Elena Filipovic

EO

You just started a new job at the Kunstmuseum Basel. Do you speak the language?

EF

Switzerland is a country of dozens of distinct dialects, which can change dramatically across even just a few mile span. I don’t speak Basel German at all, and my high German is spoken like an American who learned it late, which people describe as “charming” but really just means they slide over my mistakes. The language barrier raises the question of what qualities are actually required to run the oldest public art collection in the world, which is essentially what I’ve taken over. The collection was founded as something for the public roughly one hundred years before the Louvre and two hundred years before the Met, which means that this little town I now live in generated the idea of a public art collection in the first place. Not princely, not royal, not private, but for and of the people, and that concept arguably became the blueprint for everything that came afterward among public museums around the world. And, as it happens, I’m the first American and the first non-European to run it.

EO

Are you the first woman to run it?

EF

I’m the second woman. But the founding of the collection as a public entity is over three hundred and fifty years old, so that’s not exactly a statistic to celebrate. It shows you how deeply entrenched the institution’s history is. It also tells you something about how slowly change happens in certain parts of the art world. My presence there marks a shift, but it also exposes how overdue that shift is.

EO

Let’s rewind. You grew up in LA. How’d you get from Los Angeles to Basel? What happened in the between?

EF

It’s a little more complicated, because while plenty of people in the art world come from LA, far fewer grew up in San Bernardino, California. I was born in LA but spent my teenage years in San Bernardino, which is really the styx, and during that time it had the highest crime rate in the country outside Detroit. It was a place teeming with meth labs, the birthplace of McDonald’s and the Hell’s Angels (I was never sure if that spoke for or against it), and the San Andreas Fault runs right through it. Every fire, every disaster, every unthinkable, freaky story—people burning their partners alive as they slept, violence layered on violence—seemed to come from San Bernardino, which Joan Didion once described as California’s most devastated, haunted place. Only two artists I know of made it out of there: Jack Goldstein, who took his life there, and Kaari Upson, whose psychological intensity came directly from growing up in that environment.

EO

Where did you go from there? What was the plan?

EF

The plan was to get as far away from that place, which felt like a world with no culture and no hope, as quickly as possible. At first I desperately wanted to go to UCLA because it was free to California residents and LA was close but still distant, so it would have been a practical choice. But my mom’s hairdresser told her one day that I was the smart kid and the hope of the family—since no one in our family had made it past high school—and that if I was going to college, I should go to the “Ivy League.” My mom came home with that mandate, and although the thought terrified me because the kids in those movies always seemed bred for those schools, I felt obliged to apply to one. I chose Cornell because it seemed like the least known and least intimidating Ivy, since there was no way I was going to apply to Harvard or Yale. When I got in with a scholarship it felt almost unbelievable. I was pushed to go, went, fell completely in love with it, and ended up being there from 1990 to 1994.

EO

Was Hal Foster there yet? I know you studied with him later.

EF

He was there, but I wasn’t in art history. I was doing a literature major. I had walked into the art history department once because I’d been taken to a museum on a school trip when I was a really young person, and I had fallen in love with museums and thought museums were magical places. But when I walked in to inquire about classes, the department was full of these really beautiful young women who looked like they rode horses and took ballet classes and had fathers who had collections. I felt so alienated from that world that I didn’t even dare take an art history class. I just thought, “It’s not my place. And, what does one do with an art history degree anyway?” [Laughs.] So I studied literature, because I intended to be a lawyer.

EO

Why did that feel like the only path forward?

EF

As the child of immigrants, you’re given two options if you’re meant to be successful: you become a doctor or you become a lawyer. There was no vocabulary for anything else that equated to success in a way that was understood by my parents or their communities or within the metrics by which an immigrant life is measured. But still, I was convinced that I would be a lawyer for museums and artists. Either that niche didn’t exist at the time or, if it did, I didn’t know about it, but the fascination I had for museums was already implanted in me. So I thought, “That’s the worthy cause.”

