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by Kari Lydersen
Special to The
Washington Post
Sunday, May 15, 2005; Page N05
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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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