Ephemerality and expectation, Benjamin Weil

Benjamin Weil, new media curator at SFMOMA, addresses ephemerality, expectation, and the extroverted artist. A discussion of the role of documentation in art practice and the evolution and interplay of the curator/artist.


Ron Goldin: Do you think recent events, specifically the global witness of the Sept. 11 tragedy, in addition to a sobered "new economy" whose original foundation was reliant on intangible models, has sparked a cautious step away from the ephemeral, both in art practice as well as in our society as a whole?


Benjamin Weil: It is very hard to tell what has triggered what. I am not sure September 11 is really anything else than the epitomy of a crisis that is much larger than that absolute hyper-real tragedy. What strikes me is the growing awareness in our western post-industrial societies (and primarily so in the US) of a very confusing blurriness between reality and fiction. Infotainment and edumercial, or whatever conflational combination one can think of, destabilizes the understanding of how to comprehend specific information. This confusion is very visible in such mainstream Hollywood production as "Vanilla Sky", for instance, and in a more sophisticated fashion, in such production as David Lynch's recent "Mulholland Drive". One could trace that back to "The Matrix", or even to Steven Lisberger's "Tron". It is also the war in Iraq and its coverage that was somewhat a bad copy of "Top Gun"... There are plenty of examples in contemporary culture...


What is undeniable is that the shift in the economic climate results in a less daring cultural moment. When there's opulence, experiments seem like a normal compliment to more traditional endeavors. These days, it is more difficult to convince people about the fact cultural evolution does not stop because of the economy. I believe we are still at the beginning of a fundamental shift, which probably is less probable now to be carried out, or found in traditional institutions. From that extremely chaotic moment will emerge new ways of understanding what we are exposed to, what we are looking at. I do not know why, but I think for instance of this whole idea of a scenario that is manifested through very different forms. A common narrative structure will inform a film, a computer game, a line of products, educational tools, and what not. There's no longer a necessary hierarchy to understand this cultural nebulous of sorts.


In regards to art, I think the confusion also is due to the ever-increasing blurriness between the locus of production and the one of distribution or experience is something traditional venues for visual art have a really hard time dealing with. Artists have also shifted from being loners, secluded from the world, creating in a studio, to cultural producers, very much engaged with the course of our time, and creating social and cultural comments in collaboration, and borrowing from all kinds of models, ranging from film to philosophy, to advertising, to science, and so on.


It is time to engage in a thorough reflection on how to reconcile the notion of history, and historical, as best incarnated by the traditional museum, and the one of progress, forward thinking structure that produces, commissions, supports, and reflects upon new ways to display, distribute, and emulate experience of new contemporary art forms. Then again, it is important to remember that the experimental nature of what is being produced today should exist both inside and outside of the institutional frame.


We probably will not escape the need to re-examine criteria used to understand what is a valid art form, and what is not.


RG: Both SFMOMA's 010101 and the Whitney's BitStreams featured "companion websites" to their show's physical venue. It seems like some things have changed (ex. Janet Cardiff's "Video Walk" is a giant step from 'please move away from the painting...') but some things have not, such as the resistance to works (or entire media, in the case of net.art) that provide a less immediate gratification. Are expectations of art becoming more entertainment-based than the "secular church" that the museum has traditionally signified? Or do people approach a new media object with the same expectations they do a Rodin?


BW: Your question takes us back to the notion of criteria used to understand what we are looking at. The same way we may be confused, as consumers, by the ever evolving form of information, and whether it is news, fiction, advertising... for instance, it is increasingly harder to know how to filter advertising out of news, games, or television: think about product placement in computer games, or maybe even news reel, for instance!


New art forms, that take radical departures both in terms of form, and content, and, to a certain extent, context, call for a rethinking of how we evaluate things, how we appreciate them, how we comprehend them, etc. While it is for instance possible to talk about the formal quality of a networked based piece, referring to the intrinsic qualities of its coding, this calls for an understanding of how this is to be understood by people who may not be able to tell the difference, because they have not trained their eye. I recall a time when I would systematically look at the source code of a web page... I would not do that any longer because chances are it would have become Chinese to me: things have changed extraordinarily fast! And while I think it is an interesting parameter, this is such a new realm, and a new medium explored by artists, whose training is not necessarily "fine art", that the intellectual and emotional adjustment is very difficult. It requires flexibility, and, let's face it, a lot of time! Think how hard it was to understand Cubism, even though it was still oil on canvas or traditional media. You can imagine how a society that has barely digested Duchamp can accommodate such leaps as the ones introduced by networked art forms: not only you need to understand the notion of browser as formal frame, the net as context, but you also need to accept the idea of looking at art on the screen of a machine one more often relates to as a practical instrument.


So, while I think museums such as the Whitney or SFMOMA - and many others, particularly the Dia Center for the Arts, and the Walker Art Center, both real pioneers as far as networked media is concerned - are genuinely interested in exploring ways to incorporate these emerging forms, there is still an enormous amount of work to be done in order to understand what is the best role to play for such institutions, how to create an appropriate frame to best enable access to these experimental forms, provide tools, relate these art projects to the more traditional media, etc. That is, I believe what both "BitStreams", and even more so "Data Dynamics" sought to do at the Whitney. And similarly, the web commissions and educational component of 010101, but also Crossfade (http://www.sfmoma.org/crossfade, a collaboration with ZKM, Goethe Institut, and the Walker art center).


Sometimes, there is a temptation for the museum to merge the notion of accessibility or approachability with the one of populism. This is undeniably a very dangerous confusion, informed primarily, I believe by the economic model the museum functions with: sales results, of tickets and by-products have become a way to judge the success of a program, which of course is quite a limited way of thinking about real cultural impact. That's because there has been a dramatic shift in the past 20 years (since the Reagan administration decided to eradicate public funding for art). However, it seems to me we have not yet found a way to really engage different publics to become real stakeholders of the cultural institution, rethink the model of financially supporting the museum as a seminal cultural tool... Rather, this still depends of "the kindness of strangers", and merchandizing strategies that look increasingly like the entertainment industry. We will not spare ourselves from engaging in this reflection, if we want to steer clear of artentainment.



RG: Documentation of the production of new media arts is a central concern, especially pertaining to the issue of ephemerality. Documentation is the only tangible, somewhat-static byproduct of some new media art practices. You've mentioned that art can be thought of as a proposition, rather than an object. How does an artwork focus our attention to the very process that brought it into existence? Is this the concern of the artist, as part of the art making, the curator as a historian/ facilitator/ translator, or is this perhaps the collaborative element that is required of the representation of all new media objects presented to a public audience?


BW: Technology changes very fast. The context in which work is made also changes. The combination of those two factors creates a situation of accelerated obsolescence of a given form. This often results in the loss of the original form and meaning. The moment artists choose to work with technology that is primarily developed for uses other than art, and, as a mass product, is conceived so as to be constantly evolved, they are faced with formal instability. This condition, by the way, not only applies to computers and software: one can probably trace it back to the Ready-Made, and is also the case with artists, who later on elected to work with mass produced objects, or perishable materials. Working with instable media, they are basically faced with two options: one is to completely abandon the idea of preserving anything, let the art work “die”; the other is to try and think about models that may help design solutions to transmit the “essence” of an art project, beyond its “original incarnation”. Music and theatre are two cultural forms, which function with the premise of formal instability. One can see those as systems of notation, instructions of sorts: a set of intentions, which then can be restaged, re-interpreted, and thus kept alive through time. Hence, the interesting conceptual basis they offer to offset the problem of working with instable media. Work created today with technology is by nature ephemeral. In order to preserve the artistic intent, one must start thinking beyond the constraints of obsolescence, while trying to “frame” the various dimension of an artistic proposition. There’s undeniably a “look and feel” of a given work, which denotes an anchoring in a given cultural moment. While it is possible to preserve the artifact, it is harder to justify evolving the role of the preserving institution into a repository for technology. Curators, who work with instable media, and particularly with technology, are faced with having to engage in a very close dialogue with conservators, in order to start outlining strategies that may then be implemented to better preserve formally instable art projects. The museum, in collaboration with the artists, as well as a network of experts from all fields, have engaged in the systematic of documents n many different forms (artists interviews, installation records, technical data, and so on. This accumulated documentation traces the formal evolution as well as the perceptual shifts that may occur in the course of this iterative way of understanding the artists project. Together, this set of documents, along with the “original version” of the artwork, constitutes what I would be tempted to call a data maze. Akin to the cultural constellations as defined in the work of Henry Jenkins, the data maze is probably the way to best understand how the museum may safely proceed with its task of being the repository for cultural heritage.


The work of art never existed outside of a formal and cultural context. Even the Wunderkammer -- which can be understood in many ways as the ancestor of the modern museum -- created specific viewing conditions, which in turn determined the way a given work could be grasped. What happens with instable media is that the data maze emerges as an inherent part of the artwork, in a manner that makes it much harder to dissociate or hierarchize: the way it artistic intent was initially carried out, the way it has been communicated at various given times, the layers of interpretation added with the various iterations and consequent “evolutions” of the work.


To go back briefly to the role of the curator, this is why I believe commissioning works is an interesting manner to foster a dialogue with the artists, so as to create good conditions for the transmission of work to future generations. This of course implies an evolution in the nature of the relationship between the institution and the artist, as well as a revision of the understanding of the notion of collecting.



RG: It is very common for curators to treat their work with "artistic inclination", that the job of curating is an art endeavor in and of itself. Artists are also becoming more involved in the curation of their own works, as well as their peers. Is there still a clear line today between curator and artist and what is the distinction?


