May 2013

buZ blurr aka Russell Butler

 

Education: Some college, lots of collage

Lacking credentials for art authority he appropriated the blank spaces on railcars as he walked the narrow canyons between the rails and practiced his own dispatch in the folk art tradition of chaulk and paint stik drawings of railworkers and hobos, which had been riding the rails for over a century. Close calls from falling boxcar doors, broken chains on handbrakes, and squeezed between inadequate clearances, gave him the right to partake. Outside of the hazards of the railroad livelihood, a series of head injuries perhaps gave him the delusion he could elevate his repetitious drawings to the claim of purposeful monumental conceptualism, as some pervasive practitioners had become the first human scrawl brand coast-to-coast, well before radio, Coca-Cola, Ford and Chrysler. Icon and logo famous anonymously on the transcontinental railroad.

In April of 1972, he discovered the existence of the mail art network, subsequent to the start of his use of N.American railroad system in Nov 1971. With these two outlets of expression, the 'low orbit' of global postal exchange, and the evanescent route of graffiti markings on the steel roads of the world's largest physical network, he felt he had found his audiences, albeit captive.

His main focus in the mail art network has been the conversion of his primitive photography portraits to artists stamps, including many self-portraits as the sovereign and issuing authority of his philatelic realm, Surrealville, Principality of buZ.