the art collectors

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Interview Mag sits down with Whitney Biennial Curators

2010 Whitney Biennial artist, Tauba Auerbach, in her studio (Image © Stefan Ruiz/Interview Magazine)

With the 75th Whitney Biennial two weeks from opening, Interview Magazine has published an insightful conversation between the exhibit’s co-curator, Francesco Bonami (who also curated the 2003 Venice Biennale) and New Museum director,  Lisa Phillips, who has curated six Whitney Biennials herself. As the magazine notes, most of the questions Phillips asks Bonami are the very same ones he had posed to her in 1997 for Flash Art, when she last curated the event.

Accompanying the interview is a fashion photo spread of several contributing artists in their studios, including Tauba Auerbach, Aki Sasamoto, Sosephine Meckseper, George Condo, and others.

LISA PHILLIPS: The 75th anniversary of the Whitney Biennial is quite a milestone. So what was your starting point in making selections for this exhibition?

FRANCESCO BONAMI: When I was asked [to curate the Biennial], they also asked who I wanted to work with, and I chose to work with this young curator, Gary Carrion-Murayari. I started as the head curator—I wanted to make it clear that I was the head, and he was the associate curator. To be safe, I wanted to have refusal and limits. But then the combination worked so well that we actually co-curated the Biennial together. I mean, it was a process of working together—not one where there was a head or a tail curator. But the starting point maybe was the museum itself, the building, and then the collection, because for the first time we are going to use the collection as part of the Biennial. The fifth floor will be devoted to a rehanging of the collection with artists who have been in the Biennial before, and with work that was acquired from past Biennials. So it will show that the Biennial is a kind of bridge toward something else and not just something that is outrageous at the moment that it appears. Edward Hopper was in many Biennials—he was in one in 1963. At the time, Hopper looked conservative compared with what was going on in 1963.

Continue on to the full interview here