[curatorial.net] fyi

[pauloneillp at aol.com]

Dear List,

Here is one of the many interviews with curators I have conducted over 
the years which may be of interest to you. Beginning with Seth 
Siegelaub, who will be talking at Spike Island at the end of the month.

Best
Paul
---

PAUL O’NEILL: Looking back now, how would you define your activities 
from 1966-1972?

SETH SIEGELAUB: First I had a gallery, which was a very ordinary 
gallery, from the fall of 1964 to the spring of 1966. The period that 
you are talking about, however, is somewhat later because I didn’t get 
up to speed until probably late 1966. Although I showed a few 
interesting works at the gallery I wasn’t very clear about what I was 
doing, why I was doing it, or even how I got involved with it. But the 
period that you are referring to is the exhibition-making period, and 
that really began to come together in 1966, 1967, 1968 with the 
exhibitions themselves taking place from early 1968 to 1971, after 
which I gradually began to leave the art world, and then New York 
itself in 1972, to live in Europe. The height of my activities was 
between 1968 and 1971, when I independently did 25 exhibitions or so. 
At first I thought of myself as a dealer, linked to the interests of 
the four artists Robert Barry, Douglas Heubler, Joseph Kosuth and 
Lawrence Weiner, and to a lesser degree, Carl Andre. My interests were 
very closely allied to working with them to devise exhibitions 
structures and conditions that were able to show their work, which 
would reflect what their work was about. In other words, it became 
clear to me that the solution to the problems that were posed by the 
nature of their work and the ideas behind it, that a gallery was not 
necessarily the most ideal environment to show it. By that I mean not 
just the physical gallery but also the social idea of a sort of 
"semi-religious" sacred space, everyone knew and visited regularly, a 
sort of "art space". Part of the problem was to present the work in a 
different, broader framework that was not a "consecrated" art space. 
Thus my “job,” so to speak was to find those formats, to find those new 
structures and conditions to be able to show their work. Initially, it 
started with these four men and Carl [Andre] too, although his work was 
based on a very different set of aesthetic principles. To be able to do 
this meant showing their work, say, indoors or outdoors, dealing with 
art-making problems, or art and exhibition environment problems and 
things like this. In my own history it is clear that my interests moved 
 from a very specific group of artists to a more general group of 
artists, to a more general art problematic, to a general social 
problematic framing the art problematic etc. By the time I was doing 
the Studio international exhibition [in July-August 1970] I wasn’t even 
selecting artists anymore, I choose 8 art critics who would in turn 
choose artists. I was always trying to move away from the individual 
"art genius" or the personal quality choices that are essential for an 
art dealer; to choose what he or she thought was the "best" art, etc. 
My history thus moved towards the more and more general, to artists’ 
contracts, to political fund-raising, etc., which eventually of course 
led me entirely away from the art world. Many of the aesthetic problems 
or issues that were being dealt with at the time led me personally to 
think about questions of the media, the left media, cultural 
imperialism, etc. Everything was going in that direction.

PON: Were you working with artists and not primarily artworks?

SS: Definitely. I’ve always said that my relationship to the artists 
was collaborative. It was a very close thing. No one would come into 
the gallery and ask me to sell a painting, because it wouldn’t have got 
them very far. I was never a good businessman dealer in that sense. It 
never really occurred to me while I was dealing that one could make 
real money. It was about the excitement, intellectual ideas, or 
changing the world which was the turn-on. But it never really occurred 
to me that the point of Lawrence Weiner or Carl Andre was to by one at 
$5 and sell it for $500. I am not dumb, but this was not why I was 
doing it. I was always more interested in the problems of art-making 
and exhibitions, and finding situations for the artists to work in, or 
working closely with the artists to be able to realise projects. Many 
of the projects that I did were in fact collaborative. This 
relationship was probably a new, perhaps revolutionary, one. Not in a 
literal sense that we all sat down in a room, but in the case of the 
January show [“January 5-31, 1969”], we actually did all sit down and 
decided how we were going to do this project: should we show any work 
at all or should we just have a catalogue as exhibition, etc.? I also 
decided that no works were to be available for sale to remove it from 
the usual gallery business environment. Collectively we eventually came 
up with a format that the four artists and myself were happy with. I 
went out and found the money to do it, but not all the projects were 
like that. I tried at the very beginning to be a sort of agent without 
the need for a space. Most of the projects I did were inexpensive, just 
like the work itself was inexpensive to make. The projects had to be 
something manageable, something I could handle without being involved 
with too many people. Projects I could finance myself, or with help of 
a few close friends. The projects I did then –as well as all the 
projects I have done since– were relatively inexpensive, which at least 
gave me the means to have the allusion of freedom to be able to do what 
I wanted at the rate I wanted. More like research & development as 
opposed to merchandizing or mass marketing.