I took the LSAT. I filled out the applications for law school. On the night before I was going to send them in, I went out to celebrate with my friends. A boy at the keg asked me and my girlfriends what we were celebrating, and they told him I was applying to law school. So he started chatting me up, asking questions—“What kind of law?,” and so on—and I explained that I wanted to be a lawyer for museums and artists. He kept asking these really probing questions about why museums, why artists, what exactly I thought I wanted to do. The more he questioned me, the more he kept circling back to the idea that it sounded like I wanted to be in the museum, not simply to have museums as my clients. It just so happened that I ended up at the one party with the one boy whose parents were connected to museums and the arts. So I asked him what jobs existed for someone who wanted to be inside the museum. And he told me that it sounded like I actually wanted to be a curator. (Harry, if you are reading this, you changed my life!)

EO

How old were you at this point?

EF

Twenty-one, maybe. A bit too late to learn what a curator is by today’s standards, when the word is part of a much more common vocabulary and people claim they’re curating everything. But you have to imagine what this was like for someone who had come from San Bernardino and from a family for whom working in art history or in museums were not seen as legitimate professions. It was completely mind-blowing to me that someone had a word for what I actually wanted to become. I suddenly had a clarity that I had rarely known up until that point. So I went home tipsy, ripped up my law school applications, went to the guidance counselor at Cornell the next morning, and asked for applications for PhD programs in art history. Because when I asked the boy what I needed to do to become a curator, he told me that I had to get a PhD in art history. So I just applied directly to PhD programs.

EO

How did you decide which programs to apply to?

EF

There was no plan. I didn’t know that I was supposed to look at who the professors were or which programs were the strongest in which discipline—none of it. I was so green. Embarrassingly so. I just took the pack of applications and applied to five different PhD programs, including Princeton and the IFA. I don’t remember the other programs—we’re talking about the Stone Ages. NYU offered me a scholarship so I wouldn’t have to pay tuition, but nothing else. Princeton offered me both a scholarship and a stipend. So I went there.

EO

Let’s walk through who was at Princeton at this point. Were Felicity Scott and Reinhold Martin there?

EF

Yes. They were students at the School of Architecture, and I took some classes in the architecture department because it was so much cooler over there. Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley had been teaching there a few years already by the time I arrived. I began my studies working with this amazing modernist, Dorothea Dietrich, who was a Kurt Schwitters specialist. After she left, Hal Foster arrived and took over as my doctoral advisor.

EO

What did Princeton feel like upon arrival? Were you aware of what was happening at other institutions, and how Princeton placed among them?

EF

I had no idea how amazing and famous the professors actually were at that time. I went because it was the school that gave me a stipend—it was simply the best offer. I wasn’t naïve enough to not understand that Princeton was a really famous and respected school, but I didn’t know it wasn’t known then for its modernist program. If you were interested in modernism at the time, you were better off going to the IFA, or to Columbia to study with Rosalind Krauss, or to Yale to study with Yve-Alain Bois. At that time, Princeton was strongest in Renaissance and Chinese art. Hal’s arrival changed that, it was the moment when the Princeton Art & Archaeology department doubled down on modernity. Hal worked very synergistically with other department heads and programs to make that happen. With Beatriz, Mark, and Tom Levin in the German department, and together they created the Media and Modernity program, which had real momentum.

EO

What was studying with Hal like at that point?

EF

He was a big deal. And he was also really encouraging but, in all honesty, we didn’t overlap much because I left for Paris shortly after he arrived. He was a generous advisor, and gave me a really long leash so I could figure out what I needed my dissertation to be. In the beginning I checked in a lot and needed feedback, but my response times became longer and longer as I was digging into primary research on Surrealism and Duchamp and figuring out what my dissertation would eventually become. Then, Hal was in Paris on sabbatical and we overlapped again. I was still working on my dissertation. My fellowship money had run out. I had had two different grants that allowed me to stay in Paris and concentrate fully for two years on the dissertation. And when those ran out, I took odd jobs—translating, editing, assisting, doing anything. That eventually became more formalized round about 2000, when I became Hans Ulrich Obrist’s assistant.

