Postcards as Art

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Quinn: Hello and welcome to Pictorial on Relay FM. I'm Quinn Rose. I am an art enthusiast, someone who has not gone to art school, but is very excited about it anyway.

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Betty: And I'm Betty, I am also someone who didn't go to art school, but I'm also super excited about art. So we're going to talk about it.

Quinn: And today we're talking about something that was inspired by one of my favorite activities, which is going to art museums.

Betty: (softly) Yay!

Quinn: Well, in this case, it actually wasn't an art museum specifically. This is--I went to the British Museum on a family vacation, and one of their special exhibits at the time was about postcards. And basically they had a whole room that was set up with all these postcards and examples of different art movements and all this stuff. And it was actually all from the personal collection of one person, which I thought was just interesting. This dude has collected tens of thousands of postcards and then the British Museum is like "we could use those." But I found it fascinating and I thought it was really cool to see postcards displayed out there properly in a museum and and treated with this like, very serious respect as with any other type of art medium. But I had never really thought about them as art before. I don't know, do you happen to collect any kind of postcards? Do you like to send postcards when you're out and about? 

Betty: Well, I must say I--that's something that I haven't done in years. I, I'm pretty sure I have sent postcards, but maybe like years ago when I traveled to Europe I sent something, I think back to my family. But other than that, it does seem it's something that's kind of went away. Maybe when smartphones came around when you can just send like, a Snapchat, or like, Instagram. I actually, I learned a new word when you mentioned this topic. I just quickly looked it up and apparently people who collect postcards are called "deltiologists." So deltiology is the act of postcard collecting. But yeah, I don't, I don't collect any postcards and I don't even know if I have any. I think when I moved and my, like I moved and then my parents also moved a few years ago, so they threw away a lot of things and it's possible that if we had postcards before we don't anymore. Which is kind of sad, but maybe I should start collecting postcards.

Quinn: Ohh. I actually do have a postcard collection, interestingly enough. 

Betty: Oh, wow. Hmm. So you're a deltiologist. 

Quinn: I guess I am! But specifically, a couple years ago I just decided to start getting a postcard for everywhere that I visited. And so I have a postcard from almost everywhere I've gone for the last two or three years or so and... Which is a really cool way to sort of get a souvenir of all these places, and it's a very inexpensive souvenir.

Betty: This is true.

Quinn: I mean usually postcards are generally anywhere from like 25 cents to a dollar depending on how fancy they are, for sort of the standard like... location-based postcard imagery. So I have dozens of them. I say I don't think about them as art, but I use them as art, weirdly enough. Like I display them on my walls and it's something that I really like being able to see, like I have a world map print and so I put them around because I'm very fun and basic. So--[both laugh] But yeah, but it's just funny that, that that they actually are like a part of my life. I don't send them super often. When I first moved to Chicago I sent a bunch of my friends who live in other cities postcards from Chicago, but I don't tend to send them when I'm just like on vacation or something. But I always get one for myself and then I put it up on the wall. And then I'm like, look, I have a piece of art. But I was so surprised to see them, like, in a real art museum, which is so funny.

Betty: Do you have any sort of themes of like the type of postcards you collect?

Quinn: I try to get... collage pictures. So for example, like if I want to get a postcard from London, I want it to have a bunch of little pictures on it that has like, the Tower of London, and the London Eye and the... blah blah, you know, so it has representation. And I try to--I love getting them that have pictures of the stuff I actually went to, and so it's like a little scrapbook memory without me having to put it in any actual effort.

Betty: Yeah. That's, that's actually really interesting. A thing that I kind of do, but like not, consistently is I try to get like little booklets... Like when I visit art museums when I'm in a city that I don't know, I get like booklets that showcase their collection. I was at the Victoria and Albert Museum a few years ago and I got like, they had a mini book that showed highlights of their collection, which was kind of cool because it had stuff that I saw in there. So I guess that's kind of--but I haven't done it for obviously every museum I go to, but that's like my version of postcards where--when I go to places.