BW: The role of the curator is undeniably evolving. There was a time when the curator was working with finished art works, made primarily by artists who she/he did not have to be in contact with, applying scholarly knowledge to create a frame for the work. Working with living artists, curators have eventually become editors of sorts, presenting selected works from an artistic career, establishing hierarchies between what they deem better and less good. More recently, the curatorial process has become the result of a dialogue between the curator and the artist, who most of the time becomes directly associated with the process of showing the work, even though the curator puts together the exhibition. The curator, however, never authors the artwork itself. She or he merely fosters the creation of a field of interpretation for it. I do not necessarily believe that artists can actually curate their own work, unless you understand the notion of curating as being specifically context-conscious.


Even in the case of instable media, where the artwork is in perpetual flux, and the relationship of the institution with the artist ongoing, at least as long as the artist is willing and/or able, the artist remains the author. The curator remains a facilitator, a dialogist, and a translator. She or he is also the guarantor of the intellectual integrity in the process of preservation and interpretation: the moment one of these works enter a public art collection, the curator and the artist become the actors of a dialogue or collaboration, which also involves preservation and conservation specialists, in order to ensure that each formal evolution of the work consequent to media updates does not affect the original artistic intent.


RG:
"... when visitors choose to enter a museum, they know what they're in for. But if art is coming to the street, one way or the other, it has to somehow morph into a more adaptable and fluid form, which reaches out and yet does not impose on the potential viewer. Since the Web is a public environment, one can easily see how the strategy is to reach out and offer an eclectic array of projects that investigate the medium and truly help to shape it." (Benjamin Weil, Gallery 9: AdaWeb)

The language of the Web provides a context which is non-static, and therefore, the medium is a more challenging but perhaps more powerful framework which a curator/artist must incorporate into the project. Is the Web, legalities aside, a more public space than the museum? Is the public nature of authorship on the Web, with its collaboratively constructed, open-source signification, a model that is entirely incompatible with the museum?


BW: A few years ago, I set myself to explore the notion of art in public space. I curated an exhibition of poster projects, which were shown in urban settings, fly posted by the very same people who put posters in the street. I recall having to research the specificity of local culture. In Cologne, where the show was first installed, I had to work with young musicians. They knew where to put the posters, how to make sure they did not get covered too quickly, what were the unspoken limits beyond which one could not go… Similarly, an exhibition of artists projects on the water buses in Venice (Italy) was an opportunity to find out how art in the real public space (in a way, maybe real is “unmapped”), how it could function without the shield of art. Online, it is a little bit the same thing… one can test the “cultural validity” of a project until it is deemed as art. This does not necessarily imply that being named art is anything else but creating a context to understand something that is décalé.


Public space is a very difficult notion to tackle. One thing we have learnt from the network, maybe, is the idea of public art that no longer needs to be a monument.


The notion of good art as good craftsmanship is something our western societies have lived with until very recently. One can probably trace the break to Duchamp, who somehow pronounces the “divide” between the notion of the artist as a good craftsman, and the artist as a thinker, an actionist, whose means to communicate are only as good as they help convey what she or he is trying to express. The artist coming out of that school of thoughts may cook one day, and do a film the next. She or he may publish a book, or take a car trip across the country. The notion of art as performance, or action, can merely be recorded; props can be conserved as relics. What this type of ephemeral proposition shed lights on is the importance of a cultural context for art. Art history provided this context, a classification, and a set of cultural tools to understand a given moment in history.


What we may realize by examining art history is that artists in fact always were creating with a large number of collaborators. The myth of the artist working alone, secluded is a modern myth. Prior to that, artists worked in studios, where they directed students and studio assistants to produce their work.


It is very difficult to do this without knowing exactly what we talk about when we say technology. Are we talking about a set of tools, are we talking about a process, a place?


There’s probably a multitude of answer to this ongoing question. In my mind, there’s no doubt, however, that we cannot avoid talking about community, production, and distribution, if we want to understand the dynamics between art and technology.


I do not think we are talking about technology only as a set of tools. Rather, as Gerfried Stocker points out in his introduction to the ARS electonica festival of this past year, it is about who makes art, how they make it, and where they make it, introducing a new set of skills, and hence, perspectives.

Above copied from: http://switch.sjsu.edu/nextswitch/switch_engine/front/front.php?artc=76

An Interview with Christiane Paul, Sheila A. Malone

on Feb 12 2002 SWITCH issue 17

SWITCH's Sheila Malone talks to the Whitney's Christiane Paul about collaborative curation, autonomous identities, and the differences between European and American approaches to the showing of new media works.


SWITCH: As a curator of new media have you ever collaborated with other curators in the curatorial process? If so, what was the nature of this collaboration?

And, was it successful?

If not, do you think curators can collaborate? and what would a model of collaboration look like?

CP: So far, I haven’t had a collaboration with other curators where all responsibilities were shared. I was part of the curatorial team of the 2002 Whitney Biennial but despite our regular meetings and exchanges we were all mainly responsible for our own specific area. I think models for collaborative curation in the new media realm require a constant dialogue between curators and artists and a shared decision-making process when it comes to the presentation of the work, which mostly has no pre-determined physical manifestation. It is always “reinvented” and recontextualized for the physical space. Ultimately, possibilities for a productive collaboration are always a matter of personality and ego -- no medium will ever change that. If the process isn’t about the art itself and is mainly focused on proving one’s own brilliance, a collaboration can hardly be successful

SWITCH: In your opinion, does new media lend itself to a collaborative process/model(in terms of artists?)

CP: When it comes to new media art, a collaborative process and model is almost a necessity. This applies not only to the collaboration between curators and artists but also to collaboration among artists on specific projects. Some pieces require a whole team of programmers, designers, researchers et. al. In other projects, an artist sets certain parameters and collaborators create different (visual) manifestations of the work within these parameters.

SWITCH: Do you consider any kind of shared project collaboration? How is it different from an artist employing or contracting out skills and construction while remaining autonomous? i.e. Christo, Oldenberg....

CP: Personally, I’m most interested in collaboration (I find it boring to work mostly alone and for myself), and the fact that new media art is more participatory is one of the characteristics that attracts me to it. I think that the work process of the artist who “employs” people to build components etc. is very different from the one required for new media works. In some new media projects, artists become “producers” who work with a whole team of collaborators. In most of these cases, the collaborators aren’t playing the role of contractors but are very much involved in aesthetic decisions. New media art is a very hybrid medium and often demands expertise in very different fields, which one individual alone can hardly acquire.

SWITCH: As a curator what do you find is interesting art? (I know this is such a
mundane question, but really...) Are your interests as an individual the same
as your interests as the curator? Does the institution play a part in your
focus?

CP: I cannot come up with a definition of what constitutes “interesting art” for me (that would be similar to the endeavor of delivering the ultimate definition of art, which is a fluctuating concept in the first place). When it comes to new media, the works that I find most interesting are making intelligent, surprising, and aesthetically refined use of their medium. My interests as an individual and curator are at least very similar. As an individual, I probably allow myself more of an immediate emotional response to the work; as a curator, I tend to step back more and evaluate a work from as many different points of view as possible. The institution definitely influences my focus but this has a lot to do with the place new media occupies within the art world at this point in time. It is an art form that still hasn’t found an established place in the arts at large. Many people are still scared of computers, technology, and interfaces and do not understand the inherent possibilities of the medium. I could easily curate a show consisting of projects that I find very interesting, and it would turn out to be a complete “geekfest,” entirely inaccessible to a larger art audience. Curating for a museum, I am aware that I’m still introducing many people to this art form, so I strive to strike a certain balance, choosing projects that are accomplished as well as engaging and accessible.

SWITCH: Do you think Europe is more advanced in terms of embracing, developing,
and showing new media? If so, why do you think this is? If not, how is American New Media doing in terms of the gallery and museum?

CP: Europe certainly has more venues (quite a few of them well established) when it comes to showing this art, ranging from Ars Electronica, EMAF, DEAF, Viper and Transmediale (to name just a few) to museums such as ZKM and Kiasma. I don’t think that more of this art is being developed in Europe; the new media scene in the US is quite large and many of the artists have been showing at the venues mentioned above. There are a few galleries in the US that have consistently shown new media art but museums have only fairly recently begun to embrace the medium. In my opinion, this situation is largely due to economics and funding models. So far, there are no established economic models for selling this art, and commercial galleries obviously need to sell in order to survive. There is far more government and state funding in Europe while institutions in the US have to rely mostly on private and foundation support; they are more cautious when it comes to being adventurous and showing art that is hardly established and doesn’t necessarily have a huge box office draw.

SWITCH: Can you describe your personal and professional background in terms of
your current position at the Whitney? I mean what has led you into the art
world and more specifically into the New Media Curation.

CP: My original background is in academia, specifically American literature. I had done a lot of work on poststructuralism, and when hypertext began to catch on in the late 80s, early 90s, it seemed to literalize many of the theories of poststructuralism, so I started working with hypertext software. Hypertext was my entry point into “multimedia” / new media and when the WWW came into being, I was already deeply immersed in the background theory of this practice. I founded a magazine on new media arts called Intelligent Agent in 1995 and have been chronicling this type of art ever since. Before I officially became a curator, I often “consulted” for curators who were interested in new media work but not very familiar with this art practice.

SWITCH: Do you see any trends or movements in New Media in America? in New York?

CP: I’m always very careful when it comes to generalizations and so-called “trends.” Art that uses digital technologies as a medium can take so many different forms (ranging from interactive installations and networked installations to software art or purely Web-based art, among others). Even the term Internet art has become a broad umbrella for multiple forms of artistic expression that often overlap. There is art that has been created for and exists within the browser window; there are telepresence, telerobotics, and streaming media projects that establish telematic connections between remote places; there are performance and time-based projects that take place as actions within a specific time frame during which they can be experienced by Web visitors worldwide; there is hypertext that experiments with the possibilities of non-linear narrative; there are netactivism or “hacktivism” projects that use the network and its possibilities of instant distribution and cloning of information as a staging platform for interventions; there are alternative browsers, and there is software art that doesn’t make use of existing applications but is coded from scratch and distributed over the network. All of these forms are aesthetically very different and to distinguish certain “trends” is almost impossible. However, there are certain prominent themes and narratives within new media, among them data visualization and mapping, database aesthetics, gaming paradigms, agent technology etc. Currently, more and more works are being developed for nomadic devices, PDAs or cellphones, and I would expect that this art will experiment more with network structures that go beyond the static set-up of the CPU, monitor, and keyboard.


