1d FOR ABROAD

1d for Abroad – contemporary artists invent, disturb, dissect and perform with postcards.

1d for Abroad is one of four linked postcard shows on in London this Spring; The World Exists To Be Put On A Postcard: artists' postcards from 1960 to now at the British Museum; Jeremy Cooper and kennardphillipp at Danielle Arnaud Gallery; and Political Postcards of the 1980s and 1990s at Bookartbookshop.

Much has been written about the cheap accessibility, and compact democratic ubiquity of the postcard – and as the other shows testify, the postcard has provided a rich springboard for artists to re-invent, radicalise and appropriate the postcard form. Jeremy Cooper asserts that “Artists’ work with postcards from the 1960s onwards is a concealed element in the history of contemporary art.”

Unlike the other exhibitions, Tintype’s 1d for Abroad does not solely present postcards. Roughly three-quarters of the work has been made specifically for the show and includes film, sculpture, print, painting, photographs, a wall-text, embroidery, collections, posters, drawings – and postcards.

With thirty-one artists participating, 1d for Abroad is a playful postcardian offering – a response to the role postcards play in people’s lives; an experiment with the formal elements of a simple postcard; postcards as documenters and disseminators of fugitive events; postcards as significant visual markers or references.

Postcards function as containers and carriers that have a throwaway temporality as well as a role as keepsake or record. The artists in 1d for Abroad improvise on the efficient composition of image, message and text offered by the postcard format; how their flatness stores short-hand, symbolic information – gestures of love, duty, or tenderness, feelings which the postcard seems to hold so resiliently.