selected projects of Timothy Furstnau

Since 2003, I have operated a successful business writing and designing an ongoing series of all-occasion, non-traditonal, brutally honest, highly recycled, limited edition greeting cards for wholesale and consignment at various boutiques, galleries, museums, and fairs across the country and online.

On a basic level, if one is willing to see through some cultural baggage, the greeting card – a piece of paper, maybe folded into a front and an inside, with words on each, etc. – can be seen as a medium or genre like any other, with its own set of formal conventions and expectations, the modifying or disrupting of which similarly mirrors the histories of other media like painting, music, video, etc.  On another level, Sappycards is a demonstration of the amazing ease with which capitalism recuperates oppositional postures: in an industry that gives itself the appropriately Orwellian name “social expression industry” – greeting cards – commonly regarded as unadventurous and associated with the most thoughtless social rituals…it is not uncommon for me to witness a someone browsing through a rack of cards with profanity-laden, anti-capitalist ‘messages’, laughing agreeably with these messages and then underscoring the status of the pieces of paper bearing these messages as commodities - by buying them.  (And later, putting them in envelopes and addressing them to their recipients, literally ‘stamping’ this status.)

Almost every Sappycard is printed with vegetable inks on 100% Post-Consumer recycled paper that is processed mostly chlorine-free, making Sappycards THE MOST RECYCLED LINE available. (More recycled even than some large companies whose reputations depend more on the appearance of ecological responsibility.) I haven’t done all the research to back this up, but I’m confident enough to put it in print, and I challenge anyone to prove me wrong.

More information is available at the official Sappycards site.