Stamps, from Biopsia

Edgardo Antonio Vigo was a prolific producer of prints, sculptures, visual poetry, performative works, and publications. In the mid 1960s, he began participating in the Mail Art movement, which had emerged in the 1950s as artists around the world began exchanging small-scale works on paper through the postal system. They created a decentralized international network that connected artists through channels that were independent from art galleries and museums. Vigo reached an extensive network that included the Blanton Museum of Art. Vigo’s work was inexpensive and reproducible due to the handmade, accessible aesthetics of paper-based materials associated with the mail, such as postcards, envelopes, rubber-stamps, and recycled images. He frequently included stamps that looked official but lacked any postal value, since they were designed by him out of a dense combination of visual motifs recurrent in his work. The stamps in this case mention the word “biopsy,” which is not a medical reference but a label the artist adopted and used in a manner synonymous with the term “biography.” Since the 1960s, he began preparing a series of boxes called “Biopsias” where he archived annually all the information he compiled about his own work over the year. As a personal archive, these boxes are part “biographies” and part “opsis,” a Greek word meaning what is apparent or visible.