SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'm Alehandra Rusi, and this is the Rusi Hive. Conversations with people who treat their work and life as a creative practice. Today, I sit down with Shochakat Kazarian to talk Curating as Medium, where instinct meets scholarship, language frames without caging, and exhibitions keep ripening after they close. From Henry Darger's Secret Intensity to Chloe, presented on Hangers, we look at how a curator handles biography without spectacle, fashion with restraint, and research that lets the work lead. This podcast is presented by Rico Moresca. Thank you for joining me, Shahakat Kazaran, and welcome to the Rusi Hive podcast. It's the third to last day of 2025, and you are here in my little pop-up uh studio in the gallery, and I think that's amazing. So things are really slowing down in the last few days of the year, and I think it's kind of the perfect atmosphere to have the conversation that we are about to have. So before we do that, here is your hive card. So for you, it took the shape of a field guide, and it has a side A and a side B. The beginning. Communicate with several languages and one ear for subtext. Start with a feeling, earn it with research. Don't categorize things. They will tell you what they are. Let the physical experience carry part of the story. Let words make the frame not a cage. Let biography add gravity, not glare. Give the exhibition an afterlife while the lights are still on. Time will do some of the work. The end is a decision, not a fact.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

There it is. That's quite exciting. I think it kind of conveys the way I create exhibitions or write something. I know a lot of, especially this color-late research exhibitions, sometimes they may appear as a book. And I'm not always keen on that. I like to use words and curating differently from it in a different media. So they need to convey different things. And as you said, sometimes words can be limiting, and they always only show one side of the work. The work has so many different meanings and views and potential um feelings to convey, while words are much more limited, I feel, although they can tell other things as well.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:41

So and so is language. I mean, usually if I can, I write or speak in a given language rather than having my writings translated. So we feel like not only it's not even with the best translation, you lose something, but also I feel like I think differently. It's just a different way of seeing the world.

SPEAKER_00 3:09

Absolutely. Today I want to talk about curating as your creative medium and how you make meaning through uh what you choose, how you place it, the sequence, the tone, and I want to connect that to your work as an art historian as well. How you take research, images, um, and fragments of evidence to build a narrative. So on the page in a room or both, really, it's like two versions of the same creative impulse. But before I get into the mechanics of all of that, I want to rewind for a second and go back to how your eye and your taste started to take shape in the first place. If I time traveled back to you at age 16 or 17 and asked what you were obsessed with at the time, whether it were books, images, objects, um, what would you have said?

SPEAKER_01 4:07

Well, at that time I already knew exactly that what I wanted to do. I already knew I wanted to study art history. Um, I decided that at the age of 13.

SPEAKER_00 4:16

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

So it was quite early on, and I fell in love with Paolo Uccello's uh Battaglia di San Romano, one of the three panels was at the Louvre, and I would go there and see it all the time. And I think, in a sense, it really shaped my taste, and I think Paolo Uccello is definitely the Renaissance artist that really attracts a modernist crowd. There's something so odd about that representation, his obsessive nature. I think so deeply it shaped my taste. And after that, I would say my biggest love when I was a teenager at the age of 16 or 17, it was Marcel Duchamp and the Dada movement. I just loved that. I loved it for many years. But then Marcel Duchamp and I kind of divorced and I took a different path, but although not quite entirely, and we'll discuss that later. But so I think they were my heroes. And that kind of disruptive movement really appealed to me, and just willing to create this sort of tabula rasa was something I was really attracted to, and in general, it really shaped kind of my taste later as first infused with the avant-garde.

SPEAKER_00 5:36

Do you come from an art family at all?

SPEAKER_01 5:39

So for me, it was maybe a more obvious choice than for others because my father is an artist, so I kind of grew into that. So for me, it just a normal path. And it was funny because the other day I was just reorganizing a little bit of family archive, and I stumbled on this VHS cassette of a seminar of performances my father did in a village in Armenia in 1990. And and we were there with my mother, my little brother, and we were just little kids. And I always remember that this few days as more a holiday. It was just our home movie. But now I'm looking at this as a more piece of history as the history of performance. So for me, yes, that was in art, but I wasn't necessarily realizing that because it was just part of life.

SPEAKER_00 6:32

Understood. So you were born in Armenia and you moved to France at the age of eight? Yes, that's and then you grew up in Paris. If Armenianness and Frenchness are two radio stations, do you mostly switch channels or have you become like a remix?

