of introductions, librarian, manager and accountant, animator, conservator, financier, and diplomat. This list can be expanded by adding the functions of the guard, the transporter, the communicator, and the researcher.
WH That’s absolutely true. I’ll tell you the worst thing I ever had to do. From time to time—maybe once a year—we would do a historical show. Nobody was showing Josef Albers in California, so we showed Albers. Prior to that we did a joint show of Kurt Schwitters’ collages and Jasper Johns’ sculpture.
Anyway, one of the painters I loved—and I realized that a number of the artists, including Irwin, also really loved him—was Giorgio Morandi. No one was showing Morandi in the Western United States. I had been traveling, and I came back and discovered that Blum had not put an image of Morandi on the invitation. I was really furious. I said, “One in the thousand people who get our invitation will even know who Giorgio Morandi is. We’ve got to have one of his drawings on this invitation.”
Well, he hadn’t had a photographer come in to take a picture. I said: “Clear this desk off. I’m going in the back and choosing a drawing.” I picked out a Morandi drawing that was strong enough—it had glass over it—and I laid it down on the table. I took a piece of paper and laid it over the glass, took a soft pencil—and I’m not an artist; Blum would have been better, because he can draw—and I traced out that Morandi drawing, to life size, in my own crude version. Traced the son of a bitch out on a blank piece of paper, and I said: “There’s the artwork.”
Blum said: “You can’t do that. You’ve just made a fake Morandi.”
I said: “You watch me do it. You just watch me do it.” And that went to the printer, so it’s printed in red with its line cut very elegantly on a paper. We waited to see who would identify it as a fake. Never—no one, no one. Szeemann is right—there’s no telling what you’ll have to do.
HUO Certainly, in a small place like Ferus, you got used to doing everything yourself. Soon afterward, in 1962, you began curating and directing the museum in Pasadena. With only a few employees, you succeeded in doing an amazing number of exhibitions, 12 or 14 a year. You must have worked with enormous efficiency in such a small operation. You did big shows on Cornell, Duchamp, Jasper Johns, and so on—in a very short time.
WH Yeah. You have to be energetic and have good people. Sometimes the measures are extreme.
HUO And the museum was also a very small structure, wasn’t it?
WH The building was small enough to manage. It was like a square, symmetrical doughnut. There were larger rooms, and a garden in the center. A curious building. The design was fake-Chinese, like Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. But there were these rooms strung together. There were walkways through the gardens. All on one floor. The second floor didn’t have galleries. But somehow these separate rooms, with the garden in the middle, were very pleasing to people—it worked very nicely.
HUO What about the staff?
WH We almost never had more than three or four people physically installing a show. The hours were terrible. Somehow we were able to get some very grand shows—with Kandinsky and Paul Klee and so on. And that would mean extra people working pretty long hours to get it all straight. You couldn’t do it today. Nobody would allow artists to come in and help you handle Kandinskys. I’ve never had better workers. You know, with a little training, they care very much for the work.
HUO At this time there was also your pre-Pop exhibition?
WH Oh, yes—New Paintings of Common Objects.
HUO How did this show come about?
WH Just seeing the work—I had been seeing the work and was determined to do it. The word “Pop” was already in use in England, and was just beginning to be used in America. But I associated the word with the English movement, so I wanted something very bland and dry. I didn’t want to use the word. There were three East Coast artists—Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jim Dine—and three West Coast artists—Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, and Wayne Thiebaud. I asked Ruscha, who did design work, what to do for a poster. He said: “Well, let’s do it right now. Here, let me sit down and use your phone. What are all our names? Write ’em out in alphabetical order. Here are the dates, and that’s your title—fine. That’s all I need to know.”
And he called up a poster place. I said: “What are you calling?” He said: “This place does prize-fighting posters.” He went to a Pop, mass-produced poster place. He got on the phone and said: “I need a poster”—and he knew the size—and he just read it off on the phone. The guy saw no layout or anything—he just read it off. And then I heard Ruscha say, “Make it loud. And we want this many.” I gave him a number, they quoted a price. And he said: “Yeah, these folks are good for it,” and he hung up.
And I said: “Why the hell did you say, ‘Make it loud’?” He said: “Well, after you give the guy the size, the copy, and how many you want, he wants to know the style.” And I said: “That’s all you said for style?” He said: “Those guys, that’s all they want to hear—make it loud.” It was perfect. The poster was done in yellow, red, and black, and very loud. It was the most important poster that museum had ever done, with one exception—the poster Duchamp designed for his show.
HUO In 1919, Duchamp was one of the first artists to use instructions. He sent his sister in Paris a telegram for his Ready-made malheureux, to realize the piece on the balcony. Moholy-Nagy was the first artist to do a piece by transmitting instructions over the phone.
WH Absolutely—just called it in. Sometimes the best solution is the easiest one—if you know what to do.
HUO If one looks at the museum situation now, creating small structures with flexible spaces seems to be of most importance.
WH Somewhere in the 1970s in America—and in Europe, too—the idea of the smaller, more independent Kunsthalle arose. In America, it was the so-called artist’s space—that whole phenomenon.
HUO Which leads us back to the laboratory idea.
WH That’s right. I hope the concept doesn’t disappear. I hope a breed of entrepreneurs will come along who aren’t worried about being chic or fashionable and will keep some of that alive. One damn way or another, some version of that idea has always been around. We don’t have the salon now; we don’t have the big competitive shows in smaller cities, you know? They don’t mean much anymore. Most serious artists don’t submit to those. In a sad way, the old salon is dead.
I’ve been waiting for some breed of artist—some terrible little ancestor of Andy Warhol or whatever—to put out a mail-order catalogue of his or her work independently of the galleries. Whether it’s printed matter or it ends up on the Web, people, without even using galleries, can find interested patrons. This was the thrust of what the East Village was all about. They had artist-entrepreneurs there. Never in SoHo. This market appeared, then died down again, but I think it could happen again.
I really believe—and, obviously, hope for—radical, or arbitrary, presentations, where cross-cultural and cross-temporal considerations are extreme, out of all the artifacts we have. If you look at the Menil, with its range of interests—everything
