Reviews

Sheri R. Klein, Ph.D.
Professor of Art Education
University of Wisconsin-Stout
Author of Art and Laughter (2007). London: IB Tauris Press

For almost two decades, Chicago-based artist, Michael Hernandez de Luna has been creating postage stamps. These stamps do not depict the flowers or fruits that one might find at the post office. His stamps take on themes of sexuality, violence, celebrity, or politics, and that address “social disorder and moral misconduct” (De Luna, p.9). After designing the stamps, de Luna prints a page with perforations just like you would find at the post office, removes one stamp, and places it on an envelope that he mails to himself. The art is both in the 37-cent stamp and in the performance of mailing, and receiving the envelope. There are two kinds of irony in his work. The first kind of irony is that these convincing, beautiful and subversive stamps pass through the postal system unnoticed. The second kind of irony is the result of the juxtaposition of the stamps that are placed on envelopes from business, art, historical, or government agencies. An example is a stamp with sexual imagery that he has placed on an envelope from a religious organization.

While the scathing social commentary is a critical component of his work, it is the element of humor that makes it palpable. Using techniques of appropriation, de Luna manipulates photographs and images found in popular culture and the media to create new images that are highly satirical and mocking of the behaviors and actions of political figures and celebrities. And, in doing so he has met with both controversy and recognition for his highly thought provoking, and humorous works.

American Beauty is a collection of deLuna’s work from the past ten years and includes over 100 examples of his stamped works. The book is divided into six sections and includes luscious, glossy color reproductions of his stamps and their accompanying envelopes. In addition, the book includes four illuminating and informative essays about his work: one essay is by the artist.

American Beauty is a wonderful overview of deLuna’s work that will hopefully give you a greater appreciation and understanding of this artist’s work, and his unique abilities to create visual humor concerning some of the most pressing issues of our time.

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Green Apple Books, San Francisco, CA 2008

Review of American Beauty

Hey philatelists, think your collection is complete? Do you have The Michael Jackson Commemorative issue, the condom series, The Baader-Meinhof Girls, or the series Celebrating the Creation of Chemical and Biological Germ Weaponry (Botulism, Anthrax). No, thatís because these lovely stamps were single issue with small printings. Very small printings. This book samples the work of Chicago artist and provocateur Michael Hernandez de Luna, the king of the guerilla postage stamp. Not only does he bypass the post office by creating his own stamps, he affixes them to customized envelopes, and includes photos of the postmarked finished product. Much of it is too raunchy to be described in this family-friendly newsletter.

Chicago Tribune – ON THE TOWN – Section 7 – Friday 12, 2008

Written by Alan G. Artner / In the Galleries

Michael Hernandez de Luna pursues the guerilla activity of postage stamp and mail art. He has a hatred of hypocrisy – and exercises it. He does this on stamps he creates and get through the mail on envelopes that have return addresses laden with irony.

His exhibition at the Carl Hammer Gallery goes off in all directions. He treats pop-culture figures, politicos, famous mistresses and, in a continuing series, female hunters of the ilk of Sarah “Barracuda “ Palin. The humor in these works comes as much from their subjects’ treatment on the stamps as the envelopes that bear the examples he has passed through the postal system.

This time the artist indulges some nostalgia on the behalf of Abbie Hoffman as well as LSD. These are the least successful pieces. Even lightly comic homages are not Hernandez’s forte. You expect - and look forward to - him whacking people. He is so good at it that he does not require only media figures. His plain-folk huntresses are as disturbing as anything he has done.

Some targets, such as Michael Jackson and heavyweight wrestling, are of course too easy. And the sting, even when perfectly placed, seldom lasts long. But the lack of piety is positively bracing.

At the Carl Hammer Gallery,
740 N. Wells St., through Oct.18,
312 266-8512:
www.hammergallery.com

An Artist's Controversial Stamp Acts
By Kari Lydersen
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, May 15, 2005; Page N05

CHICAGO Artist Michael Hernandez de Luna pushes the envelope.

