Front of Double-Image Postcard of Jeremy Cooper on a Studio Visit to Frances Richardson Who Made This in a Limited Edition of Twenty-Five
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Front of double-image postcard of Jeremy Cooper on a studio visit to Frances Richardson who made this in a limited edition of twenty-five. 2012 POSTCARD NARRATIVES POSTCARD NARRATIVES Jeremy Cooper & invited artists Julie Cockburn / Daniel Eatock / Tracey Emin / Cristina Garrido Susan Hiller / Georgie Hopton / Helen Knight / Abigail Lane Rebecca Loweth / Sara MacKillop / Frances Richardson Sarah Staton / Gavin Turk R O O M BOOKS PREFACE Jeremy Cooper’s involvement with contemporary art has always been personal and private. This, the first exhibition of his own work, is an uncharacteristically public act—supported by the presence of artist- friends he has invited to join the show. All his and their work in this exhibition is centred around postcards, which are themselves both private and public, a form of communication intimate and egalitarian, available to everyone to make what they wish. The three best-known artists in the exhibition, Susan Hiller, Tracey Emin and Gavin Turk, were all important to Cooper in the develop- ment of his interest in artists’ postcards—meaning postcards made as independent artistic expression rather than merely postcards of art, or art of postcard size. Turk’s postcard Window [see p.33] first appeared as the personal invitation to his MA degree show at the Royal College of Art in the summer of 1991, its form a topical response to the similarly composed front page image which had appeared in The Sun newspaper earlier that week, beneath the caption “Support our boys and put this up in your window”. Cooper saw the work as a freely available form of political as well as artistic expression. Turk and Cooper lived through- out the 1990s in the same street in Shoreditch, where Tracey Emin was a frequent visitor. It was on one of Emin’s visits in the late 1990s to Cooper’s warehouse home that she came across his labelled envelopes of postcards, stacked in the long drawer of a bookcase, and her enthusiasm for the collection triggered Cooper’s thoughts of one day mounting an exhibition. Emin used to keep her own postcards and other ephemera in similarly stored order, from which to make work. In 1997 Emin gave Cooper the monoprint portrait drawing of him she had made over tea in her studio in Waterloo Road, a ground floor shop with a neon sign in the window reading The Tracey Emin Museum. Cooper used Turk’s work Godot [1996] on the cover of his third novel The Folded Lie [ellipsis 2000]—Turk appears as himself in Cooper’s novel Kath Trevelyan [Serpent’s Tail 2007], the cover this time with a work by Peter Doig. Contact with Susan Hiller, though coming later, was no less signifi- cant, and being able to buy in 2010 one of her early postcard pieces, The Flying Spray. The Feathery Foam. Addenda 1. Section 3 [1976], sealed Cooper’s commitment to forming the large collection of artists’ postcards 7 recently accepted PROSE POSTCARD as a promised gift by the Dean Hughes British Museum, scheduled for a substantial exhibition and The postcard arrived specific and codified. 12th Feb 2013. I hold the catalogue in card pinched between my thumb and index finger and register the 2018 in the thickness. I tilt my wrist and oscillate my attention between the image Department on the front and the text on the back. The text is horizontal whilst of Prints and Untitled. Cristina Garrido. Two Tate postcards with the object painted the image is portrait requiring an extra flip to allow the appropriate Drawings. out in acrylic: Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII [1966] and Rachel Whiteread’s engagement with either format. The text on the back of the postcard Untitled (Air Bed II) [1992]. 2011 Hiller’s piece for says Riber Castle, Matlock, Derbyshire, England. I turn the card over and Postcard Narratives makes use of some of the old postcards of artists’ look again at the image. In the center stand’s an electric blue castle palettes she has gathered over the years, one of which, dated 1907, was with three turrets, a small red roof and a yellow ladder leading up illustrated in Cooper’s book Artists’ Postcards. A Compendium [Reaktion some four feet to a small balcony framed by a red and yellow curtain. 