55th Carnegie International

James Trainor Given that, at the time of going to print, the names of the artists invited to participate in the show haven’t yet been announced, a lot of the press coverage has dwelt on your prodigious travel schedule. In the light of this, how are you and your team defining the ‘international’ in the Carnegie International?
Douglas Fogle The 55th Carnegie International is the second-oldest exhibition of this type in the world: it was founded about six months after the Venice Biennale, in 1896, when ‘international’ meant Paris and New York. In the 1920s, however, they started including Latin American and Japanese artists. Now the question of trans-nationalism has been well covered in terms of international exhibitions; there’s a point where you don’t need to do a show about the global to be global.

JT But how do you cope with the pressure that organizing any major international survey places on you and your team to be hyper-culturally aware?
DF I keep reminding myself that it’s just one show. You have to take a particular point of view and find a way in a finite space to make an interesting show that says something about the world today. No matter how many hundreds of thousands of miles I’ve covered, there are always other places to visit that I won’t get to. I rely on colleagues in some of those places to help me identify artists that I should look at.

JT Are there any places that you haven’t visited that you wish you had?
DF I was planning to go to Beirut in the summer of 2006 when the war broke out so I wasn’t able to make it there, or Israel either. There are some places in South America that I didn’t get to, such as Peru or Chile, but I was in Argentina and Brazil and spent a lot of time in Mexico and Central America.

JT Have you been to Australia or New Zealand?
DF Sadly, no.

JT Could you talk about your thesis for the show?
DF I’ve been kicking around ideas that have to do with the state of the world. I am very interested in questions of materiality and its relationship to the human condition. Basically, I mean to question what it is to be human today, and to include artists in the show who address that. It’s not going to be a show that’s anti-spectacle, but it’s a really philosophically fraught topic and one of my advisers, Daniel Birnbaum, will be addressing it in his catalogue essay. Actually, one of the starting-points for the idea for the show was the launch of the Pioneer 10 space probe in 1972.

JT Was that the one for which Carl Sagan helped design the ‘Hello from Earth’ plaque?
DF Yes, exactly. The probe’s mission was to photograph Jupiter. It took the images and then NASA sent it out of the solar system, and so Pioneer 10 became the first man-made object to enter interstellar space. It was still sending signals back in January 2003, after which it either got too far away or the batteries died, but on the spacecraft is a plaque that has a line-drawing of a ‘typical’ man and woman who look very European circa 1972. If it doesn’t run into an asteroid, it will keep going well after our sun explodes and we’re gone, so it is a sort of weird time machine. This started me thinking about the notion of being together yet alone, in the ‘intimate immensity’ of the universe as Gaston Bachelard put it, and about Arte Povera artists like Mario Merz, and the so-called poor materials that they used, but also Merz deploying the Fibonacci numbers during the height of Conceptual art in America and Europe. When Merz was asked why he was interested in the sequence, he described how it is a mathematical formula embedded in nature that describes the way, say, bees replicate dispersion patterns of seeds and fruit, the shape of spirals and sunflowers – that it’s expressed in the DNA of all living things. This idea made me wonder which artists are using materials in a similarly modest but interesting way today. One who came to mind was Paul Thek, who began painting on copies of the International Herald Tribune in the late 1960s and early ’70s. I liked the idea of these funny, intimate gestures in gouache being done on top of the world events. Thek has a wonderful work he did in 1974, which consists of four pieces of newspaper on which he painted an image of the Earth as seen from space. That first photograph of the Earth seen as a whole surrounded by blackness changed everything; it was a sort of paradigm shift in the way we imagine ourselves.

JT What are you going to title the show?
DF I wrote an essay called ‘Is There Life on Mars?’ for a show that Midori Matsui did in Tokyo last February called ‘Micropop: The Door into Summer’. It’s a reference, of course, to the song on David Bowie’s 1971 album Hunky Dory about the world falling apart and the question of whether we can get away to Mars. I was big Bowie fan. When I was growing up in the 1970s, it was the post-Vietnam, post-oil crisis, pre-Iran hostage crisis, pre-Reagan era – one of strange malaise, internationally and certainly in the USA. For me that song became emblematic of some of the artists I was looking at. So we’re going to call the show ‘Life on Mars’.