Above copied from: http://switch.sjsu.edu/nextswitch/switch_engine/front/front.php?artc=88

Nicolas Bourriaud and Karen Moss

Nicolas Bourriaud and Karen Moss
Part I and II

Interviewed by Stretcher


French theorist Nicholas Bourriaud, a curator at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and curator Karen Moss, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs at the San Francisco Art Institute, settled down with Stretcher inside an artwork by Andrea Zittel to discuss the role of curators in contemporary art. Zittel's Pit Bed was installed in SFAI's galleries as part of Bourriard's exhibition TOUCH: Relational Art from the 1990's To Now, an exploration of the interactive works of a new generation of artists. The exhibition was a springboard for Moss and Bourriard to discuss Bourriard's book about relational esthetics, changing curatorial practices and notions of the new. But it was a surprising practicality � museum hours � that opened the discussion.
- Ella Delaney




Stretcher: Palais de Tokyo has unusual hours, noon to midnight. That simple shift changes the gallery into a more social space. In effect, it embodies the notion of relational aesthetics at an institutional level. How does relational aesthetics change what you do as curators?

NB: There are two ways of building an institution. One way is to build a jewelry box to present objects and the other one is to conceive of it as an open market where everything is removable and you can change things all the time. That was the main idea at Palais de Tokyo. I think we cannot present art the way we did in the last century because now we're in 2002. We have to start from people's behaviors and the way they live. The idea with Palais de Tokyo was to adjust the art institution to the way people live in their city and obviously, it had to be open until midnight.

KM: One of the most successful programs at Walker Art Center was called "Late Night in Gallery 8," an after-hours music series that John Killacky did. If you can't change the box, you can somehow shift the time to allow for a different kind of social interaction. I think here most museums close at six o'clock on their regular nights and eight o'clock on their late nights. It's ridiculous. Young people are starting to go to clubs at midnight. If we want people to continue to occupy social spaces within an art context, they have to be open late.

NB: There is a huge contrast between the hours of the museums and their purpose. They keep the same hours as banks, post offices or businesses, but they offer entertainment. Just think about a movie theatre which closed at six � the whole industry would collapse! For me art is something you want to do as a social, recreational activity rather than a kind of transaction/administration.

Stretcher: Karen, tell us about the class you and Nicholas are teaching in conjunction with the exhibition.

KM: It's called "Art Meets Everyday Life - Social Interaction and Relational Aesthetics." The class was conceived to coincide with Nicolas' exhibition, which had been in the planning for eighteen months. We wanted to get students involved not only in coming to the gallery, but in the artistic practices that relational aesthetics proposes. The seminar started with a few weeks of historical background. We talked about how artists in the 1960s and '70s were concerned with redefining or de-defining art, with dematerializing work and consciously going outside the gallery and museum system. Younger artists today have had that work done for them. They have the freedom to do relational work because they want to, not because they have to.

NB: In the 1960s and '70s artists invented new tools. I think my generation and the upcoming generation of artists consider the history of art as a toolbox.

Stretcher: So history has changed from baggage to toolbox.

KM: Interesting. Yes, absolutely.

NB: It's no longer a weight. Paradoxically, if you don't care about the new, you can make new things.

KM: One of the questions that a student asked Nicholas was, "Is the idea of relational aesthetics a manifesto?" And you had a great answer.

NB: The idea of a manifesto is totally related to the idea of newness and novelty. Instinctively I find it ridiculous. I wouldn't be able to explain why, but it's out of purpose for me. I'm not trying to relate to the old form of the manifesto. I didn't think about it.

Stretcher: I hear so often from students that everything has been done.

NB: People already said that in the twelfth century. This pressure of the new is something which is quite new in history. But it was not a determinant interrogation for artists for centuries. And it didn't make them repeat things. People like Vermeer and Velasquez did new things, but they didn't think about "newness" specifically because it was not of value for them. The new as a value is something which is gone now.

Stretcher: So what's replacing it?

NB: I think that maybe the idea of being relevant, of being useful, of being pertinent is more important to artists than just doing something new � new in what sense actually? It's like the Guinness World Book of Records. What really good artists do is to create a model for a possible world, and possible bits of worlds.

KM: I like your term micro-utopia.

NB: Avant gardes were about utopias. How is it possible to transform the world from scratch and rebuild a society which would be totally different. I think that is totally impossible and what artists are trying to do now is to create micro-utopias, neighborhood utopias, like talking to your neighbor, just what's happening when you shake hands with somebody. This is all super political when you think about it. That's micro-politics.

Stretcher: It's very demanding of the artist.

NB: What's an artwork? Any artwork materializes a relation to the world; if you see a Vermeer or a Mondrian, it's concretized, materialized, visible in relation to the world that they had. You can decode and interpret for yourself and use it for your own life. Or for your work if you're an artist. It's a chain of relations. History of art is about that � a chain of relations to the world. So, any artwork is a relation to the world made visible.

Stretcher: About this new relationship between the artist and their audience, Christine Hill, one of the artists in TOUCH, said the other night. "I really wanted to be there to hear what my audience had to say." I know so many artists who are working in their studios who feel that after they put their work out there they're completely removed from it. They never hear anything back. It's as if you throw it into the void ....

KM: It's true for curators as well. You do have a certain voyeuristic opportunity when you are in a space and you can watch spectators viewing the work, or you receive response back if there's a publication. But often you don't get feedback. That's why having the artist present [Ed. note: three of the artists in TOUCH spent time in the gallery as part of their work] is so intriguing. It's not an artist shipping a work, you have people actually here. This was also true with some other exhibitions I've personally been involved with like In the Spirit of Fluxus at the Walker. Or the John Cage exhibition at MOCA in LA. The live action becomes really important to the beginning of the exhibition. It is also interesting how few of the artists in this exhibition are involved with technology. While their work may somehow comment on the technological, they are not much involved with technology, which is refreshing.

NB: They just use it.

KM: They use it, but they're not commenting on it.

NB: But their way of thinking was totally modified by the Internet and e-mail. I was never really impressed by any interactive high technology artwork. I think the best of Internet went into artworks which don't clearly use it, but use its possibility in order to think differently.

KM: But, speaking of technology, in your book Post-Production, you talk about the sampler, the hacker and the programmer as different mechanisms for assembling the toolbox of history in a new context. Because of the conundrum of not being able to produce anything new, I find it interesting that your proposal for art is post-production � mining previously made work and recontextualizing it. That is what, if anything, could be considered new, the recontextualization of the already-made. I think that Post-Production is such an interesting follow-up to Relational Aesthetics.

NB: It's a prologue, in a way. Ten years ago, it would have been completely impossible to consider a DJ as an artist for example. Now, it's normal. Nobody would even think of saying "you're already playing pre-existing records, so you're not an artist." That's vanished. The idea of the artist as a kind of demi-god creating the world from a blank sheet of paper is something that has just vanished from our every day culture. The fact that the DJ or programmer or artist uses already existing forms in order to say what they want to say is something that is certainly the most important thing at the moment because it totally goes beyond the art world.

KM: And this is why the institutional frame has to shift. Because it's not just that the work is interdisciplinary. It is a complete overlap between all different forms of art and entertainment that need new and more open spaces to exist because they're not separable in any way any longer. I imagine that the spaces for exhibiting art will feel more like clubs. There's an example here � 111 Minna � it's a club but there's art there as well. One begins to see the breaking down of those barriers. And one wonders when one is in a white cube what one needs to do. Sitting in this pit bed disrupts the box of this gallery space. I think more and more that is what has to happen to accommodate this kind of post-productive work.

Stretcher: Back to the role of curators in creating the new institutions that you are talking about. Nicholas, you come from the discipline of philosophy. You didn't follow an art history and academic track. I think that may have facilitated your finding a different perspective to all these issues. Artists have been making this work, yet it took someone from outside the discipline to put a different light on it.

NB: I think the most important thing is you don't have to be intimidated by knowledge and by history. Most people's relation to history can be summed up by this image of somebody trying to walk into a room with a lot of porcelain and fragile things and not wanting to break any of them. It's super-precious and it has to be kept exactly like it is. I think all these artists do exactly the opposite. Which is they don't care about any historical object, they just use it and try to understand what's in it. And these are two different ways of seeing history � first as a commodified history, doing nothing to change it - or revisiting it all the time and feeling totally free.

KM: And I think curators are changing, the shift is not just because the artistic practices are changing and artists are changing. I was trained as a traditional art historian. Because I went to graduate school once in my twenties and once much later, and in between worked in museums, I was between the generation in which people were trained in extremely narrow art historical ways and curators were still largely connoisseurs, and the new trend. I've worked in traditional museums, but I've also had the good fortune to work in a lot of alternative artist spaces or museums that weren't really museums. I think that it enabled me to be someone who presented work that was not as traditional. But there's still a real schism within institutions. Because what you have are people who were trained in a linear, formalist, modernist way. And now you have younger people coming in who have studied cultural history, they've studied visual culture, they've studied architecture, philosophy � and I think this is a very good thing for the field.



Nicolas Bourriaud and Karen Moss
Part II

Interviewed by Stretcher

In Part II of our Face-Off with Nicolas Bourriaud, a curator at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and Karen Moss, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs at the San Francisco Art Institute, we continue discussing how architectural, institutional, curatorial, educational and economic structures need to change to facilitate the new forms of art production.