EO

Where was HUO working at this point? And how old were you?

EF

The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Assisting him on his projects outside of the museum was my first job in the art world. I was about 28, I think.

EO

What was the job?

EF

I met him because he had heard about my research on Duchamp as curator, and he thought it was interesting, so he asked someone to connect us. I sat down to meet him and tell him about my research, and I just couldn’t believe I was in front of such a legend. At that moment, Hans Ulrich was the most inspiring, iconoclastic, unconventional exhibition maker. He wanted to hear about my research, and I had seen or heard about the projects he had done, so I was fascinated to meet him. I had also read he was an advisor at de Appel, the curatorial training program in Amsterdam, and at the end of our talk about Duchamp I asked him, a bit cheekily, if he could tell me about the program and whether he thought I should do it. I had no network and no real knowledge of the art world—could doing the program be a solution?

He gave me a few tips and said he’d be happy to write me a letter of recommendation if it would help me get in. Then he paused and said, “Or you could learn what it is to be a curator by doing it and working for me.” I chose that option. The job started with no training or explanation, just a few inexplicable emails that said “Ever, ever” or “you are a revolutionary” and no instructions. After a few days of those, he would send me the name of someone and I had to intuit that I should research possible interview topics for his interview with them and maybe others like them that should also be interviewed. Basically, background research for his massive, endless interview project. Shortly after starting, he had been asked to co-curate Utopia Station with Molly Nesbit and Rirkrit Tiravanija, which was part of the now landmark 2003 Venice Biennale. He gave me the choice between editing his first volume of interviews or working on Utopia Station. I picked the latter, which turned into a crazy 24/7 ride to the end. Basically every artist of that generation who has made an impact on art history was part of Utopia Station—Trisha Donnelly, Pierre Huyghe, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Philippe Parreno, Tino Sehgal, Anri Sala, and so many more. It was an amazing, thrilling introduction to the contemporary art world, which was not the world I expected to enter. Working on Duchamp, I assumed I’d end up at MoMA in the drawings and prints or painting and sculpture department. I didn’t think I’d end up working in contemporary art. And suddenly, with Hans Ulrich, I was thrown into that world.

EO

What years were you specifically working with HUO?

EF

It was from 2000 to 2004. Utopia Station opened in June 2003. Then it had a second iteration in Munich at Haus der Kunst, so I worked through that as well. The thing about working with someone like Hans Ulrich is that there’s always going to be more work, always going to be something thrilling happening. So, at a certain point you have to recognize for yourself when it’s time to leave. I realized I could probably be the role of assistant forever, but I wanted to figure out what it would mean to be a curator and writer on my own. So I moved to Brussels to finish my dissertation, and branch out, at first simply because Brussels was more affordable at the time. Paris was simply too expensive if all you had were freelance jobs.

EO

Can you speak to the feeling of being at the Biennale at that moment in time?

EF

I can’t say that in the moment it felt like we were doing something epic or historic. I didn’t have that recognition or understanding at all. But I do see now what a landmark project Utopia Station was. At the time it was just an absolutely non-stop, scintillating job. The artists were brilliant. I couldn’t have possibly realized what they would go on to become.

EO

What was everyone’s relationship to and expectation of contemporary art?

EF

The Venice Biennale has evolved since that time, especially in terms of what curators now understand the Biennale’s job to be. I’m thinking about the recent turn toward retrospection or historical consideration. At that time, though, it was still understood that the Biennale was about being of the moment and anticipating the future. That was true of Utopia Station for sure. The idea of putting performance in exhibitions was still in its infancy. Imagine: Tino Sehgal is the artist who most defined bringing performance into exhibition spaces, and this was one of his first major group shows. He’d been in a group show earlier that year or the year before, I think, but this was still quite at the beginning of his career. And it wasn’t just a question of this or that artist, the whole of Utopia Station was properly performative. It wasn’t an exhibition of artworks on walls or sculptures on pedestals. It was built, quite literally, as a platform. It was meant to be lived and was intended to be alive. It had endless performances, lectures, and events built into it.

