Walter Hopps hopps hopps

ArtForum, Feb, 1996 by Hans-Ulrich Obrist

WH: Yes. "Thirty-Six Hours" was literally organized from the street. There was practically no budget, no money.

HUO: So you actually bad just a small alternative space, the Museum of Temporary Art, at your disposal.

WH: Right. It had a basement and four floors. It normally just showed on two of those floors. So I said, "Let's clean up the basement and these other floors so we can have it everywhere in the building." And the people who ran the space said: "Why? We normally only show on two floors." And I said: "You'll see. More people will come than fit two floors." They said: "How do you know?" I said: "If you say you're having a show where anyone who brings anything can be shown, people are going to come."

HUO: How did you make it public?

WH: We worked at letting people know for a couple of weeks. We put some posters up and got certain people to mention it on the radio. We had some musicians performing the opening night; one reason we had the musicians was that they knew the disc jockeys. I knew perfectly well that lots of working artists, you know - they're in their studios at night, and so forth, they listen to rock 'n' roll, whatever's on the radio, and they're going to hear this. They'll call up and find out. And they will come.

HUO: So not just artists - everybody:

WH: Anybody - we made no distinction. But it's interesting how few people who were not really artists showed up. One drunk guy came in who had ripped out a lurid Hustler photo with this nude woman exposing herself. He crumpled up the paper and then flattened it out. He'd signed it, and he came in insisting it was his work. My role in this was to be there all 36 hours, meeting and greeting every single person who brought in a work. We'd walk to a space and they would help install it, right then and there. So here was this crisis. But I found a place that was reasonably dark - it wasn't spotlit - and I walked him over there and said: "This is the perfect place for it."

HUO: So you actually did the hanging when people brought things.

WH: Yeah. So we stapled this thing up, in a sort of shadowy corner. This guy was so out of it, and so surprise - this was just a dirty joke on his part, but I didn't treat it that way. We put it up there, and he went away, and that was fine.

HUO: So the show was inclusive.

WH: My only requirement was that it had to fit through the door.

HUO: In the exhibitions you organized, there's something like a thread - from Duchamp or Joseph Cornell to Robert Rauschenberg - of artists whose work was encyclopedic.

WH: Yes, that's true. They're all artists who would have a difficult time explaining to you what they would not put in their art. They're naturally inclusive.

HUO: Many of your exhibition projects, like the "Thirty-Six Hours," or the unrealized project of the "1951 show" and, of course, the 100,000 images project, have this same impetus.

WH: Yes. Well, it's a very innocent response to natural phenomena. It's a perception of all the sorts of things one studies in the natural sciences, where you immediately get a vast realm of phenomena thrown out in front of you. I remember when I studied bacteriology, I had a good professor who went out of his way to talk about both bacteriophages and viruses so we might get a better sense of the whole category. Somehow, early on I got used to the idea that these people who were exploring any given subject were constantly pushing out beyond the boundaries, in order to understand what the boundaries were in the first place.