John O'Brien

Postcard Magic -- by Bill Barrette

John O’Brien is a man of multiple facets and talents. In true Vermont fashion, he does many things well and, from this New Yorker’s point of view, does them with style and a refreshing lack of pretension. Widely known and appreciated in Vermont for his “Tunbridge Trilogy” of films (Vermont is for Lovers [‘91], Man with a Plan[‘95] and Nosey Parker [2003]), the less well-known aspects of O’Brien’s CV include shepherd, farmer, high school debate coach, Justice of the Peace, producer of daily, brain-teasing answering machine pop-quizzes, and—what most concerns us here— visual poet and creator of extraordinary illustrated postcards sent to friends as a special form of communication. A comprehensive exhibition of these cards has been in the planning stages for some time but Anni Mackay’s invitation to include John’s work in “The Collectors Show” provides a welcome opportunity to present, for the first time, a selection of this intimate correspondence to more than 30 of his friends.

John’s postcard offerings turn the idea of collecting on its head—from the obsessive collection as possession, to the acquisition of cards for the pleasure ofgiving them away. His practice involves transforming the objects with witty texts, drawings, and collaged elements before sending them out into the world. In an article published in Seven Days (Aug 2004), he described his method like this:

When I send a postcard to a friend, the image side must be something apropos to our friendship. The stamp must be a commentary, too. The address must be thematic, or at least artistic. The message, being public, is an opportunity for a double entendre. The restrictive writing space requires welcome brevity. My daily challenge is to find a postcard in my disorganized collection that almost magically connects.

The recipients of John’s postcards value them highly as diminutive works of art and collect them, appreciating the time and care that have been lavished on the cards asunique gestures of friendship. No money changes hands but something of artistic value has been transmitted and with it, perhaps, an unspoken responsibility to reciprocate in some fashion. It is not that O’Brien expects a card in return—although a number of friends do maintain lively postal exchanges with him; it is more that, by the example of creative generosity, O’Brien inspires us to rise to a better and more humane version of ourselves—one that doesn’t confuse giving with getting. John’s postcard philosophy suggests that creative expression is its own reward, and that the true joys of creativity need to be shared with a community of sympathetic souls in order to be fully realized.

O’Brien has been acquiring, embellishing, and sending postcards for more than 20 years and has refined his singular art form to an unusual degree. When gathering examples for this exhibition, I was struck by their wide range and formal inventiveness—the elements of each card ingeniously calibrated to the shared experience of the person and the event that stimulated it. There is a great deal of subtle thought that John brings to bear on the visual and verbal associations that go into the cards. A witty playfulness of multiple meanings informs most of them and rewards careful examination.

To give an especially rich example, I will share the back-story of a card I received following a viewing of Robert Altman’s Secret Honor by our informal summer movie group, of which John is a member. The movie is a harrowing and moving portrayal of an isolated Richard Nixon in exile, a manrailing against his persecutors in a state of paranoid delirium. The face of the postcard is a reproduction of Norman Rockwell’s portrait of the triumphant, pre-Watergate Nixon. For the portrait, Rockwell has doubled Nixon’s image to show two aspects of the enigmatic man—one view showing Nixon smiling and confident, the other, with a darker, more suspicious-looking, expression. Seen even through the haze of Rockwell’s sentimentalized rendering, Nixon’s image still retains the power to send a chill up the spines of those old enough to have endured the terrible years of the politician’s rise and fall. The back of the card is divided into four elements—message, stamp, address, and a collaged photograph—all relating to the Nixon theme. The stamp, appropriately, bears a smug-looking image of Nixon’s successor and pardoner, Gerald Ford. The collaged photograph, to which O’Brien has added a speech balloon, is more complex. It is of O’Brien’s father taken when he was teaching in the Puerto Rico in 1956. The speech balloon that emerges from the mouth of this handsome young man contains the word “Creep,” and can be considered the key element of the card, around which all others revolve. The message text sheds some light on the multiple meanings that can be attributed to the word ”creep.” It says “Dear Bill and Christine. Do you agree that there is something Nixonian about my father? Perhaps with a touch of those Kennedy pricks thrown in (the hair, the confidence, the Brooks Brothers’ suit). Isn’t there a little Nixon in all of us?” It is helpful to know that O’Brien’s father had political aspirations. He was a state senator from Orange County (‘74-‘76) and once ran, unsuccessfully, for governor of Vermont (‘76). O’Brien remembers being dragooned into canvassing for his father as a child, an experience that left him with mixed feelings towards his father as well as the political system (see Man With a Plan). The card’s address is also interesting in that it omits the name of the recipients. The proximity of the word “creep” to the address field, however, could be read as, ”(To the) Creep at 145 East 92nd Street,” which would be in keeping with the sentiment expressed in O’Brien’s message, “ isn’t there a little Nixon in all of us?”.

