A Brief History of Curating. Hans Ulrich Obrist
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