BECAUSE: A POETICS OF PONTUS HULTÉN

Pontus Hultén Study Gallery at Moderna Museet. Based on an idea by Renzo Piano.

The following text is a re-working of Hans Ulrich Obrist's interview with the curator Pontus Hultén in the former's just-published A Brief History of Curating (JRP Ringier, Zurich, 2008, ISBN 978-3-905829-55-6). The interview was conducted in Paris in 1996 and was first published in Artforum, New York, April, 1997, under the title "The Hang of It - Museum Director Pontus Hultén."

BECAUSE an elastic and open space hosting a plethora of activities within its walls

BECAUSE I was given carte blanche to what interested me

BECAUSE lectures film series concerts debates

BECAUSE between the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College

BECAUSE you could bring a Mondrian to the gallery in a taxi cab

BECAUSE signed everything

BECAUSE we could gather there and talk about ants everyday

BECAUSE I'm not sure that last sentence is transcribed correctly

BECAUSE what I meant to write is that level of activity 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.

The museum became a meeting ground for an entire generation: 

BECAUSE

(1)Create a public - that trusts the institution - come not because of the artists but because the museum is usually interesting

(2)Don't be identified with one person - too easily breaks down 

           (you'll be noticing that a lot of what I say in my sleep is about the need to built a durable system that can survive) 

Niki de Saint Phalle, Pontus Hultén, Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt working on the hand of Hon.

you need trust 

making connections

making catalogues

identifying axis

a catalogue in the form of a suitcase

an encyclopedic catalogue

QUESTION:What is an exhibition?

ANSWER: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.  

CONCLUSION: 

ART 

IS 

ANYTHING 

YOU 

CAN 

GET 

AWAY 

WITH 

AFTERMATH: It was obvious that the mechanical age was coming to an end, that the world was about to enter a new phase.

Niki de Saint Phalle, Per Olof Ultvedt, Jean Tinguely and Pontus Hultén discussing the Hon project at the Moderna Museet on 27 May 1966.

OTHER KEYS TO THE SUSTAINING SYSTEM:

Documentation was something we found very exciting. 

in the spirit of Duchamps boxes

having your own workshops is important - built Tatlins tower using my own miniature carpenters

installing an exhibition with that incredible collective spirit - install a new show every five minutes

POETRY MUST BE MADE BY ALL! TRANSFORM THE WORLD! UTOPIANS AND VISIONARIES! NO ORIGINALS!

BECAUSE a wall on which local organisations could affix statements of their principals and goals

BECAUSE it was like a big family, everyone helped each other out

BECAUSE work, money, school, press, community life

BECAUSE Dada in Paris

BECAUSE Ritual Celebrations of the Iatmul Tribe of New Guinea

BECAUSE Russian Art 1917-15, Surrealist Utopias, Parisian Graffiti, May '68

BECAUSE installed in trees

BECAUSE a geodesic dome

BECAUSE never started by thinking about budgets

                                         THEN:

a telex enabled visitors to pose questions to people in Bombay, Tokyo and New York 

Each participant had to describe his vision of the world:

what would the world be like in 1981?

is still the question we ask about the future.

come to test how open we really are: the Black Panthers, soldiers gone AWOL, Vietnam draft-dodgers. 

Accused of using public money to form a revolution.

a cross between a laboratory, a studio, a workshop, a theater, and a museum

A LABORATORY IS...

A STUDIO IS....

A WORKSHOP IS....

A THEATER IS...

A MUSEUM IS....

BECAUSE the participation of the public was to be more direct, more intense, and more hands on than ever before

BECAUSE where the public could participate directly

BECAUSE how something new was dealt

QUESTION:These ideas are fantastic, Pontus! Perhaps you could describe for us something about the architecture of your brain.

ANSWER: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 when they are in your brain. On the fifth floor we were going to show the collection. Unfortunately the politicians and parliament took over my brain for themselves. But the work I did conceiving that brain turned out to be useful preparation for

BECAUSE I don't go there very often

BECAUSE I once made the mistake of going back

BECAUSE I now no longer go back

BECAUSE as a principle

BECAUSE I saw how fragile a space could be

BECAUSE the day someone decides

BECAUSE its all over almost without a trace

BECAUSE a few catalogues and that's it

BECAUSE no those are suitcases

BECAUSE ants are too expensive

IMPORTANT NOTICE! HAVE A COLLECTION!