Karen Moss: I think a lot of museums are rebuilding their buildings, because they are realizing again that the architectural imperative is not conducive to doing this kind of work.

Stretcher: So what kind of architecture would be appropriate?

Nicolas Bourriard: Any. It's not the shape � it's what you do within the shape.

KM: I meant places that still have very small discrete galleries that are not flexible. You have to activate them.

NB: Exactly � it's what you do inside.

S: Is the new curatorial studies program here going to reflect this kind of thinking? And what would you say to those who think that curatorial studies programs are a less serious program than art history programs?
KM: Curatorial studies programs need to exist now is because contemporary artists are so diverse. If you're working with living artists, you're dealing with a completely different set of power structures and processes than if you're working with historical material. Before, the curator was there to merely select from what an artist had already produced. In the contemporary context, if you're working with artists who are working with different forms, it's more of a collaboration, a negotiation, a co-production. I was really lucky because my first curatorial internship was at Berkeley Art Museum when David Ross was the curator, so I learned the administrative aspects of an exhibition in a way that was quite different than it would have been in a traditional museum. One of the very first things I did when I was there was work on a Terry Allen and Jo Harvey Allen performance series. I had to find a regulation boxing ring and four-inch spike-heeled shoes for Jo Harvey Allen. That's not typical curatorial practice.

S: Is that true for your work also, Nicolas?

NB: Absolutely.

KM: I can think of a very specific example. We originally wanted to Christine Hill to do a walking tour of San Francisco. You heard in her talk the other night that she's set up a tour guide office in Manhattan. Unfortunately the time frame did not allow her to spend the amount of time that she would have needed in order to really get to know San Francisco. The whole point of that project is that she spends a lot of time getting to know, inside out, every tiny aspect of the neighborhood so the tour becomes more about the idiosyncratic qualities. And we have a lot of idiosyncraties in this neighborhood. There was a negotiation about doing a different project that would be more site specific, more conducive to this environment. And because Christine does not create objects, there is also a negotiation about what an artist is paid for their time and their work. The issues are production and labor, not about commodity objects, which is also interesting.

S: How do the economics or economic relationships or structures in museums need to change to facilitate this different kind of art production?

KM: Nicolas and I have very different situations in our respective institutions. An art school allows a certain freedom. We are not dependent on selling objects in the Walter McBean Galleries, nor on supporting the program for a public that is coming to consume. We are here primarily for students; for the larger public, we offer an educational opportunity to learn something new about art that they would not necessarily see in a commercial gallery or a larger non-profit space such as a museum. So, it's a great luxury. On the other hand, it presents challenges because our budgets are not at the same level that one would have in a larger museum. Nicolas, maybe you should talk about your arrangement with the Palais de Tokyo.

NB: Again, it's a non-profit organization which is important. It's the same symbolic structure as any French museum. But the fact is, we are totally free from any political power. I'm not employed by the government, I'm employed by an association which is totally different. My boss is the board and actually we set the board up ourselves.

KM: You're able to choose your own bosses.

NB: That's what we did � literally. It was an exciting opportunity to set up an organization from scratch which is something you never normally have. Normally, you integrate into something, you're in the middle of a process and then you have to cope with what your predecessors did. I didn't have this problem.

KM: The American system is very different from France's national museum system, where everything is part of a ministry. American museums have changed considerably in terms of the market and marketing. And I think one of the most difficult things about being in a large museum in this country is that you do not have the government sponsorship that you have with the national museum system. Museums here are largely driven by private contributions since the government monies are less available. Private contributions are largely driven by marketing efforts and also by what we euphemistically call "alternative revenue" which means bookstores and caf�s. The problem with American museums is that at the same time they're trying to expand audiences, they are becoming sites of commerce and consumption, particularly in the arena of the bookstore and the caf�. That's not necessarily bad, but it does put pressure on curators, because marketing forces and the forces of development are always knocking on one's door.

NB: We all know that the most important things in art history in the last forty or fifty years were not popular. So what do we do?

KM: Using the commercial places in a museum could be really productive. It can create a locus. I think for instance, that Benjamin Weil [new media curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art] has used the social space, like the lobby, for various events. When I was at the Walker Art Museum, we were very successful in dovetailing the programs that the curators were generating with spaces that allowed a greater flow between different activities.

NB: For me, the restaurant and the bookshop are an important part of the project. Super important. We are trying to develop very interactive situations, between the boutiques and caf� and the activities of the space of the art center. What is now the restaurant will be transformed into a self-service caf�. And then next December we'll have the real restaurant open on the Avenue of President Wilson. It's important to provide visitors with books, objects, games � whatever � as kind of a sweet preceding the medicine.

S: This is probably oversimplifying things dreadfully. I have a European friend who says artworks like those in this show [Touch, an exhibition informed by Bourriard's theory of relational aesthetics] are commonly shown in Europe. Whereas here ...

NB: That is optimistic!

S: Nostalgic, maybe.

KM I think it's true. Someone like Ben Kinmont [an artist in Touch] says that he's been's showing almost exclusively in Europe, although he lives in the United States.

NB: He had a show in New York � but I curated it actually.

KM: Many of these artists whose work is more relational, performative, emphemeral, or interhuman are not as well-accepted in the context of the strictures at American institutions. The other thing is Americans have an edifice complex. It's so often about the building and the social aspects, like who patronizes the museum, and I don't know how you change that, because that's a much bigger cultural shift. It really gets backs to an educational problem.

NB: On the other hand, the European idea of America is that people here are very much more receptive to new things, new ideas.

KM: I do think people are open here � especially younger people. But I also think there are issues about who goes to museums. You told me a very interesting story about the fact that, because you're open from noon to midnight, lots of people who don't normally go to museums � like everyday workers � go into the museum. I am curious about what their reactions to the art.

NB: It really depends � there's no typical reaction to it � that's the lesson also � the reaction is totally diverse.

KM: But you have a very diverse audience too. There's no specific age range.

NB: Not really. I have the results of a study of the audience of Palais de Tokyo, but it doesn't give many clues about the typical visitor. It's very balanced between ages and social conditions, etc. It's mainly Parisians and foreigners, more than the people from the rest of France.

KM: That says something. We were having a conversation about all the activities that are being organized in upstate New York around the place that David Ross is doing up in the Hudson River Valley and they were saying the profile of the visitor there was likely to be New York City people or foreign travelers. The point is that the average American is not as educated in the arts and so it's a harder thing to say, "if we open our museums from noon to midnight that we will get a much more diverse audience", because there is still that educational issue.

NB: On the other hand, being educated in the arts doesn't mean that you can more easily understand the art works which are, for example, in this room. Sometimes it just makes them think "this is not art" because they think they know what art is. It can be good also not to know anything about art.

S: Let's go back to the idea of economics for a just a little bit; we'll play devil's advocate for a moment. Let's say an artist makes an object that someone wants to buy. They want it, give the artist money � that's the base of one kind of economic structure. It seems as if relational aethetics involves an underlying assumption that the money comes from somewhere else, like maybe government funding or granting. What actually becomes the economic structure through which the artist is supported?

NB: The funny thing is that most of the works here belong to private collections.

S: But, at the roundtable discussion you made the point that this is the after-effects of the actual piece of art. The transaction is the actual piece of art.

NB: What do you buy when you buy an artwork? Do you buy shape and colors or do you buy an experience? You buy an experience � otherwise you can buy anything else. If you're buying an experience, then this experience can take many, many forms and it doesn't necessarily have to be an object. It can be something you can use, it can be something you have to do. There are many possibilities that feed the relationship between the artist and the collector, or the artist and the museum curator.

KM: A lot of artists are utilizing the issue of service, like Christine Hill. The first time you met her, Nicolas, she gave you a back massage. Now she's "shown" the Volksboutique in various forms. So it's about performing the service. Her personal economy revolves around her different "organizational ventures" and the fees she's paid as an honorarium for a service.

NB: Criticizing this kind of art because it doesn't provide an object would mean that any enterprise which doesn't produce objects is irrelevant which is not the case. It doesn't work that way in real life. So why would it work that way in the art world?

KM: But speaking of the art world, the other interesting part of this show from an historical vantage point, is the early 1990s was the time when the art market crashed and so it allowed a certain freedom on the part of younger artists not to worry about some superstructure of the market because the market had collapsed so they started their own galleries

NB: Which was the case in the 1970s, also.

KM: The other interesting aspect of artists in this show is they don't have the same issues that artists from the 1960s and 1970s had about making a living through their art. Some of the artists who have the anchor pieces in the show have major gallery representation and are shown in major international exhibitions. They may have started out quite anti-commodity or ephemeral, but at this point it's less of a problem for them to be represented and sell their work. There are some younger artists in the show for whom that's not the situation � who explicitly do not have representation by choice. They show with galleries, but they're not represented.

S: That's the question � the gallery structure as we now know it is a collecting structure. And is that an appropriate economic interface?

NB: I think yes. Absolutely. If you're a good gallerist you don't sell a painting as an object. If you do, you're really a bad gallerist. You sell it for what it is which is a really complex and rich network of the idea of experience, the idea of history, ways of thinking, etc. It is not only an image on a canvas.

KM: Which is why the collector is someone who buys the art because they understand it's one of many nodes on that network as opposed to something to be consumed for monetary value. Which takes an enlightened collector.

S: Anything else?

KM: It's really interesting to utilize this pitbed.

NB: Welcome to the Moss Mansion!

