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INTERVIEW: Matthew Higgs with Justin Strauss

Matthew Higgs trucks in ideas. He is a curator, DJ, artist, producer, writer, critic and national treasure who’s also kind and well-spoken, known in wide circles for his unflinching support of art and artists and his uncanny ability to find the good work that’s being made. Though coming of age in Manchester, Higgs lives in New York now where he’s the director of White Columns — New York City’s oldest alternative non-profit arts space that, through brave exhibitions, creates an experimental place for ideas to fester and bloom. In this day, we are so thankful for such a thing. Higgs sat down with Ace friend and NY legend Justin Strauss to talk about fanzines, producing the first nationally-advertised New Order concert, and the generosity of sharing ideas.

Justin Strauss: Hi Matthew. What was it like growing up near Manchester in the 70s and 80s?

Matthew Higgs: I was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, which is just across the Pennines from Manchester, but I grew up in the Northwest of England in the late 70s and early 1980s. In 1979, I would've been 14. I was a little too young to have had any kind of meaningful relationship with punk, but I was aware of it. What interested me most at the time was what came immediately after punk, so 1978, 1979, 1980: what we now call post-punk, or new wave. It was the beginning of the independent music scene. So, as a 13- or 14-year old I would devour the weekly music press, and at the time there were three weekly newspapers dedicated to music, that were all interesting in their own ways.

JS: NME and Sounds?

MH: NME, Melody Maker and Sounds. They were quite different from each other, and trying to understand, as a teenager, what made them different was interesting too. I became especially interested in the bands that came after punk, and in particular the bands that came from the North of England. Each city had its own distinct scene, even its own ‘sound’. Liverpool and Manchester, which were less than an hour apart from each other, had their own distinctive scenes, their own distinctive ‘sound’. The same with Sheffield, and Leeds, and further north in Scotland with Fast Records in Edinburgh, and a little later the Postcard label in Glasgow. It was just an amazing time for music and independent labels. And as a teenager, like many people at the time, I tried to find a platform for my unformed adolescent ideas , so aged 14 I started to write and publish a music fanzine.

JS: Was there a band that galvanized your interest at that age? For me, when I saw the Beatles when I was 7, that was it. From that moment on, I just knew that nothing would be the same and music would be my path.

MH: The first band that really interested me was the Buzzcocks, and they still interest me to this day. The first run of records they made remain extraordinary. They also set the stage for my subsequent interest in what was happening in Manchester. So I quickly moved from the higher-profile Buzzcocks and Magazine, to bands like The Fall and Joy Division, both of which I first saw live in 1979.

JS: I remember getting a copy of the Buzzcocks “Spiral Scratch” when it first came out, and it was just an amazing record.

MH: Clearly it wasn't the first independently released record, but it acted as a catalyst for the whole DIY and indepedeent label explosion in the UK at that time. The Buzzcocks and Howard Devoto and Pete Shelly were clearly interested in things outside of ‘punk’, art, literature, and more experimental music such as Can. Through following certain bands, and reading about their interests, these other cultural worlds started to come into focus. So music became a form of cultural education for me and stimulated my nascent interest in art.

JS: Living in New York around that time, I was obsessed with all of it. To get NME and Sounds. I would drive in from Long Island to go to a newsstand on Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street that got it first, every week, on Thursdays I think. I was obsessed with the music, and wanting to know where everything came from, and the history. I would just sit in my room and read these papers, and magazines, and devour all the information and obsess over the records.

MH: For me, as a young person at that time — I would have been 14 or 15 when I was writing my fanzine — it was a question of how does one go beyond being a fan, and how does one get closer to the thing that you're interested in? And then beyond that, how does one get involved with the thing that you're interested in? I think it was sort of those kind of thoughts that led me to start writing a fanzine.

JS: What was the name of it?

MH: It was called “Photophobia”, which was the title of a song on Cabaret Voltaire's first album. But before that, I had written another fanzine, which was called “Eat And Digest” (which included an interview with the Swell Maps). I made the whole issue and laid it all out, and took it to my local photocopy place. Photocopying was pretty rare at the time, and it was quite expensive, and I asked the guy how much it would cost me to print 100 copies, and he said it would be like 100 pounds. About a pound a copy! Which would have been insanely expensive at the time. So, I just walked home with my complete fanzine, and put it to one side, and regrouped. Eventually, I discovered a cheaper community-based printer in Manchester, so I started my second attempt at a fanzine, which was “Photophobia”, which retailed for 20p.