PON: Was this a critique of the dominance of the “White Cube” at the 
time?

SS: No it wasn’t a critique of the white cube in that sense, but it was 
the fact that the work that these artists were doing was not 
fundamentally related to an art gallery type of space, and not just as 
a physical thing. The space of the art gallery is one of prestige, a 
social space created by a group of collectors, promoters, dealers over 
a period of time try to build up a kind of “prestigious” environment 
whereby that anything you put in it would hopefully absorb a kind of 
quality by virtue of the gallery space it is shown in. Of course the 
museum’s trick too is to make itself appear as prestigious as possible 
so that no matter what art is put into this space its quality is 
upgraded dramatically, thus becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy. It 
poses the troubling question: is an artist great and thus his work is 
shown, for example, at the Museum of Modern Art, or does the work 
become “great” because is shown, for example, at the Museum of Modern 
Art? It follows this logic. It wasn’t so much in terms of the physical 
space of a gallery, because I would agree that a gallery could well 
fulfil the spatial needs of a painter. But what I was more concerned 
about because of the nature of the artist’s work was that they were 
doing something else which could best be seen out in the world, on 
billboards, street corners, paperback books or anything else. I was 
constantly searching, along with the artists, for new ways of getting 
this work out in to the world without requiring people having to come 
to a “sacred” space or art-shrine. This was also the spirit of the time 
when you think of “guerrilla theatre”, graffiti, and many other things 
at the time. It was about being able to confront a more general public, 
not necessarily an informed art public. Along with this were inherent 
new qualities of the work, not just the de-materialized and physical 
aspect, but that the works were trying to question their status as 
commodities, saleable objects or permanent collectible objects. Thus I 
was constantly searching for ways of dealing with this material that 
would best reflect the material itself. This also corresponds to the 
fact that I was –and still am— relatively not rich, so I didn’t have a 
problem with not having a gallery on Madison Avenue or something, as I 
could never afford it anyway.

PON: In Alexander Alberro’s recent publication ‘Conceptual Art and the 
Politics of Publicity,’ which focuses on your practice, Alberro appears 
to be careful not to use the term ‘curator’ to define your practice 
 from 1966-1971. Would you have called yourself a curator at the time, 
or how would you have described what you were doing?

SS: I probably wouldn’t have used the word “curator” at the time, 
although I have recently done so in retrospect because there is a whole 
body of “curatorial” practice that has quantatively evolved since then. 
During the 1960s there were few people like Harald Szeemann around at 
the time. He was director of a museum in Bern, but this guy was all 
over the place (and he still is in fact); he was a true one-man show. I 
am not familiar with the history of curating, but I am somewhat 
familiar with my contemporaries, people who were working at around the 
same time as me, like Harry. But the first thing want to say is that 
all the different art world categories were breaking down at the time: 
the idea of gallery dealer, curator, artist-curator, critic-writer, 
painter-writer, all these categories were becoming fuzzy, less clear. 
In a certain way, it was part of the 1960s political project. The 
“information society” was up and running, and many of these different 
areas were very touch and go, people were moving between things and 
doing many different things. If there wasn’t a critic available or 
interested, artists would do their best to explain, write and publish 
what they were doing. While I can look back now and say that curating 
is probably what I was doing, it is not a term that I would have used 
when I was active for one simple reason: the dominant idea of the 
curator at the time was basically someone who worked for a museum. 
Since then, the definition of the term curator has changed. This is 
just another facet which reflects how the art world has changed since 
the 1960s/early 1970s; the art world has become much bigger, richer, 
more omnipresent; there are many more museums, galleries, artists, art 
bars, art schools, art lovers, etc. It is has also become more central 
and more attached to the dominant values of capitalist society

