A Brief History of Curating. Hans Ulrich Obrist
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.
Johannes Cladders
Born in 1924 in Krefeld, Germany. Lives in Krefeld.
Johannes Cladders was the director of the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach from 1967 to 1985. He was responsible for bringing Joseph Beuys and others to international attention and acclaim. In 1972 he collaborated on Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany, and from 1982 to 1984 was the Commissioner of the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
This interview was conducted in 1999 in Krefeld. It was previously published in TRANS>, no 9–10, New York 2001; reprinted in Hans Ulrich Obrist, vol. I, Charta, Milan 2003, p. 155; as well as in French in L’effet papillon, 1989–2007, JRP | Ringier, Zurich 2008, under the title “Entretien avec Johannes Cladders,” p. 167.
Translated from the German by Christine Stotz and Pascale Willi.
HUO How did everything start? How did you get into making exhibitions and what was your first one?
JC I actually had a very conventional museum career as an assistant at the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, as well as at the Museum Haus Lange, in Krefeld. Under the leadership of Paul Wember in the 1950s and early 1960s, it was the only institution in Germany that actually had the courage to show contemporary art. It was a marvelous education for me, and gave me the opportunity to make a lot of contacts with artists, especially with the Nouveaux Réalistes and all the Pop artists, who were very popular at the time. In 1967, the directorship of the Städtisches Museum Mönchengladbach became available and so I applied for it, and from that point on, I was able to realize my own ideas independently. The first exhibition was of Joseph Beuys. At that point, Beuys was around 46 years old and had never had a major museum retrospective.
JC And it hit like a bomb. Suddenly, the institution was known well beyond Mönchengladbach.
HUO Was that already in the space where later exhibitions took place?
JC No, this was in a small provisional space in Bismarckstrasse. Actually, it was a private house that we used for exhibitions. From the start, my focus was always on the present—the immediate present—which I considered crucial to the development of art. This means that I never made any concessions to the taste of the public, or gave room to derivative art in any of the exhibitions I organized. After all, with all due respect to the work of artists, art must move forward! I always tried to discover where the innovative ideas were … where the new idea was coming from … in the sense that “art defines art.” It was from this that I developed my program. The next exhibition—because finances were tight—meant finding opportunities closer to home. I showed the cardboard works of Erwin Heerich.
HUO How did the catalogue boxes come about?
JC I made a virtue of necessity. The financial situation was not very good, and I only had a small budget, but I did not want to produce flimsy pamphlets. I wanted something for the bookshelf, something with volume. A box has volume. You can put all sorts of things into it that you have money to buy. With this in mind, I went to Beuys and told him that, for his catalogue, I had a printer that would print a text and reproductions for free, though only of a limited size and not more. This size was not enough and was way too thin. “What can you contribute?" I asked him. He promised me an object made out of felt, which he would make. With that, we almost had the box filled.
HUO The decision was made with Beuys?
JC He agreed with my idea to make a box. I talked to him about the form of the box … I mean the measurements. We did not want the standard size, but something unusual. It was then that Beuys defined the dimensions of the box, which we kept for all future exhibitions. I also remember telling Beuys that I wanted to print an edition of three hundred. Beuys said,“I don’t like that at all. That’s a strange number. It’s too smooth. Let’s make it 330. 333 would be too perfect.” I always maintained an irregular number, even for larger editions.
HUO With which exhibition did you move from the provisional space to the new one?
JC When I came to Mönchengladbach, the museum existed only as this provisional space. I went there though because the city had stated its intention to build a new museum. The site for it had been under discussion for a long time. I went to Mönchengladbach in 1967, and the location was finally decided on around 1970. In 1972, I was able to approach the architect Hans Hollein, and the city commissioned him to design