SPEAKER_01 6:53

Well, my view on the question has changed over time. So I think my first vision was like, okay, until the age of eight, I was Armenian then when we moved to France, now I'm French. My past is Armenian, my present is French. But over time I just realized, especially in the last few years, that that's not how it works. Just I am definitely a mix of that. And just now living in in New York also has changed me a lot without me noticing it. And I've also spent a lot of time in Italy working on Italian art, which is also transformed in that way. So I think I'm just part of that mix. I kind of, yes, I switch channels every time I'm speaking a different language. It's a different world, different culture. So I see things differently. And and and within a day, I speak at least three different languages. So I think differently throughout the day.

SPEAKER_00 7:48

That must be crazy. I didn't speak two languages, but for me it's more like I switch really quickly.

SPEAKER_01 7:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

I don't I'm not a remix, I just am a very quick switcher between the two.

SPEAKER_01 7:59

Yes, you know, and and and you think in the language. I don't translate, I just think in that language. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 8:06

If I'm in this in a setting, in a country, I you think in the language that's most appropriate for the moment, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 8:12

Yes, and like each language has a certain perfume to it. And you just capture culture so deeply. I know today there's so much emphasis on race, ethnicity, and other more visible markers of identity, but for me, language is the most important. Yeah. And I'm Armenian also mostly through that. I think my ethnicity as an Armenian doesn't matter to me as much as the fact that I speak that language, which is the best carrier of culture and feelings. Yes. Just there are certain things I cannot translate in another language.

SPEAKER_00 8:48

True.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

Yeah, language for me is the most one of the most important things.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

So you've mentioned that you're interested in how biography and process intertwine. So what is the version of that in your own work? What in your life shapes your curatorial instincts the m the most?

SPEAKER_01 9:08

Well, clearly, I think just growing up in an artistic family really kind of gives you a different vision of life, more romantic, and also because I think from my thought, if things were intermixed. Art is not just a separate practice, it's just part of your life commitment. So I think in a certain sense, it gave me something. I would say I'm a romantic, and in that sense, I have always had that romantic approach to art, even though it doesn't show in methodology, but my motivation is, and in a sense, that's why I like that interaction with work and biography, because we all shape bio experiences, and and it's always something very deep. And I always say, I know some people ask me to write something, and I would say, you know, I don't have time for that. Because I try to limit my writing, it's not just about the writing process, because when I write something, it's the result of an experience. I need to have that connection with the artist. Even though most of the time I just write about that artist, but I still have a connection with them at this point.

SPEAKER_00 10:10

You spend so much time when they're live.

SPEAKER_01 10:12

I have a very deep connection to every artist I write about. So I need that time to connect at one level or the other to have that experience. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 10:23

I wonder what a romantic methodology would look like. That was that was an interesting concept.

SPEAKER_01 10:29

I know there's this thing that has been going on in academia, like there's no place for your own personal taste or liking anything, and just not saying the word I like it, or it's it's beautiful. It's something that is considered for Philistines. It's just for the amateur, the collector at best, but not for serious art historian. I'm not a collector. Um don't consider myself as an art critic. I'm an art historian, but I think that kind of thing matters a lot. And I think a lot of my curatorial choices have been guided by this first instinct. It's always this kind of going back and forth between something intuitive, very visual, and the historical background of the object.

SPEAKER_00 11:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:16

And I think that's quite important because that's how we convey things.

SPEAKER_00 11:19

And so connected to that, now I want to pause on what curating actually is. Because for a lot of people who are not in the art world, I think it seems like exhibitions just kind of materialize. They just appear. They just appear, you know, something happens and they are there. So I would love to lift the veil a little bit on that and talk about what really goes into mounting a show. What is the first spark of an exhibition for you? And what do you have to work with early on before it becomes uh like a full-fledged concept?

