationship with public institutions. How they alternately provide for and enslave us, how we alternately glorify and antagonize them. 2) It is also emblematic of our consistent belief that objects have contiguous traces of their previous owners, their aura.

Despite the Ray Johnson reference above, Post Haste is not a mail art show. Post Haste is about the United States Post Office as institutional epoch, emblematic of our civic infrastructures legacy and trajectory in the shadow of a hyper-efficient, hyper-curated digital world. All the works included in Post Haste have a predecessor – Yves Klein, Ben Vautier, Dan Huebler, or Anna Banana. But beyond elaborating on a grand tradition– one that pre-dates mail art as a specialized fine arts practice –the artworks in Post Haste, as well as Macarthur B Arthur and the USPS, are vessels for the circulation of reified mores and their deviations be they cultural, commercial, interpersonal or governmental, or otherwise. Mail art, once conceived as the antidote to “the institution,” has always been part and parcel of one. The expectation of Post Haste therefore is not to destabilize one institution by enjoining another but to consider what psycho-social traces these “institutions” leave behind.

My friend’s thieving intentions were, in the end, derailed not by my efforts nor by good conscience but by the institution whose function it is to both interpret and protect the tangible expression of ideas. I wonder if and when both of these functions will eventually be put to bed and what the alternative will feel like.