Gallery, Land (Arte Polvera)

Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is an experimental gallery and research site based in Los Angeles. As a medium for (art)work, the gallery operates through an evolving program at its current location (4478 W Adams Boulevard), as well as through off-site projects and collaborative presentations that take-place locally and internationally. Working against settled constructions of space, place, and time, the gallery inhabits a drifting, germinal and adaptive—seeding and blooming—structure that sustains consciousness through critical analysis and careful documentation. By working-through the time and space (or the place) of the gallery, we orient the gallery as a kind of land or land-art: as a planetary transformation over a duration of time. This transformation is carried-out through work. A primordial work—a populating æffect of the stars.

We begin with the gallery as a work of art: an artwork built with others. A work. And a marketplace: a logic of exchange. And a technique of a body: a technique of survival. But this is a survival that makes-room for emerging forms of life, and is not only an instinctual response to the imminent threat of death or disappearance. An afterlife that is already present, and still future. (A surplus scarcity.)

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Some recurring questions to keep in mind: How does a gallery keep-up with itself? How does it keep-track of its rates and productions (and its rates of production)? What is the language of this gallery and how does that relate its structures, functions, programs, and exhibitions? (These questions have been asked before, beginning at least in the 60s in Europe and the US, but since the concept of the gallery still seems slippery, and relatively unaccounted for compared to collectives, collections, and museums—and even fairs and markets to some extent—it seems relevant to keep asking these questions (again and again).)

In any case, if we are going to take-up space, then we should give an account of ourselves, of our causes and our lacks and our lags.

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Actualized in Spring 2023, the gallery functions independently as an open source for artists, audiences, curators, collectors, and critics. The gallery builds a general economy—and physical place—between the conceptual forms, the cultural positions, and the material productions of contemporary art with the objective of supporting artists working in all mediums and dimensions of the present (and future) moment. The current program focuses on experimental work and insurgent or liminal processes (work that are actively at the margins of identity, material, economy, or history). The trajectory of the gallery is non-linear, non-teleological, and anti-imperial. As an archive and a community, the gallery works to develop ethical ways of keeping time, connecting spaces, and circulating alternative economies that usurp, disorient or reorient “art markets.”

What is an artwork? What is an artist? What is a gallery? And how might a gallery begin to give an account of itself (or at least of its disappearances and displacements)? These basic but recurring and unanswered questions are the gallery’s foundational problems. (We begin as outsiders—turning outsides in, and insides out.)

It is the place of the gallery (and its inhabitants) to investigate how the historical/material conditions of an “art object”—including the gallery itself—are either reproduced, translated, challenged, or disinherited with each act of exhibition. Rather than focusing on any particular movement or genre or theory, the program demonstrates a simultaneity of movements, genres, and theories at work along any single exhibition, artwork, object, or artist. (The contemporary artwork appears in more than one place, at more than one time.)

Functions: Through analytic and historical documentation of exhibitions, works, and artists, the gallery’s form is critically driven in response to its own processes, materials, and records: light, time, body, language, and space. The gallery’s program is performed through physical exhibitions, analytical texts, exhibition catalogues, historical documentations, collaborative publications, and virtual collections, as well off-site events or projects. Orienting itself as a resource, and a vehicle of research and experimentation, as much as a formal exhibition space, the catalogues and other publications produced by the gallery provide a relational structure that extends beyond the physical premises. Exhibitions are positioned as part of an artist’s (and the gallery’s) process and practice, and not as authoritarian declaration: a result of what’s already in circulation. (Working any other way would make anything like an ‘avant-garde’ impossible to begin with: nobody is along the front or on the edge if the limits are already firmly established….)

{Read about the gallery’s current program here: XY}

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4478

The gallery is a public (re)source.

Our plan is to continue to build a place and position capable of addressing ‘everyday’ or ordinary realities through works of art. (To address work through work.) For us, that is a foundation of the gallery: to be a place in time, and a kind of work, that breaks-up the habits that congeal into conditioned and normalized forms of life and death (ready to be bought and sold). The gallery can disrupt this regular exchange and offer active, de/constructive techniques of uncovering, deciphering, transforming, deranging, or exiting readymade systems and relations.

Part of the work of the gallery is to recognize the ways in which the place, history, neighborhood, and architecture structure the spacetime of the gallery and the ways in which exhibitions are curated, installed, and constructed. By sustaining a roving, adaptive program that evolves in relation to each space we occupy, we are building a way of working that recognizes the gallery as an active force, agent, and participant in each exhibition or event it holds.

