I was attracted to mail art because of their rules, "No jury, no fees, all work exhibited, as received; documentation to participants."

I wrote about the writing life, or the life of a writer, trying to combine writing, work, and family, and many of my friends were painters, or musicians, or writers, who shared similar experiences, outlooks on life, and so forth. When I talked about my struggle it rang a responsive chord with them.

Mail artists were suspicious of academics, gallery owners, collectors, museum curators, grants specialists in foundations and arts agencies. Insiders who banded together to exclude anyone they couldn't control, by controlling how arts patronage was passed out-grants and prizes, teaching jobs, book contracts, and the like.

They were able to make the outsiders sound like sore losers who couldn't hack it, isolated loners, disgruntled and embittered by failure.

I didn't get that feeling from the mail art shows I entered or from the mail art people I communicated with. Rather, the opposite. They were open, rather than closed, democratic, rather than cliquish, disingenuous, rather than secretive.

They weren't big on credentials, badges, getting their tickets punched, paying their dues, the old apparatchik omertà, in which you don't divulge the secrets of the guild.

Fraternity-boy silliness. What did they think artists were--business majors?

A mail art show would announce a theme, and I would send a flier, a single sheet of paper, no illustrations-a squib-on the subject, and people would say, "What's this? It isn't art. It's text."

It raised questions about what art is by not being visual art. By being text about the subject the visual artists were portraying.

It was about the subject the show was about, but also about how did one approach the subject? As an artist? By what medium?

Also, many shows have a program, that accompanies the art, a catalog, a catlogue raisonné, sometimes, or a display, next to the art, a gloss, of what the painting represented.

Why did a painting need that? Or why wasn't that a piece of art in its own right? Or what was the boundary between the two?

Howard Finster painted a painting and painted on it something like, "Howard Finster is discovered by the art collector Sydney Janis." That's what the painting was a painting of.

Mexican ex-voto painting does the same thing. A person to whom a miracle has occurred hires a painter to paint a painting of the event and the text explaining what happened is in the painting. A person whose prayers have been answered, the prayer is spelled out, in the painting. Is narrated. The painting is a narrative.