One of the works made for Borderlines, Front Lines comprises four altered postcards. The postcards were written and sent to addresses in England between 1916 and 1918 by British soldiers on active service in France or Flanders during the First World War. On each one the correspondence section has been almost completely erased, and written over with my own text, four messages to my grandfather, who also served in these areas between 1916 and 1918.
As the destruction of historical material sometimes excites comment and protest it is useful to make certain points, and to consider some implications.
The destruction of cultural material as an act of creative art is not new. Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing was made before I was born. The artwork is both the act of erasure and the erased drawing as evidence of the act. For hundreds of years previously cultural artefacts have been made by consciously recycling, reworking, overpainting, and incorporating other older cultural artefacts.
I have been using this process, partial erasing of historical cultural material, with the addition of my own work, for over 20 years, using a range of media.
Each postcard was selected for not being special; in each case part of its value lies in its lack of differentiating features, its similarity to so many hundreds of thousands of other postcards, referencing a huge commonality of experience. Each one is also an individual experience.
People have in the past asked with regard to my working in this way, how I would feel about my own work being erased. This is one reason why I have written the text in pencil. It is both a reference to the original medium used, an acknowledgement that the point is valid, and laying the work open to future intervention.
Every one of these postcards has lost contact with the family concerned. In each case the card would have been easily raceable by a researcher, and was sold via a well-known internet marketplace. Of the four soldiers who sent the cards, two may have been killed in action after the cards were sent, and two survived the war.
For archival purposes I have kept a record both of the original text, and of my erasing it. These will be erased at the end of the exhibition.
And, since this work stems from the First World War, a phrase from that conflict is relevant. Amongst the heavy-industrialisation of death cynicism flourished, truth pared of all presentation; in order to get the soldiers out of the trench to face a heightened risk of death one officer was heard to encourage them with the words ‘Come on, do you want to live for ever?’