Zach Feuer: The _Heeb_ Interview

We don’t do many things ceremoniously, but this summer we ceremoniously called Zach Feuer the “art world wonder boy” in our “Kids Issue”:http://heebmagazine.com/issues/view/13. The piece isn’t available online, but Feuer is now showcasing a new exhibition by Aaron Spangler at his “Chelsea gallery”:http://www.lflgallery.com/ so you can judge for yourself if we’re full of shit. Consisting of five carved pieces made of basswood and covered in black gesso and graphite, Spangler’s work is a mash-up of Classical bas reliefs and modern subject matters. We did not have a chance to interview Mr. Spangler, but in the spirit of “NBC’s Green Week”:http://www.nbc.com/Green/ ,we now present to you my recycled interview with Zach Feuer.

*What do you look for in an artist?*
I look for someone who has the potential to enter history books. I’m looking for someone who is taking a step forward in the dialogue of contemporary art or art in general. So I’m constantly looking at schools and groups and what is the most sort of logical thing to happen after that school has been made, so I’m more sort of tracking, hopefully, what’s going to be history.

*Speaking of which, which artists are your favorite of all time? Which have really influenced you or do you just really love?*
I like Bruce Nauman a lot. Gabriel Orozco. Hanne Darboven. But it changes all the time, depending on what I’m excited about.

*You grew up in New Jersey, right?*
Yeah, New Jersey, and then I went to school in Boston, and that’s when I really got into art, in Boston, because my first few shows were there.

*But in terms of when you first discovered art, it was before you moved to Boston?*
My grandmother’s an artist and my dad’s an artist, so I sort of grew up around art. My father was actually arrested for photographs he took for an art class of my 5-year-old sister (4-year-old sister at the time), nude, and so there was this whole year-long case with the ACLU and it was on the front-page of the _New York Times_, this whole crazy thing. It never got to court cause it just ended up being a corrupt prosecutor and everything got dropped because my dad clearly wasn’t a pervert. But I think that really made me think more about the potency and support that artists need. At that time I still thought I was going to be an artist.

*Right, you were originally an artist. What medium were you using at that point?*
I was doing photography and video.

*And that continued through school?*
No, as soon as I did my first show in my apartment, I pretty much stopped making art. I was a lot better at doing that and promoting and organizing than I was actually making art.

*Of course you’re referring to “The Apartment Show.” Can you talk a little bit about how that show came to be and how successful it was?*
That show happened by accident. I was frustrated at the Museum School so I took a break and went to London and interned at a gallery. And when I was there, I explored the gallery scene there and in London at the time all the alternative galleries, these East End galleries, were as respected a part of the mainstream as the others. There was no sort of hierarchy of the economy as there is in the New York art world. So I was really attracted to these spaces that were like, above bars, or in abandoned buildings, and I came back and I thought ‘If they can do a show, I can do a show.’ So I did a show in my apartment. I had all my friends make domestic objects. No paintings or sculptures or anything. Someone made me an ice cube with all these sound pieces. Someone filled a drawer full of Jello. You had to walk in and it had to be kind of a normal apartment. It wasn’t just like putting art on the walls. I sent out a press release. I don’t know why. And then suddenly I was just bombarded. It was just instant from then. I was on TV. I was in the newspaper like every week. It was pretty overwhelming. And from there I met this guy who owned a gallery in Cape Cod. He hired me to come work for him for like 10 bucks an hour, so I worked for him and sold a lot of art, and he decided that he wanted to open up in New York so he gave me this tiny budget to go open up in New York. And that’s what happened.

*And how old were you when you came to New York?*
I was 20 when I opened up the gallery. I was still enrolled at school and I was commuting back and forth. My school was really laid back, the Museum School is really good, and they gave me a budget and credit for being in New York and opening up the gallery.

*So you had apartments in both New York and Boston at the time?*
I did. Or I had a girlfriend in Boston who I would stay with, and I rented this place, like a bed [chuckles], in Brooklyn.

*From there you opened the space in Chelsea, but you’re also in L.A. now, and you’re opening one in London, is that right?*
Yeah. The L.A. gallery opened. I mean, I get approached for weird projects all the time, and the L.A. one, it was kind of like the perfect thing, like the gallery structure was already there. They just needed sort of new management. So it was great, I didn’t have to deal with the whole logistics of buying a fax machine or any of that stuff, but I could just sort of program from scratch. And it’s more of a challenge too because you know the gallery had a previous reputation which is not something I would brand myself with, so I’m kind of like starting over and at the same time it’s structured in a way where profit is not a required thing in that gallery, so I can do more experimental art shows. I can show younger art shows. I can do whatever I want there.

*And London?*
London hasn’t happened yet so I don’t know. The aim for that one is to be even more experimental: less painting, and more performance and video and conceptually-based. It’s not gonna be such a traditional gallery space.

*Do you think there is anything to the idea that your artists have a ‘Zach Feuer’ quality to them?*
No, I don’t think it’s anything at all. It’s hard to group an aesthetic. Everyone associated us first with Columbia graduates, then they associated us with messy painting, then it was finger-painting. But the last four or five artists we’ve taken on have not made paintings or figurative work. I think because we’re not like a one-artist gallery, people recognize all of our artists as a group and end up grouping them together, which is not always the best thing for our artists, but it ends up happening.