Years ago, when we were active, the art world could be considered like 
a pimple on the ass of capitalism. It was thought of as a marginal 
area, or a ghetto, where strange people did crazy “avant-garde” things. 
It is clear that, in the last thirty years or so, art has become a more 
acceptable profession, even a type of business, a more acceptable thing 
to do, both as a practitioner, as well as an art collector. One can 
think of becoming an artist as a possible “career choice” now, which 
just didn’t exist back then. One just didn’t have this opportunity. The 
question of the curator, in this context, is also related to another 
modern phenomenon today: the need for freelance curatorial energy to 
invigorate museums that no longer have this kind of energy. On the one 
hand there is a multiplication of people who are involved with curating 
and exhibition organizing etc., while on the other hand the people 
working within many institutions are becoming more like employees 
working for a big business. So the idea of independent curators can 
also be used by these institutions too, because many of the people 
working in big museums are more and more concentrating on practical 
fund raising, organizational issues, budgets, administrative tasks, 
etc. So in the past, people who were serious curators, say, like Alfred 
Barr, who was involved with selecting, buying, curating and collecting 
are now involved in fund raising, trustees, all sorts of 
business-oriented activities. In that sense the growth of independent 
curators also gives the museums a source of energy to do interesting 
things, if they choose to do interesting things.

PON: Are you saying that these larger art institutions and the role of 
independent curating has become inter-dependent within the art world?

SS: Yes, I would think that there is a definite symbiosis in many ways. 
I have the impression that we are seeing much more of the creative 
exhibition energy is coming from outside the institution. There is a 
new inter-relationship between the museum and curator, because there 
are now many many new museums, a hundred times more than there were 30 
years ago. Now every little town almost has to have a modern art museum 
of some sort. So independent curators are one way to use these 
exhibition spaces without having to keep people on the payroll, or to 
pay pensions or health insurance, etc. It’s like all freelance work or 
outsourcing in any profession, it can be a very cheap way of keeping 
the creative energy flowing without the fixed payroll overheads.

PON: Did you have a sense of isolation within what you were doing in 
the sixties or where there other curators or art dealers were you 
influenced by or in dialogue with during that period?

SS: It was a very small but active community. There was no sense of 
isolation. People may have thought someone was a little crazy, but 
there was a very active bar life, exhibition life, and travel, 
especially between Europe and the U.S. This was the beginning of a 
generation who travelled regularly; even people without much money were 
able to go to Europe a few times a year, which was totally unthinkable 
before this period. All that was in the process of changing. From New 
York there was much excitement about what was going on in Germany, 
Italy, France and England. There was no sense of isolation, 
particularly in New York, where there were great art bars where you 
would hang out and talk all hours of the night on all possible art and 
political subjects with a wide range of people. There is always a kind 
of isolation for a group who consider themselves as an unappreciated 
“avant-garde” because they feel they are not getting the recognition 
they feel they deserve, but that is really bullshit, of course, and 
often, temporary.

PON: Did you think what you were doing at the time as particularly 
unique or where there other people doing similar curatorial projects?

SS: There was Harry Szeemann as I mentioned earlier, but he was doing 
something very different. He has always worked within a very broad 
spectrum, from the avant-garde to Swiss bankers, advising collections, 
working on museum boards and things, so he would not really be an 
example that I would refer to at that time, but there were interesting 
dealers active at the time, like Konrad [Fischer}, or Gian Enzo 
Sperone, Kasper König, and especially, Dick Bellamy. I also remember in 
a more general way there was a good critical environment; people always 
interested in writing about the projects and coming to the exhibitions 
and talking about the work and the ideas behind the work. We weren’t 
lost in the backwoods; it was really very active; there were a lot of 
people around even though it was a relatively small community. There 
were four or five art magazines or something like that.

PON Your practice seems much more atomised geographically than say the 
new kind of international curator, travelling from biennale to biennale?

SS: This came much later; we were only at the beginning of these 
phenomena in the 1960s. There were connections between New York and Los 
Angeles, but the New York-European relation was the new horizon, 
between what Carl Andre called the NATO countries. One was constantly 
seeing people coming and going, dealers, critics, people like Germano 
Celant, Harry Szeemann, Charles Harrison, etc., but the whole 
international, biennale thing that exists now, just didn’t exist. The 
one important thing, for me at least, was the link between United 
States and Europe, and to a certain extent, Latin America too, but I 
was much less aware of this aspect.

PON: How do you think we suffer from amnesia with regard to a 
curatorial history?

