Wait a Minute, Mr. Postman
Only he hadn’t. The young man and woman were U.S. postal inspectors from the Chicago field office. They’d been dispatched by postal service brass in Washington at the behest of the Norwegian postal authorities, who were disturbed by a stamp on a letter Thompson had asked a friend to mail him from Oslo. It was a reproduction of Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting The Origin of the World and featured, says Thompson, “a frank depiction of the female genitalia.”
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In 1994 he hooked up with Hernandez de Luna, with whom he’d attended the School of the Art Institute in the early 1980s. Hernandez de Luna had just returned from a six-year stay in Germany, where he’d been painting, playing in a Hank Williams cover band, and making signs for the civilian services branch of the army. He suggested they start producing sheets of stamps using a color printer and a stamp perforator Thompson had found in his building. “After we started making sheets, I started to grasp the potential of this thing,” says Thompson.
Initially they sent out dozens of letters addressed to themselves, receiving between 25 and 50 percent of them back. Sometimes Hernandez de Luna would trade a stamped envelope for beer. But by 1995 they’d amassed enough canceled stamps for a show at the Oskar Friedl gallery. They displayed the postmarked envelopes next to the sheets of originals, and sold the sets for upwards of $600.
They stayed two hours. “My initial fear was that they were going to arrest me that very day,” says Thompson. “Once I established they were not there to arrest me, I was kind of curious about how the post office viewed it and how much they knew about it.
His most drawn-out project–getting The Necklace, a stamp featuring a burning tire, mailed from South Africa–took two years from conception to cancellation. “I did it because a girl said her mother said she’d do it for me. But she sent them back because she found the image so disturbing. I had to wait for someone else to go to South Africa.”
“We’re on hiatus, I’m afraid,” says Thompson, who owns an etching press and is thinking about engraving a set of stamps. “I’m not sure what it’ll take to get back in the saddle.”
