IN CONVERSATION WITH SARA BLAZEJ
Published in Sap Magazine Issue 005

Sara Blazej was on her lunch break when she walked into Sara’s for the first time — Sara’s, which was not yet then Sara’s, which was then an approximately 2,500-square foot commercial space on the market in Chinatown, with golden light spilling through its windows, windows that overlooked the Freedom Tower & the NYC Office of the Public Advocate, whose magnificent columned building is crowned by a golden woman, a statue called “Civic Fame.” She looked around. The last time she had an exhibition space in Chinatown, it was in the living room of the apartment she shared with her then-boyfriend. They painted the walls black, lit the room’s central art piece, swathed it in ambient sound. If they could do all of that in one room, imagine what she could do here. She said, “Yes. Yes, I’ll take it.”

Sara had always wanted a space. Since beginning to study and make art in high school, she’d painted, filmed, written, danced. What she liked best was bringing people together, creating communal experiences through which people could engage critically with ideas and aesthetics. “It was obvious I was going to have a space at some point. Everyone knew that, I talked about it incessantly,” Sara told me with a laugh as we split a chocolate bar on the couch of Sara’s this fall during the space’s second show, Harris Rosenblum’s Inorganic Demons. We had a lot to talk about. I’d read work on the opening night of Harris’ show and been involved with Sara’s across-the-street neighbor — the art collective 8-Ball Community — for four years. We both entered the art world as outsiders and found our way in New York.

Among other topics, our conversation touched on different ways to approach art spaces, the FlucT collective’s work, the inclusivity versus exclusivity debate in the art world, the first show at Sara’s — Nick Klein’s Bring the Flowers to the Theater — and why it’s important to buzz poets offstage after two minutes.

SARA:

I’m thinking about how the early communities you engage with inform your approach when you’re the one building out or curating in a space. For me, Otion Front Studio had an effect on the way that I think of this kind of thing.

EM:

What is Otion Front Studio?

SARA:

It’s a studio in Bushwick founded in 2014 by the artists Sigrid Lauren and Monica Mirabile, who make up the collective FlucT. I performed with them sometimes when I moved to the city after college, when I was working my first job at Metro Pictures gallery.

Otion Front is a tiny performance venue and rentable dance studio, and it has a backyard. When I was going there in the mid-2010s, it was where all the FlucT rehearsals were held, they had parties, they were doing a screening series, and they had this great residency program, which has been ongoing. I saw it as a space that was run by and serving core members of a movement-centric performance art community. FlucT specifically call themselves performance artists, not dancers, and were calling what they did “poetic movement,” which I thought was really fun and interesting. Honestly, I think about that term a lot.

EM:

I like that. I'm really interested in that, actually.

SARA:

Yeah, it’s great. How are you interested in it?

EM:

So the St. Mark's Church, where the Poetry Project is based, has always been really entwined with the arts. In the early 1900s, one of their pastors saw dancing as a way of expressing a direct connection with the divine. And then that space went on to house so much poetry.

I feel like poetry is ultimately an undercurrent that can run beneath all art--it's just a sort of sensibility, this really elastic medium that can encompass a lot of things. It makes a lot of sense to me that they're seeing themselves as performance artists, and that the particular type of movement they're doing is poetic movement. It's just a way of thinking about it that differs it from traditional dance. Even if it looks the same, it's about how you're approaching it and what you're expressing through it. The distinction does matter.

SARA:

I agree. So apt to say that poetry is an undercurrent running through all forms of art. Even the driest research-based practice has to carry some emotional complexity or poignancy to be successful, in my view. It’s funny -- an artist friend was just saying how much poetry there is in geopolitics.

FlucT comes at their work with a particular language that is very much like poetry. The way that Sigrid speaks, titles things, or will talk through choreography is like spoken poetry. I always thought the language of communicating movement was interesting.

EM:

I see that with screenplays, too -- sometimes directions in a screenplay will be quite abstract, and it's up to the actor to try to embody this abstract concept. That's really interesting to me.

SARA:

Totally. Me too. Instructive language is interesting—not only how abstract it can be but also how intuitive and nonverbal. The way a certain embodiment directive can light up the same idea in the minds of two or even thousands of people.

