HUO Poetry Must Be Made By All!, Transform the World! and Utopians and Visionaries were forerunners of many exhibitions of the 1990s that also emphasize direct audience participation.
PH In addition to the shows themselves, we organized a series of evenings at the Moderna Museet that took things pretty far. During Poetry Must Be Made By All! Vietnam draft-dodgers and soldiers who had gone AWOL (Absent Without Official Leave), as well as the Black Panthers, came to test how open we really were. There was a support committee for the Panthers that held meetings in a room set aside for public use. For these activities, we were accused by parliament of using public money to form a revolution.
HUO Talking about these shows reminds me of your famous plans for the Kulturhuset, Stockholm. It has been described as a cross between a laboratory, a studio, a workshop, a theater, and a museum—and in a certain sense as the seed out of which the Pompidou grew.
PH That’s not far from the truth. In 1967, we worked on Kulturhuset for the city of Stockholm. The participation of the public was to be more direct, more intense, and more hands-on than ever before, that is, we wanted to develop workshops where the public could participate directly, could discuss, for example, how something new was dealt with by the press —these would be places for the criticism of everyday life. It was to be a more revolutionary Centre Pompidou, in a city much smaller than Paris. Beaubourg is also a product of 1968—1968 as seen by Georges Pompidou.
HUO In your plans for the Kulturhuset, each floor was accorded one function. How could multidisciplinarity and interactivity have been promoted in an institution structured that way?
PH 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. On the fifth floor we were going to show the collection. Unfortunately the Kulturhuset went awry, and the politicians and parliament took over the building for themselves. But the work I did conceiving that project proved to be a useful preparation for my work at the Pompidou.
HUO What about the On Kawara show you brought to the Pompidou in 1977 in collaboration with Kasper König?
PH I had met On Kawara in Stockholm; he was living in an apartment owned by the Moderna Museet, and he stayed for almost a year. We became friends. I have always thought On Kawara was one of the most important Conceptual artists. The show included all the paintings he had done that year. There was absolutely no reaction on the part of the French press—not a single article!
HUO How do you see the Pompidou today?
PH I don’t go there very often. I once made the mistake of going back as an adviser. I now no longer go back, as a principle.
HUO How does a space like the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, where they’ve always operated a bar, cinema, and exhibition spaces, compare with the multifaceted, interdisciplinary role you envisioned for the Kulturhuset in Stockholm?
PH I think a collection is absolutely fundamental. The failure of André Malraux’s Maisons de la Culture can be traced to the fact that he was really aiming at theater. He wasn’t thinking about how to build a museum, and that’s why his cultural institution foundered. The collection is the backbone of an institution; it allows it to survive a difficult moment—like when the director is fired. When Valéry Giscard d’Estaing became President, there were some rather strong-willed people who asked why the Pompidou was exposing itself to all these problems with donors. Why not just leave the collection in the Palais de Tokyo and build a Kunsthalle without a collection? There was lots of pressure to go in that direction. I managed to convince Robert Bordaz that that would be dangerous, and we saved the collection and the project.
HUO So you are against the idea of separating collections from exhibitions?
PH Yes, otherwise the institution has no real foundation. Later, when I was director of the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle in Bonn, I saw how fragile a space devoted to contemporary art could be. The day someone decides that it’s too expensive, it’s all over. Everything is lost, almost without a trace. There’ll be a few catalogues, and that’s it. The vulnerability of it all is terrifying. But that’s not the only reason I talk about collections with such passion. It’s because I think the encounter between the collection and the temporary exhibition is an enriching experience. To see an On Kawara show and then to visit the collection produces an experience that is more than the 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.
HUO You’ve always insisted on the importance of a serious scholarly monograph to accompany an exhibition. This seemed especially important in the 1980s when you mounted an impressive series of retrospectives of artists who had meant a lot to you over the years.
PH Yes, it was wonderful to have the opportunity to do so. I loved Tinguely’s retrospective in Venice at the Palazzo Grassi and Sam Francis’ retrospective in Bonn. Those shows were both developed in close dialogue with the artists and marked great moments in the history of my friendship with them.
HUO What other exhibitions do you remember most fondly?
PH I did a show called Futurismo & Futurismi in 1986, which was the first show in Italy dedicated to the Futurists (Palazzo Grassi, Venice). It was divided into three parts: Futurism’s precursors, Futurism itself, and its influence on artistic production until 1930. The exhibition is considered a classic, thanks in part to the catalogue, which reproduced all the works shown, and included over 200 pages of documentation. 270,000 copies were sold. The [Giuseppe] Arcimboldo show we did was dedicated to the memory of Alfred Barr, which really upset the Italian press, who called him a “cocktail director.” In 1993 I installed the Duchamp show at the Palazzo Grassi, grouping documents and works together in sections devoted to such topics as the readymade, the Large Glass (1915–1923), and the “portable museum.”
HUO What about Claes Oldenburg’s great happening, Il Corso del Coltello [The Knife’s Course], at the Campo dell’Arsenale in Venice in 1985?
PH Oldenburg does everything himself. The exhibition organizer becomes a kind of troubleshooter, but it was a great event. One of the main props of the performance, Knife Ship, 1985, is now at LA MoCA. I played the role of a boxer, Primo Sportycuss. He buys an ancient costume that combines St Theodore and a crocodile, with which he confronts the chimera of San Marco. Frank Gehry played a barber from Venice; Coosje van Bruggen played an American artist who discovers Europe. The whole thing went on for three nights and there was a lot of improvisation. We had a good time.
HUO In 1980 you were asked to head the project to build a new contemporary art museum in Los Angeles, which became the LA MoCA. How did that get started?
PH