SS: I don’t think it is amnesia but rather ignorance, but I am probably 
one of the amnesiacs. Although I was vaguely aware of Alexander 
Dorner’s work and that of El Lissitsky, mostly from the political 
publishing as he was important for many other things. I knew Alfred 
Barr existed and in Amsterdam there were very important activities with 
the work of people like Wilhelm Sandberg at the Stedelijk Museum who 
were also very imaginative museum people, but I was more like a newborn 
baby and I was just concerned with my artist friends and the problems 
arising from their work. I didn’t have to look for inspiration. There 
are one or two people, however, who come to mind as influencing my 
practice. Dick Bellamy, a dealer, although I was not particularly 
interested in his artists, he was close to many artists and could get 
things done, and was highly thought of. The other person was someone a 
little older, who in fact he died almost on the same day as Douglas 
Huebler, was Gene Goossen, [Eugene C. Goossen], who was basically a 
critic but also, in his way, a kind of an independent curator. He did a 
number of shows at MoMA in the 1960s, including Barnet Newman, among 
others, and also curated a show called “The Art of the Real”, around 
1970. He was involved with younger artists, such as Carl Andre, Robert 
Barry, and a number of other artists, and did one of the very first 
shows in 1964 of what would later be called “Minimal Art”. But most 
interestingly he was the head of the Hunter College art department and 
he was able to give artists teaching jobs, which was very important for 
survival. For some reason I don’t think he realised his full potential, 
but was highly regarded by many artists, and like Dick Bellamy, looked 
closely at art. I suppose I was mostly inspired by their close 
relationship to artists. Most of the other people, including Harry 
Szeemann or Germano Celant or Kasper König, were more like 
contemporaries so I wouldn’t have looked to them as predecessors even 
though they may be somewhat older. There was also dealers like; Konrad 
Fischer who, with Hans Strelow and Jürgen Harten, did the “Prospect” 
exhibitions, which was another example of the breakdown of boundaries 
which was going on at the time.

PON: You are often cited as one of the first “creative” curators. How 
significant do you see your contribution to the idea of the curator as 
a creative component within the production and mediation of art and 
what influence, or impact do you think your projects had on altering 
the perception of what the role of the curator could be?

SS: I would agree with that. I think more in action than in theory. In 
other words, I didn’t theorize my position, and if you look back at the 
interviews I gave in the sixties and early seventies the word “curator” 
probably didn’t even come up. I thought of myself in terms of an 
organizer, a publisher, exhibition maker, and things like that. Also 
the word curator at the time didn’t have the open meaning as today, as 
curators were basically people who had jobs working in the museums. 
Thus it wouldn’t really have occurred to me to be a “curator” at the 
time because a curator worked at a museum, so how can I be a curator 
when I am not working at a museum? But I probably was not very involved 
in a very self-reflexive practice in that sense. Furthermore, much of 
opinion or analysis I am giving you now is over 35 years after the 
fact. But if you look back on any of the interviews I doubt I thought 
of myself as a “curator”; more like an exhibition organiser, project 
maker, things like that.

PON But you would have thought of yourself as a creative component 
within the process and not merely a facilitator?

SS: Yes, but not too much and I always avoided the “are you an artist?” 
question as being irrelevant. I was not making art, and my materials 
were not Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Lawrence Weiner and Joseph 
Kosuth or something like that. But this idea seems to have become today 
an important issue, where curating may have become a kind of 
manipulation of other people. Yes, I was very creative but only in the 
sense that one can be a creative bicycle rider, plumber, or anything 
else; one can be a creative in anything if one approaches one’s work 
with a certain kind of imaginative spirit. It’s strange; it is as if 
only artists are creative, so if you are creative you must be an artist 
or something like that. I think the work of a dealer or exhibition 
organizer can be very creative, but I think what people are really 
referring to, in my case, is the fact that I am very closely identified 
with the artists that I worked with and it was indeed a very close 
relationship. It’s a little more difficult to separate the nature of 
the art making process and how it’s linked to very site-specific 
situations, inasmuch as my role was to try to provide the situation. In 
such a close collaborative relationship my work could be misunderstood 
as that of another artist. But it’s also a more contemporary concern; 
during the last ten or fifteen years this idea of the “curator as a 
kind of artist” is become an issue. This also goes back somewhat to the 
break down of categories I mentioned earlier. But I think it is only 
retrospectively that the term curator is something that I am 
comfortable with in relation to my work.

PON: A key word you used to clarify the changing role as a dealer/ 
curator in the late sixties was “de-mystification”. How relevant do you 
think this term is to evaluating contemporary curatorial practice?

SS: It is difficult to say, other than it was definitely a hot word in 
the late sixties, but I am not sure of its relevance today. On the one 
hand today there are large exhibitions that include many artists from 
the so-called “third world”, but it is not clear if the purpose is to 
show the aesthetic energy and ideas of these people who twenty years 
ago wouldn’t have been seen or rather to harness their energy into an 
understandable capitalist context? I am not so sure if 
“de-mystification” is a key concept today. I was very surprised when I 
walked through Documenta XI in 2002, although there was much work that 
I had never seen, many of the artists from these “third world” 
countries lived in London, New York, etc., apparently in order to be 
able to produce their work and have it seen. Is that bad? Not 
necessarily, but it certainly does not de-mystify capitalist values and 
its art and culture. By integrating more and more artists throughout 
the world into capitalist values, its aesthetic systems, into its 
machinery, I would not refer to as a de-mystification of the relations 
between what was called the “first world” and the “third world”.

