Secret postcards

The Royal College of Art's 'Secret' exhibition is back in March. To raise money for the college's bursary schemes, more than 1,000 famous and not-so-famous artists will anonymously pit their talents against the postcard's form.

At the end of the exhibition, cards will be sold off for £45 each. Post purchase buyers find out who made their cards.

Photo of the RCA Secret from 2011

Of late, I've been reading Jeremy Cooper's Artists' Postcards, an excellent compendium of how the postcard has been used by different artists since 1900. It's quite a book. And I bet more than a few RCA artists refer to it as they create their cards for 2013.

At a pace, Cooper takes you through the canon(?) of postcard art: René Magritte's postcard magazines, Gilbert & George's Post Card Sculptures, Paul Morton's Thatcher Therapy (a dot-to-dot postcard suggesting you draw a pencil mesh over a photo of the ex-PM), Joseph Beuys' wooden postcards, Rachel Whiteread's hole-punched cards...

Two cards stood out, though. It's always the personal connections ultimately, isn't it?

The first, a 1908 Donald McGill postcard titled "In the Asylum".  The image shows a red-nosed man, grinning from behind the bars of a cell door.

Above him is a sign:

CAUSE: Picture-postcard collecting
CONDITION: Up the pole

REMARKS: Thinks he's a Gibson Girl 

How cruel Donald!? How cruel.

The second card was made by Belgian artist Francis Alÿs. I first came across Alÿs when a friend showed me this film of him painting a line in the middle of a road in Panama. I love it.

This is the Alÿs postcard in Cooper's book:

Image from artpdf blog 

Copies were given to visitors to the Tate exhibition of Alÿs' work in 2010.

The card caught my eye, not just because it was made by Alÿs but because of the contrast with a Rough Sea postcard I bought recently.

The Rough Sea series was one of the most popular in Edwardian Britain. Published by Tuck's, some say it tapped into Britain's island psyche, others that the cards have a deep erotic charge.

While I really like Rough Sea cards, I resist collecting them. One thing I have learnt is that to avoid ending up in McGill's collecting asylum you have to set some limits.

Rather than buying it for the image, I bought it to add to my collection of old postcard messages. Specifically, I bought it to add to a new category of cards I've noticed: empty postcards, postcards without written messages.

Increasingly, I'm coming to think of them as secret postcards.

RCA Secret opens on Thursday 14 March at the Dyson Building in Battersea, London. The sale takes place on Saturday 23 March. If you're going, good luck!

Good luck with the essay, love from Gilbert and George

Paul Ricoeur noted that when we meet an author "we experience a profound disruption of the peculiar relation that we have with [them] through [their] work.” (Ricoeur 1991, p. 107) 

Meeting an author (or an artist) removes the distance we normally have from them when we consider their books (art). A dialogue is possible where it wasn't before. 

In the case of a book signing, however, it is likely to be an unbalanced dialogue which emerges. Loaded with the scripted thoughts of the reader/consumer and hurried by the queue behind, some of the distance remains. 

I went to see the Gilbert and George postcard art exhibition at the White Cube a few months ago, and thought it would be interesting to see them in person at their book signing at the Tate last week - not least as they too collect old postcards. I went, after a day in the library.

Ricoeur, P., 1991. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.

Rachel Whiteread

I've been challenged by my tutor, John Reardon, to use my collection of messages in ways that don't simply rely on nostalgia. 


I know what he's getting at. It's all too tempting to romanticise the messages, to separate them completely from the present. 


To get me going, I've been thinking about the work of artist Rachel Whiteread. 


A few weeks ago I went to see the Tate exhibition of her drawings. As well as her sketches, the show included some of her collections of objects - from Russian postcards to hotel keys, squashed cans to a cast of Peter Sellers' nose. 


Whiteread (of the plinth on the plinth in Trafalgar Square, of concrete casts of a terraced house, and of a winding village of old dolls' houses) appears interested in our ambiguous relationship with memory. 


In conversation with Bice Curiger, Whiteread likened drawing to writing a diary. This fits with the feeling you get as you walk round the rooms at the Tate. Peering into the vitrines feels very much like looking into Whiteread's mind. Or her memory.


But in the interview, I was puzzled by her attitude towards collecting. Here are two quotes, one about her collection of dolls' houses and the other on how she regards postcards:

"I started collecting dolls’ houses about 22 years ago, by chance. I bought maybe three or four, and then people started buying them for me. I didn’t really know what to do with them, but I kept buying them, and the more dishevelled and unloved they were, the more I wanted to look after them.... I had wanted to make something that wasn’t sentimental, but would make children gasp when they saw it."

"Explorers took photographers with them, and would make postcards [from their pictures]. Postcards were a way in which people first saw the world. However, I do not want to be nostalgic…"

For both the dolls' houses and postcards, Whiteread is keen to avoid nostalgic sentimentality. But her attitudes to the dolls' houses and to the cards differ substantially.


Of the dolls' houses she says she "look[s] after them". And you can see this in her artwork. Her village brings the collection to life. She resuscitates the "unloved" houses. 


But with her postcards, things are different. Rather than preserving, she has irreversibly changed them. Punched holes into them. Created something new - see the photo below. Whereas she's fallen in love with the dolls' houses as they are or how they've been, the postcards offer potential for what they might become.

I think my interest in old postcards is most similar to Whiteread's love of her houses. My urge is to preserve and breathe new life into them. 


Or to put it another way, I won't be introducing them to any hole punchers.