Adam and I began our collaboration fifteen years ago in the production room of a mass-market magazine—such rooms have long been places where artists get paid for physically assembling the product and, not so ancillarily, start friendships around the work they do both in and away from the office. When we met, Adam had recently begun making paintings using stock photographs, which art directors of magazines and other publications use when they need depictions of people going about the business of living—working at the office, playing Frisbee, having a picnic, etc.—and I was writing short stories based on TV advertisements. Neither of us wanted simply to critique our source materials’ artificial construction of what sociologist Harvey Sacks called “doing being ordinary”; rather, we both wanted to preserve their emotional pull, and reinstate the intimacy and idiosyncrasy that had been drained from the images in the process of their mass production and dissemination.

Our first joint venture was a performance at Four Walls in Brooklyn, which Adam had co-founded; this consisted of me reciting a short story while Adam presented a slide show of stock photos that commented on the words, sometimes by working against them—i.e., Adam selected images based on my story. We promised each other that next time, I would generate stories based on the images. Seconds is the keeping of that promise. Our goal is for the stories not merely to illustrate the paintings, nor vice versa, but for each piece to amplify an audince’s experience of its cohort.

Matthew Sharpe is the author of the novels Jamestown, The Sleeping Father, and Nothing Is Terrible. His stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s, Zoetrope, McSweeney’s, The Los Angeles Times, Art on Paper, and elsewhere.

Adam Simon’s most recent exhibition was at Pocket Utopia in Brooklyn last March. He founded and co-directed the exhibition space and artists’ forum Four Walls and, more recently, the Fine Art Adoption Network (as part of Art in General’s New Commissions program).

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BOMB 108/Summer 2009