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.
When I was a child, one of the many pleasures of going away on holiday was to stand around in shops looking at displays of postcards, with scenic images of the place where we were staying, the famous landmarks or buildings, pictures of notable people who were associated with the region, and choosing a selection of these cards along with the stamps that needed to be affixed to the top right hand corner of the reverse side. Then, once back at the hotel, cottage, or boarding house, I would sit on my bed, resting the cards on a book, and carefully write the addresses of my friends along with a message, describing the weather, the local attractions, and the many exciting things I had done. While these texts were, no doubt, rather dull and formulaic, the point of the postcard was not primarily to provide information, rather it was to remind my friends that I was thinking of them, despite being away and having a good time without them. And, when I returned home, receiving cards from my friends who, in turn, were away on their travels, was equally exciting. Before the ubiquity of social media and global digital networks, which are now hard to evade, the postcard was the simplest everyday mode of connection that kept friends in touch with each other.
Nowadys, postcards have become collectibles. Their changing images testify to cyclical fashion trends, the development of photography, and the evolution of taste in holiday destinations and activities. There are postcards of people, places, objects, and artefacts of all kinds. Somewhere, in a box of personal treasures, I still have a delightful postcard image of a group of multicoloured used condoms that someone sent me, although I can’t remember where from: Amsterdam? Greenwich village? Probably not the Vatican. I tend not to keep many memento, but for some reason I don’t want to part with this cherished postcard.
At this year’s Venice Biennale, I thought the most impressive national pavilion was that of Spain, which was full of postcards, organised into a magnificent artwork by Oriol Vilanova, who has lived for many years in Brussels, where he collects postcards obsessively, buying them in bulk from flea-markets, second-hand shops, and other sources. He views them as the ordinary residue or remnants from the past, unlike the precious objects that museums collect, catalogue, and display. And his installation – which consisted of more than 50,000 postcards – was made without any obvious viewpoint, narrative, or thematic development: the cards were fixed to the wall in perfectly ordered columns and rows across several large rooms, grouped together thematically.
These themes were sometimes places, sometimes objects, sometimes colours: for example, of the roughly 150 themed groups, those beginning with the letter ‘P’ were: Pagoda, Painter, Parasol, Parrot, Pink, Playground, Pool, Pope, Pulpit, Pyramid; and for the letter ‘S’: Santa Claus, Sheep, Ship, Siren, Snake Charmer, Snow, Spanish Riding School, Squirrel, Sunset, Swamp, Swan, Swiss Flag, Swiss Guard. Fittingly, one of the themes for the letter ‘V’ was postcards of Venice. It is a classificatory system that captures the breadth and eccentricity of human interest, without being either comprehensive or systematic. No matter: it worked brilliantly.
Whether the viewer stood close in and looked at individual images – with many predictable, clichéd photographs adjacent to a range of unexpected and exotic – or stood back and looked at the overall visual effect achieved by the repetition of shape and colour, gradually shifting across the large white walls of the pavilion, the experience was engaging and illuminating. All human life, all of its humour, its sentimentality, its respectfulness, its admiration, and its cheekiness, was evident in this show. And all the variety of what we choose to remember of the places we have travelled to, all that we choose to share with our friends and families, to whom we sent postcards, was visible. It was a compendium, a cacophony, an atlas, an almanac, and also an endless stream of advertisements, all displayed in perfect formation, the standardised size of the postcard allowing the thousands of individual units to cohere into a perfectly geometric formal structure. I repeat myself: it worked brilliantly.
Few of us still buy and send postcards when we are on holiday. We have no need. From our phones we can send a text message, a location link, a voice message, a photo, all of which are delivered within seconds and no need to worry about postal delays. The postcard is now obsolete, just like the cassette tape, the horse-drawn carriage, and the fountain pen. With obsolescence comes the possibility of re-birth, or re-cycling. And, as so often, it is artists who see the value in transforming small and simple images designed to carry short and simple messages, into something more mysterious and meaningful.
In 1981, the philosopher Arther Danto wrote a book about the way in which Andy Warhol and others had taken banal objects and made them into artworks, which he called The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. It’s a great title, and whether or not you find Danto’s argument compelling, it seems to be a helpful description of one of the many things that contemporary artists do: they transform the quotidian into the exceptional. I came home from Venice this summer without sending a single postcard. But I saw more than 50,000 of them in the Spanish Pavilion and it made me happy. And last month, I travelled back from Bolton to London, having seen yet more postcards, which had been cut up and re-used to make beautiful collages: seeing them made me happy too.