Episode 029: Pavel Pyś
Show Notes
This week, we visit with Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center. Much like The Walker itself, Pavel's curatorial practice is incredibly interdisciplinary. Although he certainly doesn’t label himself a curator of digital art, media art, or performing arts, it just so happens that for Pavel much of the important artists you'll find him working with at The Walker and beyond are utilizing and integrating moving image, sound, light, performance, sculpture, painting, everything - and in some cases all of the above within one work of art. Tune in to hear Pavel's story, how he came to The Walker, and his ongoing curatorial work there and beyond.
Links from the conversation with Pavel
> The Walker Art Center: https://walkerart.org
> Carolyn Lazard: Long Take: https://walkerart.org/calendar/2022/carolyn-lazard
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Ben: From Small Data Industries, this is art and obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben Fino-Radin and on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past, present, and future of art and technology. Welcome back friends, or if you're new here welcome. Each week we hang out here and visit with artists, engineers, conservators, archivists art collectors, and last, but certainly not least. Curators. Which brings us to this week's guest.
[00:00:27] Pavel: My name is Pavel Pyś I'm a Australian, Polish, British curator and writer, and I am a curator in the visual arts department at The Walker Arts Center here in Minneapolis.
[00:00:37] Ben: I am so thrilled to share this chat with Pavel whose curatorial practice is important for many reasons. To me, one of the standout aspects of Pavel's curatorial work is its interdisciplinarity. Pavel doesn't label himself as a curator of digital art, media, art, performing art, et cetera, but simply: a curator. But it just so happens that for Pavel much of the important artists, you'll find him working with at the Walker and beyond are utilizing and integrating, moving image sound, light performance, sculpture painting. Everything. And in some cases, all of the above, within one work of art. I think that the slice of art we'll see through our chat with Pavel today, points to the fact that time-based media is just that: a medium and one that has become quite integrated and intertwined with contemporary art broadly speaking.
Before we dive in, though, just a quick reminder that if you enjoy today's show, I hope you'll share it with a friend. It's one of the biggest ways you can support the show. You can reshare clips on Twitter or Instagram. And as always, you can find the full transcript and show notes artandobsolescence.com. When you share the show, it helps new listeners find us and that in turn helps with fundraising, which in turn, enables my ability to support artists that come on the show. However you share it is much appreciated. Now, without further delay, let's dive into this week's conversation with Pavel Pyś.
[00:02:04] Pavel: I grew up in a family that really valued culture broadly, and I had the experience of going to museums from a very young age. One of the earliest experiences that I remember of engaging with contemporary art, or maybe not engaging with it was when I was a child. I grew up in Poland and there was a Roman Opałka retrospective. He was a Polish artist who lived most of his life in France and he created works like On Kawara, his works were really about marking the passage of time through serial numbers that were Shown that were drawn and painted on canvas. So it was a retrospective of paintings of numbers. And I think I was seven and I had no idea why we were there. What was happening. What were we looking at? Why are we looking at these numbers? For me, I think everything changed when I was a teenager and I actually had an experience of seeing an exhibition that included a lot of light and space artists from California in the sixties and seventies. And It's quite cheesy, but there was a very clear experience of seeing a James Turrell and really being mesmerized of course, by the sheer beauty of it. But particularly what I remember at that point was not having the language, not having the words to articulate what I was looking at, why it had an effect on me. And that lack of vocabulary was an indication that this was something that I really wanted to engage with.
When I was in my twenties I really thought I would be in academia and I studied first sociology. And then I did two MAs, full-time at the same time, which was a busy period. One was in sociology and cultural theory at the London School of Economics and another was in curating at Goldsmiths College, and I had this experience of being in two worlds at the same time and I think that very quickly, I realized through working with artists, that it was really that experience that I, got the most out of. Academia was very interesting, but I found that even if I would publish a paper or give a lecture, it would take so long to hear anything back from a colleague or from someone in the field. Whereas with exhibition making it so immediate, you can immediately engage and have conversation about what is most fulfilling or what are the shortcomings of a particular exhibition. So I think that was a really clear sense that I should be working with artists.
