Foto

Daniel Birnbaum: The Modern Director

Arterritory.com


26/10/2011

On the morning of October 6, the exhibit Turner, Monet, Twombly: Later Paintings was opened at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The exhibit provides an unprecedented opportunity to view world-class works by three leading artists of three different eras — who could be each other’s great-grandfathers — alongside one another. The exposition is open to visitors from October 8 through January 15, when the show will travel further to Stuttgart and then to Liverpool.


At the entrance to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Read more about the exhibit in subsequent materials on Arterritory.com

The exhibit was unveiled with an introductory speech by Moderna Museet Director Daniel Birnbaum (1963), a Swedish-born art critic and curator with a PhD in philosophy, who assumed his position last year. His projects have included the 50th Venice Biennale’s exhibit “International Art Exhibit” (2003) and the 53rd Venice Biennale’s exhibit “Making Worlds” (2009). He was co-curator of the first and second Moscow Contemporary Art Biennale (2005, 2007) and has worked on a string of other art projects, exhibits, and publications. Yet in addition to this list I’d like to add another description: Birnbaum is a positively crazy guy who loves art with a passion, and with a trustworthy artist at his side he is even ready to color the rivers of Stockholm green.

But is Birnbaum like this still, even after assuming the position of the museum’s director? decided to find out. Here is our interview with Daniel Birnbaum.

On November 1, one year will have passed since you became director of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet. Tell me, what plans have you accomplished, and what is there still left to do?

There will never be a lack of things to do. (Laughs.) But overall I was very lucky to take over the museum without an ironclad program, because I could implement changes right away. For example, I could include in the calendar of exhibits a solo show by the Berlin-based Swedish artist Klara Liden (1979), which is on view for a couple more days [through October 9] on the ground floor of the museum and which, together with curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist [often referred to in the press as a “super curator,” the most influential person in the art world], we had organized earlier, in the fall of 2010 for Obrist’s Serpentine Gallery in London. And now the exhibit is on display in Stockholm! I must admit that it was a bit like cheating—organizing a project that was already ready even before I started work as director… (Laughs.)

In terms of the big exhibit Turner, Monet, Twombly: Later Paintings—of course, I didn’t curate the show, and it’s not my predecessors exhibit [the previous director of the Moderna Museum was Lars Nittve]. This project is by Jeremy Lewison (Great Britain), a curator, Tate collection expert, and art historian. It’s a collaborative project between three institutions: the Tate Museum in Liverpool, the Staatsgallery in Stuttgart, and Stockholm’s Moderna Museet. Yet at the same time I am happy that we, Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, could produce the exhibit and are its first stopping point before the show travels to Germany and Great Britain. What is more, this has in a sense become my project, too, because even though the idea was developed before I got involved, I have physically devoted the last nine months to making the plans become an actual exhibition. 

Speaking about the future, there are several plans, but the most important thing is the notion that the museum can be figured out anew again and again; this must be done every season, because a museum shouldn’t get stuck in place. Right now we are actively working on the collection. In order to introduce it this fall as the home of modern art, we have posed the question: What really is modernity? The exhibit Turner, Monet, Twombly is perhaps one of the most ambitious ways to do this. Yet at the same time you cannot deny that, in a sense, the show is about the birth of modernity. Turner is often mentioned as the starting point of pure painting—the atmospheric as the source of the abstract. Claude Monet’s works, in turn, are about pure vision, perception; his paintings aren’t planned as abstract, yet something they look pretty abstract. They somehow foresee what will follow in art…

Step by step, we are also setting up a new exhibition, encompassing all the photographs in the museum’s collection. At the end of the fall—in November, December, and January—the museum will be split in two: a huge exhibit of paintings, and the history of photography. Sweden has never had such a wide-ranging photo exhibit with works of historical significance. Actually, I can’t even remember if I have ever seen an exhibit like this. Maybe in France, or in Germany, there has been something like this. Possibly.

In any event, Stockholm’s Moderna Museet has a very strong photography collection, with such renowned names as Man Ray, Diane Arbus, and others. Yes, people have been actively interested in photography for some time now, but nothing like this has ever been done so systematically before.