When I moved to the city, I really felt like what FlucT was doing with performance was the most interesting, truest, best kind of performance that there is. There’s a delicate balance that needs to be struck when you’re doing performance art and it’s dance and it’s critical, which theirs was -- they were making a commentary on how the female form exists in the technological age, post-the internet, post-selfie, engaging with this idea of being competitively visible by one’s own hand. And I felt like they were doing it in this really engaging and fun way. They got these really talented musicians to make scores for their performances, they would make their own costumes, and it was just this incredible show. I felt like for that time, for what they were trying to say, with the means that they had to say it, it was the most successful way that they could do it. I was happy to perform with them for several years.

And Otion Front had an impact on me when I was first thinking about intentionality with spaces. I’d come to New York with the idea of one day having a space, and at the time I was going there I was also working at galleries. Being in those different kinds of environments was the first time I had these thought processes around what I’d want to do or say with my own space. I was thinking through what a space means in a certain time among a certain community or group of people, where in the historical discourse it’s positioned, and what the space is doing. Is it going to have a social effect? Is that something I want it to have? Or do I want it to be a straightforward gallery? It was a pivotal moment for me -- it was when I started understanding what was required of me in terms of my intentionality of approach, and how I’d apply that to what I was going to set out to do.

It got me thinking about you and the spaces you’ve engaged with, because you’ve been really entwined with art spaces, too. Can you talk about your experiences with them?

EM:

There's so much I connect to in what you just said, because space is such a significant thing, and I feel like I've gotten to approach it in two ways: one as a reading curator and one as part of 8-Ball.

KGB has been such a significant space both for me personally and for the literary world as a whole. It was founded in the ’90s as this place for writers to gather who were making work outside the mainstream. It’s in the East Village, and it’s a bar rather than a Center for Fiction-style official space. It set this intention right from the beginning of “this is going to be a bar that hosts readings, both fiction and poetry.” And ever since then, it's carried on that tradition.

When I was getting involved in the literary world in the early 2010s, I would drive into the city to go to readings at KGB. So when the opportunity came about for me to host there, it was huge for me, and I thought of it as me being able to carry on that tradition. By 2021, when I started hosting, it had definitely become more established, to the extent it had almost become the institution it was designed to serve as an alternative for. So when I got involved -- and I had conversations with the bar owners about this -- my intention was to bring back this kind of connection with the streets it had had, this connection with younger poets and writers who were trying to create work that was “cool” or “cutting edge” or whatever. [laughs]

It was a really fortuitous connection, because I was so inspired by and engaged with the history of the avant-garde literary scene in the city and the role that KGB played in that. I was so invested in that continuing. So it was a good thing, I think, both for me and for KGB. It had a lot to do with what the original intentions of that space were, and with carrying that on.

And then with 8-Ball, I've gotten to see the different spaces we've had over the years and the different energies that moved through them based on spatial considerations. When I first joined 8-Ball in 2018, it was at, by far, our jankiest space. We got it through Wallplay, this nonprofit that was connecting art groups with spaces on Canal Street through this program called “On Canal.” We got 327 Canal, a ground floor, street-facing spot, and at first everybody was super excited about it because 8-Ball was like, “We’re this inclusive organization, and now literally anybody can come in off the street and join.”

But that created this really quick turnover with new members. People would come in and be like, “What is this? Oh, this is cool, I'm going to join,” and then immediately be out. We had a lot of interesting conversations. Whenever you volunteered for a shift at the space, you’d have to talk to whoever came in about 8-Ball. I once had a 15-minute conversation with these people because they were asking me all these questions about 8-Ball, and then at the end of it, they were like “Do you believe in God?” And I was like, “I mean, I do, but what's this about?” And they were like, “We're with the Jehovah's Witnesses. We want to know if you want to become a Jehovah's Witness.” And I was like, “Interesting. So you don't want to join 8-Ball, I guess. Okay. I'm not going to join your thing either, so I guess we're equal on that.” But it kind of created some challenges for us about how to keep a solid organization when people were coming in and out so much.

Also, because the space was so public, and because of where we were as an organization at that time, there were a lot of young people involved who didn't care about the space too much. Like, there would be punk shows and people would just, like, destroy the walls, and then other people would have to pick up the slack. So when we moved to a different space in 2019, we were like, “Okay, this is where we're going to grow up as an organization a little bit more.” The new space was on a section of East Fourth Street called the Fourth Arts Block, in a co-op building owned by art nonprofits. So we were presenting ourselves a little differently and moving a little differently because of the surroundings we were in.