JS: And at 14 years old would you just write to these bands like, "Hey, I'm just starting a fanzine," and they would be happy to participate?

MH: Oh, yeah. I was clearly a naïve teenager. And I was also pretty shy, so the fanzine allowed me to have conversations with people including bands and record labels. One of the extraordinary things at the time was just the degree of access you had to people, which I think was a part of the whole ethos and transparency of the DIY music scene. And, for the most part, the bands I was interested in were in their late teens or very early 20s, so they weren’t that much older than me, even though a few years at that age is a big difference. But it definitely felt like there was a sense of community, ot sorts. Or at least the idea that everybody was in it together. But I’m still surprised that bands were tolerant of my teenage inquiries. One of the first bands I interviewed was The Cure, in late '79 when I would have been 14, and I can still clearly remember them being unbelievably nice to me! Eventually other people strated to contribute to the fanzine so it became more than just my voice. I wasn’t able to travel much at that time — due to my age — but through the fanzine I would correspond with people from across the UK, then Europe and beyond. So, all of a sudden, as a teenager in the late 70s, growing up in a small town in the North of England, my world got a little bit bigger. My frame of reference got a little big bigger too. More than 30 years later (i just turned 53) it is easy to relate this teenage experience to my subsequent interest in art and working with artists — which also came out of a similar set of ideas and a similar sense of community.

JS: Did you have a lot of friends who were of this similar mind at the time?

MH: Only a few. I had four or five close friends in my hometown and we were all interested in music, playing in bands and so on.

JS: How did you distribute the fanzine? Did you sell it to the local record shops? Was it something people subscribed to?

MH: Local record stores would carry it. Record stores in Manchester would carry it. Rough Trade carried it. I would sell them at gigs. That was a nice hands-on approach, where you're trying to convince someone to spend 20p on this thing you've made. I think by the final issue it was selling around 300 copies a time.

JS: That’s pretty impressive.

MH: It was a modest enterprise! For me it was probably more important as a catalyst for other ideas and conversations. Around that time — 1980/1981 — when I was 15/16 I started a little cassette label, and I also started organized a few gigs in a community center in my hometown. I organized New Order's first nationally advertised concert in January 1981, shortly after I had turned 16. All of these things were simply geared towards trying to make something happen. I think that's what I've always been most interested in, in the idea that somebody would go to all this trouble to make something happen, to create situations that other people could enjoy and participate in: to create a social situation. I had the same feeling later when I started going to clubs, I was always fascinated by the generosity involved in people creating platforms for other people’s ideas.

JS: So, you're 16 years old, and you'd seen Joy Division, and you'd seen many shows of theirs, and you became friends with them?

MH: We definitely got to know them as well as 14 year-olds could! My school friend Rex Sargeant (who was 13 at the time we met them) would remain close with them, and would eventually produce records for people including The Fall. We would watch Joy Division rehearse on Sunday afternoons, in their rehearsal space in Little Peter Street, the one depicted in Kevin Cummins’ famous photos of the band. They were incredibly nice to us, and it seemed to me that they were very interested in their relationship with their audience. I was, and remain, impressed with the degree of self-determination that Joy Division — and later New Order — had as a group. The way they worked with Factory Records, the way that they refused to do large tours, the way they did everything on their own terms, the way they collaborated with Peter Saville on how their records looked, etc. It struck me — as a young person — that you could actually do things on your own terms, and be successful, and retain your integrity. It was a very powerful and tangible example of that. Similarly, the way they treated us and their fans was pretty exemplary.

Joy Division by Kevin Cummins

JS: And the connection between the art and the music, which is something that always fascinates and interests me. Did you meet Peter Saville then who did their artwork ... was he a local guy as well?

MH: Peter studied in Manchester, but he left Manchester for London at the end of the 1970s and started working for Virgin/Dindisc, and other record companies . So I didn't meet him at the time. But, I met Tony Wilson, who ran Factory Records, and a lot of the bands that recorded for Factory Records, interested me a great deal: A Certain Ratio and especially the Durutti Column.

