This Small Change: postcards in prison

This Small Change - a project I'm running with the Prisoners' Education Trust in the UK - is asking museums and galleries to offer printed material to prisoners, to help alleviate the extreme conditions prisoners are facing during Covid 19 lockdowns. I've been a bit quiet on this blog for a while, so I thought it would be good to make amends by documenting the project here. I hope you're well. Gx

Three of the handwritten cards sent with the first delivery from Tate.

"The idea of gold"

In March 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, a housemate working in a mental health unit was finding it tough going. The consequences of the lockdown for his patients were becoming severe: among other restrictions, patients were no longer allowed out of the facility, even on accompanied trips. The only accessible external space was a small enclosed garden. As well as keeping everyone safe, staff were under pressure to think of more indoor activities. 

Rooting round the house, we put together a pack of art gallery postcards, including those of works by Rodin, Lubaina Himid, Christina Broom and David Hockney. The next day, my housemate offered them as a gift to patients. While not all the patients appreciated them, a couple really did: they wrote a series of cards to their families who could no longer visit.

Encouraged by the response, I contacted Francesca Cooney, Head of Policy at the Prisoners' Education Trust, to see if something similar would be of interest to people in prisons. Francesca thought it would be worth giving it a try. She explained prisoners were in their cells nearly all day; libraries and gyms had been closed; and all visits cancelled. Alarmingly, there were also reports of more incidents of self harm. 

Together, we devised a scheme to see if museums - themselves closed to the public during lockdowns - could send stocks of gift shop postcards to prison education teams. The hope was that the postcards would be of interest to prisoners in their cells. Given the quality of cards from museums, we felt there was a fair chance this would be the case. As the Surrealist poet Paul Éluard argues, while postcards may be art's "small change", "this small change sometimes suggests the idea of gold".

"I never felt so proud to write to my son. A proper postcard." 

Thanks to the efforts of many people across a number of institutions, the pilot scheme - between HMP Pentonville, Tate and the Postal Museum - was a great success. 

Tate's Distribution Manager, Keith McCubbin, with the first box of postcards.

Despite the challenges of remote working, we were able to distribute 100 'packs' of cards to prisoners. Each pack included a handwritten card explaining the project, a selection of cards from the Tate, and some first class stamps donated by the Postal Museum. 

We were especially grateful to José Aguiar, a prisons education consultant, who worked with men in HMP Pentonville to put the packs together and to distribute them to other prisoners. The different elements of the pack had to be sent into the prison separately and collated by José and his team. We also needed special permission from the governors of HM Pentonville to include stamps in the packs.

José said the men were really impressed with the postcards, commenting that it is rare for prisoners to see anything as beautiful and of such quality as the Tate cards. One of the men said it was the first time he had been proud to write to his son while in prison. For him the Tate card was "a proper postcard". Another said the postcards became "a window" to his family. 

Since the first delivery, we've managed to deliver more cards from the Tate, as well as packs from the Garden Museum and the London Transport Museum. We'll be continuing the scheme this year. On my next post, I'll include a few of the stories the cards have inspired, written by men in HMP Pentonville. 

In the meantime, if you know of anyone who works in museums and who is able to access spare or old stocks of postcards, please get in touch.

The packs being assembled at HMP Pentonville by men serving time there.
Photograph by José Aguiar.  

Postcard from Brussels

Agnès Varda and some potatoes

A couple of weeks ago, I went to an exhibition by the artist and filmmaker Agnès Varda in Brussels. Among her many films, Varda created the extraordinary documentary The Gleaners and I. The film - released in 2000 - explores the lives of those who gather (or 'glean') things which others leave behind: grapes left by winemakers to rot on the vine, potatoes still in the fields after the harvest, food unsold at the end of a market.

As well as looking to parts of society that are rarely given respect by popular media, and her instinct for taking seriously the importance of material circumstances, I find Varda's work really inspiring because so many of her working processes are improvised.

For example, according to Kelley Conway's excellent book on Varda, Varda's decision to base her 1985 film Vagabond on the experiences of a young woman rather than a man came as a result of a chance encounter with a female drifter while on the road. Varda became friends with the woman, Setine Arhab, who went on to stay with Varda in Paris and have a cameo in the film. Likewise, Conway shows how The Gleaners and I changed significantly from the film Varda set out to produce.

This improvised or instinctive feel to her work helps give it a sense of adventure. It seems to allow Varda the space to not just spot the intriguing, but to follow it, and even nurture it in a way that encourages the viewer to follow where their own curiosity takes them. On watching one of her films, I get a sense of wanting to go somewhere, anywhere, to find something new to look at or to talk to someone I don't know - even if this is just the end of my street.

The exhibition in Brussels included extracts from Varda's films, as well as art installations relating to her childhood in Ixelles, the district of Brussels hosting the exhibition.

Varda recreates a pond from a local park which she recalls from childhood

The pond as it is today

In a piece entitled La paravent de mémoire - À ma mére, Varda arranges ephemera relating to her late mother on a folding wooden screen: postcards of Brussels, a half-completed jigsaw puzzle, an interrupted game of patience. On the exhibition's audioguide, Varda explains the screen involves both displaying and hiding: another clue perhaps as to how she is able to let the curious hang still in her films.

La paravent de mémoire - À ma mére

With Varda lodged in my head for my three days in Brussels, I inevitably found myself looking for moments of enchantment, of which Brussels has a ready supply.