Now 8-Ball is in Chinatown, across from Sara's. I haven't been to that space yet because I've kind of graduated from 8-Ball member to “friend of 8-Ball,” where I’m not actively involved on a day-to-day level anymore. I'm interested to see how this new environment has affected them. I know they were really bummed that there was no elevator, just because in terms of actual literal accessibility, it's not as accessible as it could be. But they also were like, “Okay, it's affordable rent, and we have limited options.”

SARA:

I’d been wanting to talk to you about accessibility, or, rather, this idea of inclusivity versus exclusivity in the art world and where the line is for you. There’s been this Twitter discourse in recent years where people have been talking about the need for an intelligentsia, or gatekeepers to certain fields, so there’s a level of quality control. I'm curious what your thoughts are on that.

EM:

Yeah, I was gatekeepy about KGB -- and I feel comfortable saying that -- because I need there to be a standard associated with reading there. It's important for everybody. It's important for the literary world that it's not just a free-for-all. There are reading series that are more about onboarding people to the literary world, and then there are places where you need to have reached a certain level of quality in your work to read there. When I talk about bringing in people who haven't followed traditional channels to get to where they are, that doesn't mean that their work hasn't gotten to that level. To me, it matters a lot that somebody's work is good. I mean, it's the most important thing.

I think at the end of the day, my thoughts on it can be boiled down to “ambition is important and quality is important, and it's good for everyone if there are standards for things and there are certain levels you can reach when you've reached a certain level of quality in your work.” Because I've seen the impact of the “everybody gets a participation trophy” approach to art, and I think there's been justifiable backlash to that idea. It makes you feel like there's nothing to aspire to, because everybody's on the same level no matter what. Natural hierarchies forming is not a bad thing when you're making the bar based on the quality of work rather than, I don't know, “This person's dad went to Harvard, so they're going to get this thing even if their work sucks.” Similarly, barriers to entry are not a bad thing -- they inspire people to improve so they can clear those barriers.

I think, also, that different projects serve different purposes: some are for onboarding people into a world, and others are for people who are already in, and, at that point, a level of exclusivity matters. 8-Ball served a different purpose than my reading series at KGB. And a small DIY gallery in Bushwick run out of somebody's apartment serves a different purpose than Sara's. Both are needed for the art world to function.

SARA:

Yeah, I agree. And I agree with the idea of there needing to be a goal, or a bar set.

I have trouble with this thought experiment in general, though. When institutions talk about inclusivity versus exclusivity, there’s sometimes this weird dichotomy that’s created based on people’s backgrounds. Sometimes the reason somebody's work meets the bar is directly related to the fact their father went to Harvard, and they had a lot more opportunities to hone their craft. And then if there's a person who didn't have that same experience, but they’ve worked really hard and their work is very good, there’s this idea that it's like, you know, “okay they get access through their merit.” They’ve come from such an underprivileged scenario that their success is considered exceptional. And that permits anyone keeping the gates to point to those cases and say, “See? We opened the gates for merit, not privilege.” But the gates are still there, it’s still hard to get great at what you do without resources. We both see privilege-based meritocracies reinforced in our respective creative fields. It’s hard to know how to best work against it.

I guess when I’m putting together a show, I sometimes will trust somebody who's very early in their career. The work will maybe not have the highest production quality, but there are still incredibly interesting ideas at play, and I see a path for their practice. In some art spaces, work has to have a market already, or even a certain level of attention, but I don't always need to abide by that kind of thing because it’s not the purpose my space serves. I'm allowed to take chances on people whose work might not be there yet, but will be there. It's like, “Are they there enough for me to give them something?”

It’s something that’s interesting to think about in the context of curating spaces. I don't have a “yes or no” answer or particularly solid position on all this. It’s something I like to think and ask about, but it's also kind of dangerous territory, you know what I mean? It feeds into a much larger social conversation that is ongoing.