Returning to the theme of this postcard, the word “creep,” in the context of Nixon, is an acronym that refers to the “Committee to Re-elect the President,” Nixon’s fundraising organization which was, in fact, a huge money laundering slush fund that financed many of the Watergate shenanigans ultimately leading to the president’s resignation in 1974. Other meanings of creep or creepiness are certainly in play here as well; as a verb in, “to move stealthily” or “to create a strong sensation of revulsion or unease,” or, as a noun, “an obnoxious or insignificant person.” Additional shades of meaning could be suggested but the point is that by the artful placement of a single word, O’Brien has managed to create a dense tangle of associations that resonate in surprising ways. Through the agency of his father’s speech balloon the artist insinuates that we collectively share in a portion of Nixon’s dark matter—having a potential for creepiness that, following John’s example, might effectively be held in check though the magical power of art.

Bill Barrette
July 2010

Bio

John O’Brien was born in Vermont in 1963, and grew up with his brother and two sisters on a sheep farm there. His parents were active in Vermont politics, renewable energy, organic farming, and alternative schooling. He graduated from Chelsea High School in 1981 (Valedictorian) and Harvard University (cum laude, Political Science) in 1985. It was at Harvard that John began making movies; during his senior year he took an elective course in documentary production taught by the filmmakers Alfred Guzzetti and Robb Moss.

John recently completed The Tunbridge Trilogy, three critically acclaimed films that both lovingly and humorously document his hometown, Tunbridge, Vermont. Coined “anthropological comedies” by the filmmaker, Vermont is for Lovers, Man with a Plan, and Nosey Parker are narrative features peopled with John’s real-life friends and neighbors. The movies are cultural snapshots of vanishing small-town America, balancing fact and fiction, entertainment and elegy. John’s films have played at the Sundance and Toronto film festivals, in theatres from Bar Harbor to Hollywood, and on network and cable television. Fred Tuttle, the star of Man with a Plan was a guest on The Tonight Show and was featured on the front page of The New York Times.

John is currently making Oxymorons, a comedy about the contradictions between the day-to-day priorities of teenagers and the long-term future of the planet.

In addition to his life as a filmmaker, John runs his family’s sheep farm, mentors in the elementary school, and is a Justice of the Peace.

 

Bill Barrette is a New York art writer and artist who has worked in various media since 1967. He has had numerous one-person sculpture and photography exhibitions in the United States and Europe. Most recently he created a series of exhibitions and symposia focusing on aspects of the Occupation of Japan as seen through the art and poetry produced at Sugamo Prison in Tokyo, 1945 to 1952. He is the author of Eva Hesse Sculpture, a Catalogue Raisonne (Timken, New York, 1989), and the editor of Letters from H C Westerman (Timken, NY, 1987). His photographs of urban subjects have been published collaboratively with the work of two poets: Big City Primer, Reading New York at the End of the Twentieth Century (with John Yau; Timken, NY, 1991), winner of the Brendan Gill Prize 1992; Berlin Diptychon (with John Yau; Weidle, Bonn, and Timken, NY, 1995); and Wien Stadt Bilder (with Barbara Neuwirth; Locker Verlag, Vienna, 1998). Since 2002 he and his wife Christine have been dividing their time between Manhattan and their home and studio in Chelsea, Vermont.