Do you know more now about curating an exhibit than you did before?
FOGLE: Oh, always. Every show you do you learn something. Definitely. I had big group shows at the Walker Arts Center. It’s the scale of this is four times as big as any of those shows, physically, and budget-wise, and otherwise. You know, it’s like a very massive version, exponentially bigger version of what I’d done at the Walker Art Center. But of course, you’re always learning, learning how to deal with galleries, learning how to negotiate different personalities, whether they’re artists or otherwise. Yes, you learn a lot about production. You learn a lot about helping people produce works. A lot of the pieces that we did in here might have been solo projects I would have done maybe at my last institution.

There were four commissioned pieces for this show?
It depends on what we mean by commissioned. Haegue Yang, Phil Collins, Richard Wright, Doug Aitken — it was new work done for the show. It’s a quasi-commission, because we didn’t give him money to do it. We installed it, which cost as much as doing the film. So that was our contribution to doing it. So that’s sort of a commission. But there’s a lot of other work that’s new work for the show. There’s a piece by Susan Philipsz. There’s a piece by Mark Bradford on the roof and all of Mark Bradford’s paintings are brand new. So commission, yes, there may be a three or four works that were commissioned specifically for the show. But then a lot of other works that were done for the show that are brand new.

Figure 3 (still), Paul Sietsema
Outside of, say, contemporary art, what influences you?
FOGLE: Music. Film. I’m a huge film person. Literature, music, and film would be the biggest three. Philosophy as well because I was trained in political philosophy as an undergraduate and in graduate school as well.

What music are you listening to now?
FOGLE: I don’t know. This morning I was listening to the Flaming Lips in the car. But that’s an older album I was listening to. I’m going through their whole catalog right now, which I tend to do. I’ll go through, like, a band’s whole catalog on the iPod. I don’t know why. I just chose to do that this week, so that’s what I’m doing this week.

Is that a potential future exhibit?
FOGLE: No. The title of the show was random. It could have been from a film. The last show that I did at the Walker Art Center was called The Last Picture Show, from the Bogdanovich film and the McMurtry novel. Titling our shows at the Walker Art Center was very competitive. It was a bit of a contact sport amongst our curatorial colleagues. So we all enjoy doing that. So that’s why we always had great titles, so, no, I would hesitate to say that any show that I do is about those things, but that’s where I get my inspirations: from novels, from film, and from music, those are the three areas in which—I’m a political junkie too, but that doesn’t really inform the exhibition so much although in a way the show is a response to the world such as it is, in a way, socially.

What are you reading right now?
FOGLE: Stanisław Lem’s “The Cyberiad”, it’s a novel the Polish writer wrote — science fiction sort of novel — but it’s really more like sort of a mythological and very political — it’s very much an indictment of the cold war, he’s the author who wrote “Solaris” and a number of other novels. During the communist-period science fiction, but it’s literature. I mean, I don’t dismiss science-fiction, it’s something I find really important, Philip K. Dick is a great author, there’s a lot of people that I read in sci-fi literature who I find really incredible. But I just happen to be reading that right now. I’m actually re-reading it, I read it years and years ago and I just picked it up again.

Do you have multiple books going at one time?
FOGLE: Always. I had to stop reading for about a month, during the installation, I was just too tired to read at night in bed. I’m reading Nina Planck’s book called “Real Food” which a friend here in Pittsburgh recommended, I was, I got a third of the way through that and then I started reading the Stanisław Lem novel.

So what are you working on five years from now?
FOGLE: Retiring. I have no idea. I’m too young to retire. The future, I do not know what the future holds. Maybe I’ve done the next international, maybe I’ve gone and started teaching at university, I don’t know.

What’s on the list of what you want to do, but it might be ten years, fifteen years?
FOGLE: Oh I don’t know. I really imagine I’ll be curating still or director of an institution or something, it’s hard to decide, hard to know. Maybe I’ll produce films, I don’t know. That seems unlikely. Right now the show just opened and I can barely think about what’s happening next week, let alone next year, let alone five years from now.