EM:

I guess I see the access-to-resources issue as a slightly different conversation. To the extent that a project makes inclusivity a goal in order to give people access to resources who didn’t have it before, I think that’s an important mission -- one of the most valuable missions that can be taken on in this field, actually. I owe where I am to projects like that -- specifically, to 8-Ball, which gives people who didn’t go to art school access to the resources of an art school, and to low-cost independent poetry workshops and the city’s non-institutional poetry scene. The cultural organizing work I’ve done with 8-Ball has been in service to that mission, and I have a lot of respect for institutions like the Art Students League in New York and the Barnsdall Arts Center in LA. What I’m saying is simply about the quality of work mattering and it being okay -- necessary, actually -- for scenes and entities to be selective once you’re in the mix. Ambition breeds vitality. And people need to be surrounded by others who are at or above their level to be satisfied and to grow.

As far as what you’re saying about production quality -- like, newer or less resourced artists working at this reduced level -- I, personally, think the je nais sais quoi of good work comes from something in its essence, and that comes through regardless of where someone is in their practice in terms of technical skill. This painter I like Tilly Losch, who was a ballerina and actress who then became a kept woman and socialite, was self-taught -- she started painting in a sanitarium. Her work isn’t super technically advanced, but its essence is strong. There’s a something that’s very much there. That’s the lure of outsider art and juvenilia, too.

In that sense, I really understand and connect with what you're saying about giving a chance to newer artists. I would try to do that with the reading series. It was important to me because potential is exciting, and it’s nice to give people room to explore their potential. Also, someone who hasn't been as involved in the same conversations as people who are more entrenched is going to naturally bring new ideas to the table, and that's exciting.

SARA:

Yeah, usually when I’m getting a spark of inspiration from something going on under DIY auspices, it happens when the ideas are coming out in semi-raw form, rather than fine-tuned, well-rehearsed and institutionally polished.

EM:

Exactly.

SARA:

It’s one of the benefits of being part of an art community, getting to witness things like that. I’m really so grateful for all the wildly gnarly projects I’ve seen over the years. If you pay attention, you get the most amazing opportunity to learn from other people’s mistakes—to connect with their intention, and see their trial-and-error in real time. It’s really generative and rewarding.

EM:

It is, yeah. Art community in New York is so interesting to me. I think there’s an inherent tension because New York is a city that people move to in order to hone and refine and express their distinct sensibilities, so it's a very individualistic place in a lot of ways. Projects that have community as a goal can be counterweights to the darker sides of that, like alienation and the stagnation that can breed. Where these projects can get into trouble is when they’re so militantly communal that individual ambition becomes frowned on in a way, because everything is about the group. I’ve seen this in activism-driven scenes.

Projects that aim to meld the idea of a community with high art ideas can be a way for there to be some reconciliation between these poles, I think, if they’re executed correctly. That’s what 8-Ball tries to do, and even though it’s a continual navigation and there are a lot of bumps in the road, I do think it’s something they’ve achieved.

I read an interview with Nick Klein going into this conversation, because I was researching past projects you’ve done. And he said something like, “I hope that people can see my [Sara’s] show as ‘our solo show.’” I wonder if that speaks to a way to reconcile all this -- to let people express their own sensibilities and be an art star while working with other people and bouncing ideas off other people. To have something that feels like a kind of warm or communal thing that is inspiring rather than deadening.

SARA:

I’ve been thinking about this as well. One part of Peter BD’s recent show at Sara’s that I liked had that ethos, too, or at least played on it. Like Nick did with Bring the Flowers to the Theater, Peter hosted these performances where he brought in a lot of people. But there was one night that we decided to do two-minute poetry readings.

EM:

I wanted to make it out for that one. I knew a few of the performers, and it sounded really fun.

SARA:

It was fun and funny, but when we were going over it, I was like, “That's sooo rough.” [both laugh] At two minutes, we cut the mic and buzzed them off. When Peter told me that idea beforehand, I was like, “That is the funniest thing I've heard in a long, long time.” You're inviting people to read their poetry, such a vulnerable thing--

EM:

Such a vulnerable thing, yeah.

SARA:

--and we're going to buzz them off? We're going to cut them off? [laughs]

EM:

It's like in Miss Universe, where you have a minute to answer the question, and they buzz when you have to stop.

SARA:

That’s so sad. [laughs]

EM:

I kind of love it, though, because it adds a game element.

SARA:

The people who practiced and timed themselves, those were the game players. The challengers.

