Postcards, Books, and Art

Sorry I just couldn’t explain this picture without too many words… feel free to skip:-)  and just guess…)

I love postcards and have a huge collection form many years of traveling and art looking…  I’m also lucky to be the recipient of many many lovely postcards sent to me from blipper-orienteer-walker-bikerider-knitter-teacher Wendles56 from her home territory in West Yorkshire and many other places she has visited.    A while ago, these postcards all about art by Grayson Perry started arriving, one by one or more at a time..with notes written on the back of course and questions about “what does this mean?”   Well, usually I didn’t have a clue, although there were some very clever jabs at the gallery/museum art world…so went to google where I too learned more about this crazy transvestite potter from the UK and a book he wrote “Playing to the Gallery:  Helping Contemporary Art in its Struggle to be Understood.”   I checked it out from the e library and soon saw that all the postcards (18, so far) were his illustrations in this book..(which is a distillation of a lecture series..)
A successful artist and winner of the Turner prize in 2003, he is attempting to answer that “what is Art” question….which I can’t possibly relate all here.  (but after much talk about the who and where that’s important and the economic realities of staging “popular” shows that aren’t necessarily “great art”, he lists among other criterium  “is it in a gallery or art contest?  Is it a boring version of something else? Is it made by the artist? Photography is problematic —size matters. the handbag test, the rubbish test, and of course technology and how to navigate the abundance on the web……   

So,, I had to make some sort of “book” out of these little gems…Using a tin postcard box that had map cards in it (thanks to Mike) some of which will be in the mail on the way to Yorkshire when I get back to Seattle, I covered the bottom of this opened out box with a postcard of the floor I adore in San Marco in Venice with a dodecahedron design by Paolo Uccello, a painter who was obsessed with visual perspective to create a feeling of depth. He was sent for in 1425 to come to Venice from Florence to help with some mosaics that were burned. He did some (actually artists made the designs but skilled mosaicists executed them) for the facade that have since been destroyed.     The postcard on the front is one of those shiny 3D pictures, mobias-like design card from Germany, that I got at MOMA in NYC (the sticker is still on it)…You can’t see the amazing depth here - it looks like it goes right thru the box.    Inside are the postcards stacked  so one can read the backs too, and I copied the cover for Perry’s book - except his painting looked like a Rothko, while mine is supposed to be more of a Turner watercolor of Venice.    The extra is some of the cards…one of my favorites is the palette  of “rubbish” words (I quite like this word I’ve learned from the UK clippers but certainly didn’t know “”codswallop” etc.)

One of Perry’s early simple definitions of art as a visual medium is “made by the artist’s hand, a pleasure to make, to look at, and to show others.”     I’m not sure about this piece but it was a pleasure to make and I like looking at it, I’m showing you..…
………………. and it beats what’s on the news today.   Thank you, Wendy!

Would love to hear what Grayson Perry’s fellow Brits think about him…..and his controversial art.