Читать книгу A Brief History of Curating - Hans Ulrich Obrist - Страница 9

HUO Jean Tinguely always said you should have been an artist. How did you end up running a museum?

PH In Paris, where I was writing my dissertation, I met Tinguely, Robert Breer, and some other artists who urged me to take up art making. I resisted this idea, but did make some films with Breer, who worked as an animator, and also some objects with Tinguely. To tell the truth, if I had had a chance to become a film director, I wouldn’t have hesitated. Though I managed to make some short films, I realized that the mid-1950s wasn’t a very good time to try and make features. I made a 25-minute film with a friend, but it was a great failure because the producer released it with the wrong feature film. It got some prizes, though, in Brussels and New York. I wrote a second screenplay, which I wasn’t even able to finance. It was at that point that I was offered the job of creating a national museum of modern art in Sweden.

HUO Before you were put in charge of this museum, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, you’d been organizing exhibitions for several years on your own.

PH Yes. In fact, in the early 1950s, I started curating shows at a tiny gallery that consisted of two small spaces, about 100-square meters each. Curiously enough, it was called The Collector [Samlaren, Stockholm]. The owner, Agnes Widlund, who was Hungarian, had invited me to do shows there, and she basically gave me carte blanche. I put together exhibitions with friends around themes that interested us. We did a big exhibition on Neo-Plasticism in 1951. Things were infinitely easier then. Paintings didn’t have the value they do today. You could bring a Mondrian to the gallery in a taxicab.

HUO One of your shows, held in a bookstore in 1960, was of Marcel Duchamp’s work.

PH I had done another one with pieces of his in 1956, but it wasn’t a solo show. I’d been fascinated with Duchamp since I was a teenager. He marked me very deeply. At the bookstore, we did a small show—we didn’t even have a Box-in-a-Valise (1941–1968), but managed to come up with replicas. Duchamp later signed everything. He loved the idea that an artwork could be repeated. He hated “original” artworks with prices to match. I had met Duchamp in Paris in 1954, I think. At that time, he gave an interview in an art journal in which he discussed his notion of “retinal art,” of art made only for the eye and not for the mind. It had tremendous impact; people were really hurt. The painter Richard Mortensen, who was a friend of mine, was really shattered. He had misgivings about his own work that he couldn’t express or wouldn’t accept. Then Duchamp put this idea out on the table, just like that, and it was as if someone had lifted the veil. I still have Mortensen’s letter.

HUO Walter Hopps told me that in the United States in the 1950s, Duchamp was known mainly to artists, not to the general public. What about in Europe?

PH Duchamp was much appreciated by artists because they could steal from him without risk of discovery, since he was almost unknown. At that time, Duchamp’s work had been forgotten, despite [André] Breton’s praise of him in the heyday of Surrealism and again after the war. It was in many people’s interest for Duchamp’s work to remain unknown. For obvious reasons, this was especially the case for important gallerists. But he made a comeback—it was inevitable.

HUO It was at Denise René’s Paris gallery that you organized an exhibition of Swedish art in 1953?

PH Yes. I used to go to the gallery a lot. It was one of the few places in Paris that was lively. We would gather there and talk about art every day.

HUO It sounds rather like the kind of forum created by the Surrealist magazine Littérature.

PH Unlike the Surrealists, we didn’t expel anyone, but all the same, our discussions were infected by politics. There were great debates about how to deal with Stalinism and with capitalism. Some people seemed to think Trotskyism represented a viable alternative. There were people like Jean Dewasne (considered at the time to be a young Vasarely) who tended to take the communists’ side. He was practically excluded from our circle. Eventually he left the gallery. We also engaged in numerous debates about abstraction, which were central to our discussions. Sometimes the great Modernist figures would come by, like Alexander Calder when he was in Paris, or Auguste Herbin, Jean Arp, and Sonia Delaunay. It was very exciting to meet them.

HUO Were there other significant galleries?

PH There were two galleries then. Denise René was by then the most important one. She was wise enough to show not just the abstract “avant-garde,” but also Picasso and Max Ernst. Then there was Galerie Arnaud, on the Rue du Four, which basically showed lyrical abstraction. Jean-Robert Amaud had a journal called Cimaise, it was where I first encountered Tinguely’s work. His art was shown in the gallery’s bookshop. Gallery bookshops were a way of exhibiting the work of young artists without making a financial commitment. You have to understand how differently galleries operated then. Prestigious spaces usually showed artists with whom they had contracts.

