No junk mail please: the man who popped YBA art in the postbox

Matthew Higgs’ visionary Imprint 93 was snail mail’s artistic swansong and helped to deliver a new generation of artists from Chris Ofili to Martin Creed

Martin Creed Work 88 is today considered a modern masterpiece. Collectors covet it and any museum would be proud to display it. However, when Creed posted it to Tate director Nicholas Serota and about 150 other art-world folk in 1995, this radical sculpture was not so reverently received. Work 88 is, after all, essentially (entirely) a piece of paper crumpled into a ball. Serota’s secretary, presumably thinking it was just a crazy piece of junk mail, carefully flattened it out and posted it back.

In one sense, Creed’s crumpled piece of paper really was junk mail – an unsolicited, slightly enigmatic object sent through the post. Artists have a long history of turning the postal service to their own ends. During the first world war, the dadaist George Grosz sent abusive “care” packages to German soldiers as an anti-war protest. He also worked as a postman and tipped his sacks of mail into a ditch. Much later, the subversive Ray Johnson, who worked on the fringes of the pop movement in 1950s Manhattan, invented “mail art”. In 1962, Johnson created The New York Correspondence School, an informal network of recipients for the idiosyncratic, unpredictable artworks he sent by mail.

The 1990s British art scene was much more complicated than the story allows

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