Monsieur Ambassador

Art Center to direct a new art center in his native France. In December 2004, he was planning the Walker’s reopening exhibitions and a retrospective of a Chinese artist for the fall when he was invited to curatethe 2006 Whitney Biennial—the foremost survey of American contemporary art. In spring, his Paris plans fell through, so he decided to move to New York. That summer, he and Whitney Biennial cocurator Chrissie Iles crisscrossed the country, visiting artists’ studios. By late summer, Vergne had been rehired by the Walker, this time as deputy director and chief curator. Then the Huang Yong Ping exhibition opened. Then the London-based magazine, ArtReview, named Vergne to its annual Power 100 list. And this month, the Whitney Biennial opens in New York.

Given Vergne’s eventual career choice, recent rise to eminence, and engagement in his work—“I wake up every morning thinking how lucky I am to be doing what I’m passionate about”—it’s strange to think he grew up wanting to be a truck driver and hating museums. He attributes some of that to adolescent insolence. Early on, Vergne, now forty, became—and still is—enthralled with ancient Egyptian culture, but otherwise he wasn’t interested in the historical art of ages past, which is what he believed museums had to offer. Art galleries, however, opened to him the world and work of living artists. “Going to a gallery and seeing art that had just been made was fascinating,” he says, with a French accent. “To see how an artist responded to a recent moment was fascinating. Most of the time, I didn’t understand what I was seeing, but learning something new was exciting.”

One of Vergne’s first encounters with contemporary art was as a university student, when he saw a video of a performance work by Joseph Beuys. “I was so struck by it, because I had no idea what I was looking at,” he says. The experience inspired him to buy a book about body art and read it cover to cover.

Vergne’s inborn curiosity and need for knowledge has transferred to his curatorial approach. “Philippe needs to think about things from his own perspective,” says Walker director Kathy Halbreich, “which is an all-too-rare quality in curators. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that Philippe is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met. You’re as apt to find Philippe talking about a movie or a performance as you are a visual artist whose studio he visited in Mexico City.”

Before Vergne moved to Minneapolis in 1997 to be the Walker’s visual arts curator, Halbreich recalls that he told her not to worry, that he didn’t have much furniture. Halbreich, who figured the Walker could save a little money with his move, says, “We ended up moving the largest library I’ve ever had to pay the freight on. I’m sure he slept on those books and ate off them for years.”

Vergne first became aware of the Walker in the early 1990s when he was an art history student at the University of Paris. When researching artists, he often referred to exhibition catalogs and realized that the Walker had been showing artists, including Marcel Duchamp, before it was obvious to do so. “I had no idea what Minneapolis was,” says Vergne, “but I knew of all of these exhibitions coming out of there. ‘What is going on there?’ I wondered.” After viewing two Walker touring shows in Paris—a retrospective of Hélio Oiticica and Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s “D’Est”—and coordinating In the Spirit of Fluxus with the Walker and the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Marseille, where he was director, Vergne understood all the more why the art world held up the Walker as a model for contemporary art institutions.

In 1996, Vergne visited the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship and lunched with Halbreich and Richard Flood, who was then Walker deputy director and chief curator. Unbeknownst to Vergne, the Walker was searching for a new curator. “Immediately after lunch, I went to Richard’s office,” says Halbreich, “and said, ‘I think we found our new curator. You must take him out for dinner.’ It was love at first sight.” After a series of conversations over several months, Halbreich and Flood met Vergne in Paris to confirm the details of the job with him. “It all was going really, really well,” says Flood, who’s now chief curator of New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art. “But I thought, ‘What am I doing to him? He’s sophisticated, he’s funny, he’s got a great job there, and I’m asking him to come to Minnesota.’ So, I said, ‘Minneapolis is not like any other cultural city. It’s really cold. It’s very far north. We’re held hostage by one airline that’s going out of business.’ Without missing a beat, Philippe said, ‘If you can promise me it’s no worse than Fargo, I’m coming.’”

Perhaps what surprised Vergne the most upon coming to Minneapolis was not the climate but people’s attitude toward the Walker. “I was going to the mecca,” says Vergne, “and for people here, it was perceived as the local arts center. It was a given. And I was like, Don’t you understand what the Walker means on an international level?”

