ser-quasoid

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mus-croissant

tec-wonder

art-mckloud

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tec-gellix

gen-brody

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ser-infini

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ser-cheee

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ser-gliker

gen-buffon

sci-american-typewriter

ser-pipa

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art-ohno-fatface

mus-basteleur

sci-pipo

ser-ohno-blazeface

sci-ameliapro

art-strike

gen-fleya

art-roberta

art-tenpoint

ser-bradley

gen-puchakhon-magnifier

ser-hybryda

art-kenwyn

ser-herbus

mus-gooper-condensed

sci-twoblock

ser-scandia-stencil

art-cako

ser-blimone

ser-bb-standard

ser-guillotine

sci-eklektyk

gen-combat

sci-microgramma

tec-twobit

mus-french-typewriter

ser-taters

ser-clip-regular

mus-churchward-marianna

art-nichrome

tec-hunter

sci-borax

tec-booty-bold

test

art-churchward-tua

arch-catalog

till-melted

mus-antique-olive

ser-separat

mus-workbench

sci-boogie-school-serif

mus-robur

test-font

till melted

sci-joe182

sci-cirgeos

tec-boecklin

tec-sudety

sys-zipper

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ser-twopoint

 engages in conversation with artists and thinkers who incite change within their respective fields, to gain insight into the unique ways they engage with the world.

) they’re often asked questions about their “process”—you know, reasons why they made the work, what they were thinking about, and what the work means to the 

 or some larger context beyond the gallery or museum

 A month or so ago, I was sitting in my apartment on the sofa trying to give myself some purpose, something to do other than what I was supposed to be doing, when I woke up my computer and ordered 

 Seth Price. A friend had mentioned him for years—he’d come up in conversation from time to time—but I never dove in.

Seth is a materially-focused artist. He’s what I would call a compressionist; he processes the world by collecting its varying shapes and colors and then produces objects or stages experiences that play with the intended function of the material or technological. For instance, in the fall of 2004 at one of his shows for Reena Spaulings in New York, he showed 

Digital Video Effect: “Spills,” (2004),

 which features a bulbous television, face-up, packaged in its original box. It was plugged in and playing grainy footage captured in the ’70s by Joan Jonas. The video features Richard Serra, Joseph Helman, and Robert Smithson sitting in a room in conversation about art. The piece dances the line as a videoed sculpture or installation piece.

, one doesn’t have to know how the artworld works to “get” how the artworld works—he shows you what to pay attention to as you navigate the pages with an unnamed and placeless protagonist. On this very infrequent occasion we get to ride on the back of someone who knows where they’re going, and what to steer clear of, so buckle up. Re: questions artists are asked when they do make good work, I did ask Seth a lot of those questions because I really did want to know what he’s been thinking about to really just live in the interiority of the 

 and all the things that have consumed him over varying stages of his career. We talked about fashion, art, and a bit more about this theory stuff.

EMMANUEL OLUNKWA

I was talking to Dan [Graham] yesterday and he was saying that in the ’60s everyone was so focused on or had the desire to be called a writer. Anyone and everyone could call themselves an artist but so few people had the talent or pedigree to be a writer. What does writing take from you? Is it a diaristic practice?

SETH PRICE

Yes, it’s a practice with a diaristic dimension, absolutely.

Do you have a routine and are you regimented?

I did that once, in order to write a novel, which became 

. I cleared my plate so I could just sit down and be a writer. So yes, then I felt like a writer. Usually, it’s just random diary time.

Do you think of yourself as a compressionist?

It’s like the saying, “all the best artists are the greatest thieves,” which is to say that you’re an extractionist; someone who is taking bits and different influences and putting them in the bowl and mushing them together and putting it through the meat grinder and producing a “Seth Price” work.

I have worked like that at times. It’s interesting that you use the term extraction. I’ve been thinking about extraction, and how it’s linked to the digital, and the processes of how digital technology works, what it’s supposed to do in this economic regime. It has this brutal, extractive logic to it, and you can feel the violence there, in digital production and communication, or in artworks produced with digital tools. Everything has to be reduced to the same plane, in order to be transacted. It’s something people have noticed with my work, when they talk about violence, or coldness, or alienation.