SPEAKER_01 11:54

Should it a lot of people imagine exhibition making as just the installation part, which can happen. I mean, traditionally it has been. It still happens for certain small-scale, more contemporary exhibitions. But if you're creating historical exhibitions as I do for museums, retrospectives, or historical overviews, it usually takes two to three years. So it's a very long process. Usually the first sparkle can come from different um directions. Usually it can be just a director who wants to work on a project and one of the curators is interested. This is what happened at the Musee d'Armode, for instance, with the Lucio Fontana retrospective that I created in 2014. The director was interested in that, and Fontana was among my gods. So really, there was a big sparkle. I was interested in taking on that project. Sometimes it can be an idea matured by curators as the exhibition immersion I created two years ago in Lausanne, the Fine Arts Museum. It was a conversation I had with the curator there. We were just having that discussion during COVID about how everything has become virtual, and we wanted to have a more in-person experiences that are very three-dimensional. And so that's how this idea of an immersive exhibition came out, doing this, exploring the historical pioneers of immersive installation. So it can be really different. And in terms of process, so it starts with something very romantic, just an interest. And there's often always something also, you need to clarify something. There's always a misunderstanding at the beginning of an exhibition. For instance, for the Lucho Fontana retrospective, the first misunderstanding was that he was always associated with the monochrome practice of the 1960s, something very pure and clean because of his slashed canvases. But when you look closer, and that's why I love catalog resonates, because you can have a real overview and not just a parcel, is I realized, but he's not the same generation as all these other 60s artists. He was an old man at that time. So it's a very different perspective. He was almost 60 when he started the slashed canvases. Although he exhibited with Manzoni, the Zero Group, he's not from the same generation. So I looked at his career and just discovered he's he's a sculptor. He loves ceramics. I had to go against that vision of purity and minimal art that he was associated with. And I know at that time a lot of people told me, Oh, are you going to show those kitschy ceramics with glazies and glitters? This is super kitsch and bad taste. This is more commercial work or whatever. But once I opened the exhibition, it entirely changed the game for the artist. Everybody was crazy about ceramics. And so a decade has passed and so much attention has been given to that. So I think there's that misunderstanding has been clarified. And it was the same with the exhibition about immersive installations in Lausanne. It's just about, well, you know, what we see as immersive is not just virtual reality or those kitschy exhibitions like immersive Van Gogh, but many artists in the 60s made actually immersive works.

SPEAKER_00 15:33

So where do you feel your authorship most as a curator? In the selection, in staging the viewer's experience, in the literature, or somewhere else entirely?

SPEAKER_01 15:47

Well, there's a lot of research done, I would say, the first year of exhibition making. It's mostly about research. And the result of that research is the checklist. And this is like the key of an exhibition, of course. The works you choose and how they articulate with each other. And you know, sometimes I know some curators work with an ideal checklist and then eliminate what's not possible to get for budget or loans that are refused. But for me, if I don't get a work, I might even change the entire room because the balance is not the same.

SPEAKER_00 16:27

Yes, changes everything. Yeah. Curating also means negotiating with reality. Budgets, loans, deadlines, institutional politics. So when constraints enter, they reshape the core idea, right?

SPEAKER_01 16:42

I would say institutional politics usually they come early on with programming. So once the exhibition is just approved, you're good. I've I don't remember seeing so much interference throughout the exhibition making. Then obviously there's financial reality. Uh, there's also what loans you can get, also works you can locate. And for the Fontana exhibition, it was very hard because most of the works were in private Italian collections, and Italian collectors are extremely private. So it's very, I mean, the first difficulty was just to know where the works were.

SPEAKER_00 17:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:21

And find them, convince lenders. The other thing is the other reality, I would say, and and it yes, it's having the space to show them properly for me, it's very important. And I know, and in some cases, when the lenders have put so many conditions in the way the work can be displayed, I prefer to renounce to the loan because I knew the work wouldn't be displayed properly, so it's better not to show. Going back to the idea of authorship, I know over the last, I mean, since probably Harold Zeman, there's this idea of create as author. Yes, I feel that thing. It's like my baby, but I think for me an exhibition is well done if the creator disappears. For me, it's very important. Although I think my presence is shown when the when the visitors can see the artist the way I see them. But I need the creator to disappear. I think if you're going through an exhibition, thinking about the curatorial concept, it's a failure. Yes. You're not supposed to see it.

SPEAKER_00 18:26

I agree. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:28

It's like a good exhibition design. If you're looking too much at exhibition design, it's not good.

SPEAKER_00 18:33

Well, I suppose that's why people feel like exhibitions materialize because they feel so natural, right? Like they're just there, of course.

SPEAKER_01 18:40

Yeah, I want that feeling. This is exactly how fun. I want that it kind of direct connection with the works. And it's the same with wall text. If there's too much and if you need to read all that to just enjoy the exhibition, then if I'm a failure if you need to read like the size of a book to go through the exhibition. So try to keep that really to the minimum.

