HUO How did you make it public?
WH We worked at letting people know for a couple of weeks. We put some posters up and got certain people to mention it on the radio. We had some musicians performing the opening night; one reason we had the musicians was that they knew the disc jockeys. I knew perfectly well that lots of working artists, you know—they’re in their studios at night, and so forth, they listen to rock ’n’ roll, whatever’s on the radio, and they’re going to hear this. They’ll call up and find out. And they will come.
HUO So not just artists—everybody.
WH Anybody—we made no distinction. But it’s interesting how few people who were not really artists showed up. One drunk guy came in who had ripped out a lurid Hustler photo with this nude woman exposing herself. He crumpled up the paper and then flattened it out. He’d signed it, and he came in insisting it was his work. My role in this was to be there all 36 hours, meeting and greeting every single person who brought in a work. We’d walk to a space and they would help install it, right then and there. So here was this crisis. But I found a place that was reasonably dark—it wasn’t spotlit—and I walked him over there and said: “This is the perfect place for it.”
HUO So you actually did the hanging when people brought things.
WH Yeah. So we stapled this thing up, in a sort of shadowy corner. This guy was so out of it, and so surprised—this was just a dirty joke on his part, but I didn’t treat it that way. We put it up there, and he went away, and that was fine.
HUO So the show was inclusive.
WH My only requirement was that it had to fit through the door.
HUO In the exhibitions you organized, there’s something like a thread—from Duchamp or Joseph Cornell to Robert Rauschenberg—of artists whose work is encyclopedic.
WH Yes, that’s true. They’re all artists who would have a difficult time explaining to you what they would not put in their art. They’re naturally inclusive.
HUO Many of your exhibition projects, like the Thirty-Six Hours, or the unrealized project of the 1951 show and, of course, the 100,000 images project, have this same impetus.
WH Yes. Well, it’s a very innocent response to natural phenomena. It’s a perception of all the sorts of things one studies in the natural sciences, where you immediately get a vast realm of phenomena thrown out in front of you. I remember when I studied bacteriology, I had a good professor who went out of his way to talk about both bacteriophages and viruses so we might get a better sense of the whole category. Somehow, early on I got used to the idea that these people who were exploring any given subject were constantly pushing out beyond the boundaries, in order to understand what the boundaries were in the first place.
You can tell from the museum here that I believe very much in sometimes isolating a single work, with a very discrete situation—not having it be cluttered or complicated. At the same time, I have a great feeling for really large numbers of works.
HUO This 100,000 images project was conceived as filling a single entire building?
WH That’s right. I conceived of it as a really exciting project for P.S.1 in New York. I calculated that the whole building could hold 100,000 items, if you had some kind of discretion as to what the size would be. That may seem unimaginably large for an art show, but, on the other hand, if you counted the number of phases of music, or measures, in an opera or a symphony, you’d get an unimaginably large number, too.
HUO Or a computer program.
WH That’s right. I believe people could take in presentations of art that are almost as vast as nature. If a lot of things looked very repetitive, well, that’s the way it is. If you’re walking through the desert and looking at creosote bushes and some tamarack and some sage—they’re all different and discrete. But, on the other hand, they can appear very repetitive.
HUO And everyone can put together his or her own sequence.
WH Exactly. I think in the future some of the experience of finding one’s way through vastly larger realms of information on the Web and in cyberspace will allow for what I’m talking about. But I’ve also tried to think of exhibits featuring only two or three works, or even one work, and some unusual comparisons. I’ve often thought that Vermeer’s work would fit in this kind of show. The same is true of Rogier van der Weyden.
HUO The explosion of images and sources leads also to Rauschenberg.
WH Yes, in recent years I’ve had a lot of involvement with Rauschenberg, and to use your term, he’s probably the most encyclopedic artist of our time.
HUO And you’re working on a retrospective.
WH Yes, having done one at the National in 1976, the Guggenheim wants me to do one for what I guess will be 1997 or 1998—a little more than 20 years later.
HUO So it’ll be the retrospective of retrospectives.
WH Yes. The difficulty will come in the work after 1976, where Rauschenberg began to become prolific in larger-scale works—all the international touring he did.
HUO The global venues.
WH The overseas venues seemed, to most people, not very discriminating. There wasn’t any sense of discrimination as to why this or that piece was chosen. I don’t know whether, doing this show, I’ll be beyond such a notion of discrimination. I’m concerned with whether one can get into that vast body of work—and truly represent the vastness of Rauschenberg’s oeuvre, and yet still seem discerning.
HUO So it’s a paradoxical enterprise, to frame abundance without annihilating or reducing it.
WH Yes. We’re talking about using both spaces—both the uptown and the SoHo Guggenheim. That appeals to me.
HUO The last Rauschenberg retrospective you curated, in 1976—it must have been one of the first times a contemporary artist made the cover of The New York Times Magazine.
WH Yes.
HUO This leads to what I call the double-leg theory: an exhibition that is highly regarded by specialists but also makes the cover of Time—in other words, having one leg in a popular field and one in a specialized field.
WH Yes, I realized early on I couldn’t live without both fields. It isn’t made quite clear in Calvin Tomkins’ article [in The New Yorker], but early on, when I was at UCLA, I kept this small gallery—Syndell Studio—which was like a very discreet laboratory. I didn’t care if four or five people came, as long as there were two or three that were really engaged. I met any number of interesting people that way.
We had only one or two reviews written in all the years it was there. It didn’t matter. But, at the same time, I felt compelled to do this show of the new California expressionists in a very public place—in an amusement park on the Santa Monica pier...
HUO Was this the Action exhibition?
WH Action 1—in a merry-go-round building. It was near Muscle Beach. It attracted the most totally inclusive mix of people—Mom, Dad, and the kids, and Neal Cassady, and other strange characters, and the patrons of a transvestite bar nearby. I got Ginsberg, Kerouac, and those people to attend. It’s amazing they came. Critics I’d never met before showed up. It had a big attendance. So I wanted to work,