flexible strategies: it's just fine

from A Brief History of Curating:

Hans Ulrich Obrist: In curating there is a need for flexible strategies. Every show is a unique situation, and ideally it gets as close as possible to the artist.

Walter Hopps: Yes. To me, a body of work by a given artist has an inherent kind of score that you try to relate to or understand. It puts you in a certain psychological state. I always tried to get as peaceful and calm as possible. If there was a simple way of doing something, I would do it that way. When I did the Duchamp retrospective in 1963, he and I walked through the old Pasadena Art Museum—the colors were white and off-white and brown; there was some wood paneling; some dark brown. Duchamp said: “It’s just fine. Don’t do anything that is too hard to do.” In other words, he was always very practical. But he had a very subtle way of trying to orchestrate or bring out what was already there, to work with what was already given. Duchamp knew exactly how to work with what was there.

But with other artists installations were very different. Barnett Newman was a very bright man, but he would get a preconceived notion of how the space should be. Wherever I showed him, we always had to do a lot of construction.

Walter Hopps is the former Director of The Corcoran Gallery

Alternative Architecture: Cold Corners by Eva Rothschild

video walking through installation at Tate Britain

Architecture as archive, time and memory

Rem Koolhaas interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist Art Review July 2006

HUO: I saw the historian Eric Hobsbawm yesterday and he was saying that his life was a kind of protest against forgetting. Which I think is really beautiful. I was wondering about memory in relation to the (London) pavilion, because it's also archived, an archive of previous discussions. Could you speak a little bit about Hobsbawm's idea of a protest against forgetting?

RK: In an architect's case it's either involuntary in the sense that you create structures that stay around in the best cases, and sometimes for a very long time, so that they contribute to a sense of history, but also potentially to a sense of depth in terms of time and memory. Or it's much more a kind of journalistic level, but perhaps in the current avalanche of forgetting, journalism also becomes closer to history writing.