Response to Postcards by Kendra Ballingall

Reorienting the Postcard
By Kendra Ballingall

Mail is a seasoned traveller and an ambitious explorer – much less innocent than intimate handwritten correspondence between long-distance friends or lovers would have it seem. Mobilized in the service of demographics, taxation, intelligence gathering, and state expansion, mail mediates contested and imagined geographies of desire, power, and resistance.

No more innocent, the postcard – this extroverted, somewhat superficial subset of mail – is a tourist. So often bound up in economies of tourism, postcards inevitably convey more than their literal content. While they may be a last refuge for handwriting or a distracting indulgence for the curious postal carrier, they are also an enticing lie about faraway places declaring their represented origin to be more cultured, more entertaining, more photogenic than their destination. Their two-dimensional, glossy cities and wonders of nature can inspire fondness or desire, mark a missed person or a lack, boast or whitewash.

With the “Greetings from North Point Douglas” postcard collection, Rebecca Thiessen reorients the postcard. These are ten oblique, subjective views of Point Douglas scenes in a playful aesthetic, intricately rendered with colourful thread and felt marker that still seems to emit scents of melon, blueberry, cinnamon, and licorice: among them a menacing dog growling over a fence, a shopping cart protruding conspicuously from the Red River, a sunshower against tall trees and narrow houses, a streetlamp adorned with a bus stop sign, and roads, railways, and freeways traversing the neighbourhood – “So many ways to bypass PD, but there is good life here” is the marginal text on the reverse of this last one.

The neighbourhood is accustomed to being represented: as the first settlement site along the north end of the Red River for Scottish crofters evicted from Sutherlandshire, it initiates narratives of the region’s westward colonial expansion and the establishment of the province, and is now known to Winnipeg's middle-class and media as typically inner-city. For Thiessen, as for the initial recipients, these postcards represent something more personal and experiential: home.

While the postcard images betray certain trepidations of an outsider, their distribution reveals Thiessen’s interest in engagement and exchange. Compelled to address her own desires in moving to North Point Douglas, Thiessen is intentionally negotiating ongoing colonization, early gentrification, and the resulting displacement. She leaves the pre-stamped cards in politicised spaces – the MLA office, the women's centre – as well as the mailbox of each of her neighbours (most of whom have lived in the area much longer than she) to be picked up and redistributed, as a counter-deltiology of sorts. The reverse of each card leaves room for the recipient’s own message. With more than one potential recipient, Thiessen’s postcards anticipate an unlimited network much less utopian than 1970s and ’80s mail art.

Fluxus artist Robert Filliou publicised the concept of mail artists as an “eternal network” of sender-recipients in a 1973 issue of FILE magazine. Filliou claimed that with the end of the avant-garde, art was no longer a field separate from life (ironically, the unification of art and life had been the mandate of the avant-garde for the last century). In the 1980s, mail artist Hans-Ruedi Fricker extended Filliou’s vision, deciding that "After Dadaism, Fluxism, Mailism, comes Tourism," and encouraged the international network of mail artists to follow their art. ¹

More introverted than Fricker’s Tourism, Thiessen’s postcards from home, with no target artist recipient, engage the intersections of art and mail more along the lines of relational art, “an art that takes as its theoretical horizon the sphere of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an autonomous and private symbolic space,” as described by Nicolas Bourriaud in 1998. Bourriaud attributes this perceived aesthetic shift in the 1990s to “the birth of a global urban culture and the extension of the urban model to almost all cultural phenomena.”² These relations are certainly not without antagonism³; while Thiessen’s reorientation of the postcard is playful and neighbourly, it has the potential to be no less invested than the conventional postcard in mediating desire, power, and resistance.

In Manitoba, urbanization has not always been so accommodating to mail. The collapse of the Eaton’s mail order system was a result of unprecedented urbanization. The Eaton’s catalogue had been an exciting delivery in itself, giddily displaying first-class wares and the latest haberdashery. A colonial archive of desire spanning almost a century, the catalogue promised the spectacle of the metropolis to rural residents, evoking factories, warehouses, and railways – an “eternal network” of prosperity and progress. For most, the actual store was within reach by 1976, the mail order system no longer a necessary mediation between rural and urban.

The origin of every city inevitably coincides with the birth of its own prison, in many ways echoing the reserve system in an urban context, given the disproportionate number of incarcerated Indigenous women and men. Responding to the criminalization of women, Passing Pictures with Prisoners was a mail art collaboration between artists and women incarcerated in the Portage Correctional Institution that found itself subject to censorship and surveillance throughout its duration from 1996-1999. In a publication of the exchanged materials, coordinator and editor Edith Regier writes, “At times art supplies were confiscated from the residents seemingly without reason. Artwork coming into the prison was at risk of being dismantled or lost . . . . It’s my opinion that as the residents of PCI communicated more deeply their circumstance through images, the more restrictive the actions of the prison administration became, ending with a complete shut out of the art program.”⁴

Indeed, the threat of postal interventions has been felt since permanent settlement began in this region. On November 17, 1869, The Nor’-Wester reprinted an issue by Governor McTavish, who, “beholding with great alarm the unsettled state of feeling existing in this Territory, and the threatening position assumed by a portion of its French-speaking population towards the Crown,” listed five reasons to defend the Selkirk Settlers at Point Douglas and the whole of the Red River Settlement, including the following:

[The “French-speaking population”] have unlawfully interfered with the public mails, both outgoing and incoming, and, by that tampering with the established means of communication between the settlement and the outside world, have shaken public confidence in the security of the mails, and given a shock to the trade and commerce of the Colony, of which the mischievous effects cannot now be fully estimated.⁵

It was not long before Louis Riel and the Métis were using The Nor’-Wester printing office as a guardroom.

In her neighbours’ hands, Thiessen’s pre-stamped postcards have the potential to momentarily inundate the postal system, and without a prescribed destination, they could end up anywhere – in another mailbox with the new sender’s added writing, in a desk drawer or recycling bin, on a bulletin board or along the riverbank, in an archive or returned to sender. Whether they trace a geography of desire, power, or resistance, or whether they are received as innocent, critical, community-building, or mischievous, the effects of these postcards from home are optimistically inestimable.

¹A rubber stamp slogan first published in H.R. Fricker's Tourism Review, Volume 1, No. 1, p. 5.

² Nicolas Bourriaud, “Relational Aesthetics,” Participation, Clair Bishop, ed. London: Whitechapel, 2006, p. 160.

³For a thorough critique of Bourriaud’s position, see Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110, Fall 2004

⁴ Edith Regier, “Introduction,” Passing Pictures with Prisoners, Edith Regier, ed. Winnipeg: MAWA, 2001, p. 12-13. The program has since transformed into the city-based Crossing Communities Art Project directed by Edith Regier.

⁵Bruce Peel, Early Printing in the Red River Settlement 1859-1870, Winnipeg: Peguis Publishers, 1974, p.10.