Left: Matt Keegan and Su Barber at the North Drive Press release party at X Initiative. Right: View of NDP 5.

The annual art publication North Drive Press has produced interviews with a wide range of artists, as well as unique multiples––from records and posters to perfume and soap. On the occasion of its closing issue, artist and cofounder Matt Keegan discusses its origin and finale.

WHEN WE STARTED the project in 2003, I was in my second semester of Columbia’s MFA program, and wanted to create a publication that reflected the collective and discursive space of school. North Drive Press tried to translate this intimacy within its first issue, which was designed like a nonthematic, mobile group exhibition.

Lizzy Lee and I founded NDP (its name came from the street that connected the parallel blocks we lived on as kids growing up on Long Island), and as the project’s art director, she suggested a brown vinyl envelope as a cost-effective way to house the inaugural issue’s contents. As with most art projects, all decisions were based on what we could afford (for assembly and future mailings). Also, we didn’t want our publication to have a particular beginning, middle, or end; ideally the “kit,” as we initially called it, could be reconfigured each time it was opened. The sleeve contained ten unbound, legal-size, photocopied interviews and a panel transcription, as well as two large, double-sided, full-color posters and five commissioned multiples, all made in an edition of five hundred.

From its inception, NDP was made for and by artists, and the priority has always been to make it affordable to this intended audience. This first issue retailed for twenty dollars, and subsequent issues have gradually increased to the current price of fifty dollars, while all interviews and texts are available as free downloadable PDFs from the website.

Thanks to a friend who shared his copy of NDP 1, we were offered funding to make a second installment. For NDP 2, I started working with a new art director, Susan Barber, who proposed using a box for the sequel. This would provide the project with a spine to allow for shelving––booksellers were dissuaded by number one’s semi-rigid vinyl casing, and the box provided greater depth for our new focus on funding and publishing more multiples. The format of the publication found its template and beautifully articulated design under Su’s direction.

In reviewing the first issue and preparing to make a second, I knew that I was most excited about the potential of the artist-on-artist interviews and multiples. There seemed to be a void in the distribution channels available to for emerging artists that NDP was committed to presenting––for them to be recorded in their own words and provided with funds to produce editioned artwork. NDP’s initial contributors (although we have featured a wide range of artists) fell below the radar of publications such as Bomb and Parkett.

From NDP 2 on, we provided no editorial parameters, allowing the contributions to define each issue. After completing NDP 3, Su and I—and my editorial collaborator for NDP 3 and 4, Sara Greenberger Rafferty—knew that the project would have to come to a close, as it began to take more time and money to produce. We didn’t want the publication to ever feel burdensome, as all of our own art and design practices began to demand more time and attention.

Su and I decided to end the project with NDP 5 because the number five felt like a point of completion. After we made this decision, the production of this final installment took on a different energy. Assisted by a fantastic crew of interns, we were really excited about it from beginning to end, and our enthusiasm helped fuel an intimacy that had existed in earlier issues.

Many of our contributors have gone on to have success as artists, and NDP’s archive of five issues, more than 150 contributors, and more than fifty interviews has been accessed by students and teachers as points of reference at varying moments in our various contributors’ careers. I’m glad North Drive Press is over, but Su and I have already talked about continuing to work on a future publication with a smaller number of contributors and lower production costs. This yet to be titled project will definitely be informed by NDP, and I look forward to that next permutation.

— As told to Lauren O’Neill-Butler

Views of “Selections from the Life and Work of Michael Bravo,” CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, 2010. (Photos: Navid Baraty)

Since the mid-1990s, Harrell Fletcher has worked collaboratively and individually on socially engaged, participatory works. He is currently the director of Art and Social Practice at Portland State University in Oregon. Here he discusses “Selections from the Life and Work of Michael Bravo,” an exhibition on view at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco until April 24.

I’VE THOUGHT ABOUT CURATING this show for the past five years. Michael Bravo retired from the art department at Humboldt State University––where I studied with him as an undergraduate––in 2004, after thirty-one years of teaching. Coincidentally, that year I began to teach at Portland State University. He was married to my older sister when I was a child, which adds an unusual element to our relationship. I’ve always been inspired by his work, as it is very interdisciplinary and unorthodox. But I’ve also been interested in him as a person and feel that our trajectories have been similar in several important ways.