HUO Didn’t Alexandre Jolas also run a gallery?

PH Yes, a few years later. In his own way, he was much wilder. I couldn’t say whether or not he provided artists with stipends —Denise René’s artists got serious money. With Alexandre, things changed a lot. There was a kind of looseness that mirrored life in the 1960s.

HUO During your early years as a museum director in Stockholm you combined various art forms—dance, theater, film, painting, and so on. Later this approach became central to your large-scale exhibitions, first in New York and then in Paris, Los Angeles, and Venice. How did you settle on this working method?

PH I discovered that artists like Duchamp and Max Ernst had made films, written a lot, and done theater, and it seemed completely natural to me to mirror this interdisciplinary aspect of their work in museum shows of any number of artists, as I did several times, but particularly in Art in Motion in 1961 (Moderna Museet, Stockholm). One person who influenced me greatly was Peter Weiss, who was a close friend of mine and was known primarily for his plays such as Marat/Sade (1963) and his three-volume treatise Aesthetic of Resistance [Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, I–1975, II–1978, III–1981]. Peter was a filmmaker in addition to being a writer; he also painted and made collages. All of that was perfectly natural; for him it was all the same thing. So when Robert Bordaz—the first president of the Centre Pompidou in Paris—asked me to create shows that combined theater, dance, film, painting, and so on, I had no trouble doing so.

HUO Looking at your program in Stockholm in the 1950s and 1960s, you put on an impressive number of exhibitions despite very modest budgets. It reminds me of what Alexander Dorner, director of the Landesmusem, Hannover, from 1923 to 1936, said—that museums should be Kraftwerke, dynamic powerhouses, capable of spontaneous change.

PH That level of activity was quite natural, and corresponded to a need. People were capable of coming to the museum every evening; they were ready to absorb everything we could show them. There were times when there was something on every night. We had many friends who were working in music, dance, and theater, for whom the museum represented the only available space, since opera houses and theaters were out of the question—their work was viewed as too “experimental.” So interdisciplinarity came about all by itself. The museum became a meeting ground for an entire generation.

HUO The museum was a place to spend time in, a place that actually encouraged the public to participate?

PH A museum director’s first task is to create a public—not just to do great shows, but to create an audience that trusts the institution. People don’t come just because it’s Robert Rauschenberg, but because what’s in the museum is usually interesting. That’s where the French Maisons de la Culture went wrong. They were really run like galleries, whereas an institution must create its public.

HUO When a museum lives through a great moment, it often becomes linked to a particular person. When people went to Stockholm, they talked of going to Hultén’s; when they went to Amsterdam, of going to Sandberg’s.

PH That’s certainly true and it leads me to another issue. The institution shouldn’t be completely identified with its director; it’s not good for the museum. Willem Sandberg knew this quite well. He asked me, as well as others, to do things at the Stedelijk [Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam], and he would remain on the sidelines. For an institution to be identified with only one person isn’t a good thing. When it breaks down, it breaks down completely. What counts is trust. You need trust if you want to present the work of artists who are not well known, as was the case when we first showed Rauschenberg’s work (part of an exhibition of four young American artists) at the Moderna Museet. Though people didn’t yet know who he was, they came anyway. But you can’t fool around with quality. If you do things for the sake of convenience, or because you’re forced to do something you don’t agree with, you’ve got to make the public believe in you all over again. You can show something weak once in a while, but not often.

HUO What were the points of departure for the shows on artistic exchanges that you organized at the Pompidou: Paris–New York, Paris–Berlin, Paris–Moscow, and Paris–Paris? Why do you think they were so successful?

PH I had proposed the Paris–New York show to the Guggenheim in the 1960s, but I hadn’t received a response. When I started at the Centre Georges Pompidou, I had to establish a program for the next several years. Paris–New York brought together the people from the Musée national d’art moderne and those from various other departments—it was multidisciplinary. I should have taken out a patent on the formula that allowed me to unify so many different teams at the Pompidou; this approach later became very popular. The library also participated: in the Paris–New York show, their section was separate; in Paris–Berlin everything was part of one space. With these four shows, I was also attempting to make a complex, thematic exhibition easy to follow—to be straightforward yet to raise many issues. Paris–Moscow, for instance, reflected the beginnings of Glasnost before the West knew any such thing existed.