, (2015). The website that you made is a perception tool for artists to browse to search collectors and art investors who buy their work, where you can also see their political affiliation.

That piece started in a personal way. I found out that an artwork of mine from a show I’d done had been sold to a client I felt uncomfortable with. I found out only after the sale. I was happy to have sold an artwork, but I was also trying to examine my feeling of discomfort. And I started to think that it was bigger than what I was feeling, because, I mean, where does any of the money come from? Once you really look, it can start to get disturbing. So I thought, well, what if we had this resource?

Have you ever made works for the market? Do you think about the market when you’re making work?

No, because when I’m making something, I can’t usually conceive of the end result. I’m not that kind of artist. To make something for the market would mean thinking about what the market wants, in relation to what you have to offer. There’s nothing wrong with that, because art is also a marketplace: on one level, I sell objects to rich people. It’s not the only level, but that’s the way it is, and it’s good to remember that, as an artist trying to make a living, you’re a business. But the market likes predictability. It’s hard for me to conceive of something and then execute it. I try, but I always get waylaid. I mean, I would love to paint oil on canvas, but I just can’t seem to get there, somehow.

I always wind up with this weird, other thing. I just get kind of carried along in this process of forces and materials acting on each other, and chance, and changes in direction. It’s not unintentional, it’s exactly what I love about art, that it’s about change, and transformation, and the unexpected.

What’s your relationship to materiality and materials?

All of the works are very material. It’s practically the first thing I’m working with, when I’m trying to figure out what I’m doing. The quality of the material, the way that it feels, the desire to want to touch the object, this is all very important. It’s something that doesn’t come across in a lot of the photographs, because I’m also interested in flatness. But it’s of the utmost importance to me that you can stand in front of the work and just feel it.

What do you think the disconnects of your practice are generally?

There was a time in the 2000s when me and my friends were being called appropriation artists. With a few exceptions, I don’t think it was accurate. Certainly not for me. I think it came out of the fact that we were using digital tools, which are about taking, and manipulating, and recontextualizing. People weren’t used to that, there hadn’t been so much digitally-made art. I made 

; I don’t know of any other artists who were making art with internet searches at that time, in 2000. People would be like, “You’re a computer artist, you’re an internet artist.” So are you, you just don’t know it. Within a few years, they’re like, “I put a filter on my face.” “I scanned my signature and squashed it to fit the document.” People launder their whole life through their phone. I think the issue is, the logic of the digital wants to pull things out of context and manipulate them, and quantify them. That suggests appropriation, but it’s a very different mechanism from the art historical idea of appropriation.

How do you relate to the term appropriation in its current context and cultural reception, having been assigned that label in the early aughts?

I remember talking to some of my friends about it at the time, and our general feeling was like, a shrug. We felt like, from now on everything is appropriation. Ignore it, proceed as planned. I still don’t like these terms, because if we were to speak in an art historical way, using the term as it was defined —it’s the same with “conceptual,” which people also were calling me, for a while. As an industry, we end up with these terms floating around in a very loose way. For a lot of people, “conceptual” just means they kind of suspect there’s more to it, but they don’t know what it is.

The industry? Excitement and confusion, in equal measure. You look at someone’s collection that’s good, and you feel excited, and uneasy, and it’s all whirling around in your mind, and that blend of discomfort and desire is what keeps you coming back.

Can you speak about the collaboration in the early ’10s?

That started Fall/Winter 2011, with a collection I did with Tim Hamilton that debuted during Men’s fashion week. We rented a vacant storefront downtown, on Walker or something, and did a presentation. All the buyers put in their orders—

[laughs] I’m joking, no one wanted to buy it. But I debuted it in another way, the following summer, at Documenta.

Kara Walker has this studio approach which she calls “retinol detachments,” which is about having heavy non-presence, where she enters the studio and then “conceptually” peels her skin and then enters into a space where she isn’t raced, isn’t gendered, but she is embodied. When you’re in the midst of working do you have to enter a dissociative or possessed state to churn out the work?