The thrill of contemporary art for Vergne is that it’s the art of his time, it’s the product of artists responding to the present, and he can talk with the artist and ask questions. In the case of the Huang Yong Ping retrospective, which closed in January, Vergne and Ping were involved in a four-year-long conversation about the show, discussing its necessity, the pieces that should be included, and the narrative that should be told. During the two years they spent planning the actual installation, Vergne worked with small, three-dimensional models of the gallery and the works—“it’s like a dollhouse,” he says—and discussed ideas over the phone with Ping, who was in Paris. About three weeks before the exhibition opened, Ping arrived in Minneapolis, and the two tweaked the installation a bit more. Mounting the show took three weeks (which is average for a show of its size), and, says Vergne, “is one of the most enjoyable parts of the process—being in the space with the artist and the work.”

For Vergne, curating is about giving visual pleasure, putting art in the public eye, and using images and objects to help make sense of today’s world. But the “poetic of space”—the idea of how space is used and experienced, which was explored extensively by the twentieth-century French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in La Poetique De L’espace—is equally as important to Vergne as the works themselves—and that’s unusual. “Every exhibition he’s done has shown that there are brand-new ways to install exhibitions that just aren’t being pursued anywhere else,” says Flood. Likening Vergne’s exhibitions to theatrical experiences that make the viewer a participant but still respect the work, Flood cites the Huang Yong Ping show as an example: “Philippe wanted to break from traditional chronology and create a show that was dynamic and immersive. He met the right artist for that particular exercise.”

Curating also requires sensitivity and diplomacy, both of which Vergne possesses in good measure and have served him well as cocurator for the Whitney Biennial. For four months, he and Iles, Whitney Museum of American Art curator, traipsed around the United States, visiting galleries and knocking on hundreds of studio doors. “It’s always a little emotional to enter an artist’s studio,” says Vergne, “and I don’t think it’s an easy thing to open the door to two curators. But when that happens, something changes. You can see their energy, their commitment, how they treat their work. It was an incredible summer.”

“When you’re curating, you’re quite often asking people to do things they don’t want to do,” says Flood. “An artist has been living his life, and all of a sudden, you’re saying, Would you mind going into a stadium and taking off all your clothes in front of a couple of thousand people? Especially with a retrospective, you’re asking them to subject themselves to great risk. I think Philippe can win an artist over very quickly with his enthusiasm and commitment.”

Before embarking on their trip, Vergne and Iles spent weeks sifting through thousands of artists’ submissions, and they received hundreds of leads from gallery owners and other artists while traveling. Prior to the release of the list of biennial artists, Vergne admits he felt pressure. “But the fact that we’re under pressure—the fact that we don’t sleep well—is great, because it means that people are actually interested in art,” he says. “It’s a good sign that an art exhibition of young artists can raise so much expectation.” Titled Day for Night, the show has many themes, says Vergne. “There’s a darkness and there’s an anxiety, which manifest in many different ways,” he says. “There’s also the idea of responsibility.”

With the list available to the public—and the critics—in December, Vergne says he felt some relief, undoubtedly in part because it was well received, even by the notoriously hypercritical New York art critics. Granted, it’s hard to tell much from a list, but it is noteworthy that of the more than 100 biennial artists, 5 have significant Minnesota ties—Jay Heikes, Angela Strassheim, Todd Norsten, Lucas DeGiulio, and Jennie Smith.

In January, after spending three months developing floor plans and working with models, Vergne and Iles consulted with the artists to make sure they were happy with how their work would be installed. During the three-week period prior to the biennial’s opening on March 2, Vergne split his time between Minneapolis and New York, helping with the installation and seeing his wife of more than three years, Sylvia Chivaratanond, who runs a gallery there. The opening week will be filled with lots of parties and tours, of which Vergne plans to lead a few. “I love to share art, and I like to give tours,” he says. “The least you can do when you’re privileged enough to make a living out of what is your passion is make it public.” Then he catches himself. “That might be too romantic.”

“We underestimate how people who grew up in one language can be humorous in another,” says Halbreich. “I knew Philippe was going to stay when, maybe two years after he’d started here, he said that he’d begun to dream in English.

"Phillipe's commitment to the Walker and the Twin Cities’ arts community is second nature, and one sees that in everyday life, as well as in special moments like the Whitney Biennial.”