Jeff Preiss: Orchard Documents

Jeff Preiss’s Orchard Documents are a series of experimental film collaborations the filmmaker made together with Moyra Davey (with Isaac Preiss and Barney Simon), Josiah McElheny, Andrea Fraser, Nicolás Guagnini, Anthony McCall, and Christian Philipp Müller, while he was a member 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 life span. 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 others were 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, film history, 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.

Formed as an act of resistance towards 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 cooperative, the gallery’s program unfolded in a locality that was undergoing rapid gentrification. When Orchard started, the Lower East Side had already begun to attract a new generation of downtown galleries and alternative spaces, including Reena Spaulings Fine Art and Participant Inc., who were among the first to establish themselves there. By 2008, the neighbourhood had become a primary destination for artists to live and work. All seven Orchard Documents are presented at Cell Project Space. While each document varies in style in accordance with their respective collaborator and associated exhibition or event, Preiss’s virtuosity as a filmmaker is present throughout, pulling from the conventions of home movies, the constraints of structural film, and techniques from classical filmmaking.

While experimental in nature, the documents can also be seen as counterpoints to an increasingly prevalent condition within contemporary art, in which installation views that circulate online flatten exhibitions into images. Whereas documentation today often functions 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. 

Curated by Saim Demircan.

Jeff Preiss is a New York-based filmmaker, cinematographer, and visual artist active since the 1980s. A founding member of the experimental gallery Orchard and former co-director of Films Charas, Preiss’ work spans narrative and experimental cinema, with films preserved by Anthology Film Archives and the Andy Warhol Foundation. His projects have been shown internationally at venues including ICA, London and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and have involved collaborations with artists such as Joan Jonas, Andrea Fraser, Josiah McElheny, and Anthony McCall. He was Director of Photography for Bruce Weber’s Let’s Get Lost (1989), and his 2014 feature Low Down won the Sundance Cinematography Award. 

Accompanying the exhibition is a screening of Preiss’s Beckoning Cats and The Secret World made in collaboration with the artist Josiah McElheny, followed by Q&A between Preiss and Dr Dan Kidner at Close Up Cinema in London on Monday October 12, at 7:30pm.

Generously supported by The Elephant Trust.