Rome, 2016

Independent curator and art historian Cornelia Lauf holds a PhD from Columbia University and began her career at the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Over three decades, she has edited publications and produced exhibitions for institutions in Europe and the United States. Recent projects include Wall to Wall: Carpets by Artists, (Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, 2016); a traveling exhibition on certificates of authenticity by artists (De Vleeshal, Middelburg, traveling to the Drawing Center, New York, and SALT Beyoğlu, Istanbul, among other venues, 2011– 12); and extensive publishing and editorial work in the field of artists’ books. Lauf is currently working on a publication on Emilio Prini, as well as projects devoted to craft by artists, in Baku, Azerbaijan, and the Middle East. She advises private collections in the United States and specializes in custom- commissioned contemporary artworks, produced in collaboration with heritage artisans.

WHAT DOES THE WORD ARCHIVE MEAN TO YOU?

My life in boxes.

IS YOUR ARCHIVE A FAMILIAR PLACE, CLOSELY CONNECTED TO YOUR LIFE?

Definitely. I have been dealing with other people’s archives since I was in graduate school, but I am not very good at organizing myself. I hate to look backwards, even though I worry about the past all the time.

HOW IS YOUR ARCHIVE ORGANIZED?

My university teaching is organized chronologically in folders and spiral binders. I also have a section for IUAV (University of Venice) master’s theses. I am particularly proud of that, because supervising a thesis and steering somebody’s thoughts, helping to shape ideas, is the part of being a curator that I enjoy the most. Working with less well-known artists I can help them find the best way to exhibit, and to present their biography and bibliography. I have a lot of documents from artists at the beginning of their career, because for some reason I prefer to shape art history from the start rather than adding my perspective to an already established situation.

IS THIS APPROACH REFLECTED IN THE STRUCTURE OF YOUR ARCHIVE?

I have been collecting artists’ invitation cards since the 1980s until the internet arrived and took over. Invitation cards were a key form of art-making and there were not a lot of people interested in ephemera at that time. Steven Leiber is the only other person that I have met who was keeping and archiving them. Well, there was also Maurizio Nannucci. In the 1980s, a lot of artists used to make beautiful gadgets, pens, party invitations, and so on. Those are the kinds of objects that I would be interested to show if I were asked to. I have one of Keith Haring’s first sweatshirts, club posters, club invitations that bear witness to the whole art world from the underground and East Village vantage point. These are the items that I have collected and that can be found in my archive. I have also kept all my correspondence with artists, alongside documentation of the exhibitions I worked on and the texts that I wrote. At that time, biographies were not available online, so you had to request them from the gallery or help the artist to write one. I have all of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s slides when he was handwriting the labels himself, and they are really delightful because you can see the personality of the artist. I am from the age of the slide, a fascinating document that enables us to see the development of creative thinking at the beginning of the artist’s career—which photographer they chose to work with, what they included in their biography and how they structured it, which artworks they selected, and so on. I tried to collect material on these people to make a record of that time. I did the same for Joseph Kosuth as I set up his archive. When I met Joseph, a lot of the material was in garbage bags, and there was no order in the library. I set up the archival system with two people: Susan Hapgood and a woman named Carol, very nice—I forget her last name. We put everything in acid-free boxes and envelopes, created a theoretical framework for his archive, and purchased all the materials and equipment, like electric tape readers, the Xerox machine, and so on. I took care of the archive for approximately twenty years, supervised the macro-structure, and hired newly graduated art historians like Avery Lozada to work with it—also very good artists such as Lucky Debellevue, Gavin Brown, Tom Beller. A variety of people went through Joseph’s archive. I had the idea of collecting his writing in a book for MIT press; I asked David Freedberg and Joseph Connors, who were working with me at Columbia University, to write scholarly essays on Joseph’s work and put it into an academic art historical context. I personally wrote his first biography. So if my own archive was neglected, one can say that I have worked on archives that made art history. My role as an art historian has always been that of a weaver; I have always been very good at weaving people or cultural moments together.

WHAT PART OF YOUR ARCHIVE DO YOU MOST PREFER?

I would say the letters that I received from artists, and the personal objects that my first husband Joseph Kosuth made for me, because they are so poetic. Also the letters from my relatives sent to me as a young art historian, and my old notebooks from 1979 onward with all the notes I took about the exhibitions I visited and the people I met, like Paloma Picasso and Gerhard Richter. Those records are funny to find because they recreate the era. I am in favor of keeping the material how it is found rather than organizing it by some kind of abstract code. To this end, filming and photographing archives is a good idea. I was taking documentary photographs before the “selfie” era. These documents capture art history. I was always aware I was living art history, and I captured all those meetings as much as I could. A lot of them are just about social life but that was where art history was being made. Part of my archive includes the menus of the dinners I used to organize for friends, the bill from Gino de Dominicis’ 12-people table, invitations to parties given by the intelligentsia of New York, Belgium, San Casciano, etc. Anyway, organizing my own archive also makes me incredibly sad. It is very painful sometimes.

YOU MAKE NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN YOUR PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL ARCHIVE, IT IS ALL ONE; THERE ARE MANY INTERCONNECTIONS, YES?

Exactly. My professional life was my personal life, and this is mirrored in the archive. Real life is the material for poetry, literature, and art. I think this is the essence of living somehow: we have to look at the past. The internet gives us the illusion that we do not need to look back to what happened previously in art history; that is why comparisons between modern and contemporary art are so poor. Some curators do not even wish to work with living artists as it means knowing about their lives, their behaviors, and thoughts too, and this can be difficult to do.

DOES BEING A WOMAN AFFECT THE WAY YOU DEAL WITH ARCHIVES?

Definitely. I was the first woman in my family to get a PhD, and I am sure that I would have had a different education if I were a man. There was no tradition of women in my family obtaining doctorates, but my mother was tremendously supportive, as were my grandparents. I was also mentally predisposed to helping other people, to take care of them—the female trait of nurturing. That’s why I don’t take care of myself in the same way I do with other people. That’s a failing. Men are much more used to being in charge, progressing. Even speaking professionally, men and women are very different and are still treated unequally. I love being a woman, having a mind and body that goes from giving birth to creating climates for the production of art.