Peter Saville’s design for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures

JS: Section 25?

MH: I loved Section 25! I still do. I interviewed them for my fanzine in early 1980s when they supported Joy Division at Preston Warehouse. My fanzine was titled after a song by Cabaret Voltaire, but at the time — aged 14 — I didn’t know what Cabaret Voltaire was. But I eventually found out. And of course, Malcolm Mclaren and Tony Wilson would make references to the Situationist International, which I also knew nothing about, but through these ‘clues’ I started to get more interested in art and the 20th Century avant-gardes. Someone like Linder Sterling from Ludus was also an important reference point for me ...

JS: She did art for the Buzzcocks.

MH: … and Magazine. The way that she presented her band Ludus, and her work with collage. So by '81 or '82 I'm starting to become as interested in art and visual culture as I was in music.

JS: More than music?

MH: I think so. I definitely remember my interests shifting.

JS: I remember seeing New Order and, I think Quando Quango in 1983, at Paradise Garage, when they came over, which was quite something. Were you aware of the scene in New York at that time?

MH: Only through what we could read in the British music and style press, as I would have been too young to visit New York and it was way too expensive to travel back then. In a way I was also too young to visit London much, as I didn’t know anyone there and no one I knew in the early 1980s would have, or could have afforded to, stay in a hotel aged 17 or 18. Obviously some of the music being made in New York made its way over, and some of it would eventually find domestic release in the UK, but at the time I couldn't afford to buy imports.

JS: Did you go to the Hacienda at that time?

MH: The Hacienda was a bit later. It opened in '82 when I would have been 17. We went a few times in the early days, mostly to see bands. I remember everyone, myself included, was very impressed with the space — Ben Kelly’s architecture - there really was nothing like it in the the UK at the time. I went to art school in Newcastle between 1984 and 1987, and we would go to The Hacienda when we were home for the holidays. Around the time House music was starting to get played in UK clubs, and in Manchester and at The Hacienda in particular. But when I was younger the American bands that interested me most would have been The Talking Heads and Devo. I saw Devo on that second UK tour. I remember that they showed their short films before they came on, which left a lasting impression - not just the films but the idea of showing films in a concert setting. I hadn’t experienced that before.

The Hacienda, designed by Ben Kelley

JS: In New York, in the late 60s, Andy Warhol was doing that with the Velvet Underground at the Dome, projecting his films behind them, designing their record covers. I loved that coming together of the art world and the music world. And the downtown scene in New York in the 80s with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf and Andy Warhol.

MH: I think something probably like that — albeit a British version — probably existed in London, around people like Derek Jarman and then later Throbbing Gristle etc., i.e. that intersection between art, music and other cultural spheres, but I certainly hadn’t experienced anything like that as a 15 year old. But, clearly those connections — between art , design and music etc. — existed, because people like Peter Saville or Linder Sterling were already exploring those ideas in their work. Music was, for me and many other people that I know, a kind of ‘gateway drug’ into art. I’ve never actually met anybody that got into art through going to galleries. Everybody I knew got into art through music.

JS: And, did you study art at school?

MH: II went to art school in 1984 as an undergrad. I went to Newcastle-upon-Tyne Polytechnic, which is in the northeast of England. I think my interest in art school wasn't necessarily to do with becoming an artist per se, I was probably more interested in the legacy of the relationship between art school in the UK and music. And how, art school, at least at that time in the mid-80s, still seemed like a fairly ‘open’ or elastic place space, to spend three years without worrying about the outcome. It is worth stating that education was free at the time!

JS: Were your parents supportive of all this?

MH: My mother certainly was. My father had less interest in my interest in art. My sister became an architect and I went to art school. My mother was very supportive of us in whatever our independent paths might be. In the early 80s, before I went to college, as my interest in art was developing my interest in music shifted too, I was basically only listening to dance music, of one kind or another.

JS: And that came through going to the Hacienda?

