A Protest Against Forgetting

In celebration of the late, great Walter Hopps (1933–2005) and curators everywhere that his spirit has influenced, we have re-created the original walter hopps will be here in 20 minutes button. At this critical moment as the art world is facing a time of crisis, it is important to remember those who have come before, those who faced opposition and through reinvention, experimentation and the mounting of radical exhibitions are a guide into artistic landscapes that yet to emerge. As Daniel Birnbaum, curator of the 2009 Venice Biennale, says, “The future of exhibition making will deploy devices we once knew but had forgotten about.” ForYourArt invites you to pick up a button and wear it as a “protest against forgetting” as the great historian Eric Hobsbawm says.

WEAR A BUTTON

Distribution began in Los Angeles on May 3, 2009, the anniversary of Walter Hopps’s 76th birthday, and will continue through March 20, 2010, the anniversary of the curator’s passing. The “eccentric maverick” – as Calvin Tomkins called him in The New Yorker – never succumbed to administrative logic or routine. His workday famously began just before sundown and would stretch into the early morning hours interminably with near-mythic disappearing acts. Walter Hopps’s legendary elusiveness prompted the employees at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., where he served as director in the 1970s, to make buttons reading walter hopps will be here in 20 minutes. Buttons will be distributed throughout the world at museums, art fairs, bookstores and events through March 2010. Click here for a complete list of places to pick up your button.

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Walter Hopps is only one of 11 ground-breaking figures gathered together in Hans Ulrich Obrist’s most recent collection of interviews, A Brief History of Curating. An excerpt:

Hans Ulrich Obrist: In curating there is a need for flexible strategies. Every show is a unique situation, and ideally it gets as close as possible to the artist.

Walter Hopps: Yes. To me, a body of work by a given artist has an inherent kind of score that you try to relate to or understand. It puts you in a certain psychological state. I always tried to get as peaceful and calm as possible. If there was a simple way of doing something, I would do it that way. When I did the Duchamp retrospective in 1963, he and I walked through the old Pasadena Art Museum—the colors were white and off-white and brown; there was some wood paneling; some dark brown. Duchamp said: “It’s just fine. Don’t do anything that is too hard to do.” In other words, he was always very practical. But he had a very subtle way of trying to orchestrate or bring out what was already there, to work with what was already given. Duchamp knew exactly how to work with what was there.

But with other artists installations were very different. Barnett Newman was a very bright man, but he would get a preconceived notion of how the space should be. Wherever I showed him, we always had to do a lot of construction.