HUO Why did you choose to stress the relationship between east and west, rather than north and south?

PH Strangely enough, the east-west axis seemed less familiar at the time. I came up with the exhibition trilogy Paris–New York, Paris–Berlin, and Paris–Moscow to address the exchange between various cultural capitals in the west and those in the east. Paris–New York began with reconstructions of Gertrude Stein’s famous salon, Mondrian’s New York studio, and Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of this Century, and ended with Art Informel, Fluxus, and Pop art. Paris–Berlin, 1900–1933 was confined to the period before National Socialism, and provided a panoramic view of cultural life in the Weimar Republic—art, theater, literature, film, architecture, design, and music. For Paris–Moscow, 1900–1930, thanks to a period of détente in French-Soviet relations, I was able to assemble works produced by numerous French artists showing in Moscow before the October Revolution, as well as Constructivist, Suprematist, and even some Social Realist artworks.

The groundwork for the Paris–New York show and the shows that followed had been done before the Pompidou even opened. In the late 1970s, it was considered odd to buy American art. Thanks to Dominique de Menil and her donations of works by Pollock and other American artists, American paintings became part of Beaubourg’s collection. Before I mounted the first show in this series, I felt it was necessary to give the museum audience some historical background. Inaddition to major retrospectives of Max Ernst. André Masson, and Francis Picabia at the Grand Palais, I organized a big Vladimir Mayakovsky show at CNAC [Centre National d’Art Contemporain], the space on Rue Berryer near Place de l’Étoile. We redid Mayakovsky’s show from 1930, which he had organized in hopes of providing a multifaceted portrait of himself; shortly after, he committed suicide. For that show, Roman Cieslewicz did the graphic design and he also did the covers for the catalogues for Paris–Berlin, Paris–Moscow, and Paris–Paris. But for Paris–New York, Larry Rivers did the cover. Those four big catalogues, which were sold out for a long time, were recently reissued in a smaller format. With that series we succeeded in establishing a good relationship with the public, because we also made conscious attempts to prepare our audience. The Centre Pompidou was embraced by the public because they felt it was for them, and not for the conservators. Conservator—what a terrible word!

HUO I agree. Who were the curators, for lack of a better term, with whom you spoke most frequently in the 1950s and 1960s?

PH Sandberg at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, Knud Jensen at the Louisiana in Denmark, and Robert Giron in Brussels; once I even did a show with Jean Cassou on the paintings of August Strindberg at the Musée national d’art moderne. Sandberg and Alfred Barr—at MoMA—created the blueprint; they ran the best museums in the 1950s. I got close to Sandberg. He came to see me in Sweden, and we got on very well. He kind of adopted me, but our friendship ended on a rather sour note. He wanted me to take over from him in Amsterdam, but my wife didn’t want to move, so I decided not to.

HUO A few years later you got an offer to do an exhibition at MoMA in New York.

PH The Stedelijk adventure was over in 1962; the offer to work for MoMA came in 1967. MoMA and the Stedelijk were quite different. In New York, the structure was less open, more academic. It was more compartmentalized than at the Stedelijk, where Sandberg had succeeded in creating a fluid, lively structure. MoMA was relatively conservative because of the source of its financial support—wealthy donors. The Stedelijk had a different kind of freedom, because Sandberg was, essentially, a city employee; he could make policy as he saw fit. All he had to do was convince the mayor of Amsterdam. Catalogues, for instance, were absolutely his domain.

HUO You also put a lot of energy into your catalogues. Last year the university library in Bonn organized an impressive retrospective of about 50 of your publications [Das gedruckte Museum: Kunstausstellungen und ihre Bücher, 1953–1996, Universitäts und Landesbibliothek Bonn, 1996 (The Printed Museum of Pontus Hultén)]. Many of them seemed like extensions of your exhibitions. And some of them were really art objects in themselves: the Blandaren box from 1954–1955 had lots of artists’ multiples, or that fabulous catalogue in the form of a suitcase for the Tinguely show in Stockholm in 1972 (Jean Tinguely, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1972). You also invented the encyclopedic catalogue: 500-1000-page volumes for the Paris–New York, Paris–Berlin, Paris–Moscow, and Paris–Paris shows that have since become so common. So catalogues and books would seem to play a preeminent role for you as well.

