Pentecost, Claire. Jason Simon, BOMB Magazine, Summer 2016

Pentecost, Claire. Jason Simon, BOMB Magazine, Summer 2016, print, pg. 144-152.
Jason Simon by Claire Pentecost
You may know Jason Simon because of the annual
One Minute Film Festival he hosted with Moyra Davey
for ten years (ten years was always the plan) in a barn
out near Narrowsburg, New York. Or you may know
him through Orchard, a gallery on the Lower East Side
organized by several stellar artists who decided they
would run an exhibition space for three years (2005
to 2008) and three years only. I know Jason as an
Argonaut, a searcher whose golden fleece is made
up of the everyday wool between our ears; a leader
by virtue of enthusiasm, gumption, and honest labor;
an adventurer in kingdoms of the lost (thrift stores,
The Mayfair Show (detail), 1994, C-print, 16 × 20 inches. On the wall: Vision Quest: Columbus Day, by Claire
Pentecost. The exhibition took place at the Mayfair Club and American Fine Arts Co., with Dennis Balk, Ashley
Bickerton, Moyra Davey, Melissa Hayden, Claire Pentecost, Adam Simon, Jason Simon, David Smith, and Hans
144 Weigand. Images courtesy of the artist and Callicoon Fine Arts.
flea markets, eBay); and, like a true artist, a champion
of archaic media. Jason is the kind of person you can
run an idea by and expect to get a response capturing
the pulse of the people and the beat of an eccentric
empathizer, a real mensch.
A lot happens in thirty years of friendship. But
one thing that had not happened until a few months
ago was a lengthy, focused discussion of Jason’s art
projects. I highly recommend interviewing your friends
now and then—you’ll be amazed at what you may
learn. In this case, among other things, I got a glimpse
of the real depth of Jason’s modesty. It shows in work
often built around the visions of other people. Isn’t
that precisely the kind of artist we need in our era of
hypertrophied ego and withered attention?
Jason himself is a person of vision, but rarely
willing to cop credit; he will cringe upon reading these
words. (Sorry Jason, but it’s true.) Just because he
shines a light on other people’s visions doesn’t mean he can hide his own. —Claire Pentecost
CL AIRE PENTECOST You curated a group show at the
Mayfair Club, a private poker club in a basement near
Madison Square Park, in New York, back in 1994. A
lot of artists have been interested in presenting artwork in spaces designated for purposes other than
art, maybe to enrich the framing of the work, or in
the hopes of diversifying audiences. But, over time,
your projects have made me aware of cultural distribution in a broader sense and, simultaneously, at a
much finer grain. I mean, you aren’t just interested
in positioning art where it meets different audiences,
you also want to dissect specific historical examples
of what I call “infrastructures of access.”
In Festschrift for an Archive (2012), you draw
on the story of MoMA’s Film Still Archive, which was
curated and managed for thirty-four years by Mary
Corliss. Your next show at Callicoon Fine Arts, in 2013,
was an installation on artists’ film and video distribution, with the examples of the Castelli-Sonnabend
Videotapes and Films business and the 1989 compilation Video Against AIDS, bringing these and other
antecedents to our attention. Last year, for your most
recent exhibition at the gallery, Request Lines Are
Open, you worked with DJ Liberty Green, the host of
Soul Spectrum, a radio show in Sullivan County, NY.
145 ART — JASON SIMON
Through her show, Liberty has cultivated a relationship with the prison population within the geographical
reach of her broadcast.
Each of your shows focuses on a unique situation provoking larger questions. Can you talk about
how you arrive at the subjects for your work?
JASON SIMON The Mayfair Show, which is now a dozen
photographs of the original group show, saw the light
of day again recently at Yale Union, in Portland. The
photos still seem to present this idea of arriving at my
subject by going someplace new, and puzzling it out
from there. For better or worse, I make each project
different from whatever comes before or after. I don’t
initiate any of them from within a consistent daily art
discipline, although I sometimes wish I did. Instead,
I’m relying on activities that come from jobs or preoccupations or skills, mine and other people’s. I was
already a poker player and a member of the Mayfair
Club when I decided that the club would be an interesting site for the show.
