One of them. After my visit to New York in 1959, I curated two Pop art exhibitions. The first was in 1962 with Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and others (Four Americans, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1962). The second part was in 1964, with the second generation: Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, George Segal, James Rosenquist, Jim Dine, and Tom Wesselmann.
HUO One of your links to the United States was the electrical engineer Billy Klüver.
PH Billy was a research scientist at Bell Labs. In 1959, I came to New York and I started to give Billy a crash course in contemporary art; he generously accepted to act as a liaison between the Moderna Museet and American artists. Lots of artists needed technology. Billy started EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology) with Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, and Fred Waldhauer, a collaborative effort that came to a bad end. Pepsi-Cola had commissioned them to do the youth pavilion at the World’s Fair in Osaka (Expo 70, Osaka) where they enclosed a dome-shaped pavilion in a cloud sculpture by Fujiko Nakaya. In a way it came from an idea of [John] Cage’s, that a work of art could be like a musical instrument. When the pavilion was finished, Billy insisted on doing some live musical programming. After a month, after three or four artists had performed, Pepsi-Cola took over the project—they wanted automated programming.
HUO What was the art scene like in Sweden in the 1960s?
PH It was very open and generous. The great art star was Öyvind Fahlström, who died very young, in 1977. I did three shows of Swedish art later in my career: Pentacle, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, 1968, a show of five contemporary artists; Alternatives Suédoises, at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, in 1971, which focused on Swedish art and life in the early 1970s; and a big show, Sleeping Beauty, at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 1982 that included two retrospectives—one of Asger Jorn, the other of Fahlström—and occupied the entire museum.
HUO Many exhibitions you organized in the 1960s didn’t privilege the artwork as such. Documentation and participation in various forms became equally important. How come?
PH Documentation was something we found very exciting! It was in the spirit of Duchamp’s different boxes. We began seriously buying books, like Tristan Tzara’s library. There was also another dimension: the museum workshops became an important part of our artistic activities. We reconstructed [Vladimir] Tatlin’s Tower in 1968, using the museum’s own carpenters, not specialists brought in from the outside. This approach to installing exhibitions began to create a phenomenal collective spirit—we could put up a new show in five days. That energy helped protect us when hard times came at the end of the 1960s. After 1968, things got rather murky—the cultural climate was a sad mixture of conservatism and fishy leftist ideologies—museums were vulnerable, but we also withstood the tempest by doing more research-oriented projects.
HUO You also did political shows like Poetry Must Be Made by All! Transform the World! in 1969 (Moderna Museet, Stockholm), borrowing a sentence from Lautréamont, which was an attempt to link revolutionary parties to avant-garde artistic practices. It included almost no originals, and a wall on which local organizations could affix documents stating their principles and goals. How was that show organized?
PH It was divided into five different sections: “Dada in Paris,” “Ritual Celebrations of the Iatmul Tribe of New Guinea,” “Russian Art, 1917–15,” “Surrealist Utopias,” “Parisian Graffiti, May ’68.” It was about the changing world. It consisted principally of models and photographic reproductions mounted on aluminum panels. We used teams made up of people who served various functions at the museum; they acted as animators or technicians. It was like a big family, everyone helped each other out. Things were very different then. At the time there were lots of volunteers, mostly artists who helped install the work.
HUO Another of your famous exhibitions was Utopians and Visionaries 1871–1981 (Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1971), which began with the Paris Commune and concluded with contemporary utopias.
PH It was even more participatory than Poetry Must Be Made by All! Held two years later, Utopians and Visionaries was the first open-air exhibition of its kind. One of the sections was a 100th anniversary celebration of the Paris Commune, in which the work was grouped into five categories—work, money, school, the press, and community life—that reflected its goals. There was a printing facility in the museum—people were invited to produce their own posters and prints. Photos and paintings were installed in trees. There was also a music school run by the great jazz musician Don Cherry, the father of Neneh Cherry. We built one of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes in our workshops and had a great time doing it. A telex enabled visitors to pose questions to people in Bombay, Tokyo, and New York. Each participant had to describe his vision of the future, of what the world would be like in 1981.
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
