Ways of Curating Read online

  Richter told me that he often produced these overpainted photographs at the end of his working day. He would use the oil paint still clinging to the wide squeegee after he had finished work on one of his large-format abstract paintings. The photographic prints are generally in the postcard format that is the norm for snapshots, and Richter usually has a box of these in his studio with a wide variety of motifs, which allows him to select at will an image that matches the leftover paint. He uses different techniques for overpainting: more often than not he pulls the photograph across the paint on the squeegee, so that the oil paint leaves streaks on it. Sometimes he places the photograph face-down on the paint and then lifts it off again, as though making a monotype. In certain cases, as in the pictures of Sils, Richter spattered the paint on the photograph, and in yet other cases more paint is applied later on with a small spatula.3

  Some photographs take up only a little paint; others are almost entirely covered with paint. The images used for these paint-overs are not art photographs, but perfectly ordinary snapshots, the kind that anyone might take – portraits of family and friends, colleagues in the art world, captured on film by Richter at home, in his studio, on walks, on holiday or travelling; there are all kinds of landscapes, photographed at all times of year – forests and mountains, lakes and beaches – interiors and exteriors of buildings, everyday motifs.

  Ever since the invention of photography in 1839 painters have engaged with this new image technology: Eugène Delacroix took instruction in the making of daguerreotypes, became a founding member of the Société héliographique in 1851, and variously used photographs of models as the basis for painted figures in the 1850s. Gustave Courbet also had photographs that he used as source materials, and some of his paintings of waves, from the late 1860s, are evidence of his interest in the new pictorial medium, particularly the photographs of waves by Gustave Le Gray. Edouard Manet used photographs and press reports of the shooting of the Mexican emperor for The Execution of Maximilian (1868–9). Photographs brought news of an event in South America to Paris. Lastly, there is even a photograph by Edgar Degas with traces of paint on it, which – however random they may be – nevertheless remind me of Richter’s dabs of paint on photographs he used as sources early on.

  In the twentieth century, with the ever increasing importance of image technology, countless, diverse connections arose between photography and painting. Photographs – as aids, as a source of inspiration and motifs – have taken their place in the painter’s studio. The walls and floors in shots of studios belonging to a wide range of artists (such as Francis Bacon, to name but one) are often strewn with photographs and images cut out from magazines and papers, some with spatterings of paint on them. It seems that at some point, almost inevitably, the connection would be made between photography and abstract painting, not merely as a by-product of artistic activity but even leading to autonomous works of art. The fact that Richter came to identify the artistic potential and major importance of this connection is certainly partly due to the fact that, in the paintings he was making decades before he started overpainting photographs, he had already been actively exploring and reflecting on the levels of reality in photography and abstraction.

  ‘We aren’t capable of viewing paintings without searching for their inherent similarity with what we’ve experienced and what we know,’ Richter once told me. His works are heterogeneous models which allow, even demand, perpetual change and mutation: ‘Surprises always emerge,’ he states, ‘disappointing or pleasant ones.’ His oeuvre is permeated by doubts and reservations about anything posited as absolute, whether a style of painting or an account of the world. He embraces contingency in artistic practice.

  Our idea was not to take over the whole Nietzsche-Haus, but to work very discreetly in the interstices of the museum. Richter also created a small book as part of the exhibition. It had become clear to me that the book could not just be a subsidiary companion to the display, but a sort of exhibition of its own without a place. The book for Sils, as we called the exhibition, was the first of many textual collaborations between Richter and myself. In addition, in the room where Nietzsche wrote Also Sprach Zarathustra, Richter added a mirror-ball on the floor, which reflected the whole room. The ball focused the space and acted as a kind of formal evocation of the room’s importance for Nietzsche. This reflecting silver ball was a gesture with a kind of solemnity but without sentimentality. As Richter has said about another work, it contained ‘no saints, no message, and, in a certain sense, not even art’. Through Richter and Sils Maria, and Robert Walser as well, we can access alternate ways of conceiving art and the world. It is often an intuitive attraction to certain figures, certain places and world views that allows one to remain receptive to exactly these types of unusual curatorial opportunities.

  Mentors

  The museum is one truth, and this truth is surrounded by many truths which are worth being explored.

  – Marcel Broodthaers

  There was a man standing against the north wall of the Romerbrucke Heizkraftwerk, or power plant, barely visible. In 1990 I had come to Saarbrücken, in the west of Germany at the border with France, on an errand for my friends Fischli and Weiss. In this case, the job was a droll one. The power plant was host to a project inviting contemporary artists to create installations. Fischli and Weiss’s idea was to create a snowman, which they would install in a glass refrigerator, powered by the excess from the power station; as long as it generated electricity, there would be a friendly, unmelting snowman on display. It was a typical example of their work, expressing the plant’s function – to create the power to defy nature – in a charming way. And so I had driven my creaking Volvo to Saarbrücken with a snowman in the back – to be precise, it was a snowman dummy, a kind of test mannequin for Fischli and Weiss’s piece. I was to deliver it to the curatorial staff.