EO

That’s intimated by the word “station.”

EF

It really was the brainchild of the three curators—Hans Ulrich, Rirkrit, and Molly. They understood that what the world needed at that moment, what the Biennale needed at that moment, was something that defied exhibition conventions and defied the idea of a mere panorama of the (market darlings of the) present. Instead, Utopia Station was about looking toward the future.

EO

You were doing all of this while still writing your dissertation?

EF

I was not really writing it much at that time. It was so much more exciting to be out in the world. When I was in Princeton, I was really studious. But I had a classic case of imposter syndrome, I’m not too embarrassed to admit it. It felt so important that I had been let in, and I didn’t want anyone to discover that I didn’t belong, and didn’t come from a posh background filled with regular exposure to books, ballet, opera, add museums. Class gets so little spoken about in the art world but when you get to a place like Princeton, it was unavoidable. As a result, I spent most of my time not leaving my room because I felt like I needed to catch up with everyone else and to somehow learn to imitate what had come with their privilege.

This combination of factors is probably part of the reason my dissertation took as long as it did. On one hand, I was convinced that if I put it down on paper and sent it in, it would be proof that I wasn’t “good enough.” On the other hand, it was exciting to work on projects in Europe. I was really learning by doing. But I pursued these experiences as a kind of distraction from the banal feeling of imposter syndrome, the feeling that turning in my dissertation meant handing over proof to Princeton that I wasn’t worthy. It wasn’t a fun feeling to live with, but I did for a long time.

EO

So Europe became both escape and pressure?

EF

Exactly. I was pretty nerdy there; I didn’t really go out. I was either trying to write my dissertation or trying to avoid writing it by taking on odd jobs to survive. In the end, it took me more than a decade and a half to write my dissertation on Duchamp, or you could say I spent more than a decade and a half not writing it. But it was always with me. During the years working with Hans Ulrich, I wasn’t writing it at all—there was no time left in the day. And then I started doing other jobs. I was asked to co-curate the Berlin Biennale in 2008. Then I became senior curator at WIELS in Belgium. I was fully in the art world, but the dissertation was still unfinished. Yet I didn’t give it up.

EO

How old were you when those transitions happened?

EF

I was 35 when I co-curated the Berlin Biennale, and 37 when I started at WIELS. I didn’t finish my dissertation until 2013, when I was 41, which is rather “old,” I guess, by typical standards.

EO

Given how professionalized the art world is now, what did those positions feel like then?

EF

It’s interesting because for the generation above mine, you had to have a PhD if you wanted a curatorial position in a serious museum or art institution. And that’s why I started the PhD in the first place—I wanted a museum job. Now, your generation and the one below you realizes you absolutely don’t need a PhD to work in an institution. It never hurts, but it isn’t necessary. That shift only really happened in the late 1990s and 2000s. Think of Catherine David, Okwui Enwezor, Hans Ulrich, all these figures that really dominated the artworld in the early 2000s—they didn’t have PhDs and it didn’t matter.

But I had started in a moment when I still believed I needed one for legitimacy and institutional credibility. Yet by the time I got the Berlin Biennale job, I realized I got it without a PhD. I got my WIELS position without a PhD. I was making shows that were winning awards and getting attention. I realized I didn’t actually need the PhD to curate in the contemporary art world. But I nevertheless wanted to finish what I had started. And, the truth is, the topic still fascinated me. Duchamp fascinated me. There was no obligation, but I wanted to finish. So I carried it from job to job, year to year.

Eventually, at WIELS, I struck a deal with the director: every few years I’d do a big project, fully focused, and then I’d take a three- or six-month sabbatical to work further on my PhD. He was super supportive and generously let me do that a few times. That’s how I eventually finished it. And I knew that if I was going to finish it, I wanted it to become a book, which it did, The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp.

EO

And then there’s the David Hammons book. How did that enter the picture?

EF

I was working on it alongside the dissertation.

