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Foci: Interviews With 10 International Curators
Description: Foci gathers together interviews with ten of the most renowned curators working internationally in the field of contemporary art. The interviews are rich with wide-ranging dialogue and cover issues such as the relationship between the exhibit and its location, art as the barometer for the age, the role of architecture, fashion, and design in shaping art, the notions of national and gender identity in art, as well as more specific issues concerning personal curatorial styles. Interviews with Kasper Koenig, Rosa Martinez, Hou Hanru, Harald Szeemann, Vasif Kortun, Maria Hlavajova, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Dan Cameron, Yuko Hasegawa, and Barbara London provide the reader a fascinating insight into the work and thought process of some of the most creative individuals in today's art world.
144 pages, Paperback
First published September 15, 2001
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November 23, 2025
To be a curator is fascinating!
NOTES (SO MANY I DIDN'T REALIZE!):
**Harald Szeemann**
pg 23
> That's why I invented th term, "individual mythologies" -- not a style, but a human right. An artist could be a geometric or a gestural artist; each can live his or her own mythology. Style is no longer the important issue.
**Hou Hanru**
pg 29
> Regrettably, some curators create exhibitions in the service of their own ideas, contributing to their own power.
pg 30
> For us, the first necessity of art is never to return to the enclosure of self.
pg 35
> [...]; he shows the interior contradictions among those images. It is a destabilizing intervention into fixed ideas.
pg 38 (to look up the art)
> Huang Yong Ping's Photographing things you don't want to look at
- i couldn't find this as it is quite old, but there a wiki of him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huang_Y...
- interesting.. https://publicdelivery.org/huang-yong...
**Yuko Hasegawa**
pg 44
> For Western people the power of the ego, the personality, and individualism is very strong. Japanese people, for example, share consciousness with one another as we are very oriented towards co-existence.
pg 46
> I esteem those artists who do not stay at the level of self-expression but give up their egocentric concerns and picture the world as visions after this self-annihilation
pg 51 (to look up artist)
> Matthew Barney's photographs, sculptures, and drawings for _Cremaster 1_ [1996] refer to a symbolic point from which male and female organs develop in the embryo.
- this is the art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cre...
pg 52
> [...], _Egofugal_, [...]. The term implies the lightness and rhythm intrinsic to moving away from the ego, transforming itself, just like the fugue. It describes an escape from the center, bit it is also about ambivalence: We remain in our own egos and yet try to develop beyond them. By freeing and distancing ourselves from the ego, we may be able to share a common field of consciousness with others.
**Vasif Kortun**
pg 59 (again looking up art)
> _Magiciens de la Terre_
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magicie...
And then i wrote this..
i am obsessed, more than any other thing in writing, in the formation of words, the evocative image, the surprise revelation. and then to continue on, not to linger on it, not be attached to this formation
(i wrote the following one night outside alone by the river, i spent a lot of time outside alone by the river)
avalanches when the conditions freeze over
accumulation of snow the higher you go
3 lifts to get to the top of whistler
The above references how in large ski mountains which get a lot of snow, times when, say it is warmer for a bit and it rains, creating a layer of ice on top of the snow that has accumulated over a long period of time. This is when avalanches happen most frequently, this layer of compression on top of feet of snow. And the 3 lifts is just as the mountain is so large you need to take 3 lifts to get to the top, the one we go to there are 2 lifts max and they go much less high up, as the mountain is much smaller.
And then this..
Languages. Being from a half latina family living in an American suburb, no desire to speak the not english.
Above is based on experiences Cata, a Columbian living in the states now who was on the trip, and she has relatives spread out through America. Her cousin married a man in the midwest and is settled there, her kids do not care to speak spanish at all, predominantly as no one does, it's all english in the midwest.
But in Brooklyn, in a metropolitan area where so many speak a second language, the kids are much more open. It's a social, peer pressure thing at the end of the day.
Kathary, another friend from Ecuador, would adamantly try and speak english, to practice it when we hung out.