Above copied from: http://www.stretcher.org/archives/i1_a/2003_05_24_i1_archive.php

Mind over matter. (interview with Harald Szeemann)

From: Artforum International | Date: 11/1/1996 | Author: Obrist, Hans-Ulrich

Harald Szeemann began his career as a curator, which spans more than 40 years, when he took charge of the exhibition 'Dichtende Maler/Malende Dichter' at the Museum in St. Gallen in Switzerland in 1957. Until 1969, he was the director of the Kunsthalle Bern, where he organized 12 to 15 exhibitions each year during his eight-year stint. He was responsible for transforming the museum into a venue which brings together emerging European and American artists.

Ever since he "declared his independence" by resigning his directorship at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1969, Harald Szeemann has defined himself as an Ausstellungsmacher, a maker of exhibitions. There is more at stake in adopting such a designation than semantics. Szeemann is more conjurer than curator - simultaneously archivist, conservator, art handler, press officer, accountant and above all, accomplice of the artists.

At the Kunsthalle Bern, where Szeemann made his reputation during his eight-year tenure, he organized twelve to fifteen exhibitions a year, turning this venerable institution into a meeting ground for emerging European and American artists. His coup de grace, "When Attitudes Become Form: Live in Your Head," was the first exhibition to bring together post-Minimalist and Conceptual artists in a European institution, and marked a turning point in Szeemann's career - with this show his aesthetic position became increasingly controversial, and due to interference and pressure to adjust his programming from the Kunsthalle's board of directors and Bern's municipal government, he resigned, and set himself up as an Independent curator.

If Szeemann succeeded in transforming Bern's Kunsthalle into one of the most dynamic institutions of its time, his 1972 version of Documenta did no less for this art-world staple, held every five years in Kassel, Germany. Conceived as a "100-Day Event," it brought together artists such as Richard Serra, Paul Thek, Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, and Rebecca Horn, and included not only painting and sculpture but installations, performances, Happenings, and, of course, events that lasted the full 100 days, such as Joseph Beuys' Office for Direct Democracy. Artists have always responded to Szeemann and his approach to curating, which he himself describes as a "structured chaos." Of "Monte Verita," a show mapping the visionary utopias of the early twentieth century, Mario Merz said Szeemann "visualized the chaos we, as artists, have in our heads. One day we're anarchists, another drunks, the next mystics." Szeemann's eclectic, wide-ranging shows evince a boundless energy for research and an encyclopedic knowledge not only of contemporary art but also of the social and historical events that have shaped our post-Enlightenment world. Indeed, in the last few years he has mounted a number of shows that reflect his penchant for mixing artifact and art, combining as they do inventions, historical documents, everyday objects, and artwork. Two of the largest offered panoramic views of his home country and the one across the Alps: "Visionary Switzerland" in 1991 and "Austria im Rosennetz" (Austria in a net of roses), which recently opened at the Museum fur Angewandte Kunst in Vienna.

Szeemann now divides his time between the Kunsthaus Zurich, where he occupies the paradoxical position of permanent freelance curator, and the studio-cum-archive he calls "The Factory," located in Tegna, the small Swiss Alpine town where he lives. What follows is a record of the conversation I had with Szeemann last summer, in which he reflected on his more than forty-year career.

HANS-ULRICH OBRIST: Until 1957 you were involved in theater. Then you began organizing exhibitions. What prompted this transition?

HARALD SZEEMANN: When I was eighteen, I started a cabaret with three friends, two actors and a musician. But around 1955, sick of intrigues and jealousies, I began to move away from ensemble work until I was doing everything by myself - a one-man style of theater that reflected my ambition to realize a gesamtkunstwerk.

At the time I had already been visiting the Kunsthalle Bern for five years. Bern is a small city where everyone knows each other, and when Franz Meyer (he took over as director from Arnold Rudlinger in 1955) was asked if he knew anyone who could show Henry Clifford, then director of the Philadelphia Museum, around Switzerland, he proposed me, knowing my interest in all the arts, but particularly in Dada, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. We visited museums, private collections, and artists; it was a wonderful month of "vagabondage."

In 1957 Meyer also suggested me for an ambitious project, "Dichtende Maler/Malende Dichter" (Painters-poets/poets-painters) at the Museum in St. Gallen. Four people were already working on the show, but the two main directors had health problems and the other two were reluctant to take on an exhibition of this size alone. So they asked Meyer if he knew someone who could take care of the contemporary section, and he said, "I only know one person. It's Szeemann." I was the ambitious understudy who ended up getting the main part.

The intensity of the work made me realize this was my medium. It gives you the same rhythm as in theater, only you don't have to be on stage constantly.

HUO: What drew you to contemporary art to begin with?

HS: Until I was nineteen I still wanted to be a painter, but the Fernand Leger exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern in '52 impressed me so much that I said to myself, "I'll never get that good." Through Rudlinger's exhibitions - ranging from Nabis to Jackson Pollock - at the Kunsthalle Bern, one could really learn the history of painting. He was the first to show contemporary American art to a European public and later, when he became director of the Kunsthalle Basel, he bought paintings by Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline, and Barnett Newman for the Basel Kunstmuseum. He was friends with many artists - Alexander Calder, Bill Jensen, and Sam Francis - and through him I met a lot of artists in Paris and New York. In Bern he did a series of exhibitions called "Tendances actuelles 1-3" (Contemporary tendencies, 1-3), a splendid survey of postwar painting from the Paris School to American abstraction. When he moved to Basel he had more space and more money, but his real adventure was in Bern.

Meyer served as director until '61. He mounted the first exhibitions in Switzerland of Kasimir Malevich, Kurt Schwitters, Matisse's cutouts, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, and he showed Antoni Tapies, Serge Poliakoff, Francis, and Jean Tinguely. By the time I took over the Kunsthalle in '61, I was faced with this venerable past, so I had to change direction.

HUO: You wrote that Bern was something like a "situation." A kind of "mental space."

HS: I found art to be one way of challenging the notion of property/possession. And because the Kunsthalle had no permanent collection, it was more like a laboratory than a collective memorial. You had to improvise, to do the maximum with minimal resources and still be good enough that other institutions would want to take on the exhibitions and share the costs.

HUO: In the '80s the Kunsthalle became more structured. The exhibition program was reduced from more than a dozen exhibitions a year to between four and six. And the introduction of "midcareer retrospectives" turned the Kunsthalle into an extension of the museums themselves - its elasticity was lost.

HS: Yes, everything was flexible, dynamic, and then suddenly everything changed. To hang an exhibition, to produce the catalogue, used to take us one week, and then suddenly you needed a four-week period between shows to photograph everything; with this slower pace came institutional pedagogies, restoration, and guards. In the '60s we had none of this. For me, if there was a pedagogy it was about the succession of events; documentation was not important.

My approach attracted a younger public and a very young photographer named Balthasar Burkhard started to document exhibitions and events, not for publication but just because he liked what I did and what was happening at the Kunsthalle. That's how I prefer to work. Actually I stopped publishing catalogues and just printed newspapers, which were anathema to the bibliophile collectors.

HUO: And that worked out?

HS: Of course. the Kunsthalle had an exhibition program but it also welcomed all kinds of participation. Young filmmakers showed their films, the Living Theater made its first appearance in Switzerland there, young composers performed their music - groups like Free Jazz from Detroit played - young fashion designers showed their creations.

Naturally this provoked reactions. The local newspapers accused me of alienating traditional audiences, but we also attracted a new audience. The membership increased from about 200 to around 600, with an additional 1,000 students paying a symbolic Swiss franc to belong. It was the '60s and the zeitgeist had changed.

HUO: Which exhibitions influenced you most as you were starting to curate your own shows?

HS: Well, I already described some of what I saw in Bern and in Paris. Also very important was the German Expressionism show in 1953, "Deutsche Kunst, Meisterwerke des 20 Jahrhunderts" (German art, masterworks of the twentieth century), at the Kunstmuseum Lucerne, and, of course, in Paris " Les Sources du XXe siecle" (The sources of the twentieth century, 1958), and the Dubuffet retrospective at the Musee des arts decoratifs in 1960, as well as Documenta II in '59, curated by its founder, Arnold Bode. I also visited a lot of studios - those of Constantin Brancusi, Ernst, Tinguely, Robert Muller, Bruno Muller, Daniel Spoerri, Dieter Roth, among others. I saw the most fabulous show of Picasso in Milan in 1959. From the beginning, meeting artists and looking at important shows was my education - I was always less interested in formal art history.

Of my peers, I admired Georg Schmidt, director of the Kunstmuseum Basel until 1963. He was absolutely focused on quality, able to choose the work he wanted for his collection and to incite fabulous gifts like the La Roche collection. But I also admired William Sandberg, director of the Stedelijk Museum until 1963, who was Schmidt's opposite. Sandberg was obsessed with information. Sometimes he exhibited only part of a diptych, for instance, or left a good work out of the show altogether because it was reproduced in the catalogue. For him ideas and information counted more than the experience of the object.

In a sense, I combined both approaches in my shows to achieve what I like to think of as selective information and/or informative selection. This is how I view my Kunsthalle years. In putting together an exhibition, I took both connoisseurship and the dissemination of pure information into account and transformed both. That's the foundation of my work.

HUO: Tell me more about Sandberg.

HS: Amsterdam in the '60s was the meeting point, the whole art world converged in the Stedelijk cafeteria under a mural by Karel Appel. Sandberg was very open-minded. He let artists curate exhibitions such as "Dylaby" with Tinguely, Spoerri, Robert Rauschenberg, and Niki de Saint Phalle; he was enthusiastic about new artistic directions: kinetic art, the California "light sculptors," new synthetic materials. When Sandberg left, Eduard de Wilde took over and painting filled the Stedelijk. De Wilde was much more conservative.