EO

Why take on something else that big?

EF

Probably precisely because the dissertation itself felt like such a big thing. I happen to work best when I have too many projects and too many balls in the air. It will sound absurd, perhaps, but I couldn’t quite handle finishing my Duchamp project, so I thought, “Why not take on Hammons?”

EO

What was happening on the ground at WIELS?

EF

I got the job at WIELS in 2009, and the director told me my first exhibition would be a Felix Gonzalez-Torres retrospective. He had already put it on the institution’s calendar—the date was reserved and the Felix Gonzalez-Torres foundation knew that a show would happen. Someone just needed to actually do it. I was thrilled to be given the task. I was a huge fan of Felix’s work, but I didn’t really know it deeply. As part of the preparation, I read everything—every interview, every obscure lecture, every published essay I could find. And I quite quickly came to this realization that I tried to explain to my boss: the vital legacy Felix left is not a legacy of candy piles and paper stacks, as it might appear. It’s not primarily material. It’s a fundamental questioning of authority—of the artwork, the artist, the institution, the forms we inherit. I was utterly convinced that’s why he remains so important.

EO

So already you’re realizing the form can’t just be inherited.

EF

Yes, but I thought that if that’s true—if questioning authority is central—then you can’t do a retrospective. A retrospective, after all, is the ultimate form of authority: it declares that these forty works, in this order, tell the “correct” story of an artist who isn’t here to contest it. So I argued we shouldn’t do one. Instead, I suggested a David Hammons retrospective, because his paradigm is different, his questions are different, and he deserved one. The director said it was an interesting argument but insisted I do the Felix retrospective anyway. He said that once it was done, I could start working on David.

Long story short, I did the Felix retrospective in a very particular way. There had been a big Felix retrospective in Berlin a few years earlier, and I just thought there was no reason to repeat it. It felt like it would dishonor the practice and the thinking to simply make a conventional retrospective. I was green, fired up, totally convinced by the idea that Felix’s exhibition must be guided by his thinking.

EO

So you’re solving it by rethinking the structure itself.

EF

Well, it took a minute to get there. Luckily the director, Dirk Snauwaert—he’s still the director at WIELS—was such an inspiring and brilliant mentor, who didn’t let me get out of doing the retrospective. His insistence helped me to finally find the right form. I realized that I had to invent a retrospective with no authority, or one that undid its own authority from within.

That’s how I arrived at the idea of a retrospective in multiple parts, at multiple venues, where each venue had two versions. Each version contradicted the other: different orders, different chronologies, different emphases. I asked Danh Vo to deinstall my WIELS show and install his own version of a Gonzalez-Torres retrospective in its place; then Carol Bove to deinstall my version at the Fondation Beyeler and to conceive her own in its place; and finally, Tino Sehgal to deinstall my version at the MMK in Frankfurt and conceive his own version too. In the end, it was a retrospective in six parts with no “authoritative” version. And it was called Specific Objects Without Specific Form.

EO

Right, and the instability becomes the point.

EF

That was my first project at WIELS. And while I was trying to find a solution for it, I simultaneously began talking to Hammons since you’ll remember I was determined to do a retrospective with him. It took forever to even get a phone number for him. No website, no gallery contact, nothing straightforward. But finally, I eventually got a number from someone who got it from someone who insisted I not admit where I got it from. There was so much stealth around David. After many tries, I got through. We met at St. Mark’s Bookshop when it still existed. He walked me around the city for hours. Every time I’d bring up the idea of a retrospective, he’d say, “I’ve always been looking forward. I’m not looking back. I’m not interested in doing a retrospective.” I thought: if he’s not going to do a show, at least I can ask him about the Bliz-aard Ball Sale, because already then I was completely obsessed by that iconic performance for which so little was known.

EO

You were right there in the belly of the beast, right around the corner. Bliz-aard Ball Sale happened in Cooper Square on the backside of Cooper Union, right?