It felt like instead of taking the whole piece of pie and handing out slices to each reader, like “here’s your time slot to be the star, and here’s yours, here’s yours…,” everyone had their one chance to prove themselves, or get slimed. And that put a funny, huge, hard spotlight on the competitiveness inherent in how we create careers in writing and art.

So maybe that one looked on the outside like an “our solo show” situation, but it was a complete reversal. Critical and hilarious. I thought it was really valuable to have both approaches.

I’d been trying to think about what it is that I like about Peter's practice so much, and I think it's this defiant, anti-intellectual drive. It’s smart, but it's poking fun at everything that the art world takes so seriously.

EM:

It’s a way of keeping this stuff feeling alive and connected to humans that are moving through the art world. People see these things that just happen over and over, and it becomes deadening.

I was actually thinking, in a similar vein, about how smart the FlucT collective’s way of engaging with bodily movement was in the late 2010s, because that was a period of time when a lot of people were referencing -- in these weird, oblique ways that became caricatured -- the concept of “bodies.” But I feel like it's such a fearless and, like, full-throated way to explore these ideas that were talked about during that time by actually doing performances that were engaging the body.

SARA:

“Full-throated” is a good word for it.

EM:

There’s this element of criticality to it. They're both doing the performance and having this understanding of what it means. I find it interesting to think about balancing a critical side with an art side, because I feel like a lot of times when you're making art, it really is just coming from this other place and you don't know what it even is. Though maybe I'm just saying that because I’m a poet. I'm writing stuff and I'm just like, “I really like this, but I don’t know about this on some other level.” And that's what poetry is supposed to be in a sense -- it's supposed to surprise you -- but that's why I've always thought it's interesting to have a critical side and an art side.

So Peter was hosting those many days of performances. And Nick's show, which was the first at the space, was also based around the idea of bringing in many different people. I was hoping you could talk a bit about Nick’s show and how it came to be.

SARA:

Well, I've known Nick for, like, 15 years. We both wanted to come to New York and have an art space. If you read that article from Curatorial Affairs, he talks about not really feeling like he could access the art world, and I kind of felt the same way.

EM:

I felt that way too, very much so.

SARA:

I get it. Nick and I always had this unspoken bond that comes from being like that -- not coming from the art world or from money, and having all of these ambitions and ideas and having to do it on our own. And how hard that feels, and how special it is when you feel like you've done it, or are making headway in some way.

EM:

Right, exactly, exactly.

SARA:

So, when I got Sara’s, Nick and I started talking about doing something. I was like, okay, how do I open this up? It's such a huge space, I don't think it can be just a normal show. It has to be something that not only does justice to the space, but is going to set a precedent for it to be experimental -- a continuation of the spirit of what I was doing with the apartment gallery I ran in Chinatown, which was discursive, interactive projects rather than straightforward exhibitions.

When I first talked to him, I sent him pictures of the space, and I was expecting him to do a sound show or something, like a sculptural installation with sound. Then we had our first meeting about it, and he's like, “So this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to build this stage. It's going to be huge. It's going to fill up the entire space, so that it almost feels like there is no space, there is only stage and window. And then I’ll have someone activating the space every single day. I'm going to do stuff, and there will be collaborations. I'm inviting people from local organizations to do things and inviting professors we know to bring their classes in.”

EM:

What was your response to this idea?

SARA:

I had questions. Questions, questions, questions. “Is that what I want? Is that going to say that this is an event space or music venue more than a gallery and project space? How is this going to be received, perceived?” It’s important what you do as the inaugural thing. But once I understood it, I was all about it.

Nick is not super vocal about this–or, I wasn’t aware of it until we started talking about him doing a show here–but his music practice is coming from a critical art perspective. He's looking at clubs and DIY noise venues as interactive spaces that have more to do with the idea of relational aesthetics–which he hates to say, but it’s true–than they do with the idea of, “Oh, here's my music, you're my fan.” It has more to do with the communality of bringing people together and creating these environments that he hopes can be critical. The people that he books are artists–sound artists. In a different sense than the way we typically understand it, they are music artists.

He’s been talking about this stage idea for years and years and years. I think that he was recreating the idea of a DIY space, a performance space, but taken out of context and put into this context that we were both very adamant was an art gallery, an exhibition space -- not a performance venue, not a punk house or a loft that you can throw parties in. We wanted it to be perceived as an elevated space for critical thinking and looking.