The Goldsmiths program was really great in the sense that when you started the program, they immediately referred to you as not a student, but as a curator. And it was very, very, very important that you were producing while studying. It was a course that really encouraged. Doing and collaborating with peers unlike some other courses, which are maybe more rooted in study. What I loved about that course and also of engaging with artists is that it was highly interdisciplinary and also very much indiscriminate when it came to the various readings and resources and references that we were looking at. A press release for an exhibition could have as much weight as reading Wittgenstein or
advertising copy for, you know, something from the sixties. It was really exciting to move from a much more academic context where you have these highly canonized voices that everyone follows and then moving into an environment which was so adventurous in its thinking. And that course, we studied in a building where to get to our space, where we had our classes, you had to negotiate the artists studios on the way. So very much felt. I mean, everyone got to know the artists and were in direct proximity to their studios.
The first exhibition that I curated was actually in Copenhagen, in Denmark, which was a place that I lived on and off for about two years. And it was an exhibition at a space that doesn't exist anymore, but it was called Ultra Silvam and it was an exhibition about how artists were reflecting on the forest in the popular imaginary, the forest as a place of adventure, escape, threat, danger, quite Scandinavian topic, actually. So, that was one of my first experiences, I think, in the first year of that two year course. There are some little moments in that exhibition that are also still relevant to the way that I think about art and make exhibitions. For me, one of the things that I'm very interested in is museum display and the ways in which objects are presented. Material formal, ideological political considerations around display and a Polish artists called Katarzyna Przezwańska created a very beautiful display for a range of ephemera that related to the topic of the show, such as I secured a Gustave Doré lithograph from Dante, a small vignette of Alice disappearing into the forest that we borrowed from Disney and Katarzyna made an incredible display for these various objects. That was really one of my favorite pieces in the show.
I had a very quick move into the museum world after Goldsmiths. I worked for a little while for a commercial gallery in London, and I was fortunate to be nominated to apply for residency in Italy. There's a brilliant foundation in Turin called Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and every year they invite leaders of curatorial courses to nominate two graduating students and then those students apply and ultimately three are chosen by a committee and they go and live and work in Italy and then after a period of five months, co-create an exhibition. It's a little bit like a reality TV show because you kind of, you go there and you, you have no idea who the other people are. Not only do you have to work with them, but you also have to live with them and travel with them. So you were together basically 24 7. It was a incredible experience of getting to know the two co-curators Pádraic moore and Ginny Kollak and we traveled to, I think almost 15 cities in Italy over a period of three months, met over 200 artists and then co-curated an exhibition together. So that was a key experience and then at the same time, I won a competition called the Curatorial Open that was hosted by the Zabludowicz collection in London. And then a year later I was hired as the exhibitions and displays curator at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, which is a center for the study of sculpture. I was there for four years and I was working with Lisa Le Feuvre who was the head of sculpture studies and she's now the inaugural director of the Robert Smithson Nancy Holt foundation. Many people assume that the Henry Moore Institute as a center devoted to the study of sculpture is in some ways genre or medium specific, but actually all of the time that we were there we were always thinking about sculpture in its widest sense. So if you look at the program, it was always thinking about object hood and materiality and sculpture, but in relation to architecture, film performance the built environment. So I think that I was fortunate to have that experience because it quite naturally dovetailed with the way that The Walker approaches art.
The Walker was always in some ways, a kind of north star, always a beacon. I always wanted to work at The Walker, even though I had never been there. I had never been until my interview. It was always a place that I was like many people I think looking at thinking about referencing. It's this very unique combination of both a collecting institution, a museum in its true sense, but also a Kunsthalle in, that it's a commissioning body and it really celebrates and engages artists to make work in the present and that's a, very unusual combination. and I think it was really those two polarities that really excited me and then just the sheer richness of the program. And knowing that if you came to The Walker, you could experience exhibitions, film programs, talks, you could learn about design and architecture. You could see dance. It's just such a kind of rich kaleidoscopic instrument.
The job of the curator is to really be an advocate for the artist and to really facilitate, champion, support, and make real the artist's vision in our spaces, but at the same time, it's being able to convey that vision and connect it, not only to staff and colleagues, but ultimately, and very importantly to audiences. So it's about taking an idea and then being able to shed light on it to many, many different stakeholders. And I think that what I love so much about working as a curator is that really. There's no such thing as a day that is exactly the same as the prior one. There could be writing involved. There could be discussing prospective acquisitions with colleagues that could be problem solving with colleagues on the technical crew and registrars there could be speaking with funders, hanging a show, hanging out with artists and crucially less so in the last two years, but I hopefully more travel and meeting people, meeting artists, curators, collectors and learning constantly learning.
