Director of intelligence: Daniel Birnbaum, Ann Goldstein, and Daniel Buren on Pontus Hulten

ArtForum, Feb, 2007 by Daniel Birnbaum, Ann Goldstein, Daniel Buren

DANIEL BIRNBAUM

AT A DINNER I attended some years ago, an artist friend of mine asked Harald Szeemann whether "Les Machines Celibataires" (The Bachelor Machines), a legendary 1976 exhibition inspired by Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass that treated the theme of obsession in contemporary art, hadn't been a project by Pontus Hulten. Clearly pained at this younger individual's mistake--the show was Szeemann's own brainchild--the Swiss curator nevertheless managed a wonderfully understated reply: "Not quite everything interesting was done by Pontus."

But, of course, so much of it was. The Swedish-born Hulten, who died in October 2006 at the age of eighty-two, was the founding director of four art institutions--the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle in Bonn, and the Jean Tinguely Museum in Basel--as well as the director of Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, making him, arguably, the most influential European museum professional of the twentieth century. Indeed, Hulten was a large man in every respect, even on a personal level: He was a sailor and a boxer in addition to being (as he would often remind people, in his powerful voice) an anarchist.

Yet however unique Hulten's profile, in many ways my friend's conversational faux pas was quite easy to understand, and in fact a confusion well worth considering as we seek a clear sense of Hulten's legacy today. Over the course of their lives, Hulten and Szeemann--who passed away in 2005--displayed a striking overlap of interests. For instance, regarding his research for "Les Machines Celibataires," Szeemann once wrote of being sent into a deep depression when, in the elevator of New York's Chelsea Hotel, Hulten presented him with the Museum of Modern Art's catalogue for his own exhibition of Duchampian and post-Duchampian contraptions, "The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age" (1968). (On the other hand, when Hulten staged a massive Duchamp retrospective at the Pompidou in 1977, his encyclopedic catalogue included many discussions already taken up by Szeemann a year earlier: alchemical and optical speculation, esoteric eroticism, and the mechanics of death and desire in philosophy and experimental literature.) More important, a comparison of these pioneering figures offers a way to think through a crucial distinction--one having to do with institutional models and the very conception of curating. In this regard it could be said that Szeemann and Hulten defined opposite ends of the spectrum, and in so doing vastly expanded the spectrum itself. Szeemann chose not to direct a museum and instead invented a new role: that of the independent Ausstellungsmacher who eschews traditional museum tasks. Hulten, on the other hand, and more than anyone else, tested the limits of the contemporary art museum from within.

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For most of the art world, it is probably Hulten's work at the Pompidou that defines him. Scandinavians like me, however, will always remember him, first and foremost, as the brilliant director of Moderna Museet. He arrived at the fledgling institution in 1958--having spent the previous seven years shuttling between his native city and Paris, curating gallery shows and forging connections with artists like Jean Tinguely and Robert Breer--and took the helm in 1960. In the ensuing decade, he made the museum world-famous. One of his greatest gifts was his sense of timing, his ability to be at the right place at the right moment and to home in on the most interesting things going on. It's a talent apparent in the list of groundbreaking shows he organized at Moderna Museet: "Art in Motion" (1961), one of the first exhibitions of kinetic art; two of Europe's first surveys of American Pop art (in 1962 and 1965) and its first Andy Warhol retrospective (1968); and experimental initiatives like "Poetry Must Be Made by All! Transform the World!" (1969), a show about radical politics that, in lieu of artworks, presented documentation and progressive activities, including visits from American draft dodgers and Black Panthers.

But he made perhaps the biggest impression with the startling collaborative installation She, 1966 (conceived by Niki de Saint Phalle, Tinguely, and Per Olov Ultvedt, with significant input from Hulten): a gigantic, lurid cathedral in the form of a supine woman that viewers could walk into, the entry being between her legs. Inside, visitors found an aquarium full of goldfish, a love seat for couples, a bar, a small cinema showing a Greta Garbo movie, a playground with a slide, and many other surprises. Green and red lights controlled the traffic through the vaginal entrance. It was sexual liberation for the entire family, something that, at the time, was probably conceivable only in Sweden, and it was an instant sensation. Time magazine's review set the tone: "A cross between an amusement park and a return to the womb, She is one of the most uproarious, outrageous--and incredibly popular--exhibits to make its debut in Sweden's capital in years." With such efforts throughout his career it was clear that Hulten was quite willing to privilege the creative side of his institutional role and that he, as Saint Phalle once claimed, had the soul of an artist.