Quinn: So when I went to this exhibit I was like wow, this is so exciting. And I know that museums generally sell postcards of their exhibits and I was like, I want to get a postcard set of the postcard exhibit. 

Betty: Oh, yeah.

Quinn: They didn't have one!

Betty: Oh, no, that sucks.

Quinn: I was so disappointed! They had the book. So it's like they made a book out of the exhibit, which is also something that museums do quite often when they have special exhibits. And I kind of regret not buying it actually, because I--it really made an impression on me, but I was like, oh, why would they not sell this as a little postcard set, that'd be so great!

Betty: Yeah, that would be awesome. I do also find it... like, interesting and I like it when museums show--I don't know if this is the right word for it, but like, low art? As in like not high art, not like art that is super expensive and super elite but kind of art that's in like, the every day world and everyday life such as postcards. And yeah, it's just like, it's really great to see this other side of the art world that's not all about like, you know, money and millions of dollars at auction, but that's like a different, that's like a different side that we all have access to.

Quinn: Yeah, absolutely. That was one of the big themes of this exhibit was that postcards are fundamentally accessible. And I--just as I'm saying these words realizing the irony of this, as I am talking about an exhibit that I saw on another continent that's now closed. So it's like the least accessible thing possible. But the book is widely available. So if you're really interested, there will of course be links in the show notes if you want to check all that out. And the nice thing is like I also feel like postcards of one of those things that you don't need to see it in person, like a picture of postcard is is fundamentally a postcard. To get to get back to the point you were making, that was a big theme of the exhibit as the way that postcards have been used as sort of way to make that art more accessible. Both by being used by people who are shut out of traditional art world--like there were a lot of women who used postcards to sort of disseminate their art because they were kind of shutout of traditional galleries. Or if people wanted to spread subversive political messages, like the feminist movement had really strong usage of postcards, Yoko Ono's and John Lennon's anti-Vietnam campaign War is Over also used postcards. I find that one interesting because they also like, bought billboards in Times Square, like it was not--it was a very well funded project, but even hand in hand in that, they also use these sort of grassroots... common denominator part of their movement, which I think speaks to sort of the message they were trying to send.

Betty: The one that--when I was reading just the synopsis of the exhibition, the one that really caught my attention is the one where--I think it's the artist Ben Vautier where he had the address on both sides of the cards, and it's called The Postman's choice, so that--I guess it's up to the post office's employee to decide which address to send it to. I think it's kind of funny and it's kind of funny how like, it's still a postcard but it's like a double sided postcard. But did you see that one? Like was it--did it just have to do not have a picture, did it have just addresses on both sides? 

Quinn: Yeah, it's just--I think I remember that one is just addresses and... I feel like if you tried to send that, they just wouldn't send it.

Betty: Yeah, probably.

Quinn: You don't really find return addresses and postcards either though. So it's not like they'd be returned to sender. I don't know.

Betty: Right? Yeah. I don't know what they would do with that.

Quinn: Or I have to assume that probably the person looking at it would just see one side and then put it like in that bin or whatever.

Betty: Oh, maybe, yeah.

Quinn: That's almost like a Plinket toy. You know those things where you, you put the ball down and hits all those nails, then it goes to the--it ends up in one of the holes at the bottom. It would--maybe its path would change depending on what side the person pulled up when they looked at it, you know?

Betty: Right, yeah. That would be interesting because I think it's like they felt they go from city to city and that will be funny if like in one post office. They had it on the one side and they sent it into a bin that went to whatever sorting center, and then it--the other side flipped up at the next person they go "oh this isn't supposed to be here" and then it's just on a loop around the world. So that would be funny.

Quinn: Almost a fun social experiment there really, if you could track it at all.

Betty: Yeah, that would be cool.