Working as a film and video programmer,
beginning with Bill Horrigan at the Wexner Center in
Columbus, Ohio, allowed me to become familiar with
resources like MoMA’s Film Still Archive and various
film and video distribution businesses, including those
that represent my work. The first video I ever showed,
Production Notes: Fast Food for Thought (1986),
thirty years ago, was entirely taken from my job in
advertising, and twenty years after that, I made Vera
(2003–06), a video bound up in the start of my teaching in Staten Island. Vera and I worked at the same
school, and she was the first person I got to know
who was from the borough. So yes, my projects issue
from specific situations, but ones that are embedded in a horizon of work and habit. And like different
jobs, they feel sort of few and far between, taking up
chunks of my life.
CP I love hearing about how these projects arise from
your work experiences, from the situations of your
life. This makes me think of artists’ enduring desire
(at least since the Impressionists) to narrow the gap
between art and life. But you sharpen that trajectory
of artistic intention with strategies of institutional critique, integrating the work’s reception and context
into your project. It’s interesting to see institutional
critique flowing quite easily into the interstices of daily
life. Being able to identify so directly with the people
and the elements you present is one of the things I
find satisfying about your projects. While you are celebrating Mary Corliss, a key leader in the strike against
MoMA, you are also critiquing the institution that punished her and ended the golden age of the museum
department that she built.
JS
I always get anxious around the term, but if institutional critique declares that we can’t escape the
institution, maybe we can still think of jobs as a bit different from the edifices of control. I’m talking about a
space between the symbolic and material experiences
of working—is that distinction even still allowed?
Those were early days, but back then I had
some independence at my various jobs. I could feel
a bit professional and then quit, rejecting the work
situations as my occupations, even though I was
tempted to remain in advertising, or museums, or
film production, to make a living. Maybe I was making
the professional into the amateur. Isn’t your website
called Public Amateur? I had some class privilege that
made me not worry constantly about money, but I
was always looking for full-time employment just the
same, and would have these jobs, and frankly enjoy
them—maybe because I knew that, if push came to
shove, I could afford to be unemployed for a while.
Now everything feels the opposite. I’ve become a
long-term teacher.
Diverse, simultaneous, and hyphenated skill sets
are an economic necessity for artists and nonartists
alike, and current conditions have, in turn, made some
of these specialized, long-term actors that I’ve come
to know and work with for my art projects seem like
rare birds. A life’s work, a single person’s focused
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efforts over an entire career, get anonymized by institutions, as in the case of Mary Corliss at MoMA. So
there is a pleasure in crediting some corner of what
we take for granted—work performed with such skill
and effect—and seeing how it resonates with our own
persistent experiences.
CP R
ight. You illuminate how a single person may have
had a substantive impact within and through an institution. Guattari once said that the only way we have
an effect is by working through institutions. JS
hat can be true whether we are talking about instituT
tions to be celebrated, and that we all want to pitch in
to help, or ones that we loathe and want to replace:
you have to appreciate the skills there in both cases.
Although nothing is ever so conveniently extreme, and
daily interactions are usually a mixed bag, right?
The Mayfair Show comes to mind again if we
just shift this conversation a little toward artists entering into systems of economy and control. All the
contemporary artworks that I hung in that odd, semilegal private poker club, including your photographs,
Vision Quest: Labor Day and Vision Quest: Columbus
Day, were in dialogue with how the same questions
affect artists and gamblers alike. CP I don’t think I know what you mean. JS
hen I did The Mayfair Show, I was interested in
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psychoanalytic writing about gambling and how it
overlaps with artmaking. My ideas quickly started
to revolve around risk, time, the interpretation of
codes and signs, repetitive actions that have little use
elsewhere, and also around the need to constantly
maintain a sense of loss. All this was brought into view
in these intense environments, places like casinos
or gambling clubs, as well as museums and galleries, where people hang their economic and symbolic
value on unpredictable outcomes that feel out of their
control. These are the literary, imagined notions at
play—gambling and artmaking. And part of the project
was to bring them into a mundane space with regular
folks playing cards surrounded by artworks dealing
directly with chance operations or money.