PH Yes, but not as much as for Sandberg. It was from his idea of being part of the exhibition. He had his own style that he used for all his exhibitions. I am more in favor of diversification.

HUO Sandberg hosted Dylaby (Dylaby—A Dynamic Labyrinth) in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in 1962, and in 1966 you organized the even more interactive project Hon (She—A Cathedral) in Stockholm, a monumental reclining Nana, 28 meters long, nine meters wide, and six meters high. Could you say a bit about your collective adventure with Tinguely, Niki de St Phalle, and Per Olof Ultvedt?

PH In 1961 and 1962 I had numerous discussions with Sandberg about doing an exhibition of site-specific installations created by several artists. He accepted, and Dylaby opened in Amsterdam in 1962. After that, I wanted to do something even more collaborative, with several artists working together on one large piece. Over the years, the project had several names: Total Art, Vive la Liberté, and The Emperor’s New Clothes. In the early spring of 1966, I finally managed to bring Jean Tinguely and Niki de St Phalle to Stockholm to work with the Swedish artist Per Olof Ultvedt and myself. Martial Raysse withdrew at the last minute—he’d been selected for the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The idea was that there would be no preparation; nobody would have a particular project in mind. We spent the first day discussing how to put together a series of “stations,” as in Stations of the Cross. The next day we started to build the station “Women Take Power.” It didn’t work. I was desperate. At lunch I suggested we build a woman lying on her back, inside of which would be several installations. You would enter through her sex. Everyone was very enthusiastic. We managed to finish her in five weeks, inside and outside. She was 28 meters long and about nine meters high. Inside there was a milk-bar, in the right breast; a planetarium showing the Milky Way in the left breast; a mechanical man watching TV in her heart; a movie-house showing a Greta Garbo film in her arm; and an art gallery with fake old masters in one leg. The day of the press preview, we were exhausted; the next day, there was nothing in the newspapers. Then Time wrote a favorable piece and everybody liked her. As Marshall McLuhan said, “Art is anything you can get away with.” The piece seemed to correspond to something in the air, to the much-vaunted “sexual liberation” of that time.

HUO In 1968 you put together a big exhibition at MoMA,The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age. What was its premise?

PH MoMA had asked me to put together an exhibition on kinetic art. I told Alfred Barr that the subject was too vast, and instead proposed a more critical and thematic exhibit on the machine. The machine was central to much of the art of the 1960s, and at the same time, it was obvious that the mechanical agewas coming to an end, that the world was about to enter a new phase. My exhibition began with Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches of flying machines and ended with pieces by Nam June Paik and Tinguely. It included over 200 sculptures, constructions, paintings, and collages. We also put together a film program. Tinguely was really in love with machines, with mechanisms of any kind. He had had his breakthrough on March 17, 1960, with Hommage à New York—a self-destroying artwork. Richard Huelsenbeck, Duchamp, and myself had written for the catalogue at the time and Tinguely wanted to bring his friends Yves Klein and Raymond Hains with him to New York in 1960, but somehow it never happened.

HUO Your machine show could be thought of as a requiem to L’Homme-machine (1748), the famous book by the 18th-century philosopher [Julien Offray de] La Mettrie, about the machine age.

PH Yes—as its culmination. It was also the height of MoMA’s golden age, a period when Alfred Barr was there and René d’Harnoncourt was director of the museum.

HUO Why was it so wonderful?

PH They were both great men. For one thing, no one ever mentioned the word “budget.” Today it’s the first word you hear. There were all kinds of possibilities. When, at the 11th hour, we had to get one of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion cars from Texas, they said “Boy, that costs a lot of money,” but we got it. This was the last great exhibition of that period at MoMA. René d’Harnoncourt died in an accident shortly before the machine show opened, and Alfred Barr had retired the year before.

HUO Though there were numerous exchanges between Stockholm and the United States during your tenure at the Moderna Museet, you were the first to do big one-person shows in Europe with Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol. What about the Pop art show at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm [Amerikansk POPKonst (American Pop Art), 1964]; wasn’t it the first survey show of American Pop art in Europe?

PH One of them. After my visit to New York in 1959, I curated two Pop art exhibitions. The first was in 1962 with Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and others (Four Americans, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1962). The second part was in 1964, with the second generation: Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, George Segal, James Rosenquist, Jim Dine, and Tom Wesselmann.