Quinn: One of the other things that artists would utilize is postcards as a medium that's really easy to alter, because they're so inexpensive but recognizable, you can do interesting plays with that medium. There's a sculptor, Rachel Whiteread who--she was a postcard collector, and she primarily works in sculpture, and she makes these like huge room... giant room size installations, but she also would take postcards and like, punch a bunch of holes in it and play with space and create kind of almost these two dimensional sculptures as this microcosm of her wider work.

Betty: Hmm. Yeah, I found it really interesting. Yeah I have, I've seen some of her work. I think it was also in London when I was there and I had heard like about some of her big sculpture--sculptural like houses that she does. But it's so interesting that she also works in, or also has done these like types of--like you said like a 2d sculpture thing. I just realized as you were talking that these are holes because as of course, I'm looking at it on a computer screen and I thought it was like painted white do--painted white dots for some reason. And then--but now that you're saying I'm like, oh, these are like hole punch through that--like that postcard, it looks pretty cool.

Quinn: It is a little bit like, trypophobia inducing. 

Betty: Oh, yeah a little bit.

Quinn: It's not quite like terrible enough to hit it for me. But if you are really sensitive to that kind of thing warning for that picture, but yeah, it is a really interesting way to play with space.

Betty: So did she... like punch holes and then try to send these out again, or maybe she just punched holes through them and like that was... that was it?

Quinn: I don't think she was sending them.

Betty: Oh okay.

Quinn: And I was looking--trying to do some research on exactly like what she did with these, but because this wasn't her primary medium information is a little hard to come by, but I did hear one record that these were postcards sent to her. 

Betty: Okay.

Quinn: That she was just like--she got in the mail and she's like "great" and then she's messing around with it.

Betty: Mmhm. So the collection you saw, was it like a specific time period or was it postcards from what like, from old to present day?

Quinn: So it was from the 1960s to present day. So--

Betty: Oh okay.

Quinn: --not the whole history of the postcard. Another thing I never thought about is where postcards came from, but they were sort of like officially invented in Austria, which I thought was funny.

Betty: Oh, okay.

Quinn: I mean Austria was the first country to officially publish like what we would think of as a postcard. And then Canada officially had them in 1871 and the United States had them in 1873.

Betty: Yeah, I read on the Smithsonian's website that apparently the... like predating the postcard in the U.S. there were envelopes that had pictures on them. They would send those, presumably with stuffing the envelopes, but they were kind of like a predecessor to postcards, which I thought was kind of interesting.

Quinn: Oh, that's cool. Yeah, there's there's a picture in the Smithsonian website. And yeah, like it does it look like a postcard then you're like, whoa, that's...

Betty: An envelope.

Quinn: An envelope, yeah, that's so weird. Yeah. [laughs]

Betty: I also found it interesting that like just in like that history of postcards--apparently the... apparently a pre-World War One was like this considered this like golden age of postcards, but then it kind of went downhill in terms of like the quality of postcards because... Basically, the place that was producing a lot of the postcards was Germany, and then because there was the war, German postcards became less available. So then it's--the quality of postcards just declined, and also they were apparently trying to save ink, so that's kind of how white borders started to go around postcards as basically so that they don't have to print as much when, I guess when things were tough during the war, so I found that pretty interesting too.

Quinn: It's always funny to think about all of these different ways that completely unintentional things about the world and technology changes affect art. Like with this thing, you know, changes in the way that mail was sent and financial decisions and all these different things ended up with the postcard medium that we have today. And nobody sat down and was like "we want postcards to be like this so that they'll be like that in the year 2019," but you get these little pieces in the ways that now they become this thing that is... that has been used over the decades as like this political tool, this artistic tool, all of these different things.

Betty: Mhmm. Were there any other postcards that you saw in the show that you wanted to talk about or thought was interesting?

Quinn: My favorite section was probably the feminist art postcards. They had some really cool interesting stuff like from the Guerrilla girls movement.

Betty: Oh, cool.