I also have to mention Robert Giron, who had been exhibition director at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels since its inception in 1925, an exemplary institution. Everyday at noon curators, collectors, and artists met in his office to exchange the latest art-world news. When I met Giron, he had been running the Palais for forty years and he said, "You are too young, you'll never hold up as long as me." But out of my generation and the next, I'm the only one still going. It gives me pleasure.

HUO: What about Johannes Cladders, the former director of the museum in Monchengladbach?

HS: Cladders was always an idol for me. I knew him when he was still in Krefeld. He did not rely on grand gestures. He had a love of precision but precision based on intuition. His first space was an empty school building on Bismarck Street. It marked a great period. James Lee Byars presented a golden needle in a vitrine, the windows to the garden were open, the birds were singing. Sheer poetry. And Carl Andre did a catalogue in the form of a tablecloth. I asked Cladders to participate in Documenta V. He said, Okay, but I won't take over a section, I'll just work with four artists - Marcel Broodthaers, Joseph Beuys, Daniel Buren, and Robert Filliou - and integrate them into the rest of the show. It was his way of working. This was a period when everybody was fighting to establish the significance of their institutions. In the late '60s, art and culture started to be promoted by politicians and it became important which party you belonged to, especially in Germany. Cladders established his importance quietly, with artistic deeds at the museum in Monchengladbach, while the nearby Dusseldorf Kunsthalle did it with power plays.

HUO: You said you went to Amsterdam every month. Were there other places you visited regularly?

HS: Yes, there was an itinerary of hope and ambition: Pontus Hulten's Moderna Museet, in Stockholm; Knud Jensen's Louisiana, near Copenhagen; and Brussels. In 1967 Otto Hahn wrote in The Express magazine: "There are four places to watch: Amsterdam (Sandberg and de Wilde), Stockholm (Hulten), Dusseldorf (Schmela) and Bern (Szeemann)."

HUO: At the Kunsthalle Bern you not only organized thematic exhibitions but also many solo shows.

HS: The Kunsthalle was run by artists - they were a majority on the exhibition committee, so I had to deal with a lot of local art politics. There were Swiss artists I loved - people like Muller, Walter Kurt Wiemken, Otto Meyer-Amden, Louis Moilliet - but in my view they were not well-known, so I organized their first solo shows. I also showcased international artists: Piotr Kowalski, Etienne-Martin, Auguste Herbin, Mark Tobey, Louise Nevelson. Even Giorgio Morandi had his first retrospective in Bern. I usually did a thematic exhibition first - for example "Marionettes, Puppets, Shadowplays: Asiatica and Experiments," "Ex Votos," "Light and Movement: Kinetic Art," "White on White," "Science Fiction," "12 Environments," and finally, "When Attitudes Become Form: Live in Your Head" - with both established and emerging artists, and then showed single artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Max Bill, Jesus-Rafael Soto, Jean Dewasne, Jean Gorin, and Constant. It was logical for a small city to do it this way, to alternate between solo and group shows. In a couple of exhibitions I showed the work of young artists - young British sculptors or young Dutch artists.

HUO: You mentioned "When Attitudes Become Form" which was a landmark show opost-Minimalist American artists. How did you put it together?

HS: The history of "Attitudes" is short but complex. After the opening in the summer of '68 of the exhibition "12 Environments" (which included works by Andy Warhol, Martial Raysse, Soto, Jean Schnyder, Kowalski, not to mention experimental film and Christo's first wrapped public building), the people from Philip Morris and the PR firm Rudder and Finn came to Bern and asked me if I would like to do a show of my own. They offered me money and total freedom. I said, Yes, of course. Until then I had never had an opportunity like that. Usually I wasn't able to pay shipping costs from the States to Bern, so I cooperated with the Stedelijk, which had the Holland American Line as a sponsor for transatlantic shipping, and I only had to pay for transport in Europe. In this way I was able to show Jasper Johns in '62, Rauschenberg, Richard Stankiewicz, and Alfred Leslie, and many more Americans later on. So getting this funding for "Attitudes" was very liberating for me.

After the opening of "12 Environments," I was traveling with de Wilde (then director of the Stedelijk) through Switzerland and Holland to select works by younger Dutch and Swiss artists for two group shows devoted to each nationality that took place in both countries. I told him that with the Philip Morris money I intended to do a show with the light artists of Los Angeles: Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, Doug Wheeler, Turrell. But Edy said, "You can't do that. I've already reserved the project for myself!" And I responded, "Well, if you reserved that idea when's the show?" His was still years down the road, but my project was for the immediate future. It was July and my show was scheduled for March.

That same day we visited the studio of a Dutch painter, Reiner Lucassen, who said, "I have an assistant. Would you be interested in looking at his work?" The assistant was Jan Dibbets, who greeted us from behind two tables - one with neon coming out of the surface, the other one with grass, which he watered. I was so impressed by this gesture that I said to Edy, "Okay. I know what I'll do, an exhibition that focuses on behaviors and gestures like the one I just saw."

That was the starting point; then everything happened very quickly. There is a published diary of "Attitudes" that details my trips, studio visits, the installation process. It was an adventure from beginning to end, and the catalogue, discussing how the works could either assume material form or remain immaterial, documents this revolution in the visual arts. It was a moment of great intensity and freedom, when you could either produce a work or just imagine it, as Lawrence Weiner put it. Sixty-nine artists, Europeans and Americans, took over the institution. Robert Barry irradiated the roof; Richard Long did a walk in the mountains; Mario Merz made one of his first igloos; Michael Heizer opened the sidewalk; Walter de Maria produced his telephone piece; Richard Serra showed lead sculptures, the belt piece, and a splash piece; Weiner took a square meter out of the wall; Beuys made a grease sculpture. The Kunsthalle became a real laboratory and a new exhibition style was born - one of structured chaos.

HUO: Speaking of new structures for exhibitions, I wanted to ask you about the Agentur fur Geistige Gastarbeit (Agency for spiritual guest work). I know that it served as a kind of base from which you mounted a number of significant shows in the early '70s, but I'm unclear how the agency was founded.

HS: "When Attitudes Become Form" and the following exhibition "Friends and their Friends" provoked a scandal in Bern. To me, what I was showing were artworks but the critics and the public did not agree. The city government and the parliament got involved. Finally they decided that I could remain the director if I didn't put human lives in danger - they thought my activities were destructive to humankind. Even worse, the exhibition committee was mainly composed of local artists and they decided that from now on they would dictate the programs. They rejected the Edward Kienholz show and the solo show of Beuys, to which he had already agreed. Suddenly it was war, and I decided to resign, to become a freelance curator. It was during that period that the hostility to foreign workers began to manifest itself; a political party was even founded to lower the number of foreigners in Switzerland. I was attacked since my name was not Swiss but Hungarian. In response, I founded the Agentur fur Geistige Gastarbeit, which was a political statement since the Italian, Turkish, and Spanish workers in Switzerland were called "guest workers." The agency was a one-man enterprise, a kind of institutionalization of myself, and its slogans were both ideological "Replace Property with Free Activity" and practical, "From Vision to Nail," which meant that I did everything from conceptualizing the project to hanging the works. It was the spirit of '68.

Since I wasn't under contract at the Kunsthalle, I was free from my duties in September of '69 and then I immediately began a film project called "Height x Length x Width," with artists such as Bernhard Luginbuhl, Markus Raetz, and Balthasar Burkhard. But soon offers to do shows started arriving at the agency. I organized an exhibition in Nuremberg "The Thing as Object," 1970; in Cologne, "Happening and Fluxus," 1970; in Sydney and Melbourne, "I Want to Leave a Nice Well-Done Child Here," 1971; and, of course, Documenta V.

HUO: Let's talk about your 1970 exhibition "Happening and Fluxus" in Cologne. In this exhibit, time was more important than space. How did you decide on this approach?

HS: During the preparation of "Attitudes" I had long talks with Dick Bellamy at Leo Castelli about the art that preceded what I had grouped under the rubric "Attitudes." Of course Pollock was evoked, but also Alan Kaprow's early Happenings and Viennese actionism. So when I was asked by Cologne's cultural minister to do a show, I thought, This is the place to retrace the history of Happenings and Fluxus. Wuppertal, where Nam Jun Paik, Beuys, and Wolf Vostell had staged events, was nearby. So was Wiesbaden, where George Maciunas organized early Fluxus concerts, and in Cologne itself Heiner Friedrich promoted La Monte Young. I chose a three-part structure. Part one was a wall of documents that I put together with Hans Sohm, who had passionately collected the invitations, flyers, and other printed materials that related to all the happenings and events in recent art history. This wall of documents divided the space of Cologne's Kunstverein in two. On each side, there were smaller spaces where artists could present their own work - this was the second part of the show. All kinds of gestures were possible: Claes Oldenburg put up posters and publications, Ben Vautier did a performance piece in which he provoked the audience, Kudo imprisoned himself in a cage, and so on. A third part consisted of environments by Vostell, Robert Watts, Dick Higgins, as well as Kaprow's tire piece. To cap it all, there was a Fluxus concert with Vautier, Brecht, and others, as well as happenings inside and outside the museum with Vostell, Higgins, Kaprow, Vautier, and of course Otto Muhl and Hermann Nitsch.

During the preparations, I felt something was lacking. So a couple of weeks before the exhibition opened, I invited, against Vostell's wishes, the Viennese actionists - Gunter Brus, Muhl, and Nitsch - to add some spice to what was in danger of becoming a reunion of veterans. It was the first public appearance of the Viennese and they took full advantage of the opportunity. Their spaces were filled with documents concerning the "Art and Revolution" event at the University of Vienna which was followed by a trial. Brus, Muhl, and Oswald Wiener were given six-months detention for degrading state symbols. Their sentences were later reduced except for Brus'. It was after that that Brus and Nitsch emigrated to Germany and founded the "Austrian Exile Government" with Wiener. Their films for sexual freedom and body-oriented art, and their performances caused a scandal.