2012]. At the center of the castle lies an arched doorway. I turn the card over The writing of this book and formation of his collection brought again and read “riber castle viewed from Hall Leys Park Matlock…” Cooper into personal contact with the two youngest artists in the exhi- I look again at the front image of the card. Adjacent to the children’s bition, Cristina Garrido and Rebecca Loweth, both of whom spent their playground castle stands a women and a child with a pushchair who final year at art school working exclusively with postcards, Garrido for are either looking at, or feeding ducks in a pond. I am curiously drawn her MA at Wimbledon College of Art in 2011, and Loweth for her BA to the white plastic bag hanging off the handle of the chair, and try at Farnham College of Art in 2012. Several of their works are now in yet fail to register the brand. The pond occupied the majority of the Cooper’s collection, and will therefore end up in the British Museum, foreground whilst the mid ground is largely taken up by a plethora Garrido with the painting out of of different trees and shrubbery through which the grill and window the art works in new postcards, of a parked car and single chimney point to the proximity of town or and Loweth with the sculptural village inhabitation. Rising steadily from the trees is a steep bank of folding of found postcards. At crested green hills on top of which lies the silhouette of the actual Christmas 2011 Garrido sent as a Riber Castle. A thin sliver of sky confirms that this is summer and the present to Cooper her painted-out light coming through pinpricked windows confirms, along with the postcard of Toxic Schizophrenia text, that castle is a roofless shell. [1997] by Tim Noble and Sue It’s a strange image that points to the partial stories that postcards Webster, knowing that they were solicit. Only from the repeated turning of the card in my hand do I Shoreditch friends of his from glimpse a fuller picture for the image presented belies the descriptive the 1990s, with a written note: text. The image is almost a deliberate contradiction and I began to “Things are going good for me wonder if not all postcards are like this? It occurs to me that which- and I will always remember that T 6119 Rebecca Loweth. Composition of three ever way they fall through the letterbox and onto the floor behind my you were the first to buy my folded cards. 2012 door the first action is already to turn them over, and then over again. work!” The postcards state is perpetual oscillation; image and text are reso- lutely flipside. I enjoy writing postcards for the sensation of writing on something taut. I run my finger over what has been written and feel 8 9 the slight indentation caused by the indelible marks made by the pen. CATALOGUE Akin to secret brail the furrows caused by the pen as it moves across the card register hesitancies and assertive reconnection with the potential of what can be said. My address is smooth and fluid whilst my personalised message that begins with my name and ends with its sender admit varying degrees of applied pressure. 1. The Sands of the Desert Grow Cold Postcards are restless objects. 45 Bamforth postcards, 6 Ogden Guinea Gold cigarette cards, mounted on card. 35 x 33in. [1994] In the process of research for his book Under the Hammer. The auctions and auctioneers of London [Constable 1977 and 1979], Jeremy Cooper attended in the mid 1970s several specialist auctions of postcards and cigarette cards held at Caxton Hall in Westminster, known at the time principally as a venue for civil weddings. The Middlesex Collectors Centre, the London Cigarette Card Company, and Murray Cards (Inter- national) Ltd., all held auctions at Caxton Hall and this group of WW1 postcards was bought at one of their sales, chosen because of their perfect condition and completeness of the song-sets on these early picture postcards. Legal restrictions to the inscription of messages on the same side as the address in postcards were not lifted in England until 1902 and in America in 1907. During the war and its aftermath this standard form of the picture postcard fully established itself. These post- cards are from “Songs” Series No 4979/3, published by Bamforth & Co., one of the world’s leading makers of postcards during the First World War, manufactured in England, although the bulk of their production was sold into the American market through the Bamforth office in New York, as detailed within the elaborate art nouveau decoration on the backs of the postcards. The Ogden Guinea Gold cigarette cards, photo- graphic portraits of Boer War generals, were from an album purchased at another of these auctions. 2. Maggie & Gilbert 25 postcards, mounted on card. 36 x 28in. [1990] Jeremy Cooper first came across the work of Gilbert and George on attending their performance-piece Red Sculpture at the Robert Self Gallery in Covent Garden in 1977. When, in 1979, the artists turned up at his antique dealing premises, a Victorian schoolroom near the British Museum, he met them personally, readily agreeing to deliver that same evening the small arts and crafts table they bought, chosen to hold the black telephone in the ground floor front room.