Lost in translation - part 2

A month ago, I posted a 1913 card sent from the US to Japan.,, 

Well, thanks to an old school pal (Rupert) and a friend from university (Fuyu) we've now got a translation (or two) .... 

I always feel a bit conflicted in finding out more about the cards. 

Walter Benjamin talked about us living in an age where everything is explained, where "no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation." He speculated about the impact this has on our imagination, and our ability to connect through storytelling.

I like to think the mysteries in old cards offer some resistance to this. But there's still that itch to find out more. 

And sometimes I give in. Hence the appeal for ideas about what was going on with this card. 

You'll remember I found it at a fair in London. And that the card had been sent from San Francisco in the US to Yokohama in Japan. That much we knew.

Now we know a lot more...

And to that we can add Fuyu's thoughts ...

"In the past, Japanese used to make a horizontal writing from right to left, which we never do in contemporary Japanese.

So I read this line from right to left then it makes sense.

The other part is written in vertical writing so it's different.

Although I cannot understand all of it, I can see it is not saying something happy but something sad/bad because I can see some words like "A year with dreadful Japanophobia" "suffered from devastating blow" "lonely" etc.

Does "Japanophobia" make sense? I can't really find a good phrase for this..

But the thing is I cannot connect all of these, so it may be saying something positive in the end..."

Thanks Rupert, Ai and Fuyu. 

Extra information, for sure. Extra painful information, that is. 

But the card isn't shot through, or is it?

Merry Christmas everyone!

I promised you a Christmas card this week.

And so here it is.... complete with a Google tour of the house it was sent to in Bath. Before it got put into the postcard album, let's hope it got an airing on the piano. A house like that must have a piano? Mustn't it?

Anyway, wishing you.... and the current residents of Claremont Villa.... a very merry Christmas!

Have a great holiday everyone and see you in 2012!

Much love, Guy.



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Self-captioned portraits

This month the fashion company ESPRIT started an ad campaign in which models tell us what they are "wishing for" this Christmas.

How do we know what they want? 

They've written it on pieces of card. They've held these cards up. And then they've looked at us... down the lens of a camera. 

Self-captioned portraits. If you like.

The messages are messy and clear. Messy - to make us feel like they are spontaneous, and therefore genuine. Clear - to make sure we can read them when we're waiting for the bus.

Even putting aside the banality of the wish list - lottery wins, "real happiness" and "harmony with nature" - the campaign has really irked me. 

I know when you analyse advertising, it can make you cross. An advert is only successful if it makes you feel short of something. And admen/women will use all the tricks in their books to give you a desire itch.

But this campaign has crossed the line... it's mangled the work of an artist I really like. That of Gillian Wearing. 

Not that using elements of others' work is in itself always bad, of course. I admit Wearing's work was an influence on the images I took of the "postcard tour" I did at a bookshop in May. 

But if done badly or for a dubious motive, there's a risk the original artwork itself is undermined. Classical music has been an obvious victim of this. Listen to a Puccini opera and at some point you'll inevitably find yourself thinking about buying a new car or, worse still, renewing your home insurance.

In particular, ESPRIT's campaign brought to mind: Wearing's “Signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to say”; the Volkswagen advert that Wearing suggested was based on her work; and DHL's fanverts at the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand this year  - where fans were encouraged to hold up handwritten messages on boards, framed with DHL logos.

For her piece, Wearing approached strangers in public spaces, and asked them to write a spontaneous message on an A3 piece of paper. She then took a photo of them holding the paper. 

Below is one of the first photos in the series. 

It shows a woman holding the message “I REALLY LOVE REGENTS PARK”. With it, Wearing skillfully counters the notion that when it comes to looking at photos ‘you can no longer trust your eyes'. The woman is photographed in a park, suggesting a chance encounter between photographer and subject. 

To create a credible narrative across the series of photos, Wearing uses the same white paper and black marker pen in each, making visible the process of her arranging the photoshoots - you can picture Wearing approaching the volunteers and asking them to join in her project. 

In each photo, the direct gaze into the camera gives the impression the individual is content to be photographed in this way; they are fully aware of what is going on.  And having written the message themselves, they have been given more than a bit of control over how the photo will be read by those that see it. 

With 'authenticity' established, the photos make us believe in the people in the photos. 

For ESPRIT, I guess they want us to think the same of their images. These people are real. Their views are real. Their love of ESPRIT is real. 

There is a problem though for ESPRIT. And it stems from not letting anything interesting or confusing be written on the boards. If applying Wearing's techniques has made us believe in the people photographed and all they've written are trite, empty 'wishes', then aren't we simply left convinced that the brand is for people who themselves are genuinely boring? 

Or is that wishful thinking on my part? 

PS Don't worry, I'll cheer up for Christmas! And on the next post I'll have an update on the Japanese postcard from last week. Am very excited about this. Thanks to Rupert and Fuyu for sending in their translations.

Plus, I have a great card with which to wish you a Merry Christmas.

Lost in translation

I picked this card up at a fair on Sunday. It's a treasure. 

How a card sent from San Francisco to Yokohama, Japan, in 1916 ends up in London in 2011 goodness only knows. But here it is, at £8. 

Would be really grateful for an English translation? I've sent the feelers out on Facebook to a couple of Japanese friends so fingers crossed.

Thank you Debs, Postcardy and PFF!

I thought I'd share some good news with you this week - I managed to pass my masters degree at Goldsmiths.

As you might remember, after messing around with some post-it notes I wrote my dissertation on why old postcards are intriguing today. Here's an extract which gives a very big knuckle tap on the shoulder to the brilliant Postcard Friendship Friday, run each week by Beth in Oregon.

Thanks everyone for your support and, as you'll see below, special thanks to the PFF gang; your expertise was invaluable....

Tilted stamps

Two years ago I set up a website to explore the messages in my collection of postcards.  

The site was adopted by a group called Postcard Friendship Friday, hosted by Beth Niquette in Oregon, Ohio. The group is typical of the 'super-niches' that the internet allows us to develop in some part of our lives.  

Each week members post images of old cards they have found, explaining why the cards appeal and how they came across them. Tastes vary across the group, with each member specializing further within the category of postcards: 

“Bob of Holland” specializes in vintage postcards of European film stars; 

“Mr Cachet” a retired artist from Montana explores the history of the printed word; and

“Postcardy” a collector from Minnesota collects vintage comic postcards. 

The collectors leave postcard-sized messages on the comment boards for others to read. 

In June 2010 I wrote a post on a mesmerizing card sent to Miss L. Warden in London in 1904. Having taken scans of the ‘front’ and ‘back’, I presented a full anatomy of the card. 

On the ‘front’ the sender had annotated the image of The Exchange buildings in Liverpool, at the time a centre for trade in the city. He (or she?) used various signs and a key to direct the way the reader would approach the card: with a double-feathered arrow he showed where he worked and with a dotted cross highlighted “a broken down cotton speculator”. 

On the ‘back’ he drew a map of Britain, outlining the route of his rail trip from London, adding a reference to Hastings which presumably meant something to Miss Warden. 

The next day I checked the site’s comment board only to find my analysis had been exposed as incomplete. “Postcardy” and "Debs" had spotted a further detail which needed to be acknowledged in any deciphering of the card: 

I could not believe I had missed this aspect of postcards. I looked through my collection and found twenty or thirty examples of cards where the King’s head had been placed on an angle, or even stuck upside down. In one example, besides the address there was only a tilted stamp on the card. 

At the next fair, I found cards presenting a whole “Language of Stamps”.  

Yet again, for all its apparent familiarity the Golden Age postcard had reasserted its status as an endlessly foreign object.

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....?