![]() White Columns has a vinyl-only record label THE SOUND OF WHITE COLUMNS, its next release – summer 2012 – will be a 12″ EP of new recordings by Malcolm Mooney, the original vocalist from CAN. Over the past twenty years he has organized more than 200 exhibitions and projects with artists, and has contributed writing to more than fifty publications. Since 2004 he has been the director of White Columns, a not-for-profit art space located in New York’s West Village. Matthew Higgs is an artist, writer and curator based in New York. I’m still looking for a copy of The Man From Colours. Monneret.)įarina, Rago and Monneret were responsible for other proto-Italo classics including Wanexa’s The Man From Colours and ‘Lectric Workers Robot Is Systematic and The Garden. It’s an early (1982), raw example of what would come to be known as Italo Disco, and was written by Gianluigi Farina, Francesco Rago and Monneret De Villard Xenia Olga Anastasia (aka X. I suppose the only thing that has changed is that I’ve become more. Do you feel the same way today PAULA COOPER: Yes, I still feel very independent. I think the most important thing in life is to be able to do what you want to doand I am. “Wherever you go, whatever decade, there’s always these really amazing connections between the most interesting artists and the most interesting musicians.”īelow, a look at some of Higgs’s vast collection.- This is the most expensive record I’ve bought (to date.) I think I paid $255.00 for it (plus shipping.) MATTHEW HIGGS: You once said, All I wanted was to be independent. “Music is, to all practical intents and purposes, infinite-so there will always be new things to discover, as well as new music being made every day, so I can’t see my enthusiasm for it waning,” Higgs said later, as he showed me an Arthur Russell record with art by Albert Oehlen. He used to go to live music more but realized over the years he was standing further and further from the stage, adding, “I think a lot of the music I gravitate to isn’t meant to be seen live.” “You can buy extraordinary things for relatively little,” he said. Records are undervalued, in Higg’s estimation. “The democratic aspect of it is also partly why it remains interesting as a way for artists to circulate ideas.” He mentioned as examples artists Jeremy Deller, Martin Creed, and Darren Bader, who recently offered records at his show at Sadie Coles HQ in London. “One of the great things about recorded music is that it’s so extraordinarily accessible,” Higgs said. As a teenager, he started a music fanzine called Photophobia and in the 1990s, when he ran his influential mail art project Imprint 93, some artists he worked with produced cassettes. At White Columns he started a label called The Sound of White Columns, releasing records by Tussle, Billy Childish, and others. Music has been a constant in Higgs’s long career. “It’s maybe the greatest dance record store of all time!” he told me. His all-time-favorite is Vinyl Mania, the now-defunct shop on Carmine Street in New York, which he says is sorely missed by collectors. The number of quality record shops is dwindling everywhere, but he named New York’s A1 and Academy Records and London’s Phonica Records as a few of his current favorites. When I visited Higgs in early June, the legendary record store Other Music on Fourth Street in Manhattan was to close in a few weeks. The British Council Collection has 8500 works of modern and contemporary British art: painting, sculpture, photography, video, graphics, ceramics and new. “I’ve probably owned five different copies of it over the following 35 years, replacing them as they got worn out.” “I bought my first copy in 1980 when I was 15,” he said. Higgs is known for DJing friend’s parties, and he thinks the record he’s played the most is The Return of the Durutti Column by the Durutti Column. One of his most valuable records-a rare original pressing of Stephen Encinas’s “Disco Illusion” on the Kalinda label-was a gift from artist Peter Doig. His holdings spans genres and price points. For Higgs, “curating and collecting have a lot of things in common: researching, finding, contextualizing, and sharing with audiences.” “The rest are either in my office, storage, or back in the U.K,” says Higgs, the West Yorkshire, U.K.-born director and chief curator of the New York alternative space White Columns. Matthew Higgs’s collection of records numbers about 7,500, about 5,000 of which are neatly organized in his Chelsea apartment.
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