SPEAKER_00 19:02

The right length for sure. So exhibitions are temporary by nature, um, but their ideas can last. When you're building a show, how do you think about its art afterlife?

SPEAKER_01 19:14

Well, I've been thinking about this recently. I was invited in Venice for a big symposium about Fontana, and they asked me to speak about the exhibition I created 10 years before. So, and I kind of was able to see the result of that exhibition because during that symposium, so many new researches have emerged. And I remember when I started that researching the exhibition, almost no new research had been done on the artist. And after that, it was a huge avenue that opened up. So I can see that, but I wasn't seeing it and feeling it at the moment at all. It was more very intuitive in a rush, and you feel more, we're trying already quite hard to be timely and just be sure that it makes sense today, and it's hard to project uh the consequences. I would say the most immediate consequence of an exhibition is the art market. And I've noticed that because you know, Fontana was known for slashed canvases. You would find them in all big auction, like at Sotobi's or Christie's. You would rarely find ceramics. And so the Fontana show had opened in April and at Art Puzzle in June, so many galleries had ceramics with Fontana. I think that was the most immediate reaction. But then I think more academic research comes later. Yes. And you see that over the years, but you can't plan that. But you just, I mean, with every exhibition I know, you just wanted it to think, okay, this is it, this is the definitive answer or the definitive exhibition. But I see it more as a beginning. Okay, this is just the opening. I hope more people will come and look at that in different ways.

SPEAKER_00 21:03

So I would love to talk about your poll toward artists and histories that don't fit neatly into categories. And with that in mind, let's go to the 2015, wow, that was 10 years ago, Henry Darger show that you curated at the Modern Art Museum in Paris. I'm not even going to attempt to say it in French, but you can. With Darger, the life and the work are so incredibly intertwined. You know, an artist who, on the surface, had an ordinary life in Chicago, you know, working as a janitor, and then this vast secret universe that he built in private, both in images and writing. As a curator, how do you tell that story without turning his life into a kind of spectacle or into gossip?

SPEAKER_01 21:50

For me, the discovery of Henry Darger was a huge thing. It was a there was a before and after. I would say he was one of my major. Loves, still he is. The first time I saw his works was in 2011. I was in New York. I went to the American Folk Art Museum. It was next to the MoMA. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have gone. It was just next to MoMA. So I went there. I had no interest in folk art or outside art. I hardly knew what that was because I had a very traditional background in art history, very modernist. And so my heroes were Marcel Duchamp, Malevich, Yves Klein, Fontana, Manzoni. So had really nothing to do with that world. I went there and I chanced and I saw these works. I had no idea who he was. I couldn't even remember the iconography. I know a lot of people are shocked, but I wasn't. I just remembered the odd format, this horizontal drawings, and there was this feeling of fear and sublime at the same time. And it it it left some very odd feeling as if the works were not from this world. And then I just forgot about it. And I started working at the Musée d'Armoderne, and entirely by chance, we received an amazing gift from the artist estate of 45 works. And I got the chance to study them, to select them, and do a very deep research on them, and which added with the exhibition and the book. So it was a huge commitment on my side. And I was just fascinated by both the work and the artist. Because sometimes I know in outside arts you can have a fascinating life story, but the work is not that great. In his case, both were amazing and out of the ordinary. And I don't want to use the word purity because it's fraught with so many things, but yes, it's the sort of ultimate outsider because it was discovered after his death. There's nobody to interfere directly. And, you know, there was this big question in his life about how come if God exists, there's evil in the world. You know, everybody asked that question at some point in our lives. But then people just move on. He didn't. He just continued asking that same question over and over again. And there was this visual intensity in his work. It's not, it's not seductive, it's not compromised in any way. It's just so strong and very intense, like tornadoes and extreme violence, extreme beauty. And I love that intensity in his work. And to be honest, but it was hard for me because after the 2015 exhibition, I was like, I had an almost intellectual depression after that because every artist seemed so corrupted or lukewarm next to him. So it took me a long, long time to just recover from that.

SPEAKER_00 24:52

It was so intense. Yeah. What do you think is the purpose of labels like Art Brute and Outsider Art?

