The Pioneers

Adam Katz: Tell me a bit about The Pioneers.

Saul Appelbaum: The Pioneers is a creative agency that’s embedded in my art studio. If we look around the studio, half of the space is committed to my artwork, and the other half, the table I’m sitting at with all the computer equipment, the shelves with the video and photo equipment, and this area for a seamless backdrop—that’s The Pioneers.

As for services, we collaborate and make content with people in the culture industries: art, architecture, design, fashion, beauty and cosmetics, film, theater, music, entertainment, culinary art, poetry…did I leave anything out? It used to be that only large corporate agencies could handle large corporate clients. Now a single practitioner can do a national or global scale campaign on a freelance or contract basis.

Things were a lot less complex when I started doing digital media for businesses around 2007. I could build out a website, handle the digital ad buy for that space, social media and email promotions, and any creative production within that, all by myself. Potentially getting into some application design. Now you need specialists in each one of those areas.

Depending on what I have going at any given time, I contract with other people. With some projects that are larger-scale corporate, I will hire out a photographer, someone who does that full time. Or I’ll hire out a producer and younger designer who can assist me on a project. But I’ll be doing the design. And generally, it’s me building the website, designing the graphics, directing the video, holding the camera, and capturing. Editing. You can see that all on our own website, thepioneers.la.

Long story short, The Pioneers’ sweet spot at this point is having a comprehensive, multi-channel understanding of digital and traditional marketing and being able to build out creative assets that will tap into multiple channels. So it’s video, photo, and design production, for large corporations, small businesses, and even independent practitioners, artists who come to us to work on creative projects.

I get that if you’re collaborating with an artist then the “creative asset” that you’re making together would be a work of art, but can you give me more details about how this works with corporate clients?

There’s quite a range.

So Mira Beauty comes to The Pioneers to do a comprehensive rebranding. This means we’re recreating the entire identity. Starting with strategy and communications, what do we want to communicate about this brand? It was an eight or nine-month project, where The Pioneers is responsible for creating a new logotype, new monogram, copy rules for copywriting. A new brand identity book, which signifies everything right down to the business card.

We’re also working with the front-end development team to handle creative direction for the web application that they’re building. So we’re responsible for the complete rebranding, which is something that an ad agency or a creative agency would handle. But we’re also responsible for the relaunch of the brand and the campaign for that. In the brand identity book, we’re responsible for making the photo approach that the brand can use moving forward, the rules and ideas for the photo and video approach, and we’re implementing that in their first campaign. Motion graphics, video production, photo production for the first round of campaign assets that they need.

The range is really from full production to potentially using assets that a person or company has already developed and built out more assets from that. Video production has increasingly been a sweet spot for The Pioneers as well. A client may come to The Pioneers to make a video on the set of a photo production, and we're responsible for the video alone.

You’re shooting it at the same time that they’re doing a photoshoot with their other contractors?

Or we double up on the set, such that we build the video set. Examples are the editorial video production that we’ve been doing with some of the major fashion publications, Vogue, InStyle, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, L’Officiel, etc. Whoever is doing the hiring for that project, usually the photo editor or fashion editor, will come to The Pioneers to do a standalone video for a fashion story or an editorial on the artist or personality.

InStyle Mexico is doing a cover story for Zion Moreno. There'll be a photographer that they hire, and then they hire The Pioneers for video. So we're responsible for the video that is being released alongside the cover story.

You and I have been talking about collaboration and experimenting with different structures of collaboration for almost twenty years.

Oh, Lord. Fuck that.

You honestly look amazing.

I’m married to a stylist.

Who is also a frequent collaborator—let’s return to her in a minute. I wanted to ask, why the centrality of collaboration, and how has your relationship to collaboration changed?

Coming from a fine art background.… I don’t like distinguishing between fine art and commercial art. So I’ll just say, coming from a background in painting, one is trained to be kind of solipsistic. It’s a lonely, independent project, in a lonely, independent studio, and there’s this myth of the artist as an independent genius who is not listening to or working with other people.

