Interview by TANK
Portrait courtesy Olivia Taussig

Michael Taussig is a writer and anthropologist. His books include The Magic of the State (1997), I Swear I Saw This (2011) and Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown (2020). In Postcards for Mia (Strange Attractor, 2023) Taussig presents a collection of hand-painted postcards he made and sent to his granddaughter, Mia (then aged about five), while travelling around the world. Known for his explorations of colour, magic and myth, this book is his first fully illustrated publication, and an examination of how adults and children co-collaborate on imagining the other’s imaginary – something he refers to as “the adult’s imagination of the child’s imagination” (or AICI). TANK spoke to Taussig and his daughter, Olivia, Mia’s mother and co-collaborator on the book.

TANK What does drawing do that language can’t, in the context of the ethnographic notebook?

MT I met a middle-aged guy in Vienna who was part of some crazy Wittgenstein fan club, who told me that in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Wittgenstein says something like, “What can be shown cannot be said.” It sounds very mysterious and enticing. You say things with drawings that can’t be said with words. I have noticed in my own practice that it’s sometimes easier to sketch something than put it into words if what you have to say is enormous. A drawing also serves as a mnemonic when you’re trying to describe a scene or event. Photographs are too common and boring but drawings are cranky. My drawings – through ineptitude – are not a substitute for photographs, but they’re not realistic and are not meant to be. If it weren’t for Olivia I wouldn’t have gone as far as I have, as she’s a great critic and if she feels there might be something there of value she boosts it. It’s a question of trying to create surprise or fun through colour, through the event or thing being described and then through the magic of the postal system. When I first started thinking about this a year or two ago, I searched on the internet to find out what’s happened to post- cards. It seems around the First World War everybody was sending postcards all the time, and then by the 1930s and 1940s it dropped off. Very few people send postcards now and they certainly aren’t making their own. In a sense, this [project] is part of a go-slow movement, or an attempt to put the brakes on the craziness of the internet.

TANK In the book’s afterword, you describe the postcard as a kind of conspiracy for the child with whom the postcard is made. Could you talk more about that?

MT I wonder if Olivia would have something to say about that, and the sort of implicit relationship set up by the cards which take advantage of the implicit relationship between adults and children, or the grandfather and child.

Olivia Taussig To be specific about you and my daughter rather than a general relationship between a grandfather and child: you are a writer and travel six months of the year, sometimes more, so I think the postcards were a way for you to connect with Mia. She’ll have evidence of their relationship long after Mick is gone. It’s also a way for Mick to share his life with Mia in a way she can relate to in writing, travelling and the humour of travelling itself. His postcards aren’t like, “I bought this coat” with a drawing of a coat, they’re like, “Look, I saw a mermaid.” I think for someone who uses language so much it’s a natural way to have a kind of illuminated connection. I can’t speak for Mick though, and he might think that’s too sentimental.

MT To pick back up, the AICI or adult’s imagination of the child’s imag- ination is an idea I have been thinking about on and off in a desultory way over the years which came to a head with the postcards. When you’re writing or drawing for a three or four-year-old, the adult, absurdly or not, is trying to get into the mindset of the child, and the child, even at that age, has got a good sense of what the adult’s expectations are. There’s a sense in which they’re both sort of conning each other. When I thought about it more, I realised that this dynamic doesn’t just exist between adults and children, it exists in institutions like schools, universities and the police, which demand obedience and thrive on hierarchy.

TANK In some contexts, there have been anxieties around researchers making drawings rather than photographs because of the possibility of embellishments or fantastical impressions being layered onto them. I think this connects to the idea of the AICI where there’s a sense of things being made more mystical or fantastical or wonderful by the adult.

MT For me, the point of the drawings in ethnographic notebooks is that they are fantastical. In our ideologies the photograph is real but anybody who studies photography will say there are so many ways of photographing a person or event that the “real” doesn’t really exist. With a drawing you know straight away that is a personal point of view – it’s an adventure in vision. In my last book I Swear I Saw This, which is an attempt to elaborate on the drawings in ethnographic notebooks, I quote John Berger who equates drawing to singing or dance. In his early books, he has this famously terse style – lots of one-line sentences, like telegrams – then there’s this switch to drawing. The comparison with dance and song is one I like enormously. For me drawing is a means of filling your world, bringing something new into one’s life and the lives of others or the world in general. If I were to put it in a very banal way, I would say drawing fills up space and time.

TANK What does Mia think of the postcards?

OT She loves them. She misses Mick a lot when he’s away. I think she’s very inspired by them – she’s up late at night making all sorts of letters for her friends.

MT I didn’t know any of this. If you had asked me, I would’ve said she’s indifferent and takes them for granted. But I think what Olivia is talking about is pretty recent. I think as she gets older she’ll go through different waves of appreciation and dismissal. My romantic notion was that it would be such fun to get a letter with all different sorts of stamps on it out of the mailbox, but in the first few years she gave me the impression that it was no big deal.

TANK I think that when you’re really little, all sorts of extraordinary things are folded into your experience of the everyday.

MT Have you seen her postcard to me at the very end of the book? It’s real genius. .