| Buzz Spector (2009) |
| An Atlas of Proximity and Distance: |
| Buzz Spector’s Postcard Works, 1973-2000 |
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| Exhibition Catalog Essay: “An Atlas of Proximity and Distance: Buzz Spector’s Postcard Works, 1973-2000,” Buzz Spector: Cards and Letters, Postcard Works 1973-2000, Gahlberg Gallery, College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, IL 2009 |
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| http://www.buzzspector.com/ |
| http://www.cod.edu/gallery/ |
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| Postcards from Gracchus, 2000, photographs on postcards on paper, 20 x 44 inches, framed |
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| That Buzz Spector regards postcards as simultaneously a literary and a visual medium is immediately evident in his collage, Postcards from Gracchus (2000). Not only does this piece include sixteen dust jacket photographs of authors, each affixed to a postcard, but its title also alludes to Kafka’s story, “The Hunter Gracchus.” Spector has elsewhere noted that postcards are “the only novels most people ever write.” This collage manifests a number of important characteristics of his work. Spector is a master of ironic doubleness, and the piece invites us to participate actively in its twists of playful thought, witty questions, and serious, intellectual speculation. Puns thoroughly permeate Postcards from Gracchus: some are strictly visual, like an author striking the same pose as a person in the postcard; some rely on more obscure references, like the image of Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, on a postcard of a farmer plowing his field; and some are slowly, quietly disturbing, like Kafka on a postcard of a library that because of its high contrast printing begins to look like a prison. |
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| This postcard collage is a diverse crowd of jostling images. One postcard depicts an Eastern European ghetto, another a lascivious putto on an artist’s palette. Spector invites us to actively interpret, see connections, construct stories. Is that Graham Greene, or John Dos Passos? And why does this other author appear to have horns? We are willing to engage it like this because we can tell that the work is not arbitrary; it is a structure created through numerous acts of careful selection and calibration. Like all collages, the recontextualization of diverse materials brings with it numerous points of rupture, and these are also points of engagement. Postcards from Gracchus seems hard to pin down—our speculations are contingent, provisional, in constant flux. |
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| This collage is one of the later pieces in the exhibition, an exhibition that includes four distinct bodies of Spector’s postcard works produced from 1973 through 2000. The earliest piece, Boulder Dam (1973) is typical of the collaged postcards that he sent to friends and other artists who did “mail art” at the time. From 1981-1987, his postcard pieces consider various art historical narratives, referencing in particular the De Stijl movement, specifically the art and theory of van Doesburg, Mondrian and Vantongerloo. These postcard works question one of the mythic, core movements of modernism, a movement that dogmatically preached a purity of form. Spector quotes some of its most iconic imagery in the context of the visually impure world of a contemporaneous Dutch postcard, in others he replaces a rectangle of “pure form” with the messy referential presence of a postcard, again an image of Dutch landscape or culture. What we get is two parallel, opposing past histories, a witty critique of art, culture, and modernism that is, however, marked with clear signs of respect—a meticulous, reverential care in their production, their own formal elegance, and a serious meditation on the meanings of De Stijl. |
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| In 1988, Spector moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, and, perhaps not coincidentally, his work moved from the more refined, restrained postcards of the De Stijl series (Spector’s own kind of purity) to postcards with an excess of sentiment, indeed, sentimentality—floral cards, ruins, vulgar joke cards, erotic imagery. In his writing he examined the prevalence of material excess in the art of the time (for example, his 1989 Artforum essay, “A Profusion of Substance”). His interest in postcards gravitated to what he describes as the “subtly sinister and erotic aspects” of their conventional sentimentality. In the collage, French Letters (1990), the postcard images depict a highly clichéd, melodramatic narrative of two lovers, one burning her letter, the other clasping it to his heart. Alternating cards create a checkered, gameboard image that can also be read as an accumulation of postcards that are themselves physical markers of sending and receiving. (Of course, the interspersed postcards of the Eiffel Tower playfully maximize the double entendre of the title.) If French Letters is lightly erotic, the collage, Anatomy Lessons (1991) is an example of the more sinister. It consists of a grid of fifty-six congratulatory postcards of roses: “Best Wishes,” Congratulations,” “Birthday Greetings.” And on the surface of the postcards is a pink, linear diagram of a severed leg and arm. From a distance, this anatomy book image is barely discernable. To its right, an embossed, black postcard of a faceless woman is superimposed on the grid. We slowly recognize this profuse bed of roses as a memento mori. |
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| With a few exceptions, Spector stopped working with postcards after 1992, but in 2000 (and having returned to the Midwest) he began a series of postcard pieces in which a grid of similar postcards is sanded and altered. A transparent ink or watercolor silhouette of a book or books is painted over the grid (once again implying a conflation of text and image). The collage, Atlas (2000) consists of twenty-four postcards in which everything but the water in the images has been sanded off, erased; trees and buildings remain only as reflections in the water. The silhouette of a large open book is painted over them in transparent ink. Is the book an atlas? Are its contents also lost in its watery, shadowy shape? Or are the postcards the atlas? In their spaced arrangement they resemble displays of the painter Gerhard Richter’s Atlas, a massive image bank that functions as reference material for his paintings. But what kind of image bank are these postcards? Trees and buildings perceived indirectly. They seem so completely unreliable, so uncertain as references. |