Yes, yes, absolutely. Often, when I get home, I’m still in this other realm. I’m not easy to be around, or talk to. Not, like, in an evil, nasty person way, more just like, I’m not in the realm where human interactions come easily. I enter a kind of floating mind space, when I’m working. I like to have a lot of different things going at once, to be able to give in to — I wouldn’t call it distraction, but drifting, taking sudden forks in the road. I like to drift in a non-goal-oriented way, in order to keep everything popping, and not get bogged down.

I’m still not convinced on the fashion bit. What about the architecture of the storefront? Why couldn’t the project just exist as images or as a staging of a catalog? Or something drawn out about the narrative or story of the collaboration?

Why make objects? I mean, that other stuff comes inevitably, anyway, because art installations don’t last. You’re left with just the images, the catalog, the story. That’s the unfortunate part of art history, right? Pick an artist you like and it’s rare that you understand what a given gallery show looked like, and felt like, what was the layout, what was there.

Because it’s not the way we document these interventions and phenomena. It would take a lot of work to reconstruct what all the shows look like that Kara Walker or Dan Graham did. I think we all know the experience of flipping through a catalog, and turning the page, stumbling across a little black and white photo of a show, and being like, “Oh my god, what? That’s what the show looked like?” With the fashion, it’s always going to exist as a story, a myth, ephemera, photographs. But there was something important in that moment, at Documenta, of staging a shop window in this department store right next to the main exhibition hall, and doing the fashion show in the parking garage. Those were all amazing experiences, to enter into that discourse, and that language. That was a huge part of the project for me, entering into the vocabulary of making garments. At the time, it felt like there was a lot of interest, obviously going back decades, a mutual interest between art and fashion, but there tended to be two main approaches from the art side. There were industry collaborations, where artists were kind of giving some images to put on clothing or handbags, and then there was an interest in fashion in a more generalized, abstracted way that has to do with youth culture, and newness, and taste — I’m thinking about Bernadette Corporation, for example, though they made clothes, too. But I wanted to specifically get into the architecture of the fabric, to design a line, to make sculptural pieces in that industry, in those shops in the garment district, with pattern makers and seamstresses and all that.

Okay so, Bernadette Corporation and Art Club 2000, go!

Right, yeah, it’s all there. But we entered into a different era after the ‘90s, in respect to luxury and branding. Fashion in the’90s was very interesting to me, and a lot of people I knew, you’d go to the bookstore and read the new Face, and i-D, but at the same time, nobody I knew was actually wearing labels, that would have been really uncool in 1995, with the people I knew. The people that were wearing, like, Prada were—

[Laughs] They’d be “euros,” like, wealthy students from other countries, where there wasn’t a punk heritage that said you’re supposed to look scruffy. People here who wore labels were tribal, there’d be skaters wearing Fuct, and ravers wearing Danücht or something, and club kids from New York in X-Girl. This was before streetwear was something everyone fucked with. People I knew were wearing unbranded stuff, thrift store clothes. It was that Naomi Klein, “No Label” thing.

That’s my vibe. [Laughs] I don’t fuck with labels.

We all experienced this massive conglomeration of the industry, LVMH, and all the consolidation. And then music, rap, all sectors of the culture became interested in luxury, right? People were now interested in Vuitton.

Right, this obsession with the necessity of labels.

Yeah, it’s aspirational luxury, I think, if you have to use a phrase. I think that’s a different approach to fashion than this slightly earlier generation of artists, not that someone like Bernadette Corporation wasn’t going to fuck with luxury, because they definitely were, but luxury itself changed, the circuits around it changed. I think we consume culture in particular circuits, and that makes up kind of an affective relationship to the culture. In the ’90s, it was magazine time.

I saw in Dispersion that you write about magazines, and then when I was talking to Dan, we spent a lot of time parsing through his relationship to magazines as well. What’s your relationship to magazines?

I used to go to the bookstore and get a giant stack of magazines, and sit there for about two hours until I read them. These days, I just don’t.

Right. What’s your relationship to collecting? What do you collect?

