Interview

It's almost a parable: Two people leave their desk jobs and have the option to decide their space in whatever way they choose; they decide to set up yet another office—in a storefront, no less. Then it's a paradox: They set up shop on a small, primarily residential space on the Lower East Side, where their best customers are skater kids, not collectors, or even other business people. But that's the melodrama of Howie Chen and Gabrielle Giattino of Dispatch, formerly of the Whitney and the Swiss Institute in New York, respectively. They've triumphed over both parable and paradox by balancing solid programming with idiosyncratic risks—see, for instance, their next show, a collboration of artist Kai Althoff and music journalist Brandon Sosuy. When we spoke with Chen, he'd just returned from Basel where Dispatch had a booth at Liste, the Young Art Fair for the first time. Has the international market changed the way he and Giattino run their office? Only slightly.

ALEX GARTENFELD: Hi, Howie. What are you doing today?

HOWIE CHEN: I'm going to catch up with Gabrielle [Giattino, co-proprietor] at Dispatch and see how it went at Liste. I was there for 11 days.

AG: What a terribly long time to be in Basel—

HC: Well it's seven days there. And then setting up...

AG: You're not a non-profit. But did you imagine your space in the context of an art fair?

HC: No, but I wouldn't say we would have never ruled it out. We're testing the waters. The idea behind Dispatch was to be flexible enough to do an art fair like the Liste. This was intense, though. We did Artissima last year; we did a solo project in their showcase area equivalent to Basel's Statements. This, at Liste, was the first time we set up a group presentation. I think it represented what we've been doing. Meeting collectors-that was new to us. We don't exactly have collectors knocking down the door in the Lower East Side. It gives us profile and visibility, and we can try to get a few backers to follow us and keep our doors open.

AG: How did you and initially Gabrielle meet?

HC: I'm involved with a group called New Humans, and we did a  performance at the Swiss Institute, where Gabrielle worked. Gabrielle ended up curating a small show of Mika Tajima's work. At the time I was working at the Whitney Museum, at the Branch Museum at the Altria. It was the last branch space the Whitney had; I was there for six years, and when the Branch closed, it was a natural way to fade away, and start up Dispatch.

AG: Why the name Dispatch?

HC: Gabrielle lives above a car service dispatch office and we were always amazed by how much activity is generated in a small office with a fat man and his fleet of cars driving around New York.

AG: How did you find your storefront?

HC: We'd worked together on a number of collaborative projects, and always batted around the idea of working beyond the institutions we were in, and continuing the rigor and work in a more flexible way. When the current space popped up  we jumped at the chance.

AG: What changes did you make to the space when you moved in?

HC: We painted the floor black. We wanted a few visual markers. The other is our clock: We wanted to maintain the environment of an office since we didn't have real office jobs anymore. We could clock in when we got in to work, and clock out at the end.

AG: How do both of you incorporate your other projects, as curators and artists, into the space?

HC: We don't put Dispatch on everything we do. But a lot of time it helps our other projects, and it provides a place so that people can people anchor our activities to something material.

AG: God fear the freelancer.

HC: Exactly. Gabrielle does a lot of independent projects. But all our collaborative and independent projects end up being connected to Dispatch in someway—the space really functions as a premise and a name.

AG: Did you base Dispatch on any other models? Miguel Abreu Gallery on the Lower East Side also has an office space in front.

HC: Obviously early on we looked at Reena Spaulings, Dexter Sinister, Orchard Gallery. But we really wanted to focus on the office aspect. Sometimes the process as a curator is more interesting than the product. You're walking into our office. We can't offer white walls and clean floors, but it's an office and things are happening.

AG: What's the ideal show for your space? Or how does the space, either its strengths or its limitations, determine what you put in it?

HC: Since space is so limited, we look more at an ideal string of shows and how they inform each other. We want each show to be strong individually, but we also want it to function in a sequence of shows. One shows ephemeral works; the next show's something else.

AG: Do you think that sequence gives Dispatch a specific narrative?

HC: Gabrielle and I have different ideas about how it works out, and that's good for me. The space is a canvas for me to figure out things I don't understand—like Expressionist paintings or something, and how people resist formalism or specific categories. (LEFT: ITEMS FROM HANNE MUGAAS' "SECONDARY MARKET")

AG: So what are you bringing to the X Initiative?

HC: We are presenting a project by curator Hanne Mugaas called "Secondary Market" which is an exhibition of art ephemera, paintings, sculptures, and artistic objects that she buys on eBay—like a Picasso T-shirt. They're awesome objects.  All of this is for sale, and there's a series of commissioned Artist Edition Coffee Mugs by Mugaas. She's done the "Secondary Market" project before at Ooga Booga in Los Angeles, and showed it in Europe ion a gallery setting. It gains more by having an exhibition history. And of course it's a play on the secondary market.

AG: So did you bring home any lessons from your art fair experience at Liste?

HC: Well were hanging around with a lot of other gallerists—well, they generally prefer that title over "dealers." We were staying in the immigrant neighborhood of Basel, and there was a Turkish café in we passed every day called Agora, which comes from the Greek word for "marketplace." It was nice to think of Agoraphobia as not just the fear of open space, but the fear of being in the market place.

AG: Now you have no fear.

HC: I have no fear, just anxiety.


Dispatch is located at 127 Henry Street, New York.

For a survey of the storefronts participating in No Soul For Sale, click here. For Art in America's coverage, read on.