Episode 025: Magda Sawon
Show Notes
This week's episode features pioneering gallerist Magda Sawon, who together with her husband and business partner Tamas Banovich has been running Postmasters gallery since 1984. Postmasters hardly needs introduction – it is a veritable New York institution, and an incredibly important piece of the puzzle when looking at how time-based media art (and especially digital art) exists within the gallery world. In our conversation we'll hear Magda's hard earned perspective from navigating the booms and busts of the art market for almost 40 years. Tune in for a real slice of New York art world history, and to hear all about what Postmasters is up to in 2022.
Links from the conversation with Magda
> https://www.postmastersart.com/
> Can you Digit: https://www.postmastersart.com/digit/index.html
> MacClassics: https://www.postmastersart.com/macClassics/
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Ben: From Small Data Industries, this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben Fino-Radin and on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past present and future of art and technology. Welcome back friends this week on the show we are building on last week by staying in the gallery world.
[00:00:18] Magda: This is Magda Sawon. With Tamas Banovich I run Postmasters Gallery since 1984.
[00:00:25] Ben: That's right. The postmistress herself, Magda Sawon. For many of you Magda needs no introduction. Postmasters gallery is a veritable New York institution and an incredibly important piece of the puzzle when looking at how time-based media art, and especially digital art exists within the gallery world because, well, they've just been doing it for so long. Together with her husband and business partner Tamas, Magda has been relentlessly independent, navigating the booms and busts of the art market as Postmasters gallery for almost 40 years. In the art market, as it exists today, especially in New York City of all places that is nothing short of miraculous for a gallery, the size of Postmasters, and in these crazy times we're living in the perspectives of real veterans, like Magda is ever more crucial. So today's chat is full of gems, not only for Magda's past, but the present.
[00:01:20] Magda: There is such a vast amount of things on offer and the vast 95% of it is junk
[00:01:31] Ben: Before we dive in, though, just a reminder that this show is listener supported in order to equitably compensate artists that come on the show, we rely on your generosity for two more weeks, all donations will be matched one-to-one by the Bates-Gosset Family Fund, so if you are not one of the many generous listeners that has already chipped in and you are in a place to donate, I hope you'll consider heading on over to artandobsolescence.com/donate, where you can give through the lovely folks that handle the money stuff for us, the New York Foundation for the Arts. No donation is too small. Everything is appreciated. And most of all, thank you for tuning in. Now without further delay, let's dive into this week's conversation with Magda Sawon.
[00:02:08] Magda: I'm from Poland and I have a very boring, solid art history degree. In the seventies, contemporary art by living artists was cut out from the field. You could not necessarily study, interpret and be engaged with contemporary art. Everything had to be dead. There was no way that I could say do my thesis on anything that was even remotely connected to real world, and real living art. So I kind of flipped it a little bit and wrote about the Japonisme, which throughout the time, up to the most contemporary version, this kind of posts up to like an email and the influences of that, but starting with, mid 19th century. Obviously I don't engage in the terrain that this thesis had, but it was very useful studying art academically makes you think and makes you refer and contextualize the contemporary work. That's a benefit for me. So, I left the academia. Then I left the communist Poland, and I left Poland kind of at the very beginning of solidarity. It's my regret of some sorts, because I did not expect a very large historical terms. I thought that the communists would be sitting there much longer and yet I have not experienced that change, but I came to New York 1981 and for two, three years, I just worked some of that work involved selling shoes at the very, very high-end boutique in New York city called Henry Bendel. During that time, you know, I was just trying to learn English enough to function well on the level higher than, you know, what size are you? And I took a course through a new school with a lady named Estelle Schwartz who at that time was probably one of these kinds of higher consultants to people to mostly women. 99% women groups that she took through the galleries and through artists studios in those early eighties. So that was my kind of first dip into the market. That's how I saw the backroom of Ileana Sonnabend with the first paintings of Terry Winters. That's how I saw the basement studio of the Basquiat, where under Annina Nosei place, I think it was where he was making these paintings on misstretched two by fours that were available for $2,000. So there are these kinds of myths and stories that you know, longevity privileges, but this was the beginning of me being engaged in real meat of art and galleries and what the scene was at that time.
