Ways of Curating Read online

  Hopps believed that curating required obsessive knowledge of an artist’s oeuvre, comparing the task to a conductor who must know a composer’s entire body of work intimately in order to conduct a particular symphony. His obsessiveness came with a mercurial nature and a deep eccentricity about working hours: he often arrived at the office in the evening and worked through the night. He was not punctual and would sometimes go missing for days on end. In Washington, where he went from Pasadena to become director of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1967 and then the Corcoran Gallery in 1970, bemused employees had badges made saying ‘Walter Hopps will be here in 20 Minutes’.

  By putting Los Angeles on contemporary art’s map, Hopps changed the contours of the art world, and he continued expanding boundaries after leaving California. In 1975 he curated perhaps the ultimate democratic exhibition, Thirty-Six Hours, for the Museum of Temporary Art in Washington. He invited the public to bring their own works, the only requirement being that they fit through the door. Personally greeting each artist, Hopps installed their work on the spot, eventually accommodating more than four hundred works. He invited musicians to perform on the opening night, in part for a strategic purpose: he used their contacts amongst disc jockeys to advertise the show on late-night radio, believing that artists were likely to be up working in their studios and would hear about the show. His most ambitious unrealized ambition, with Alanna Heiss, was to install 100,000 images in PS1, the contemporary art centre in New York, reasoning ‘people can take in presentations of art that are almost as vast as nature’.

  René d’Harnoncourt

  René d’Harnoncourt, who was born in 1901 in Austria with an aristocratic title but without inherited wealth, began his career in Mexico, organizing artisans and craftsmen in the production and sale of folk art. Out of this experience he began to organize large-scale shows of Mexican art that travelled to museums throughout the United States. Even as d’Harnoncourt began curating, he continued to work directly with the people whose art he exhibited, in a respectful form of anthropological fieldwork; eventually, he became one of the most influential US museum directors of the twentieth century, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1949–68).

  D’Harnoncourt began at MoMA, working for Alfred Barr, its legendary first director. Barr, who was strongly influenced by Alexander Dorner’s work, promoted modernism in painting, sculpture and the newer, related fields of photography, film, typography and graphic design. He also developed what came to be known as the ‘white cube’ style of display, which favoured rectangular, neutral spaces with works placed far from each other and at the height of the viewer’s eye. Works were meant to be encountered alone, rather than part of an ensemble, bestowing a new power on the single artwork. To Barr’s modernist aesthetics, however, d’Harnoncourt added a pioneering understanding of the globality of art.

  In the first half of the twentieth century it was the norm for Western art museums to present modern Western art and society as the pinnacle of cultural evolution. D’Harnoncourt sought to complicate that picture. For his MoMA show Indian Art of the United States, he brought Native American sand-painters to the museum to produce works that were destroyed just before completion, as per traditional practice. The museum staff were instructed to treat them with care and never to disturb them. When he displayed Navajo shawls, d’Harnoncourt treated them on a par with contemporary Western art, placing them on abstract cylinders, rather than presenting them as mannequins dressed like Indians, which would have been expected.

  In the early ‘laboratory years’ of the Museum of Modern Art, d’Harnoncourt pioneered a new style of exhibiting artworks based around their common affinities, rather than their particular place in history. This modern idea lay behind his seminal show, Timeless Aspects of Modern Art, held in 1948–9. D’Harnoncourt included works ranging from prehistoric carvings to Sung dynasty paintings to Picasso; he began the exhibition with a timeline of the last 75,000 years and a map of the world on which the artworks’ places of provenance were marked. However, he displayed the works from across human history spotlit in darkened galleries, emphasizing their individual character even as he showed how art from all periods used very modern techniques, such as exaggeration, distortion and abstraction. Where previous museum directors had expanded the appreciation of art across Western national boundaries, d’Harnoncourt emphasized its influence across the entire globe and throughout its history. His career, however, was cut short when he was killed by a drunk driver in 1968.

  D’Harnoncourt’s daughter Anne, a curator and later director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was a pioneering curator as well. She also told me much of what I know about her father’s career. Anne d’Harnoncourt became a curator in Philadelphia soon after it acquired the most important collection of Marcel Duchamp’s works in the world, from his benefactors the Arensbergs. She went on to install the great unseen work he left behind, Étants Données, in Philadelphia, as well as organizing a major retrospective of Duchamp’s work that influenced countless artists. For that alone she ranks among the more important American curatorial figures. Anne d’Harnoncourt was director of the Philadelphia Museum from 1982 – she was the first woman to hold that position at a major American museum – until her death in 2008.