I think, in our generation we thought that we could demystify the role 
of the museum, the role of the collector, and the production of the 
artwork; for example, how the size of a gallery affects the production 
of art, etc. In that sense, we tried to demystify the hidden structures 
of the art world. I am not so sure if that is what I am seeing today. 
Mostly what I see is an explosion of different personal and cultural 
sensibilities, which has a more “free for all” character; itself not a 
bad thing. But I don’t think curating today is about making the hidden 
mechanisms more visible now. Maybe they are about promoting unknown 
artists from Africa or Asia or elsewhere, but not necessarily 
de-mystification. Perhaps a types of subversion? I am not sure that we 
ever de-mystified anything, but many activities also had a clear 
political dimension, artist’s rights, anti-war, etc. linked to the art 
exhibition project.

PON:  In 1968, you curated the “Xeroxbook”. Was this a means of 
curating a large group exhibition without a fixed gallery space?

SS: It could have been, but there were only seven artists; it wasn’t 
that large. What it was really was a curatorial project in which I 
proposed the parameters for the artist’s participation in the 
exhibition: each artist had twenty-five pages to do what they wanted 
with it. I later tried a similar project in which each artist was given 
a day to do their work (the “One Month” exhibition, also referred to as 
“March 1969”). I wanted to be able to provide a standardized metric to 
the exhibition environment with the thought that if everyone had the 
same basic parameters to do their work what they would do would be 
their art. In this case in the format of a book, but it could also have 
been a space somewhere. I always found it strange that often in 
group-exhibitions some artists have more space or the means to have 
larger works than others, showing a clear preference by the organizer, 
making it more difficult to look at the art and the exhibition as a 
whole. Or when one artist is on the cover of a catalogue for a group 
show; I have always found that it is unfair for the other artists in 
the show, as if this one artist “symbolizes” or “represents” the 
exhibition.

But the “Xeroxbook” exhibition, in fact, was never published as a 
“xeroxed” book, it was printed in offset. I have never liked the term 
“Xeroxbook” as it gives the misleading impression that the Xerox 
Company had something to do with it, which is not the case. 
Furthermore, as an aside, it should be remembered that in the 1960s the 
word “xerox” was then virtually synonymous with “photocopy”. A few 
years ago the art bookshop Printed Matter wanted to do a retrospective 
about the book and how artists have been influenced by photocopying, 
and I said it had nothing to do with the technique of photocopying, it 
was just a practical way to get the project done very inexpensively. 
That was the primary reason. The idea was to produce an exhibition 
project. I like the term project because it is never clear what exactly 
is meant by it. I am currently beginning to work on a project related 
to a certain aspect of physics, and for many years now I have been 
involved with a bibliographic project on the history of textiles and it 
was only after a number of years did I have an idea what form this 
project could take. I would have preferred to keep the potential of the 
so-called “Xeroxbook” as open as possible. I wouldn’t have referred to 
it as a book necessarily. I would have stayed with the word “project” 
because it covers lots of different things; it is more open and full of 
possibilities. For all I know, the book could have done as a radio 
program or a film or newspaper or wallpaper or today, as an Internet 
site, who knows what; I have no idea.

PON: At the time, you also talked about catalogues as “containers of 
information” that were “responsive to the environment”. What did you 
mean by this?

SS: Probably what I meant was that in general catalogues illustrating 
traditional artworks like painting and sculpture were “secondary 
information” about an object that is “primarily” somewhere else. But 
for the kind of work that these artists were making and the ideas they 
were dealing with, the catalogue could function as something very 
different because the information it contained was primary information. 
It wasn’t information about something that was somewhere else, it was 
all there in front of you, it didn’t have to be bigger or smaller or in 
colour. This is what I probably meant by a “container of information”. 
For example, the Xeroxbook was primary information. This was probably 
the intention behind many of my publication projects.