Tamas is a sculptor. He studied art, physical art. He then has a post graduate degree in set design. And that, I think it makes a really nice capsule between the two of us and between, the fights and the agreements and the contributions that we together or separate give to this tiny enterprise that is postmasters. We met in New York city through a Polish friend. The interesting thing with him is that he did study in Poland, he's Hungarian. He studied in Poland and so we did have a set of new 12 friends from when we were both there, but unless it was in some drunken stupor at some party, I don't think we have met there. And it's very likely we did because between the art history department and the arts academy, there's literally one street. So the, those were both circles in which we both functions. Eventually after several years in New York together with Thomas, we opened postmasters and my interest with that. To actually despite this degree, but with it help us contextualizing our power. I wanted always to work with and look at and think about the art that is of this moment and that engages new forms of creative expression and the art that is not yet evaluated because you know, art history it's still is about evaluation and stratification of movements, names, and hierarchies.
That was the moment 83, 84 happened when the east village became this kind of galleries kindergarten for young people to start something without necessarily high budgets, without necessarily connections, or education that was geared towards running a gallery as a business. Nobody really taught business at that time, that came a bit later, but it was a very vibrant and very interesting scene. And we spent five years, in east village in the company of galleries of which probably maybe two or three still exists. That would be 3 0 3 gallery. That would be PPOW and I think that's that for the list. It was a very interesting time. Then that scene sort of died. And the galleries that were run by artists, the artists chose to be artists, the galleries that were run by dealers like Pat Hearn or Colin de Land decided to upgrade from east village into the bigger pool and that's how the start of the Exodus to Soho happens. So we joined that, we went to have a gallery in Soho on green street for 10 years, from 88 through 98 and then in 98 was a shift Chelsea started to emerge because Soho became like food fashion furniture over saturated area in which the galleries were not necessarily not welcome, but it was very, very busy. So the only person that missed being there was my son because he liked that. But everybody else was very happy to depart into what at that time was Chelsea as a desert, you know, three, four places. And we found a garage there that used to be a garage for a garbage trucks and with Tomasz skill in terms of designer, organization needs to be said, all our spaces are designed by him. No Gluckman's, no other highly revered architects. And we learned with each and every one of our spaces what's needed how to do the gallery, that is adaptable to all these different media that we want to show. So we spent 15 years in Chelsea got priced out and then in 2013 opened up a space in Tribeca, which is our biggest gallery now. And at that time gallery wise Tribeca, was also a desert. So I have this kind of a golden touch or a curse to go somewhere where, you know, you begin things and then others join you. And we are at this point where I'm still here, but the neighborhood again is becoming very saturated and the pricing of spaces gets higher and higher and it doesn't bode well to me and you know, my negotiations about our place, because this is a money time in the art market, as we know. So Yeah. We are here and we'll see how we do. I don't know, maybe next we go to the moon. We also have a space in Rome that is run by my former director. So there is this kind of expansion of what we do and of visibility but at the same time, I don't really think we changed any kind of principled parts of what constitutes Postmasters and maybe sets it, not necessarily a part but sets it in its own sauce I would say.
[00:12:02] Ben: it's interesting, you know, I obviously don't want to romanticize, New York in the eighties, but just hearing how you told it, it sounds like it really just was an inherently different city back then and that, it sounds like you didn't have to be as reliant on constantly moving art to just exist. Is that accurate?