  Pontus Hultén

  As the founding director of several museums, including the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Pontus Hultén’s innovative exhibitions expanded the scope of curatorial practice and redefined the function of the museum. Born in 1924, during his thirteen-year tenure as director of the Moderna Museet (1960–73) Hultén transformed his museum into one of the leading institutions for contemporary art – in the process facilitating Stockholm’s emergence as a principal player in the art world of the 1960s. Hultén combined various art forms – theatre, dance, painting, film and so on, under one roof, reasoning that ‘artists like Duchamp and Max Ernst had made films, written a lot, and done theater, and it seemed completely natural to me to mirror this interdisciplinary aspect of their work in museum shows of any number of artists…’

  Looking at the program of exhibitions that Hultén undertook during the 1950s and 1960s, it is very clear that his curating, even at the beginning of his practice, takes up the standard of Alexander Dorner’s battle cry earlier in the century, namely to dynamize the museum; the strange collisions and reversals that Dorner’s vision of art history advocated are sharply evident throughout Hultén’s trajectory. Dorner’s notion that the museum should aspire to be a Kraftwerk, or power station, is echoed in Hultén’s view that the museum should be an open and elastic space; one that does not limit itself solely to the display of paintings and sculptures, but provides a site for a myriad of public activities: film series, lectures, concerts and debates.

  Hultén was both intellectually and practically invested in what, at the time, was a still largely latent movement towards an increasingly international, cosmopolitan art community. In the 1960s he and Niki de St Phalle organized She, a startling exhibition housed in a large cathedral in the form of a supine woman that viewers could walk into, the entry being between her legs. During his time at the Moderna Museet, Hultén was also instrumental in enabling artistic exchanges to take place between Stockholm and New York. In 1962 his show 4 Americans introduced the work of Pop artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns to the still largely insular European art world; later, he installed one of the very first European surveys of American Pop art, and was responsible for bringing together the first international survey of Andy Warhol in 1968.

  In 1968, Hultén was invited by Alfred Barr to organize an exhibition of kinetic art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but, as he told me in one of our meetings in his next-door apartment on rue Beaubourg, he thought the subject too vast. Hultén instead proposed a more thematic and critical exhibit, one that would explore both the approaching end of the mechanical age and the role of the machine in art, industrial design and photograp
hy. The resulting show, called ‘The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age’, covered vast historical ground. Beginning with Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches of flying machines and ending with contemporary pieces by Nam June Paik and Jean Tinguely, the exhibit comprised over 200 constructions, sculptures, paintings and collages, as well as a film programme.

  In 1973, Hultén left Stockholm to help found the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, which opened in 1977. Hultén’s inaugural project in the newly erected space was Paris-New York, the first of four large-scale exhibitions that examined the making of art’s history in the cultural capitals of the twentieth century. Paris-New York, Paris-Berlin, Paris-Moscow and Paris-Paris included not only art objects ranging from Constructivist to Pop, but posters, films, documentation and reconstructions of art spaces such as Gertrude Stein’s famous Parisian salon, Piet Mondrian’s New York studio and Peggy Guggenheim’s short-lived but highly influential New York gallery, Art of This Century. While Hultén’s MoMA show is widely considered one of the art world’s major interdisciplinary exhibitions of its time, Paris-New York came to be heralded for its presentation of an array of objects and concepts never before seen within the narrowly defined fields of traditional art history and museum practice.

  Night Trains and Other Rituals

  One cold December morning in the year 1989, I was travelling from Rome to Venice. I had been visiting the artist Cy Twombly and had left the capital by train the evening before. I had spent the night awake, ruminating about my visit with Twombly. He was steeped in the history of poetry and a lot of his paintings make allusions to, are inspired by or are responses to poems: Leda and the Swan, his sprawling, swooping vision of W. B. Yeats’ poem of the same title, is just one example. Twombly was always talking about his reading of Rumi, Keats, Pound, Rilke and others. He was also deeply inspired by the poets of antiquity: Catullus, Sappho and Homer. Twombly had advised me to connect art and poetry. All the great twentieth-century avant-garde movements had one thing in common: close ties between art and poetry: Dada and Surrealism, and so on. Yet in our time, dialogues between art and music, or art and architecture, are much more frequent than dialogues with poetry. Twombly told me something was missing.

  I was to repeat that morning experience in Zurich many times: during my years at university, I took night trains all around Europe. Nights spent on the train became my think tank. It was also, of course, an economical way to travel: like many European students, I had an InterRail pass. Night trains also saved time. One could leave a city late at night and arrive in the next one early in the morning. Trains were my hotels. One city, one day.

  On my travels during those years I visited an ever-expanding group of artists, ranging further with chains of train trips, and driving my old Volvo station wagon for shorter distances. This being the pre-mobile-phone era, night-train rides were also a kind of refuge from the world. I could reflect on what I had seen that day, make notes and have conversations. Soaking up ideas like a sponge each day in the studios of artists I admired, I would process their work in my mind in the quiet of the train. I had strong ties with artists, and a sense of ease with them, so it was natural to pursue my obsession with art and artists, even if I had yet to curate an exhibition. It was a period of study and observation.

  Night trains taught me to sleep when I could. On a long train or bus journey you learn to rest when you can, despite the lack of comfort. I also began to experiment with different ways of sleeping. For instance, I had read about Leonardo da Vinci’s method, which involved sleeping fifteen minutes every two hours. I tried it. Honoré de Balzac would drink large amounts of coffee (to fuel his ceaseless creativity he would reportedly drink up to fifty cups per day), including just before falling asleep to limit the length of time spent unconscious. However, he died aged fifty-one, possibly from caffeine poisoning, and so I eventually curbed this tendency. The idea behind these unconventional procedures was not just to reduce the amount of sleep to the minimum required for an active and creative existence. They were also attempts to try out alternative ways of organizing daily life, alternative daily rituals. The attraction of these methods to me has always been to erase the structural separation between work and recreation that organizes conventional living. The night train was a way to get from city to city, but also a travelling laboratory for testing such practices.

