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.

When a postcard becomes a placard

For the best part of a year, I've been involved in a project called Save Our Placards. At the second biggest demonstration ever in the UK on 26 March 2011, a group of us asked people how they wanted the Museum of London to remember the march against government spending cuts.

Photo credit: Guardian

It was an epic project. In the end, more than 400 people donated their placards, flags and costumes. Enough for an exhibition at the museum a week later.

Watching the Occupy protests this week has brought back a lot of great memories of the March For The Alternative. Of the woman who gave me her "protest umbrella" on Piccadilly, even though it was starting to rain.  Of seeing a man walk the length of Hyde Park to give us his TAX NOT AXE axe. And of nervously leaving a minibus packed full of angry cardboard joy on a London street overnight.

As if on cue Liza, a formidable campaigner from Vermont, sent me this today ... a postcard-come-placard. I love what Liza has done - twisting the standard lines on old postcards. We expect nostalgia, yet we get a protestor's sting. Very clever. Thank you Liza.

And a big hello to my placard partners in crime (Mark Teh, Hafiz Nasir, Svein Moxvold and Lolo Galindo) who are now spread across the globe. Wish you were here....?

Post-It-ese

A trend for 2011 has been the re-emergence of the post-it. This week, at Apple stores across the world, it was the low-tech post-it note that people used to pay tribute to the hi-tech visionary Steve Jobs. 

Photo credit: Twitter user @lautenbach

In London over the summer, we had the Peckham Peace Wall after the riots. People expressed their frustration, shock and optimism on notes stuck to a boarded-up discount shop.

Photo credit: Flickr user Celie

In Paris, there was even La guerre des Post-Its. Office workers competed over who could make the best art from the sticky notes.

Photo credit: postitwar.com

What is it about the post-it note that makes it popular now? 

Low-tech. Physical. Mobile. Playful. Free from rules of grammar and etiquette. Anonymous.  I guess all of these. 

Post-Its were massively useful for me over the summer as I ordered my thoughts on old postcards for my dissertation. Not just because they were easy to move about but because they made me engage with the form - the short, written message. 

There's more in this... any thoughts?

Lost in admiration

At a fair, most collectors will come and go from a dealer in a matter of minutes. “Any new churches today, Brian?” “Don’t think so, but you’re welcome to have a look."

They know what they want. And a dealer's cards will be ordered by popular collecting categories to make searching easy. It might be a certain place or artist that a collector is after, or pictures of a famous Edwardian actor or politician.

I'll typically stay hunched over one or two stalls the entire time, until my eyes tire.

A good message could be in any box.

While staying in one position can be exhausting, the advantage is you get to eavesdrop on passing trade...

Dealer 1 (holding his friend’s card): I’ve never seen such a good gypsy card. I mean the expressions on their faces…

Dealer 2: I found another one as well which was pretty amazing. And that was £80. How many times have I ever had great photos of gypsies like that in the last 40 years?

Dealer 1: Who does get them?

Dealer 2: Jeremy, not very often.

Dealer 1: Who does get them? They’re just not there. No, no.

Dealer 2: I won’t see another card like that for 20 years. And I won’t be around in another 20 years. I only got them because I would pay whatever people ask for them which means you’re not making money. That’s the problem….

Dealer 1: A card like that will always appreciate in value…. I am lost in admiration for that one.

Before the 'back' was divided

I hope people enjoyed the documentary last week.

A few people have asked since seeing the programme what postcards looked like before the back was 'divided'.

You'll remember the modern card only arrived in 1902 after a German publisher (one F. Hartman) persuaded the Post Office to let him put a picture on the 'front' and then split the other side between message and address.

Well, here's an official card sent in 1875. That's 5 years after the postcard was introduced in the UK. It's much smaller than later cards and is printed in mauve. Only the address could be written on the side shown above, with the message restricted to the other.

You'll also see the stamp comes with the card. No need to buy one.

These cards were all made by De La Rue, the money printers. And incredibly, they were the only cards that could take advantage of the half penny rate for postcards.

De La Rue's monopoly was finally relaxed in 1894 after a campaign by the MP Henniker Heaton. After this, privately-published cards could be sent at the postcard rate. Go Henniker!

When something becomes so familiar, like the form of the postcard, it's easy to forget the people behind it. Yet how the card looks today was not inevitable. It needed people to change things. And in a curious way, the anonymity of Hartman and Heaton today is testament  to the totality of their triumphs.

The Picture Postcard World of Nigel Walmsley

Edwardian postcards make it onto the small screen on Thursday with The Picture Postcard World of Nigel Walmsley.

Jake Hayes and the rest of the BBC4 team did a great job unpacking their history. Messrs Tuck, Hartmann, Gladstone and all the other postcard heroes would be very proud. And I really enjoyed getting the chance to tell the stories of Dorothy and Miss Emerson.

As well as helping out on the documentary, I've been busy finishing my dissertation on the mysteries of old cards. Thanks for everyone's support. Now that it's handed in (phew!) I'll be writing up bits on Postcardese. Really looking forward to hearing what people think.

As I wrote it I realised the importance of this card from Meg to M. That word on the second line, "tonight", has had an impact on how I see all pre-WW1 cards.

Franked in Putney at 10.45am, Meg was so sure of the Edwardian postal service she was able to plan a trip to the theatre that very evening:

"H and I are going to see the "Girl on the Stage" tonight, would you care to join us..."

With one word the card reveals how postcards were not like they are now. As the documentary explains, rather than being a sign of not caring about the timeliness of a message, they could be sent and received within hours.

And because of this, they become such curious objects. On the one hand foreign, signifying a way of life that has disappeared. But on the other, eerily prescient of our instant means of communication today.

Anyway, I really hope you enjoy the programme. It will be on BBC iPlayer for a few weeks if you miss it on Thursday.

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The price is part of the card

When I first started collecting, I used to rub out the prices dealers wrote on cards. I don't any more.

I guess I had wanted to restore the cards to how they'd originally looked.

Now, the price mark is part of what I'm buying. It signifies the card's present - that it has a value today. And also that it has passed through many hands since it was first sent.