New York, 2016

Susan Hapgood is the executive director of International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), New York, senior advisor to Independent Curators International (ICI), and founder and director of the Mumbai Art Room. She was ICI’s director of exhibitions, developing and managing the exhibitions program for seven years until 2010. She has worked in a curatorial capacity for institutions including the Guggenheim Museum, the New Museum, and the American Federation of Arts. The exhibitions she has curated and co-curated include FluxAttitudes (1993), Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-62 (1994), Video Divertimento (1997), Slightly Unbalanced (2008-10), and In Deed: Certificates of Authenticity in Art (2011–12). She participated in the development of VOTI—Union of the Imaginary, an international forum founded in 1998 and formerly existing as an online site for discussion among contemporary art curators.

TELL ME ABOUT YOUR ROLE IN THE VOTI—UNION OF THE IMAGINARY PLATFORM.

I was invited to join VOTI as the archivista. I was initially introduced to the project by Jordan Crandall, who was working with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Carlos Basualdo to get VOTI up and running. Earlier in the 1990s I had been involved with the first digital arts foundry, äda’web, and was really interested in the way digital formats could intersect with contemporary art. As someone with an MA in art history, with strong writing and organizational skills, I was in charge of enrolling new members, making general announcements, keeping the activities documented as much as I could, acting as an administrative overseer. This experience did not last that long, about one year or so, but during that time, VOTI was quite active, with a whole range of different discussions and voices from all over the world. VOTI eventually came to an end due to lack of participation. Some time later one of the VOTI members, Vasıf Kortun, then-director of SALT in Istanbul and Ankara, wrote to ask me about the archives.

ROBERT FLECK KEPT A LOT OF THE DOCUMENTATION, DIDN’T HE?

He had most of it actually. He had printed everything out in hard copies. Luckily we were also able to recover some files from an old server, with the help of Wolfgang Staehle, who had hosted VOTI on his very early digital platform, The Thing, for free. But technology changes very fast and some of VOTI’s records were gone forever by then. Other VOTI members had also saved material; I had some paper archives, so did Carlos. After about six months of corresponding with many of the people involved, I finally gathered a pretty comprehensive body of documents together.

DID YOU AND THE OTHER VOTI MEMBERS HAVE THE FEELING THAT YOU WERE BUILDING THE BASIS FOR CONTEMPORARY CURATORIAL DISCOURSE BACK THEN?

No. It just felt like a very futuristic platform for communication that was exhilarating, exciting for everybody. We were not thinking of the future: we were making use of a technology that was nascent and still only beginning to be used by the general population; email was not quite a daily tool for at least a few more years. The web was a novelty for everybody, and the connections it allowed were just dawning on all of us. The forum was a listserv, which was a kind of email software that allowed a group of subscribed members to be addressed at once, instead of writing to each person individually. I do not think that anybody was looking ahead to the future; in fact, nobody was censoring, there was a refreshing degree of informality. Well, probably some people were thinking of posterity, but not the majority of us.

THERE WERE SOME ATTEMPTS AT SELF-REPRESENTATION THEN…

We tried to structure the conversations aro- und certain topics more than around people, in order to avoid that. Some people were pontificating perhaps and trying to push the conversations in self-serving directions, but generally speaking, we were all excited by the new format and free in expression. We could hear voices from all over the world, and confront one another with different opinions and experiences.

HOW DID PEOPLE REACT WHEN YOU AND SOME OF YOUR COLLEAGUES DECIDED TO PUBLISH THESE EXCHANGES IN A BOOK?

We sought permission from all VOTI members. Most people agreed and were happy about it, a few did not answer, only one said no. The lapse of time seemed to erase worry about any lack of privacy the book would bring about. But in addition, there was a bond among us, even if some of VOTI members never met in person. Vasif Kortun approached me with this idea of the publication, and we launched it during the Istanbul Biennial. There was also the notion of organizing a summit to somehow revive it, but that plan sort of fizzled out. Vasıf was definitely the force behind getting the publication going. Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carlos Basualdo and Jordan Crandall—the first three VOTI founders—were very supportive. As archi- vista, I readily agreed to step up and collaborate, working with an amazing team that included our co-editor, November Paynter, who really spearheaded the publication through to the end.

WHAT IS YOUR EXPERIENCE WITH ARCHIVES? ARE THEY SOMETHING THAT YOU PARTICULARLY CARE ABOUT?

I have worked for many institutions with important archives, like the Sperone Westwater Gallery and the Guggenheim Museum. Also being trained as an art historian, and as an avid researcher, I fully understand how archives are crucial for the future of this discipline. So yes, I definitely care about archives. As a curator, I am pretty sloppy with my own projects: I do keep all of my papers and digital files but they are filled with a lot of ancillary junk, too. A lot of my own early curatorial records were in boxes that got damaged by water years ago, because I had stored them in a basement that was flooded.

While I love researching in archives, maybe I am not so good at making them, especially making my own. Which also explains why I did not have that much archival material for VOTI when my colleagues came and asked me. Generally speaking, curators are overworked and it is usually very difficult to find the time to organize personal papers and make them available for other people to look through. Most of the time my archival materials are condensed into publications that accompany exhibitions, and by then I am interested in the next project rather than in organizing the old papers and computer files.

CAN YOU GIVE ME AN EXAMPLE OF A SHOW YOU HAVE ORGANIZED STARTING WITH AN ARCHIVE?

Cornelia Lauf and I co-curated an exhibition called FluxAttitudes: it started in a small non-profit institution called Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo in 1991, and then, a year later, the New Museum asked us to present it. At the second venue, we ended up displaying some of what might be considered archival material— we showed our correspondence with many of the artists while we were curating the second presentation. We had some really interesting discussions with Fluxus artists about artworks’ value, equity, and money. There was a low budget for the exhibition at the New Museum, and there was no insurance for exhibition loans, so we wrote to the artists in the show about this, asking them to declare that their loans had zero valuation. Not surprisingly, this made the artists really angry, and some of them refused to participate, getting into an interesting discussion about institutions, about how Fluxus was sometimes sidelined and how unfair it was to ask this of them. We understood, but we felt we had been very upfront about the situation. We decided to exhibit the correspondence, or what you might call archival material, in the show.

HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT ABOUT DONATING YOUR ARCHIVE TO AN INSTITUTION?

I have, and hopefully I will one day, but I have no idea where I would offer it. It would be great if the material—a lot of ephemera, correspondence, and documentation—that I have gathered could be useful to researchers, but it is becoming more and more difficult to get archive donations accepted by institutions because they have too many requests and of course physical archives take a lot of space. We will see, I am still making archives, not done yet!