I've been at the Walker for almost six years and have had the great pleasure of working with artists across our gallery spaces, but also the Minneapolis sculpture garden. On our theater stage, and I've really enjoyed working on very specific single projects, solo shows with artists, but also being able to delve much more deeply into thematic shows and think through ideas together with artists to commission new work and also building the collection has been a real privilege. When I started at the Walker, I had a chance to spend a little bit of time with Doryun Chong who's a former Walker curator, and currently the deputy director of the Mplus museum in Hong Kong and we were talking about building the collection and Doryun said to me, remember, Pavel your mistakes will forever be visible. And I thought that is such great advice. Whenever I think about acquisitions that I'm championing those words certainly ring in my ears. But I've really really loved being able to work with artists at the Walker. It's a very special place.
[00:12:16] Ben: Something that I wanted to ask you about is The Walker of course has a particularly interesting past and legacy when it comes to a very specific generation of like net art and digital art through Steve Deitz work there many, many years ago. Then, of course there's a whole other realm of the film programming that happens at the Walker. And I'm curious how has any of that intersected with your work? Is that a legacy that you've been able to engage with?
[00:12:42] Pavel: Absolutely. And there are so many individuals who really championed experimentation with artists that is really relevant to thinking about time-based media and of course, Steve is one of those people, but there are so many John Killacky, Philip Bither, Bruce Jenkins, Peter Eleey so many over the years who either works directly and presented artists work that pose these questions, or certainly acquired works for the collection that also speak to these issues. As part of my role I'm one of the curators in the visual arts department who oversees the permanent collection. So I'm certainly engaging with a lot of these issues around conservation. I'm privy to a lot of the challenges that we face in terms of stewarding works that pose exactly these kinds of problems. But it's also my role to really think from the artist's perspective and to really think about intent rather than objecthood so much, and to really work with an artist, to think about how their intent can travel into the future. And I think that's something that is really interesting about conservation is that I think that from what I've seen, a lot of the conversations around conservation are moving away from strictly being an object-based question towards a practice-based question. As a curator, rather than a conservator my perspective is that I really think about these issues very closely with the artist's voice in my mind. And that's something that certainly relates to some of the acquisitions that I've been working on.
One of those projects, I would cite the acquisition of a dance by the Cypriot choreographer Maria Hassabi. Maria is someone whom we commissioned to present a work as part of our Merce Cunningham, retrospective, common time. That was in, I think, 2017 and the work that Maria presented was called staging solo and it's a work that consists of a dancer, glacially slow through a series of very carefully choreographed and composed poses. And the work was presented alongside a few objects in space. And we began a conversation around acquiring a work by Maria at that time. And at first we kind of gravitated towards the more tangible things and of course realized that. The core and the most important part of Maria's practice is of course, the live dance. And so we had a great experience of working directly with Maria, but also with our colleagues in registration, with colleagues on the curatorial team, and then also Maria working with some of her friends in the field, other artists, but also curators over a 16 month period. We really worked closely to come up with a way to. Acquire this live dance and bring it into the collection. And so that was very, very special and I think in terms of time-based media conservation, it was a really interesting process because Maria actually conceived of the acquisition as having various intricacies and very careful considerations for how do you. Hold a work like that in your collection and carry it into the future beyond the lifetime of Maria herself, but also the staff who are at the institution.