  The man waiting for me and the snowman, it turned out, was the project’s curator, Kasper König, a man whom Gerhard Richter had always told me I should meet. In 1968, the year I was born, König was curating a celebrated exhibition of Andy Warhol’s work at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet. In the 1970s he had taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and he returned to Germany and organized large-scale museum tours de force in the 1980s. One of these, the 1981 Westkunst exhibition in Cologne, created a transitional moment after which the art world became more global, more porous. As König said in a conversation, ‘The title was a pun on the word Weltkunst (World art), and was meant as a conscious distortion of the kind of imperial ideology that we now consider old-fashioned.’ Intimating the shape of the shift in artistic centres that would mark the late twentieth century, Westkunst was a monumental full stop at the end of an epochal sentence.

  König is a cultural impresario. As an independent curator he carries museums inside his head and yet, as director of Cologne’s Ludwig Museum, he was able to work within the constraints of an institution and open wide its potential. He uses the past as a toolbox to construct the future and has artists in residence at the museum to create a dialogue between the generations. He pioneered the concept of public art, erecting with his co-curator Klaus Bussman a series of installations and artworks all over the city of Munster every ten years in one of the most influential public art projects ever. His ideas helped me realize that art can appear where you least expect it and he taught me how to work with space – that art and architecture are intertwined.

  When he was dean of the Städelschule in Frankfurt, an important art school that bridges the disciplines of art, design and architecture, König created a space next door called Portikus. It was little more than a container, but he made magic in it, inviting different artists to reinterpret the surroundings in their own way. Most of his exhibitions arise from conversations with the artists, and a vital lesson he taught me was that it is not the job of a curator to impose his or her own signature but to be a mediator between artist and public.

  We had met briefly before, and then at a dinne
r after an opening of the artist Katharina Fritsch. But in 1990, arriving with Fischli and Weiss’s snowman dummy, I had a chance to speak to him at length for the first time. He ended up being one of my most important mentors. During our first conversation in Saarbrücken, we spoke a lot about books. König had edited a legendary catalogue for his Warhol show in Stockholm, and we discussed it at length. We also talked a lot about König’s mentor, Pontus Hultén, with whom he had first worked at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet and then at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

  Artists have been making books for centuries – witness William Blake’s innovative self-illustrated books – but the artist’s book has become an important aspect of contemporary art since the 1960s, when a number of artists began to use the book not as a complementary, explanatory sidekick to their ‘real’ work, but as a primary medium in and of itself. König recognized this potential early on, and while teaching in Halifax he had edited the Press of the Novia Scotia School of Art and Design. There he published many books in conjunction with groundbreaking artists, from the choreographer Yvonne Rainer to film-maker Michael Snow to composer Steve Reich.

  After our meeting in Saarbrücken, König asked me whether I would collaborate with him on an anthology, to be called The Public View. The idea was to create a sort of yearbook in which various artists and writers would be asked to create works that somehow dealt with the theme implied by the title. I began to travel every week to work with him on the book in Frankfurt, where he was the head of the Städelschule. I started attending lectures at the school whenever I was in Frankfurt. Our book was really a kind of group exhibition and debate in the medium of print. During the process of making The Public View, König and I were struck by the difficult status of painting (debate in the art world continues to inspire proclamations of the death or resurrection of painting to this day), and so we began to conceptualize an exhibition of painters together. After we completed The Public View, my first book as co-editor, I visited Frankfurt with greater frequency, as we began work organizing an exhibition for the Vienna Festival that came to be called Der zerbrochene Spiegel (The Broken Mirror).

  For the first time, I was curating a large show for a major institution – the exhibition space covered thousands of square metres, which raised the question of critical mass and how best to use such an enormous quantity of space. König and I wanted to undertake a survey of painting at a time when not many curators would exhibit paintings, and also to offer small retrospectives of work by some pioneering artists who had not yet received the exposure they deserved – like Maria Lassnig, Dick Bengtsson or Raoul de Keyser. In keeping with the historical survey method, our catalogue listed the artists in chronological order of their dates of birth. It was a key experience for me to work on such a big exhibition for the first time. As the Vietnamese General Giap said: ‘If you win territory you lose concentration – if you win concentration you lose territory.’4 When you have a big exhibition, I realized, you gain territory but the risk is that you lose concentration. Nevertheless, the critical mass in a large exhibition is very attractive. There are more works than you can perceive in a single visit, and there are many more zones of contact than in a normal exhibition. But it was also a shock suddenly to have to work with – indeed to fill – thousands of square metres.

  The Broken Mirror attempted to group together a wide array of painters without dictating a structure or thesis for how they should relate to one another. The exhibition was not to be a stage for an essay-like argument we were making about painting, but a discontinuous assemblage of possibilities. The mirror, of course, is the Western tradition’s ultimate symbol for mimesis, or the representation of life. Painting was, by the late twentieth century, a broken mirror in the sense that its function had been superseded, its historical prominence among the fine arts challenged by other media. And yet it persisted within the ‘post-medium’ condition in an unstable, incoherent way. So we invited the widest range of painters we could, eventually ending up with three thousand paintings by forty-three painters.

