Q&A with Carnegie Int'l curator Douglas Fogle

The Carnegie International opens this weekend. The curator of the show is Douglas Fogle. For the first time the show comes with a subtitle: "Life on Mars." Today I'll feature a Q&A with Fogle and then I'll have a roundup of Carnegie- and Pittsburgh-centric links. [Photo, with , er, accompanying explanation.]

MAN: What is the origin of the title and, well, why?

Douglas Fogle: It's from David Bowie. "Life on Mars" is on the album Hunky Dory. The show has never had a title -- it's always had the title of 'Carnegie International,' and every show I'd done at the Walker had a title. There was a bit of a contact sport among my colleagues at the Walker with titling shows, and so I wanted to do one here.

For me the Bowie reference is important. I was a big fan as a kid, and he was a big influence on me in terms of art rock and art and rock. I learned a lot about visual art through music.

It was also a chance to post a question before [visitors] get into the show, to prepare you for where you are. The song sort of talks of a world - either a personal world or the world itself - spinning out of control and the protagonist asks if there's life on Mars. It can be read in many ways: It can be hopeful. It can be utopian, or it can be 'can we get out of this place?', which is a darker reading.

When I wrote notes about what this show could be about, I thought of the Pioneer 10 space probe. It's not a show about sci-fi or a space exhibit. I just loved that Carl Sagan and a bunch of scientists had put a plaque on Pioneer 10, a little drawing etched on metal of a man and a woman, a mathematical rendering of our place in the Milky Way galaxy, and a little diagram of the solar system. It's a mini-Lascaux cave for the 20thC and it was strapped on the back of this thing that went up . It did its job, and was slungshot out of the solar system. it was the first object that went literally into interstellar space, the first man-made object to leave the solar system.

And so for me it became this metaphor for this human desire to connect with another person or another world in a way. That was sort of a tip-off point for me thinking about what contemporary art should and could be about. I ended up thinking it should be a show about humanity and have a human quality, that it should be about connections, about the idea of trying to connect with someone else. You don't want artists to be Legos in your argument, but it's helpful for the audience to have a loose way of engaging the show.

MAN: So how does 'humanity' and 'human quality' get into a show? What about the show is those things?

DF: Work being done by hand being emphasized. Unlike with Sol LeWitt - who I love - the art in the show doesn't come from anything like a mathematical formula. It's very much a medieval, Renaissance way of approaching it: Work made by hand or directly onto the wall, that kind of ephemerality. Like with Richard Wright, who's doing a wall-piece. That kind of ephemerality - when you're done with the show, you paint over Richard's piece and it's gone. A month's worth of work by three people: It's there for a moment and then it's gone.

Continued: Part two is here.