Your grids of photos all showing the same view,
but with changing natural light, were about sitting in
one place for eighteen hours and observing. It’s something that art audiences still find extraordinary, but
gamblers sit like that all the time, and therefore could
be prompted to think about their experiences differently, as could artists when encountering their work
in relation to the gamblers. So I associated interpretive ideas from a corner of popular psychology, as well
as artists’ creative ideas, with risk and games about
money and survival. In fact, a lot of the games at the
Mayfair Club were very high stakes, with four- and
five-figure buy-ins, and satellite games getting you a
Liberty’s show manages to be about prison and not about prison at the
same time: her audience writes about how the music lets them forget
they’re incarcerated for a moment, and she calls that effect “time travel.”
World Series entry. Eventually the place was raided,
but not because of the poker: it was because of the
sports bettors who met there. They were affecting the
odds nationally.
i
CP A
rtists and gamblers. I’ve also been told by farmers that they feel like gamblers playing against the
house—the agricultural multinationals—and they
always lose. Artists, gamblers, and farmers all have
to have a certain faith—or call it illusion or delusion—
that their efforts will be able to satisfy their ambitions
on some level. But they each work in specific time
frames. Playing poker, you really have to keep the long
game in mind and not overreact to any one hand. The
artists I admire are definitely in it for the long game as
well, and I include you among them.
ii
iii
JS
I was fascinated by the traditional Freudian idea of
playing in order to lose; losing is the goal, because
winning carries so much more risk. For Freud, the risk
is patricidal: asking the fates if we are loved with every
roll of the dice brings guilt with every win, because
we’ve beaten the father, so losing starts to feel better.
That theory has a funny kind of friction with the basic
monetary policy of hedging, where losing with less is
better than losing with more. It’d be interesting to see
how farmers and artists might share ideas of hedging.
CP I want to return to how, in so many of your projects,
you engage a particular individual as the center of
gravity. But you don’t do conventional portraiture,
which more or less isolates the subject from a context.
You bring the whole context into the work—always
by very economical means, formally—and invoke the
situation and practice of another person who acts in
relation to a specific audience. Is this a kind of portraiture? How would you describe your role in the
ongoing story of your subjects and their audiences? JS
It’s a small group of portraits of such particular individuals: shopper Vera Saverino, curator and writer
Bill Horrigan, archivist Mary Corliss, and DJ Liberty
Green. What I’m saying in the portraits is that these
people represent something that we connect with and
can translate to other arenas; that what we are looking
for—the vested dialogue between a practice and an
audience or a constituency—is there. I’d prefer to pay
attention to them rather than supplant them. They’re
all extraordinary, and I lose myself in their stories, but
it is also about grounding artmaking in a bonding kind
(i) Mary Corliss in her office at MoMA, circa 1998. (ii) Vera Saverino in Vera, 2003–06, DV video, 25 minutes.
(iii) In and Around the Ohio Pen, 2014, Super-8 film transferred to HD video, sound, color, 11 minutes. With Bill
147 Horrigan and music by Chris Marker.
i
ii
(i) On Air, 2015, archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, 20 × 30 inches. (ii) Record Room, 2015, archival
148 pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, 20 × 30 inches.
149
2LGA5 (detail), 2015, 1948 Altec A5 loudspeaker, 10 remastered broadcasts of the radio program Soul
Spectrum, 35 hours total; pine, plywood construction; approximately 8,000 pieces of correspondence
addressed to Liberty Green; 102.5 × 73.5 × 35.5 inches.
of observation, in a social connection. I become a devotee in order to make the work, and companionship
becomes as operative as any other goal of the content,
including critique.
I am motivated to make these portraits into
artworks because of the larger implications of the
subjects’ situations and their work, which I have established in my personal dialogues with them. Curators
like Mary and Bill have had this quiet, essential impact
on film and media arts from their own specialized corners of their institutions. In creating works that act
simultaneously as artifact, biography, and a kind of
public service, I make claims for Mary and Bill’s situations as relevant, even if they don’t make those claims
for themselves, which they don’t. I want to add these
other histories to how we understand their work,
their jobs. With Mary, I focused on her example as an
unlikely and under-the-radar labor leader, mostly in the
MoMA strike in 2000 (in fact, she was the only curator who took part in all three strikes in the history of
MoMA), and on the subsequent loss of the important
archive she ran there. And with Bill, I used the example
of a nearly lost compendium of AIDS-related video art
he co-organized, but that is just the tip of how he has
been able to make sense of these otherwise very fractured intersections of film and video and art history. CP T
hen Vera is a sympathetic portrayal of that scorned
category, “the consumer.” There is a lot of dignity in
Vera’s self-understanding.
