Art itself is of course not immune from the postcard vision. My veneration for Cezanne was embodied in pictures painted from postcards of his studio. The old masters are also victims of the card-maker who crops the shape of their works to conform to the standard format and spices the colour to taste. The transcriptions from reproductions of The Concert in the series After Ter Borch have only the basic composition of the original in common. Of all such commentaries, where the perception of art became the subject of art, the most ambitions work grew out of a single postcard of the interior of the Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield, the finding of which condemned me to over a year's labour culminating in the life-size installation of a whole wall of conjectured pictures complete with reconstructed wallpaper. This itself, when finished, became in its turn the subject of a postcard, and thereby source material for painting.

No aspect of postcards, however trivial or minutely incidental, was overlooked in what I now see as a form of passionate distancing, which, like Hamlet's (or his author's) play-within-a-play, might by indirection find direction out. The Union Jacks flying from buildings in various views of Britain, examined one by one and taken as literally representing real flags, led to a wild group of treasonable nightmares in red, white and blue (or, as in one or two instances, puce, yellow and green).

The postcard as cultural ikon dominated my imagination for a long period. Though the tendency now is for a more self-consciously artistic object to inhabit the card racks, the genre still survives and the torturous elaborations of naive utopias still abound, at least outside the cynical city. For all the deliberation that goes into their making they still, in England as elsewhere, show a nation visually off its guard. Perhaps they will one day be seen as the pictorial equivalent of folk music. It was certainly the aesthetic distilled from the years of browsing (a conflation of thousands of examples) that conditions the calculated stylelessness of the photographs taken in 1973 to initiate 20 Sites n Years. The tentacles of card-mania reach as far as my slender compositional output. Opus XI ('Find a postcard. Assume it depicts the performance of a piece. Deduce the rules of the piece. Perform it') which, as theme with variations, was first published in Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Anthology, is perhaps only a reversal of what happened in the making of postcards. Maybe they are all merely records of different manifestations of what is now known as Performance Art.

Work and Texts (1992),  pp. 41-46.

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