| by Kari Lydersen Special to The 
      Washington PostSunday, 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 
              
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          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." 
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