SPEAKER_01 24:59

I know there've been a lot of questioning about the labels, whether Arbruot, outsider art, outliers, etc. I know a lot of scholars nowadays are very reluctant to use them. I understand why. However, I think we need words at some point. So I around I was in this symposium about Arbrut, and I know some scholars refuse to use that word. So it you would go through just complicated sentences to qualify something when it's so easy. Yes. Of course, by definition, it's a definition, it's kind of outside definition, so it's huge, but there's a history to that, and in a sense, it's an easy term to use among people. I personally prefer the word outside the art to Arbruit. Yes. Um, because I think Arbruit is a little bit too connected to Dubuffet and a bit too strict as a definition, which is fine for that, but my interest lies outside of his definition of Arbruit. I mean, the artists I'm interested in, like Henry Darger, probably are more aligned with, I don't know, Sunday painters or amateurist practice or who we or just we find ourselves using uh self-taught more and more in the gallery context.

SPEAKER_00 26:15

Self-taught can also make sense.

SPEAKER_01 26:17

I'm not using it that much because a lot of mainstream artists are also self-taught. It's more flexible than du buffet's arbreut. But I'm I'm not against I know there've been also this discussion about the outsider art fair. I think it's used this is a good example why those words are still useful to qualify something and just to be able to communicate.

SPEAKER_00 26:40

So I also want to talk about Louise Michel Alchemius because you have written about him and he is such an interesting in-between figure, academically trained, but treated like an outsider, and then validated by Duchamp. What first drew you to him?

SPEAKER_01 26:58

So it's actually Duchamp, and that's what I was saying. Like I divorced with Duchamp, but somehow keep on going back at him through Alchemis. So I wrote my master thesis on a work by Marcel Duchamp called Paris Air. And yeah, I like radical works. And when studying Duchamp, I just read by chance that he discovered that artist named Alchemis. I just somehow remember that because the name is so odd. That was it. And then when I came to the United States uh for the first time, I just saw some of his works and I got just intrigued a lot, and that's how I started studying his work. And I also like the idea that even among outsiders, he's an outsider because he doesn't fit that category. I mean, he's not a mainstream artist, but he's not an outsider art either because he's highly trained, like has a very uh high-end education. But and also the idea that we always see outsiders of this kind of um artist who's not interested in fame or anything, who's just painting for the sake of it. The fact that he he searched for fame and just wanted it and had that kind of megalomaniac dream of being a great artist, it may appear as something shameful, and a lot of people saw him like that. But doesn't mean anything. So we have to be very careful about labels and and and just because an artist says such things like I'm a great artist, that he's not.

SPEAKER_00 28:31

So I think Which is actually quite common. I mean, I know he's he is academically trained, but like saying I'm such a great artist, I want to be famous is a very common thing with self-taught outsider artists, you know.

SPEAKER_01 28:43

Which is odd also for someone who who is so well trained. But I think, yes, I like that not only, well, first I was first attracted to his work, I like the late El Shimis, the ones that the very sketchy paintings, but also as a phenomenon and the way he just thought of creativity in general.

SPEAKER_00 29:00

So now I want to make a sharp left turn. Um, because you also guest curated the Chloe fashion exhibition at the Jewish Museum a couple years ago. And that I think was basically like a whole new playbook. I am really curious how that came about. How did Chloe come into your life and what did they ask you to do?

SPEAKER_01 29:24

Obviously, fashion is an entirely foreign world to me. It's I'm a visual person, so I look at things. And I grew up in Paris, so it was all around me, but I've never had any personal or professional interest in that field. How it came was that um I was in touch with the museum's director, Claudia Gould, who left after the exhibition. And uh well, she likes art, she likes fashion and design, and the she had discovered that the founder of the Fashion House, Chloe, was Gabby Allion, was this Egyptian Jew who moved to Paris after the war and founded Chloe. And she had sort of started a cycle of exhibitions about um Jewish women entrepreneurs like Elena Rubinstein or the gallerist Edith Halbert. And so she thought that will be a great idea to dedicate a show to another great woman who was an entrepreneur. The thing is, nobody really knew what was the story, the full picture, because Chloe was a little bit outside the scope of fashion history because it's not couture, but it's high-end ready to wear. And it also doesn't bear the name of the founder or the designer. So it's a very blurry image and quite a new archive, actually. So they needed to go to Paris to visit uh the archive. And so first she asked me if I would be able to just do a little project just to go to Paris, spend a week in the archive, look at what's out there, process it, and make a proposal if there's a possibility for an exhibition and how it will be interested. But that's it. I wasn't supposed to create the show first. I did the job, everybody loved the project, so they invited me to be the guest creator of the show. Uh it was quite a new venture, uh, although I would say I kind of approached it as I would with any other exhibition, just researching every designer, researching the founder, more doing that work and just selecting the best and most meaningful pieces, obviously, depending on availability, because some pieces just couldn't be located, and just thinking how I want to show clothes. It's very different from painting and sculpture. They're not meant to be there. So, and I've kind of not usually hated most fashion exhibitions, how much they just became a spectacle of mark and marketing projects. I was lucky enough because the museum director, Chloe's CEO, they were both interested in a more independent historical research rather than turning this into a marketing project. So it was really a unique experience of doing this exhibition with a design that will be much more low-key and more focused on the dresses, contrary to all those exhibitions we see like Christian Dior, where you hardly see the dresses. You just see this spectacle.