I think a collection is absolutely fundamental to a space. To see a temporary show and then visit the collection produces an experience that is more than a 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. 

The cover of the folder that accompanied the Moderna Museet exhibition, showing a working drawing itemizing the interior of Hon playrooms; Visitors to the Hon exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

a close dialogue with the artists

marked great moments in the history

of my friendship with them

becomes a kind of troubleshooter

there was a lot of improvisation

we had a good time

I had to leave 

I was no longer practicing my profession

BECAUSE it was a kind of cafe

BECAUSE where people could meet everyday

BECAUSE no real structure or authority figure

BECAUSE grew out a discussion

BECAUSE I had with the mayor

BECAUSE while it lasted

BECAUSE we invited

BECAUSE there were only 20 per year

BECAUSE we did great things together

BECAUSE including going on an excursion to Leningrad where we did a site specific show

BECAUSE experience for me

BECAUSE an end to it

                little coherence, something of a crisis

also moments of great courage and an enormous

general interest compared to when I started

I'm writing my memoirs

A NECESSARY MUSIC AND AN EVENING WITH ROBERT ASHLEY

Robert Ashley, Perfect Lives: An Opera for Television. First broadcast 1984.

A NECESSARY MUSIC - A project by Beatrice Gibson developed in collaboration with the composer Alex Waterman. Narration by Robert Ashley. 

AN EVENING WITH ROBERT ASHLEY - A talk by Will Holder

Organised by the SHOWROOM. Cockpit Theatre, London, 29 Jan 2009.

Art writing, space and artists' film are three of More Milk Yvette's ongoing obsessions, so Thursday's event at the Cockpit theatre could have been designed to order: a screening of Beatrice Gibson's study of Roosevelt Island in New York, followed by Will Holder, editor of the excellent F.R.David, talking on the American composer Robert Ashley. 

Ashley was in many ways the evenings presiding genius, as his glorious vocal tones - which, I suspect, may have been directly responsible for inventing the word mellifluous - were also to be heard narrating Gibson's film. I wondered if this was the most sustained attention his work has ever been given in London. Knowing only a few of his pieces, it was pleasurable to realise his centrality to current work, and to hold to some memory of his vocal invention walking home along a freezing Edgware Road. 

Gibson's film - which last week won a Tiger Short Film  Award at the Rotterdam film festival - began with the camera moving horizontally across Manhattan, continuing out over the water and arriving, between Manhattan and Queens, at Roosevelt island. Home to the kind of historical conjunction that is god's gift to psychogeographers, the island's history combines a nineteenth century insane asylum with a little known Philip Johnson modernist social housing project.

Once on the island, Gibson's moving camera became more stationary, showing a series of still, sometimes repeating shots, of the island bus station, a near empty residential street, and the view back across the water to Manhattan. It established a sense of the island's atmosphere, whilst also highlighting the formality and constructed nature of what we were seeing. Roosevelt Island became a set of carefully composed images that puzzled rather than revealed its character. Or: Roosevelt Island was filmed in a way that physicalised ideas, ambitions, and hopes embedded, say, in Johnson's social housing project. 

Two other elements were key to that mental-scape's architecture. Ashley's contribution was to read extracts from Adolfo Bioy Casares 1941 novel The Invention of Morel. Noting this in the programme notes set off a few alarm bells - Casares, along with Borges and Sebald, is one of a handful of writers finding a devoted fan club amongst contemporary artists, such as Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Doug Aitken. It's fascinating how such baroque, imaginative visions are aligned with modern, urban, non-space, but I would personally support a year long moratorium on art works inspired by the writings of W.G.Sebald. 

Beatrice Gibson, A Necessary Music, 2008, film still. 

