Ways of Curating Read online

  I once did some calculations about this, it was quite a while ago and I should probably do it again. I researched the price per square metre of a Milan apartment that was neither in the old town – too expensive – nor in the poor suburbs. I had to get my head around the fact that the nice reasonably bourgeois apartment would cost me six thousand Euros per square metre or three hundred thousand for an apartment of fifty square metres. I then subtracted the doors, windows and all elements that cut down on the apartment’s vertical space, mainly the walls that might host bookshelves, and that left me with only twenty-five square metres, so one vertical square metre would cost me twelve thousand Euros. I then researched the cheapest price for a six-shelf bookcase, which was five hundred Euros per square metre. I could probably store three hundred books per a six-shelf square metre, the cost of storing each book therefore would be about forty-two Euros, more than the price of the book itself. So each person who sent me a book should include a check for that amount.

  His story speaks volumes about the fact that so many archives are still homeless.

  There is another problem with archives. As the late architect Cedric Price pointed out, the twentieth century entertained an obsessive desire for architectural and artistic permanence, based around structures that could be preserved forever. The twenty-first century, I believe, will increasingly question this fetishization of the object. The architectural and artistic contributions that are going to endure are not only the ones with a built physical form. It is not only a question of objects but a question of ideas, and of repositories of ideas and scores.

  In a conversation we had some years ago, Doris Lessing questioned the future of museums. It’s not that she was fundamentally opposed to them; rather, she worried that their prioritization of material objects from the past might not be enough to convey functional meaning to tomorrow’s generations. Her 1999 novel, Mara and Dann, is premised on the aftermath of an ice age thousands of years into the future that has eradicated all life in the northern hemisphere. The protagonists, long since confined to the other side of the globe, embark upon a journey into this now desolate terrain but they are at a loss to understand its remnants; they have no grounding in its culture and artefacts. This is Lessing’s fictional portrayal of her belief that ‘our entire culture is extremely fragile’ – the more dependent it becomes on increasingly complex devices, the more susceptible it is to a sudden collapse. In light of this, Lessing urges us to pause and to reconsider the capacity of our language and cultural systems to be meaningful to those beyond our immediate public.

  Since 1990 I have gathered information on an unusual species of art: unrealized projects. Unlike unrealized models and projects submitted for architectural competitions, which are frequently published, such endeavours in the visual arts – that are planned but not carried out – ordinarily remain unnoticed or little known. But these roads not taken are a reservoir of artistic ideas: forgotten projects, directly or indirectly censored projects, misunderstood projects, oppressed projects, lost projects, unrealizable projects.

  There are many reasons why the projects about which I gathered information have not been executed. Public commissions are the most common type, and they usually entail postponement, censorship or rejection by the government agency in charge of the project. There are also desk-drawer projects developed by artists without reference to a particular commission, many planned but then forgotten or even rejected by the artists themselves. As the philosopher Gilles Deleuze argued, each process of actualization is surrounded by a constantly thickening fog of virtual possibilities. Missed opportunities and failed projects also fall into this category. Unsuccessful works tend to remain totally unknown, as success is a more popular topic of discussion than failure.

  A few examples. Gerhard Richter wanted to exhibit a readymade object: ‘A motor-driven clown doll, about 1.5 meters tall, which stood up and then collapsed into itself.’ Louise Bourgeois wanted to build a small amphitheatre. Nancy Spero created billboards for display in New York City but they went unrealized due to censorship. Pierre Huyghe wanted to execute a project to be called ‘The Family Film Series’. He planned to reprogramme an abandoned small-town cinema to show the residents’ home movies continuously. As he explained, he was ‘doing that in a small city, so that everybody would show up in each other’s films, the neighbor in the background, a co-presence and a collective auto-portrait of a town’. Eventually, Guy Tortosa and I edited a few hundred unrealized projects into an exhibition in the form of a book called Unbuilt Roads.

  Printed Exhibitions

  The idea of the book as an exhibition brings us to the curators Lucy Lippard and Seth Siegelaub. During my first trip to New York, in the late 1980s, I acquired several books by and about Lippard and Siegelaub. Through them, I came across the idea that exhibitions can be immaterial, and be held outside museums and exhibition spaces. In the 1960s, Lippard, at the time a librarian and archivist, was living in New York City with a community of artists and friends, like Robert Barry and Sol Lewitt, who were experimenting with new forms of art production. They and others of their generation thought visual art could move beyond objects, typically paintings or sculptures, and could be found – especially for Lippard – in the social life of cities and communities.

  In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lippard organized what have come to be known as her ‘numbers’ shows, exhibitions that took the total population of the city in which they were shown as their title. With the numbers shows, Lippard hoped to ‘democratize’ art in some way, and transform the activity of art-making into something experienced daily by the inhabitants of the cities where she staged her shows, taking artworks outside of the museum system, the loci of privileged taste and power, into the streets and parks and fields. These were endeavours that sought to expand the site of art beyond the constrictive frame of the museum, encompassing works that were installed in a fifty-mile radius around a given city. The first of these shows, 557,087, was set up in Seattle in 1969. Due to budget limitations, Lippard and a team of helpers executed most of the works themselves, according to instructions from the artists – but this gesture was in keeping with the ideas behind the works, during a time when there was a significant shift towards dematerialized art practices.