Architecture was the thing that really opened up collaboration for me. I did a Masters at Cornell starting in 2004 and worked at Kohn Pedersen Fox after graduation. It’s a requirement to incorporate ideas and creative input from a lot of different people to be able to make architecture. I came to really love and actually feed off of the challenge and complexity of working with other people to create something that is an expression of several people’s and stakeholders’ ideas, thoughts, passions, cares, concerns, and bringing that into a single visual work.

How it’s changed, is something that’s been really pleasantly surprising to me.… It probably shouldn’t have been, but growing up as an alternative artist, punk skater kid, we’re sort of taught to hate corporations. But as I’ve gotten older I’ve found that working with these larger corporations, like Blaze Pizza or Mira Beauty, the person I was working with who was an executive at NARS Cosmetics, or for this current project we’re working on with Perry Ellis America, I’m working with the Vice President of Design.… I had this awakening that these people I’m working with are actually a lot more like me than most of the other people who I come across in day-to-day life, they’re highly educated, culturally extremely sophisticated. To work with the chief marketing executive of Blaze Pizza, they’re bringing a lot of really amazing ideas to the table for these projects that we’re working on. If I'm working with a CMO, a lot of times they have a very sophisticated visual or cultural understanding where we're able to throw around ideas.

Do any particular collaborators come to mind who, by what they brought to the collaboration, taught you something or influenced the way that you were able to approach subsequent projects?

The L’Officiel project that we did with Heidi Klum led to some other work with her, for her big Halloween event. For the past couple of years, she’s done full films, and she hired The Pioneers to do several of the behind-the-scenes or documentary videos that she could use as a release for a campaign that she was running for the one in 2021.

The new one I’m working on right now is actually being released on January 14, which is a documentary behind the scenes video for her in collaboration with Snoop Dogg, for Germany’s Next Top Model, where she’s host, judge and co-producer. She's pretty much a genius, creatively and with her persona. So she's just such a joy to work with. She always has such amazing ideas, but has also given me and The Pioneers a lot of creative freedom.

Coming from a fine art background, it’s amazing, it's been really a joy to work with people who put as much creative energy into their persona and acting, to see the kind of creativity that plays out in people's composure and their ability to really give the camera what it needs and wants. Where it's almost like Heidi or Snoop Dogg are directing me behind the camera because they’re just so good at responding to the camera. There's a mastery and a genius in that. So it’s this incredible back and forth to work with talent like that, where I’m being taught how to capture.

Architecture can be a frustrating field, because it’s partly creative and expressive, but at the same time you’re making what the client needs, so you’re dependent on the client to put you in a position where you can express yourself. Similarly, what The Pioneers is doing is very client dependent. What is your ideal client?

Someone who treats creatives with the utmost respect, who is kind and excited and cares about new ideas, but who acts more like a collaborator than a client. They sometimes defer to my direction, and I defer to their direction and what they need.

Your dad is a photographer and your brother runs a camera store, so you’ve always been around cameras. Your mom is a painter and you started as a painter. You went to a fine arts high school and then did a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. But then you studied philosophy, and then architecture. One of your major projects at Cornell was Working Frameworks, which was curatorial. By the end of your architecture degree, you were primarily focusing on music and computer programming. After that, you did an MFA in painting, and your thesis involved nonplanar canvases, that would be draped over a chair instead of framed. Then, teaching at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, you met your wife, Danita Nuchsawat-Appelbaum, who’s a stylist and fashion designer, and you started working with textiles. You had teachers and friends all throughout who wondered what this was all building up to, or if there was indeed a coherent through-line.

If there is a through-line, I would say it is multimedia, or you could say interdisciplinary practice. I don’t know if these terms are used as much anymore. Ranging all the way from thinking visually with text, to understanding the built environment, and sound in the built environment, as with my architecture thesis. Being able to draw comprehensively from culture in general.

I worked on fashion even at Cornell, painting on clothes and post-producing fashion images with my classmate and friend who is now a sculptor, Hugh Hayden.

When I started dating Danita, who at the time was fashion director for InStyle Thailand, she took me to fashion events for many of our first dates, and I was fascinated with the problem of documenting them photographically. It became a bottleneck where my entire thinking up to that point was squeezed through that question and then opened back up into everything I’m working on now, including several collaborations with Danita.