It was all very messy. Vostell who had a pregnant cow in his environment was forbidden by the Veterinary Institute to let her give birth. So he wanted to cancel the show. But finally after a night of discussion we decided to open. Since the exhibition was upsetting the authorities, it had to open and stay open.

Beuys was not in the show, but of course he came knocking on the museum's door in the name of his "East-West Fluxus." The same happened in "Attitudes" with Buren. Though I didn't invite him, he came and glued his stripes throughout the streets around the Kunsthalle.

HUO: But Buren was invited to Documenta?

HS: Yes. And of course I knew that he would put me on the spot by choosing the most problematic locations for his striped paper. He was very critical of Documenta. He said curators were becoming superartists who used artworks like so many brushstrokes in a huge painting. But the artists accepted his intervention, which took the form of discrete white stripes on white wallpaper. It's only in retrospect that I heard that Will Insley was offended by the wallpaper along the base of his huge utopian architectural model. Beuys participated with his Office for Direct Democracy, where he sat throughout the run of Documenta discussing art, social problems and daily life with visitors to the show. He chose the well-known medium of the office to show that you can be creative everywhere. He also intended by his presence to abolish political parties, to make each man represent himself.

This was the first time that Documenta was no longer conceived as a "100 Day Museum" but as a "100 Day Event." After the summer of '68, theorizing in the art world was the order of the day, and it shocked people when I put a stop to all the Hegelian and Marxist discussions. With Documenta, I wanted to trace a trajectory of mimesis, borrowing from Hegel's discussion about the reality of the image [Abbildung] versus the reality of the imaged [Abgebildetes]. You began with "Images That Lie" (such as publicity, propaganda, and kitsch), passed through utopian architecture, religious imagery and art brut, moved on to Beuys' office, and then to gorgeous installations like Serra's Circuit, 1972. You could lie down under the roof and dream to a continuous sound by La Monte Young. All the emerging artists of the late '60s were present. And their works formed an exhibition that included performances by artists such as Vito Acconci, Howard Fried, Terry Fox, Byars, Paul Cotton, Joan Jonas, and Rebecca Horn. I also decided to use only the two museum spaces and forget about putting up sculptures outdoors. The result was a balance between static work and movement, huge installations and small, delicate works.

I always felt that it was the only Documenta possible at that time, though during the first two months the reception in Germany was devastating. In France they immediately grasped the underlying structure of moving from the "reality of the image," such as political propaganda, to "imaged reality," Social Realist work or photorealism, for example, to "the identity or non-identity of the image and the imaged," Conceptual art, loosely speaking. I also wanted to avoid the eternal battle between two styles, Surrealism versus Dada, Pop versus Minimalism, and so on, that characterizes art history, and so I coined the term "individual mythologies," a question of attitude not style.

HUO: Your notion of an "individual," self-generated mythology began with sculptor Etienne Martin.

HS: Yes, this expression was born when I organized an Etienne-Martin show in 1963. His on-site sculptures called "Demeures" (Dwellings) were for me a revolutionary idea, though the surfaces were still in the tradition of Rodin. The concept of "individual mythology" was to postulate an art history of intense intentions that can take diverse shapes: people create their own sign systems, which take time to be deciphered.

HUO: What about Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipe (Anti-Oedipus)? Did it influence your way of conceiving Documenta V?

HS: I only read Deleuze for "Bachelor Machines," not before. I've never read as much as people think I have. When I curate exhibitions I barely have time to read.

HUO: After Documenta, you founded what you called the Museum of Obsessions. How did it come about and what was its function?

HS: I invented this Museum, which exists only in my head, to give direction to the Agentur fur Geistige Gastarbeit. It was Easter '74 and the agency had already existed for five years. Documenta had been a brutal exhibition: with 225,000 visitors, fragile pieces were easily damaged if you did not pay attention. I reacted to that by organizing a very intimate exhibition in an apartment called "Grand-Father," which consisted of my grandfather's personal belongings, and the tools of his profession - he was a hairdresser, an artist. I arranged these things to create an environment that reflected my interpretation of who he was. I have always maintained that it is important to try new approaches.

In "Bachelor Machines," for instance, the show was slightly different in each museum to which it traveled. New things were constantly added, in tribute to the various towns where the show was held: it went from Bern, to Venice, Brussels, Dusseldorf, Paris, Malmo, Amsterdam, and Vienna. After Documenta, I had to find a new way of doing exhibitions. There was no sense in proposing retrospectives to my colleagues at the institutions; they could as easily do these shows themselves. So I invented something else. In the Museum of Obsessions I settled on three fundamental themes, metaphors that had to be given visual form: the Bachelor, la Mamma, and the Sun. "Bachelor Machines" was inspired by Duchamp's Large Glass and similar machines or machinelike men, such as those in Franz Kafka's short story "In the Penal Colony," Raymond Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique, and Alfred Jarry's Supermale le Surmale, and it had to do with a belief in eternal energy flow as a way to avoid death, as an erotics of life: the bachelor as rebel-model, as antiprocreation. Duchamp suggested that males are only a projection in three dimensions of a four-dimensional female power. I therefore combined works by artists who create symbols that will survive them - like Duchamp - and those artists who have what I would like to call primary obsessions, whose lives are organized around their obsessions such as Heinrich Anton Muller. Of course, I also wanted to abolish the barrier between high art and outsider art. With the Museum of Obsession, the word "obsession," which from the Middle Ages up to Jung's "individuation process" had negative connotations, came to stand for a positive kind of energy.

Another exhibition in this series was "Monte Verita," which embraced the themes of the "Sun" and "La Mamma." Around 1900 a lot of Northerners traveled South to realize their utopias in the sun and in what they considered a matriarchal landscape. "Monte Verita" near Ascona, Italy, was such a place. Many of the representatives of the greatest utopias went there: the Anarchists (Bakunin, Malatesta, Guillaume); the theosophists; the creators of paradise on earth in the form of botanical gardens; the life reform movement, which considered itself an alternative to both communism and capitalism; then the artists of Der Blaue Reiter; the Bauhaus; the revolutionaries of the new dance movement (Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman); later on El Lissitzky, Hans Arp, Julius Bissier, Ben Nicholson, Richard Lindner, Spoerri, Erik Dietmann. Ascona is actually a case study in how what are now fashionable tourist destinations get that way: first you have romantic idealists, then social utopias that attract artists, then come the bankers who buy the paintings and want to live where the artists do. When the bankers call for architects the disaster starts. When I did the show with the subtitle "Local Anthropology to Form a New Kind of Sacred Topography," there was another goal: to preserve the architecture on Monte Verita, which, though it only covered a twenty-six year span, presented an entire history of modern utopian architecture. The life reformers who wanted to get back to nature built huts, the theosophists attempted to eradicate the right angle, then there was the crazy style of Northern Italian villas, and finally the rational style of the Hotel Monte Verita (first drawn by Mies van der Rohe but executed by Emil Fahrenkamp, who built the Shell Building in Berlin).

"Monte Verita" involved about 300 people who were either represented individually or in one of the sections, each devoted to a particular utopian ideology: anarchy, theosophy, vegetarianism, and land reform, to name only a few. You can imagine how much research it involved. Even during the exhibition new documents and objects kept arriving. To deal with them, I bought a bed made by an anthroposophical sculptor (who had worked for Rudolf Steiner's first Goetheanum) where I put all the newly arrived objects and letters before they were integrated into the show, in which documentation was grouped thematically, while the artworks were hung in a separate space.

HUO: Did "Monte Verita" map psychogeographical connections?

HS: It helped me to retell the history of Central Europe through the history of utopias, the history of failures instead of the history of power. Looking at Hulten's great shows at the Pompidou, I realized that he always chose an East-West power axis: Paris-New York, Paris-Berlin, Paris-Moscow. I chose North-South. It was not about power but about change and love and subversion. This was a new way of doing shows, not only documenting a world, but creating one. Artists were especially comfortable with this approach.

HUO: After "Monte Verita" you did "Gesamtkunstwerk"?

HS: Yes, needless to say a Gesamtkunstwerk can only exist in the imagination. In this exhibition, I started with German Romantic artists like Runge, a contemporary of Novalis and Caspar David Friedrich, and the architects during the French Revolution; then I included works and documents relating to major cultural figures like Richard Wagner and Ludwig II; Rudolf Steiner and Vassily Kandinsky; Facteur Cheval and Tatlin; Hugo Ball and Johannes Baader; Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet and Schwitters' Cathedral of Erotic Misery; the Bauhaus manifesto "Let's build the cathedral of our times"; Antoni Gaudi and the Glass Chain movement; Antonin Artaud, Adolf Wolfli, and Gabriele D'Annunzio; Beuys; and in cinema Abel Gance and Hans Jurgen Syberberg. Once again it was a history of utopias. In the center of the exhibition was a small space with what I would call the primary artistic gestures of our century: a Kandinsky of 1911, Duchamp's Large Glass, a Mondrian, and a Malevich. I ended the show with Beuys as the representative of the last revolution in the visual arts.

HUO: Since the '80s you've focused on several big retrospectives which you organized for the Kunsthaus in Zurich: Mario Merz, James Ensor, Sigmar Polke, and more recently, Cy Twombly, Bruce Nauman, Georg Baselitz, Serra, Beuys, and Walter De Maria.