[00:12:26] Magda: It's accurate. I'm probably the least nostalgic person you would know. So I'm not gonna, Sing songs, how incredibly amazing it was, but it was distinctively different that is true and from the East Village galleries, nobody really knew what they were doing. I was running gallery in a parallel with International With Monument, which was a very important gallery where, you know, Jeff Koons, Bickerton, Peter Halley and Meyer Weissman who was one of the owners of the gallery presented their work first and established this ground for the Neo geo movement, whatever I hate those terminologies. But that was that the gallery that I was very close with and Meyer as a person that was coming from a family of merchants. He was the one that told us how to make invoice because we didn't really you know, selling something was a surprise, so we didn't know these things and it was not expensive to do. And Tamas throughout a long part of our early days supported this gallery through his work outside. So credit goes there but you know, it was much different in terms of what levels of revenue justified having a functional gallery. And with all the economic struggles to keep going I don't think we changed the fundamental principle of the gallery. It's a very pro artists gallery. It's probably less pro collector gallery. That is very different from, the models that are operational right now. It was really important for us to look and locate the art that was unfamiliar that had something very much connected with the moment. That's where, this kind of rejection of art history comes in my mind that all these artists just like getting out there and trying to do new things within whichever medium, that came across. Our first show in east village that's interesting because it's almost like a clairvoyant thing. It was a show of an artist Eva Buchmuller. She was one of the founders of Squat Theater, Squat Theater recently, not so long ago had a great exhibition at the Whitney, it was an incredible experimental, amazing theater troupe of truly crazy and super talented people and her show in the gallery, she was responsible for the majority of the set and set design she's Hungarian as Tamas, so that's how we met. But her paintings in that show all had cutouts with the TV monitors that showed video in it. It was kind of amazing I don't even think we have a proper documentation of that because you know, nobody at that time thought in this archival way that, you know, we doing for posterity and it's gonna end up in the Smithsonian archives. We were just doing it. I remember we built the gallery and we had to cut through . The wall between the gallery space and the storage in order to accommodate this bulky monitor to play that video. So, that kind of tells you that, maybe somebody upstairs was thinking that these people are going to go into media that was one of these patient zero moments.
We didn't really do much with media in East Village. It was here and there. We did a show with video work, like we showed the Alex Pearlstein very early, but really once we moved from East Village to Soho, it became much more on the radar because, at that point, people were in fact experimenting with new media that went beyond video that went into some kind of adaptation of technologies and some kind of, playfulness and in taking apart the existing software. So that was the beginning when we went through this kind of technological curve as a business, which started IBM Selectric and the fax machine and then somebody came and built us at first DOS computer, which was a nightmare. But a necessary progress and then eventually it just started to seep out from the real world into the art world that, there's email there's internet. There is The Thing BBS and all these elements started getting together. The credits for that curiosity, again, goes to Tamas he just started digging, researching and looking and it resulted in a show that right now is probably important that was the show called, Can You Digit? It was in 1996 and it was a show in which we managed to from, I think, Sony, for some reason, we managed to get 20 something monitors and present varied screen-based work. One monitor per artists. So it was this effort to, present this new format, the screen-based work in the context of IRL gallery and with this exact same respect that was given artists in traditional media. You don't put one painting on top of the other on the wall, but with the media work, I got time in best circumstances you had a computer in the basement of the museum and some stuff was on it. So it's very different, than the privileged position of traditional media. So we did that show and it was a large scale group show where the effort was to present all different work. There was art that was a screensaver, there was art that was a very simple game, there was art that was a theatrical hypertext piece, there was a work that Lev Manovich had one of the one pixel movies in it Perry. Hoberman had some strange piece that also involved I think shadow place. So that was this first effort. Then we did a show called Mac Classic The Immaculate Machine and it was 1997. And in that show, we collected those little boxy Mac Classics, which at that point were already obsolete. They came from this street corners, they came from people that were upgrading, and we did this show again in which each artist was given that machine with 5M RAM, nothing. And the idea was that they would go with and against technology at the same time, because there was this incredible limitation. The nature of technology is like more and more and more and more of everything. And this was going backwards and reducing what you can do with this, uh, you know, pitiful little thing and present it. And then the approaches were quite amazing, from pieces in which the screen was just so, place of art to display to pieces that became physical sculptural painted objects and all that. So these were these kind of two key early moments for us to be engaged in media work.
[00:21:24] Ben: What was it in particular that was really drawing you and Tamas to really engage with this work. Looking back to that time, there weren't too many galleries, I would imagine that were doing that kind of curatorial work.
