What difficult aspects have you found working on this exhibit?
FOGLE: Well, I mean traveling all over the world in the back of the plane. You know, your bad beds and things like that. I mean the travel itself is quite difficult. But I think the most difficult thing is putting together — you can only choose 40 artists. The bottom line is that I could have chose 100. There were 100 plus people that I thought were interesting. And really, you can only really manage to get about 35 to 40 artists in this show, and typically. And since this show’s been sort of reborn in the early ’80s, that’s what people have done, about 35 to 40 artists.

That gave you the opportunity to have more pieces, though, per artist?
FOGLE: There’s more space. Yes. This exhibition’s different than the Whitney Biennial or the Venice Biennial or things like that. One, like the Whitney, it’s an institutionally based show, so you have a building that you’re working in. And that’s very unique, except for the Whitney. Two, those exhibitions tend to have 80, 100, 120, 140 artists in them, maybe with one work in the corner, or on the ceiling, or on the floor, or on the stairwell, or whatever. I mean we use all of our public spaces as much as we can and for the show, but really, all the artists have a really significant amount of space for the most part. I think they all look really good. They breathe. The room can breathe. It’s just more elegant and I think more respectful. Having fewer artists means you limit your appetite as a curator.

If you had to describe your curating style, what would it be?
FOGLE: Style? I don’t know if I have a style.

If not style, then method.
FOGLE: I put together shows like I write essays. I mean I don’t really know how it happens, but I start with kind of a couple building blocks and build up around it. What’s important to me is that the concept of the show be loose enough that it doesn’t dominate the artists, that they’re not Legos in my Legoland to build my argument up. But I’m actually trying to find something that’s kind of out there and put my finger on it and bring it together to show people and to show the other artists.

I mean a lot of the artists in the show were very excited that they were with certain other artists in the show. Some they didn’t know as well; some they knew well. Vija Celmins fell in love with Richard Wright’s work, and they became fast friends and they had never met before. It makes a lot of sense, given the obsessive nature of the kind of painting practice that they do. But that was a really wonderful aspect of the show for me. So I guess that’s my method. You have to start somewhere and in this case I started from two historical bodies of work, which, for me, are very much alive, Paul Thek and Mario Merz, and it sort of spun out from them.
My Future is Not a Dream, Cao FeiBut they weren’t the first artists I chose, necessarily, but — I think Sharon Lockhart was one of the first people I chose. The idea of the human condition or the human qualities of what a lot of artists are talking about today came out of, first of all, I think, looking at Sharon Lockhart’s film, “Pine Flat.” And that was one of the first studio visits I did — that might have been even before I arrived here in the summer of ‘05. I went to a film-editing suite in a film production place in Burbank, California, and sat with her while she was doing sound editing on “Pine Flat” before she had shown it. I knew then that I wanted to show that and invited her into the show and we bought the project for the collection, too. So we own the film and all the photographs.

Had you entertained other themes, for the show, other than Life on Mars?
FOGLE: There were a few other titles that I won’t mention that we, my advisory committee and I, were talking about, but this is the first one that I came up with. They came up with a bunch that they thought were better but were worse.

But you’re not going to tell me are you?
FOGLE: Oh, no. They were — as a friend of mine who’s a screenwriter in Hollywood says, “every title for a script sounds stupid until it’s the actual title for a script.” Another friend of ours is in a band, a very successful band, and he says it’s the same thing with bands — every name you can give your band when you’re sitting around trying to name it sounds totally ridiculous, but once you choose one, and once you’re doing it then it sounds great. So, anyways, I mean the whole idea of naming a show — I had to persuade my colleagues. Or, you know, some of our colleagues here, but they were really excited once they heard the title and whatnot.

Mirrors against identity, Katja Strunz
Some curators attempt to communicate with the everyday visitors of the exhibit. Some curators attempt to communicate with peers or art experts. How have your efforts been directed in this show?
FOGLE: Well, the main role of a curator in my mind is to connect the artist with the audience, the audience here in Pittsburgh. The audience for this exhibition is hundreds of thousands of people from this area. Then there’s a thousand people from the rest of the art world that come in, maybe more from all over Europe or South America or friends are coming from Tokyo to see the show. And that’s an audience, too, that is part of that larger audience. It’s a sub-audience.

But the bottom line is you do the show for an institution. I’m not parachuting in here– I live here. It’s my town now. It’s really making that connection between the artist and all those audiences. There’s definitely more sophisticated — and I don’t want to be taken incorrectly about this — there are more professionals. When I say sophisticated, there are professional art people, who maybe know a lot of the artists. Then there’s a more general public, who now are discovering some of these artists for the first time. That, for me, is really exciting. It’s great when my colleagues love the show, but it’s really great when people in town here who see the show get excited about contemporary art for the first time. Maybe some young people, this is the first time in their lives they’ve seen a show like this where normally you have to go to New York, or go to Europe, or wherever.