Tracing the Roots of Photo Sharing, From

Mail Art to Instagram

A new exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art shows that image sharing is
evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Installation view of “Snap+Share,” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It shows mail
art from the ’60s and ’70s, an early form of photo sharing.CreditJason Henry for The New York
Times
Image

Installation view of “Snap+Share,” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It shows mail
art from the ’60s and ’70s, an early form of photo sharing.CreditCreditJason Henry for The New
York Times

By Jori Finkel

 April 4, 2019
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  SAN FRANCISCO — The image of a bright-eyed cat with many online lives peers out
from a hole in the wall as you enter the new exhibition “Snap+Share” at the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art.

You might wonder if the museum has designed a show for the sake of Instagram or Facebook
likes. The cat-in-hole is a recognizable internet meme, while the show’s title is itself a clear play
on Snapchat, the messaging and photo-sharing app. And the museum, a short walk from Twitter
headquarters, is actively competing with other cultural institutions to reach the local technology
community, for both funding and audience.
But the exhibition offers more than opportunities for selfies (there are two or three). Clément
Chéroux, the museum’s senior photography curator (who said he received no financial support
from the industry), is exploring how the transmission of images has evolved from analog to
digital times. In particular, he makes a compelling argument for the serious art-historical lineage
of social media photo sharing.

The show questions the common mythology that the internet has radically changed the way we
share pictures of ourselves, our pets and our vacations, and created “an entirely new kind of
dialogue,” as the technology reporter Nick Bilton wrote. Instead, it proposes that the roots for
this kind of sharing came decades earlier, making for an evolution, not a revolution.

“We have been sending postcards and snapshots since the early time of photography,” Mr.
Chéroux said, though noting that the volume and intensity of communication have of course
grown with social media. “The whole exhibition is playing with this tension,” he said. “It’s new
— and not so new.”

The show makes its argument most dramatically with its focus on “mail art” of the 1960s and
’70s, artists’ projects that used the Postal Service as an unwitting collaborator. Ray Johnson, for
instance, sent a photographic self-portrait to Joseph Cornell in 1966 in hopes of establishing a
relationship with one of his artistic heroes. And Lynn Hershman Leeson made postage stamps in
1972 with images of her face partly obscured, challenging the United States government to
stamp them and further obliterate her identity.

Other mail artists in the show include On Kawara, the Japanese conceptual artist; Jan Dibbets, a
Dutch artist who experimented with color photography and perspective; and Endre Tót, a
Hungarian artist affiliated with the Fluxus group. Examples by dozens of lesser-known
practitioners are featured in a large window display of mail art sent to the San Francisco artist
and archivist John Held Jr.

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On Kawara’s “I Got Up...” (1975) is part of the new exhibition “Snap+Share.” The conceptual
artist sent two post cards every day to friends and colleagues, each stamped with the exact time
he awoke.CreditJason Henry for The New York Times
Image
On Kawara’s “I Got Up...” (1975) is part of the new exhibition “Snap+Share.” The conceptual
artist sent two post cards every day to friends and colleagues, each stamped with the exact time
he awoke.CreditJason Henry for The New York Times
The installation "24 HRS in Photos" by Erik Kessels at the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art is a room filled with prints made from photos uploaded to Flickr during a 24-hour period in
2011.CreditJason Henry for The New York Times

Image
The installation "24 HRS in Photos" by Erik Kessels at the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art is a room filled with prints made from photos uploaded to Flickr during a 24-hour period in
2011.CreditJason Henry for The New York Times

Mr. Chéroux’s premise that mail art prefigured social media is debatable. The form was one of
the 20th-century’s most subversive modes of art-making, with roots in the anti-art and anti-
commodity movements of Dada and Fluxus — in contrast with the commercial DNA of image-
sharing today. And mail artists were typically sending postcards, letters and packages to select,
handpicked recipients, networks far from the enormous reach and popularity of social media.

Why not look back to other historical moments when photography was transmitted through mass
media, such as the rise of photography magazines or photo books? Mr. Chéroux said his interest
was more in the intimate, “person-to-person exchange of images, the gestures that say ‘I am
here’ or ‘This is me,’” an impulse he says mail art and social media share.

Jeff Guess, a Paris-based artist in the show, finds the argument oddly persuasive. “I have made
mail art before, and it seems to me like an amorous relationship with someone, where you spend
a lot of time making art for that person. But you can also see social media as a form of
interpersonal communication using images, just on a much more massive scale.”