Stuff kind of accumulates. I’m constantly going through books and music, but I’m not a collector. I was just having this conversation with somebody, because I have a large library of music, but I’ve never collected records. I might buy something on Bandcamp, and I like to own files, because I’m not into the Cloud. But I’m not fetish-y about objects in a way that I would buy vinyl. I’ve never bought any art. I don’t really collect anything, actually. You can make power objects without being a collector, you know. When I was little, I had traffic cones that I would steal off the street, and I would take hubcaps from the gutter, from accidents, and I collected rocks. I once nailed a Twinkie to my wall because I wanted to see what would happen, and left it there for a few years. Nothing changed about it, except there was a grease stain on the wall.

Was this pre- or post-Maurizio Cattelan’s Art Basel Banana?

The Object Talk: Seth Price 

Seth Price

The Object Talk: Seth Price

A few weeks ago, I ventured over to the Raymond Naftali building in Chelsea to have a chat with Sam Stewart in the 

 magazine office, which up until recently functioned as his studio space, but is now defunct. I’ve been following Sam’s work over the last three years; he’s a maker who crafts and corrals objects out of familiar materials that sometimes take the form of food to construct an armchair, or uses tulle that dances and drapes the exterior of a couch or lamp shade. He’s interested in playing with ornament to represent design function, starting with the architectural needs of a given space. For instance, what a space might be lacking in light could be compensated for in texture or form. More specifically, Sam seems to be asking, how does one enliven or activate a chair as an object to witness and experience but never use, but that can represent its intended function.

Sam hails from North Carolina and doesn’t have a background in design or art, but does have exposure to them. He often witnessed his father’s process as a contractor building houses, but Sam was rarely impressed with the final product itself. He was always more taken with the process and materials as individual components that could collide and make something unrecognizable to the untrained eye. I caught up with Sam on the remaining chairs in the office and we spoke more intimately about the inner workings of navigating the downtown New York design and art scene, the process of engaging and maintaining relationships and forming communities, and the art of giving yourself over to the practice of doing and making things.

So, I read that your dad was a carpenter and that's kind of the story that you tell. But how did you shift into making things; were you always thinking about furniture

SAM STEWART

I’ve never defined specifically what I do because I've never felt I needed to, given that I didn't go to an art school. I've just always liked to make things and to create things and I think I've always had an interest in the objects in my home from, like, a very young age. Obviously, I saw the stuff my dad was doing and building. I never really had an interest in that kind of work.

He's a builder, and so he was framing out and building houses. I always found certain things about his practice that shocked me, or I thought what he was doing was more beautiful in certain stages than when it was finished. So, I already had developed some sense of aesthetics based purely on observation.

Yeah, the skeleton was more beautiful than the finished thing.

I saw this house that was being constructed when I was in the Hamptons and the constructors were framing out the house in plywood. And I thought to myself, I wish my house could just be a plywood house.

All the things that make it look like a house, things that, like, hide...

...the actual house, itself. Yeah, that's my earliest memory of that. I was one of those kids that painted and would draw obsessively, and my parents would encourage that. As a kid that grew up in North Carolina, in an area where you could build stuff in the woods or whatever, I built a lot of structures like little treehouses and always had a project or something I was working on.

I built a raft and I would just entertain myself with all the free time that I had by coming up with something to build. Whether I was sectioning a garden or building out a yard, that’s always been a consistent thread for me. But to me it's never been an interest of mine to define that and I never once really thought about going to art school. I didn't really do anything interesting in high school and I think my high school art teacher probably was surprised this is the direction I went in.

And then when I came to New York I worked across the street from here [the Naftali Building in Chelsea] at the Barry Freedman gallery as an art handler for my first job. I knew basically no one in New York. I knew nothing. I kind of got this job through a friend. You know, you could've said Chelsea and I would've been like "What?" You know, no idea. I was totally green. And I think that because of that and not really having any distraction, basically no social life, I just had to develop, and it happened I further developed my interests in art design. So one really formative experience from that time was that one of the people who I worked with at Freedman had just graduated from the Whitney ISP program, and her and a friend of hers, who worked at Paula Cooper at the time, were starting a gallery just for the summer on Forsyth Street in Chinatown. It was open for like four months or something and they were like, “we need someone to help us for free to install all the shows.” I was like, “of course I'll do it.” But for me it meant working all day doing this one thing for money, and then working for free in the evenings.

