SHARED UTOPIAS. TOMASZ SCHULZ’S COOP-BOOKS (1979–1988) IN THE CONTEXT OF MAIL ART

Abstract

ABSTRACT______This paper presents the first art historical analysis of Polish mail artist Tomasz Schulz’s (*1951) COOP-Books, focusing on Artist’s Contact Book About Important Matters (1979–ca. 1986). By examining selected pages, it explores how the book embodies strategies typical of the international mail art network of the 1970s and 1980s and how contributors used it to share artistic ideas, political views, and insights into their personal lives. By comparing the book and its entries with Birger Jesch’s The First Mail Art Project of Dresden (1980), the concepts of CONTART by Robert Rehfeldt and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, and arte íntimo by Graciela Gutiérrez Marx, as well as relating it to the notion of a “tautological feminist sign” by Ewa Partum, Artist’s Contact Book About Important Matters is interpreted as a particularly intimate mail art object. While operating in a pre-political sphere, it blends politically engaged and deeply personal content, exemplifying the concept of contact as art and contributing to the utopian vision of a global artists’ union shared within mail art.