SPEAKER_00 32:23

Yeah, it's all about the blockbuster energy and the atmosphere.

SPEAKER_01 32:27

And for me, it wasn't, and it wasn't possible for Chloe. It might work for certain designers, but not Chloe, which was all about low-key fashion, all about details and flimsy fabrics. And I was also against the idea of trying to recreate the body within the museum, which will necessarily be false and not authentic. So that's why I wanted to display the clothes as in their storage state, which means on hangers, which is much more complicated than itself for conservation reasons and display reasons, but I wanted this to be more honest and just look at those garments in that condition as archival garments and not recreate this false body.

SPEAKER_00 33:10

So when you're showing garments, how do you strike the balance between kind of museum history and fashion fantasy, like between something looking almost like a diorama or like a showroom? That that seems like a tough thing to do.

SPEAKER_01 33:25

For me, it's really about the focus, it's really about first the garments, just physically be able to see them and and give them that attention, and also chronology, which is very important for me, that kind of gives you that historical understanding and the gravitas of a museum show. And it was really about also how through I mean, I covered 70 years of history and you see changes in time, and there's nothing better than fashion to show that change over time. Yes. How each decade captured a different spirit. I mean, um, the turn of the millennium that and it was Stella McCartney who was the creative director. I mean, you can see definitely that kind of energy and this late 90s energy.

SPEAKER_00 34:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:10

It's so different from before.

SPEAKER_00 34:12

And so relatable for people going to an exhibition to see it through fashion, I think.

SPEAKER_01 34:17

It's it's it's very relatable. Even for me, it was very odd because although I'm not a fashion historian, there were so many things I already knew just simply because I grew up with that.

SPEAKER_00 34:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:28

I mean, I wasn't able to afford that, but I would see this in magazines and just posters, and so it was all part of my own visual culture of late 90s, early 2000.

SPEAKER_00 34:39

Yeah. Fashion is, you know, wearable, people have a relationship to it. We're all aware, I think, of how clothing um changes the way people see us and the way we see ourselves. And the audience walks in, I think, already carrying a story of what Chloe is. As a curator, do you meet that story? Do you subvert it? Do you rewrite it?

SPEAKER_01 35:04

I try to avoid certain cliches. I know, for instance, a lot of people knew Chloe through the perfume. Yeah. This was like a huge marketing thing. Uh I didn't display that. I tried to avoid, I mean, also because of lack of space, all the images around that, celebrities and all that, to focus really on the clothes themselves. Some sketches to show the creative process, but it was more about the clothes than just going around that star-studied system of fashion, which is interesting on its own. But I feel like in a museum, it's really a place to see physical objects. That, and this was really my focus because you can find a lot of images, all those amazing advertisement campaigns online, but it's very hard to see these archival garments in person. So I think that's what museums are for. And this this was an amazing opportunity to see that.

SPEAKER_00 36:02

Exactly. You're not reiterating what people know, you are showing them a different side. Yeah. Yes. From curating with fashion to curating with sentences, another place where we find your brain at work is the Brooklyn Rail in your writing, editing, and conversations that you build there. Does interviewing feel like a natural extension of your art history and curatorial practice? Or is it where you get to drop the footnotes and like uh follow curiosity in real time?