Here's what he does: He makes fake stamps, puts them on envelopes and drops the envelopes in the mail. One stamp features an image of President Bush's face between spread buttocks cheeks. Another showed a stained blue dress labeled "Property of Monica Lewinsky." A third showed obese fast-food-fed Barbie dolls.

About 40 percent of the time, according to Hernandez de Luna, the Postal Service cancels the stamps and delivers the mail.

Why, exactly, does he do this? He says it's a way to get people to take a fresh look at the culture that surrounds them.

"My environment is my collaborator," he says during an interview in his cluttered studio in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood, where many Latino artists live. "I've decided to just take what people are feeding me and go over the top. People are getting spoon-fed this mush of media and pop culture and being told: It's okay, just eat it. It's not okay. That's what I'm saying. I'm not being anti-American; I'm just being a caring person by telling the truth."

Hernandez de Luna's work has caught the eye of the federal government. His last run-in was in April, when the Secret Service visited a show he curated at Columbia College in Chicago in which artists from 11 countries created stamps to portray their definition of "evil." One of the images, by Chicagoan Al Brandtner, showed the president with a gun to his head and the words "Patriot Act."

Hernandez de Luna was fired from his job as a baggage handler for American Eagle airlines several days after a story about the incident appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times. A picture accompanying the article showed Hernandez de Luna in his American Eagle uniform.

Federal authorities also launched an investigation into his work in October 2001 after he mailed a stamp that featured the word "anthrax" and a skull and crossbones on a bright yellow background. That stamp caused the main post office in Chicago to shut down for several hours. The Postal Service sent him a postcard announcing an investigation.

"He straddles the line between artist, activist and criminal," says Diane Barber, visual arts director of the DiverseWorks gallery in Houston, where Hernandez de Luna's work is part of a show called "Thought Crimes."

"When I watch people walking through the exhibit, they really spend a lot of time with his work, engage with it, talk about it. People come up to me and say: 'Thank God you're showing this. We need to see more things like this.' I think people are hungry for some kind of counter-dialogue."

Hernandez de Luna, 48, graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1983. His philatelic fascination started four years later when he bought a collection of vintage U.S. stamps in Iowa City. He took up stamp collecting in Germany, where he worked for a company making visual and advertising materials for the U.S. Army, and played in a garage rock band that specialized in Hank Williams covers.

He never lost his fascination with stamps. When he returned to his native Chicago in 1994, he even bought a 1976 Postal Service Jeep. About that time, he made his first fake stamps with fellow Chicago artist Michael Thompson, who had started creating his own stamps several years earlier. In 2000 the two published a book documenting fake stamps they had sent through the mail.

Hernandez de Luna creates the stamps on a computer. The paper he prints them on is perforated with a century-old pedal contraption he found in a thrift store. He collects old envelopes from specialty stores to complement the stamps. For example, a stamp of a marijuana leaf was mailed on a 1924 envelope from the Department of Agriculture. Stamps referring to priest sex abuse were sent on old envelopes from Boys Town and various churches. A stamp featuring Ted Kaczynski was mailed on a Postal Service envelope. A Bill Clinton stamp is on a copy of a White House envelope.

He usually sends the letters to himself or to galleries where he is exhibiting. Sometimes they arrive with messages like "this is a fraudulent stamp" or "this is blasphemy" scrawled on them, presumably by postal workers. Most of them are hand-canceled, meaning that workers got a close look at the stamp and sent it through the mail anyway.

"That makes them a participant in the art," he says.

Hernandez de Luna says he is part of an international "mail art" tradition.

One of the first fake stamps to gain attention was French artist Yves Klein's monochrome blue, used to mail out thousands of invitations to exhibits in the '50s. American Robert Watts, a '60s artist, is also a patriarch of fake stamps. A number of artists currently produce fake stamps, but Hernandez de Luna is one of the few mailing them.

Lynne Warren, curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, where Hernandez de Luna's work was shown in 2003, says he is part of the heritage of Fluxus, a radical art movement that flourished in Europe and the United States in the 1960s in the hands of people like Joseph Beuys and Yoko Ono. It rejected traditional art objects and promoted happenings and other kinds of artmaking that went outside the bounds of galleries and disturbed the status quo. "They were," Warren says, "a very subversive lot who wanted to get art more directly to the people."