  The 557,087 show travelled to Vancouver and became 955,000. The catalogues for both shows took the form of a randomly organized stack of index cards – one card for each of the artists, but also cards with aphorisms, lists and quotes. The idea was that the reader could choose the order in which to read them, just as he or she could choose how to navigate the unruly size of the exhibition.

  Lippard has said of her numbers shows, ‘I have in mind the arguments Robert Smithson and I had on finity versus infinity (as though you could argue about such a thing): he was for finity; I was, idealistically, for infinity.’ Lippard’s work attempted to imagine and then realize ways of expanding the frame of art beyond the reaches of the museum and art world. One of the earliest exhibition projects she planned, in 1968, was an attempt to find alternative circuits or modes of distribution for art with a ‘suitcase exhibition’ in Latin America. ‘I was trying to do shows that would be so dematerialized they could be packed in a suitcase and taken by one artist to another country,’ she later commented, ‘then another artist would take it to another country, and so on, so artists themselves would be hanging these shows and taking them around and networking. We would bypass the museum structure.’

  Always a political exhibition-maker, Lippard continued to expand her practice away from the metropolitan centres of the art world. She now lives in a village in New Mexico with a population of 265, where she writes community newsletters and is involved in land use, planning and watershed politics. She writes about local artists for catalogues, and has been working on a number of books that chart the archaeology and history of ancient Pueblo sites and ruins of the area. Lippard has also written a study of the American landscape, arguing that a single place or locality is underpinned by m
ultivalent meanings, emphasizing the need to work against the homogenization of our cultural spaces and the responsibility we have for valuing their underlying historical meanings and uses.

  Another exhibition-maker investigating the meaning of archives was the inventive Seth Siegelaub. A key word of Siegelaub’s practice in the 1960s was ‘demystification’: the idea that an exhibition-maker should attempt to understand and be conscious of the way his or her actions played a part in the production of meaning within a given exhibition. If the power of such an individual to choose artists and works often operates invisibly, Siegelaub and Lippard nevertheless tried to demystify this process – that is to say, take responsibility for and make evident to the viewer the effect of decisions they had taken that imparted meaning to their exhibitions.

  In 1964, Siegelaub opened his own gallery in New York, Seth Siegelaub Contemporary Art, but he soon found that the pressure of putting on eight to ten shows a year as well as running a permanent space meant that there was little time for looser forms of thought and play. Two years later he closed the gallery and became a private dealer allied closely to a group of Conceptual artists including Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner. He worked with them to devise exhibition structures that would reflect the nature of their work, and found that the gallery context was not necessarily the ideal way of showing it.

  In 1968, for the so-called ‘Xerox book’ project, a group exhibition in book form, Siegelaub came up with specific requirements for each of the seven artists involved to work within: they were asked to make a 25-page work on 8½ x 11-inch paper to be photocopied and printed. The intention was that by standardizing the conditions of exhibition and production, the differences between each artist’s project would be more pronounced and that it would be specifically in those differences that the meanings of the works would lie. Furthermore, this project tackled the problem of representation via the traditional means of reproduction (e.g. photography) of works of art in books: because in this case the original work was in fact a reproduction in itself (a photocopy), its integrity as art was not compromised when it was reprinted and mass-distributed in the book.

  With this and other projects, Siegelaub used mass-media formats in order to set up new kinds of encounters: the viewer did not necessarily need to make a journey, pilgrim-like, to the sacred gallery space. Works were available to audiences across great geographical distances, in reproducible forms. An intriguing side effect of this process was that publicity material for an exhibition of Conceptual art took on the status of art proper, defined by Siegelaub as ‘primary information’ about the works. His advertisement for Douglas Huebler’s November 1968 exhibition both documented the show and became a material part of it, synonymous with the art.

  In 1970, Siegelaub organized another group exhibition in print, this time for the journal Studio International. He asked six art critics (David Antin, Charles Harrison, Lucy Lippard, Michel Claura, Germano Celant and Hans Strelow) to each edit an eight-page section. He thereby took himself out of the process of selection, which is traditionally the domain of the curator, paradoxically as a way of making the role of the curator more visible and more aware of his part in the exhibition process.

  At the same time Siegelaub, like Lippard, was also becoming politically active and in 1971 he worked with Bob Projansky to produce The Artist’s Contract (The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement). The intent of this project was to shift the art world’s power relations more in favour of the artists themselves by giving them greater control over their work once it left their studio.

