Ways of Curating Read online

  Soon after, as part of the Migrateurs series, the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija took as his area of interest the line between observation and participation. Tiravanija installed a kitchenette, in which anyone could make themselves tea or coffee, in the stairwell between the historic collections and the contemporary galleries. People became used to its presence, though without necessarily realizing that it was an artwork, leading to an interesting phenomenon: only at the moment of the work’s removal did it become noticed. Many of the Migrateurs projects similarly verged on invisibility.

  Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who influenced many artists of my generation, changed the relationship between galleries and museums and their visitors. When I invited him to participate in Migrateurs, he decided not to install work in the visited portion of the museum at all. Instead, he was inspired by the contextual interventions of earlier artists like Michael Asher, whose works often responded to the history of the particular context for which they were produced. Gonzalez-Torres, in turn, was interested in infiltrating all the social spaces of the museum. He hung a billboard at the museum’s entrance, which he had also done at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He also bought vases and flowers from nearby markets and placed bouquets in the museum’s offices. Visitors would not see this work, since they did not normally have access to the office areas. Only the staff experienced this change to the museum environment.6

  While I was working for Pagé and König, I met the late Josef Ortner and Kathrin Messner, who in Vienna had founded the museum in progress, which was a mobile platform for exhibitions in print, on television, billboards or the Internet. They would have artists become involved in their chosen art form and create an exhibition within mass media. They had established a cooperation with the Ministry for Education and Culture and also with the daily Austrian newspaper Der Standard, which provided space in its publication for artists on a regular basis.

  I had read about the museum in progress and found it fascinating, an initiative that channelled many of Alexander Dorner’s ideas. It also echoed my own desire to create exhibitions in unexpected places. Ortner and Messner, however, were using the more popular sites of ‘new media’: subways, the airwaves, magazines – networks of urban and global circulation.

  We discussed their ideas further, and in 1993 I agreed to begin curating a series of projects for the museum in progress. For one of our first projects I fulfilled a long-held desire by helping Alighiero Boetti produce his piece for Austrian Airlines. Together with Kasper König, we also invited Ed Ruscha to create two enormous pictures, which were printed in large panels with the help of computer-aided design. These pictures, which were ten by fifty metres, adorned the outside of the Vienna Kunsthalle during the Broken Mirror show. The work questioned the easy assignment of authenticity to painted works and artificiality to mechanically reproduced works, which was a theme of the museum of progress. It was appropriate that the pictures were by Ruscha, one of the first important conceptual artists in America, who had started in graphic design and had been a billboard painter in California.

  Félix Fénéon and the Hotel Carlton Palace

  During my work in Paris, I discovered Joan Halperin’s fascinating biography of the French critic, editor, collector and anarchist Félix Fénéon, who became another inspiration to me. Fénéon began his professional career as a clerk. Born in 1861 in Turin, he was raised in Burgundy during a period of political turmoil and cynicism, and developed anarchist-communist views from a young age – at age twelve he started the Societé de la mort facile (the ‘Society for Those Willing to Die’). As a student, he won a competitive exam that got him a job in Paris’s War Office. He worked there for thirteen years, eventually becoming head clerk. In his spare time, Fénéon created an influential ‘little magazine’ called La Libre Revue (The Free Review). He served as its editor and critic, and he also published the work of the Symbolist poets and pioneers of experimental poetry, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarmé. For Fénéon, literature and visual art were inseparably interwoven, and he is credited with developing a new, modern style of interpreting paintings that ‘read’ them as texts.

  Fénéon was a bridge between and a crucial ally of avant-garde poets and artists. This depended in small part on his dandyish personal charisma – according to Mallarmé, ‘there was no one who didn’t enjoy meeting him’. While writing on art and becoming an integral part of the Symbolist movement, Fénéon came into close contact with the painter Georges Seurat. He later noted, ‘The art of Seurat was revealed to me by “A Swim (Asnières)”. Though no trace of my reaction remains, I realized completely the importance of this tableau: the body of work that was its logical consequence followed without my joy being colored by the pigment of surprise.’ Thereafter, Fénéon worked to bring Seurat to the attention of a wider public.

  A figure with many secretive qualities, Fénéon pursued most of his endeavours behind the scenes, perhaps most notoriously his anarchist political activities. In 1894 he was widely suspected of bombing the restaurant Foyot in Paris, a destination for senators and the wealthy. The bombing killed no one, and he was acquitted in the ensuing trial, but much anecdotal evidence points to him, including the detonator caps that police found at his office. But Fénéon was enigmatic even beyond politics. The founder of a dozen small magazines, editor of the Revue Blanche and the Revue Indépendante, the first French publisher of James Joyce, and translator of Jane Austen, he never produced an autobiography. Neither did he write about himself in his essays, which he often signed with pseudonyms, preferring to remain in the shadows. A typical writing project was the set of three-line news items, Les Brèves, which he wrote anonymously in 1906 for the Paris newspaper Le Matin.7

  After 1910, Fénéon sold paintings for the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, promoting the work of many of the same artists he had earlier championed in his criticism. He was the son of a travelling salesman, and his journey through life was peripatetic, reflecting his many identities and professions. Fénéon was also indifferent to personal prestige, rarely if ever playing a public role, despite curating several important exhibitions. That indifference, and his non-linear, discontinuous biography, meant that the influence he exerted over fin de siècle artistic culture, though attested to by many, is difficult to trace. We owe much to the historian Halperin, who recovered the fragments for her biography. In his various initiatives Fénéon, to those around him, always seemed to function as a catalyst, a chemical term he used to describe the task of the curator. In history, as in chemistry, the catalyst disappears.