SPEAKER_01 36:36

As I said before, I don't consider myself as an art critic and I've I've rarely read art criticism or that kind of things. I usually write for exhibition catalogs and very rarely for um such media. But so I think most of my writing for the Brooklyn Rail is somehow connected to my practice as an art historian. And although it frequently opened up to new territories and artists with whom I've never worked before. For instance, I did an extensive interview with Melvin Edwards, which was quite a very intensive moment and such an exciting work to do. And regarding interviewing, uh for me it's uh I like doing deep interviews whenever that's possible, more oral history style, because this is something I also do a lot as an art historian. For instance, when I work, I recently worked a lot on Armenian art of the 80s, and there's so little written about it, so little physical archive, so we rely a lot on oral interviews. So that's something also as a historical tool, but it can also sometimes be just a more conversational. I also like to ask personal questions to artists.

SPEAKER_00 37:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:53

Not always the ones that are most polite ones, but yes.

SPEAKER_00 37:57

Right. Yeah, it's it's really an art. When you're interviewing someone, uh, what are you listening for beyond information? Like what tells you the conversation just clicked?

SPEAKER_01 38:05

To prepare for an interview is hard, and depending on what artist you're interviewing. For instance, when I did this big interview with Melvin Edwards for the Brooklyn Rail, it's very difficult because he's an artist who has been researched well already. There have been tons of very long and well-done interviews done with him. So it was very hard for me to kind of find a place where I can make him say new things he hasn't said before. But somehow it happened. I think, first of all, because as an Armenian, he started because he he asked me where are you from? I said, I was born in Armenia, so he started speaking about Arshil Gorky. And so it just opened up a new thing.

SPEAKER_00 38:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:49

I would say that.

SPEAKER_00 38:50

You have to find the thread and then jump off of that, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 38:53

I think, yes, I would say it's it's kind of well when you get some new materials because a lot of artists and just people in general, they have a discourse already prepared. Of course, when they cannot give different answers to the same question. But I think when just you're opening up new avenues, it's very different. And sometimes, yeah, it could come from a personal question. I like to ask artists how they think about death, which is not something people do, but you you get interesting.

SPEAKER_00 39:22

Always, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:23

Yes. Yeah. They all have different perspectives on that.

SPEAKER_00 39:27

Finally, you wrote your PhD dissertation on the American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder. And the title alone, Unquicken the Pace, feels like a manifesto for the present moment. Unquicken is such a specific word. And it almost sounds like reversing a spell to me. Why that word? What does it not capture that like slow down?

SPEAKER_01 39:54

So for me, um, I came to Ryder actually through Alchemis. Because when researching Alchemis, I discovered that Al Shemiaus had visited the studio of Ryder to ask him uh to know about his secrets. And so he asked Ryder, how long does it take to make a painting? And Ryder said, At least 10 years. And Al Shimus said, counted, watch 10 years, I can do the same trick in two hours. So he got back home and kind of try to recreate a writer painting in it in a couple of hours. It can be like an amusing anecdote, but for me it's very deeper and it does make sense. And for me, it has speed in creation has always been something I've been interested in for a long time. And it started when I was working on postwar art like Fontana, Carl Apple, and Jackson Pollock. You know, there's been this emphasis on speed in postwar art. You know, there have been even videos like the Hans Namut video of Pollock painting. And you it feels like the painting appears immediately, something very spontaneous and highly made, with no labor or concealed labor. And so I was very interested in that topic. No art historian had to research that as really. I mean, there's a lot of writings about time, but not the time of making, actually. But this is a topic that you hear about in artist studios or just artist talks in general. But a lot of people consider that as a just sort of mundane discussion. But for me, it was very important, especially for an artist like a writer who would spend 10 to 20 years on the same painting. It's such an extreme case that I thought it's worth looking at because it's so there's no technical logic to that, although, of course, my research has proven that there is something, but it's also counterproductive, especially in American society that is obsessed with productivity. I mean, it's insane. And I remember when we first moved to this country, we thought, oh my God, it's amazing how American people speak about productivity on a daily basis. For instance, when an American person has had a good day, they say, I had a productive day, which is something you never hear like in France, in Europe, anywhere else. Or I remember I kind of found it so interesting that Americans sometimes would say something like, Oh, I had a productive weekend. We thought, why do we need to be productive on a weekend?