Broadly, we are continuing to build a program focused on experimental practices that work-through bodies, materials, languages, and techniques in response to systems of normalization and consumption. Practices that not only notice “problems” but also actively work-through problems, symptoms, sicknesses, and (bad) habits. Artworks that repair, advance, or combat the worlds that make them. Works that disrupt ordinary ‘forms’ and ‘ways’ of life (and death). More narrowly, and in particular, the program is turning toward exhibitions and projects that work between systems of cultural production, knowledge production, social production… between (academic or technical) research, (ordinary) labor, (daily) ritual, and aesthetic desire (or distaste). Eventually, by pushing interdisciplinary, and non-disciplinary—as well as ‘post-’ studio and ‘post-’ relational—(art)work beyond the framing of the art historical context, we are asking “where is the artwork”? Where does an artwork take-place? Or, what are its (lost) causes, and its results or æffects? As always, we are asking basic questions that are often difficult to respond to. We are keeping-track of ourselves.

[Summer 2024.]

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Histories and Future Anteriors (Thens and Now-Thens)

(Picture: a family tree.) Branching from the photography business built by Chris Reisig and Leeza Taylor, and set in motion by their daughter Emily Reisig, the gallery is artist-founded and family-operated.

Starting with something already shared between us (a family), we work through the intimate relations in a “house” (and a home) as a place between a traditional gallery and a collective gallery—and between cultural labor (jobs) and the work of art. A place between economies and communities, markets and people. And between publics and privates. But, from the outside, a house is also just a house: ceilings and walls, plumbing, electricity; a technique of survival and a financial instrument. Or, from within, a place or premise with people and things, necessities and dreams (and deliriums) evolving, breaking-down, and regenerating together. And, unlike a house, a gallery is only a shelter and does not need to sustain life—it just needs to keep-out the threats. However, we never wanted the gallery to only stand-guard—and that’s where the lessons of a house, as a livable (and loved) place, offer some clues as to how to actually inhabit this place: how to make a gallery a livable structure: a mode of survival. And a kind of collective memory. (Remember: There’s no place like home.)

Now-then, how do we build a gallery that is as necessary as it is exuberant and enjoyable (or at least loving)? How does a gallery link artwork, reality, history, and survival (instead of continuing a capitalist mythology)?

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As a place that is necessarily staked at its limits (the best, the richest, the biggest, the newest, the busiest, the whitest, the mostest (avant-garde)…), the systems and relationships that circulate through any gallery are always exchanging (their goods) between extremes: revelation and remembering, totalitarianism and insurgency, circulation and singularity, disclosure and dissimulation. So, we put these exchanges on display, instead of preserving an inherited wealth by laundering our own activities and (family) relations through the structures we produce under the housing of a Name: “Reisig and Taylor Contemporary.”

When we first started working together we were just artists in the same family sharing a house. We didn’t share any kind of movement, genre, schooling, taste, or attitude—we only shared a house and everything in and around it. We shared materials, we shared feedback. We shared meals and milestones. We were at odds with one another but nonetheless working-together. We shared space and time. Sometimes, we hated each other. Like a “gallery,” a “house” is a social structure as well as a (often inherited familial) financial instrument. It is can be a place of sanctuary and safety, or a place of instability and hostility. (And often, it is capable of housing both of these extremes at the same time.) It is space of rooms filled with bodies and objects. Rent is paid (or not). Maybe a mortgage is taken-out. It is a place that binds the present, finite but repeating tasks of daily life (and death) to the infinite search for new forms of survival, new ways of thriving. Necessity and desire, chance and distaste, coexist and even cause one another. A gallery built like a house, is a livable link between all of these paradoxical ways of life of death. It is an interval, a structure, and a work that links ways of living to paths of becoming. It goes-on.

Inhabit this structure, the gallery pairs the archival and conceptual rigor of an academic or institutional setting with a utopian promise of a self-reflexive (but nonetheless generationally) and circularly organized economy of power and kinship. The opening-up of this semi-private place between entangled entities—the private and the public, the actual and the virtual, the already and the yet-to-come—is neither invention nor rejection, but a socially necessary (and historically impending) surgical incision into the politics and poetics of relations bound-up in the knotted place of the work of art. Positioning the gallery as a question of relation (of relations), this strategy is a way of beginning with the “family-operated” organization of the gallery as a recursive and literal entry into the preliminary conceptualization of the space and its exhibitions. More immediately, it is a way of working with something familiar in an unfamiliar way. (In this case, a de-atomization of the atomic family.)

By working-through the transparent sheets that usually separate artists, artworks, critics, collectors, curators, families (estates), and gallerists, the gallery is built to re-examine social stratifications of artworlds through a critical engagement with (non-)persons, (non-)places, (non-)things, and (an-)aesthetics as they alchemically converge in the space of the contemporary gallery. In other words, beginning with its foundation, the gallery constantly works to interrogate the places, markets, and populations through which it carries-out its work. The gallery and the community it gathers will continue to evolve in response to the results of its adaptive structure.