**Mária Hlavajová**
pg 71 (more art to look up)
> Anri Sala, for one, made a video that consisted of two stories: one of a man who had thousands of fish in an aquarium and the other of killing people. We were forced to see the two narratives as intertwined.
- it's a film: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/11912
pg 74 (another art to look up)
> One, by Ene-Liis Semper, was a quietly startling video depicting the preparation of a suicide.
- i think this is it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-BLO...
pg 77 (and another)
> Paweł Althamer, [...] _The Motion Picture_
- https://m3.manifesta.org/a_pawe.html
- https://www.artforum.com/features/100...
> pg 77 (another)
> Roman Ondák('s) [...] work of second-hand images of tourist sites, called _Antinomads_, evolves from his storytelling and the residue of objects and drawings left by the different individuals who translate his travel descriptions. [...] "We don't plan our memories," Ondák says in the _Manifesta 3_ catalogue. "But this time it will be different." He continues articulating the intensely lived years of this project: "I'll be pursued by this idea of remembering. Maybe I'll want to see things that otherwise I'd neither want nor need to see."
- https://m3.manifesta.org (though cannot find the quote but what an interesting site)
- these manifesta catalogues are a bit pricy, but i may get one of the 20 dollar ones out of curiosity
- the manifestas are m1, m2, ..., m12 (same site prefix .manifesta.org)
**Rosa Martínez**
> pg 82
> Cai Cuo Qiang [...]. He then invited the visitors to construct paper planes, to write a desire on them, and make them fly in the axis of the church connecting the entrance with the apse -- representing the human and the divine. At the end of the show in the middle of the church there was a big, beautiful, white mountain with all the planes and all the desires of the visitors.
- The Other Shore was the artwork: https://www.instagram.com/caistudio/p...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cai_Guo...
pg 85
> Monica Bonvicini [...] she took excerpts from films [...] where there is always a certain moment where sad, tired, or abandoned women lean against a wall, to gain suport -- as if they never could stand by themselves. [...] the macho world of construction workers. She has been collecting various answers to a very ironic and ideological questionnaire in various cities and she will present the results.
- https://www.wallpaper.com/art/monica-...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_...
(i then wrote another random thing)
This idea of knowing. This conception i have of the truth in words people say. How, frequently, a critique of another person is a reflection of oneself. This obsession with the frustration of 'understanding it all' correlates with a deep desire to do so. To break out of this desire, i've had for so long, to not read too deeply into things. And here, right now, this deep urge to read this book full of art philosophy, curation, and arts meaning, how all encompassing this is.
pg 86
> I think women's art is starting to be part of the river of art, whose present course is not militant.
- the river of art metaphor is what sticks out to me, how this is the main desire of my own work, to be a part of the river of art. art in it's pure sense
**Hans-Ulrich Obrst**
pg 90
> Alexander Dorner's book, _The Way Beyond "Art"_, [...]. He defined the museum as a laboratory of permanent transformation with its borders between object and process.
- the cheapest copy i can find costs 40 dollars, most cost a hundred or so...
- also this: https://monoskop.org/images/6/6d/Dorn...
**Dan Cameron**
pg 101 (this is quoted from the questioner)
> The Oxford English Dictionary refers to the Latin root of "curator" as one way of defining the word: overseer, agent, or guardian for persons legally unfit to conduct themselves, like minors or lunatics in the Romantic tradition
pg 104
> Artists like Schneemann or Rosler could have been accepted only if they conformed to the art world's idea of what was marketable or historically sanctioned.
pg 110
References Clido Meireles, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cildo_M...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lygia_C...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9...
**Barbara London**
pg 117
> Nam June Paik's _TV Buddha_ which is like a koan about time.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3NWN...
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMUJB...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nam_Jun...
pg 118
TimeStream MOMA commisioned site: http://www.moma.org/interactives/proj...
- need adobe flash player installed to use it, more than that probably need to run a virtual box with old internet explorer or something crazy like that :(
**Kasper König**
pg 129
> If somebody is using concrete or is using film, video, or chewing gum, I don't give a damn as long as the work has an intelligent haptic point -- this, then, is the anchor.