Hernandez de Luna says the provocative content of his stamps is appreciated, especially in the post-9/11 world of heightened security. Many of his stamps lampoon the Republican administration, but he also attacks high-profile Democrats, featuring references to Bill Clinton's infidelity and Jesse Jackson's out-of-wedlock child.

"Anyone who does something shameful and deceiving, who preaches moral greatness and then screws up, they deserve to be on a stamp," he says. "Politicians are easy targets. And I have a real dislike for the Catholic Church -- I was raised Catholic -- what they teach and what they hide."

He "left the pope alone for a few years" at the request of his mother, "a real old-fashioned Mexican woman."

A stamp that has drawn complaints shows a traditional image of Jesus and Mary turned on its side in a sexually suggestive way.

Hernandez de Luna sees his work as a way to bring levity to contemporary political and social issues, as in the stamps that advertised anthrax in orange, lemon-lime and grape flavors.

"I made the fruit anthrax stamp in reaction to how the media was so overrun with the anthrax scare," he says.

That stamp and the ensuing federal inquiry caused the cancellation of a 2002 show of "Sinister Plants of North America" that Hernandez de Luna and Thompson had been commissioned to do at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago.

Despite his scrapes, the FBI's Chicago office said there is no ongoing investigation of Hernandez de Luna's work. Secret Service spokesman Lorie Lewis said the inquiry into the Columbia College exhibit has been completed, with no art confiscated and no one charged. A spokeswoman for the Postal Service said she couldn't comment on whether it is conducting an investigation but was familiar with his history. The Postal Service issued cease-and-desist letters in 1997 and 1998.

"We respect artistic freedom, but we also have a responsibility to look into exhibits or statements when necessary," she said.

Hernandez de Luna has never been charged or arrested in connection with his art. With recent works including an image of a plane flying into the Sears Tower and "the Hamas baby bomber," Hernandez de Luna thinks he may draw more scrutiny from authorities. It's a risk he's willing to take.

"Everything has a consequence," he says. "If you get in a love affair, that will have a consequence. If you do something to provoke, as an artist that's our mission."

He says if he went to jail for his art, he could accept that.

"If I can just get someone to really think about what's going on in our world, I'm happy."

Direct Action: An Artist's Controversial Stamp Acts, by george@loper.org / May, 2005, Chicago click to read the article...

Going Postal: Two Michaels and the Elusive Stamps of Approval, by Lamaretta Simmons / March 2002, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago F News, Chicago click to read the article...

Nature Museum Stamps Out Exhibit, Sean D. Hamill / February 2002, Chicago Tribune, Chicago click to read the article...

'Anthrax Stamp' Has Feds Going Postal, by Sean D. Hamill / November 19, 2001, Chicago Tribune, Chicago click to read the article...

Stamp Act, by Margaret Wappler / May 30, 2001, New City Newspaper, Chicago click to read the article...

Canceled Stamps, by Deanna Isaacs / February 8, 2002, The Chicago Reader, Chicago click to read the article...

Art Monthly click to read the article...

The Stamp Art and Postal History of Michael Thompson and Michael Hernandez de Luna by Ray Olson / August 2001, Booklist, Chicago click to read the article...

Imposters by Christina Huntington / March 2001, The New ART Examiner, Chicago click to read the article...

Sextablos / Red Bud Gallery, Houston by Randy Wodck, November 8th, 2000, The Other click to read the article...

SEXTABLOS, Gallery's Men Magazine, July 2000 by Michael Hernandez de Luna click to read the article...

Erotic art show puts fantasies down on tin, by Douglas MacCash / May 12, 2000, The Times - Picayune, New Orleans click to read the article...

SEXTABLOS, by Christopher Fischer / New Orleans Art Review - May 2000 click to read the article...

Stamps, The San Francisco Chronicle, by Rob Haeseler / May 18th 1998 click to read the article...

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