Publishing was and still is very important for me. I really like 
publishing things. I have been able to use publishing over the years as 
a way to support myself and to engage with the world. In the 1960s I 
always tried to distribute and sell the publications that I produced to 
be able to support myself, and eventually, possibly the artist, but the 
publications were very inexpensive, around $2 or $5. They weren’t 
particularly successful to say the least, but it was possible to sell a 
few to some interested dealers such as Gian Enzo Sperone, Konrad 
Fischer, Leo Castelli or John Weber, and they were always an important 
potential source of income for me because I wasn’t really very good at 
selling art. I had no independent income and that was a way to survive. 
Publishing was also a way of publicizing the projects we did. At the 
time, there were no bookstores selling these types of projects, with 
the exception of George Wittenborn in New York and Walther König in 
Cologne. I was also a great believer in mail order, and I would often 
send announcements and things via the mail, but less so now since the 
advent of e-mail. But as a means of supporting myself at that time the 
income from the sale of publications, although no one was running 
around buying these books, $2 here, $2 there really helped to pay the 
rent.

PON: Was the publication an equivalent site to the gallery?

SS:  Yes, after I had the gallery on 56th street, I realized that 
didn’t like sitting in the gallery, and after a year and a half, from 
the fall of 1964 through the spring of 1966, I decided I would never 
want to be trapped indoors like that again. No only were there were 
very few people around at the time looking at art, but for a small 
totally unknown gallery like mine you would get about five people in a 
day, and four of which would want to use the bathroom, have a glass of 
water, ask directions, and the fifth would be Lawrence Weiner dropping 
by to talk. It really wasn’t at all like the galleries in Soho or 
Chelsea today; where even the least-interesting gallery today would 
have hundreds of people walking through in an afternoon.

PON: So your public was very localized?

SS: It wasn’t just localized, there were just very few people in the 
art world at the time. If you were an unknown gallery there was even 
fewer, and even when they knew who I was there still weren’t many 
people; even at the now well-known “January Show” [1969] there were not 
many visitors. It wasn’t like it was a great fantastic success. One had 
to be very publicity conscious, like a Warhol, a person who could 
really sell themselves, which was never the case for me and the type of 
projects I did.

PON: Why do you think there has been a resurgent and insurgent interest 
in conceptual art over the last 5-10 years?

SS: Difficult to say, as the old joke goes it’s now our turn in the 
barrel. Maybe nostalgia for the good old days and its struggles? Maybe 
people think of it as the “golden age” of contemporary art? Maybe 
people and institutions wanting to increase the value of their 
collections? But there does seems to be a more serious reason. There is 
little doubt that the kind of artistic practice, questions and 
possibilities that were opened up by the generation of artists working 
in the mid-late 1960s, including the group of artists I was working 
with, as well as others, is still today both a very important 
historical reference and a contemporary point of departure for many 
young artists, and its influence is still being felt. Our generation of 
artists made it possible that anything could be art. It may have been 
Donald Judd who said it, but it was artists like Lawrence Weiner, 
Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler or Joseph Kosuth, and a few others, who 
actually did it. At that moment the whole nature of the art-making 
process changed, not just the subject matter of art but the very 
relationship between art and life. It was very different than Fluxus 
and Surrealism, which in spite of their attempts, were still operating 
within the art world context. I don’t think this current interest comes 
 from economic speculation in works from the period, as perhaps was the 
case with “Pop Art”, as there is still relatively little money to be 
made from these artists. It seems that the works and the ideas 
generating them are still very close to young artist’s hearts and 
that’s where I think most of the energy and interest comes from. I 
think a number of artists are a bit let down by the period because we 
promised so much –to get rid of capitalist art values and the 
commodification of the object, etc.- and didn’t quite do it, but the 
promise is still there. I think this interest is really an 
artist-generated phenomenon, even though they may not always aware of 
much of the actual work that was done during the 1960s, but they do get 
the sense of the period and its possibilities.

PON: Does it seem to you that this is the moment that the history of 
this period is being written?

SS: One of the things that have always struck me is the fact that there 
is no critic that lived this period that is still interested in writing 
about it. Lucy Lippard and others were active in it for a while but 
moved on to other things, which is normal. Although he was not 
personally involved in the period, the research of Alexander Alberro 
has become absolutely invaluable as he has made a great effort to 
re-discover and document the basic historical sources of the period, 
and he certainly knows more about the period than anybody else. It is 
not like you have a Harold Rosenberg who wrote over a long period on 
Abstract Expressionism or Michael Fried on colorfield painting, etc. 
There is no critic attached to our moment for a long period so most of 
the interest has come after the fact. There are good books and 
catalogues by Anne Goldstein or Anne Rorimer, among a few others, but 
you don’t have the critical continuity that goes with somebody having 
being involved and fighting for it over the years. So most of the 
critical interest has come from people who write about it from time to 
time. It is possible that a lot of the historical facts are getting 
lost, but nevertheless between the work of Alexander Alberro and Lucy 
Lippard you have a pretty good idea of what went on at the time. I am 
not really involved in this kind of historical research accepts maybe 
to participate in conversations like this. I do have my personal 
archives, which Alexander Alberro has organized and used for background 
for his book “Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity”. Part of 
the archive is still here in Amsterdam, but most of the material is in 
New York.