Gibson's use of Morel, however, was an astute one. If you didn't recognise the text then it both fitted and didn't fit with the images, again stirring that mix of real and idea. The use of Ashley as narrator explored this on the level of the voice. Ashley, whose work has been much preoccupied with how to score and sing American English, here reads a  translation of a novel written in Spanish, seeing how Morel's words fit the landscape of the island, Gibson's framing,  the (American-) English language, and Ashley's own vocal characteristics. In contrast to his own work - where such explorations could lead to a vocal virtuosity - Ashley read calmly and flatly, his voice fitting the landscapes the camera focussed upon. 

This was also part of the film's final element, in which groups of residents sat in semi-tableau and offered their  thoughts on their lives and the island. I don't know how these sections were designed but I often experienced it as if Gibson had gathered quotes and opinions from the residents, then re-distributed them back, sometimes to different people. This isolated and emphasised particular phrases in ways that both foregrounded the words and prompted an examination of the speaker, an effect emphasised by Johnson's spacious modernist interiors. It also dramatised the process of a place and people becoming mediated by film. 

In one enjoyable tableau a group of young children seemed to be  repeating an adult conversation, playing between the voices they ventriloquised and their own.  In scenes like that pictured below, not knowing quite how to read the speakers voice and dress,  I felt the style put in flux their social identity, asking they be brought out of the normal flow of conversation and experience to become their familiar selves and something other. These scenes seemed to sum up what Gibson found on Roosevelt Island: words fit bodies and bodies fit words, and places too, but oddly. 

Beatrice Gibson, A Necessary Music, 2008, film still. 

All of which was also present in Holder's lecture. An Evening with Robert Ashley comprised Holder and his MacBook Pro, long audio and video extracts of Ashley's work - an audio recording of In Sara, Menken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women - and an  episode of Private lives - and a pile of small cards which Holder, moving around the space, worked his way through, reading aloud what seemed to be a gathering of Ashley's own words from writings and interviews. It was all scripted, apart from a seemingly unintended intervention by the Ghost of Sixties Indeterminacy, who muddled up the order of some of the cards in the middle of the pile in devilish homage. 

Although examples of Ashley's work were named and dated on the screen, Holder's approach deliberately withheld much context, scene setting or biography. Instead, Ashley's work became an active, contemporary presence of words and sounds, rather than a historical phenomenon. This certainly made the work more relevant, but the small bits of context I already had certainly made it more approachable. Perfect Lives, for example, certainly changes once you realise it was specifically written as an opera for the TV form, first premiered on Channel 4. Connecting Ashley to contemporaries such as Steve Reich or Laurie Anderson similarly makes his style much more understandable.

That said, making Ashley a contemporary rather than a historical artefact is a valuable strategy amongst a tsunami of sixties-rediscoveries and retrospectives. It's also somewhat delicious that such a sense can come from a text comprised solely of Ashley's own words. In both this and Holders talk on concrete poetry - reproduced in the current issue of Dot Dot Dot - there was a moment a few moments in where my brain switched from thinking of this as Holder's own commentary to realising it was actually quotation. If it's vague and digressive it's not Holder but Ashley himself! Holder's variety of ventriloquism plays with authority and audience, keeps the subject subjective.

Robert Ashley, Perfect Lives: An Opera for Television.

Like Gibson's film, Holder's talk revealed its subject as a way to maintain its opacity. It recognised that  this doubleness depended on a particular sense of time. Unannounced, Holder's long Ashley extracts sometimes had the audience wondering when and if they would end, but they emphasised how what was important was the timescapes of Ashley's work not the time of the lecture as a unit of information-absorption. Or, rather, the talks own distinctiveness came from the interaction of the experiences and expectations of each of these forms. 

Combined with Gibson's film the lesson of this intriguing evening seemed to be how to work with that sense of time to where it molded bodies, space, speech and movement with an intensity we might call music.      

*

NOTE ADDED FEB 2  2009: For a brief response to this post, Gibson's film and lots of community news about Roosevelt Island, see the blog of ROOSEVELT ISLANDER here.  The post notes Roosevelt Islander's initial concern that A Necessary Music continued the cinematic tradition of Walter Salles 2005 horror-thriller Dark Water in depicting Roosevelt as a"dark, strange and weird place."