JS
he’s totally different from subjects like Mary and
S
Bill. Vera is a compulsive shopper who emerges as
the everywoman’s voice for consumerist subjectivity.
Vera is closer to the early pieces on advertising and
art restoration, Production Notes and Artful History: A
Restoration Comedy (1987), which can also be read as
portraits of triumphant perversities, where an implicit
critique goes alongside admiration for the chutzpah
and skill of the adman and the restorer. CP D
o you identify with Vera? Your shopping practices
couldn’t be more different from a quest for the perfect designer ensemble, but you are sort of famous
for cruising the kingdoms of the secondhand and
emerging with choice finds. In fact, I recall that you
coached me when I first started to build installations
out of particular things I found the same way, especially on eBay. Maybe I should just admit that I identify
with Vera’s vulnerability, with fixating on a category of
thing in the delirious stream of objects available for a
price. I remember something about Mary Douglas’s
research on consumption in which she found that
people often felt they were really accomplishing
something when they shopped. It would be ridiculous
to reduce it to some atavistic hunter-gatherer impulse,
but it does become a kind of skill, requiring patience
and persistence.
150 BOMB 136
JS
era is so fundamentally generous with her narraV
tive in the video that we are all implicated in her very
destructive compulsion and debt, and yet are still
grateful for the connection. It’s impossible not to identify with some aspect of Vera’s monologue. You’re
reminding me of and binding me to a moment when
she describes herself as being well-known in her community for her shopping skills: there’s got to be some
vestigial shaman status there.
I was a connoisseur of thrift shops and salvage
yards and flea markets and yard sales, and I still hate
to pay retail, and she didn’t hold that against me: we
connected as collectors and she indicates as much in
the video. She is so into the physical space of retail,
and that passion for the grand store is as much of a
throwback as my nostalgia for some truly crummy
consignment shops. I think eBay and Craigslist carry
on the democracy of these gray, informal markets, but
they also amplify the entropy of the material in the
virtual, which I feel is a loss to the built landscape.
Meanwhile, abandoned to what she calls her “craziness,” Vera assists us in sorting out our own much
less thoughtful relations to consumption.
CP Y
ou and I have talked about falling in love with a person’s efforts and capabilities and the story they make
through them. Conventionally, an artist displays her
own capacities—of imagination, creativity, and technique—when making a portrait of someone else. I find
it richly provocative that an artist would attempt to
direct the full range of the spotlight to someone else’s
capacities. This puts the gesture of tribute at the center of artmaking.
JS
I don’t think portraiture, the choice to pose another’s
life as a model for one’s own, is a solution to what to
do as an artist, but it is a really important distraction
from the question. I’ve been having extended conversations with a writer and curator in Montreal named
Vincent Bonin. My impulse right now, with you, is to
start to talk about Vincent, about his achievements
and insights, and to make people more aware of him.
He would say that this impulse of mine is about both
knowledge production and my desire to hide at the
same time. It’s what I’ve done in these projects we’ve
been talking about: pay tribute and make my own
position a little opaque and problematic simultaneously. If I didn’t want to claim the portraits as art, I
could just be performing a service, right? I put forward
these people, friends and acquaintances, because I
want to pay tribute to them and also because knowledge happens as we take in these lived competencies.
I’m interested in the sensuality of that kind of knowledge, through its having been lived. With Vera, the
idea of the “assisted self-portrait” came about. Maybe
that sums it up best: that a portrait and a self-portrait
are both being enacted, at the same time, by both the
subject and me. CP W
ell, first of all, I don’t know why making art and performing a service can’t coexist in the same act, but
that’s another rabbit hole. Vincent’s reference to you
as hiding is so interesting. I don’t think of your role in
terms of hiding. I would say that you are in fact very
much present in the stories you tell through other people, but in a supporting role. For several decades now,
because of interest in an increasingly complex understanding of identity, we have seen so much work that
foregrounds the artist himself. This is one of the reasons I am refreshed by the oblique way in which you
occupy places around another person who is at the
center of the work. Many theories of identity stress
that we only achieve subjecthood in relation to others,
to institutions, to things, and so on. I could think about
your intervention as building a very artful infrastructure of access around the people with whom you are
building a bond.