This personal history enables me, in the Pioneers, to communicate and work with a very broad range of clients, and to offer a lot of different possibilities for the directions that a collaboration can go in.

Painting people who saw the work that you were doing in high school and in your twenties would often think of the immediacy of the abstractions of Gerhard Richter. I’m wondering if, at this point, you think there is a Pioneers style, or if it’s more chameleonic in terms of whatever the client is interested in?

Richter is an interesting example or Pollock, fields or patterns that read as one singular field or object. I think a better example from postwar Germany would be Sigmar Polke. The layers of reading or representation that he’s able to achieve with imagery, where there’s an image behind an image behind an image, a layering of images as well as reading of the picture as a singular abstraction.

Alfred Hitchcock would draw out the key frames for a scene. That used to be more standard in the industry, to actually draw the frames for a scene. The experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage would literally paint on every single frame of a film. And then with my own upbringing during the eighties, MTV video and the video art generation, MTV was drawing extensively from people like Stan Brakhage.

Fast forward to The Pioneers: if you look closely at our videos and video editing, you’ll see a complexity of working with videos on a frame-by-frame basis. There have also been advances in digital interpolation technology such that you can set a parameter at this point in the timeline, set a parameter at this point in the timeline, set the rules for how a manipulation is happening through this time span, and then allow the computer to do the more intensive frame by frame processing for that interpolation.

At one extreme, in our video for the Heidi Klum L’Officiel project, there is this almost insanity of the frame by frame treatment for the full video, incredibly artful or painterly. At the other extreme, video for InStyle with Natalia Reyes and Diego Boneta where I pulled back from that into a more traditional cinematography and more traditional cuts, with fewer micro treatments frame by frame.

I can show these to a client and say that we can pull back from the experimental extreme and have a conventional treatment of a documentary while having creative flourishes within that, that brings it into a space like early Vice or i-D, some of their video productions that are both documentary and creative. An example is our short video documentary series for Petzel Gallery with the artist John Pylypchuk.

We also always have an interplay between complexity and simplicity. Many of our collaborators and clients are in the arts and culture, so the design aesthetic for The Pioneers is often to pull back on the design into an extreme simplicity that allows for our clients’ media to speak.

If you look at The Pioneers website, again, white space or negative space, or where we’re not designing, is almost more important than where we are designing, or you could say that where we decide to design becomes of the utmost importance. The amount of time spent on the exact right placement of a single line of typography. It is just as much design as our most layered, complex videos.

We were talking about how there are so many brands, like how the Yorkdale Mall in Toronto is so saturated that they cease to feel special, so there comes to be an ever increased importance of people feeling like they have a relationship or familiarity with a particular brand. Watching your videos, it seems like there is a kind of comic timing going on, that makes them more personal or personable. How much do you think about video editing in terms of humor, or is it just a result of your whole approach?

I think that would be a whole interview unto itself.… It would be hard for me to pinpoint the exact comical moments that happen in the final video. But there is humor in excess or extremes or choppiness, the way we’re excessively chopping up images. There is a rich interplay between still and moving imagery, a kind of pacing that approaches duration, polyrhythm, the meter in music.

Sometimes you shoot a model, a personality or a performer, and it’s almost like, in the edit, you can do whatever you want with them. You’re able to make them dance in a way that they don’t typically dance when you’re capturing. This is an expression of the joy that there needs to be in the making and in doing anything creative.

But, a lot of times, I will begin with a kind of joy or humor or joke, and that joke becomes something more serious by the time we arrive at the final edit.

One of the first things you ever said to me, on the day we first met, was that you needed to stop painting. Did you ever stop painting? Or do you still have, I know you resist this term, a personal fine art studio practice?

I was actually serious about not painting. But I never accomplished that. Since we met, it’s not like I’m counting, but it’s been pretty close to making a drawing or painting every day since then.

