The Card That Travelled: Charles Ross, Point Source / Star Space, 1977

There is something fitting about the fact that this card moved.

In March 1977, two New York galleries — John Weber at 420 West Broadway and Susan Caldwell at 383 West Broadway — jointly presented Charles Ross's Point Source / Star Space. To announce it, they sent a card. The front is a single graphic proposition: a speckled field, a bold yellow diagonal, a small white circle at the centre. Star space. Point source. The whole cosmological argument compressed into a 15 × 10 cm rectangle.

This particular copy was addressed to Hermann Kern at Kunstraum München, Nikolaistraße 15, Munich. It left New York on 17 March 1977 — the meter mark is still legible in red — and arrived in Germany sometime before the opening reception on 24 March. Kern was a central figure in Munich's experimental art scene at the time, later becoming director of Haus der Kunst. The card was, in other words, sent from one serious institutional address to another.

What makes it interesting now is precisely that journey. Ross's work in this period was concerned with light, solar geometry, and the relationship between earthly position and cosmic scale. His Star Axis land work in New Mexico, begun in 1971 and documented in full on charlesrossart.com, remains one of the most ambitious site-specific projects of the twentieth century. Point Source / Star Space extended that investigation into the gallery context. The announcement card extends it further still: a printed object that enacts, in miniature, the same logic of transmission and distance that the work itself explored.

The verso is as legible as the recto. Typed label, postmark, the address of a kunstverein. It is a document of how the art world moved in 1977 — not digitally, not instantly, but through the mail, gallery to institution, New York to Munich, one careful printed card at a time. Ross's practice is well documented at the Dia Art Foundation, whose holdings reflect the sustained institutional attention his work has received. The records of John Weber Gallery itself are held at the Getty Research Institute — a useful archive for anyone tracing the full distribution network of which this card was once a part.

The card is available in the shop.