SPEAKER_00 42:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:21

And this obsession with productivity and writer was the exact opposite. He was not productive. He was slow. I mean, his production is 150 works in total for someone who died at the age of 70. It's not much. So I thought that kind of his slowness was something as a form of resistance to time, to money, to productivity, to American culture in general. And of course, I had an admiration for all those figures and biographies of resistance and just alternative lifestyles in general. I mean, my attraction to Henry Darger, for instance, and in general, counterculture. And so for me, it's a sort of form of resistance to dominant society.

SPEAKER_00 43:06

I think we need to redeem incubation or the concept of incubation, like the offstage part of making in a culture that like prices constant production. How do you think we should understand that empty time?

SPEAKER_01 43:21

It's something that has been studied a lot in theories of creativity. That's the way to just take that distance from your subject in order to kind of see it different from under a different light. That's the thing. But also I feel like you just accumulate it's some credit that you can use later. Because if you're just constantly producing something, you just empty yourself and you need to recharge. But that being said, I think I like, you know, we spoke about my work for the Brooklyn Rail and just doing interviews and talks. I like to work at different pace because I think your brain functions differently. I like to do like this kind of deep research on several. Years and also do at the same time something more spontaneous as writing an article for the press or doing a talk because you just function differently and both can be creative and stimulating in different ways.

SPEAKER_00 44:15

Yeah. So one of the wildest writer facts is that he kept working on paintings even after they were exhibited or even sold, which I feel is kind of heroic. In your view, is endless revision a pathology or wisdom?

SPEAKER_01 44:33

So a lot has been said about that. And because writer is a sort of real-life embodiment of Balzac's unknown masterpiece. I don't know if there's so much of the pathology. There's something, you know, I think over time he just got attached to his works and didn't want to let go. They just became part of him in a sense. And revising also meant they couldn't be taken away because most of those works were commissioned and paid in advance. So if he finished, it means that he had to deliver. You know, it's like uh Penelope's story in Greek mythology. She had she undid the work she did during the day, you know, the shroud she was making in order to just postpone getting a remarried.

SPEAKER_00 45:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:23

So I think that's kind of what Ryder was trying to do. By saying, Oh, I have still some work to do, also meant that he can keep the work with him for a long time. But also I think he just saw it evolving and every time it was a new adventure.

SPEAKER_00 45:38

And it becomes a new work. I mean, literally, right?

SPEAKER_01 45:41

You revise it so much, it's not the same work. It's it's both a new work, but also a kind of the same one that gets that just ripens, really. It's all about ripening. And uh I feel like it's also it's a practice that's actually common, although not as extreme among many artists when some works are left in the studio, they just rework them. It happens quite frequently.

SPEAKER_00 46:05

Yeah, that is common.

SPEAKER_01 46:06

Ryder is just more extreme because it lasted longer, and he did that with works that were sold or exhibited.

SPEAKER_00 46:13

So writer makes the idea of finish feel provisional. In your world, what does it mean to end something, a show, an argument, a podcast episode without pretending it's truly complete?

SPEAKER_01 46:28

Well, that's always the difficulty for me. Um, you know, especially when working on an exhibition catalog, you know, the last stages are the worst for me because the proofreading is a painful process, but it's also a period of mourning for me to let go. This is the time when I say, okay, now I have to stop. I can't go further. So for me, it's always a very painful moment. And I feel like if we didn't have uh deadlines, we would never finish anything. That being said, it's not never uh entirely finished because we can just go back to the same subject. It's happened to me, just to be asked to write again about an artist years later. But also, I think a research can be neuro can nourish another one. And just like as I said, you know, I discovered Ryder at the beginning through Duchamp because knowing Duchamp opened the door to Alchemis, and Alchemis opened the door to Ryder, that who was in turn nourished by my passion for Henry Darger and that kind of romantic artist, and just the whole subject was nourished also by my interest in post-war art and the insistence on speed. So it's it's more problematic and complex, and no, it's it's I don't think it's finished. Yeah, although you can not go back to that. Yeah, it's more like closure rather than yes, I would say it's closure is the word.

SPEAKER_00 47:57

All right, so we are done, and this is side B of your hive card. You can flip it. Oh, it's the end. What does it say under the end? Refer to side A. Oh. And then we're back at the beginning. Oh. If this conversation resonated with you, follow the show wherever you listen and find me on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack at RusiHive. If someone came to mind for the hive, send guest suggestions to guests at rusihive.com. And if you just want to say hi, it's hello at ruseyhive.com. Original music and sonic identity for the Rusi Hive by Ant Food. Until next time, let your life be a creative act.