The show features some objects he made for me when I was a baby, such as a mobile that used to hang over my crib, a toolbox, and wooden ships. I’ve also included a selection of Michael’s art from the past fifty years, as well as ephemera, like family photographs and documents from his life. I interviewed him for a publication that accompanies the show and wrote an exhibition text that describes our relationship and thoughts about his work. The exhibition presents my very particular view of Michael. It’s a very idiosyncratic exhibition, and many people have told me they think it’s the most personal show I’ve done.

I think this exhibition is related to several projects I’ve organized in the past that look at artists who operate on the margins of the art world or who are not involved in the art world at all. I’ve always been drawn to people and places that are peripheral to art-world centers. These are concerns that are central to my practice.

The exhibition is also similar in some ways to my traveling exhibition “The American War,” which began in 2005. In that case, I rephotographed all of the images and texts from the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City and organized events and talks to accompany the show. I think the connection between that project and the current one at the Wattis is that in both cases I create a framework in which to view a set of objects that I didn’t make myself. As a viewer you can look at the work directly or you can consider it from the larger perspective of my relationship to the materials and my motivations for organizing the show.

Michael’s exhibition is part of the Wattis Institute’s program “The Magnificent Seven,” which is spread out over a three-year period. In addition to having a solo show, each participating artist will teach at CCA for a semester and will create a new work as part of a Capp Street Project Residency. (The other artists are Abraham Cruzvillegas, Ryan Gander, Renata Lucas, Kris Martin, Paulina Olowska, and Tino Sehgal.)

Right now I have another project that I’m working on with Wattis director Jens Hoffmann called “The People’s Biennial.” For that traveling exhibition, which is being organized by Independent Curators International, Jens and I will travel to five locations across the US––Portland, Oregon; Rapid City, South Dakota; Scottsdale, Arizona; Winston-Salem, North Carolina; and Haverford, Pennsylvania. We will choose local people’s work in each of the cities to be a part of a group exhibition that travels to art centers in each of the cities that we selected work from. The art itself could be anything from a kid’s science experiment to the work of an artist who for one reason or another hasn’t participated in the art world. We’ll also have roundtable discussions about art and curating in those cities where the exhibitions are held. The show was partially inspired by the artist Michael Patterson-Carver (not to be confused with Michael Bravo), whose career I helped launch. When I first met him he was selling his drawings on a sidewalk in Portland, Oregon, and now he has had shows in galleries and museums in New York, Paris, London, and Brussels. Not that I think there is anything wrong with showing your work on the street, but it is also nice to be able to break down the walls that normally prevent artists like Patterson-Carver from showing in mainstream art venues.

I want to level things out by drawing attention to work being made outside of standard art world circles. I’m not interested in hierarchies or creating distinctions between different kinds of people and the work they make based on where they live or whether or not they have a MFA. I think this kind of expanded view of what qualifies as “art” and who can be called an artist, ultimately makes for a more interesting art world and world in general.

“The People’s Biennial” opens September 10 at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Oregon.

— As told to Lauren O’Neill-Butler

Left: James Welling, 0467, 2009, digital ink-jet print, 33 5/8 x 50 1/2". Right: James Welling, 9818, 2009, digital ink-jet print, 33 5/8 x 50 1/2”. Both images from the “Glass House” series, 2006–2008.

James Welling’s long-standing interest in abstraction has often distinguished his practice from his Pictures-generation peers. His recent subjects include Mies van der Rohe’s 1945–51 Farnsworth House and Philip Johnson’s 1949 Glass House. An exhibition of a new selection of works featuring the latter and a video installation opens at Regen Projects in Los Angeles on January 30 and at David Zwirner Gallery in New York on March 24.

WHEN FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT visited the Glass House, as Philip Johnson tells it, he was unsure whether he was inside or outside. He said that he didn’t know whether or not to take his hat off. Another quote by Johnson on the house: “Nature is the most expensive wallpaper.” I think the greatest thing about the house is that you’re “inside” once you step on the property. The Glass House is, in truth, a large structure of landscape architecture and a dozen buildings and sculptures.