*When you moved to New York, which artists were really the breakthrough artists for you?*
Dana Schutz was kind of like the first artist we had or someone who believed in the gallery and believed in what I was gonna do enough to really support and stick around. I had known her socially, not her work. We had this low-key show. We thought nothing was going to sell, like no one would notice, but suddenly it was this huge hit. And then because of that show I was able to break even and was able to find other artists.

*You haven’t always gotten along with your artists.*
Well, actually the artist that you’re talking about, we still get along. I still support her, but it was something where I didn’t see the growth in the work that I was expecting, so there was a split in the gallery. That probably happens with one or two artists a year, where, you know, I don’t see the potential that I saw when they first started. But I’d say most of the artists I’m pretty close with. And for a lot of them, they’ll call me when they get locked out of their apartment. It’s a weird relationship: I’m friends with some of them, I’m not friends with others, but I’m kind of the agent for most, and they have to trust me to represent them to the world.

*And what about collectors?*
Yeah, there are some collectors I like, but I don’t run my gallery for collectors. I mean, I don’t really care about any collectors. Collectors don’t give a shit about me. They care about getting the stuff that they want. If I get them that stuff, they like me, if I don’t get it, they don’t like me. That’s it.

*There’s a story floating around that you put pressure on collectors who want to buy one piece from you to buy a second to donate to a museum.*
We did kind of a version of that (they changed the tax law so it’s not so beneficial), but the idea was all the paintings by my artists should end up in museums at one point or another, and we were using tax laws to try and make that happen. Being a collector and being a patron are very different things in Chelsea right now. As a collector you’re competitive, you have to fight to get works, and then if you get the works you want there’s like this speculative reward. I was trying to transfer collecting back from speculating to more of a Medici style. And it seemed to work, I think a lot of galleries do that now. There’s a congressman who’s very upset about the fractional and promised gift thing, but hopefully it’ll be a new way to encourage collectors to do it.

*You were a driving force in the founding of the New Art Dealers Alliance. Can you talk a little about the background of NADA, and why you felt its formation was necessary?*
NADA was started with three other people and we were all emerging galleries at the time and we thought that as a team we would have more power and more control and be able to be more competitive as whole, so it was kind of a union, I guess, or a trade association. We were still competing against each other but as a whole, NADA galleries wouldn’t poach artists from other galleries. You know, if a collector screws one of us, all of us know, that kind of thing. I think NADA is really successful at this point, NADA is becoming more known for an art fair than for sort of the ideals we started from. And also I’m no longer a new art dealer. I’ve been here for seven years, so I’m not involved that deeply with NADA anymore and we’ve appointed people to sort of take it over and now they’re running elections and they’re like this kind of official non-profit out on their own.

*Speaking of being around for seven years, how has the ‘wonder boy’ label affected your business and what you’re trying to accomplish?*
Oh it’s great. Yeah, I’d milk that for as long as I could. But no, I don’t think people think of me as this emerging dealer where you can go and find a bargain and someone will become a star. I think people are seeing me more now as having emerging that are becoming mid-career and serious mid-career artists, so there’s a shift. But yeah, certainly the press was really good for me. In the end though, it’s the press for that artists that make the gallery not for us. So that’s what we aim for. We don’t have a PR person or anything like that.

*And now that you’re more established, what are your long-term goals?*
I want to have a really important gallery. I want to have the most important gallery. And I’m hoping that these franchises in other cities are gonna help me because it seems to be a new model. I want to have kind of like the farm league and then New York. A lot of galleries, it seems as if they kind of lose touch, and I want to still have an idea of what’s happening with artists now.

*Right. And with the current drive to find the ‘next big thing,’ galleries are signing younger and younger artists right out of MFA programs and even college, often forgoing mid-career artists. Does that concern you or do you want to focus on the mid-career artists?*
Yeah, definitely at this point it would be odd for me to take on an emerging-emerging. I’m taking on people who’ve been out for a few years who’ve been making work on their own. In the beginning I was definitely known for showing really young artists, but I was really young and these were my peers. So I want to show my peers and I want to show artists that are at the same level as the gallery. Once in a while, there’ll be a new artist or younger artist who I think I can do something for and could match kind of levels with eventually. But it’s a potential problem because it’s a very speculative way to do things and there’s all this thing where it’s easier to sell an emerging artist and an emerging artist can be more expensive than a mid-career artist because these stupid collectors end up paying money for what an artist could do as opposed to what an artist has already done. It’s absurd. So there are these very short careers because of this mindset.

*I read somewhere that one of your favorite pieces was this Jewish star in a clear box, and I was wondering if that was somehow representative of your attachment to Judaism or if you liked it for pure aesthetics sake?*
Hmmm, I need a _Heeb_ answer for this. That piece for me was not necessarily about Judaism. It was more about the iconography and the artist who made it is named David, and so it became this sort of very personal self-portrait more than it did become this sort of spiritual representation. We’re not overtly practicing. Spiritually, I most closely identify with Tamy Ben-Tor, who’s been in your magazine a few times. She’s sort of dealing with the two-generations away mentality and trying to look at Jewishness a little more objectively and the absurdities of these ideologies that get set up. But no that’s not a spiritual piece, and I don’t think I have any spiritual experiences with art. It’s primarily intellectual and aesthetic.

What do you think?