Last month, I took a train from London to Manchester and then another on to Bolton, where Hive Artists, a community arts organisation, hosts exhibitions in the Market Place Shopping Centre. They have transformed an empty retail unit into a well-lit and spacious gallery, where a good friend, Martyn Lucas, was showing some of his recent collage work, under the title A Fragile Earth. Using old art books and catalogues, found images, and picture postcards as his source materials, he transforms the original format of these pictures into puzzling but pleasing new images, where landscape, figure, and meaning are all disrupted. The works are often playful and humorous, but they also carry a serious message, namely that our world is constantly vulnerable to destructive forces, whether vestiges of our social history or the waste products of the modern economy. Images that should be the source of beauty and pleasure can become transformed instead into sources of pain and loss. Lucas’s use of old postcards in his work involves a certain poignancy, because the original intention of these small pictures was to bring delight to the receiver, not to warn of danger.
The postcard was invented in the Austro Hungarian Empire in 1869, as a simple means to send short messages to recipients that did not require the work of a letter, written on a sheet of paper and placed inside an envelope. The British developed their own version the following year, with a pre-paid stamp, and they proved highly popular: around 75 million were sent in 1871, the second year of their introduction, and by 1912 the annual volume in Britain exceeded 800 million (at a time when the population was still fewer than 50 million people). The first postcards had the address on one side and the message on the other, but quickly the design changed so that the address and the message were both on the reverse side, allowing for an image of some sort – a drawing, or a photograph, or a cartoon – on the front. This innovation allowed the sender to deliver a double message – using both word and image – to the chosen recipient, and the public format of both elements encouraged the development of both subtle, coded forms of communications alongside the blatant and the conspicuous.
Continue reading “Postcards of Venice”