Local artist Matthew Strauss bought a building in the Grove with the intention of making it into his personal studio. Little did he know, it would turn into the non-for-profit alternative art gallery, White Flag Projects. Eleven sat down with him to discuss The Grove, the story behind the gallery’s name, and the art and music scenes in St. Louis.
Why did you choose to open up the gallery in The Grove?
Actually we really didn’t. The building was not purchased with the intention of being a gallery. It kind of happened more organically. But the decision about the building was based on it being in this neighborhood that was one of the last underdeveloped areas in central corridor of the city and I think that’s why you’re seeing the kind of development that is happening here. St. Louis really does operate right down the middle. Five or six years ago when we did buy this, it was still pretty rough at that point. I think Atomic Cowboy was there and I think a couple of the gay clubs were starting over there. It’s really developed very quickly. It was nice to kind of luck into that. Although we are a little further, I mean I think we are four blocks from the nearest meal.
You are an artist yourself, how did that play into deciding to open up a gallery?
MS:
I bought the building just to be a studio for my own work. It was just too big and the original idea was to build a wall down the middle and every once in a while, when the mood struck me to do a show out here. It just snowballed very quickly to the point where there was really almost no studio here, a more off in the corner type of studio. The business of the gallery has really pushed anything else far, far into the background. Which is fine because the environment in here really looks hungry for a new kind of programming and it came at a very opportune time.
Where did the name White Flag Projects come from?
MS:
The name came from a couple of inspirations. One was a desire to put it in the context of several other art institutions that incorporate the word white, white columns in New York being the kind of prototype of all the non-profit cases that are around the country now, of the kind of alternative projects. And then White Flag coming out of a personal philosophic, kind of impulse forward kind of thinking about the commitment of running a space, necessitating giving up a lot of other ideas and ambitions and so a White Flag being the international sign of surrender, there is that kind of mentality. There are a lot of places it could have come from apparently. I’ve heard crazy ones. It’s got nothing to do with the Jasper Johns painting. Apparently there is a reaction band to Black Flag called White Flag that it has nothing to do with. The thing that never occurred to me, and I guess it’s particular to St. Louis, but there was some question about it having some kind of racial undertone, that just never occurred to me. It’s just a word now, just like Nike. I don’t even think about what it means.
White Flag Projects is a non-for-profit, what is the reasoning behind this decision?
MS:
A really careful analysis of the failure of the local art apparatus and why galleries were intended to be programmed the way they were programmed and my belief at the time, that has been pretty well validated I’d say, that the need to cater to the people that collect art locally, necessitates showing pretty bad art. There is really now sophisticated art market that is capable of affording one gallery, much less a dozen galleries. The solution to that in most galleries is to show a lot pieces or sell a lot of pieces no matter what the quality is, to get outside of that model. It seemed like the first step was to take the collector out of the equation and I knew the kind of art work that we would be exhibiting was not going to have a wide base of buyer interest. It was part of an overall desire to work around the necessity for commercial galleries.
Your website says that you facilitate meaningful artwork. What would you say makes an exhibition meaningful?
MS:
I think the relevance of the artist to the larger conversation about art that goes on in the world. That creates meaning for us as a gallery. The other kind of meaning that we strive for is to, and especially in solo exhibitions, make it meaningful for the artist and give them the opportunity to work in a fairly large space with few descriptions and to do it outside of that commercial context. Even if you’re dealing with an artist with a very successful career, generally a show like this in this kind of space is connected to a commercial exhibition. That requires making sellable artwork and very often the capability and importance of the artist’s development. So for instance, this is the early stages of an exhibition for September. He is a very successful painter. We are not going to hang canvas in here. This is going to be a gigantic painting and at the end of the week it’s just going to be sanded off the wall. The other two paintings he is going to show, one is going to be made of water soluble paint, so the paint is just going to literally melt away throughout the show and the other one is just a bunch of torn pages out of a book. There is this kind of temporal painting that he is experimenting with that would have very little potential in a commercial environment. We are kind of operating in a space that is more like a small museum than it is a big art gallery. A lot of artists have taken the opportunity to really produce exhibitions that are very important to their development.
What kind of music do you enjoy?
MS:
Right now I am completely obsessed with a live Modern Lovers record. That’s this week. My taste is pretty liberal. I went through a big Belle & Sebastian revival about six months ago during a break up, so you know that was resonating at that time. Nothing too cool.
There was a time when we were actually booking a lot of shows in the gallery. One of the things, and this is a lot of the galleries that are doing it, the art is secondary to the music with some of these places. It’s hard to do during exhibitions. We had a show in here where we had to cover ever single wall, we couldn’t take it down for the show and there was an unsafe number of people in here. You end up spending so much time protecting everything. Actually, the last straw was this Canadian band that I saw at Pitchfork last summer called Japandroids. I read something about them playing a really small gallery that I knew of and I was like, “Oh, they’re playing galleries” and thought that would be cool. I called their booking agent and I saw that they had like three or four days open between Chicago and Memphis and I was like, “Oh they totally have time to stop here, I’m sure they’re not going back to Vancouver.” They never really got back to me, maybe like one e-mail back and forth, no real follow up. And I got super pissed off because for some reason they ended up playing in town at the Billiken Club and I was like, “You chose a free show where you are literally standing next to a pedestal with a taco salad on it over this gallery?” Clearly these bands aren’t making distinctions between venues. It’s an extension to make a guarantee for a band and not know if they are going to make it, but that’s the reality of it, it’s a totally different business. When things show up on our door sometimes we accommodate them, but as far as going out of our way we’re going to let Lumière and Open Lot deal with it. We’ve got a very serious exhibition program here that takes up most of our attention. If I had the Contemporaries building, if I had the Courtyard the whole summer would be bands.
One thing that I really always heard about St. Louis, and maybe it’s true everywhere, but seems less so in other cities, but the devout audiences for music and art don’t cross pollinate here the way they do in a lot of different places. You see the music people and music things and the art people at art things and if you have an art thing at the music place the music people aren’t there. There is just this kind of selectivity that actually kind of baffles me, because there is so little to actually do here. You’d think that every cool thing that came up would find some significant audience. I don’t know if it’s part of some laid-back quality or lack of urgency or some quality that actually makes people want to live here, but they don’t want to go out and do things. I always thought that was really strange, the inability to get these two groups to co-mingle.