EF

That’s right. But I didn’t think about it at that very moment. I just let him walk me around New York City, and every now and then I’d slip in a question. I’d say, “There’s no essay about the Bliz-aard Ball Sale. There’s no book about you.” There was so little published on David—just a few exhibition catalogs, most of them out of print and insanely expensive online. I couldn’t even afford them. I had one PS1 catalog, it was an ex-library copy—nobody who fetishizes books would buy it, which is why it was only a hundred dollars, still a lot for me then. But that was it. Nothing on the Bliz-aard Ball Sale, despite it being so iconic and so widely referenced. And each reference carried a different story: one passing mention said the balls were a dollar each; another said ten, yet another said they were priced according to size. I asked him: how much were they? How many did you make? Who bought them? He chose when and which questions he would answer. Finally, probably tired of my pestering, he gave me some crumbs: they were all sold, they were a dollar each, and he made about twenty dollars. When I asked if there were more photos than the two or three online, he didn’t answer directly. Instead, he said, “People are lazy.” And I understood: there must be more, but he wasn’t going to tell me where. We walked until two in the morning. Hours. He pointed out cracks in the pavement with tiny embedded artworks, shoes thrown over a telephone wire, Schnabel’s studio, where The Factory used to be. And then he brought me back to Cooper Union, and I understood the evening was over.

EO

He brought you back to the exact place.

EF

Exactly. By that point I’d stopped asking him about the Bliz-aard Ball Sale, and he just nodded in that direction—“Well, it was there.” And I didn’t get it at first. I thought to myself, “What was where?” And then I realized: he had brought me to the exact spot where he sold the snowballs. It lit a fire in me. It was already there, because I was obsessed and asking questions, but now I became genuinely determined to track down the mystery of it. So when Afterall asked if I wanted to do one of their “One Work” books, a series I love, I knew immediately what I wanted to write about. At first, they’d simply asked me to help review their list of possible titles and identify gaps. And I remember saying, “You barely have any women. You have no artists of color. It’s so Western, so white.” I gave them a list of what I thought should be there. And with these suggestions, my most emphatic question was: “And why is there no book for the Bliz-aard Ball Sale?” They came right back and asked if I wanted to write it. Of course I did. Then, I immediately wrote to David, proud I’d gotten the commission, and told him I wanted to write about the Bliz-aard Ball Sale and would love to speak with him. He wrote back a simple one line answer: “Thanks, but no thanks.” I was deflated but determined.

EO

So you had to build the book without him.

EF

Indeed. I spent years trying to track down information without him. And this was happening while I was basically stalking the ghost of Duchamp and curating full-time at WIELS. Everything was in parallel. There was this sense that I was triangulating two ghosts at once. And the obstacles were real. I kept thinking: how do you write an art-historically rigorous book when the object of your study cannot be summoned? When the artist refuses to speak? When the documentation is minimal and there is little or no eyewitness testimony to be found? When there is no press release, no reviews from the time? And the artwork itself no longer exists? In classical art history, at least you have the object, or any of those other elements to help you reconstruct it. Here the “object” was snowballs—melted, gone. After digging around as much as I could, I hit a genuine wall in terms of how I felt I could legitimately go forward. I did the only thing I could think of: I became unbearable at dinner parties whenever I was in New York, I’d interrupt conversations to say, “Sorry—was anyone in New York in 1983? Did anyone see the Bliz-aard Ball Sale?” It became a running joke. I would not leave a dinner party without asking, and the answer was always no.

EO

Always no.

EF

It was always no...until I happened to be at a dinner table next to Kerry James Marshall. I had nominated him for a prize in Cologne and given the laudatio. At dinner afterward, he mentioned having the Studio Museum fellowship in 1984, and my entire nervous system lit up. I asked, of course, if he had seen the Bliz-aard Ball Sale. He shook his head—no, he had arrived a year too late. There was a pause. Then he said, “But I saw the snowball.” And I remember like it was yesterday my bewilderment, “What do you mean you saw the snowball?” He said, “You know, the snowball Hammons saved for years in a freezer at Just Above Midtown.” It was a watershed moment for me, “He saved a snowball?” And Kerry James conferred, “Yeah. David saved one of the snowballs from the sale. It had been in the freezer for years.” So much for someone who purported to always “look forward and not back”! I realized that in none of the references I had read, had I heard about that stray frozen snowball anywhere, nor that it had been there for years. And in that moment, I knew: there was an untold story, and I had to investigate it.