- haptic point meaning here... what pulls you into the body of the work
pg 130
Alan Sonfist
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_La... (place to go)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_So...
pg 131
> The criteria for understanding are quite often being offered along with the work. It's a very dialectical relationship between the maker, the viewer, the museum, or the places where you expect art. There really is no such thing as a public artist. Either there is a good artist, or one who is not serious or risk-taking.
NOTES (SO MANY I DIDN'T REALIZE!):
**Harald Szeemann**
pg 23
> That's why I invented th term, "individual mythologies" -- not a style, but a human right. An artist could be a geometric or a gestural artist; each can live his or her own mythology. Style is no longer the important issue.
**Hou Hanru**
pg 29
> Regrettably, some curators create exhibitions in the service of their own ideas, contributing to their own power.
pg 30
> For us, the first necessity of art is never to return to the enclosure of self.
pg 35
> [...]; he shows the interior contradictions among those images. It is a destabilizing intervention into fixed ideas.
pg 38 (to look up the art)
> Huang Yong Ping's Photographing things you don't want to look at
- i couldn't find this as it is quite old, but there a wiki of him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huang_Y...
- interesting.. https://publicdelivery.org/huang-yong...
**Yuko Hasegawa**
pg 44
> For Western people the power of the ego, the personality, and individualism is very strong. Japanese people, for example, share consciousness with one another as we are very oriented towards co-existence.
pg 46
> I esteem those artists who do not stay at the level of self-expression but give up their egocentric concerns and picture the world as visions after this self-annihilation
pg 51 (to look up artist)
> Matthew Barney's photographs, sculptures, and drawings for _Cremaster 1_ [1996] refer to a symbolic point from which male and female organs develop in the embryo.
- this is the art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cre...
pg 52
> [...], _Egofugal_, [...]. The term implies the lightness and rhythm intrinsic to moving away from the ego, transforming itself, just like the fugue. It describes an escape from the center, bit it is also about ambivalence: We remain in our own egos and yet try to develop beyond them. By freeing and distancing ourselves from the ego, we may be able to share a common field of consciousness with others.
**Vasif Kortun**
pg 59 (again looking up art)
> _Magiciens de la Terre_
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magicie...
And then i wrote this..
i am obsessed, more than any other thing in writing, in the formation of words, the evocative image, the surprise revelation. and then to continue on, not to linger on it, not be attached to this formation
(i wrote the following one night outside alone by the river, i spent a lot of time outside alone by the river)
avalanches when the conditions freeze over
accumulation of snow the higher you go
3 lifts to get to the top of whistler
The above references how in large ski mountains which get a lot of snow, times when, say it is warmer for a bit and it rains, creating a layer of ice on top of the snow that has accumulated over a long period of time. This is when avalanches happen most frequently, this layer of compression on top of feet of snow. And the 3 lifts is just as the mountain is so large you need to take 3 lifts to get to the top, the one we go to there are 2 lifts max and they go much less high up, as the mountain is much smaller.
And then this..
Languages. Being from a half latina family living in an American suburb, no desire to speak the not english.
Above is based on experiences Cata, a Columbian living in the states now who was on the trip, and she has relatives spread out through America. Her cousin married a man in the midwest and is settled there, her kids do not care to speak spanish at all, predominantly as no one does, it's all english in the midwest.
But in Brooklyn, in a metropolitan area where so many speak a second language, the kids are much more open. It's a social, peer pressure thing at the end of the day.
Kathary, another friend from Ecuador, would adamantly try and speak english, to practice it when we hung out.
**Mária Hlavajová**
pg 71 (more art to look up)
> Anri Sala, for one, made a video that consisted of two stories: one of a man who had thousands of fish in an aquarium and the other of killing people. We were forced to see the two narratives as intertwined.
- it's a film: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/11912
pg 74 (another art to look up)
> One, by Ene-Liis Semper, was a quietly startling video depicting the preparation of a suicide.
