Cell Project Space

Jeff Preiss’s Orchard Documents are a series of experimental film collaborations the filmmaker made with other members of Orchard, a cooperatively run gallery that operated on New York City’s Lower East Side between 2005 and 2008. Filmed within the context of exhibitions organised by the gallery’s members, each document employs unique cinematographic techniques and formats to convey Orchard’s activities over its three-year lifespan. The resulting films are more than an exhibition history, instead positing that documentation itself, through various forms, can be generative rather than purely representative.

 

For Preiss, the gallery was a studio and contained within it the raw material from which to generate moving image works that fall somewhere between experimental film and documentary. Already a seasoned filmmaker and cinematographer by the time Orchard was founded, he was one of twelve members who co-ran the space. The other members included Rhea Anastas, Moyra Davey, Andrea Fraser, Nicolás Guagnini, Gareth James, Christian Philipp Müller, R.H. Quaytman, Karin Schneider, Jason Simon, John Yancy, Jr., and one anonymous member. Together they operated and organised the gallery, with each individual eventually curating one exhibition of their choosing and another framing their own work. The programme reflected their diverse interests, which encompassed painting, cinema, and post-conceptual practices.

 

To some extent, Orchard’s collective structure had a direct and intentional lineage to historic film cooperatives, such as The Film-Makers’ Cooperative and The Collective for Living Cinema. Yet the gallery was also established as a for-profit limited liability company (LLC) under the name Art Sales and Services, or ASS; a sardonic nod to the many woes of running a so-called alternative space in the market-dominated art world of NYC.

 

In the mid-2000s, during George W. Bush’s second term, American politics was marked by intensifying ideological polarisation, growing public outrage over the Iraq War, and increasing concerns about the administration’s commitment to democratic principles and constitutional constraints. Formed as an act of resistance to Bush’s re-election as president, Orchard’s three-year lease on an empty property in Manhattan was timed to expire at the end of his presidency in late 2008; a year which also saw the onset of the global financial crisis.

 

While the broader socio-political context in the US was the catalyst for the group, the gallery was firmly entrenched in its own locality, often confronting its own role in the gentrification of the area. When Orchard started, the Lower East Side had already begun to attract a new generation of downtown galleries and art spaces, including Reena Spaulings Fine Art and Participant Inc., who were among the first to establish themselves there. In 2007, the New Museum reopened nearby on the Bowery. By 2008, the neighbourhood had become a primary destination to see art.

 

All seven Orchard Documents are presented at Cell Project Space, along with a sculptural film installation Preiss first made for a group show at Orchard. Since the Orchard Documents are not historical records in the traditional sense, the show also resists historicisation, or the chronological convention of retrospective exhibition-making; Preiss filmed consecutively with Orchard’s exhibitions, and either made, or even remade, the documents during or after the gallery’s run. Temporary walls also pay homage to Orchard’s original exhibition architecture, where sheetrock only partially covered the crumbling plaster at 47 Orchard Street.

 

Each of the Orchard Documents varies in style, in accordance with their respective collaborator and associated exhibition. Preiss’s virtuosity as a filmmaker is present throughout, pulling from the conventions of home movies, the constraints of structural film, and techniques of classical filmmaking. While experimental in nature, the documents can also be seen as counterpoints to an increasingly prevalent condition within contemporary art; whereby installation views that circulate online flatten exhibitions into images. Whereas documentation today often functions as a form of publicity, Preiss’s films expand upon the exhibition as a medium from which to generate new material.

 

While not strictly documentation of Orchard’s programme, the Orchard Documents reveal aspects of artistic practice and exhibition-making that typically remain unseen, such as the people involved and their personal lives. In Preiss’s own words: “All documentation faces the question of whether to reveal itself as an outer layer of perspective. It is within the framework of that question where I open space for other narratives.”