MH: It pre-dates that, but The Hacienda —and Manchester more generally — played an important role. My interest in dance music came through post-punk, Public Image Ltd., early New Order, A Certain Ratio, the Bristol scene, The Pop Group, Maximum Joy, etc. A lot of the music I gravitated to around ‘80-’82 was essentially coming out of reggae and dub. A Certain Ratio often had a DJ as their support who would play current early 80s dance music before they took the stage. The pre- House era, circa '84–’86, when I was at college, was a great time for underground and mainstream club music, which was constantly in transition. There were good clubs at the time in Newcastle playing all kinds of dance music, Rockshots in particular on Tuesday and Thursday nights (the rest of the week was mostly Hi-NRG!) I started a weekly club night in Newcastle called ‘Fever’ with my art school friend Matt Rice, which ran for a year or so on Wednesday nights and the highlight was when our club chart got printed in the NME! I still have the clipping somewhere.

JS: Do you remember what was on that chart?

MH: It would have been c. 1986-87 and we were playing a mix of rare groove, Hip Hop, Go-Go (which was huge in the UK), and early house. We played everything — as most clubs did at that time — probably influenced by the approach of London clubs and warehouse parties. Things hadn’t become musically segregated yet: i.e. only House, or only Hip Hop, etc.

JS: That was happening in New York as well. In places like Mudd Club, Area and Danceteria. Everything was just new music and we just played it.

MH: Same in the more interesting clubs in the UK. Later in the 1980s you started to see the separation of musical genres, and the social aspect of clubbing becoming more ‘tribal’, more codified and based around specific genres, or micro-genres of music. I became less interested in going out in the late 80s when the club scene started to fragment and become more specific muiscally.

JS: And how long did you DJ for?

MH: Our night didn’t last long. Just over a year or so. We did it for fun and as a way to make some money to buy records! Newcastle was a very cheap place to live. My rent for my room in a house was 4.50 pounds a week! The money we made at ‘Fever’ - which wasn’t much - still allowed us to buy the latest releases and the occasional import from Hitsville USA, which was the best dance music and only import store in town. That’s where I saw import House 12”s for the first time.

JS: And at this time, you're kind of getting more into the art world. What was steering you more towards that?

MH: There were two art-related magazines that I read as a teenager in the late '70s and into early '80s: ZG magazine, which was edited by Rosetta Brooks, which made amazing connections between what was happening between New York and London at that time. It would include things like an article by Dan Graham writing about Malcolm McLaren and Bow Wow Wow. So through ZG I could start to make connections between art and music that I think would otherwise have eluded me. There was another great magazine around this time called Performance Magazine, which covered the UK performance scene, which at the time was very active and important. But they also covered free and experimental music, and visual art alongside figures like William Burroughs and Laurie Anderson. It was an education. One that really expanded my knowledge and interest in art. By the late '80s, after art school, I was definitely looking at and thinking about art more than music, but I was still buying the NME every week. So I was still following whatever was coming out but not with the same kind of focus. In late '87, I moved to London, but I didn’t really know what to do with my interest in art. I certainly hadn’t thought about a career in the art world, and didn’t know anyone who worked in the art world. The British art scene was very small in the 1980s. After a few years in London, after looking at a lot of new art, and thinking about what I wanted to do I started a modest independent publishing project in 1993, called Imprint 93, where I collaborated with artists on publishing artworks and projects that I would then distribute by mail.

JS: And, it was a magazine?

MH: It was different things inc. artist’s books, pamphlets, cassettes, multiples etc. I made about 60 projects between ‘93 and ‘99 with different artists. It was really a way for me to create a kind of ‘space’ for myself to work in. It wasn't a physical space, like a gallery, but more like a ‘platform’ that allowed me to work in a fluid way with artists - and mostly artists of my generation.

JS: New artists?

MH: For the most part. I published early projects by artists including Peter Doig, Elizabeth Peyton, Martin Creed, Ceal Floyer, Jeremy Deller, and Chris Ofili, among many others. In a way, Imprint 93 mirrored the logic of my teenage fanzine and cassette label from the late '70s and early '80s: applying similar same strategies to thinking about art and artists.

JS: You would show this somewhere, have exhibits?