And so, without having to really go to art school, I developed a community through working with them that summer. And yeah, it's kind of crazy, a lot of people that were involved in that have gone on to do some interesting things, and so have Suzie Oppenheimer and Margaret Kross who started the space. Suzie works in curatorial at the Art Institute of Chicago and Margaret's at the Whitney now as a curatorial assistant, and writes for 

. And so, they really kind of formed me because they saw that I had an interest in art writ large. You know, I was going to work for free just to have more exposure. And then the last show of that summer they allowed me to include work and the thing I made was a bench. And I don't know why I made a bench, but I did.

] Was there a departure from the way you made objects as a child, by just engaging and not labeling it to get to what you're doing now and how you conceptualize having a practice?

My practice is totally ephemeral. I was making a lot of things myself for a long time, and I think about four or five years ago I started really relying on fabricators. Things shifted and became a lot more conceptual—in my head—just like having an idea for something, and in part probably due to all these years of having ideas and executing them myself I now fully conceptualize the object, and then it's just a matter of articulating it to someone who can make it.

What I do is I communicate the ideas that I have and that's the practice. It's hard to fully understand how I ended up in this place, and to trace it, but the further I go on I just have less and less interest in defining what I’m doing. I was reading this piece on Ron Nagle who was talking about ceramic art in the ’60s and ’70s. And for a long time, ceramics of any kind were considered craft. There are very few instances where Peter Voulkos and Ron Nagle and even George Orr, all of these ceramic artists from that era and even earlier, were considered in the contemporary art or modern art discussion at the time. And although a lot of artists made ceramics it was still kind of like craft in a silo. And I think that the language and the narrative historically evolved and now Ron Nagle's firmly positioned in contemporary art and shows with Matthew Marks.

I found that his comment on it, basically when he was asked how he would define his work, he just said it really doesn't matter. He said, “I don’t care what the label is; I just do the things that I feel like I should do, the things that come to mind and I have an interest in.” And I kind of really feel similarly. I've been categorized as an artist, categorized as a designer.

It seems like you’re engaging your practice in an architectural sense. Firstly, by thinking about what the space needs. Then asking, what do I want this light to do? How do I want this shape to function? What does that color emote in tone or structure? How do I activate or disembody an idea in order to produce a certain kind of feeling or situational circumstance?

Yeah, it's like wanting to control emotion through things that aren't alive, through inanimate objects. The architecture that I'm interested in and a lot of the art I'm interested in does exactly that. It provokes you in a way makes you feel a certain way, and as they say, “the sap starts to rise.” You can feel the energy from something, and it makes you excited. It makes me want to make something that feels that way to both myself and maybe someone else.

It seems like you developed your own framework or way of thinking prior to going to St. John's College [in Santa Fe], before you were reading more rigorously. It sounds like you were computing what college was, and what it needed to be. Trying to figure out which college to go to to acquire these skills which is basically how to think and how to engage critically with these ideas that you have, right? Were you thinking or were you reading about contemporary art then? Or did it happen when you moved to New York and you started to produce objects?

It happened once I moved to New York, when things started to change, and I was in a place where I was engaging the world as an open book. I think when people who were very academically sound in their approach, both historically and within contemporary art, realized that I had the desire to learn more about art, fed me as much information as possible, such as which articles to read and shows to go to.

I'm like a sponge for knowledge in that way. I don't think that'll ever change. It's not like that was my approach for a period of time. I'm still that way. I remember being told that, “I was ‘an artist,’” and I'm like, I don't really think in these terms. And people continuously rave, “the best artists are the ones making things without knowing that they're doing it under the umbrella of being an artist.” I was actually reading this interview with Harold Ancart in the 

 a couple days ago, and he was talking about if two people call you a painter you're sort of a painter, at least in your mind and how you feel. And before then it's like yeah, he paints a little bit here and there. When 10,000 people are like you're a painter or 20,000; you're like, “I guess I'm a painter

I think part of that was him being slightly facetious, like it's not like a mathematical proof that makes you anything, it's not an algorithm, but I think he was being slightly facetious when he said that. But I feel the same way. It's more of just a realization as you go on that the world categorizes people and things and that's kind of what we do as humans. But, you know, it's felt in that, yes, it's a realization from the outside. But at the same time I have more and more confidence in the fact that this is truly something I'd like to do and that's what kind of makes it go along. And it's real curiosity. I have interest in how to express the thoughts that I have in a way that I don't feel like it's different than what a painter does or what a writer does. At the core of that, going outside of all the labels and organization, it's just a curiosity.