  One passage in Halperin’s book on Fénéon directly influenced my work. It described a small painting sent to him by Seurat, Modèle debout, de face. Fénéon said that it ‘would glorify the noblest museums’, and the picture became his most treasured possession. He made a small velvet case for it and for two other canvases from the same series, Modèle assis and Modèle assis, dos. He bought them sometime after Seurat’s death in 1891, and took them with him each time he left Paris – in the inside pocket of his waistcoat. Their ‘style, of a dignity and serenity and of an indescribable distinction, filled the most pedestrian hotel room with life’. The image of Fénéon’s mobile, private exhibition of Seurat in a hotel room became the inspiration for one of my earliest exhibitions in Paris, held in a room at the Hotel Carlton Palace.

  This show followed an evolutionary principle: in contrast to a static exhibition, which does not change after the opening, new works were constantly added and occasionally the artists exchanged the items they had first exhibited for other ones. In the beginning, my hotel room was empty, but little by little works began to accumulate. At first I had to sleep with Annette Messager’s stuffed animals. Gloria Friedman, Bertrand Lavier and Raymond Hains all stayed there, among a few permanent residents, some of whom had lived in the hotel for thirty years.

  There was also a group show in the wardrobe: the visitor was invited to try on the clothes. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster transformed the bathroom into a yellow room. I also discovere
d that On Kawara had stayed in the hotel in the mid-1960s, and he had made drawings there, which I was able to borrow and display in the show. Hans-Peter Feldmann contributed a suitcase filled with his personal archive of photographs, and Christian Boltanski sent a photo album. A claustrophobic and soundless videotape by the Israeli sculptor Absalon ran continuously on the TV. Fischli and Weiss sent a cassette for me to play on a loop containing a recording from the radio, which would confuse September visitors with its out-of-date weather reports of a heatwave in July.

  Andreas Slominski sent instructions by fax for me to carry out every day, as a sort of punishment for the curator. Some of the instructions were very open-ended, which allowed for, or even encouraged, great interpretive freedom. On the first day, the instruction read simply ‘Kikeriki’, which is German for ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’. On the second day it was ‘Lie (change artists’ names)’, which I interpreted by swapping the artists’ labels in the exhibition. On day seven, I had to put the cork from a bottle of German sekt sparkling wine in the pocket of my Sunday trousers: ‘Sektkorken in Sonntagshosentaschen’. Day eight was particularly difficult: I had to clean the person who was cleaning the room. (Slominski had worked at a home for the elderly during his military service, where part of his duties included bathing them.) On day twelve, I had to throw a bucket of water out of the window every hour.

  On day twenty, I had to let all the air out of a football in order to refresh the room and then throw it out of the window. The next day, I had to retrieve the ball. On day twenty-two, the instructions read ‘leaf guests for a leaf hotel’, which referred to a project Slominski had been working on that called for transposing the leaves at the bottom of a tree to another tree, which no one would suspect. The next day, continuing the obscurity, the instructions simply read, ‘an incomprehensible idea’. Day thirty called for a freshly painted wall, which was very complicated since I had to paint it in the morning and some visitors got paint on their clothes. One woman even threatened to sue me for damaging her coat; this was a trap set by Slominski. Since the show changed daily, people would return again and again, and some even came to see what he had asked me to do. The actions were never formally announced, but I would explain to people who asked that they were seeing an Andreas Slominski piece. Some even expressed concern over how I was executing the instructions – in a way, Slominski’s work turns the tables by keeping the curator occupied in the installation at all times. From 22 August until 22 September, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., I was the landlord, curator, exhibition guardian and guide. As Harald Szeemann told me on a walk in Appenzell: ‘The curator has to be flexible. Sometimes he is the servant, sometimes the assistant, sometimes he gives artists ideas of how to present their work; in group shows he’s the coordinator, in thematic shows, the inventor.’8

  Invisible Cities

  One rainy Wednesday after finishing the Hotel Carlton Palace show, I got a phone call from Peter Fischli and David Weiss. This time it didn’t have to do with transporting a snowman dummy, but with an idea they had for me to follow up my shows in the kitchen and the hotel. They said, ‘There is a place you should know’, and in my ongoing exploration of the boundaries between museums and everyday life, an irresistible project presented itself. It turned out to be the Stadtentwasserung, Zurich’s sewage museum. They had discovered it while they were shooting a film in the sewers of Zurich and had to collaborate with the city’s sewage administration.

