The First Poste
Poste Restante: a letter or package held at a central post office until picked up by its recipient, commonly used by travelers. Term used throughout Europe; in Germany, “Postlagernd,” in the U.S. “General Delivery.”
The art object seen as an undelivered letter, held in reserve by the gallery for a recipient whose identity and location are incompletely known. The deferral is, at base, of the resolution of ownership (which is never finally resolved), but more generally of the delivery of meaning, a suspension that is necessarily permanent. (Is the gallery then a Dead Letter Office, working to resolve incompletely addressed posts?) A delivered post would be the perfect delivery of the art into meaning, thus ending its existence as art. Resistant to its dematerialization, art remains local, specific, visible only in certain spaces, while operating in far-flung networks of discourse and commerce. Like a letter sent instead of an email.