PON: How involved were you in the Art Press publication on Conceptual 
Art called “The Context of Art” from 1996.

SS: Very; it was a great project, but it was done independently not for 
Art Press, they just published the material in French with additional 
visual material. Over the years I have been asked many times to do a 
“conceptual art” exhibition and I have always refused, not wanting to 
become a professional “Mister Conceptual Art”. But when I was 
approached by the German art dealers Marion and Roswitha Fricke from 
Düsseldorf in the early 1990s I again said no, but that I would be 
interested in doing a project dealing with what happened to all the 
artists involved in the art world in the late 1960s and their attitude 
about the art world between then and the early 1990s. I thought it 
would be interesting and perhaps significant to have their opinion 
about how the art world has changed, because one of the things which is 
most striking about the art world to me is how much it has changed 
during this period, and they agreed to do it. They did most of the 
administration and artist interviews, and it was published several 
years later in French in Art Press, partly in Dutch in Museumjournaal, 
and has just been published in English and German by Navado Press 
(early 2005). It was kind of sociological project; I was happy to be 
able to do it. I wanted to get a sense of the period, not just via the 
successful artists but also those who have since been forgotten, and 
their opinion about the art world and their own life. It was very 
interesting, and at one point we were going to do an exhibition, but 
decided that it was too complicated and unnecessary. To do the project 
I selected 120 artists active during the period and who showed in 5 
“avant-garde” exhibitions in 1969, including “When Attitudes Become 
Form”, my “One Month” project, etc. We found that ten or twelve were 
dead, another ten we couldn’t even find, another twenty or so wouldn’t 
reply, and finally we were able to get around seventy replies. Most of 
the replies were not written, but the result of the work of the Fricke 
as they went after people and did interviews with artists like Mario 
Merz, John Baldessari, Victor Burgin, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lawrence 
Weiner, among many others, and it is thanks to their efforts that this 
project became so interesting.

PON: What did you think of Alexander Alberro’s ‘Conceptual Art and the 
Politics of Publicity’ which very much focuses on your specific role 
within the development of Conceptual Art from 1966-71?

SS: It is an important historical contribution to the period, 
especially, my work. However, I just didn’t like the use of the word 
“publicity” in the title. I think it is a generational thing. For me it 
has negative connotations which suggest that I was some kind of 
advertising huckster or a Charles-Saatchi-type hustler. Yes, I did do 
lots of mailings and tried to use whatever media resources I had, but I 
never thought of myself as that sort of person. It’s clear the way he 
writes about it that “publicity” is some kind of virtue. I gave him 
many suggestions for another title, but I think someone at MIT Press 
insisted on using that word. But most important, he certainly has done 
his research and I personally learnt a lot from it as it contains many 
hard facts which I had long forgotten.

PON: Have you read the early interviews book “Recording Conceptual Art” 
that Alexander Alberro co-edited with Patricia Novell, who had 
interviewed you in 1969? How do you feel about your interview with 
Novell being published now? What do you think now about your responses 
to her questions?

SS: Yes. I wasn’t unhappy about it being published and it was a long 
time ago, but I don’t think I said anything particularly dumb in it. 
Some of the people who were also interviewed at the time, like Carl 
Andre wanted to edit parts or Joseph Kosuth, who wanted to re-write his 
interview, so eventually these two interviews weren’t published. As for 
my participation I couldn’t even remember what I said at the time; 35 
years ago!

PON: With much of the artists you were working with, the work was often 
quite invisible or ephemeral and there were significant issues of how 
the projects could be seen, or how works could be experienced or 
disseminated? Was this one of the key issues you had to deal in an 
innovative way?