In a different sense, when you speak of your role
as opaque and problematic (which it is not!), I think
of the critique of documentary, more or less beginning in the 1970s. One response to that critique was
an imperative for the maker to show herself, hence
acknowledge her interest, her bias, and the ways her
presence might have distorted the situation viewers
are presented with. Do you ever think of your work in
terms of documentary?
JS
ell, it’s so long ago, but I dropped out of college
W
to work among ethnographic filmmakers, in 1981,
training under a soundman who helped Frederick
Wiseman, Richard Leacock, Robert Gardner, and others. I sat in on Jean Rouch’s summer classes, and set
up equipment for places like the then new semiotics
department at Brown, as a technician’s helper. I was
a trainee for a year at a center of American direct and
ethnographic cinema that was then in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and it definitely colored my work for
a long time afterward. So that moment of documentary thinking was formative for me, mostly because of
education and timing. That discourse offers up reflexivity as a kind of methodology, and that’s inherently
attractive to someone who has been a producer and
facilitator and technician—laying bare the means of
production is such an invitation to geek out, right?
Since then, my favorite kind of interaction has
been working as a kind of informal producer or facilitator on friends’ films and videos, when their projects
are getting started and all the encounters feel rich
with potential and meaning. I guess it’s why I went
off to build the Art & Tech residency lab at the Wexner
Center, and then hosted the One Minute Film Festival
party for ten years. It’s a way to think about the world,
and that’s the aspect of documentary filmmaking that
I identify with. My shows usually start with a document or an artifact, or the facts of a life at least, and
proceed to questions about what representing them
might entail. The goal is always to extend the potential
151 ART — JASON SIMON
of the encounter, not to fix a relation to it. That’s a
roundabout reply to your idea of generating these
means of access to another person. CP S
o, beyond the pieces that exist as a single video, I see
you experimenting with the question of how to represent the encounters you want to share with us. The
forms that ultimately make the exhibition are porous.
They aspire to extend that potential instead of resolving it. You arrange artifacts in such a way that we are
asked to work with you to sketch possible narratives,
but around very concrete and accessible productive
activities like archiving, programming, DJ-ing. I think
when I ask about documentary, I am also asking about
form. When I teach documentary, we always start
with two questions: What is a document and what is
its relation to imagination?
JS
hat great questions. They say so much about how
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you must connect with something necessarily absent
and perfectly deferred. Another friend was just telling
me about her teaching assignments, or rules, rather,
for art students, which include no projects with kids,
animals, or music, like W.C. Fields on acting. I think
it’s because kids and critters and music cannot stay
intact as documents—they generate an irresistible
emotional response instead of an interpretation. With
the show about DJ Liberty Green, the affective impact
of the music is in high relief. When you know you are
listening to a favorite song along with thousands of
incarcerated men, you feel your foundations shift—
that’s what I had been feeling listening to her show for
fourteen years. I’d fail my friend’s art course.
CP T
hat show, Request Lines Are Open, had the most profound effect on me because you managed to bring
the radio show’s listeners into the gallery—materially in the form of the incarcerated men’s letters, and
less obviously in the ways they have shaped Soul
Spectrum, Liberty’s radio show. The listeners form a structurally and systemically isolated population. A
criminalized population we are not expected to care
about, an audience deemed undeserving. JS
I’m still trying to process the show myself: Liberty and
I worked for a year, not knowing what the outcome
would be. We were already well into taking photos
and remastering her radio shows when I learned that
she had every letter she had ever received at the radio
station, and that they all came from the prisons. From
that point on I didn’t think I could do the show without
presenting her archive, but I didn’t want to make it
public either. Even though she reads their letters for
a half hour of every show, she does a lot to maintain
everyone’s privacy. The contradictory sensorium of
private and public is true of radio in general. In her
show, it’s the combination of broadcasting and personal letters, the intimacy of it—we are affected by the
emotionality of her music, which is mostly romantic
slow jams, the deprivations of the audience, and the
scale of New York’s criminal justice system. This small
rural volunteer radio station is reaching a dozen large
state and federal correctional institutions. And it’s all
invisible. So like in my other portraits, Liberty’s project
and her audience speak to larger systems we cannot
see.
