Sam Pulitzer is an artist and writer based in New York who works with a wide array of materials, from hand-drawn vinyl transfers to ear gauges. His current exhibition, “A Colony for ‘Them,’ ” features a complex architectural warren and numerous vinyl transfers of commissioned texts, signs, and slogans. The show is on view at Artists Space in New York from March 16 to May 18, 2014.
LET’S START with the title, “A Colony for ‘Them.’ ” This is the third occasion that I have opted for a title that includes these cumbersome scare quotes—the first was in 2011 at Real Fine Arts in Brooklyn, with “Gauges for ‘Them,’ ” and the second was in 2013 at Lars Friedrich in Berlin, where the title was the fanciful “Nine Scarlet Eclipses for ‘Them.’ ” Some reasoning for this is to lessen the forceful opposition that the word them conjures, as well as to pay homage to a musician whose name I’d like to keep concealed for the time being, who classed all things spectral under a similar heading. This is not to say I believe in ghosts—I’m not personally that invested in psychically discharging life where it doesn’t belong.
The same quotes around this word also appear in more highbrow sources that probe the relationality of things ecstatic—of alterity, otherness, etc. My use of “them” began with works that theatrically weaponized artistic goods—faux-tensile constructions built from tactical laser sights that are a cheap hazard to the eye—against the expectation that they perform for an endless series of spectators through the lens of a camera. I am not certain what “them” identifies for this exhibition, though I imagine the most common identification would target the small community of producers responsible for the exhibition—a group that happens be all heteronormative men. So that might as well be the “them,” magically sent away now to a colony. This is no direct statement but rather a condition that determined itself through months of recruitment, a determination built upon the brokerage of an affective look that was to be presented for this show—images that privilege an antique atmosphere of interiority—and was later woven into the exhibition’s narrative presentation.
There was also the need to respond to the invitation from Artists Space to produce a solo exhibition, along with my memories of its galleries before its significant overhaul into something more culturally efficient within contemporary art’s value agendas, as well as memories of its previous labyrinthine space that served to couch multiple exhibitions, filling as many CVs as possible—I’m thinking of roughly 2004 to 2006. So, this is a solo show for the sake of social efficiency. It was made in extreme collaboration with Bill Hayden—following conversations that came out of our collaborative exhibition “War Pickles,” in which we tried to exploit the same interest in clusters of promising individuated careers as an infantile step in communizing this style of production. It then began to include Jeff Nagy, who had drafted the press text for my Lars Friedrich show as part of his ongoing project “The Trojans,” which was also continued for this exhibition. Nagy’s text provided a narrative glue to cement the show’s varied aspects into a continuous user interface, and elaborated it into a presentational gag in line with one of its other influences: MUDs, or multiuser dungeons. Naturally, it is just one dungeon, but one that hopefully contains a well-considered variety of branching paths and scripted encounters, where the work’s superannuated hardware hopefully immerses the exhibition’s visitors in an environment that is for the most part excruciation free. We also commissioned work from more artists via prompts drafted by the three of us: Matthew Adis, Joshua Brettel, Killian Eng, Simon Fowler, Denis Forkas Kostromitin, Steven Vallot, Viral Graphics, and Vania Zouravliov.