SS: One of the basic problems was certainly how could you could 
communicate to someone there was a work of art there, period. We never 
had a final answer to this problem because the works are so different 
and thus call for different solutions. Probably the most difficult 
problems were posed by the work of Robert Barry because he really works 
on the edge of these kinds of problems more than anybody else with his 
radio wave or radiation pieces. I mean, how do you tell somebody there 
is a radio frequency in a room, how do you label it, how do you put it 
in the catalogue etc. Even when one walks into the room you don’t know 
its there without some kind of prior information. It was definitely one 
of the problems we had to think about carefully. For example, in the 
“January 5-29, 1969” exhibition, there is an overall installation 
photograph which contains one work from each of the four artists, but I 
just couldn’t find the Lawrence Weiner work for a long time. It was 
only when I referred back to the catalogue/exhibition that I realized 
that the work was a stain on the rug on the floor which was barely 
visible. Those kinds of problems were sometimes very important. It is 
somewhat easier when you are dealing works within the context of an 
interior space, but it really becomes a problem with outdoor works in 
the countryside or on city streets or walls, etc. You really had no 
feedback with these types of works, or even if people experienced the 
work, it was just out there in the world. It is somewhat less of a 
problem with an object one cannot situate, like Douglas Huebler’s 
photographs which do not have any inherent pictorial value in 
themselves (they have been referred to as the “dumb photograph”), but 
can only be understood as part of a whole linguistic and visual 
structure.

But there was also many works where it was obvious where the work “is”. 
The publications were one way of dealing with this “visibility” issue. 
Furthermore, far more people will see a catalogue/exhibition or a 
catalogue of an exhibition than will see the exhibition itself, if 
there is one. But it solves some aspects of this kind of art. In other 
words, to see a painting in a magazine only gives a little indication 
of what the object could possibly be in its primary real life. It 
definitely was clear that many more people were going to see a 
catalogue than will ever see an exhibition. No matter what exhibition 
it is. A book or a printed piece of paper circulates and communicates 
far more than the “objects” it describes.

PON: Do you think that the catalogue has almost replaced the exhibition 
as the main means through which we now experience art?

SS: Yes; its importance has definitely increased. And this aspect was 
an important part of our project. For us it was essential because it 
was a logical outgrowth of the art work itself. Also there weren’t that 
many catalogues around at that time, so that one was much more aware of 
them. But also it related to the work in another way; when one received 
an invitation for a Robert Barry exhibition you would have to ask 
yourself what am I looking at here, is it an invitation, or is it the 
work itself? This was the case for some work of the other artists as 
well. There were all kinds of these questions being discussed. Although 
catalogues have become more important for all types of art, Alexander 
Alberro is right to say that our publications could be considered as 
advertisements directed towards people who wouldn’t see the exhibition, 
if there was one, of course.

PON: Do you think a ‘curated exhibition’ can be a work of art in itself?

SS: I would say no. It seems like a very manipulative thing to claim 
unless all the artists have agreed to be the curator’s oil paint. But 
there are also museum interventions by artist, such as Joseph Kosuth’s 
“The Play of the Unmentionable” at the Brooklyn Museum or certain 
projects by Hans Haacke, which use the pre-existing works in a 
collection to make some kind of political or cultural statement, but 
this is quite something else. These are two different things. I don’t 
agree with the manipulation of others, but if the artists agree to be 
part of such a project, why not?

PON: Why did you decide to stop your curatorial activities in 1972?

SS: I left New York in spring 1972 to live in France and I was 
interested in other things. As I said earlier, I moved from working 
with specific concerns relating to a group of specific artists, to 
working with more and more different artists, to asking critics to 
select artists, to a generalized interest in the conditions of art 
exhibitions, to organizing a projects concerning artist’s rights. I 
gradually moved towards a more and more general interest in art, which 
eventually led to an interest in left media theory by the time I left 
for Europe. By 1972, I was interested in the practice of journalism, 
and thinking about doing some kind of left newspaper in New York. I was 
certainly moving away from the “artist as genius” thing, and I looking 
at the more sociological, political and economic questions concerning 
the artist’s relationship with the art world and to the wider world. 
That was my trajectory in a nutshell.

PON: Was the “Artist’s Contract” a part of moving away from the art 
world? It seemed like a perfect end point.

SS: Absolutely. As a matter of fact, I have been reproached by Lawrence 
[Weiner] who was against it at the time, as he felt that by trying to 
protect the rights of artists the contract was in effect making their 
work into another type of capitalist merchandise. However, there were 
other artists who were for it and used it, and still do use it, I am 
told. To me it seemed perfectly logical final project to end my 
involvement in the art world, although I couldn’t have foreseen this, 
of course. But I definitely wanted to get away from the promotional 
business of individual artists. This is also logical as I was never a 
good art businessman, and I only did it for the challenge and the 
excitement.

END OF INTERVIEW


________________________________________________________________________
Email and AIM finally together. You've gotta check out free AOL Mail! - 
http://mail.aol.com