HS: Again I was lucky. After ten years of thematic exhibitions I felt the need to return to the artists I had always loved. When Felix Baumann, director of the Kunsthaus in Zurich, gave me a job with the museum, I was able to offer artists a large retrospective or a special installation in one of the biggest exhibition spaces in Europe. Of course, I tried to make the shows as splendid as I could. Actually Serra and De Maria each did site-specific installations: Twelve Hours of the Day, 1990, and The Zoo Sculpture, 1992, respectively. With Merz we pulled down the walls and all his igloos formed an imaginary city. Having worked with these artists at the end of the '60s, it was great to do major exhibitions with them all these years later. After a twenty-four-year wait, I was able to realize the Beuys exhibition in 1993. I secured most of his important installations and sculptures. The show was my homage to a great artist: I had always thought that after his death one ought to make an exhibition reflecting his concept of energy, and I was pleased when his friends who came to the show told me they felt like Beuys had just emerged from one of his sculptures.

HUO: How significant have group shows been to your curatorial practice?

HS: In 1980 I created "Aperto" for the Venice Biennale to show new artists or rediscover older ones. In 1985 I felt that a new kind of "Aperto" was needed, there was still a predominance of "Wilde Malerei," and I wanted to introduce the somewhat forgotten quality of silence. The show I mounted was called "Spuren, Skulpturen, und Monumente ihrer prazisen Reise" (Traces, sculptures and monuments of their precise voyage) and it was introduced by Brancusi's Silent Muse, Giacometti's Pointe a l'oeil, and Medardo Rosso's Ill Child, and included sculptures by Ruckriem, Twombly, and Tony Cragg at the end of the space, works by Franz West, Thomas Virnich, and Royden Rabinovitch in the center, and in triangular rooms works by Wolfgang Laib, Byars, Merz, and Tuttle. It was sheer poetry. This show was followed in Vienna by "De Sculptura," in Dusseldorf by "SkulpturSein" (To be sculpture), in Berlin by "Zeitlos" (Timeless), in Rotterdam by "A-Historical Soundings," in Hamburg by "Einleuchten" (Illumine). In Tokyo by "Light Seed," in Bordeaux by "G.A.S. (Grandiose, Ambitieux, Silencieux)." As you can see, the titles of the shows became very poetic. They don't weigh on the artists and their works.

HUO: You have gone back and forth, working both inside and outside official institutions. What's made you keep a foot in each world?

HS: I wanted to organize noninstitutional exhibits but was dependent on institutions to show them. That's why I often turned to nontraditional exhibition spaces. "Grand-Father" was done in a private apartment and "Monte Verita" in five locations never before used for art - including a theosophical villa, an ex-theater, and a gymnasium in Ascona - before it traveled to museums in Zurich, Berlin, Vienna, and Munich.

HUO: These shows demonstrate another tendency of your exhibits in the '80s: an increasing number of shows in unusual exhibition spaces.

HS: Yes, absolutely. The shows I did in the '80s were sometimes the first contact the local public had with new art, so by necessity they were group shows. At the same time, I looked for spaces that would be an adventure for the artists. These exhibitions also allowed younger artists to show internationally for the first time: Rachel Whiteread in Hamburg, Chohren Feyzdjou in Bordeaux. It's not a coincidence that they're mostly women. I agree with Beuys that at the end of this century culture will be the province of women. In Switzerland most Kunsthalle curators are young women and Pipilotti Rist and Muda Mathis are the liveliest artists. Their work has a truly fresh and courageous poetic aggression.

HUO: What about your current project "Austria im Rosennetz" (Austria in a net of roses) which just opened at the MAK in Vienna? How does it relate to the exhibition you did in 1991 on Swiss culture, "Visionary Switzerland"?

HS: "Visionary Switzerland" coincided with Switzerland's 700-year anniversary. At the center of the show was the work of great Swiss artists such as Paul Klee, Meret Oppenheim, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Giacometti, and Merz, juxtaposed with material on those who wanted to change the world such as Max Daetwyler, Karl Bickel, Ettore Jelmorini, Emma Kunz, Armand Schulthess, and, of course, Muller's autoerotic machine and Tinguely's art-producing machines, surrounded by the work of artists like Vautier, Raetz, and so on.

This exhibition traveled to Madrid and Dusseldorf and was perceived as an homage to creativity rather than as a "national" exhibition. One thing that came out of it was the Swiss Pavilion of the World Exhibition in Seville 1992, where I replaced the Swiss flag with large banners by Burkhard showing parts of the human body representing the six or seven senses, and created a circuit of work that integrated information, technology, politics, and art, which began with Vautier's painting La Suisse n'existe pas (Switzerland does not exist) and ended with his Je pense donc je suisse.

The minister of culture from Austria saw these events and asked me if I would do a spiritual portrait of Austria. I called it "Austria im Rosennetz." It's a huge panoramic show of another Alpine culture. Austria is a complex place, once an empire with a flourishing capital where East met West, it is now a small country. In the Museum fur angewandte Kunst, I begin with a room that examines Austria's dynasty; the second room has portraits by Messerschmidt juxtaposed with Arnulf Rainer's overdrawings of those photographic portraits and Weegee's photographs. In the third room are the now classical Austrian artists and architects of the Vienna Secession. The fourth and fifth rooms are devoted to narrative, showcasing works by Aloys Zottl, an unknown nineteenth-century animal painter, Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando, who wrote the book Gaulschreck im Rosennetz (Terror of the horses in the net of roses), Richard Teschner's marionettes, and, finally, the carriage that transported the body of Crown Prince Ferdinand, who was killed in Sarajevo. The entrance hall is a kind of Wunderkammer with Turkish relics and Hans Hollein's couch from 19 Bergasse, where Freud practiced psychoanalysis. The upper floor shows Austrian inventions: Auer's lamp and its use by Duchamp; Madersperger's sewing machine with Lautreamont's poetic image and Man Ray's The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse, 1920; Franz Gellmann's World Machine with Tinguely's late multicolored and brightly lit sculptures. Three screening programs are devoted to Austria's influence on Hollywood: Erich von Stroheim, Fritz Lang, Michael Curtiz, Peter Lorre, Bela Lugosi, and many others (all of whom emigrated), and Austrian experimental film (Peter Kubelka, Kurt Kren, Fery Radax). The seats in this cinema are a work by Franz West who is represented throughout the show along with other contemporary artists: Maria Lassnig, Eva Schlegel, Valie Export, Friederike Pezold, Peter Kogler, Heimo Zobernig, and Rainer Ganahl, to name a few.

HUO: Given a century in which the exhibit is more and more of a medium, and more artists claim that the exhibit is the work and the work is the exhibit, what would you say are the turning points in the history of mounting exhibitions?

HS: Duchamp's Box in a Valise was the smallest exhibition; the one Lissitzky designed for the Russian pavilion of the Pressa in Cologne in 1928, the largest. During Documenta V, I did a section "Museums by Artists" with Duchamp, Broodthaers, Vautier, Herbert Distel, and the Mouse Museum by Oldenburg, which I think was important. The master of the exhibition as medium is, for me, Christian Boltanski.

HUO: Which artists of the '90s interest you?

HS: I appreciate the intensity of Matthew Barney, although having seen his show in Bern I prefer his videotapes to his objects. I also like younger video artists such as Pipilotti Rist and Muda Mathis.

HUO: I know you have a huge archive. How do you organize the information you need for your work?

HS: My archive changes permanently. It reflects my work. If I do a solo show I make sure to have all the documentation on the artist, if it is a thematic exhibit I keep a library. My archive is a function of my own history. I know that I do not have to look for Wagner under the letter W, but under "Gesamtkunstwerk." I also sort museum collection catalogues by location, in order to have a mental portrait of the institutions. My archive is a collection of several libraries. There is one for Ticino, which originally grew out of "Monte Verita," one for dance, film, and art brut; of course there are multiple cross-references. The most important thing is to walk through with closed eyes, letting your hand choose. My archive is my memoir, that's how I look at it. Too bad I cannot walk through it any more. It has become so full. Like Picasso I would like to close the door and start another.

HUO: Despite the current increase in information about art via the Internet and other media, knowledge still depends a lot on meeting people. I see exhibitions as a result of dialogues, where the curator functions in the ideal case as a catalyst.

HS: The problem is that information can be retrieved via the Internet, but you have to go to the site in question in order to see if there is something behind it, whether the material has enough presence to survive. The best work is always the least reproducible. So you speed from one studio to the next, from one original to another, hoping that some day it will all come together in an organism called an exhibition.

HUO: In the '80s hundreds of new museums opened their doors. But the number of significant venues did not increase. Why do you think that's the case?

HS: Whether a place is significant or not still depends on personality. Some institutions don't show courage or love for art. For many new museums today all the energy and money goes toward hiring a "star" architect and the director is too often left with spaces he doesn't like and no money to change them. High walls, light coming in from the ceiling, a neutral floor are still the best bet and the cheapest one. Artists usually prefer simplicity, too.

HUO: By establishing structures of your own, you initiated a practice which only in recent decades has come to be called curator or exhibition organizer. You were a pioneer.

HS: Being an independent curator means maintaining a fragile equilibrium. There are situations where you work because you want to do the show though there's no money and others where you get paid. I've been very privileged all these years since I've never had to ask for a job or a place to exhibit. Since 1981 I've been an independent curator at the Kunsthaus in Zurich, which has left me time to do shows in Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg, Paris, Bordeaux, and Madrid, and to run the museums I founded on "Monte Verita" with no state funds. But of course you work harder as a freelance curator, as Beuys said: no weekends, no holidays. I'm proud that I still have a vision and that, rarer still, I often hammer in the nails. It's very exciting to work this way, but one thing is sure: you never get rich.

HUO: Felix Feneon described the role of the curator as that of a catalyst, a pedestrian bridge between art and public. Suzanne Page, a curator at the Musee d'art moderne de la ville de Paris with whom I often collaborate, gives an even more humble definition. She defines the curator as a "commis de l'artiste." How would you define it?

HS: Well, 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. But the most important thing about curating is to do it with enthusiasm and love - with a little obsessiveness.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist is a Vienna-based curator currently living in London

above copied from: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-18963443.html