JT Finding artists who are Merz and Thek’s inheritors of that sense of a material modesty that can also be epic, has it been difficult?
DF There are many artists who share a similar sensibility, but I must stress that the show isn’t going to be full of 24-year-olds; it’s very inter-generational. I look at artists like Merz or Thek and see them as young artists, strangely enough. It’s as if some of the artists working today are contemporaries of theirs, whether or not they know the work.

JT How will this Carnegie differ from the approach of its predecessor, which was organized around this very universalist idea of ‘the ultimates’ – the so-called Big Questions?
DF Well, it’s a different show. When you do one this big it’s important that the so-called ‘thematic’ is very loose because I am very much against the methodology of a curator who uses the works generated by the artists as figure one, figure two, etc. For me the words ‘intimacy’, ‘modesty’ and ‘singularity’ come up. I hope that the old and the new will come together in an interesting way in this show to talk about what it means to be human in 2008. But again, I hate grandiose pronouncements. I think they’re a danger in themselves.

JT Could you talk about the role of the advisory committee?
DF When Jack Lane became Director of the Carnegie in the early 1980s, he chose an advisory committee that helped him sort through material and give him advice. Now every curator picks their own advisers. I chose four people, three of whom I know well: Richard Flood, now Chief Curator of the New Museum, who I worked with for 11 years at the Walker Art Center; Eungie Joo, who up until a few months ago was the Curator and Director of the Gallery at REDCAT in Los Angeles; and Daniel Birnbaum, Director of the Städelschule Art Academy and also its exhibition space, Portikus, in Frankfurt. The fourth member, Chus Martinez, Director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein, is not someone I knew very well but who had a lot of energy and knew a different generation of artists.

JT You’re going to extend the reach of the exhibition with events, talks and a music programme?
DF Yes, we’d like to programme lots of artist talks and film screenings by artists who are in the show with other work. In the summer I’d love to do that on-site or outside.

JT And do you hope physically to extend the exhibition beyond the museum with off-site projects?
DF We would like to. I’m in discussion with a couple of artists, so we’ll see what happens. We hope to have programmes with local partners such as Carnegie Mellon University to do artist talks and other projects, but it all has to do with our budget. We have big dreams, and I think that the goal is to allow the artists to do what they need to do, within a certain reasonable limit.

JT Has any work been commissioned specially for the show?
DF Yes, there are a number of things that will be fresh in the show.

JT You’ve invited an LA-based architecture firm, Escher GuneWardena, to design the exhibition spaces and address installation issues. They’re known for their work in sustainable, affordable eco-friendly design. How do their ideas tie in with your ideas about exhibition design in general?
DF The Carnegie is actually two buildings: an 1895 structure that Andrew Carnegie built, which houses the natural history museum, the music hall, the Carnegie Library and the gallery, but there is also the 1974 Edward Barnes building, which was built to extend the Museum of Art. So it’s a very difficult space. For example, to get to one part of the International you have to go through the collection prior to 1945. I think that there are something like 12 different ways into the building! I knew Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena because they designed Sharon Lockhart’s show at the Walker Arts Center after I left, and also they worked with Mike Kelley on his installation in Muenster last summer. They know what it means to let the art speak.

JT Richard Armstrong, the Director of the Carnegie, has talked recently about the museum’s chronic institutional memory loss, in terms of the turnover of curators, and also that there’s not enough of a connection between the Carnegie International as an exhibition, and the collection and the collective memory that’s represented in the collection. Is it part of your mandate to fix this in any way?
DF Absolutely. The Carnegie International was started in 1896 , as a way to build the collection, so the collection itself is a kind of archaeological record of the exhibition’s history. I will try to leave as much information as possible for my successor. The Carnegie International was started as a way to build the collection. I’ve been trying to fill in some gaps in the collection since 1945 while also making acquisitions of contemporary artists who will amplify aspects of the collection. The difficulty is that every four years or so you have a new curator, and so you get a different vision for the collection. I’m actually really looking forward to reinstalling the collection after the International.

JT So, to sum up?
DF The show will be about the relationship between a viewer and an object, and between the artist and the world. Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist critic, wrote in 1917 that the revolutionary poet is one who can make the stone a little bit more stony. I love this: it sums up what an artist does, taking a little slice of the world and showing it to us again slightly differently. I think art can affect the world, and I think it does so in an intimate way. This is the kind of art that I’m interested in for the show.