  Trains were also the subject of many of my conversations with the architect and urbanist Cedric Price. In the mid-1960s, Price had devised an ambitious plan he called the ‘Potteries Thinkbelt’ to use industrial rail lines to renew Staffordshire, an industrial area in the Midlands, south of Manchester. Because of the many ceramics factories that had operated there since the 1700s, the region had accrued the name ‘The Potteries’. Josiah Wedgwood, Josiah Spode and the Mason family had all started out in the region. By the time of Price’s project, the area had begun to decay. It still had an extensive train network from the days in which trains were the main way to get freight from factory to market. The centrepiece of his plan was to rehabilitate this network, and in the process Price designed a mobile university system – one of movable classrooms, laboratories and research centres that could move along the train lines. His system was highly suited to the study of the area’s factories. Railways transform an area into a network of nodes; Price simply planned to utilize this transformation. Unfortunately, his grand project never saw the light of day. When I eventually began to learn about architecture and discovered this plan, it made perfect sense to me from my days of constant train travel. Europe, for me, was a kind of ‘Thinkbelt’, all linked by the rail.

  I remember a school trip to Paris around this time. I had seen the artist Christian Boltanski’s work in Switzerland, and was aware that he lived and worked in Malakoff, 5 kilometres southwest of Paris. I arranged to visit him and the artist Annette Messager while my schoolmates were trudging around the city, and spent an afternoon with them. Boltanski’s studio was full of used clothes and biscuit tins. At this stage, my desire to be a curator had solidified, but I was still generally unsure of how I could be useful to art. Boltanski was very clear on one point that has become one of my guiding principles: exhibitions, he said, should always invent a new rule of the game. People remember only exhibitions that invent a new display feature, he pointed out, and so that should be an ambition of each new exhibition.

  Boltanski was also close to the great exhibition-maker Harald Szeemann. He told me that Szeemann was not only curating shows at major museums like the Kunsthaus in Zurich but also worked all over the world. The Kunsthaus channelled all the research generated by his constant travelling. The idea of being an independent/dependent curator appealed to me. The work of a free curator, who always works in different institutions and different cities, has its limits, because there is no connection to a specific context, and there is no continuous dialogue – so the dichotomy of the permanent/not permanent curator was very important for me. With Boltanski, I first started to conceptualize this ordered/disordered model of working as a curator, taking Szeemann as an exemplar.

  The third significant direction in which Boltanski pointed me was back towards literature. He introduced me to Oulipo, short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (‘workshop of potential literature’), the avant-garde literary group that functioned as a research laboratory for the invention of new rules for producing literature. Founded by Raymond Queneau, Oulipo sought to use constraints, transpositions and game structures to generate new works. Many of the works of Oulipo authors contain nearly endless accumulations of lists, which for me connected directly to the endless Hans Krüsi lists of my childhood.

  Boltanski also recommended particularly that I read Georges Perec, who I discovered had some fascinating things to say about the relation between order and disorder. In his essay collection Penser/Classer (Think/Classify), Perec writes that order entails disorder and vice versa. He also speaks of the depressing aspect of all systems of absolute order that do not admit chance, differences, di
versity. In other words, he claims that order is always ephemeral, that it can become disorder again the next day: ‘My problem with classifications is, that they don’t last; as soon as I have finished a certain order, it is already lapsed. Like everyone else I sometimes have a mania of ordering things. But because of the abundance of things to be ordered and the near impossibility of ordering them into a satisfying classification, I never come to an end. I have to stop with a provisory and vague order, which seldom is more effective than the previous disorder.’

  The Kitchen

  During my time at high school and university in Kreuzlingen and St. Gallen, I travelled around Europe looking at art, visiting artists, studios, galleries and museums. I knew that what I wanted to do in life was to work with artists, but I had yet to produce anything. I was searching for a way to make a contribution. What, in this art system, could be a first step, and above all, how could I be useful to artists? I began to think about all the innovative, large-scale museum shows I had seen and whether it was really possible to do something new, combining all the networks I had been enmeshed in, the entire European Thinkbelt. One conviction I had was that it could be interesting to do something smaller, after the gigantism of some of the 1980s art scene which seemed unsustainable after the crash of 1987.

  Dependency on endless growth, as the end of each cyclical bull market always teaches us, is unrealistic. I studied political economy with a professor named H. C. Binswanger, who directed the University of St. Gallen’s Institute for Economics and Ecology. Binswanger was examining the historical relationship of economics and alchemy, which he made as interesting as it (at first) sounds outlandish. His goal was to investigate the similarities and differences between aesthetic and economic value, most famously in a book he later published called Money and Magic (1994). At the core of modern economics, Binswanger believed, is the concept of unlimited, eternal growth; he showed how this brash concept was inherited from the medieval discourse of alchemy, the search for a process that could turn lead into gold.