The story behind the radical collective who subverted mass media through mail-outs and queer aliases

From exhibitions such as Fiona Tan’s exploration of the Agfacolor image archives at Cologne’s Museum Ludwig, to The Black Image Corporation currently on view at Berlin’s Gropius Bau and Alexandra Bell’s edited and redacted newspaper cuttings at this year’s Whitney Biennale, the foregrounding of archival materials within the contemporary art world has emerged as a major trend in recent years. As society becomes ever more consumed by visual culture, fuelled by the speed and scale of platforms such as Instagram, images of the past offer us vital gateways into interrogating issues of the present. 

These are just some of the ideas explored at Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s thought-provoking new exhibition, Image Bank. Bringing to light the political subversion and Duchampian humour of the eponymous artist collective of the title, the exhibition unravels the history of an international network of artists who shared images and correspondence by mail. Founded in 1970 by artists Michael Morris, Gerry Lee-Nova and Vincent Trasov in Vancouver, Canada, the collective was understood as “a moment of utopic collaborative practice, kind of a hippy-esque situation,” according to the exhibition’s assistant curator, Kathrin Bentele.  Featuring a range of art objects — including letters, photographs and video footage — the multimedia display investigates the origins and inner workings of this obscure group, who strived to democratise and decentralise mainstream image culture.

Driven by a desire to distribute images to circumvent conventional hierarchies, the collective developed an innovative mail-out system — on a monthly basis, they circulated an image appropriated from a mass media source entitled ‘Image of the Month’ among a far-reaching group of creatives. Accompanied by a list of artists alongside their addresses and image requests, images were shared and spread on the basis of sending and receiving. In some ways, this distribution method might be seen as a precursor to social media — while we scroll through hashtags and curated feeds on Instagram, Image Bank similarly developed a “system of user-generated content” with a keyword index that allowed for a searchable, thematic database of visual materials. Yet, as much as they were seeking out an ephemeral production of art, at the same time, “they were diligently filing, cataloguing, archiving their material and their output,” Bentele tells SLEEK.

As their network grew, the collective began asking for works to be submitted according to a thematic framework — examples include, “1984” or “Piss Pics”. According to Bentele, this process presented something of a temporal paradox — “they projected the future into the present. This way of dealing with the archive was actually projecting something that’s happening now into the future, so the other way around, an inversion.” 

But not only was Image Bank founded to distribute artworks and build an ever-expanding network of artists,  at its core it wanted to disrupt conventional mass media rhetoric through a queer language of camp, masquerade and a playful adoption of aliases. The artists involved in the collective used interchangeable pseudonyms and aliases to challenge the individualism inherent in artistic ownership, promoting ideals of collective consciousness and fluid identities that could transcend cultural mythology instead. “It was a time of a much more collaborative thinking, and this moment of mingling of art and life,” confirms Bentele of the lively period in which they were working.

One of the most famous of these aliases was “Mr Peanut”, a character assumed by Trasov that exuded all the campness and dry humour that characterised the collective’s work. Based on the highly recognisable mascot of the American snack food company Planters, the persona represented the genericism and ludicrous quality of advertising imagery, and acted as a recurring motif throughout Image Bank’s corpus. Amazingly, in the guise of Mr. Peanut, Trasov eventually ran for mayor in the 1974 Vancouver municipal election as a pointed commentary on the superficiality of consumerism and failings of the political system. The unlikely candidate garnered around 5000 votes and subverted the consumerist tropes from which the character originated in the process.

While Image Bank is still relatively unknown outside of Canada, this eye-opening exhibit showcases an underrepresented body of artistic production in a way that interrogates the status of the art object itself. Through an international distribution network, Image Bank democratised the art object as Bentele explains, “with so much sending and receiving, the collective operated in an in-between state.”  Offering an insight into the surprising parallels of a forgotten archive with modern systems of image distribution, Image Bank attests to the power of the archive as a source for effective commentary on contemporary issues. As a final note, Image Bank reveals the significance of a diverse artistic group, who refuse easy categorisation. “Through its mail outs, its extended performances, its festivals, they used so many modes of working,” posits Bentele. “There is not a single one way you can say that this is ‘Image Bank’.”

See more from the exhibition below:

Image Bank runs through to 1 September 2019 at KW Institute for Contemporary Art.