HUO One of your links to the United States was the electrical engineer Billy Klüver.

PH Billy was a research scientist at Bell Labs. In 1959, I came to New York and I started to give Billy a crash course in contemporary art; he generously accepted to act as a liaison between the Moderna Museet and American artists. Lots of artists needed technology. Billy started EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology) with Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, and Fred Waldhauer, a collaborative effort that came to a bad end. Pepsi-Cola had commissioned them to do the youth pavilion at the World’s Fair in Osaka (Expo 70, Osaka) where they enclosed a dome-shaped pavilion in a cloud sculpture by Fujiko Nakaya. In a way it came from an idea of [John] Cage’s, that a work of art could be like a musical instrument. When the pavilion was finished, Billy insisted on doing some live musical programming. After a month, after three or four artists had performed, Pepsi-Cola took over the project—they wanted automated programming.

HUO What was the art scene like in Sweden in the 1960s?

PH It was very open and generous. The great art star was Öyvind Fahlström, who died very young, in 1977. I did three shows of Swedish art later in my career: Pentacle, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, 1968, a show of five contemporary artists; Alternatives Suédoises, at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, in 1971, which focused on Swedish art and life in the early 1970s; and a big show, Sleeping Beauty, at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 1982 that included two retrospectives—one of Asger Jorn, the other of Fahlström—and occupied the entire museum.

HUO Many exhibitions you organized in the 1960s didn’t privilege the artwork as such. Documentation and participation in various forms became equally important. How come?

PH Documentation was something we found very exciting! It was in the spirit of Duchamp’s different boxes. We began seriously buying books, like Tristan Tzara’s library. There was also another dimension: the museum workshops became an important part of our artistic activities. We reconstructed [Vladimir] Tatlin’s Tower in 1968, using the museum’s own carpenters, not specialists brought in from the outside. This approach to installing exhibitions began to create a phenomenal collective spirit—we could put up a new show in five days. That energy helped protect us when hard times came at the end of the 1960s. After 1968, things got rather murky—the cultural climate was a sad mixture of conservatism and fishy leftist ideologies—museums were vulnerable, but we also withstood the tempest by doing more research-oriented projects.

HUO You also did political shows like Poetry Must Be Made by All! Transform the World! in 1969 (Moderna Museet, Stockholm), borrowing a sentence from Lautréamont, which was an attempt to link revolutionary parties to avant-garde artistic practices. It included almost no originals, and a wall on which local organizations could affix documents stating their principles and goals. How was that show organized?

PH It was divided into five different sections: “Dada in Paris,” “Ritual Celebrations of the Iatmul Tribe of New Guinea,” “Russian Art, 1917–15,” “Surrealist Utopias,” “Parisian Graffiti, May ’68.” It was about the changing world. It consisted principally of models and photographic reproductions mounted on aluminum panels. We used teams made up of people who served various functions at the museum; they acted as animators or technicians. It was like a big family, everyone helped each other out. Things were very different then. At the time there were lots of volunteers, mostly artists who helped install the work.

HUO Another of your famous exhibitions was Utopians and Visionaries 1871–1981 (Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1971), which began with the Paris Commune and concluded with contemporary utopias.

PH It was even more participatory than Poetry Must Be Made by All! Held two years later, Utopians and Visionaries was the first open-air exhibition of its kind. One of the sections was a 100th anniversary celebration of the Paris Commune, in which the work was grouped into five categories—work, money, school, the press, and community life—that reflected its goals. There was a printing facility in the museum—people were invited to produce their own posters and prints. Photos and paintings were installed in trees. There was also a music school run by the great jazz musician Don Cherry, the father of Neneh Cherry. We built one of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes in our workshops and had a great time doing it. A telex enabled visitors to pose questions to people in Bombay, Tokyo, and New York. Each participant had to describe his vision of the future, of what the world would be like in 1981.

HUO Poetry Must Be Made By All!, Transform the World! and Utopians and Visionaries were forerunners of many exhibitions of the 1990s that also emphasize direct audience participation.