For his computer animation Addressability in the contemporary section of show, Mr. Guess
developed a program that takes images posted on Twitter under the hashtag “selfie” and
disintegrates each of them into a galaxy of pixels that float in space. The shards get pieced back
together into one legible image, only to explode.
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Mr. Chéroux with Kate Hollenbach’s “phonelovesyoutoo (matrix),” a video installation from
2016. The artist developed an application for her phone that recorded her image every time she
used it, over one month.CreditJason Henry for The New York Times

Image
Mr. Chéroux with Kate Hollenbach’s “phonelovesyoutoo (matrix),” a video installation from
2016. The artist developed an application for her phone that recorded her image every time she
used it, over one month.CreditJason Henry for The New York Times

While internet or digital art is still a relatively rare subject for museum exhibitions, there is a
growing number of shows looking into the historical roots of the field. “Programmed: Rules,
Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018” at the Whitney, through April 14, shows how
early instruction-driven conceptual art by Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner and others anticipated
works that were programmed by computer. “The Body Electric,” which opened recently at the
Walker Art Center, takes the last 50 years of virtual life as its domain. And the ZKM Center for
Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany — a leader in this field — just closed “100 Masterpieces
With and Through Media,” a century-spanning show that also happened to include some
examples of mail art.

“In the age of Snapchat, mail art becomes more interesting again,” said Peter Weibel, the artist-
theorist who runs ZKM. Mr. Weibel says mail art fulfills two of his three criteria for “media art:”
by using an “apparatus” for production (such as a typewriter) and one for distribution (such as a
truck or plane) — it only lacks an apparatus for reception.

In “Snap+Share,” perhaps the most prescient example of mail art is Kawara’s “I Got Up …,” a
set of touristy picture postcards he mailed on a daily basis to friends or colleagues from different
locations. He stamped each card with the time that he got up each morning. The series seems
made for posting on Twitter or Facebook, although it began in 1968. Running over 10 years, it
explored the themes of image overload and information saturation that marks the current cultural
moment.
Image

“Ceiling Cat,” by Eva and Franco Mattes, 2016.CreditJason Henry for The New York Times
Image
A sign pointing to “Ceiling Cat,” at the “Snap+Share” exhibition.CreditJason Henry for The
New York Times
Installation showing examples of mail art. From left, Moyra Davey’s “Subway Writers 1,”
photos of subway riders who were writing during transit (2011).CreditJason Henry for The New
York Times

Image
Installation showing examples of mail art. From left, Moyra Davey’s “Subway Writers 1,”
photos of subway riders who were writing during transit (2011).CreditJason Henry for The New
York Times

The last half of “Snap+Share” shows artists today responding to this image overflow. Erik
Kessels’s installation “24HRS in Photos,” first realized in 2011, takes the form of a mountain of
photographic prints filling an entire gallery, meant to evoke the hundreds of thousands of images
uploaded to Flickr in one 24-hour-period that year. Corinne Vionnet’s series “Photo
Opportunities” features tourist sites like the Eiffel Tour and the Golden Gate Bridge. But instead
of showing one image of a famous landmark, she makes a blurry (but still intelligible) composite
out of dozens she found online — documenting what she calls “tourist clichés.”

Mr. Chéroux decided against including made-for-Instagram work by artists like Stephen Shore
and Cindy Sherman. “You don’t need to go to a museum to see it,” he said. “You can see it on
your own cellphone at home.”

The museum does stage a selfie opportunity, making available a refrigerator where people can
pose with their heads in the freezer, following the instructions of the artist David Horvitz. He
first posted them on social media in 2009 and the work has been generating goofy images ever
since.

Visitors during a press preview react to “Ceiling Cat,” by Eva and Franco Mattes.CreditJason
Henry for The New York Times
Image

Visitors during a press preview react to “Ceiling Cat,” by Eva and Franco Mattes.CreditJason
Henry for The New York Times
Another experiment in meme-making, the cat at the entrance to the exhibition returns in the very
last gallery. Only now instead of a photo reproduction on the wall, the creature takes the form of
a taxidermied cat poking out of a hole in the museum ceiling, its pale green eyes glinting from
above. This work was made by the artists Eva and Franco Mattes, who were riffing on the
famous “ceiling cat” image first posted online in 2006. They took the weightless creature looking
at us looking at it — some see it as a symbol of the internet itself — and transformed it into a
three-dimensional sculpture.

And it could, in our age of image acceleration, morph again in a nanosecond. Now that this cat
has reached such a high perch in the museum sphere, it is bound to be photographed and posted
by visitors, sending it back into the vast digital stream. In this way, the ending of the show marks
another beginning, with the old-school, art-world divisions between high and low culture
collapsing along the way.

“What we see today is a loop from popular culture to art back to popular culture,” Mr. Chéroux
said. “And that’s the reason we encourage photography by visitors in the show, not just because
it’s trendy, but because it also says something about the real reciprocity of the art being made
today.”