Why I Publish (I Think You’re Great)
In 2006, I was invited to guest curate an exhibition at the now defunct gallery Queen’s Nails Annex in San Francisco. At the time, I had a longstanding relationship with the Bay Area writing community, specifically those tied to the New Narrative movement—a self-reflexive, experimental style of writing launched in San Francisco decades earlier, in the late 1970s, by the poets Robert Glück and Bruce Boone. While developing my ideas as a guest curator, I began to consider how one might shift a writer’s traditional relationship to an art exhibition, which most times served the work with catalogue essays, criticism or simple documentation. Thus, in the spirit of New Narrative, I repositioned the writer as a participating artist.
My result exhibition, overundersidewaysdown included artists David Hatcher, Mitzi Pederson, and Wayne Smith. I asked the late Kevin Killian, whose writings had traversed a broad and potent spectrum, to write a text. Kevin decided he would engage with each artist during a studio visit. The result was a trippy down-the-historical-rabbit-hole essay titled “I Think You’re Great.” This essay can still be read in full at the fanzine, who simultaneously had invited Kevin to contribute to their online publication in 2006. His essay was printed on a one sheet, folded over into a pamphlet, and included in the exhibition.
This pairing—writer to exhibition—launched a series I published under [ 2nd floor projects ] that now includes seventy writers and is still growing. The invitation requests newly commissioned writing of any genre or type from prose and poetry to personal narratives, epistolary, or critical essays. Once the work is received, a limited edition (50-100) is designed and printed either as a broadsheet or chapbook, without uniformity in size, shape, or typography, usually signed and numbered, on archival paper.
The writers are selected primarily for their dissonance to the exhibition rather than correspondence, allowing a range in form and content, with my direction mostly withheld except on a few occasions. I offer a modest honorarium to compensate the writers for their work along with printed editions gratis and the understanding I will sell them to cover print costs during the exhibition run and at future book fairs.
Many of these commissioned writings became anthologized elsewhere, such as Eileen Myles’ essay for the 2008 Kuchar Brothers exhibition Brothers ‘n Sons and Female Heroes in The Importance of Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (The MIT Press, 2009); and Dodie Bellamy’s “The Bandaged Lady” in When the Sick Rule the World (Semiotexte, 2015). Or, written works went elsewhere, into new dimensions, such as Masha Tupitsyn’s writing, which became a radio play performed for Time for Nothing at Performa 11, the New Visual Art Performance Biennial in 2011.
I believe small presses are important for writers. I often heard how the open process invitation provided an enjoyable break from their usual practice. I continue to delight in making these pairings, a “blind date” so to speak, between the artist and writer. As the exhibitions progressed, many of the writings began to reveal and address an interstitial space that considered the artist’s works from the writer’s point of departure—a kind of distal approach to engagement. Each of these pairings has created a surprising result.
What is sometimes more surprising is where this small press work has taken me. From more intimate events to massive book fairs, the love of “object making” is shared by so many, from all walks of life, and is one love of mine that I don’t see changing.
Header image courtesy of artbusiness.com, 2010.
Artist and long-time independent curator Margaret Tedesco works across performance, installation, photography, and video. She has presented and collaborated with visual and performance artists, writers, and filmmakers for more than twenty-five years. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally. For seven years Tedesco was a curatorial member of the now historic New Langton Arts in San Francisco. In 2007, she established [ 2nd floor projects ] an artist run exhibition and publishing space in San Francisco.