Yeah…a way of communicating something through the embodied.

It's something I definitely learned at St. John's, which was founded by two professors from the University of Chicago in the 1930s who developed the St. John's model of education, which is a very traditional liberal arts education—traditional in the European sense. It’s discussion-based and all of your finals are written. I took a lot of mathematics, the way you move from Euclidean geometry to Apollonius and the iconic sections, and saw how Newtonian physics resulted from the movement of bodies trying to describe how bodies move geometrically—but it didn't quite work. It’s kind of broken down, like each one of these thinkers was working within a specific model and a set of rules and axioms and things they would create for themselves; it's like a game. Then they would play the game to its end and there would be contradictions sometimes in the middle. Sometimes at the end they would arrive at the contradiction.

But nevertheless, they would fulfill that. It would fill out the entire sphere or whatever of information that resulted from those rules. And so, you would have the next person come along and build on that and create their own model. And so yeah, I kind of adopt that same method. I mean I really treat each new idea or project as a model, and I give myself certain restrictions, although it's not as rigid as a mathematical treatise, but I give it the full exploration.

Did you have a community before you moved to New York?

No and I felt so isolated in the ideas that I had, and so removed from even knowing where to put those ideas. When I came here, it immediately became clear to me that I would have done anything to get a start into a space where I could create.

It's when you feel like you can share ideas with the immediate people around you, whom you’re also motivated, pushed, or challenged by. I never see the work that I'm doing in a void. I care about what other artists are doing. I care about the conversations that are going on, and I remember when I was having a conversation with a friend from the first gallery space that I mentioned, Margaret, who's a curator at the Whitney, I was saying that I don't see how the work that I do—this was a few years ago—fits into any kind of politic or community. It just feels like it just exists in its own bubble. She was like, “no one creates in a bubble.” You could isolate yourself, but I think that inevitably there's going to be someone that sees what you do, and they'll want to share parts of themselves and what they're doing with you. I think that community is very simple in a way. It's dialogue. It's communication…

Yeah, I think at its core it's about having and meeting the desire of talking to someone about your ideas and being heard. I think it's a reason why a lot of artists go into academia at a certain point, not because they have to but simply because they desire community. And I think it's harder as you get older, which is the irony right? If the career advances linearly which is not always the case, it doesn't always run parallel to how building out a community usually functions. Often historically, you'll see the intensity of community and the intensity of dialogue happening very early on in the stages of most artists’ careers, then surpass their cohort and [you] will start to lose touch with that community. And that's a really scary thing to confront, existentially. And I do think that people are making more of an attempt now to preserve a sense of community and dialogue regardless of career path.

Have you seen the interview with David Foster Wallace where he's talking about being sincere and the problem with irony? I've been such a firm believer that we went too far down the path of irony.

It’s kind of toxic, and I think there are a lot of things tied to it. I feel like you kind of start to pick up on a way of being strong, like strength defined by an ability to reduce the world to...

...to divorce yourself from the pain, to evade and avoid, embracing irony as, like, an armor of sorts…

And it's no coincidence either that it parallels the drug epidemic beginning in the early ’90s and has that kind of haunting feeling. And I wonder if collectively, especially in America, if there was—being sandwiched in the peak of a kind of ironic expression and this desire to do drugs so that you don't feel—there’s an ultimate goal to eliminate pain? As a society, we have an obsession with eliminating pain of any kind, both physical and psychological.

Right, I’ve had several conversations about irony and being sincere with a lot of close friends throughout the pandemic while engaging in content that just seems empty and reads more as spectacle than anything. It’s the Disney effect, you know? It’s all about happy endings, hope, and prosperity, but it fails to ever grapple with or address the real problems, with mental health being one of them. I think about the performativity of 

 a lot. I really don't want to be insincere.

