Walter Hopps hopps hopps

You can tell from the museum here that I believe very much in sometimes isolating a single work, with a very discrete situation - not having it be cluttered or complicated. At the same time, I have a great feeling for really large numbers of works.

HUO: This 100,000 images project was conceived as filling a single entire building?

WH: That's right. I conceived of it as a really exciting project for P.S. 1 in New York. I calculated that the whole building could hold 100,000 items, if you had some kind of discretion as to what the size would be. That may seem unimaginably large for an art show, but, on the other hand, if you counted the number of phases of music, or measures, in an opera or a symphony, you'd get an unimaginably large number, too.

HUO: Or a computer program.

WH: That's right. I believe people could take in presentations of art that are almost as vast as nature. If a lot of things looked very repetitive, well, that's the way it is. If you're walking through the desert and looking at creosote bushes and some tamarack and some sage - they're all different and discrete. But, on the other hand, they can appear very repetitive.

HUO: And one could put together his or her own sequence.

WH: Exactly. I think in the future some of the experience of finding one's way through vastly larger realms of information on the Web and in cyberspace will allow for what I'm talking about. But I've also tried to think of exhibits featuring only two or three works, or even one work, and some unusual comparisons. I've often thought that Vermeer's work would fit in this kind of show. The same is true of Rogier van der Weyden.

HUO: The explosion of images and sources leads also to Rauschenberg.

WH: Yes, in recent years I've had a lot of involvement with Rauschenberg, indeed, and to use your term, he's probably the most encyclopedic artist of our time.

HUO: And you're working on a retrospective.

WH: Yes, having done one at the National in '76, the Guggenheim wants me to do one for what I guess will be '97 or '98 - a little more than 20 years later.

HUO: So it'll be the retrospective of retrospectives.

WH: Yes. The difficulty will come in the work after 1976, where Rauschenberg begins to become prolific in larger-scale works - all the international touring he did.

HUO: The global venues.

WH: The overseas venues seemed, to most people, not very discriminating. There wasn't any sense of discrimination as to why this or that piece was chosen. I don't know whether; doing this show, I'll be beyond such a notion of discrimination. I'm concerned with whether one can get into that vast body of work - and truly represent the vastness of Rauschenberg's work, and yet have it seem discriminating.

HUO: So it's a paradoxical enterprise to frame abundance without annihilating or reducing it.

WH: Yeah. We're talking about using both spaces - both the uptown and the SoHo Guggenheim. That appeals to me.

HUO. The last Rauschenberg retrospective you curated, in '76 - it must have been one of the first times a contemporary artist made the cover of The New York Times Magazine.