PH In addition to the shows themselves, we organized a series of evenings at the Moderna Museet that took things pretty far. During Poetry Must Be Made By All! Vietnam draft-dodgers and soldiers who had gone AWOL (Absent Without Official Leave), as well as the Black Panthers, came to test how open we really were. There was a support committee for the Panthers that held meetings in a room set aside for public use. For these activities, we were accused by parliament of using public money to form a revolution.

HUO Talking about these shows reminds me of your famous plans for the Kulturhuset, Stockholm. It has been described as a cross between a laboratory, a studio, a workshop, a theater, and a museum—and in a certain sense as the seed out of which the Pompidou grew.

PH That’s not far from the truth. In 1967, we worked on Kulturhuset for the city of Stockholm. The participation of the public was to be more direct, more intense, and more hands-on than ever before, that is, we wanted to develop workshops where the public could participate directly, could discuss, for example, how something new was dealt with by the press —these would be places for the criticism of everyday life. It was to be a more revolutionary Centre Pompidou, in a city much smaller than Paris. Beaubourg is also a product of 1968—1968 as seen by Georges Pompidou.

HUO In your plans for the Kulturhuset, each floor was accorded one function. How could multidisciplinarity and interactivity have been promoted in an institution structured that way?

PH It was designed so that as you went up a floor, what you encountered was more complex than what was on the previous floor. The ground floor was to be completely open, filled with raw information, news; we were planning on having news coming in from all the wire services on a telex. The other floors were to house temporary exhibitions and a restaurant; the latter is really important because people need somewhere to congregate. On the fifth floor we were going to show the collection. Unfortunately the Kulturhuset went awry, and the politicians and parliament took over the building for themselves. But the work I did conceiving that project proved to be a useful preparation for my work at the Pompidou.

HUO What about the On Kawara show you brought to the Pompidou in 1977 in collaboration with Kasper König?

PH I had met On Kawara in Stockholm; he was living in an apartment owned by the Moderna Museet, and he stayed for almost a year. We became friends. I have always thought On Kawara was one of the most important Conceptual artists. The show included all the paintings he had done that year. There was absolutely no reaction on the part of the French press—not a single article!

HUO How do you see the Pompidou today?

PH I don’t go there very often. I once made the mistake of going back as an adviser. I now no longer go back, as a principle.

HUO How does a space like the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, where they’ve always operated a bar, cinema, and exhibition spaces, compare with the multifaceted, interdisciplinary role you envisioned for the Kulturhuset in Stockholm?

PH I think a collection is absolutely fundamental. The failure of André Malraux’s Maisons de la Culture can be traced to the fact that he was really aiming at theater. He wasn’t thinking about how to build a museum, and that’s why his cultural institution foundered. The collection is the backbone of an institution; it allows it to survive a difficult moment—like when the director is fired. When Valéry Giscard d’Estaing became President, there were some rather strong-willed people who asked why the Pompidou was exposing itself to all these problems with donors. Why not just leave the collection in the Palais de Tokyo and build a Kunsthalle without a collection? There was lots of pressure to go in that direction. I managed to convince Robert Bordaz that that would be dangerous, and we saved the collection and the project.

HUO So you are against the idea of separating collections from exhibitions?

PH Yes, otherwise the institution has no real foundation. Later, when I was director of the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle in Bonn, I saw how fragile a space devoted to contemporary art could be. The day someone decides that it’s too expensive, it’s all over. Everything is lost, almost without a trace. There’ll be a few catalogues, and that’s it. The vulnerability of it all is terrifying. But that’s not the only reason I talk about collections with such passion. It’s because I think the encounter between the collection and the temporary exhibition is an enriching experience. To see an On Kawara show and then to visit the collection produces an experience that is more than the sum of its parts. There’s a curious sort of current that starts to flow—that’s the real reason for a collection. A collection isn’t a shelter into which to retreat, it’s a source of energy for the curator as much as the visitor.

HUO You’ve always insisted on the importance of a serious scholarly monograph to accompany an exhibition. This seemed especially important in the 1980s when you mounted an impressive series of retrospectives of artists who had meant a lot to you over the years.

PH Yes, it was wonderful to have the opportunity to do so. I loved Tinguely’s retrospective in Venice at the Palazzo Grassi and Sam Francis’ retrospective in Bonn. Those shows were both developed in close dialogue with the artists and marked great moments in the history of my friendship with them.

HUO What other exhibitions do you remember most fondly?