EO

So you basically became Carrie Mathison.

EF

I did. Picture the scene: I created a kind of family tree of possible witnesses and mapped these out on a wall: his girlfriend, his best friend, the photographer Dawoud Bey, Bey’s girlfriend at the time, anyone who might have known him at that time. I mapped a whole network. I lived in Brussels at the time, but every time I happened through New York I tried to set up interviews, one by one. But it was moving too slowly, so I asked a brilliant former student of mine, Alhena Katsof, who lived in New York, to help. I’d prepare questions, she’d go talk to people, record them, transcribe them. We were building an oral history of the Bliz-aard Ball Sale, person by person. And every time I’d ask someone to speak, it followed the same pattern: they’d say, “Let me get back to you,” which meant they were calling David to see if it was okay. Then they’d return my call and say yes. It happened again and again—person one, person five, person fifteen. And by the time I’d gotten to forty-four people…

EO

Oh my God.

EF

Yeah, I was a maniac. It went deep enough that I eventually got a message from David that said, “Respect, I’ll talk to you now.” He finally understood I wasn’t lazy, and that I wasn’t going away, and that the book was going to be written with or without him. After that, we had an ongoing conversation. We spoke every Tuesday, 10:00 a.m. his time, for 29 minutes.

EO

Why 29 minutes?

EF

[Laughs.] Because he had one of those old cordless phones with the little antenna, and it would die after exactly 29 minutes. The battery would start making a beeping noise, and he’d say, “I have to go.” Of course, by then he’d was already long famous, he’d been selling works—there had just been one that sold for six million that he himself put to auction. The man had all the money in the world, but a phone that cut out after 29 minutes. In true David style, he wasn’t going to change, no matter how much money he made.

EO

How long did that go on for?

EF

A few months. We had numerous conversations. Then I got the job at Kunsthalle Basel. By that point I had defended the Duchamp dissertation, but I kept working on Hammons.

EO

Had you gotten the call from Hammons by the time you finished your dissertation?

EF

No. I was still in the first phase—asking people at dinner parties if they’d seen the Bliz-aard Ball Sale. I defended the dissertation, went further with the Hammons research, started talking to him, and then got the news about Basel. That was 2014. And life got crazy. I had to move houses, move to Basel, start devising my institutional program. I had so much going on, and I somehow missed one of our Tuesday calls. And that was it. He never picked up the phone again. Maybe he thought we had talked enough. And of course, there were so many more questions I wished I had asked, because I was always so nervous in those 29-minute windows. But by then I realized: between all the people I’d interviewed and the conversations I did have, I had to write from what I had. I finished the manuscript. Then I brought it to A.C. Hudgins, who was David’s dear friend, and an incredibly supportive source of my research, and he was my first reader and fact-checker for the book. I knew David wasn’t going to do that. Do you know A.C.?

EO

Yeah, of course. I met him—maybe in 2017. A friend of mine who was a curatorial fellow at MoMA introduced us. I went to his house and spent the afternoon with him one day. He showed me all the Hammons ephemera and work he’d collected over the years. It was wild to see it all in one place and learn the stories.

EF

Exactly. He was the one I trusted to read the manuscript first. I was also a bit afraid to send it directly to David because I worried he’d send it back with things crossed out—not because they were wrong necessarily, but because he didn’t want them revealed. But I wasn’t going to publish something the artist didn’t approve of, so I was in a bind. I wrote to David and told him I was done with the manuscript, and asked him to let me know if he wanted to see it. I put the ball in his court. If he wanted to read it, he’d have to say so.