[00:21:38] Magda: No, we lost all our collectors when we started doing that, because it really was not well understood as what a gallery should be doing or should be showing, but it, in certain level, for both of us, it kind of fit better in the fiber of reality at that time. I mean, the world as such was fascinated with the potential that these new technologies being the new software and the internet, what that offers. So it was much more a response that we looked for work. that represents the time that is the crucial metric of Postmasters that we really, want the work that needs to have this time stamp on it. It needs to be very clear that this work is from 2021. It wasn't made 10 years ago because certain things either technologically not possible, or they were conceptually not addressed. So it's very important for us. Artists are always on the forefront of thinking about how to utilize the new. So, yeah, I think we are basically followers. We were just at a certain moment, we were the first followers. Anything other than traditional media was sort of a struggling territory. At the very beginning in Soho, we had no idea what to do with the video in terms of how to sell it. There was a time when we were selling VHS cassettes for like $30 unlimited, and then it became completely ridiculous and anti artists to, you know, operate in the system where, they produce a work and then it's available 30 bucks and three people buy it versus somebody selling a $10,000 painting, even at that time, a young work. So then became this adaptation into edition system, the same way as you would treat photography and to apply certain scarcity, it was always contested by the very, early nature of the internet, where everything was supposed to be for everybody. So, those are very conflicting things and we were trying all different models. Ended up settling on, the edition format, the way photography and other editions work so it benefits. the artists we tried the micro payments, but the micro payments, you need a large volume. So we just started to figure out the ways where these artists can be accepted on their own terms and also be given that same potential for success within their media as any other. So it almost became a little bit like a crusade that we were very determined that this work needs to surface. But wasn't always easy within the Can You Digit show I remember having this conversation with Tamas say, oh, well, it's very hard, but you know, let's give it like two, three years. I'm sure it's all gonna fly and take over. And, You know, we are 25 years, whatever it is later, and it ain't taking over. Let me tell you.
[00:25:33] Ben: One of the things that I love about the collecting side of the time-based media art world is the fact that living with this work, showing this work and keeping it alive over the years, it's not easy. It's hard. And seeing the different and unique ways that collectors do that, and how they live with the work. Is there a particularly unique, or favorite, way that you've seen a collector live with a work that you've placed that really has stuck with you over the years?
[00:26:02] Magda: So there are like three categories, right? We have proper institutions, MET, MoMA, places that are designed through their curatorial positions to follow these these kinds of this kind of work and these kinds of artists. And we sold work there, there are foundations which are, Thoma Foundation, for example, we've just recently placed a fantastic piece with them. And then there are, private collectors that have work in their homes on varied kind of screens. But it's not simple, how to display it because time-based work can be categorized by either something that is sort of a moving picture. Where there is repetition and it just exists as kind of a living painting, or it can be something that is a narrative based work where it has beginning and middle and the end and either loops or it just doesn't make sense to attempt to look at it from certain point. So, how do you display your work like that in the house? I think it's much more survivable for an artwork on a screen to be presented for this former model to be presented and I have a number of collectors that have screens in their houses and they either rotate pieces or they have something favorite that's runs on them. One piece that I did not sell that in the private environment makes me always smile and happy is my friends, Felix Salmon and Michelle Vaughn have a work by an artist Jay Batlle and it is a video of him pouring a fairly expensive red wine down the drain. So it's very formal, very kind of stunningly beautiful. And they placed this piece on the wall between their kitchen and their toilet. You know this sort of relationship of, eating and peeing in this tiny work is exquisite. I think it's you know, you have to love something to have it around you in your home. And they clearly do like that. But yeah, there's many different works that people have and they have it installed either permanently or they move it around. Just like any other art, but you know, very clearly this we not talking about, a dominant format people decorate or live with art that is static. It's much easier to live with that. But you know, at the same time people live with plants and they have to water them. They have to trim them. There is plenty of work around that. So, if you can negotiate between a static object, and a plant that's sort of where I think some of the media arts could fall.
[00:29:26] Ben: I love that. I mean, I'm curious for you as a gallery, what has been the biggest challenge in dealing with time-based media over the years?
