Ways of Curating Page 6
Most of curatorial history is oral history; it’s very much a story that can only be told because it’s not yet been written. The curators I interviewed were themselves very familiar with the history of what came before them. Szeemann was totally into Sandberg, and Sandberg was completely familiar with Alexander Dorner. Through this ongoing series of interviews, I discovered some of the figures who continue to inspire my practice.
Pioneers
Over the years, I have come across a number of key practitioners in the development of exhibitions. Many of these figures have been already mentioned in this book. Though what follows is a subjective and by no means comprehensive list, these are some of the pioneers I have come across, fragments from the past that have become a toolbox for me.
Harry Graf Kessler
Harry Graf Kessler was a flamboyant and aristocratic figure who played a major role in promoting modern art as a patron, writer, publisher, museologist, politician and museum director. His parents were a famously beautiful Irish countess and a banker from Hamburg, and it was rumoured that he was secretly the son of the German Kaiser. Like the critic Félix Fénéon, Kessler pursued mobile strategies of display and mediation. A junction-maker between artists, architects and writers, he organized salons and also used exhibitions to put the art he exhibited into a larger social and political context, as well as pursuing publishing activities. Peripatetic from childhood, Kessler was born in France in 1868 and grew up living in France, England and Germany. He attended boarding school in England and military school in Germany, before studying law, philosophy and art at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig.
Kessler lived in Berlin in 1893, working on a literary journal, PAN, that published the likes of Nietzsche and Verlaine, as well as illustrations and design by visual artists. In 1903 he became the director of the Weimar Museum of Arts and Crafts. While there Kessler began to pursue publishing more seriously, founding the Cranach Press and issuing books devoted to typography and design. In a typical multidisciplinary project in 1913, he commissioned the theatre reformer Edward Gordon Craig to make woodcuts for a Cranach edition of Hamlet, resulting in one of the great works of twentieth-century printing. Kessler also developed new exhibition concepts for the Weimar Museum. Always a defender of newer forms of art, he was credited with helping to introduce French Impressionism to Germany. He also collaborated on ballets for Sergei Diaghilev, working with Richard Strauss.
Kessler worked on a project for a new kind of theatre that he called the Mustertheatre, again with Gordon Craig. The son of the famous Shakespearean actress Ellen Terry, Gordon Craig was the guiding force behind the New Stagecraft movement, in which the theatre was seen as a unified art form. Kessler and Gordon Craig planned to institute this vision of a new theatre in collaboration with the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde, whom they asked to design the building. In the end, plans for the theatre failed, but it was a typical project of Kessler’s: he created an in-between situation that linked art, design and architecture, bringing people into a dialogue.
The final phase of Kessler’s career moved beyond art: after the First World War he turned his attention to politics. He kept up his dizzying pace of activity in his new role, and became an outspoken pacifist who argued against blind nationalism and anti-Semitism. With Walther Rathenau, the Weimar Republic’s half-Jewish foreign minister, he helped draft the peace treaty between Germany and Russia. After Rathenau was murdered in 1922, Kessler wrote his biography. He then became a diplomat in the Weimar Republic, serving as the first ambassador to the newly independent Poland.
Kessler often said that he felt he was a member of one great European community. He felt a strong impulse to get to know everyone who meant something from all walks of life, and he befriended many of the significant cultural and political figures of his time, from Albert Einstein to Auguste Rodin. W. H. Auden remarked that Kessler was probably the most cosmopolitan man who had ever lived. Kessler’s practice was to meet a steady stream of culturally significant figures from all fields of activity, and link them to each other, like a global salonière. This is one of his great legacies.
Kessler also kept a journal for fifty-six years. Nine volumes of his diaries were published: with them Kessler has become a lens through which the first half of the twentieth century comes into focus. Like a seismograph, his diaries recorded the growing social and political crisis that led to the First World War, as well as the Impressionist and post-Impressionist movements in Paris. At the core of the diaries lie his dialogues with the world’s leading artists, poets, writers and intellectuals – according to Laird Easton, the editor of the latest published volume, more than ten thousand names figure in them. Kessler lived and wrote the memoirs of his times. He developed a major aspect of the curator’s practice – to bring together different worlds – and applied it to fields beyond.
Alexander Dorner
While studying at university in St. Gallen, I was guided by a book I had found in a second-hand bookshop called The Way Beyond ‘Art’, by Alexander Dorner. It became the most influential book on the potential of museums that I have read. Born in 1893, Dorner was director of the Hannover Museum from 1925 to 1937, the so-called ‘laboratory years’ of exhibition design. He defined the museum as an energy plant, a Kraftwerk, and he invited artists to develop new and dynamic displays for what he called the ‘museum on the move’.
The avant-gardes of the early twentieth century had shifted the conventions of art away from the idea of the Romantic genius creating works in solitude – they understood that, as Duchamp said, the viewer does half of the work. Dorner brought this notion of art as a two-way participatory interaction into the museum and applied it to his methodologies of display. He asked artists themselves to design experimental new forms of display, including Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, Friedrich Kiesler, El Lissitzky, László Moholy-Nagy and others.
