Only Connect: Hayward Gallery director Ralph Rugoff on being an outsider and bird shit as art

“I just thought it was a great work of art that at 4pm every day 100,000 pigeons would suddenly be hovering around the Hayward. It would be very spooky but I don’t regret saying no to it as I couldn’t have lived with asking someone to clean up the bird shit from 100,000 pigeons.” Ralph Rugoff is on a roll. The softly-spoken American took over as the director of the Hayward Gallery on London’s South Bank in 2006 and has presided over its emergence as arguably the city’s most interesting public gallery. Under his watch, the Hayward has hosted solo shows for the likes of Jeremy Deller, Tracey Emin, George Condo, Pipilotti Rist and David Shrigley as well as unusual (some would say provocative) exhibitions like Light Show and Invisible: Art about the Unseen, 1957-2012. But today, sat in a glass-fronted reading room overlooking Waterloo Bridge, Ralph Rugoff is on a roll reminiscing about those ideas he had to turn down. The mass pigeon feed was a proposal from the Austrian art collective Gelitin for the 2008 show Psycho Buildings. When the clean-up operation proved fatal to their creative vision, they came up with a Plan B – flooding the gallery’s terraces to create infinite boating lakes over the river. But as Ralph recalls, turning down Gelitin was a rare occurrence. “We’ve gone through with most things that we really wanted to do,” he says. “Last fall as part of the show Art of Change: New Directions from China there was supposed to be a piece with a very high pressure hose that was just wildly out of control in one of the buildings on our terraces. I mean a hose that could really hurt you; so you couldn’t actually go in the space, you could just watch it. It was a really nice piece but we had some construction issue so we couldn’t do it. “It’s an interesting moment because there is so much money in the commercial art world and the commercial galleries are able to offer their more successful artists almost carte blanche in terms of helping with their production. That makes it quite difficult for public galleries who don’t have that kind of budget. People are creating more and more expensive artworks and sometimes those are great, but spending money isn’t necessarily the way to make more interesting art.” So in an age of reduced exhibition budgets, what is it Ralph and his team look for? “We’re very focussed on trying to find artists whose work seems to be adventurous and is not art historically navel-gazing, but is reaching out and looking at what is happening in the world and responding to that. We have incredible pop media that’s got a sort of military precision in making people feel the same things at the same moment, but art does something totally different. It traffics in ambiguities and uncertainties and ideally it’s about undoing the whole scaffolding of learned knowledge and assumptions that we have. “I really do think the one thing most art has in common is that no-one really understands it at first; you have to spend time with it and it’s a process. Increasingly it feels we have less and less patience for going through that process. We want to have five different screens open at the same time and we want to get a little of this and a little of that. But art is about engaging people in a process and we look for artists who really try to make that clear in their invitation to the viewer; that the viewer is where the work is happening. The work is not happening on a wall, in an object. That object is just a trigger and where the catalyst and the energy and the thinking comes – and where it lives ultimately – is in the heart and mind of the person interacting with it.” David Shrigley – I’m Dead at Brain Activity (Photography by Linda Nylind) Martin Creed – Work No. 960 This idea of the gallery-goer’s active role in the art process is an idea most famously articulated by Marcel Duchamp who said that half the meaning comes from the viewer. For Ralph this is more than a theory; it lies at the heart of his approach to putting on exhibitions. But he agrees that at a gallery with as much sheer physical presence as the Hayward, the space is a third participant in this conversation. “I think good curating always tries to challenge our traditional ideas about authorship and where meaning is generated,” he says. “Space is really interesting. I think the great thing about the Hayward is its flexibility. Yes it has this concrete-cave-bunker- like-feeling and you feel like you are sheltered from any potential nuclear disasters, but also from the outside world, so you can have this very intense, robust encounter. “I think if inside this great concrete shell you just had a series of cookie-cutter rooms that were linked to each other in a conveyor-belt fashion then it wouldn’t be a successful gallery. What makes the Hayward interesting is that for most of the galleries there are three or four entrances and exits into other galleries, and there’s a front stair and a back stair. If you want to make an exhibition that has