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The program’s curation and documentation is carried-out by object 80 (Emily Reisig + Zach Baker). This gallery project and their curatorial practice in general is a part of their continuing artistic collaboration as they question distinctions between work, (art)work, labor, profession, career, etc…. Along with this self-reflexive and analytical way of working, diagrammatic and other alternative modes of visual presentation and documentation are built as multiplied entries into a shared place (that takes a different form for everyone who enters—and for whoever’s looking).

Beginning as a nomadic, collectively organized gallery, Reisig and Taylor Contemporary questions how spaces become places (and how places become rooms). This questioning is initially materialized and practiced through the gallery’s use of carefully selected temporary spaces for its exhibitions throughout Los Angeles. Following the lessons learned from operating with a nomadic structure, Reisig and Taylor Contemporary initially found housing in a weird little space located in the Culver City Arts District (2680 S La Cienega Boulevard). In Summer 2024, the gallery moved to a larger space in the historic West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles, where it is now currently located. Part of the work of the gallery is to recognize the ways in which the place, history, neighborhood, and architecture structure the spacetime of the gallery and the ways in which exhibitions are curated, installed, and constructed. By sustaining a roving, adaptive program that evolves in relation to each space we occupy, we are building a way of working that recognizes the gallery as an active force, agent, and participant in each exhibition or event it holds. Further, as a gallery interested in giving an account of its own developmental structures, we also work with each space as a way of moving back-and-forth between intrinsic (or internalized) and extrinsic (externalized, embedded or immersed) states. (For example, the quirks of the first location at 2680 S La Cienega induced a more intrinsic way of working with the gallery-space where the gallery’s unique shape and indoor-outdoor fluidity informed the construction of exhibitions based on these structural limitations. Alternatively, our second current location at 4478 W Adams provides a more extrinsic space where the space itself will be built-out in response to the works.)

The gallery has regarded the quest for a permanent space in Los Angeles as a necessary ethical dimension of the gallery’s placement in a city where gentrification plays a powerful role in furnishing colonizing powers and triggering displacements of already-present populations. The selection of our gallery location has been critically accounted for, and it is our aim to take-up the space as a place of encounter between all folds of the city’s fabric. Always bearing-in-mind the relation between placement and displacement, questions of spatial justice—and the relationships between the placement of art galleries and the populations they serve—are central to the gallery’s studied confrontation with the place of the gallery in itself as the starting point for inquiries into the power of contemporary art. As a site of sights, the gallery must seriously consider what is covered and what is uncovered by its placement. This extends to the core structure of the gallery as a “house” or as “housed,” to the extent that it immediately begs the question of its opposite: the “unhoused.” Welcoming this kind of schism into the gallery gives way to a series of questions. What is it to be placed or located? What is it to make-room for objects, instances, or durations? What is it to build a space capable of asking questions about itself? Ultimately, art should be seen or encountered in view of what it obscures.

The linking of the already and not yet is this gallery’s iterative process and productive function. (A gallery is nowhere but beside itself.)

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[Past] Gallery 0000: 2680 South La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90034. February 2023 - June 2024.

[Present] Gallery 0001: 4478 West Adams Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90016. July 2024 - (…).

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Harriet and Howard Taylor: Progenitors (Grand Mother + Grand Father)

Leeza Taylor: Market Director / Genitor 1 (Mother)

Chris Reisig: Engineer / Genitor 0 (Father)

Emily Reisig: Dealer / Offspring 01 (Daughter)

objet A.D (Object 80): Curator [E. Reisig + Z. Baker]

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The Gallery and the Colonial Un/Reality

Reisig and Taylor Contemporary acknowledges that the place of the gallery is only referred to as “Los Angeles” by the fact of the European colonization of unceded lands inhabited by Ventureño, Gabrieleño-Tongva and Fernandeño peoples. The gallery also acknowledges that simply stating this fact cannot account for any repair to the violent history of these peoples’ forced displacement and reeducation, nor can it account for the irreparable damage done to native populations by separating them from their homelands. It is also true that brandishing this position—i.e., merely stating the fact that the land the gallery occupies was once and still is inhabited by these indigenous peoples—does not discount or excuse the privileged place of the gallery as a direct extension of this colonial reality. However, by writing what is usually under erasure, it is our intention to locate the historical trajectory of the gallery’s context and to begin to give an anticolonial account of how the gallery’s place, position, and power has arrived at its present iteration.

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[Read about the gallery’s preliminary formation through an experimental series of exhibitions, the “Dual Presentation,” here.]