In 1927, Dorner invited El Lissitzky to make a room for the museum. Lissitzky responded with the Kabinett der Abstrakten (Abstract Cabinet), in which works in the collection could be moved around on sliding panels by the visitors – effectively, visitors could curate their own show. Dorner also commissioned Moholy-Nagy to design a room that would represent the present in art and design, a Room of Our Time. Moholy-Nagy responded by creating a plan for a room that incorporated photography, film, design, images of the latest architecture, slides of new theatre techniques, and a ‘Light Machine’ designed by Moholy-Nagy himself, which projected abstract patterns onto the walls. Given the opportunity by Dorner, artists and designers were able to incorporate participation and interactivity not only into singular artworks, but into exhibition design as well.
Dorner had rethought the museum as an institution in a state of permanent transformation. He advocated a concept of art history that allowed for gaps, reversals and strange collisions – as the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey wrote in the foreword to Dorner’s book, in his museum we are ‘amidst a dynamic centre of profound transformations’. The museum, for Dorner, is not just a building but an oscillation between object and process: ‘the processual idea has penetrated our system of certainties,’ he writes. Museums should have multiple identities, he felt – they should stay on the move. Contrary to the stolid authoritarian role they are so often thought to play, museums should be risk-taking pioneers: they should act and not wait, they should be elastic in terms of display and in terms of physical presence, and they should be a locus for crossings between art and life.
Classic, traditional exhibitions emphasize order and stability. But in everyday life we see fluctuations and instability, a plethora of choices and limited predictability. As Dorner writes, ‘We cannot understand the forces which are effective in the visual production of today if we don’t examine other fields of life.’ In the sciences, non-equilibrium physics has developed similar notions of ‘unstable systems’ and the dynamics of ‘unstable environments’.
While operating in the pseudo-neutral spaces dating from the nineteenth century th
at were prevalent at the time of his directorship in Hannover, Dorner managed to define the museum’s functions in ways that are still relevant today. For Dorner, the museum was ultimately a laboratory. His book was my template, my toolbox, as I approached curating within an institution.
Hugo von Tschudi
Soon after being influenced by the example of Dorner and Kessler, I discovered the work of the museum curator and art historian Hugo von Tschudi, who also had roots in the eastern part of Switzerland. Born in Austria in 1851 and raised in Switzerland, Tschudi was at the forefront of the development of exhibitions as an international movement that could float free of the nationalistic context of the academies. Like so many figures in the history of exhibition-making, his biography is non-linear: he studied law in Vienna before devoting himself to curating within museums. In that role, he was to influence major museum collections decisively, moving them away from a narrowly national focus and towards acquiring the best cross section of works available to them.
In 1896, Tschudi became the director of Berlin’s National Gallery, where he immediately purchased a set of new international paintings, including Manet’s In the Conservatory (1879). This was the first time a painting by Manet had been bought by a museum; Tschudi’s pioneering decision marked a turning point in the acceptance of what came to be known as ‘modern art’. Celebrated for his eclectic yet prescient aesthetic judgements, Tschudi also acquired paintings by Bonnard, Monet, Degas and Cézanne. It’s hard to remember today, when Impressionist painting plays a sanctified role in our culture, that these artists were seen as scandalously inappropriate in a museum collection. By the late nineteenth century the museum collection was already understood as an allegory for national greatness. Not only was Tschudi opening up the collection to artists of other nations, he was also proposing that a new and widely distrusted form of art, modernism, be accepted into the canon. It was a double affront to accepted good taste.
Protests over ‘degenerate’ modern art were common in the pre–First World War Germany in which Tschudi worked. A group of 140 German artists put their signatures to a document objecting to the importation of works by foreign artists. By this point they had come to accept the importance of Manet, but Van Gogh, Picasso and Matisse remained inadmissible in their view. Such scenes of protest seem laughable today. But these protests also revealed and further emphasized the importance of the museum and its curator: rather than as an individual with a particular aesthetic, Tschudi was attacked as the steward of a nation’s understanding of what is valuable. He was fired from Berlin’s National Gallery in 1908 by the emperor, who claimed his management of the budget had been inappropriate. Tschudi’s insistence on globalizing national collections, however, was probably also to blame.
Although he championed the latest developments in art, Tschudi did not neglect historical painting. He believed there was a beneficial relationship between Manet and masters such as Goya and Velázquez. In his view, the Impressionists were working on an aspect of painting that the Old Masters had not yet tackled: the horizontal picture plane. Where older epochs in European painting had developed the art of depicting three-dimensional space through a two-dimensional picture-plane perspective, the Impressionists and post-Impressionists were investigating the relationship between three-dimensional space and the mostly flat plane of canvas on which paint produced this illusion. Tschudi was perhaps the earliest curator to focus on this aspect of artistic innovation, and the institutions for which he worked ended up with vastly more valuable and influential collections because of his instinctive eye.