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| In fact, postcards have some intrinsic qualities that reinforce this uncertainty, qualities that Spector deftly exploits in his work. Postcards always carry some sense of spatial dislocation, particularly the images of places—the postcard is meant to exist away from its image source. Viewers experience the dislocation of contemplating a place other than where they are (but aware that someone else is or was there). Postcards have, then, a built in quality of absence, best understood in that purest of postcard messages, “Wish you were here.” (When you read it, you are here.) Directly related to this spatial dislocation is their status as souvenirs. But as a souvenir the postcard references memories and thus necessarily creates a sense of temporal dislocation. And finally, postcards have an unusual ontological status as both text and image. When we use the word “postcard,” we can mean the words written and printed on them, we can mean the image, or we can mean it all. It is possible in a postcard to experience a mutual ekphrasis where text represents an image, and where an image represents a text. Spector orchestrates these qualities of absence, memory and representational status for ironic effect, and unsettling affect. Atlas clearly uses them all. The erasures amplify absence and instantiate forgetting, in their subsequent ambiguity the postcards are unstable as images and texts, a situation Spector stresses with the representation of a dematerialized, transparent book. In one way or another, all of the pieces in the exhibition utilize these qualities of postcards. |
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| But, of course, there are more things at work in Spector’s collages than the qualities of postcards themselves. Almost all of his postcard pieces are collections of cards. And the display of a collection itself means some specific things. In On Longing, Susan Stewart writes: “While the point of the souvenir may be remembering, or at least the invention of memory, the point of the collection is forgetting—starting again in such a way that a finite number of elements create, by virtue of their combination, an infinite reverie.” We are brought into this site of reverie, it is one of the ways he encourages us to construct stories and find connections within these works. But collections do other things too. In making or displaying a collection, quantity is a very high value. Collections readily indicate excess, obsession, and ritual. Anatomy Lesson suggests them all: the grid of postcards is a ritual of repeated congratulation; it’s an obsession with roses (we wonder, where did he get them all?); and it’s a lavish heap of them, of the kind seen at those sites of tragic (celebrity) death. |
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| Postcards are not without their problems as a material, and one of the most interesting things about Spector’s work is how he handles the problem of nostalgia. In its qualities of absence and memory, a postcard produces a nostalgic affect, a sense of melancholic longing. As souvenirs, postcards are necessarily nostalgic, and the more their surfaces fade and oxidize or the more prominent their marks of personal history (smudges and writing) the stronger their suggestions of nostalgia. The problem with nostalgia is that its presence in an artwork is overwhelming, to the detriment of all other affects, and in its longing for a past that never existed, it is a corrupt form of narrative. One of the ways Spector mitigates this nostalgia is by accepting it, placing it front and center, and using it. He uses nostalgia ironically, in some critical capacity that at times questions the cultural construction of nostalgia itself. His French Letters is a clear example of this. And Postcards from Gracchus also deals overtly with nostalgia. Its portraits of authors originated as mass-printed, dust jacket photos, actually reproductions of photographs. Spector rephotographed them (eliminating the printed dot screen) and turned them back into actual photographs, images with an “aura.” They have also been reduced and blurred in the process (making them more pathetic and personal). He has made them into souvenirs, he has made them nostalgic. Spector is playing here with one of the canonical works of twentieth-century art theory, Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936). The moment we notice this, the nostalgia has become ironic. |
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| Near the end of Kafka’s “The Hunter Gracchus” is a line that gets at the heart of what postcards are and perhaps to the deeper meaning of Spector’s postcard works. In the parable, because his funeral boat became lost on its way to the afterlife, the dead hunter is resigned to an endless floating through the world of the living. The tired, dead hunter says, “I am here, more than that I do not know, further than that I cannot go.” These are the phrases that initiated Postcards from Gracchus. Spector was drawn to the way in which the hunter’s Kafka-esque attitude parallels the uncertainty of position and time found in postcards, the way postcards mark a simultaneous proximity and distance. Their place is indeterminate, unfixed; like Gracchus they are always “here.” But where’s that? On some deep level, all postcards (roses as well as Dutch landscapes) and the work that uses them suggest a perpetual displacement, an unsettling state of flux, and yet they somehow simultaneously declare, “I am here,” or “I was here,” or “Wish you were here.” |
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| © 2009 Timothy van Laar |
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