[00:29:35] Magda: I would say to display it properly because we come obviously by longevity, we did not start with the media work. So we started with attempting at proper presentation of traditional media. And it's crucial that you give the same reverence and the same thought to presenting. Digital work. And that means the gallery has to have enough juice to run it. It's has to have enough equipment that constantly goes obsolete. So you buy the next one and the next one and the next one, it has to have some level of a sound system. It has to have just to the respect that you have to give to that work is. That's same so I know I'm flipping this question but I think I want to have a media presented with the same level of reverence done anything else and of course it's a 10 times bigger challenge than to hang a exhibition of paintings and store them and pack them and move them. But those are sort of simplifying things. You have to preserve paintings too. You have to preserve digital art. There are conservators that are scratching their heads, what to do with Kiefer paintings that are made out of sticks or hay. And the same thing applies to the media work where it's more complicated case by case situation where some artists give very specific instructions, how it should be shown. Some artists are completely loose. I think a lot of new, NFT art has for example, zero presentation requirements. And there is a beauty to that because whomever own something, they can live with it on their phone, they can live it on their computer, they can project it on the humongous wall of their house on the outside. So there is all these options. But it is not an easy task to figure out how to work with it. And then there are always the possibilities of breakage and something getting screwed up and something becoming obsolete. Like for example, we sold a very early McCoy's, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy's piece to the MET and it was a piece that broke a lot of barriers in terms of what it was about. They essentially took apart a database of a TV movie into re categorizing different things. It was called Every Shot, Every Episode of the TV series, Starsky and Hutch. So then they did hundreds of sequences, which was every flower in every episode. So all of these pieces were taken apart and it was presented to us as suitcase with the player and a screen. At the time that piece was done, it was done in the time when the way to record and preserve was C D video. That's before DVD and there was a CD video player and a little screen. And obviously a few years later this whole system was replaced by the next one. And yet given the aesthetic nature of this work it had to be preserved as an object that exact way. So everything went, into a back channel. All those CDs were digitized and you know, it still looks the same, but it plays from, the little room in the back and the institution put enormous effort and resources to actually do that. So it's not everybody that has that option. That's where it's complicated. That's your job. In a way we can't handle this as a gallery we try to do as much as possible. We try to educate as much as possible. We try to, tell them backup, backup, have a 3 hard drives in your closet so it doesn't vanish. The responsibility is given to the new owner and the new custodian of this work. So that means people that buy that work or foundations or institutions buy it because they truly believe in it's kind of historic value and it's nature of representing the time in which it made.
[00:34:34] Ben: This moment with NFTs must be I would imagine deeply weird, but also deeply exciting for you. Who is purchasing the NFTs that Postmasters is selling? Are you seeing these bought by folks that you've been working collectors and institutions that you've been working with for years? Or is it mostly people who are coming from the crypto world and maybe are sitting on a bunch of Ethereum.
[00:34:58] Magda: I have not sold an NFT to an institution. I don't think that engagement on the higher end is there yet. There is a lot of head scratching. A lot of it is justified. I can't talk large statistics, Postmasters Blockchain is a website. It's not Foundation. It's not Super Rare, we don't have thousands of sales of which data analysis can happen. It's primarily anecdotal and small in numbers, but the divide between the traditional art world and the NFT buyers is a grand canyon at this point. And this is our job. This is basically our effort to negotiate this gap because people that collect traditional media think this is all a hoax and just pure financial manipulation. And then people that buy it are mostly from the crypto community. When they buy from us it's very clear that they have some degree of curiosity in an effort to follow up on the filter that we have. I think that the very issue with NFTs at this point is that there is such a vast amount of things on offer and the vast 95% of it is junk. It's operates on this lowest level. Oh, well, here's the rainbow unicorn rotating, I like it here is my ETH. It's not historically determined what is being sold and what is being considered an important work in that area. That is a field that is just starting to be formulated and that is a field that, doesn't have the history that is behind digital art per se, which is vaster. There's tons of work that never made it there, there's tons of artists that are not interested in doing it. Some of them work with me, but what we see as this potential is to basically bridging this canyon that, here and there you find a collector with traditional works that is curious and interested enough. And I had a person like that. And it was a fascinating process and transaction. And then there are, people that come from crypto community to learn more and educate themselves and see value in those, small offerings that we have given the fact that the gallery has certain legacy and perhaps a judgment of ours for some people may be useful.
[00:38:08] Ben: Something I'm also curious about, you have existed as a gallery through, I mean, gosh, what probably at least three different bubbles
[00:38:16] Magda: Correct.