  One of them was particularly surprising: the Austrian painter Maria Lassnig (born 1919), with whom I began a long series of conversations. Displayed in The Broken Mirror among the work of many much younger artists, Lassnig’s work seemed to have a remarkably radiant power. Her paintings became a kind of show-within-a-show.

  As we prepared The Broken Mirror, I was also travelling regularly to Paris to work with my another of my most important curating mentors, Suzanne Pagé. Pagé was the director of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and Christian Boltanski had introduced me to her and her curator, Béatrice Parent. If König had taught me about making books and large-scale exhibitions, from Pagé I learned how to run a museum. She ran the Musée d’Art Moderne as a laboratory, but one that performed this function hand in hand with its role as a guardian of memory. She organized historical exhibitions featuring artists of the modern period – for example, Giacometti, Bonnard or Picabia – but always with a contemporary twist.

  Pagé had curated many important solo shows in Paris, from Louise Bourgeois to Hanne Darboven to Sigmar Polke to Thomas Schütte to Absalon. She had also made innovative group shows that were organized thematically, such as her exhibition on the 1930s in Europe, Années 30 en Europe. She had begun as the director of L’ARC, the Animation, Research and Confrontation institute, and Pagé was now charged with the responsibility of opening the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris to a greater range of contemporary art. Her mission was to encourage a wider audience to visit the museum, as a response to the sociological critique of figures like Pierre Bourdieu, who had argued that ‘high’ art, along with other forms of taste, functioned as a signalling system for the cultural elite. So Pagé pioneered exhibitions of outsider art to counter this tendency, and worked to bring visual art closer to music, cinema and poetry.

  Above all, the Musée d’Art Moderne under Pagé was a museum of, by and for artists. She always involved contemporary practitioners, even in historical exhibitions, believing that the eye of an artist would always reveal unnoticed correlations and correspondences. She would also ask artists to look into aspects of the museum’s collections that appealed to them and to make projects based on their discoveries, as in her legendary exhibition Histoire de Musée. Thus she maximized both the archiving and creatively generating functions of her institution. Pagé came from a classical background, having studied Latin and Greek and then seventeenth-century painting at the Sorbonne. This had led her not to pit the past and the present against each other but instead to encourage their intermingling through her inspired curating. A product of the May 1968 civil unrest in Paris, she wanted to produce a new inclusivity and invite new audiences to engage with the museum.

  Pagé, having run a large institution for many years, seemed interested by the lightness of the smaller exhibitions I had been doing: the kitchen, the monastery library, the Nietszche-Haus and the Hotel Krone restaurant. She asked me to do a project for the interstitial areas of the Musée d’Art Moderne. I was very excited by the lightness of the idea of a micro-lab of radical experiments within a big institution, thinking of Robert Musil’s idea of the future of art, which, he said, would happen where you expect it least. Out of this request from Pagé, I developed a series of exhibitions called Migrateurs. Several times a year, we would invite an artist to develop a project. In the first phase they would decide where and in what form to intervene, in an intense discussion with the museum; however, the site of intervention was never predetermined. Migrateurs was an attempt to create a mobile platform within a large institution. Without the usual pressure to occupy thousands of square metres, it was a kind of public laboratory in which ideas could be tested.

  Gertrude Stein, who collected and displayed in her Paris atelier works by Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse and many others, once questioned whether museums, which she called ‘cemeteries’ of culture, could ever be modern. For Suzanne Pagé, the answer was yes: for her the museum could perform a do
uble function too, as a repository of time past and as a laboratory for future practice.

  During the Migrateurs exhibitions I realized that, by collaborating with the artists, I had found a way to formalize something that had emerged in my work as a young curator: the oscillation between large art institutions and exhibitions in unusual places in the context of everyday life. Institutions are not the only places where official history of the field is written, but they attract by far the largest audiences – they are the articulation points where one can reach the mass audience. Also, their permanent collections offer an archive that can be kept alive by being reactivated and recombined with contemporary practices. The everyday-life exhibitions, meanwhile, offer a different chance to experiment. A dialectic had become apparent in my practice between large and small spaces. My experience curating The Broken Mirror prompted a return to micro-spaces, in the style of my first exhibition in the kitchen. In Migrateurs I could play with large and small, institution and infiltration, museum and laboratory.

  One of the first artists I invited for the series was Douglas Gordon. He was soon to become internationally prominent due to his experiments with cinema and time – for instance, in his most well-known work, projecting Hitchcock’s film Psycho at a speed that rendered it a twenty-four-hour experience.5 At the Musée d’Art Moderne, Gordon installed a text piece, ‘From the moment you read these words, until you meet someone with blue/brown/green eyes’, as both a wall drawing and as a message one heard when using the museum’s telephones. When encountered, either by a visitor reading the wall drawing or by anyone making a call, the text piece occupied the perceptual space of the visitor, ‘highlighting’ the time between receiving the message and meeting a person with the appropriate eye colour as an artwork. The artist was migrating his work outside the official gallery space of the museum, outside Cartesian, physical space altogether. Musil, I believe, would have appreciated it: this was art where you least expect it.