10 years

Stalke Kunsthandel

Vesterbrogade 15a, Backyard

1993

Interview

Out of Gallery Space

"One can easily run a gallery from a back room," says Sam Jedig, who focuses on international fairs, finds the crisis good for art, and would rather spend time surfing than wasting it on bad artists.

One must be careful about where one buys their porn videos, I think, as I step into a video store in Copenhagen’s Vesterbro to meet the art dealer Sam Jedig.

He has his office in the back room of a store, where 40 percent of the video films sold are pornographic, and I don’t even consider asking for a copy of “Swedish Girls in the Running Track”. I am here to find out how one runs a gallery without having a dedicated space to do so.

“Let’s go over to the café,” says Sam Jedig, and while crossing over to the bar on the other side of Vesterbrogade, he talks about the market for rental videos. It is his father’s business. The turnover is 20 million kroner. “Not exactly an industry hit by crisis,” I say to Sam Jedig, in contrast to something like the art trade.

“The crisis is perfectly fine,” says Sam Jedig. “It clears out the art world. And the individual artists and art dealers need to show greater ingenuity to survive. More precise marketing. Like Jeff Koons. The part of retail that performs the best is the one with the most precise understanding of who they are. If you want to make it in the 1990s, it’s not enough to just create 45 projects and hold ten exhibitions. It’s about doing it right at the right time.”

Surfing Most of the Year

He probably hasn’t always meant that.

Sam Jedig’s days as an art dealer and gallery owner are this month rounding up to ten years. In the beginning, it was humble premises in a basement in a minefield with an astonishing number of bad artists and then the few that made it worth coming at all.

Things took off from there, and by the end of the 1980s, Sam Jedig became one of the capital’s hottest and hippest art dealers, featuring Danish artists such as Torben Ebbesen, Margrethe Sørensen, Thomas Bang, Mogens Møller, Osmund Hansen, Henrik Have, and international names such as Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Wiener, Michael Goldberg, and William Anastasi. The gallery was called Stalke and was located next to Weinberger, Faueschou, Patricia Asbæk, Michael Andersen, and Susanne Ottesen, some of the city’s best.

Then – in 1991 – he closed the store and renamed his art business Stalke Out of Space. Under that name, he has exhibited a series of projects at fairs, museums, and other art institutions and showed secret Danish artists at fairs in Frankfurt and later in Cologne.

“It is far more interesting,” says Sam Jedig. “At the fair in Frankfurt and in Cologne, where the art scene matters, if you succeed there, you are remembered, and then it’s much easier to collaborate with the major international artists and esteemed galleries. In Frankfurt, no one has a clue about something like Charlottenborg, and the Danish artists’ associations are worth nothing.”

“You don’t mean that?”

“Yes, I do, I can. It’s so liberating to be far away from the jealousy and power struggles in the provincial Danish art world. I’m so happy to be out of it,” says Sam Jedig, and I notice that he doesn’t smoke, and the water level in his glass is high.

“I lost myself at one point. At one time, I had four galleries in the city and six openings a month and was afraid I wasn’t active enough. I smoked 40 cigarettes and had a hangover every other day. And I ended up sitting in my nice gallery with all these big names, bored. Ten visitors would come. Seven were art critics, two were museum people, and the last was a tourist who had gotten lost. So now I’d rather really work 20 days a year and then surf the rest of the time. You get more art experiences in a few days at a large, significant fair than in a whole year in Copenhagen.”

Surfing Europe

Today, Sam Jedig sees his time with the big names as a springboard to what he wants to do now. Exhibition projects at fairs and museums with very young talents such as Olafur Eliasson, Lars Bent Petersen, Ewa Larsson, Joachim Rothenborg, and Ann-Kjerstin Lislegaard:

“It’s my own generation of artists I want to work with. I did the ‘60s and ‘70s artists for a few years, but now...”

Filling the Cashbox

“...and to promote myself. But the truth is, it cost me one and a half million in tuition fees. My father said I was throwing the money into a black hole, but I don’t see it as wasted money today,” says Sam Jedig and adds that you won’t get far in the gallery world if you don’t have your finances in order.

“Aren’t you really just a spoiled rich man’s son who’s been playing with your father’s money?”
“No, I have invested some money in an art collection, and that is what I sometimes sell from and buy for, to finance my projects and pay myself a salary. That’s what will hopefully allow me to drive around Europe soon with my surfboard on the roof and do projects. I really love surfing.”

“Do you also play tennis?”
“Badminton. Twice a week with various artists.”

“The projects you talk about, what could they be?”
*“Exhibitions at museums, fairs, and unconventional places. For example, in shop windows, newspaper ad pages, or on the teletext network. It’s the artists who today want to show their works in other places, and the galleries or art dealers have to follow because that’s where the art is heading. The old-fashioned gallery system is done. Maybe not Leo Castelli, but where there’s interest in groundbreaking art – our time’s increasingly immaterial art – it’s no longer enough with traditional galleries. That’s the realization I’ve acted on. I run pure art dealing from a back room and arrange projects on the side. That realization has nothing to do with having a privileged background. These will be the new rules of the art world.

It’s an expression of realism, and it’s a matter of where you choose to put your energy.”*

By Torben Weirup

Berlingske Tidende 14.4.1993