Quinn: That was a really major art group of anonymous artists who were speaking out against the exclusion of women in the art world. And so they did all of these campaigns that really leaned into sort of pop art and advertising iconography and all these things. And one of the things they did was utilize postcards, which should be pretty unsurprising based we've talked about so far. And then, they're also included in that section, was this series of postcards made by Pauline Oliveros who was actually a composer, primarily. But in the 1970s, she produced these little series--there's like four or five of them. She got really frustrated by the question of "why isn't there a female Beethoven?" Because there's this prevailing idea, that is still, a lot of people today have this idea, that there aren't great female artist in history because women are inherently less good at art. She didn't--she wrote a bunch of essays and stuff about this as well, she was like "obviously it's because the social systems did not allow women to pursue art and to succeed in it. So, of course, you don't have a female Beethoven." That's why. These postcards are just like pictures of her at different ages and stuff. But the caption say things like "Beethoven was a lesbian."

Betty: [laughs] That's great.

Quinn: Or "Bach was a mother." Brahms was a Two Penny Harlot" Like--just these interesting things that that. Obviously Beethoven wasn't a lesbian but it's really interesting subversive message that kind of catches your eye and you're like, what is that? But the whole message is like in another universe where like all people were equal in social systems throughout history, maybe the greatest composer of all time would have been a lesbian, and we have no way of knowing that.

Betty: Mhm. Yeah what you're saying reminds me of like, there are so many artists throughout history, or probably so many female artists throughout history that were either good or possibly even well-known, but they've just kind of been lost to history. And what specifically you reminded me of was this Dutch artist Judith Leyster, and she's an artist from the Dutch golden age, but for like decades or maybe centuries her--like the vast majority of her paintings were attributed to another artist, Frans Hals, and so it's kind of like--and we only knew or only through like studies and different experts going through the stuff in recent years did we discover a lot of those misattributed. But I'm just thinking like, how many more female artists are out there where they like--where their artwork was just attributed to another artist? Like who knows? Maybe Leonardo was a lesbian, or like Leonardo was a woman, and it just, his paintings just got--or her paintings just got attributed to someone else.

Quinn: Wow. And that is something I'm sure it's going to come up over and over again with all sorts different stuff that we're talking about.

Betty: For sure.

Quinn: Well my sort of concluding thought on the "Beethoven was a lesbian" postcard series is coming back to kind of what I feel like I just realized I've been mentioning over and over again, is like--Yoko Ono and John Lennon used postcards as part of a larger campaign, even though they were--even though they also made like this anti-war song, and obviously John Lennon was primarily a musician, or like they use these giant billboards, they also use postcards. And then ou have this sculptor whose like primarily working in different forms, and she also used postcards. You have this composer who is also using postcards to send a message. And I feel like there's a while there were people who primarily worked as postcards as their chosen medium, I think more often what you see is artists who work in multiple mediums, or even just primarily in one particular medium, like Oliveros as a composer, who then turn to postcards as a way to express a particular visual thought, or like thought that they want disseminated more widely in a different way. And I find that one of the most fascinating things about this whole idea as postcards as art.

Betty: It's almost like postcards are this other medium that artists can choose to express through. Yeah, like a lot of whether it's paintings or drawings or music, artists can kind of--it's like another outside of the traditional art world medium that you can use to kind of like, more so widely spread your message or thoughts.

Quinn: Yeah, like there's no one telling you you can't send a postcard, right? There's absolutely no barrier to entry between you and the post office besides having access to some kind of sturdy paper. And a 50 cent stamp, right? 

Betty: Mhmm, yeah.

Quinn: So it's hard to get more accessible than that. I mean you need people's addresses, I guess, if you want really want to send them to people. But there are ways to get those.