In 2005, I started making multiple exposures using six filters (red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow) for photographs I called “Hexachromes.” These images recorded vibrantly colored shadows on succulents in my front yard. I exhibited the “Hexachromes” in 2006 at Donald Young Gallery, in Chicago, and it was on that trip that I had an opportunity to visit and photograph the Farnsworth House. I showed these pictures (also made using six filters) to Jody Quon at New York magazine and she asked me to photograph Philip Johnson’s Glass House using whatever techniques I wanted.

I started shooting the Glass House in 2006 with the same filters I used for “Hexachromes,” but that technique really depended on motion and shadows to produce multicolored images. Nothing moved over the three days, so I decided to hold the filters in front of the lens, sometimes in pairs. This is how I began to incorporate arbitrary colors into pictures of the Glass House. I went back seven more times over the following three years.

I’ve been using the word filter as a noun, but it’s also a verb. A filter lets some wavelengths of light through and certain kinds of information to seep in. In addition to colored filters, I used clear glass, clear plastic, fogged plastic, pieces of glass that were slightly uneven or tinted, and finally a diffraction filter that breaks light into spectrums. Now I bring everything with me when I shoot, but initially I introduced new filters one by one. When I realized I could make the grass red or make sun flares, splatters, and different types of visual activity in front of this supposedly transparent house, or box, the project became a laboratory for ideas about transparency, reflectivity, and color.

James Welling, Lake Pavilion, 2009

In December 2008 I brought an HD video camera to the Glass House and shot some footage, but I wasn’t happy with it. Two days later I went back with my low-definition Canon G6 camera and shot video in the strange, snow-covered Lake Pavilion, which was built in 1962. It turned out to be much more exciting footage than the material I made with the HD camera and it became my first video in thirty-five years. I showed Lake Pavilion in 2009 at Galerie Nelson-Freeman in Paris and at Donald Young. Now I’m working on another video installation, Sun Pavilion, based on footage from that pavilion that I shot in October, which will debut at Regen Projects.

When I work at the Glass House, time seems to speed up. I never have enough time to work there. It’s very strange. One of the problems I have with the house as a piece of architecture is that, although it is symmetrical, the front is the same as the back, there are very few views of it that I work with. I use a frontal view primarily (because you can see through the house) and occasionally I can get something out of a diagonal view. Recently I have been photographing the inside of the Glass House. I’m trying to deal with Johnson’s very precise interior, unchanged from 1949, still housing an Elie Nadelman sculpture, a Nicolas Poussin painting, and an ensemble of furniture by Mies van der Rohe.

While the architecture of the Glass House in itself isn’t so revolutionary, what is revolutionary about Johnson’s house is its conceptual use of glass. This big glass box is plunked down in the Connecticut landscape. It’s such a direct statement of transparency and of reflective surfaces. It’s a lens in the landscape. In my work I’m adding to the conceptual conceit of the house by introducing a new decor of color and of distorted reflecting surfaces.

— As told to Arthur Ou

Left: Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Antiteater, 2009. Performance view. Right: Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Black Mariah (The dancers’ films & performance objects), 2009, 
two fabric jackets, six leather skins, two painted wooden panels, DVD performance documentation, 55 1/8 x 47 1/4 x 19 5/8". Installation view, Pouges les Eaux, France, March 2009.

Lili Reynaud-Dewar engages a motley fold of influences in her performances and installations––from gender theory to Rastafarianism to the origins of cinema––presented by a cast of collaborators that includes her mother and burlesque performer Mary Knox. Her exhibition “Antiteater” at the Frac Champagne-Ardenne opens January 21.

THE PERFORMANCE is really the starting point for this exhibition. Unlike my previous work, which has always been staged autonomously inside an exhibition space, this performance occurred over the course of an evening of productions celebrating the Frac Champagne-Ardenne’s twenty-second anniversary. I displayed four objects or groups of objects onstage, all of which I’ve used in performances before, from Love = UFO to Black Mariah and The Power Structures, Rituals & Sexuality of the European Shorthand Typists. The principal idea was that I would show archival footage of past performances while talking about them—however, instead of describing what you actually saw onstage or on-screen, I talked about various sources that inspired the work, from Sun Ra to cartoons to Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto.” Meanwhile, performers reenacted one another’s roles onstage behind me, each one taking on the part of another in the mode of Fassbinder’s Antiteater, in which all members of the company were constantly shifting positions.