Of course - and especially of late in the city - what one finds intriguing can be alarming as much as it can prompt illumination; it can provoke fear and tension as well as hope or amusement.

Front to back to front

Rubber Stamp - by Daniel Eatock

I'm a big fan of Daniel Eatock's postcard art. You might remember he was one of the artists featured in the show THE POSTCARD IS A PUBLIC WORK OF ART in London earlier in the year.

Above are both sides of Daniel's brilliant 'Rubber Stamp' postcard. The front is a picture of a rubber ink stamp, which prints stamps. On the back, in the top right-hand corner, is a stamp stamped by the stamp.

I wrote to Daniel to find out more about the design.

He replied as follows...

the object is the work

the postcard displays a picture of the object and an impression from the object

the postcard becomes an infinite loop as the impression on the reverse depicts a stamp but references a frank mark, the cancellation process for stamps

the title Rubber Stamp is funny

A stamp for stamps

Thanks Daniel!

More of Daniel's postcards can be found on his website at www.eatock.com.

The Postcard is a Public Work of Art

Following on from January's blog, here's a quick interview I did with curator Jeremy Cooper on his exhibition 'The Postcard is a Public Work of Art', and in particular the work of artist Molly Rooke.

The exhibition runs until 1 March 2014 at Bökship on Cambridge Heath Road in London.

A bright and beautiful thing

Thank you to artist-wonder-friend Kate Wiggs for this postcard. Received, in an envelope, last week.

More on Mathilde ter Heijne's 'Woman To Go' can be found here.

On sorting

A postcard collection is never stable, never entirely complete. 

Ten years ago, artist Mary Anne Francis played with the challenge of ordering her collection of postcards in her work 'Unsorted'. 

Rather than showing an ordered collection, she exhibited her postcards in the process of being classified. 

According to Mary Anne, the installation showed someone “attempting to arrange – sort out – a collection of sorts… but: how to sort a type or type a sort?” 

I’ve come to realise that just as a collection reaches some kind of order, it seems to call out for more of a type and then, inevitably, more of a sort.


-----

Image of artwork in video courtesy of the artist: installation view of 'Unsorted' at e1 gallery, London, 2002

Artwork sourced from Jeremy Cooper's 'Artists' Postcards', Reaktion Books.

Secret postcards... continued

Ahead of the RCA secret postcard show opening tomorrow, I've written a piece for the Guardian on what three artists think about taking part.

Fascinating putting it together. Three different perspectives on producing secret art.

Thanks to David Bailey, Pete Fowler and Maggi Hambling for sparing their time. And to Sue at the RCA for helping to make it all happen.

I thought I'd share a few more photos of Maggi and Pete taken by the ace Katja Medic. 

And here are a few bits that didn't quite make it into the article...

Maggi Hambling on being an art student in 1960s London: "Telling people you're a painter can be so tedious. I used to say I was swimming pool attendant at Tooting Bec lido." 

Pete Fowler on the lightbulb full of water on his studio ceiling: "I think I'm going to keep it!"

Finally, from Bailey, the Lennon/McCartney postcard:

PS If you're going to the show, look out for the Alys card below. By chance, one of this year's submissions is a torn half of the card given out at Alys's Tate exhibition.

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!

Text, Image and Geoffrey Farmer

In October I went to the Istanbul Biennial - a big art exhibition in Turkey's largest city. Spread across two hangar-like buildings, you need stamina and plenty of chewy Turkish coffee to get through it all.

It is huge.

We spent five hours there. By the end, I felt kind of ill. Knackered. And somewhat empty of feeling.

I guess if art plays with your senses, it's not surprising you involuntarily shutdown after a while at these shows. You can only do justice to so many of the artists. You want to see them all. But can't give energy to every piece. I find I just want to be outside, away from everyone and everything, and even further away from artists' interpretations of the world.

But with time (thankfully!), the noise (and pain) disappear and you're left with the bits that moved you.

Geoffrey Farmer's collage sculpture Pale Fire Freedom Machine is the installation that has stayed clearest in my mind.

Consisting of two hundred or so magazine pictures of people, objects and buildings, Farmer had curated a flash of his mind. Or our minds.

Image credit: Raphael Goldchaim courtesy of Mousse Magazine

For me, the room suspended lingering, floating, media-ed images of a regular modern day. With photos fixed on small sticks and mounted on tiny blocks, the arrangement made visible unpredictable links we make when we let images settle. Naked figures next to a collection of chairs. Bomb clouds next to African masks. And despots alongside teapots, and the like.

What I loved, was the experience of walking around the 2D images... to inspect the text on the other side.

Did Farmer leave to chance what was on the reverse sides of the images? References to 9/11 on one photo suggested he didn't.

In fact the longer you stayed in the room, the more you felt obliged to tackle the text. Sometimes taken from an article related to the image, sometimes not. But always giving authenticity to the idea that the images had come from a magazine or newspaper you or I might have read. And always shifting your take of the image on the other side, and those around it.

As I work up ideas for publishing and installing something around postcard messages, Farmer's work is useful. As is, a piece written by Roland Barthes on the tensions between text and image; how one steers our reading of the other. If you're interested, I've tracked down an online copy here... The Rhetoric of the Image.

For sure, any installation would be worthless if it didn't make use of both sides of the cards. And seeing what Farmer pulled off, the challenge of displaying two-sided objects like the cards has become more an inspiration than a problem. Which I had seen it as for a long time.

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.