  Infinite Conversations

  Alighiero Boetti died in 1994. I was affected by his death as the immense personal loss of a mentor, but also as the loss to the public of an encouraging, stimulating presence. As an artist, he had left behind many works, but he himself as a speaking subject was forever gone. I immediately regretted that all the conversations we had had were suddenly no more, that there was no record of his unique way of expressing himself, his ways of making connections. Almost everything I had done was born out of conversations, of which I had no trace, despite their being the core of all my activity. And so I decided to start systematically making recordings.

  When I was a student, I read several very long conversations that have stayed with me ever since. One was between Pierre Cabanne and Marcel Duchamp; another was between David Sylvester and Francis Bacon; a third, between Brassaï and Pablo Picasso. I also read many of the interviews with writers in the Paris Review. These three books of interviews, somehow, brought me closer to art – they were like oxygen, and were the first time that the idea of a conversation with an artist as a medium started to intrigue me. They also sparked an interest in the idea of sustained conversations – of conversations recorded over a period of time, perhaps over the course of many years; the Cabanne–Duchamp interviews took place over three long sessions, for example. Sylvester’s book of interviews with Francis Bacon was quite popular when I was a kid. I got a copy of this book when I was about fourteen and I thought it was actually really exciting that an art critic would talk to an artist again and again and create this unbelievably intense dialogue. These two books showed me the value of a long-term conversation series. If you sit down again and again in discussion with someone, things start to happen and be said that may be interesting for someone to read about.

  Around 1993, when I began to collaborate with the museum in progress in Vienna, I would conduct conversations in television studios with artists – such as Vito Acconci and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. However, I soon found it more interesting to conduct conversations in a more informal setting, like over a coffee or in a taxi, and I thought it would be interesting to find a way to record the conversations without dragging people into a recording studio. From that moment onwards I did audio recordings, and then in the mid-1990s digital cameras came onto the market and I used them for about ten years. They have become a research method and the basis for my curatorial practice. I now have an archive of 2,000 filmed conversations, most of which I have only used as text transcriptions, and not yet presented as video. I haven’t completely figured out yet what to use. Most get transcribed.

  The more conversations I recorded and filmed, the more important they became to my curatorial practice. I realized these conversations functioned alongside my other work in a role not unlike the concept of crop rotation in agriculture. Curating large shows can be an all-encompassing and fatiguing task, with the pressure building in the lead-up to an unmissable deadline. That can lead to fatigue. Recording several unrelated conversations every week keeps me from burning out. And because they have no particular deadline, they’re a way of liberating time. Producing exhibitions represents the current crop of a curator’s practice, while writing books is equivalent to preserving the harvest of the past. Conversations, meanwhile, are obviously archival, but they are also a form of creating fertile soil for future projects. For this reason, I began to ask everyone I interviewed a very future-oriented question: what is your unrealized project, your dream? The answers to this have spurred many new initiatives: from these conversations have come many new projects, in the form of both exhibitions and books.

  At the same time, conversations are a way of archiving or preserving the past. One of the most important concepts underpinning my conversation practice came from the late historian Eric Hobsbawm, whom I interviewed several times starting in 2006. He spoke about history as a ‘protest against forgetting’. But recollection is a zone of contact between past, present and future. Memory is not a simple record of events but a dynamic process that always transforms what it dredges up from its depths, and the conversation has become my way to instigate such a process.

  A further development occurred one day when I was with the artist Rosemarie Trockel in her studio in Cologne. Rosemarie told me she knew of my conversation project: ‘You should really focus,’ she said, ‘on people whose eyes have seen the whole century! You should interview them a
ll, you know, all the great artists and architects.’ That day, Rosemarie and I made a list of who some of these ninety- to one-hundred-year-old people might be, including the novelist Nathalie Sarraute, who was still alive then, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur and the architect Oscar Niemeyer. Ever since, I have continued to add to the list quite systematically. Often it is possible to get a picture of historical figures who we don’t realize are still linked directly to the living present. I interviewed Pierre Klossowski, who had been a friend of both Walter Benjamin and Georges Bataille. Through such conversations I have learned more about some cultural figures from the earlier twentieth century, as told by those with first-hand knowledge of the protagonists.

  The conversation project is very incomplete, and there are many different branches – there’s no master plan, it happens little by little. I also conducted conversations in which I would go with an artist to interview his or her mentor. For example, I started to go with Rem Koolhaas to see all the architects who had inspired him as a student: O. M. Ungers, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and Philip Johnson. And as I began to do this, I started to realize that my own profession had its own pioneering figures whose valuable experience was in danger of being lost.

  Curating, after all, produces ephemeral constellations with their own limited career span. There’s relatively little literature on exhibitions, and there is also an extraordinary amnesia about exhibition history. When I started as a curator, we had to gather together various documents; there were no books, not even on figures as seminal as Alexander Dorner. Because of this extreme lack of documentation relating to exhibitions, I decided it was urgent to start recording an oral history. Johannes Cladders and Harald Szeemann talked a lot about their friend Willem Sandberg when he was director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. I went to see Anne d’Harnoncourt, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She and Walter Hopps both discussed at length early pioneers in American curating.