In the exhibition, the video of the performance is projected onto a really large wall that Marine Huggonier used for her exhibition this fall at the FRAC. She had also used this wall to project a video that was between cinema and documentary. I thought it might be interesting to give this wall a different purpose, namely, to host the document of a performance, one in which I talk at length about the notion of a filmed performance and its relationship to theater and live performance, theater and cinema, as well as performance and video.

The projection is reflected in a huge mirror on the opposite wall, so that visitors are somehow trapped between these two large surfaces. In this way, the audience that is present for the performance will be replaced by the audience present for the exhibition. In the same room, I am also showing the performers’ costumes, which were designed by Mathieu Bernard. In another room are the original sculptures, displayed all together—which is something I’ve never done before. I hope it will function to create relations among these very different projects.

Though this is a completely new step for me—I’ve never been onstage with the performers before, nor have I ever presented the film of a performance outside of an installation—it nonetheless is an extension of how I’ve worked in the past. I always take something from a previous project and use it in the next one, creating a different situation with similar objects or similar performers. But here, for the first time, I was able to get all the performers I have worked with so far together onstage—like a working troupe.

I wanted my role in all of this to be quite funny. I think there’s a sense of humor in placing yourself onstage and trying, if not actually to justify the work—because the justification is not the meaning—then to make yourself look as though you are somehow doing this by supporting the performance with language or discourse. In a way, this restrains the audience from their desire to enjoy the performance without having to listen to the artist talk about it. The exhibition accentuates this, because while visitors come to see the show, they will have to hear my voice constantly. A voice will always accompany the video, one you cannot escape. Compared with my previous shows, and Black Mariah in particular, which was completely silent, this one will leave you with a certain sound, the sound of an exhibition.

— As told to Joanna Fiduccia

Left: Cover of Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular (2010). Right: Harry Smith.

Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular celebrates Smith’s wide-ranging oeuvre and is available this month from Getty Publications. Here, Rani Singh, director of the Harry Smith Archives, discusses the book’s inception and Smith’s significance to the field. On January 28, the Hammer Museum will host a launch party with Patti Smith.

HARRY SMITH EMPHASIZED seeing the mundane in a creative light and would regularly ask people, “Have you been creative today?” Essentially, his search for synthesizing world cultures was what his artmaking and lifetime achievements were all about.

Although Smith was primarily known as a filmmaker and the producer of the Anthology of American Folk Music, his myriad collections of string figures, Seminole patchwork quilts, and tarot cards, as well as his involvement in peyote rituals and his art and painting practices, had not been looked at together. It is quite possible that people in the film world had no idea of his other endeavors and vice versa. So the Getty Research Institute thought that it would be a good idea to bring all these disciplines together for a symposium, which we did in 2001 and 2002.

The book brings together these disparate arenas of Smith’s life. It comprises reworked essays from the symposia, and we also commissioned additional texts and, most important, had a wealth of primary sources: interviews with Smith, full documentation of his presentations, and a lot of never-before-seen archival materials. We also had the ability to make scans of his 16-mm and 35-mm films, which is pretty astonishing because it gives us the opportunity to see each frame individually, and those frames are works of art unto themselves.

To celebrate the book, we’re holding events in New York, Portland, Oregon, and Seattle. Patti Smith was an old and dear friend of Smith’s. She knew him when she was living with Robert Mapplethorpe at the Chelsea Hotel, and they spent a lot of time together. The new book speaks at length about that era. (Funnily enough, there’s an exhibition at the DOX Center for Contemporary Art in Prague on the Chelsea Hotel that reconstitutes Smith, Mapplethorpe, and Warhol’s rooms there.) I hope that the book reflects Smith’s search for melding multiple disciplines and approaches, a worldview that synthesizes different cultures and ways of doing things.

