A Work Small Enough to Send
What changes when an artwork becomes a postcard?
Between 1968 and 1979, On Kawara sent two postcards each day to friends, collectors and colleagues. Each was stamped with the time he had risen that morning. The image already printed on the front was incidental. What mattered was the addition of a date, a time, an address and a recipient.
The postcard did not reproduce an artwork. Its passage through the post completed one.
Most art postcards begin from the opposite direction. An artwork already exists, often at a scale or in a material that cannot travel easily. It is photographed, reduced and printed onto card. Sculpture, lightbox, painting, publication and magazine cover are brought into the same approximate dimensions.
The format is indifferent to their differences. It asks each object to become an image.
A 1994 Tate postcard reproducing Helen Chadwick's Enfleshings I begins with a work made from photographic transparency and light. Raw organic material forms a circular mass around an illuminated centre. Its physical presence depends upon brightness, depth and the uneasy proximity of flesh to display.
On the postcard, the light is no longer emitted. It is printed.
The organic material becomes a coloured photographic surface surrounded by a blue border. The reverse supplies what the front cannot: the artist's name, title, date, dimensions, medium, collection and acquisition information. The bodily object has become an institutional image.
Something has been lost, but something else has been made visible. The postcard records the moment at which the work entered a collection and acquired an authorised public face. It is not simply a smaller version of Enfleshings I. It is the version selected to circulate.
Richard Prince's Good Revolution passes through a different sequence. The original 1992 Parkett edition combines a photographic backdrop, an engraved plaque and a playable seven-inch record presented as a gold disc. It borrows the language of musical achievement, commercial display and celebrity memorabilia.
The postcard cannot play the record. Its surface does not reproduce the reflective movement of gold. Instead, it compresses the edition into its most legible signs: the record, the stage, the title, the publisher and the addresses of Parkett's offices in Zürich and New York.
Here, reduction does not necessarily contradict the original object. The work already operates through borrowed imagery, branding and reproduction. Its conversion into a postcard appears less like an imperfect copy than another stage in the same system.
The gold record becomes an edition.
The edition becomes a photograph.
The photograph becomes a postcard.
At each stage, the object becomes easier to distribute.
A set of three postcards issued for Wade Guyton's 2017 Serpentine Galleries exhibition makes this sequence more difficult to separate from the work itself. Guyton's paintings are produced by feeding linen through inkjet printers. Files, machines, misalignments and printing failures remain present in their surfaces.
The postcards introduce another transfer. Linen becomes exhibition photography; exhibition photography becomes offset print on card.
The cards are smoother and more controlled than the paintings they reproduce. Printer drag, interruption and physical scale are contained within a clean institutional format. Yet this distance is precisely what makes them relevant. A postcard of a painting made through digital printing exposes a chain that might otherwise remain concealed:
file, printer, linen, photograph, postcard.
The card is secondary, but the process of becoming secondary belongs to the questions already present in the work.
Martin Kippenberger's Martin, ab in die Ecke und schäm dich undergoes a more spatial transformation. The sculpture presents a life-size figure standing with his face pressed into the corner of a gallery. Its scale places the viewer in a room with another body. The architecture is part of the work: two walls meet and hold the figure in position.
On the postcard, the encounter becomes a scene.
The body is reduced to a small figure. The gallery corner becomes a graphic division of white planes. Embarrassment, discipline and self-caricature are made portable.
There is a quiet contradiction in this movement. A figure placed in the corner, facing away and apparently removed from public participation, returns as an image intended for distribution. The sculpture withdraws. The postcard circulates.
The Tracey Emin card issued by FLUX magazine does not reproduce an individual artwork. It reproduces a magazine cover. Emin's face appears in black and white beneath the red title The All Seeing I / Paper Recordings. On the reverse, promotional copy directs the recipient towards a newsagent, record shop, gallery or bookshop.
The card therefore moves through several forms of publicity at once. An artist becomes a magazine subject. The magazine cover becomes a postcard. The postcard becomes an advertisement for the magazine.
What travels is not one of Emin's works but her public image at a particular moment. Portrait, editorial feature and promotional device occupy the same surface. The card records a period in which the circulation of the artist's face became difficult to separate from the reception of the work.
A publisher's postcard for Maciunas' Learning Machines carries almost no distinction between image and information. Its front reproduces a book cover filled with George Maciunas's handwritten charts and diagrams. The reverse supplies an ISBN, publisher's address and contact details.
It is a postcard announcing a publication about systems of organisation.
The object sits between mailer, advertisement and bibliographic record. It is not a work by Maciunas, but it carries a structure associated with him: information arranged into diagrams, history converted into a network, and an idea made mobile through inexpensive print.
In this case, the postcard does not merely reproduce the subject of the book. It begins to behave like it. It becomes another small unit within a larger system of references, publishers, collections and addresses.
Every postcard has two sides.
The front offers an image. The reverse describes the infrastructure that allowed the image to travel: artist, title, photographer, museum, gallery, publisher, copyright holder, ISBN, postal division, stamp box and address.
One side asks to be looked at. The other explains where the image belongs.
Even an unposted postcard anticipates a recipient. Its blank space remains available for a message. Its divided reverse retains the possibility of movement, however long the object remains in a drawer, shop or archive.
The postcards gathered here do not preserve the artworks intact. They cannot retain the light of Chadwick's transparency, the scale of Kippenberger's figure, the surface of Guyton's linen or the playable component of Prince's edition.
They preserve a series of decisions about those works.
Which image will represent them?
Which details will accompany it?
Who will publish it?
Where will it travel?
What will remain when its original context is no longer accessible?
The postcard is often treated as a minor object encountered after the exhibition, beside the catalogue or near the museum exit. But its smallness gives it a particular agency. It can leave the institution. It can be handled without ceremony, placed inside a book, pinned to a wall, addressed to another person or retained without explanation.
What it carries is not the artwork itself, but a proposition about how the artwork should be remembered.
Whether that proposition remains secondary is less certain.
FROM THE ARCHIVE
Wade Guyton — Set of 3 Exhibition Postcards, Serpentine Galleries, London, 2017