As part of the acquisition we worked with Maria on a extensive acquisition overview document, which is, I think, 20 something pages and it includes stipulations for anything even ranging from the Pantone color of the nail Polish, through to digital templates of the clothing that can then be reproduced in the event of a future showing it's very, very detailed. Benchmarks in terms of wages for performers, but the way that Maria conceived of the acquisition is that we can present the work and we can hire twin cities, dancers to train the work on the basis of a script, a score and teaching videos, which are narrated by the artist. And once those auditions in that training happens, Maria herself, or one of her so-called licensed teachers, meaning someone that she has taught the dance to will need to come to Minneapolis and just oversee that the work is presented to a level that Maria would be happy with. And as Maria ages, she increases the pool of licensed teachers, people that she has taught the dance to, and this idea of body to body transmission, which is something that comes from the way that Simone Forti has talked about placing her works in MoMA's collection was very, very important. And so, we have this agreement that the work has to be presented with that caveat. And in the future, If there is no one alive anymore in 50, a hundred, however many years, then we agreed that the live work will cease to exist. And so inscribed within the acquisition is the possibility of it's of the dance, essentially dying and no longer being something that can be presented. And there were two other versions of the work's presentation, one, which. Described as an archival version and it's more within the language of how you present performance through archival props. And the second is a sculptural version. So something that is much more within the realm of visual art. So that was really. Exciting to think about exactly these issues of how do you hold something that is non object-based? That's not tangible in the way that a sculpture or painting or a drawing is and how do you take care of that in the future?
[00:18:18] Ben: I really get the impression that you are kind of part of this generation of contemporary art curators for whom, time-based media and performance and contemporary art, don't really have these hard disciplinary boundaries at least in the way that they existed in the past, So I'm curious, you know, for you, how does time-based media factor into your practice as a curator?
[00:18:40] Pavel: I think in the last few years, or the last few decades, we've seen a much greater acknowledgement and understanding of the porosity between media and disciplines and The Walker is very interesting because it has never defined the labor of its curators by medium, we have a visual arts department, a performing arts department, a moving image department, design, education and public programs, but really, the dialogue between disciplines has always been there. If you look back at the history of The Walker, it's always been there. So I think that that's embedded in the DNA of the institution that I'm working in. But I think for me that's certainly the case that these separations, these silos they're not relevant and I think that if you want to understand an artist's work, you have to think about the various. Platforms that their work has manifested in. So I think to understand the objects of Senga Nengudi, you have to engage with her performances. You could say the same of Robert Morris or to understand David Hammons, his work, you have to consider his love for jazz to really engage with the work of Carolyn Lazard you have to think about their writing, to think about Wu Tsang you have to think about the role that interdisciplinary collaborations play for Wu, particularly with peers, but also friends and even loved ones. So these things, this coexistence of various ways of approaching an artwork we have to follow the way that artists think and they've always been thinking across boundaries. So I think curators have to be sensitive to that and conversant in how to hold those practices. When it comes to artists engaging with technology and really experimenting with early net art I think there are certainly figures within those histories that have been ignored I think if we think about figures like Shu Lea Cheang or Julia Sher there's finally attention on their practices. Lynn Hershman Leeson would be another great example. All great artists who have shown at the Walker in the nineties and two thousands. I think that in many ways we are as institutions and as audiences catching up with some of those important figures.
I'm proud of all of the artists that I've worked with. I'm very lucky to be able to be a small part of their lives for a limited amount of time. I gain a lot from that, but I think that there are different moments that I'm particularly excited about. Certainly the acquisitions that I've mentioned whether it was with Maria or Sarah Mitchelson or Ligia Lewis or the Trisha Brown estate. These are all acquisitions that posed very interesting time-based media conservation problems. So, those have been really exciting. I curated an exhibition in 2019 called the body electric that looked at how artists were engaging with particularly the screen and the relationship between the physical world, we're in and the virtual world and our screens going right back to the generation of Fluxus artists right through to artists working now and one of the artists in that exhibition was Joan Jonas and it was a really great experience because working in the archives at The Walker, I found brilliant image from 1974 of Joan performing a work called funnel on the stage, which is now our cinema stage at The Walker and I approached Joan and she had never revisited that particular performance as an installation, and she did for The Body Electric and she designed the environment and then came at the 11th hour I think literally 30 minutes before the exhibition opened, Joan came with a suitcase filled with various objects and she positioned things around the installation and was very generous and also asked every single person in the room, their opinion. We then brought that work into the collection. Joan was a figure missing in our collection and so we were able to finally Add that work to the collection. And also we gave a talk together for the opening day programs for the show and Joan and I were in dialogue on exactly the same stage where she had performed the work 45 years prior.
