in the 1950s.
HUO What are you working on at the moment?
PH The Museum Jean Tinguely in Basel, which has just opened. I’m also at work on a book about the beginnings of the Centre Pompidou called Beaubourg de justesse [Beaubourg, Just About]. And I’m writing my memoirs.
Johannes Cladders
Born in 1924 in Krefeld, Germany. Lives in Krefeld.
Johannes Cladders was the director of the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach from 1967 to 1985. He was responsible for bringing Joseph Beuys and others to international attention and acclaim. In 1972 he collaborated on Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany, and from 1982 to 1984 was the Commissioner of the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
This interview was conducted in 1999 in Krefeld. It was previously published in TRANS>, no 9–10, New York 2001; reprinted in Hans Ulrich Obrist, vol. I, Charta, Milan 2003, p. 155; as well as in French in L’effet papillon, 1989–2007, JRP | Ringier, Zurich 2008, under the title “Entretien avec Johannes Cladders,” p. 167.
Translated from the German by Christine Stotz and Pascale Willi.
HUO How did everything start? How did you get into making exhibitions and what was your first one?
JC I actually had a very conventional museum career as an assistant at the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, as well as at the Museum Haus Lange, in Krefeld. Under the leadership of Paul Wember in the 1950s and early 1960s, it was the only institution in Germany that actually had the courage to show contemporary art. It was a marvelous education for me, and gave me the opportunity to make a lot of contacts with artists, especially with the Nouveaux Réalistes and all the Pop artists, who were very popular at the time. In 1967, the directorship of the Städtisches Museum Mönchengladbach became available and so I applied for it, and from that point on, I was able to realize my own ideas independently. The first exhibition was of Joseph Beuys. At that point, Beuys was around 46 years old and had never had a major museum retrospective.
JC And it hit like a bomb. Suddenly, the institution was known well beyond Mönchengladbach.
HUO Was that already in the space where later exhibitions took place?
JC No, this was in a small provisional space in Bismarckstrasse. Actually, it was a private house that we used for exhibitions. From the start, my focus was always on the present—the immediate present—which I considered crucial to the development of art. This means that I never made any concessions to the taste of the public, or gave room to derivative art in any of the exhibitions I organized. After all, with all due respect to the work of artists, art must move forward! I always tried to discover where the innovative ideas were … where the new idea was coming from … in the sense that “art defines art.” It was from this that I developed my program. The next exhibition—because finances were tight—meant finding opportunities closer to home. I showed the cardboard works of Erwin Heerich.
HUO How did the catalogue boxes come about?
JC I made a virtue of necessity. The financial situation was not very good, and I only had a small budget, but I did not want to produce flimsy pamphlets. I wanted something for the bookshelf, something with volume. A box has volume. You can put all sorts of things into it that you have money to buy. With this in mind, I went to Beuys and told him that, for his catalogue, I had a printer that would print a text and reproductions for free, though only of a limited size and not more. This size was not enough and was way too thin. “What can you contribute?" I asked him. He promised me an object made out of felt, which he would make. With that, we almost had the box filled.
HUO The decision was made with Beuys?
JC He agreed with my idea to make a box. I talked to him about the form of the box … I mean the measurements. We did not want the standard size, but something unusual. It was then that Beuys defined the dimensions of the box, which we kept for all future exhibitions. I also remember telling Beuys that I wanted to print an edition of three hundred. Beuys said,“I don’t like that at all. That’s a strange number. It’s too smooth. Let’s make it 330. 333 would be too perfect.” I always maintained an irregular number, even for larger editions.
HUO With which exhibition did you move from the provisional space to the new one?
JC When I came to Mönchengladbach, the museum existed only as this provisional space. I went there though because the city had stated its intention to build a new museum. The site for it had been under discussion for a long time. I went to Mönchengladbach in 1967, and the location was finally decided on around 1970. In 1972, I was able to approach the architect Hans Hollein, and the city commissioned him to design the museum. The planning lasted until 1975, and the building was finally finished in 1982. So, I was in this “residential” space for 15 years.
HUO It’s interesting how like the catalogues this interim solution was, in that you also had to make a “virtue of necessity”—something that was used to such effect by so many artists. Over and over again, artists have told me how important the circumstance of this space was to them.
JC It really was important. In the first place, very young artists did not have great oeuvres in those days, that is, bodies of work sufficient enough for big retrospectives. Secondly, in most cases, they had never had a solo exhibition in a museum. Usually, they had had experiences with commercial galleries only, where space was typically restricted. Thirdly, there was a tendency among artists to avoid the sanctified halls of museums altogether. The inclination to go into a museum, into those “sanctified halls,” was not widely developed. There was more a tendency to avoid them. Though our institution was technically and legally a museum, it was in many ways more comparable to a private enterprise in someone’s house—a fact that has something to do with the atmosphere the place had and the way I ran it. I made decisions that I was not theoretically entitled to make, but nobody seemed to mind. There were no committees to decide what artists to show or when.
HUO Therefore, no bureaucracy?
JC No bureaucracy. Because of that, I had no difficulty making contact with artists who were skeptical of the museum as an institution. In other places, there were aggravations or things did not even get off the ground, but I did not have any problems.
HUO Would it be right to say that Mönchengladbach had the advantage of being more of a laboratory situation than a representational situation?
JC Exactly!
HUO If one talks to Harald Szeemann, or other curators from the 1960s, they often say that there only were a few interesting places in Europe at the time. Which ones were they?
JC Amsterdam, Bern, Krefeld. But I have to add that the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld closed for renovation soon after I left. The Museum Haus Lange shut down because it did not belong to the city, but actually to the Lange heirs, who decided not to extend its lease. Therefore, exhibitions were no longer held there. So, the only place in Germany that was internationally interesting was thus out of commission for a time. This was my chance to relieve Krefeld of its solitary responsibilities, as it were, which I promptly did.
HUO
