This week, JustArts spoke with Joseph Ketner, the former Director of the Rose Art Museum from 1998 to 2005, who is currently the Henry and Lois Foster Chair in Contemporary Art Theory and Practice at Emerson College and also curated the Rose's Andy Warhol exhibition.

JustArts: As part of the Rose Art Museum's fall opening, you curated the Andy Warhol exhibit that is now on display. Would you tell us a bit more about your background with Warhol's work and why you chose to curate this exhibit?

Joseph Ketner: I've been working with Warhol seriously for maybe ten or twelve years. I've done a series of exhibitions, three or four, and published three or four books on Warhol. And when the Warhol Foundation, with whom I have a close relationship, offered the gift of 150 photographs to Brandeis-that gift comes with the stipulation that the University produce an exhibition with them-I made a proposal to do such a show. I gathered my colleague in Cincinnati, Raphaela Platow, who used to work with me at the Rose Art Museum, and we joined forces with [Head Preparator] Roy Dawes, who produced this.

JA: So, a little bit more about your background - we're curious as to what you do at Emerson College.

JK: I have the Foster Chair in Contemporary Art, the same Foster whose name is on the wing that houses the Warhol exhibition at the Rose, and I teach, and I also function as an independent curator, curating exhibitions around the world.

JA: How did you first get started learning about art history and interested in curating exhibits?

JK: I've been doing it for 35 years now, and I went to school to study history and European history and literature, and just one of those moments where I took a course and the light bulb went on, and I realized art history was what I wanted to do. And I wanted to be more active and less academic, so I chose to go into the museum profession.

JA: What do you find the most interesting about studying different types of artwork and artists?

JK: There's nothing more exciting to me than working with the living artist and participating in the creation of the art of my moment in time. And I do a lot of that too - it's really thrilling to watch something happen.

JA: It is. What was the last project of that type that you worked on?

JK: Well, last week, I produced an exhibition of Aldo Tambellini, a multimedia installationist at the James Cohan Gallery in New York City, and in two weeks I will do the same thing with a young Hungarian-English laser light artist at Emerson College and at the Boston Cyber Arts.

JA: If you could have coffee with any artist ever, who would it be and why?

JK: This question was asked of me much more colorfully once, when someone said "If you could have a cocktail with any artist, who would it be?" And I immediately answered, it would be L??szl?? Moholy-Nagy, and I know he'd be drinking frozen vodka straight up.

JA: Do you have a favorite period of art or style of art?

JK: No, there are many that I like to work with. You know, it's kind of like you get up in the morning and you decide, "I think I'll wear a red shirt today." Or, tomorrow, it might be a green one. I like many different things - there are certain things I'm not fond of. But for the most part, I enjoy working on a variety of things, and I've found over time that I have the luxury of working on subjects and with people whom I like.

JA: So, according to your website, you're currently working on a publication about post-World War II art. Could you talk a bit more about what is in this time period and what categorizes this sort of art?

JK: It's a subject that not many Americans know; Europeans know this particular niche that I'm dealing with. It's the German group zero, and a variety of artists, who at the time were known as the New Tendency, and these were the people who decided to break away from the French and American painting traditions of Pollock, de Kooning and some of the more famous French tradition of Picasso, Matisse, etc. It begins to break down painting; it began to introduce kinetic work, light work, new materials, video television, performance. And in my estimation, they should be better known because they were doing this in advance of most of the trends that are in the traditional narrative of art history.

JA: How do you go about discovering new artwork or artists that you're interested in publishing or curating?

JK: I spend an awful lot of time looking at artists' work. When it comes to contemporary artists, meaning, I visit them in their studios, I see what they're doing and I talk to them. And in terms of historical things, it's usually because, while I'm doing a historical research project, I'll bump into something about which I didn't know, and then I dig a little bit, and sometimes that something really interests me. So I pursue it.

JA: Would you tell us a bit more about what goes into the process of curating an exhibit, specifically the Warhol exhibit at the Rose?

JK: The idea. With contemporary artists, you don't start with an idea and look for the artist. With historical things, you should have a familiarity with the work done, and sometimes, like in the case of this show, the most obvious thing is the one that is hardest to find. For me, the obviousness of Warhol's use of photography had not really been treated in a critical, scholarly way. Yes, Christoph Heinrich, a few years ago, did a big publication, but I was surprised when I used the Warhol archives to find that he missed about 15 years worth of photography and the entire connection of Warhol's use of photography to his development of pop art. And that idea took some years to really refine to a point where I could articulate it this quickly on the telephone to a couple of young women from Brandeis interviewing me. It took a couple of years to get to that point. And then you start seeking the works that most appropriately realizes this idea. And then you create a visual experience. One of my hopes for many people - they're not going to go in there and read those labels, and try to get into the information, that's fine, I'm comfortable with that - but I want them to go in there and have an exciting and dynamic visual experience.
*