EM:

This is exactly what I was speaking to before, the idea of looking for these interventions between the rarefied world of high art and the world of DIY that is explicitly accessible. I think there's great value to that: to keeping the intellectually and aesthetically engaged and ambitious context of the white cube, but bringing in people who have just as fascinating ideas as the institutionally entrenched, but maybe wouldn't otherwise get the chance to execute them.

So what did Nick’s show come to look like?

SARA:

Let me give a little bit of a frame to the nights he curated out. He invited people who were making work or had a practice that involved the idea of aurality–listening or speaking or sound. That would mean a lecture or a class or a communication through sound, like these throat-singing performers BEAM SPLITTER, who are incredible, and Spencer Yeh, this performance artist who uses violin and electronic music equipment as his medium. There were a few lectures that were totally batshit that I really loved, like one on the blockchain.

Then we had Dust Radio doing a residency where they came in and had lineups, and it was basically just a listening party curated by them, where one act would go, then the next act would go. That was one of my favorite parts of it all. I had never been to their parties before, but apparently they're legendary. Once I learned about what they had done, and people were getting stoked on it, I was like, “holy shit.” They’d been having these parties and broadcasting it on YouTube and projecting it outside on this little booth. They set that up here.

I thought that was a really special way to pay homage to the music scene. Even though Nick is saying that his practice comes from a place that's maybe different from the way that other people approach music and the club scene, it still existed in it and was enabled by it and is very much a product of it in a lot of ways. So I really loved that every Saturday there was just a full day of music.

EM:

That is really cool, because a lot of people who are moving in that scene are engaging with a lot of the ideas that Nick is engaging with, but maybe just not thinking of it in exactly the way he is.

It’s similar to how much overlap there is between the type of performance art that FlucT was doing and the dance world. It sounds like it could be really generative to think of himself as anchored in that community in a way, or to engage with it, at least.

SARA:

Yeah. There is a lot of overlap between the noise scene and the experimental performance art scene, too, actually.

Overall it was just a really special, fun five weeks. It brought so many people here, and I am so grateful that we ended up going with that concept.

EM:

It was a cool first project. It was risky, in the sense that you needed to trust that your audience was going to be intelligent and absorb it as art. It's cool to do that, to actually take that risk. And I think it really paid off. I mean, this has definitely been received as an art and project space.

SARA:

Thank you for saying that. It was super risky, and I was very nervous about it–Nick and I both were. We were like, “We need to be so intentional about everything around this.” It ended up being a really ambitious undertaking, and we had to veto certain ideas, but we executed a lot of what we set out to. “Shoot for the moon, and even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” [laughs] I feel like I was saying that to myself a lot during that time.

EM:

I love that. Hearing you talk about this makes me wonder, what is your level of interest in pushing boundaries? I feel like I hear a little bit of an undercurrent of that, not only in the way that you talk about approaching spaces, but in the way some of your artists approach things.

SARA:

I think it is an impulse of mine to want to do that, which probably comes from entering the art world from outside instead of coming up through channels that are more common in New York. There's this idea of wanting to subvert things or to prove that one thing can be this other thing. Having a platform is a fun way to express what type of art you think is interesting or transgressive or pushing our thoughts and the conversation forward. Nick’s show was definitely pushing a boundary, blending boundaries. And I really liked that about it.

The second artist we exhibited, Harris Rosenblum, is more part of a lineage of fine art and sculpture making -- his education is in art, what he’s making is very clearly art. But the ideas he's working with are outside of the norm. His show was bringing these thoughts and conversations from niche online spaces into a fine art context, a gallery context, a different kind of critical space. That's more a traditional way of pushing a boundary.

At the same time, there are other shows I'm doing that are meant to reinforce that it's not all about “pushing boundaries.” I think at a certain point you can lose your solidity, your credibility as a gallery, if you’re always like “here’s this radical, shocking thing.” It's great for some projects, you know?

Some galleries do a crazy, wild project for every single show. And those really are radical spaces, and I totally applaud them. I think for the particular path I set out on for this project, it's important to reinforce that this is not just for young, internet savvy kids or underground noise performers. It's showing a range of generations and people and ideas.