When Joan was at the Walker in 1974, she was there as part of the performance program for a show called projected images, which was a groundbreaking show that brought artists who were mostly moving image artists shown within cinema programs into the gallery spaces. But the artists list was very, very male and very, very white and Joan and other amazing artists were really just part of a two day performance program alongside the exhibit. So also my intention was in some ways to rectify that particular history and it was really in some ways, humbling to be able to kind of antagonize our own history and question it and to be there and to celebrate Joan's amazing work 45 years later.
[00:23:25] Ben: What is the biggest challenge that has come up for you with regards to time-based media at The Walker
[00:23:30] Pavel: I think one of the biggest challenges is that as much as you can predict and trying to plan, there will be something that you're probably not thinking of. And I think that it's this really interesting exercise of really trying to address everything. And to think through every option, whether it's with the conservator or the registrar, when it comes to the, you know, the practicalities of the thing and its lifespan and what happens with migration or refabrication but also with the artists, what do those issues mean conceptually and formally for the work. So I think that is a really interesting part of being privy to those time-based media conservation questions as to the forward planning and the inevitable fact that you're probably missing something.
I think the notion that a painting or a sculpture print is simpler that's a tricky path to go down because everything is aging all of us, but also everything. And they're just aging at different speeds. So I think you have to recognize that the speed dictates let's say the pressure and the level of attention, but we can't assume that just because something's made of bronze that it will live in perpetuity. I'm not a conservator and I don't want to be, I don't want to know all of the material intricacies and the treatment options. That's not my area of expertise, but when it comes to engaging with artists whose work poses time-based media questions for me from what I've observed in my experience so far is that it's a huge degree of collaboration and really the best results are yielded by immense inclusivity of voices from the artist, from visual art, from registration, from conservation, from exhibition production. These questions can only be resolved when all of these colleagues have a seat at the table and my role is largely to really think through these issues with the artist and to really be there for the artists, but also challenge them. And I think, going back to the experience of working with Maria, it was really exciting because for us as a collecting institution, this is the second non object based work to come into the collection. And there are so many new problems for us and interesting questions, but I think you could say the same for Maria who had not placed work in a collection up until that point. So it's really about collaboration and the exchange of ideas.
[00:25:59] Ben: Mm. So Pavel, what is coming next for you?
[00:26:03] Pavel: I'm very lucky to be working on a range of projects at The Walker. I'm excited to open the first museum solo show by Carolyn Lazard, which will open in February. And it's a show that's co commissioned with ICA, Philadelphia, Nottingham contemporary, and then in the fall, there will be an exhibition of work by Paul Chan a survey of. Everything that Paul has been making since the moment he stopped making art, which was in 2008 or nine, when he founded Badlands Unlimited and then eventually came back to making visual art. Then working on a presentation of the acquisition of Sarah Michelson's work as well as a large group show in end of 2023, called Multiple Realities, which looks at experimental art from the Eastern block, six nations from the former Eastern block between the sixties and eighties. And then finally, the last project that I would mention is a exhibition that I'm co-curating with Sara Cluggish who's the director of the Perlman teaching museum at Carleton College called Kingdom of The Ill which will open at Museion Bolzano in Northern Italy, an exhibition that's bringing together 20 to 25 artists who are thinking about issues of health, illness, care, and contamination.
[00:27:14] Ben: Wow. Well if you had any advice for artists listening to the show, what would it be?
[00:27:19] Pavel: I think that I would encourage anyone if they're interested in a particular person or an what someone is doing to reach out. I think that there's no harm in reaching out to people and asking for a phone call and asking for a conversation. And I think, when it comes to curators, I think artists should be demanding of them but also not too disappointed if curators pushback. It's a very interesting position to be in between the needs of the audiences, the institution and the artist but I think curators are really there to support you and to champion you and if they want to work with you, there's usually a really good reason why.
[00:28:00] Ben: Well, Pavel Pyś thank you so much for coming on the show. I really, really appreciated getting to know you better.
[00:28:05] Pavel: Well, thank you Ben, for having me, I'm really happy to be part of this podcast.
[00:28:09] Ben: And thank you, dear listener for joining us for this week's conversation. If you enjoyed this week's show, you know what would be super awesome. Share it with a friend. You can find the show notes and full transcript artandobsolescence.com. And as always, you can find clips and highlights on Twitter and Instagram @artobsolescence. Have a great week, my friends. My name is Ben Fino-Radin, and this has been Art and Obsolescence.