  The sewage museum recounts the history of toilets from the Middle Ages to the present – they mount toilets on pedestals without reference to Duchamp’s urinal. Intrigued by the space – what could be more relevant to the history of our cultural distinctions between public and private? – I approached the municipal government of Zurich about mounting an exhibition there. The municipality knew neither the artists nor me, so I explained the project from the beginning, and related it to my other exhibitions in unusual spaces – an interesting experience in its own right. Luckily, they agreed to collaborate with us and we opened the show in early 1994.

  Cloaca Maxima, as the resulting exhibition was called, addressed themes that affect everyone directly. There were many connections to the permanent collection of the Stadtentwasserung itself, though the point of departure was the video by Fischli and Weiss, which consisted of real-time photographs from observation cameras in the sewers. According to Dominique Laporte’s A History of Shit (1978), waste in Western societies has been gradually domesticated and, hence, banned from public view, the high point being the nineteenth-century hygienist movement. Laporte theorizes that the absolute division between the economy (as the site of filth) and the state (as the site of purity, with an all-filtering sewer) separated the private still further from the public, thereby reinforcing their borders.

  Art, by contrast, situates itself within transitions and passages; it opens up opportunities for the public incursions into the private and vice versa. Excrement is freed of its negative connotations by being employed discursively. Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista (small sealed cans, each said to contain 30 grams of the artist’s shit) plays with exactly this kind of alchemical transformation – reinforced by the fact that the price per can was comparable to the price for 30 grams of gold.

  John Miller produced scatological images and reliefs; Nancy Spero’s drawings of bombs dropping depicted warplanes and helicopters as man-eating beasts, defecating on the world. Otto Muhl proposed a defecation altar that ironically combined Duchamp’s urinal and Manzoni’s cans. Gerhard Richter sent a photograph of his painting of a toilet paper roll.

  The Stadtentwasserung is a small, quiet museum. Normally, only ten to twenty people a month visit, but with our exhibition it suddenly gained public attention. This led to a mixture of different audiences: visitors to the sewage museum saw contemporary art while the rather large art audience discovered this ‘surreal’ location. For the opening, the employees of the sewage institution with their uniforms and a sewage van fetched the artists from the airport, drove them from the airport to the museum and also to the dinner after the opening. These were moments of creative intermingling, not just of art and life, but of art in a museum with a very different – and yet deeply related – function.

  London Calling

  Ringing the bell at Gilbert and George’s house at number 12, Fournier Street in East London, is always a magical experience. On my first visit to their house, as a teenager, they likened the evolution of their career to a pilgrimage, telling me that John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was the model of their joie de vivre – of their desire continually, and uncompromisingly, to discover life anew. Because the penultimate destination of their pilgrimage remains unknown, it is predicated upon but one binding rule: the persistent dreaming of what Gilbert called ‘something better or more interesting. The dreaming world is something extraordinary in art. Ultimately, it’s why artists are always able to do something more. I really believe this.’ The idea of art as a pilgrimage, and of making pilgrimages to art, has stayed with me ever since.

  Gilbert and George’s work Waking (1984) is composed of a grid of 132 panels; it is among the duo’s earliest large-scale wall-mounted pieces that have today become emblematic of their oeuvre. Waking is derived from black and white photographs of the artists and some of the male models they have been photographing near their studio on London’s Fournier Street for decades. (The same model seldom appears twice in their work.) Repeated images of the artists, each appearing three times at different scales, occupy the centre of the grid and are flanked on either side by images of the models in various poses. In the background are eleven disembodied heads, enlarged to an imposing scale and bearing a range of expressions.

  Waking still seems amazingly fresh – timeless, even. I asked the artists about this, and they suggested that it is due to the methodology they apply to picking their models:

  Gilbert: It’s funny that you mention the models, because Harpers and Queen came to photograph us and wanted to know why all the models in our pictures
look so up-to-date. They don’t look dressed up in an old-fashioned way; they look completely like they could be now, very trendy.

  George: We never wanted to use a model who had a social sense … where you would say, ‘Oh yes, this is a bank manager’s son,’ or, ‘This is a serious student.’ We always wanted to use our models like we use flowers: flowers for beauty, and people for humanity (in the broadest sense). It’s a delicate, strange thing, that.

  Gilbert: I think we would call them ‘classless’.

  Characteristically, the images within Waking have been abstracted from their likeness by the application of a wash of red, blue, white, green and yellow that suggests a Mondrian-inspired heritage. But unlike, say, De Stijl’s pursuit of utopian geometries, or Piet Mondrian’s particular preoccupation with emptying theosophical spirituality into form, Gilbert and George appropriated the loaded symbolism of stained-glass windows to make a picture that is at once ironic, ambiguous and powerful.