This conversation is part of a series called What the Discourse?!, which unpacks how art becomes a conversation and how to steer it. This series will include case studies about artists throughout history as well as interviews with culture workers shaping art discourse. Next up, Reisig and Taylor Contemporary in Los Angeles.
Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is a gallery and test site based in Los Angeles. As a medium for (art)work, the gallery operates through an evolving program at its primary location, as well as through off-site projects and collaborative presentations that take place locally and internationally. Actualized in Spring 2023, the gallery functions independently as an open source for artists, audiences, curators, collectors, and critics.
reisigandtaylorcontemporary.com
Space On Space: You’ve been critically thinking about the role of a gallery in society. I often find myself asking “what can art writing do and not do?” in times of societal and climate collapse. Briefly, can you explain what Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is and what your practice does?
Emily Reisig and Zach Baker of Reisig and Taylor Contemporary: Briefly—we are wondering if it is possible for a gallery to work honestly given the mythological systems in which The Gallery emerges. Our practice is working-through the means of the production of our gallery: working-through its foundational materials, structures, relations, economies, and histories. Working with our gallery as a work among works. Because where something acts like something else is when ideology takes-place. Paul de Man defines ideology as ‘drama mistaken for tragedy.’ We agree with this. A gallery is tragic, and tragedy is about where and how something takes place in view of others: it is about a repeating process that is never the same. We are not dramatic; we produce a kind of difference—in the same place, over and over.
SOS: As I orient myself to your space and practice, I notice on your website much reflection on not only what Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is, but also what a gallery is and what an art market is, etc. The way you’ve oriented your curatorial practice itself feels a bit like a Duchampian institutional analysis. Is this an accurate read on what you are doing, or is there something else going on?
RTC: We would never want to be Duchampian since our lives are already enough of a urinal in the wrong context; however, this ‘not-wanting’ may very well lead us to exactly this place (of getting pissed-on, outside the bathroom). Though if we are allowed to piss on ourselves, then we would say that we are working along something like an institutional—or, really, general systemic analysis—in the vein of Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, whose work Duchamp admired and perhaps appropriated. (Appropriately, one of the works included in the exhibition—the lantern assemblage by Catherine Menard—carries this name as an homage or omen to her place in this history.)
We are open to falling in love with Duchamp, but we don’t want to be him. Maybe, like the Baroness, we want to fuck him, but that’s fair enough—no? In any case, what we mean to say is that Duchamp is a figure of speech: he’s “Duchampian.” And as soon as something like this becomes sayable, we’ve lost track of someone like this. At this point, Duchamp isn’t a person; he isn’t an artist, he isn’t anyone in particular beyond a citation that’s shared and repeated, but confused and baseless—or at least [b]anal. Excessive and excremental. So, for us, the question is: does Duchamp function within the context of the discourse his (Duchampian) work produces? And, in terms of the gallery, it’s a substitutional statement: does a gallery function within the context of the discourse produced by The Gallery? We don’t want to stop asking questions about what we are doing, or else we’ve done nothing at all. We are not interested in Macho Head Games. Or maybe we are, and we’ll have to come to terms with that.
SOS: I’m happy I was able to catch the tail end of D’étant donnés—evenₙ Good lucks get givenₙ₊₁ in Los Angeles while I was visiting. Though the show just concluded, can you share about how this exhibition directly invoking Duchamp came about?
RTC: Good lucks, mostly. We’d love to say that we are so in touch with everything going on that we knew this was perfect timing. So, we’ll say that, since we’d love to.
But if we start the scratching with the itching, then it was mostly a kind of tunnel vision. Often, we become completely obsessed with artists and works in a singular way before realizing that we’ve been seeing this everywhere.
We are rigorously idiotic. So, forgetting to the point of making any memory (of Duchamp) appear in a new form is a narcotic part of this invocation. We can’t remember Duchamp very well, but we also can’t forget him. And we were wondering why?! And it seems like a lot of people are wondering why in a similar way. He’s unavoidable. And we didn’t want to avoid him for much longer. So, we didn’t.
SOS: Why a show referencing Duchamp now, and why Étant donnés specifically?