MH: They were sent unsolicited to people via the mail. You couldn't request or ask for them. They were sent, anonymously, to a mailing list of around 100 to 150 people each time we did a project. The reason they were mailed was I saw them almost as a ‘gift’, a kind of “thank you” note, to other people that I felt were doing something interesting. I put the mailing list together with each artist I worked with, so each mailing list was somewhat different. Some people received them all, but most people would only have received a small number of them. I really didn't want them to circulate in the economy of commerce, partly because I had bought so many amazing books and records in the UK equivalent of the ‘dollar bin’. I always thought that it would be the worst day in your life, to walk into a record or book store and to see your own work in the ‘dollar bin’: that idea of success being determined by the market. So the idea was to allow them to circulate more freely, outside of the realm of commerce, and to see what happens.

JS: But, now they must be worth quite a bit?

MH: They are now collectible. You see individual titles that I published occasionally on book-sellers lists or at the annual NY Art Book Fair. I think an almost complete set of the Imprint 93 projects recently sold for something like $10,000. I was always interested in how ostensibly ‘democratically’ distributed things — zines, flyers, other kinds of printed ephemera etc. —over time accrue ‘value,’ culturally and economically.

JS: How long did that project last?

MH: Six or seven years years, by which time I'd sort of moved on and was doing other things. I was mostly working as an independent curator in London throughout the second half of the '90s, and I'd also started to teach, eventually working simultaneously at Goldsmiths College, the Royal College of Art, and Chelsea School of Art.

JS: When was the first time you came to New York?

MH: Not until the early 1990s to visit my friend Gavin Brown, who I was at art school with in Newcastle. We used to make paintings together. He moved here in 1988 to study on the Whitney Program. It was still relatively expensive to fly to America at that time, very few people I knew in the UK had been.

JS: Yeah, to travel. It was a big deal to go anywhere. What was your impression at that time?

MH: The art market had crashed in the late 80s, so a lot of that excess had gotten shook out. It was a time when a younger generation of artists and curators were starting to create a context for themselves. The same thing was happening in the UK too. It was a generational thing, and that interested me. There were interesting connections between some of the things that Gavin and his friends were doing in New York and some of the things that me and my friends in London were doing.

JS: When did you decide that you were going to move to New York?

MH: I didn't move to the US until 2001. Initially to San Francisco, where I worked as the curator at the Wattis Institute, which was the gallery for the California College of the Arts, CCA. We were there till the end of 2004. I really enjoyed my time in the Bay Area. It was also the first full-time job I’d ever had in the art world and also my first regular paycheck! (I was in my late 30s by this time.) And then I moved to New York in the end of 2004 to become the director of White Columns.

JS: When did you become aware of White Columns?

MH: I knew about White Columns from the 1980s - but only from a distance. My first visit would have been in the early 1990s when the gallery was on Christopher Street. I’d always been interested in the history of the so-called ‘alternative art spaces’ in New York.

JS: How do you find new artists?

MH: Primarily in conversations with other artists. That's always been the case. And also by looking at a lot of art, visiting galleries and artist-run spaces, and doing studio visits. White Columns also has open submission policy, our online registry, which anyone can apply to. So we get to the work of hundreds of artists that way too. Art comes from all over. I’m especially interested in the work of self-taught artists and artists who have unconventional backgrounds or training — people who came to art from different routes. At White Columns we hope to reflect something of the complexity of art, to acknowledge the idea that not all art comes from the same place, that not all art is made for the same reason, and that not all artists’ intentions or motivations are the same.

JS: And, when you think about New York, there was this period where it was Warhol, then Keith Haring, Basquiat, becoming so huge, does that still happen? Is there still that underground thing, that can bubble up?

MH: I think it is harder now - simply because the cost of living here now is increasingly prohibitive.

JS: Because, I don't find that connection so much if at all anymore. You go out to a club, it's just nothing to do with anything. It was like, The Mudd Club was a space where music, and art and all that, was kind of living harmoniously, and feeding off each other's creativity. I knew Keith, he had a cheap flat on Broome Street. No one can do that anymore.

MH: There are less rough edges or loose threads. Obviously the pressures of making a living, paying exorbitant rents, and having less free time here inevitably affects the art (and the music) produced in New York at any given time. Its probably why Berlin, for example, has such a great electronic music scene - as the artists-musicians have the resources, time and space to develop their work. So we have to work with the situation we have and the circumstances we find ourselves in. At White Columns we still primarily work with artists who have yet to benefit from any kind of critical, curatorial or commercial support. We operate in the spaces in-between the commercial art world and the institutional art world. What I always loved about New York was that there were so many great organizations committed to working in these ‘in-between’ spaces: places like Anthology Film Archives, Printed Matter, Participant Inc., The Kitchen, and many others, all committed to creating idiosyncratic platforms for artists. So I remain optimistic - despite the challenges of working here!

