Coco's New Hat!

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You've discovered my Secret Life as a deranged Artist!

There's a big community of Postal Art or Mail Art artists ... they make Faux Postage Stamps (and envelopes and cancellation stamp marks, etc.) from Imaginary Countries.

Our Gods are the late artists Donald Evans and Ray Johnson. Together they pretty much created this strange little subcult of visual art -- a superdemocratic kind of art which invites everyone who's ever mailed or received a postcard or a letter to enjoy the Mail Art, and then become a Mail Artist! Art you can create just as easily as Art you can consume! You don't have to go to university to become a Mail Artist -- you go to the Post Office instead!

And in becoming a Mail Artist, you also get to create your own Nations, and their Postal Services, and all the complicated, arbitrary, confusing Rules of the Postal Bureaucracy -- and their unique Postage Stamps! You can make Postage Stamps of all the things you never saw in real postage stramps, but wished there were stamps of!

Perhaps most Mail Artists -- there must be hundreds or thousands by this time -- prefer the Tangible world of paper, envelopes, postcards and glue, but the computer with its e-mail, websites and graphic software (I love MS Paint because it's Free and has a Very Crude, Primitive, Honky-Tonk anti-Art look to it) has also opened up a new world for Mail Artists.

In the particular computer community I hung on for a few years, one artist would call for a Theme, and dozens of other artists would send in their original reply stamps (and postcards and envelopes, etc.).

I liked this Call. Coco -- I think she's the Queen or Empress of the Isle du Coco -- seemed to be a bald female mannequin, and it was winter, and her bald head was cold. The artist asked all the Mail Artists of the World to create a new hat for Coco!

I didn't think Coco was Coco Chanel, but clearly Coco was French, and needed une chapeau from the World Capital of Fancy Women's Hats: Paris.

I'm also mesmerized with the remarkable life and the novels and strange books and art and movies (Zazie dans le métro, 1959, Louis Malle's first movie) made from the work of Raymond Queneau. So my New Hat for Coco was inspired by -- perhaps even designed by -- Raymond Queneau.

My hat should keep Coco's bald head warm for the winter, because the centerpiece of the chapeau is the catenoid cooling tower of a nuclear power plant. (Click on the catenoid site and spin the Java catenoid in 3D space with your cursor!) France has the world's largest, most aggressive system of nuclear power plants. They are not going Nuclear Free anytime soon. The cooling tower is venting -- hopefully just steam and benign smoke, but maybe it's radioactive material, too -- well, if it is, you can be certain the French government nuclear agency won't tell you, that's none of the public's business. Buy your own Geiger Counter -- I have my own, you can, too.

Then, on her new hat, is Coco's cat -- les chats are excellent for keeping you warm in winter.

And on the other side of the chapeau is The World, and the Flag of the World is an envelope addressed to

Mlle. Coco
Isle du Coco

The cat and flag are dingbats / crude clip art from the Wingdings font. I love clip art and dingbats because they're crude and because I can't really draw anything to save my ass. In school, all my art teachers forbade me absolutely from ever trying to make art again for the rest of my life. As you can see, I am defying them all, I am giving them all the finger, I am dropping my trousers and mooning them. My Mail Art is really my Revenge Art.

Merci et Danke for requesting the original Coco's New Hat! It's a miracle that it survived the Great Hard Disk Disaster of 2003! Such treasures, lost forever! But Coco and her New Hat survived!

Did you notice that Coco's creator displayed my hat first??? Bite me, Art Teachers of the World!