CP I would say that we can see them, but only with a dedicated effort. In Chicago, I’m involved with the Prison
and Neighborhood Arts Project (PNAP)—we attempt
to bring courses in art and writing and humanities to
a maximum-security men’s prison. We then organize
exhibitions and publishing projects on the outside
to make visible the real people inside this barbarous
system. The corrections administration never ceases
to create new obstacles to our efforts, constantly
changing regulations and enforcing them in irrational and capricious ways. Any kind of protest on our
part usually leads to even worse terms of access, so
we get just a taste of what it’s like for the incarcerated to have every aspect of their lives controlled by
a volatile authority that only seeks to elaborate the
trap. So what I’m saying is that it takes a lot of effort
to illuminate the conditions of this deeply suppressed
population. Liberty’s sustained constitution of an
audience through her show makes that audience visible, figuratively. She elicits the voices caught in an
entrenched but elusive infrastructure by creating a
counterinfrastructure—one of access.
CP W
hich is a haunting idea, the soundtrack of mass
incarceration. I’m thinking that the incarcerated have
only minimal contact with interfaces to the world outside lock-up, whereas we in the “free” world live deep
in the many dimensions of interface. The more mediated our lives become, the more consequential the
aesthetics of the interface become. Sometimes I think
half of my life happens on my computer and on the
Internet, which is mostly designed and maintained by
relatively invisible forces. As with the prison industrial
complex, we have to make an effort to make visible to
ourselves the features of the interfaces that shape our
experiences. One of the most exciting aspects of your
work is that of individuals designing, influencing, or
intervening in an interface.
JS
JS
I knew you had been teaching in a prison, and also
remembered that long ago, around the time we first
met, I think, you had your own late-night radio show
on WBAI. These were two reasons why I was so eager
to have this exchange with you.
Liberty’s show manages to be about prison and
not about prison at the same time: her audience (“the
guys,” she calls them) writes about how the music
lets them forget they’re incarcerated for a moment,
and she calls that effect “time travel.” She never
intended to have any connection to the prisons when
she started fifteen years ago; she didn’t even know
they were there. But her program prompted a steady
stream of mail that kept the music at the center—kept
it a music show first and foremost, and, secondarily,
provided the prisoners access to their families, who
listen along, because she would read the letters aloud
on the air. The few times that a letter or a caller shifted
the exchange toward a politics of advocacy, a discourse we would expect from people doing prison
work on the outside, there was resistance among
the guys. Liberty works to keep the show “not political,” as she describes it, so it can remain transportive.
But her time-travel metaphor also reminds me that,
in science fiction, time travelers can never forget that
they’re traveling, or that they are out of place and from
152 BOMB 136
another time. And Liberty has a general audience,
too—upstate listeners like me who are also being
given a kind of access to people who are supposed to
be completely removed.
Liberty and I have similar record collections, and
she has been talking about how her audience is aging
out of prison, and so, doing the age math, you realize
that ’70s soul music is what those who were arrested
at the height of the drug wars, and who are serving
those types of three-strikes, mandatory-minumum,
twenty-five- to thirty-year sentences would have
grown up with. It makes Liberty’s Basement mixes,
her own version of the Quiet Storm radio format, the
soundtrack of mass incarceration.
n interface is not a representation: it’s active and
A
liminal and invites participation. Liberty’s interfaces
are radio and snail mail, but she’s not nostalgic about
them: they’re a built-in condition. But they allow for a
sense of care. She cares for their letters, she’s saved
them all, and I can tell you she doesn’t have a lot of
space. And all of the guys’ letters—about eight thousand of them were in the gallery—are about their care
for her. That’s what I think of when you say interface:
that this is what caring looks like.