At the same time, we have a small exhibit by Marcel Duchamp at the Malmö branch of the Moderna Museet. So right now at the museum, touching on the question of modernity, we have exhibits of paintings, mechanical reproductions and their jostling with painting, and the origins of conceptual art in the form of Duchamp. In other words, now we are in a very lucky position, but even when it ends, we will continue with something new!

Speaking about the status of museums today, do you think that people are gradually losing faith in state museums as authorities in relations to what is good art and what is not so good art? 

I think that art criticism has lost its strength. It seems as if the critic as authority no longer exists. I, too, was once an art critic, and I still write, but more on the other front—art projects—therefore from a different point of view.

But I think that museums should strive to be this authority. Not in the old fashioned, insistent way with hierarchies; rather, they should discuss their own state and circumstances in a lively way, show their collection in a new, different way, etc. Which is what we do, for example, looking back at the twentieth century through the photography genre and not, as usual, only through painting. To write a different story, a different history.

Yet I’d like to ask you a question in return: What, to your mind, is beginning to replace the museum as an authority?

More and more often in Europe you hear doubts that, as state financing decreases, museums are searching for sponsors. And it so happens that sponsors impose their own rules and show just specific private collections, which makes visitors doubtful about the museum’s ability to preserve an independent position. I ask this because maybe that’s not the case at all, and these doubts have no basis.

I understand what you are thinking, and I even agree to the outline of the situation. But I must add that in the entire Western world we are seeing how the power of financial and commercial interests is growing. More and more private investors are also appearing, for instance, in Berlin and Stockholm there is a whole string of private art spaces and museums. That’s why, returning to Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, I can say that we are in a rather privileged status, because such a small country has an art collection of this scale.

What is more, no private institution could ever organize an exhibit like Turner, Monet, Twombly. And we shouldn’t forget that the reason why this exhibit was possible in the first place was that the Moderna Museet is a state institution. We don’t have to pay insurance. Just imagine how much this exhibit would cost if we did… I don’t even want to think about it! I must also say that up until now I’ve worked mostly as an instructor, as a curator for biennales and for various experimental projects. The world of collections is more or less a new field for me. And you can always complain about the bureaucracy in state institutions, but if you look at if from the positive side, what is inherent to a state institution—look, the exhibit [Turner, Monet, Twombly] has works from the Pompidou Center! And I can tell all the private institutions: Good luck!!! (Laughs.)

Are you up to date on Baltic art?

Not really.

Where, to your mind, is the problem? The Baltics have a whole string of wonderful artists, but why aren’t they world famous? What is more, Stockholm is so close, but even you don’t know almost anything about them.

I must say that at one time Scandinavian art used to be very local, too, and it had very little communication with the outside world. That is changing and has already changed. If you look back at the period 20-30 years ago, when I began to get interested in art and began to write a little about it, all everyone talked about was Cologne and New York. If you didn’t make it THERE, you didn’t have the slightest chance of being noticed. The situation has completely changed. For example, the Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila (1959), who has had exhibits at the Tate Modern, the Venice Biennale, and documenta, but has never moved away from her homeland. She continues to live and work in Helsinki, because the situation has changed; the world now is multi-centric. This wouldn’t have been possible fifty years ago, at last hypothetically. That’s why I don’t see any obstacles to why someone from Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania couldn’t conquer the world.

What is your motto as a curator? In other words, how near or far can a curator be at the moment when an artist creates?

I must say right away that over the course of almost a year I have changed my approach to work, because for the first time in my life I am responsible for an institution with an incredibly strong collection and a large number of employees. Before that, I was sort of an artists’ producer with a great passion to be alongside them. I covered the Brandenburg Gates in Berlin with two gigantic works by artists Thomas Bayrle (Germany, 1937) and Michel Majerus (Luxembourg, 1967–2002) (2002). Together with Olafur Eliasson (Denmark/Iceland, 1967) we colored a river green in Stockholm (2000). I had a small art space that Eliasson and I constantly changed. I have worked on biennales, which is producing and experimentation. But that was a completely different approach, I would even say that I was rather the person who complicated things instead of easing them, who stood behind the artist’s back and constantly spurred them on. Here I couldn’t do something like that; here it is all about programming the museum, which, furthermore, is in two cities.

But I’ve always wanted to be near artists. Yet the most important thing for a curator is to know how to become invisible at just the right moment. His task is to let art be good, to let it shine. At the moment when nobody else notices him, he will be the very best curator.

www.modernamuseet.se