JS: And people were saying, when Donald Trump was elected President, that these times are when the art becomes underground, when all that bubbles up, and everyone's super creative and trying to find their way to express their dissatisfaction. We shall see I guess. How is the gallery funded?

MH: White Columns is a not-for-profit and its funded through grants, individual donations, support from foundations, our annual fundraiser, and the editions we make with artists. We start every year with $0 as we don’t have an endowment. In 2020 we’ll celebrate our 50th anniversary.

JS: Have you found that process more difficult in these times?

MH: It's always been difficult to raise money! It hasn't got more or less difficult, it just remains the same! Partly because we are not working with established or known artists. So for the most part we're asking people to put their faith in the organization and its mission: which is to support largely untested ideas. We're interested in artist’s ideas before consensus forms around them, and ultimately there's a relatively small audience for that. It's the same in the field of, say, experimental poetry, dance, music, film or theater. Our hope is that we can create an engaged audience for the ideas that we can support, and that subsequent opportunities will happen for those artists. So one of the interesting things for White Columns to think about is how can we present a program to the public that feels idiosyncratic, that feels distinct, that is somehow fundamentally different to the other things you can encounter elsewhere in the city. I think that's the challenge. I believe that you can do it, and you just have to look harder, and also look elsewhere.

JS: Judging by your Instagram account, and your posts of many of your favorite records, you seem to have reconnected with music?

MH: I'm probably having a mid-life crisis. I'm 53 years old now, and I have something like 8,000 records, maybe more. I still love music. It seems almost endlessly fascinating. You can never know enough, and you can never know everything about it. It seems to be in a constant process of revealing itself. And records, for me, represent the best ‘value’. For $10 or $20 you can own something extraordinary, that will outlast you. It can give you a lifetime of pleasure and inspiration. I read a lot of novels — costing almost $30 new — but after I’ve read them I rarely, if ever, revisit them, so I take them to the Housing Works bookstore instead. I still buy 20 or more records every month, and still mostly music that was — in one way or another — intended to be danced to, so the majority of my collection is disco, 1980s house, Italo, post-punk, and a lot of early 20th century disco edits. Social music: music to be listened to in company with other people.

JS: You did start a club night here, which I was lucky enough to play one. What was the idea behind it?

MH: I did that with Spencer Sweeney at Santos Party House, we only did a few nights. Santos, I think, was modeled on the idea of the earlier 80s downtown clubs, like the Mudd Club.

IJS: That’s how i felt when i first walked in there as well.

MH: The idea that the art, music and fashion crowds would all mix. Santos was a great space, in a great location, and had a totally amazing sound system. We had some great guest including you, Eric Duncan, and Joakim amongst others. It was fun whilst it lasted!

JS: And, do you see White Columns bridging that gap of music and art?

MH: Probably not! I’m not sure those connections exist now in the same way they did in the early 1980s in New York. We have a record label called The Sound of White Columns, named for the great 70s soul and disco label The Sound of Philadelphia. We release records by artist-musicians and artist-performers. It’s vinyl only and we made about 15 records to date with people like Meredith Monk, Kim Gordon, Billy Childish and Malcolm Mooney, among others.

JS: You were involved, recently, in an exhibit in Manchester?

MH: I co-curated an exhibition with Jon Savage and Johan Kugelberg called “True Faith” that looked at the cultural legacy of Joy Division and New Order. It was at the Manchester Art Gallery this summer. They had over 100,000 visitors! It wasn't really an exhibition about the groups per se, it was more about how the band’s ideas and work has informed and influenced the work of other artists. The designer Peter Saville was central to the exhibition because his contribution was probably as important as the music that Joy Division and then New Order made.

JS: Do you still listen to your Joy Division and New Order records?

MH: All the time. If you're ever bored, just listen to ‘Closer’ or ‘Power Corruption and Lies’ - it is hard to figure out how they created such extraordinary, visceral and original music. It still stands up. It still sounds relevant. The soundtrack to my life!

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