From One O to the Other
Orchard, New York, USA
R.H. Quaytman, Chapter 10: Storefront, LES, $2200 a month on craigslist (2007)
Once the most densely populated immigrant neighborhood in the US, the Lower East Side remains a symbol of working-class diversity despite dramatic changes. Until recently it was also home to Orchard, housed in a modest storefront that belied the ambitiousness of the space’s three-year project. With a cooperative framework, Orchard was run by 12 partners with an array of practices and viewpoints, engaged in art-making, art history, filmmaking, criticism and curating. Privileging group exhibitions, once rarely reviewed in major US art magazines and a modus operandi starkly different from strategies favoured by most commercial galleries, it strove for constant discussion and self-reflection. Among its notable achievements were ‘Around the Corner,’ an examination of the transforming area including a walking-tour by organizer Christian Philipp Müller, photographs by Zoe Leonard and a film presentation by Ken Jacobs, and ‘September 11, 1973,’ a group of works responding to the 1973 coup in Chile and its aftermath shown alongside works addressing 9/11. Orchard’s penultimate show, ‘From One O to the Other,’ organized by director R. H. Quaytman with artist Amy Sillman and art historian Rhea Anastas, was typically cerebral yet accessible from various points of entry. Borrowed from Louis Marin’s reading of Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego, the evocative title alludes to the text’s intersection with concerns Quaytman has pursued in her series ‘Chapter 10: Ark.’
In keeping with Orchard’s taste for reflection and self-reflection, ‘From One O to the Other’ comprised a series of resonant archives. Anastas contributed Pull Quotes (2008), a sampling of excerpts from print and web coverage that had been published over the previous three years, typed out and displayed alongside the articles in vitrines. Some of the quotes emphasized or seemed bemused by the braininess or difficulty of Orchard projects; one – lifted from Bidoun – dryly observed, ‘Clearly we are due for some homework.’ Writing in Artforum, David Rimanelli praised various Orchard shows (and an inspiration for the project, Colin de Land’s much-missed, habitually rule-breaking exhibition space American Fine Arts, a bastion of institutional critique with which several Orchard members were associated) but also commented, ‘This ‘scene’ reminds me unpleasantly of the original black-and-white Night of the Living Dead, suffused with necrophilia and necrophagy.’ When asked about the remark, highlighted in one of Anastas’s ‘pull quotes,’ Quaytman gamely stuck to Orchard’s policy of frank self-examination, chuckling that there was truth to the charge that they cannibalized the dead.
Orchard certainly took pleasure in reanimating works that had fallen by the wayside, whether by restaging older projects or producing unrealized pieces by artists including Dan Graham, Lawrence Weiner, Michael Asher and Andrea Fraser with Allan McCollum (in 2005 Fraser re-presented her epochal 1991 monologue-cum-installation May I Help You, in the context of a different group show), or by exhibiting historical works. At the same time, it meticulously documented its own history, as in another archive on view in ‘From One O to the Other,’ a large editioned poster Quaytman made in collaboration with Geoff Kaplan, Orchard Spreadsheet Proof (2008), an update of an earlier work detailing the gallery’s exhibition program and financial data.
R.H. Quaytman in collaboration with Geoff Kaplan, Orchard Spreadsheet Proof (2008), digital print.
Sillman’s Representations (2008) brought a more performative element to the show’s retrospective stance: beginning in February, she painted gouache and ink portraits of people associated with the space, including critics, artists and visitors. The studies were shown piled on a long table where visitors could leaf through them; their consistent size and approach—monochrome, made on uniform sheets of paper, and depicting only the models’ heads—meant that one had to examine the faces carefully to identify the sitters.
A similar interactivity could be found in the presentation of works from Quaytman’s ‘Chapter 10: Ark’ series, made during Orchard’s lifespan; reflecting many of the installations at Orchard, they also suggested an elusive plenitude. Most of these absorbing silkscreens on heavy panels with beveled, trompe l’oeil edges—modular, made partly to be stored, giving equal weight to the painting’s placement and what it pictures, and often featuring photo-based images and Op art–like lines—were presented in open storage racks at back of the gallery. Visitors were encouraged to browse through them and hang selections on brackets placed on the wall. Comprising three texts, the first derived from a slide lecture on the complex origins of her work (unfolded, the ingenious dustjacket stands in for the slides), Quaytman’s book Allegorical Decoys, published on the occasion of the show, was another point in ‘From One O to the Other’’s multilevel dialogue. ‘I deliberately use the entirety of my past work as a scaffolding from which to move forward, and consider all of my paintings as an ongoing archive,’ she writes. In the show’s final layer, a quartet of ‘others,’ Thomas Eggerer, David Joselit, Carol Greene and Valerie Smith, were enlisted to ‘mind the shop’ on Sundays, providing a reminder of Orchard’s many ties to the art community.
Kristin M. Jones
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