I feel like it's a fight worth fighting. There are people that care about that conversation and I just thought the way David Foster Wallace put it was really beautiful, and I felt like almost in some way he was a victim to that, almost like too sensitive to his own narrative. The way he died, it's part of his own story, the story we now know. I just feel like there's a cruelty in that for someone that really stood for sincere expression in a world that's so, so saturated with irony. Like the media landscape at all levels.

I think a lot of photography now is ironic. Even these sincere gestures of representation, like the conversations around representations are really ironic. You can't represent–you can't choose to represent something, though you can try. You can gesture at things, stage concepts, write books, invent theories, use colors, allude to certain moods, and the more general things that kind of slip through the cracks and avoid being named explicitly. But a lot of art doesn't necessarily land in that zone or intention. There can only be so many [Marcel] Duchamps.

Yeah, it's really hard to represent something. It's a lifetime's worth of work to undo some of the things that we’ve been conditioned to think, and to try to make an honest expression through whatever work you do. I do see this limitation of thinking that everything you do signals something because you intended it to. It almost reads like naivety. But it’s really an affect.

The Object Talk: Sam Stewart 

 opens with the gallerist and curator, Bridget Donahue. Since 2006, Donahue has traversed the artworld starting as an archivist at Gladstone Gallery, then as a director of Gavin Brown's Enterprise. She opened her eponymous gallery in 2015 after leaving her post at GBE and entertaining the idea of what comes next. Her roster of artists include: Lisa Alavarado, Olga Balema, Susan Cianciolo, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Satoshi Kojima, Ragen Moss, Monique Mouton, Sondra Perry, Jessi Reaves, John Russell, Martine Syms, and Mark Van Yetter.

Emmanuel Olunkwa 

There's this quote, “if you don't understand it, then leave it alone.” For me, it loosely translates to if you're trying to make something make sense, maybe it's not meant to make sense.

BRIDGET DONAHUE

That's such a freeing thought that you don't have to crack the code, to understand it. Or with gallery programs specifically, you don’t have to represent the person. Right? What about just being a fan? I think about the duty of representing artists, and deciding when maybe I'm just a better fan of that person than a guiding or collaborative force. The art that I covet or want to hang on my wall is sometimes different than the art that I work with. And it's almost back to the notion of understanding thing you mentioned. I almost feel like a lot of the art here [in the gallery], I don't understand it yet fully. So, to stay in a kind of confounded, interested, curious questioning state–I like to be in that state.

Right, I guess the idea of “it”, you know the subject matter, is dependent upon where you’re trying to go and what you’re trying to achieve with the understanding. Instead of trying to make it make sense, bask in it fully, and give yourself over to the experience. I'm really obsessed with highlighting the differences between the narration of a life lived and living the life. So many people are really good narrators of their own lives and are like, “I’m friends with this person; we do this together; these are who our friends are; this is how we know what we do.” And it really does hinder events from happening––it alienates the possibility of culture and collaboration from happening––when you’re narrating your life to that degree; accidents don’t and can’t happen.

That’s so well framed to me. In the early days of the pandemic, you know the gallery has been closed, but we have these social media presences and e-blast, and I saw a lot of people were trying so hard to keep in touch. I just felt tongue-tied, I’m a chatty person by nature but the idea of having to create content to keep engaged while we were closed felt disingenuous. I found a little bit of comfort in the idea of the narration of what was happening and what I thought should happen, for myself at least. I would prefer to be here [in New York] doing something like participating with my body, instead of my words.

In February, next year, the gallery will be six years old. So, I’ve been thinking about what growth means there, and I’ve been trying to have conversations with my artists consistently asking, “What’s interesting for you? What do you need?” and seeing what they need from me. There are galleries that you see all the time that change spaces or scale up. Especially, with those that have been closing more recently and recognizing opportunity for growth and trying to weed through my desires to do and be more.

Nowhere yet, I don’t think. But it's like, you know, will this economic disparity change the New York landscape and create opportunities for us in the art world? Can we get bigger spaces? The depressing part about the [current] space is that it’s not accessible, it has stair-only access, which is a huge and important dream of mine, that has been impossible to realize because of budgetary constraints. I’ve been thinking about what it would mean to occupy a different space and thinking about if rents will drastically decrease because of market and demand but it’s hard to say.

What does it mean to you to own a gallery now that it didn't mean six years ago?