- i think this is it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-BLO...
pg 77 (and another)
> Paweł Althamer, [...] _The Motion Picture_
- https://m3.manifesta.org/a_pawe.html
- https://www.artforum.com/features/100...
> pg 77 (another)
> Roman Ondák('s) [...] work of second-hand images of tourist sites, called _Antinomads_, evolves from his storytelling and the residue of objects and drawings left by the different individuals who translate his travel descriptions. [...] "We don't plan our memories," Ondák says in the _Manifesta 3_ catalogue. "But this time it will be different." He continues articulating the intensely lived years of this project: "I'll be pursued by this idea of remembering. Maybe I'll want to see things that otherwise I'd neither want nor need to see."
- https://m3.manifesta.org (though cannot find the quote but what an interesting site)
- these manifesta catalogues are a bit pricy, but i may get one of the 20 dollar ones out of curiosity
- the manifestas are m1, m2, ..., m12 (same site prefix .manifesta.org)
**Rosa Martínez**
> pg 82
> Cai Cuo Qiang [...]. He then invited the visitors to construct paper planes, to write a desire on them, and make them fly in the axis of the church connecting the entrance with the apse -- representing the human and the divine. At the end of the show in the middle of the church there was a big, beautiful, white mountain with all the planes and all the desires of the visitors.
- The Other Shore was the artwork: https://www.instagram.com/caistudio/p...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cai_Guo...
pg 85
> Monica Bonvicini [...] she took excerpts from films [...] where there is always a certain moment where sad, tired, or abandoned women lean against a wall, to gain suport -- as if they never could stand by themselves. [...] the macho world of construction workers. She has been collecting various answers to a very ironic and ideological questionnaire in various cities and she will present the results.
- https://www.wallpaper.com/art/monica-...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_...
(i then wrote another random thing)
This idea of knowing. This conception i have of the truth in words people say. How, frequently, a critique of another person is a reflection of oneself. This obsession with the frustration of 'understanding it all' correlates with a deep desire to do so. To break out of this desire, i've had for so long, to not read too deeply into things. And here, right now, this deep urge to read this book full of art philosophy, curation, and arts meaning, how all encompassing this is.
pg 86
> I think women's art is starting to be part of the river of art, whose present course is not militant.
- the river of art metaphor is what sticks out to me, how this is the main desire of my own work, to be a part of the river of art. art in it's pure sense
**Hans-Ulrich Obrst**
pg 90
> Alexander Dorner's book, _The Way Beyond "Art"_, [...]. He defined the museum as a laboratory of permanent transformation with its borders between object and process.
- the cheapest copy i can find costs 40 dollars, most cost a hundred or so...
- also this: https://monoskop.org/images/6/6d/Dorn...
**Dan Cameron**
pg 101 (this is quoted from the questioner)
> The Oxford English Dictionary refers to the Latin root of "curator" as one way of defining the word: overseer, agent, or guardian for persons legally unfit to conduct themselves, like minors or lunatics in the Romantic tradition
pg 104
> Artists like Schneemann or Rosler could have been accepted only if they conformed to the art world's idea of what was marketable or historically sanctioned.
pg 110
References Clido Meireles, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cildo_M...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lygia_C...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9...
**Barbara London**
pg 117
> Nam June Paik's _TV Buddha_ which is like a koan about time.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3NWN...
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMUJB...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nam_Jun...
pg 118
TimeStream MOMA commisioned site: http://www.moma.org/interactives/proj...
- need adobe flash player installed to use it, more than that probably need to run a virtual box with old internet explorer or something crazy like that :(
**Kasper König**
pg 129
> If somebody is using concrete or is using film, video, or chewing gum, I don't give a damn as long as the work has an intelligent haptic point -- this, then, is the anchor.
- haptic point meaning here... what pulls you into the body of the work
pg 130
Alan Sonfist
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_La... (place to go)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_So...
pg 131
> The criteria for understanding are quite often being offered along with the work. It's a very dialectical relationship between the maker, the viewer, the museum, or the places where you expect art. There really is no such thing as a public artist. Either there is a good artist, or one who is not serious or risk-taking.
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