Jason Simon
Artist Book
Title: Festschrift for an Archive
Author: Jason Simon
Date: 2012
Format: 32,5 x 27 cm
Pages: 63
Print run: Limited to 200 numbered copies
Published by the artist
The Museum of Modern Art’s Film Still Archive (FSA) had been the largest and most active of its kind, with four million catalogued images, another million images in the process of being cataloged, and approximately one thousand paying scholars, publishers, exhibitors and curator clients visiting annually. The FSA’s Associate Curator managed the Archive for 34 years, and together with her assistant and a bookstore manager, was laid off in the wake of their leadership roles in the MoMA strike of 2000. Rather than relocating the archive to MoMA QNS, or making room for the archive in the large new building then being planned, the FSA was closed. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) heard a complaint against MoMA concerning the handling of the lay-offs and in the process created the public record of the precipitating events. Festschrift for an Archive reproduces the NLRB judgments as a book, with a follow-up interview with FSA curator Mary Corliss. Published in a small edition, each book presents a different publicity still from a history of cinema imaging labor. As illustrated by Simon’s project, rarely is the connection between labor and cinema quite so material as in the story of the FSA.
Jason Simon (Boston, 1961) is a professor at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, where he was founding faculty of the Department of Media Culture. Simon worked as an assistant curator of film and video at the Wexner Center for the Arts, where he established the museum’s Art & Tech lab for artist residencies in filmmaking, and was represented by the Pat Hearn Gallery from 1994-1999. His work has exhibited widely, including the Whitney Museum Biennial; Neue Gallerie, Graz; ICA London; the Tang Museum; The New Museum and The Kitchen. In 2013, ten years of the One Minute Film Festival he co-hosted with Moyra Davey became an exhibition at Mass MoCA. In New York, Simon co-founded the cooperative Orchard gallery, 2005-2008; he co-curated the traveling exhibition Macho Man, Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault, and is represented by the Callicoon Fine Arts gallery. His videos are distributed by The Video Data Bank and his writing has appeared in Artforum, Frieze, Purple, Parkett and Afterimage.
