Lynn Gallagher’s Postcards by Jeremy Cooper

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In Bolt from the Blue, Jeremy Cooper, the winner of the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize, charts the relationship between a mother and daughter over the course of thirty-odd years. In October 1985, Lynn moves down to London to enrol at Saint Martin’s School of Art, leaving her mother behind in a suburb of Birmingham. Their relationship is complicated, and their primary form of contact is through the letters, postcards and emails they send each other periodically, while Lynn slowly makes her mark on the London art scene. Here, Jeremy Cooper takes us through some of the postcards that appear in the novel.

[p.245] Carla Cruz’s postcard ‘To be an Artist in Portugal is an Act of Faith’, 2003

All my books, sixteen or more publications to date, novels and non-fiction, are centred on subjects I know and care about. In the case of Bolt from the Blue, the world inhabited by Lynn Gallagher is personally familiar to me, her progress as a young artist in London from the mid 1980s till the death of her mother in 2018 is informed by my friendship with artists of her generation, several of whom are named as themselves in the novel. Although I did not think of this when settling down to plan the book, in the course of writing it I decided to lend Lynn one of my more recent key interests: the collection of artists’ postcards. Being an artist, it soon became clear that Lynn would need also be the maker of some of the postcards she sent to her mother over the years, and instead of inventing spurious and possibly inadequate works I pretended it was she who created the examples from my collection. For instance, the painting on the Gordon Matta-Clark postcard described on page seventy-three of the novel is in fact the work of a young Spanish artist called Cristina Garrido, an MA graduate from Wimbledon College of Art, in a technique she used in another of her manipulated postcards, part of my gift in 2019 to the British Museum.

Every postcard sent by Lynn actually exists. As a way of communicating Lynn’s politics, I mostly selected on her behalf commercially printed cards from the political section of my collection, which is in the process of preparation for a substantial exhibition planned for Tate Liverpool. Some of these postcards, particularly the outstanding body of work published by Leeds Postcards between 1979 and 1996, were printed in relatively large numbers and, being easy enough to find, appear in several of my exhibitions. Paul Morton’s great Thatcher card [p.42] and Richard Scott’s graphic I Don’t Give A Shit What Your House Is Worth [p.15] were both illustrated in the catalogue which Thames & Hudson published of my British Museum show The World Exists to be Put on a Postcard. Spare examples of these two Leeds Postcards will also go to Liverpool. Another show I am working on, of artists’ portrait postcards, is planned for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and will include a rare postcard image of the avant-garde American performer Vito Acconci [p.118] – he is one of Lynn’s ‘favourite artists’, and one of mine too. Already fixed for 2023/24 is an exhibition of European artists’ postcards at the Dresden Kupferstich Kabinett, of the same size and scope as the British Museum show, resulting in the permanent gift by me to Dresden of another thousand cards, including the artist Carla Cruz’s postcard To be an Artist in Portugal is an Act of Faith [p.245].

[p.227] The most recent of the postcards, Jonathan Horowitz’s anti-Trump diatribe, was in fact not yet made when I describe Lynn’s Mum sending it on January 2016 from Spain to her daughter in London. The publishers, Primary Information of New York, produced a series of these polemical postcards, stating that they ‘see the need to double down on this form as a political space embedded with the urgency, diversity, and complexity of voices that are the hallmark of our times. Who better to do this than artists?’

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[p.18] The Guerrilla Girls collective of a fluctuating group of unnamed women artists was founded in New York in the mid-1980s and is still active today, hiding their identity by wearing guerrilla masks in public.. One of ten billboards presented by the Public Art Fund in 1991, this one was sited on West Side Highway at 48th Street, New York.

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[p.106] This Leeds Postcard, published in 1984, strongly represents the hundreds of postcards they made for trades unions and other left-wing groups, printed on the reverse: ‘NALGO, Britain’s biggest white collar trade union, is campaigning for equal pay for work of equal value.’ Jo Morris’ design was originally published the year before in her book No More Peanuts: Evaluation of Women’s Work.

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[p.69] Gender and sexuality were standard subjects in political postcards, seldom more poignant than in the set designed by Aboud-Sodano and published in the mid-1990s for free distribution to combat AIDS by the Terrence Higgins Trust. The Irish designer Alan Aboud made his name with work for Paul Smith.

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[p.79] The main body of postcard work in my museum exhibits is of cards designed by artists for significant shows, such as this rare early YBA survival, an invitation to the opening on 20 May 1998 at Kölnischer Kunstverein. The Goldsmiths-trained artists Sarah Lucas and Angus Fairhurst were living together at the time and sharing a studio in Clerkenwell.

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[p.42] The founder in Yorkshire of Hot-Frog Graphics, Paul Morton, designed a number of Leeds Postcards, this dot-to-dot card of Mrs Thatcher in 1984, captioned on the reverse: ‘Thatcher Therapy. Take a broad, black, water-based felt-tip pen and follow the dots until Mrs Thatcher’s face is obliterated. Wipe clean and it’s ready for the next go. In no time at all you’ll be looking forward to starting the day with fresh vigour.’

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[p.118] Vito Acconci, a lifelong radical, used this 1959 image of himself in the marines on an invitation postcard to his solo show Rehearsals for Architecture in 2003 at the gallery Kenny Schachter/Rove in New York. Acconci said of architecture: ‘Maybe you can sneak something in. You can sneak something in that maybe gives people a chance to think.’

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[p.94] This is another of those postcards which Lynn claimed to have made herself but is, in this case, one of an ongoing series by Duncan Wooldridge begun in 2007, in which he meticulously removes with an India rubber the writing in a message on commercial postcards made from Gillian Wearing’s photographs of 1992-3. Standing in a shopping precinct in Peckham, South London, the tattooed man had written the message CERTIFIED AS MILDLY INSANE

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[p.30] Like other cartoonists of the period, Angela Martin worked on groups of themes and characters, most of them feminist in essence, publishing postcards with The Women’s Press, Cath Tate Cards and, most frequently, Leeds Postcards. Another postcard of Martin’s ironical Famous Radical Feminist Sayings, also published by Leeds Postcards in 1994, read ‘The personal is … IKEA’.

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