Brian O’Doherty’s Artforum essays made this connection as well, showing how Monet and others played with visual effects that made use of the tricks of the eye. Tschudi, of course, had championed this view through his selections nearly one hundred years before, and had lately come to be appreciated for just this. As a review in the Wall Street Journal of a show of his acquisitions (titled ‘The Battle over Modernist Art’) put it:
… in the end, Tschudi won. ‘Degenerate’ no more, the paintings in this show give a fresh view of Impressionism through one man’s eyes. And his legacy is evident beyond the show, in the museums he once worked for. Without Tschudi, the collection of Munich’s Neue Pinakothek would consist solely of 19th-century, largely bland German art – making less of a case for German superiority than its Cézannes, Manets and Gauguins do today.
Willem Sandberg
I once travelled through the hills of Appenzell in Switzerland with Harald Szeemann. During the trip he told me to study his hero, Willem Sandberg. Born in 1897, Sandberg was one of the great museum innovators of the twentieth century, personalizing and creating a stylistic identity for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where he was appointed curator (1938) and then became director (1945–62). Sandberg left a mark on every single aspect of the museum: renovating its interior, adding a restaurant and children’s centre, and transforming the collection. A largely self-taught graphic designer, he also designed the catalogues for his exhibitions, developing a highly recognizable graphic sensibility of lowercase letters; text used pictorially; bold reds, blues and yellows; and torn edges.
During the Second World War, Sandberg was part of an underground Resistance group that in 1943 burned down the Amsterdam Municipal Office of Records to stymie the Nazi occupation. For the rest of the war he was marked for death by firing squad – had he been caught. During the war, Sandberg worked on his graphic design, producing the Experimenta typographia, a collection of eighteen handmade books composed poetically of asymmetrical, multicoloured typesetting on pages with torn edges. He also used his graphic-design skills to forge identity papers for fellow members of the Resistance.
Sandberg became director of the Stedelijk Museum at the end of the war, maintaining this position until his retirement in 1962. In addition to his duties as a director and curator, he designed hundreds of catalogues and posters. Not content with traditional definitions of high art, he incorporated graphic and industrial forms into the Stedelijk’s collection. Politically, he remained a controversial figure who was denied a visa to visit the United States during the period of anti-Communist hysteria in the 1950s. Like most of the great museum directors of the twentieth century, Sandberg successfully encouraged a much more diverse public to visit the institution. Attendance during his tenure doubled.
The Stedelijk was a museum with a limited budget, so Sandberg organized many small shows rather than major retrospectives with lavish catalogues. In 1957, while the Rijksmuseum hosted a Rembrandt exhibition, Sandberg showed Picasso’s Guernica, calling it the ‘Nightwatch’ (after the Rembrandt canvas) of the twentieth century – taking advantage of the larger institution to bring the public into contact with a contemporary masterwork. He put on large shows as well, however, such as Art Since 1950 for the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962. His 1961 show, Die Pioniers, was one of the first to travel amongst various museums. In the 1950s he built a new wing of the Stedelijk to his own specifications: open space, natural light from the sides, simple decor without embellishment. He also edited journals, served on the committees and organizing bodies of many other institutions, and was engaged in Dutch programming for the arts. Sandberg was also a vegetarian who fasted regularly, did not drive and lived in a simple apartment. He expanded design, typography, and the role of museums and museum directorship alike.
Walter Hopps
Bice Curiger, the editor of Parkett, was one of my early mentors. When I was 17, she returned from a trip to New York with an article for me about a curator named Walter Hopps. As I discovered, Hopps’ biography displayed an extraordinary range. Born in 1932, he showed early signs of his penchant for organization by founding a photographic society in high school. In the 1940s he was a keen promoter of jazz, during one of its great periods of innovation. While attending UCLA in Southern California, he ran a gallery called Syndell Studio, which served as an incubator or a laboratory for his curatorial practice. It received few visitors and very few reviews in the pr
ess, but through the gallery he was able to meet many people – the lifeblood of any curator’s metabolism.
From his earliest days as an exhibition-maker, Hopps was interested in bringing new artists and new ideas to the public’s attention. While running the tiny Syndell Studio, he also organized a show called Action 1, a presentation of the works of Californian expressionist painters in the merry-go-round building of an amusement park on Santa Monica pier. Such artists had received very little critical attention at a time when the art world was largely restricted to Europe and New York, so Hopps took it upon himself to rectify this. The show attracted, in his words, ‘the most totally inclusive mix of people – Mom, Dad, and the kids, and Neal Cassady, and other strange characters, and the patrons of a transvestite bar nearby’. After leaving UCLA, Hopps soon formed the Ferus Gallery in 1957, and five years later he became director of the Pasadena Museum of Art.
At Pasadena, Hopps also made significant strides in the opposite direction, exposing Southern California, and the United States as a whole, to important artists from Europe. He organized the first American retrospective of Kurt Schwitters. His exhibition New Paintings of Common Objects was the first museum overview of American Pop art. Perhaps his most legendary show in Pasadena was in 1963 – Marcel Duchamp’s first one-man museum show. Duchamp had an enduring influence on Hopps, through his focus on the exhibition as a totality, rather than on individual works. In the wake of their collaboration, Hopps formed one cardinal curatorial rule: in the organization of exhibitions, the works must not stand in the way.