I was Harry’s assistant from 1988 until his death in November 1991, and when he passed away I started the Harry Smith Archives as a nonprofit and attempted to locate, collect, preserve, and present his materials, which, due to his irascible nature and peripatetic lifestyle, were essentially all around the globe. Smith lived a very bohemian life, to put it mildly. When I’d visit him, his stuff would be all chockablock––it was really an incredible experience. Whether he was staying at the Chelsea Hotel, at the Breslin Hotel, at Naropa Institute, or in a room in Allen Ginsberg’s apartment in the Lower East Side, it was always an experience. He would have a Seminole patchwork hanging up or a frozen bird in the freezer or a film project in the works and stacks and stacks of books. The room usually had a unique odor, a mix of marijuana and Salem 100 cigarettes and whatever kind of beer or cheap vodka was on sale that week. It was all very heady.

— As told to Catherine Taft

Left: M. K. Guth, This Fable Is Intended for You: A Work-Energy Principle, 2009 (work in progress), backpacks, cords of used clothing, dimensions variable. Right: View of M. K. Guth’s residency at 1 New York Plaza, November 2009.

M. K. Guth is a Portland, Oregon–based multimedia artist and filmmaker who has exhibited widely and received critical praise for her work in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Her exhibition at the World Financial Center in New York opens January 6.

THERE ARE DEEP CONNECTIONS between my current project, This Fable Is Intended for You: A Work-Energy Principle, which is part of Mark Russell’s 2010 Under the Radar Festival, and the installation I created for the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Ties of Protection and Safe Keeping––but there are a lot of departures as well. The similarities revolve around narrative structure and the amplification of collective voice and human presence, and also around the consideration of a particular site. But the two projects are significantly different.

The Whitney installation was truly interactive; however, in my new work, the public does not interact with the piece physically, but through acts of generosity. People who live and work in lower Manhattan have donated all the materials—used clothing and fabric—that compose the project. These materials have directly shaped the appearance and process of the work, but the public has not literally helped to construct the installation as they did at the Whitney. My new work is arguably more expansive, and it presents the process of the piece in three successive phases.

In November, during the first phase of the project, I conducted a residency at 1 New York Plaza in lower Manhattan. The residency space was an old retail store that is now used by artists. It has two large banks of windows, so the public could view me at work with my assistant, the New York–based artist Molly Dilworth. The space acted as a window onto the performance of our labor. People could witness materials undergo transformation for the exhibition. I took into account aspects of display and construction. So, for instance, as Molly and I processed donated materials, we worked in unison: cutting, folding, hanging, stacking, or sewing––using the same types of movements––and placing materials with a mind to the aesthetic qualities of place. Each week, the space changed to complement a different form of work, accumulating into an environment of diverse forms, colors, materials, and gestures.

The exhibition––the second phase of the project––takes place in the gallery at the World Financial Center. It features long lengths of cord braided from the used fabric and clothing. The cords are anchored to backpacks hung along the walls of the gallery. The backpacks are removed from the walls for the performances and then replaced. The gestures of the residency are also captured in the exhibition, but in other forms––filling vitrines, for instance. The show acts as a staging area for the performances, and the original labor of the project is still present there.

The January performances are the final phase and culmination of the project. They involve twenty-four volunteer performers from different backgrounds––some are people I met during the residency who work in lower Manhattan, some are artists, writers, performance artists, etc. Each of the twenty-four performers will wear a backpack with a sixty-six-foot braided cord attached to it––thirty-three feet on either side. As the performers walk throughout the Winter Garden, they follow a series of choreographed movements based on maps I created in response to the architecture and significance of the site. As the performers shift, they create shifting geometric shapes––temporary sculptures––that amplify the shape and character of the Winter Garden. The braided cords connect the performers. As the performers change formation, they must carefully negotiate and manage the cords.

The geometric shapes created during the performance resemble much of the reflective glasswork in the atrium and also some of the intricate stonework on the floors. I’m interested in how the performers will amplify the human presence of the people who work in lower Manhattan and the patterns they follow in their daily lives. The title of the piece, This Fable Is Intended for You: A Work-Energy Principle, is inspired by an 1836 Hans Christian Andersen story. In the story there is a mirror, and when someone looks in the mirror, it tells the person about his or her life. I like the idea that a work of art tells everyone a little bit about everybody else––either through a reflection or a collective voice.

— As told to Stephanie Snyder