Art and Tourism Imaginaries VI
Authentic Postcards!
Free, until full capacity is reached. Tickets may be collected at the Museo’s Ticket Offices or on the Museo Reina Sofía website from 10am on 17 September (a maximum of 2 per person). 20% of the visitor-capacity will be reserved for attendance without ticket collection on the day of the activity. Doors open 30 minutes before the activity
The sixth edition of Art and Tourism Imaginaries, an encounter series organised with the research group TURICOM, sets forth a study which explores the phenomenon of postcards and their impact on shaping the themes and stereotypes which have formed the collective imaginary of geographies, peoples and consumer habits in contemporary visual culture.
The use of postcards became widespread in the late nineteenth century, coinciding with the dawn of mass consumer culture. Their central qualities of speed, concision and cheapness chimed with a paradigm of thought shaped by utilitarianism. They came into being as commercial or personal textual notifications which tended to be very short and became standardised owing to their public nature, yet the introduction of the image in the early twentieth century denoted a relinquishment of their initial functional austerity and their transformation into a fully modern product. On a small scale, the development of the tourist postcard corresponds to the development of the capitalist production system as the format gradually faded away as a simple messaging item to become a hybrid picture card encompassing at once the attraction to the place it showed and a souvenir: a private message that draws from a commercial and advertising rhetoric, thereby assuming a mainstream quality. Halfway between media and a visual commodity, between an abbreviated letter and a standardised panorama, the postcard is a choice object for understanding how the cultural dynamics of stereotype are created and perpetuated through the way in which they often represent idealised and standardised images of places and situations. As a commodity, the postcard is laden with the dominant discourse of modernity, according to which the cost of progress means a loss of authenticity, a quality that is demoted to the outside or the distant, to far-flung places or a past time. Therefore, the postcard is a striking reflection and agent of this modernising project as it is specifically equipped to build cultural stereotypes and the nostalgic invocation of lost authenticity.
Setting out from this premise, the activity explores the postcard as a vehicle for and manufacturer of clichés from the perspective of authenticity, a key concept for consumer discourses and increasingly for politics. Inside a context of culture wars based on a stereotyped rhetoric, on clichés and short messages, this humble newsstand memento could possibly teach us valuable lessons on the relationships between the stereotyped and the authentic.
This is the final encounter in a six-year collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía and research group TURICOM which has given rise to critical reflections on the tourist subject, leisure time and contemporary art.
Participants
Cristina Arribas works as an architect and urban planner for Badalona Council, and is also a lecturer in the Department of Theory and History at the Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura de Barcelona (ETSAB). Her most recent publications most notably include the essays “El nuevo paisaje turístico español a través de las tarjetas postales de los años 60”, in Sobre, no. 5 (2018) and “La puesta en escena del paisaje turístico español en el boom desarrollista”, in La ciudad en el cine (Asimétricas, 2022), and the book Greetings from the USA. Saludos desde España (Concreta, 2023).
José Díaz Cuyás is a professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory at the University of La Laguna. He also coordinates the TURICOM group, and was previously the director of Acto ediciones. His most recent publications include Encuentros salvajes: arte, consumo y turismo caníbal (Concreta, 2022), which includes his text “Arte, consumo y transgresión caníbal: a propósito de Yves Klein, Tennessee Williams y el cine exploitation”.
Julián Díaz Sánchez is a lecturer in Art History at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM). He is the author of, among other works, Políticas, poéticas y prácticas artísticas. Apuntes para una historia del arte (Catarata, 2009), La idea de arte abstracto en la España de Franco (Cátedra, 2013) and Pensar la historia del arte. Viejas y nuevas propuestas (University of Zaragoza, 2021).
Alicia Fuentes Vega is a lecturer in the Department of Art History at the Complutense University of Madrid, where she jointly directs the research group IMAGINARIOS and has coordinated, since 2023, the MA in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture (UCM, UAM and Museo Reina Sofía). Her publications include articles in academic journals such as the Journal of Tourism History, Iberoamericana and Art in Translation, and she is the author of Bienvenido, Mr. Turismo. Cultura visual del boom (Cátedra, 2017).