PH I did a show called Futurismo & Futurismi in 1986, which was the first show in Italy dedicated to the Futurists (Palazzo Grassi, Venice). It was divided into three parts: Futurism’s precursors, Futurism itself, and its influence on artistic production until 1930. The exhibition is considered a classic, thanks in part to the catalogue, which reproduced all the works shown, and included over 200 pages of documentation. 270,000 copies were sold. The [Giuseppe] Arcimboldo show we did was dedicated to the memory of Alfred Barr, which really upset the Italian press, who called him a “cocktail director.” In 1993 I installed the Duchamp show at the Palazzo Grassi, grouping documents and works together in sections devoted to such topics as the readymade, the Large Glass (1915–1923), and the “portable museum.”

HUO What about Claes Oldenburg’s great happening, Il Corso del Coltello [The Knife’s Course], at the Campo dell’Arsenale in Venice in 1985?

PH Oldenburg does everything himself. The exhibition organizer becomes a kind of troubleshooter, but it was a great event. One of the main props of the performance, Knife Ship, 1985, is now at LA MoCA. I played the role of a boxer, Primo Sportycuss. He buys an ancient costume that combines St Theodore and a crocodile, with which he confronts the chimera of San Marco. Frank Gehry played a barber from Venice; Coosje van Bruggen played an American artist who discovers Europe. The whole thing went on for three nights and there was a lot of improvisation. We had a good time.

HUO In 1980 you were asked to head the project to build a new contemporary art museum in Los Angeles, which became the LA MoCA. How did that get started?

PH A group of artists, including Sam Francis and Robert Irwin, wanted to start a contemporary art museum. The artists asked me to come and work with them. I got along very well with them, less well with the patrons; there was very little financial support. The first exhibition, in 1983, was called The First Show, and consisted of paintings and sculptures from 1940–1980, drawn from eight different collections. It was an effort to examine what it meant to collect art. I did a second show called The Automobile and Culture (1984), a survey of the history of cars as objects and images that included 30 actual cars. I tried to raise money for four years. I finally had to leave because I was no longer practicing my profession. I had become a fundraiser instead of a museum director.

HUO After you were back in Paris, you founded L’Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques, in 1985, a laboratory-school, with Daniel Buren. Can you tell me a little about this project?

PH It was a kind of café, a place where people could meet every-day, and where there was no real structure or authority figure. It grew out of a discussion I had with the mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac. We nominated four professors: Buren, Sarkis, Serge Fauchereau, and myself. Including the time it took to put the “school” together, this project lasted ten years. Then the city of Paris suddenly decided to put an end to it. While it lasted, we invited artists, curators, architects, filmmakers, all of whom came. There were only 20 students per year and we were all together for a year. The “students” were all artists who had already finished art school; they were actually referred to as artists, not students. They each got a stipend. We did great things together—including going on an excursion to Leningrad where we did a site-specific show, and building a sculpture park in Taejon, South Korea. It was a great experience for me.

HUO Who were some of your students?

PH Absalon, Chen Zhen, Patrick Corillon, Jan Svenungsson, among others.

HUO What were your most significant exhibitions when you took the position at Bonn’s Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle in 1991?

PH I opened with five shows, one of which was Niki de St Phalle’s retrospective (1992); the other, Territorium Artis [Territorium Artis. Schlüsselwerke der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (Territory Art. Key Works of the Art of the Twentieth Century), 1992], a show of key works that marked decisive stages in the history of 20th-century art. It ranged from Auguste Rodin and Michail Wrubel to Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, and Hans Haacke. I also did a Sam Francis retrospective, a show called Moderna Museet Stockholm Comes to Bonn (The Great Collections IV: Moderna Museet Stockholm comes to Bonn, 1996), in which we showcased the Moderna Museet’s collection, and a similar one with MoMA’s collection (The Great Collections I: The Museum of Modern Art, New York. From Cézanne to Pollock, 1992).

HUO From your perspective, what does the 1990s art world look like?

PH I see little coherence, something of a crisis. But also moments of great courage and, most importantly, an enormous general interest in art compared with when I started in the 1950s.

HUO What are you working on at the moment?

PH The Museum Jean Tinguely in Basel, which has just opened. I’m also at work on a book about the beginnings of the Centre Pompidou called Beaubourg de justesse [Beaubourg, Just About]. And I’m writing my memoirs.