Typically David, he never wrote back. He wasn’t going to tell me that he wanted to see it. So I fact-checked in other ways. Shortly before turning it in to the publisher, I was in New York with A.C., checking details, and I saw him get a call and step away. When he came back, he winked at me. The next thing I knew, David was at the door to pick me up in his burgundy Volvo that was literally falling apart. It broke down while we were driving, literally, and he pulled into a mechanic station and left it there.

While we were walking back toward the city, I asked him the last set of questions that I’d prepared. And he gave me this line that became the conclusion of the book: “I think we should keep talking. I think you should keep interviewing people. You don’t actually need to write the book. Don’t you realize that this is what the work is. Chasing the work is what the work is.”

I begged Afterall to increase the typical print run because there was nothing on David, and I didn’t want it to go out of print too quickly. I even explained that there was this rumor that David would buy up catalogs or books on him and destroy them—probably an urban legend. Nevertheless, they couldn’t print more than the usual print run and the book quite quickly went out of print. Afterall had to print again and now the second print run is also out of print.

When it was published, they sent me my author copies—plus all those that I needed to give one to everyone Alhena and I had interviewed, plus a set for David. One hundred copies in all. I had them shipped to New York so Alhena could help me share them with the interviewees. It was a hot August in 2017. There had been no rain in New York or Belgium where it was printed. But when the box arrived, it was soaked. Nearly every book was water damaged. I spent weeks on the phone with DHL trying to figure it out and get replacement copies sent while Alhena kindly agreed to put the ruined ones in her cellar until I could come see them myself.

EO

Stop—what? The whole shipment?

EF

Yes! A hundred copies, destroyed. In the meantime, I wrote to David explaining I couldn’t send his copies yet because the first set had this freaky mishap. I sent the new ones when they finally came. And then—nothing. No response, no critique, no acknowledgment at all. I was nervous, of course, to know what he thought. More than a full year later, I went to a Charles White opening in LA, and David was there. It had been so long since we’d seen each other. He proposed we walk and talk a bit. I was nervous to know what he thought of the book, but I knew I couldn’t ask directly.

Instead, I said, “Since you never asked to see the manuscript, I just want to make sure there was nothing factually incorrect, nothing I got wrong.” And he gave me a look I’ll never forget and then said, “Truth? Don’t you know there’s no such thing as truth in such a book?” My heart dropped for a moment. Then he added, “But I have to tell you, it’s the only thing written about me in which there is no lie.” I don’t think I’ve ever received a more meaningful compliment. That’s how I knew he was happy with it. I had heard through others that he liked it, but he was never going to tell me that directly. He wasn’t the type to give positive feedback.

EO

What happened next?

EF

On that same trip, over dinner he brought up the waterlogged books, which I hadn’t thought about in over a year. He slipped into conversation, “You know what happened to the books, don’t you? Melting snow. They got wet from melted snowballs.” I was shook. I hadn’t thought of the irony of his books being damaged by water of all things! He asked if he could have them, even though I explained that they were basically rotting in a basement. He still wanted them. I had the entire damaged box shipped to him, without at all knowing why or what plans he had. He's such a Sphinx. Much to my surprise, he froze them in one of those industrial popsicle freezers and included them in his Hauser & Wirth LA show in 2019—frozen, wet Bliz-aard Ball Sale books.

EO

This is an interesting formulation: this triangulation between Marcel, Felix, and David. How did that working trajectory—and your origin story, given where you come from—inform your approach to exhibition-making and curatorial subject matter?

EF

Art history is one thing, but curating is quite another and I am not someone who went through a curatorial training program or was taught what it is to be a curator in any institutionalized way. But I can say that it is the artists that I have worked most on, Marcel Duchamp, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Hammons, but also Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker—these were my teachers in the art of doing. I learned to be the curator I am in the act of working with these artists, or their ghosts and practices.

This meant questioning the very premise of what an exhibition could or should be. It meant refusing to take any institutional form as given. And it meant, too, even questioning how art history might be written and performed. This was what artists taught me. Absolutely. They formed me, and form me still today in my role as custodian of the oldest public art collection in the world.