Gloria Hasnay

For the majority of my time at Galerie Max Mayer, I was working at a table that Flint Jamison produced for his first solo exhibition there in 2017. The show included a total of four such table sculptures for which he adopted display elements of an exhibition by the American poet Susan Howe at YaleUnion, a non-profit cultural institution he co-founded in Portland.(1) While reusing the metal table legs from said display, the table tops were manufactured anew in Düsseldorf from untreated spruce wood and have panels of glass inlayed at their center. Embedded into the surface of one of them is a consigned edition of R.H. Quaytman’s Orchard Spreadsheet 2016 that Flint had personally produced for the artist onsite in Portland; another displayed his publication YU Contemporary VS Dept. of Revenue Oregon & Mult. Co. Assessor. While the former serves as index of the program, the artists, members, and fiscal status of Orchard Gallery—a collectively organized former art space in New York(2)—, the latter outlines Yale Union’s activities and a legal defense, helmed by Flint, of its status as a non-profit with regard to its property tax rates. Both works are a form of self-reflexive critique of each institution through the practice and based on the experience of their makers. By presenting them together in one work, Flint juxtaposes and reflects on the position of both organizations, their corresponding agendas of providing alternative models, as well as their respective modes of operation within a perversely capitalized and privatized art system in—but not limited to—the U.S. Moreover, he considers his own involvement with each entity.

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Full text online: www.maxmayer.net/artists/aaron-flint-jamison/1