Backstage presence

ArtForum, Feb, 1998 by Daniel Birnbaum

DB: Where do you find inspiration, when not in art itself?

SP: In cinema and music, but essentially in books. I prefer poetry and visionary thinkers. I read collections of translated poetry from everywhere. I am always engaged with Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Flannery O'Connor, and others. When it comes to art, I tend to privilege the statements of artists themselves, as well as the work of writers, like Genet on Giacometti, Beckett on van de Velde, Deleuze on Bacon, Barthes on Twombly. That is to say, I'm interested in a form of lucidity that comes from a passionate approach to the subject. But contemporary philosophers who have influenced me include Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard.

DB: Which shows have you found most interesting to work with recently?

SP: I have found many of the one-person exhibitions incredibly fascinating, from Louise Bourgeois to Fabrice Hybert; for me I think it is the most rewarding form to work with. But among the larger projects in recent years, I want to mention "German Expressionism" (1992) and "Passions Privees" (1995-96), which showed a number of highly interesting private collections of art in France. I love people who love art, and this project was therefore strategic as well. In today's climate, it's important not only to present art, but to promote the idea that contemporary art is important for individuals - especially in France, where the state is so present.

DB: Recently there have been a number of fierce attacks on contemporary art by French writers such as Jean Clair and Jean Baudrillard. How has that affected your work in the museum?

SP: It's dangerous, because it has a real impact on a very/anxious part of the population. Clair and Baudrillard are obviously respectable in a certain way, but I doubt that they expose themselves to contemporary work, and their defensive discourse can seem to be a kind of armor to protect themselves from the uncertainty of the world. I also think that there is a problem of power, and that certain intellectuals can be jealous of artists because art can't really be justified - no discourse can legitimate it. The artists can't be grasped.

DB: Your recent large show on the '30s, "Annees 30 en Europe" (1997), must have been quite an operation.

SP: That differed radically from any other I have worked on. Generally, when you decide to mount an exhibition, you want to present the material in a positive light, to make it look as clear as possible. That was not the point here, because of the ambiguity of the material.

DB: Why do a show about the '30s in the first place?

SP: The pretext was the anniversary of the museum's founding, in 1937. But 1937 is primarily the year of a tragic confrontation. In Paris that year there was a great exhibition devoted to the modern arts and techniques, which was about international openness and a confidence in modernity and contemporary art. In Munich two months later, a two-part exhibition opened, one part of which was devoted to German supernationalist, Fascist art and the other to "degenerate" art. Both parts pointed to the liquidation of the international avant-gardes and criticized the emergence of "Judaic-Bolshevik" and "cosmopolitan" culture as morbid, decadent, and psychopathic. The contrast between the Paris and Munich exhibits made explicit the tragic antagonism of a decade that in Europe saw Fascism grow to a pronounced barbarism. For me and the organizers of "Annees 30 en Europe," the extreme violence of this history excluded the possibility of a quiet curatorial neutrality, and that is why we exerted ourselves not only to trace the signs of that moment, but also to articulate the ambiguities relating the '30s and the '90s. Jean-Luc Godard, in his recent movie For Ever Mozart, compares the "lachete" of the two decades; the word in French has a double significance of both cowardice and flexibility. From Malevich's Man without Face, which opened the exhibition, to Giacometti's minute figure, Petit homme sur socle, which closed the show, it was a question of displaying the extraordinary trajectory of inhumanity. We were forced to invent a museography that moved between affirmation and questioning, leaving the viewer to define his or her responsibility and engagement.