[00:38:17] Ben: Do you think what we're seeing is going to last do you think it will normalize to something more boring?
[00:38:24] Magda: I think this gold rush moment that we experienced say February, March, April, it's clear already that it's not lasting. And at the same time there are two NFT worlds. Really one is this high stakes, hysterically approached art that is, Beeple selling for 69 million, it's a tulip trade to large degree. And then there's the other NFT world where the prices are tiny. It's a somewhat community exchange based reality. That's world mostly operates in Tezos right. So within itself, there is so much stratification and difference that. A lot of it will stay a lot of it is in my opinion, a positive development that gives an opportunity to digital work, to somehow put its stamp on visibility, history, and some monetary success. But at the same time, you know, you have enormous amount of garbage. You have enormous amount of grift and things that I don't know in other reality would not necessarily be accepted. It's really hard to knock down because billions of dollars are involved in it.
[00:40:00] Ben: As a gallerist that has stewarded so many artists' careers and helped them navigate the market in selling time-based media in the art world for so long. I'm curious if you have any advice for artists listening in right now.
[00:40:14] Magda: Well, it's very short: make money, but don't compromise. That's an advice to me also because I tend to work with much more difficult things. There would be a so much easier path for us to take and be a successful gallery if we would fit into, these channels of what goes at the moment. And we choose not to do that. And therefore the fight is bigger and it's much easier for a gallery than it is for an individual artists, because I have 20 artists. So that boat gets to float by this or that, and that changes. But for a single artist, it's much harder because they committed to their practice and they committed to their ideas and ideologies and output. I still think compromise is the wrong thing in order to make money. All I would want to maybe add is. Academically, it would be a heretical thing to say that the medium doesn't matter. However, for the purpose of regular conversation, I would say that medium of art is a neutral value, which basically means you have to judge it on other criteria. One can make an incredibly progressive, interesting new, unique painting, and they can also make utter garbage and one can make an incredibly unique, great progressive media work, digital art, and they can also make garbage. So in my opinion, the criterium that is given to the media is, propelled by the market and propelled by, you know, what's easier and what's more familiar. But if you have a longer perspective, if you look at things 50 years from now, media really doesn't matter. It's sifts through and the good stuff stays on top. You know, oil stays on top of the soup.
[00:42:37] Ben: I love that so much. So Magda, what is coming next for you and Postmasters and Tamas?
[00:42:44] Magda: We gonna continue this kind of flip-flopping of traditional and media based work. So right now we have a show of David Diao who is one of our older represented artists, and it's all painting sort of hard-edged modernist paintings with a twist, of course, but it is, you know, hanging on the wall. And after that, we will do a show with Lovid and Serkan Özkaya, which are both media related shows. Lovid is doing sort of digital tapestries and NFTs Serkan is gonna present an environmental installation that is an experience because, these days experience is the thing, but again, with a big twist, it's gonna be fantastic. And of the new things, we will work with Olive Allen who is one of these kinds of crypto world recognized original artists that did not start work in NFTs in February, she started three, four or five years ago. Then of course, we work with Kevin McCoy that made the first NFT. We will also in March do a digital section of Art Dubai, which for me is interesting because not only we don't do a lot of fairs partially ideologically and partially because we don't really fit with a lot of material into fairs. So that's kind of an adventure to see and try and test what it brings and we will bring physical objects and screens and NFTs. And again, the effort is to figure out how to present it. So it doesn't look like Best Buy and it is never the less an interesting place experience and that supports interesting work. So that's our plan for the future.
[00:44:48] Ben: Magda, Sawon thank you so, so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.
[00:44:52] Magda: Thank you I hope, it's entertaining at least for some people.
[00:44:57] Ben: Are you not entertained? I know I certainly was. Well, either way. Thank you, dear listener for joining us for this week's conversation. If you enjoyed today's show, I would be eternally grateful if you could leave a review wherever you get your podcasts, that really helps other people discover the show. And as always, if you want to keep the conversation going, you can find us on Twitter and Instagram @artobsolescence. Thank you for joining me for another week my friends, my name is Ben Fino-Radin, and this has been Art and Obsolescence.