Betty: Yeah exactly. It is funny--ironically when I was thinking about this topic I--or going through online, or researching this topic, I came across the most expensive postcard. So obviously like most postcards you can get for probably like yeah, like you said 50 cents or a dollar, and then I did read that like postcard collectors, like who collect really old postcards, those can get more expensive. Like maybe people who sell them on eBay for like five dollars or ten or twenty-five, but apparently the most expensive postcard was this one from 1840 that was sent by a writer called Theodore Hook to himself. And it looks like there's 12 people sitting around a room, like a half circle table and they're writing with these huge... I want to say brushes, or pens, and then they're writing on the piece of paper. Like they look almost caricature like, and then there's an inkwell in the middle that says "Official" and then on the two sides of the table one side says "Penny" and I think the other says "peanuts" maybe, or "pirates?" I don't even know. But anyway, apparently yeah, so it's apparently one of the oldest postcards ever known and it's sold for 31,750 pounds, which works out to be about like $45,000. So anyway, there are expensive, more inaccessible postcards out there, but if you can't afford this 31000 pound one, you can always get a five to ten dollar one.

Quinn: You know, store-bought is fine. This particular example is interesting because it seems like it's that expensive because it's believed to be the world's oldest postcard. Which I suppose makes sense, it's almost like a historical artifact more than it is an art piece. 

Betty: Mhm. Yeah, and I read also a lot of deltiologists, people tend to collect like based on themes. Like some people might only collect postcards of like flags, or clocks, or some people collect only like erotic postcards, but apparently--I read in this New York Times article that apparently Halloween postcards are a lot more rarer, so that they often--like on eBay or somewhere can go for like $20 or more. But I think that's kind of cool how you know, like an expensive postcard is only like $20 because I'm thinking oh, that's like a hobby that I can pick up. Like I can be an art collector, but of postcards, because I can afford that. Instead of like actual art.

Quinn: Yeah, that's a fun way to think about it. And it's also you know, they're small but they're so much less expensive than everything else that you can buy 10 of them, and that's not even the price of one like regular-sized painting or whatever, and so then you're set.

Betty: Apparently, there are also these like special sleeves that they use, because I guess a lot of the postcards the people collect are really old and fragile. So they like put them in sleeves and put them I guess, I don't know, like boxes or binders. So you want to continue your postcard collecting hobby, you might want to buy some of those plastic sleeves so that you can protect the edges.

Quinn: Keep them preserved. One thing I also wanted to mention is that while this exhibit that I've referenced extensively is sadly no longer up, there are like huge postcard exhibits that are available all online. And specifically the postcard collection in the Museum of Fine Arts, who they have, somehow have a collection of like tens of thousands of postcards and it's all entirely digitized. They'll be a link in the show notes to this, of course, but if you feel like perusing the MFA postcard collection, it is all there and there's advanced search and everything so you can get a sense of all of these different weird things and sort of what pieces are chosen to be kept by a museum.

Betty: Hmm. I'm gonna have to peruse around that myself. 

Quinn: Yeah. Tis is less of a philosophical episode and more just "share a cool thing I saw" episode.

Betty: Yeah, that's cool.

Quinn: But I think that it is fun to talk about these things that we would necessarily normally think of as art. And be able to appreciate you know, that postcard that you got on vacation, like that can be art. Put it on your wall, look at it, congratulations. You're an art collector. 

Betty: Yeah, and I think this has gotten me interested in like, starting a collection myself. And I actually, now that I'm looking through some of these MFA postcards, because I think they have also a collection of like propaganda postcards--I really kind of--like there was a, there was one time I saw like a propaganda war poster exhibit and I thought ooh, that would be a cool thing to collect, and so maybe instead of that I'll collect propaganda postcards. 

Quinn: Alright. Yeah, and have a very fun propaganda collection to you. [laughs]

Betty: Thank you. 

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Quinn: Yeah, if any of you out there have postcard collections, send us pictures. Send them to us on Twitter @pictorialpod or Instagram, also @pictorialpod. And on Twitter and Instagram we'll be posting ourselves, all the pictures of that exhibit that I took of my favorite postcards.

Betty: Thank you for listening to this episode of Pictorial. So you can find me on Twitter @ArticulationsV or you can find me on YouTube at ARTiculations. 

Quinn: And you can find me on Twitter or Instagram @aspiringrobotfm. Thanks for listening, art enthusiasts!

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