A Brief History of Curating. Hans Ulrich Obrist
A curious building. The design was fake-Chinese, like Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. But there were these rooms strung together. There were walkways through the gardens. All on one floor. The second floor didn’t have galleries. But somehow these separate rooms, with the garden in the middle, were very pleasing to people—it worked very nicely.
HUO What about the staff?
WH We almost never had more than three or four people physically installing a show. The hours were terrible. Somehow we were able to get some very grand shows—with Kandinsky and Paul Klee and so on. And that would mean extra people working pretty long hours to get it all straight. You couldn’t do it today. Nobody would allow artists to come in and help you handle Kandinskys. I’ve never had better workers. You know, with a little training, they care very much for the work.
HUO At this time there was also your pre-Pop exhibition?
WH Oh, yes—New Paintings of Common Objects.
HUO How did this show come about?
WH Just seeing the work—I had been seeing the work and was determined to do it. The word “Pop” was already in use in England, and was just beginning to be used in America. But I associated the word with the English movement, so I wanted something very bland and dry. I didn’t want to use the word. There were three East Coast artists—Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jim Dine—and three West Coast artists—Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, and Wayne Thiebaud. I asked Ruscha, who did design work, what to do for a poster. He said: “Well, let’s do it right now. Here, let me sit down and use your phone. What are all our names? Write ’em out in alphabetical order. Here are the dates, and that’s your title—fine. That’s all I need to know.”
And he called up a poster place. I said: “What are you calling?” He said: “This place does prize-fighting posters.” He went to a Pop, mass-produced poster place. He got on the phone and said: “I need a poster”—and he knew the size—and he just read it off on the phone. The guy saw no layout or anything—he just read it off. And then I heard Ruscha say, “Make it loud. And we want this many.” I gave him a number, they quoted a price. And he said: “Yeah, these folks are good for it,” and he hung up.
And I said: “Why the hell did you say, ‘Make it loud’?” He said: “Well, after you give the guy the size, the copy, and how many you want, he wants to know the style.” And I said: “That’s all you said for style?” He said: “Those guys, that’s all they want to hear—make it loud.” It was perfect. The poster was done in yellow, red, and black, and very loud. It was the most important poster that museum had ever done, with one exception—the poster Duchamp designed for his show.
HUO In 1919, Duchamp was one of the first artists to use instructions. He sent his sister in Paris a telegram for his Ready-made malheureux, to realize the piece on the balcony. Moholy-Nagy was the first artist to do a piece by transmitting instructions over the phone.
WH Absolutely—just called it in. Sometimes the best solution is the easiest one—if you know what to do.
HUO If one looks at the museum situation now, creating small structures with flexible spaces seems to be of most importance.
WH Somewhere in the 1970s in America—and in Europe, too—the idea of the smaller, more independent Kunsthalle arose. In America, it was the so-called artist’s space—that whole phenomenon.
HUO Which leads us back to the laboratory idea.
WH That’s right. I hope the concept doesn’t disappear. I hope a breed of entrepreneurs will come along who aren’t worried about being chic or fashionable and will keep some of that alive. One damn way or another, some version of that idea has always been around. We don’t have the salon now; we don’t have the big competitive shows in smaller cities, you know? They don’t mean much anymore. Most serious artists don’t submit to those. In a sad way, the old salon is dead.
I’ve been waiting for some breed of artist—some terrible little ancestor of Andy Warhol or whatever—to put out a mail-order catalogue of his or her work independently of the galleries. Whether it’s printed matter or it ends up on the Web, people, without even using galleries, can find interested patrons. This was the thrust of what the East Village was all about. They had artist-entrepreneurs there. Never in SoHo. This market appeared, then died down again, but I think it could happen again.
I really believe—and, obviously, hope for—radical, or arbitrary, presentations, where cross-cultural and cross-temporal considerations are extreme, out of all the artifacts we have. If you look at the Menil, with its range of interests—everything is quite manicured and segregated out. But there are some larger areas of juxtaposition as well. We have our African section, right up against a very small section of Egyptian art. But Egypt interposes—you can’t get into the Central and Western European section, or to Greco-Roman culture, from Africa without going through Egypt. It makes a kind of sense. So just in terms of people’s priorities, conventional hierarchies begin to shift some. But I mean beyond that—where special presentations can jump around in time and space, in ways we just don’t do now. I really believe in these kinds of shows.
Pontus Hultén
Born in 1924 in Stockholm, where he died in 2006.
The interview was conducted in 1996 in Paris. It was first published in Artforum, New York, April, 1997, under the title “The Hang of It–Museum Director Pontus Hultén.”
It was originally introduced by the following text:
Of Pontus Hultén, Niki de St Phalle once said “[he has] the soul of an artist, not of a museum director.” Indeed Hultén always maintained a very special dialogue with artists, though he was not one himself, establishing lifelong friendships with Sam Francis, Jean Tinguely, and Niki de St Phalle, whose careers he not only followed but shaped from the start. The interactive, improvisational spirit that infused exhibitions like de St Phalle’s She, 1966—a giant sculpture of a woman whose interior was fashioned by Tinguely and Per Olof Ultveldt—characterized the whole of Hultén’s career. Director of the Moderna Museet for 15 years (1958–1973), Hultén defined the museum as an elastic and open space, hosting a plethora of activities within its walls: lectures, film series, concerts, and debates.
Thanks to Hultén, Stockholm became in the 1960s a capital for the arts, the Moderna Museet one of the most dynamic institutions for contemporary art. During his tenure, the museum played a seminal role in bridging the gap between Europe and America. In 1962, Hultén organized a show of four young American painters (Jasper Johns, Alfred Leslie, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Stankiewicz), followed two years later by one of the first European surveys of American Pop art. In return, Hultén was invited to organize a show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1968: his first historical and interdisciplinary show, it explored the machine in art, photography, and industrial design.
In 1973 Hultén was to leave Stockholm and enter one of the most significant periods of his career. As founding director of the new museum of modern art at the Centre Georges Pompidou, which opened in 1977, Hultén organized large-scale shows that examined the making of art’s history in this century’s cultural capitals: Paris–Berlin, Paris–Moscow, Paris–New York, and Paris–Paris included not only art objects that ranged from Constructivist to Pop, but films, posters, documentation, and reconstructions of exhibitions spaces such as Gertrude Stein’s salon. Multivalent and interdisciplinary, these shows marked a paradigm shift in exhibition making, entering the collective memory of generations of artists, curators, and critics as few others have.
Hultén’s career after Beaubourg reflected the same commitment to working with artists that have caused so many to remember him fondly. Invited by Robert Irwin and Sam Francis to establish a museum in