Rogelio López Cuenca is an artist who combines visual art methods and customary processes of literature and social sciences. One of his main working strands deals with the representation and construction of the identity of the other, in relation to individual and collective identity in the West. He received Spain’s National Award for Plastic Arts in 2022 and has held solo shows in Es Baluard (2021), the Museo Reina Sofía (2019), Sala Alcalá 31 (2016), IVAM (2015) and La Panera (2012). His work is also part of the Museo Reina Sofía, MACBA, ARTIUM and Banco de España collections.
Casa Planas is a collective organisation founded by the artist Marina Planas in 2015 in Palma de Mallorca. As an independent, non-profit project, it came into being in response to the need for an interdisciplinary centre for contemporary creation and the interpretation of tourism on the Balearic Islands. Its collection includes the biggest photographic archive in Europe on mass tourism.
Carmelo Vega is a head lecturer of Contemporary Art History at the University of La Laguna. She has published broadly on the history of photography, for instance the monographs Fotografía en España (1839-2015) (Cátedra, 2017), Lógicas turísticas de la fotografía (Cátedra, 2011), Guía-inventario de fondos y colecciones de fotografía de Canarias (with Clara Alonso Herráiz, University of La Laguna, 2014) and Historia general de la fotografía (with Marie-Loup Sougez, María de los Santos García Felguera and Helena Pérez Gallardo, Cátedra, 2006).
Programme
“Two Hundred and Forty-Three Postcards in Real Colour” (1978) is a text by Georges Perec that explores the notion of authenticity by way of imageless postcard texts that can evoke an almost ideal tourist landscape. The intervention sees Julián Díaz Sánchez contrast Perec’s notion of authenticity with that of Gilles Lipovetsky, who demonstrates the expansion of the concept of a Disneyfied world.
Stretching beyond its presence in the Mail Art tradition, the postcard has been employed by contemporary artists to critically or parodically allude to its role inside tourist culture and tap into its communicative possibilities. Therefore, this session introduces such examples, showing the diversity of strategies and objectives in either its specific use or in combination with other media. For instance: Marina Seascape (1998) and Malagana (2000), by Rogelio López Cuenca; ¡Desengánchate!N and ¡Apostata! (1991), by Agustín Parejo School; ¡Visite Ciudad Juárez! (2003-2011), by Ambra Polidori; Zaidín Monumental (2000), by Javier Longobardo; Paisatges Fragmentats (2017), by Laura Marte; and Conflictes Urban (2002), by Arquitectes Sense Fronteres - Plataforma veïnal contra l’especulació.
Since the early twentieth century, the postcard has been a paradigm of the mass-culture stereotype. In its artistic use, the postcard and platitudes, en masse, play a transgressive role, akin to works within Surrealism and Pop Art. From the perspective of rhetoric, the value of authenticity we attribute to transgression lies in the very act of violating, when it is perceived as an unmasking. In this talk, José Díaz Cuyás invites us to ask questions around the provocative, elusive power of stereotypes, particularly today, when clichés have become algorithmic.
What makes Spanish tourist boom postcards so different and attractive? Through two exhibition projects — Diálogo de postales (Postcard Dialogue, Museo de Historia y Antropología de Tenerife, 2023–2024) and Discursos postales (Postcard Discourses, Centro Andaluz de la Fotografía, 2024) — and from a perspective on the theory of the tourist image, this talk puts forward keys to resolving such an enigma. The true value of postcards lies not only in their vast structural and visual power as contemporary flash fictions of tourism, but also primarily in their capacity to create formal and conceptual solutions that defy all conventional logic. Far from documenting the phenomenon they illustrate, postcards build their own idiosyncratic fictional realities.
The Casa Planas project is a collective, non-profit organisation founded by artist Marina Planas in 2015 in response to the urgent need for an interdisciplinary centre for contemporary creation and the interpretation of tourism on the Balearic Islands. Alelí Mirelman is a project director at Casa Planas and the coordinator of the COSTA Tourist Image Observatory.