What I meant at the time was that I was looking for a more social practice, which was architecture. Viewers can be affected indirectly by looking at a picture, they can be inspired or take something else away from that encounter. But architecture is something that people actually have to live inside of. They may be actually controlled by the design, and some architects have been a bit megalomaniacal about the implications of this, wanting to control the way that people live. And if you think about the European modernist project, it’s like, that really happened. Same with housing projects in the U.S.—though some of the failures were not the architects’ fault.

But if you think of the successful instances, like Peter Zumthor’s more sensual and personal approach, and the possibilities for improvement inherent in the failures at different levels of scale, that’s what I was highly conscious of at the time. And it’s why I’m not solely a studio painter now. The possibilities for inspiration, however, are nevertheless real, and I can even gain inspiration from my own paintings the way that a museum or gallery viewer could.

I’m getting the sense that the intervention that The Pioneers is making in the creative agency space is dependent on your art and educational background, and specifically the way that you use this background in generating new projects. You’ve been generating new work out of a uniformly formatted archive that you’ve been working on since 2015, of all your mature work in a uniform format. What is this archive, and how does it generate new work in your personal studio and with clients through The Pioneers

Well, there is a digital archive and an analog archive.

The digital archive is currently around two million files, every single digital file that I’ve developed since around 1999 when I started using computers more intensely, broken down into four categories: image, text, sound, and still, where still is every frame from every video that I’ve produced.

The analog archive is broken into scrolls, studies, and grids. The scrolls are what they sound like, an ongoing series of long paintings that can be rolled up and transported. The studies are smaller sketches for the larger works. And the grids are photos, paintings, drawings, and collages that I’ve been working on since childhood, all chopped up to fit into a bunch of twenty by twenty inch boxes.

The grid as an organizing principle and form has been very important to me since studying architecture. You know the essay by Rosalind Krauss.

The aesthetic decree of modernism, the form that’s not found in nature.

Yeah, but that goes back to Roman times and earlier as a sense of order. And is still incredibly useful. The entire web front end system, the way that we receive information in the social media period, is based on grids. Just think of Instagram.

Analyzing the plan views of buildings by the major modernist architects, Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, you see consistent patterns that are based on a grid. But what astounded me was that, if you analyze more closely based on construction documents, these grids start to be shifted based on contingencies in the built environment, material circumstance, through time. So there would sometimes be one grid overlaid on top of another grid, and then you try to make sense of it.

This was brought to an extreme in my professors’ generation and with the postmodern architect Peter Eisenman, who, rather than having this ideal grid and trying to fit everything rigidly into it, seeing contingencies as blemishes, is embracing the contingencies and the palimpsest that happens over time, and allowing for multiple grids to exist within the same project in order to come up with a design pattern that is based on that.

This sense of the shifted grid informs the Pioneers series Set With Subject and Set Without Subject, where we build sets using my analog archive and prints generated from the digital archive as props and decorations in interiors, and then we shoot them with or without a model in them. These images then go back into the digital archive, like an ouroboros. This gives a sense of the approach that I use with collaborators where I have more creative liberty.

I would like to show you soon, Adam, the Set with Subject prints that I’m developing in a collaboration about sexuality and digital communications with Jacqueline Edwards, who studied psychology and human sexuality at Illinois Wesleyan and the Kinsey Institute. It’s the most ambitious work that I’ve been a part of, using grids and my digital archive.

Moving forward, I’m going to have studio openings in downtown L.A. that show the collaborative work that The Pioneers have been doing with other people, but also some of this more personal digital archive work, where I'm pulling from my contributions to The Pioneers projects, many of which I still own the license for.

Do you think that we as human beings have a higher purpose in our life on this earth?

My parents always taught me that Judaism is simply treating people well, being kind to people. That's the highest purpose that I can think of in life, being kind and trying one's best to have positive, meaningful experiences with other people. In the context of work, this happens when, as a creative lead, I can help give projects and positions to other people, create livelihood streams for people to work on amazing projects with The Pioneers.

Great collaboration also comes from this mutual respect. Where, again, it isn’t client versus creative. No: we break down this barrier, and have two collaborators, both of whom have incredible ideas and valid insight into a project that we're working together on. The more that we can do that and come to an understanding about being kind to one another in that space, the better the collaboration is going to be.