Ultra Swede.

In 1958, the Danish art-lover Knud W. Jensen, having sold his dairy company, opened a museum for Modern art in the seaside town of Humlebaek, outside Copenhagen. The Louisiana - named for the three consecutive wives of the site's original owner, all called Louisa - has been described as the most beautiful art museum in Europe, and many Scandinavians, myself included, would credit the institution with providing some of their most powerful experiences of contemporary art.

Last summer the Louisiana's governors named a new director. Their appointment: Lars Nittve, a Swede, and perhaps the most influential Scandinavian curator of his generation. After working as a critic for the Stockholm daily Svenska Dagbladet, and also for Artforum, in the early '80s, Nittve was hired as a curator by Stockholm's Moderns Museet in 1986, where, a year later, he organized "Implosion - A Post-Modern Perspective" - the show that roused the Swedish art world from its Modernist slumber. A long and fierce debate ensued in the press.

In 1990 Nittve assumed yet another position, this time as the director of the Rooseum, a then-new space in the town of Malmo, in Sweden's far south. With his arrival there the center of gravity shifted in Sweden's art world: under Nittve's direction the Rooseum became not just one of the leading art centers in Scandinavia, but one of the hottest institutions of its kind in Europe. Besides organizing one-person shows of American artists such as Sherrie Levine, Allan McCollum, and Charles Ray, and retrospectives of Swedes like Jan Hafstrom and Ola Billgren, he conceived two Important thematic shows: "Trans/Mission," 1991, an attempt to mirror the process of cultural decentralization without getting caught in the usual traps of romanticizing the marginal or the proverbial Other that are endemic to explorations of race and nationality; and "Passageworks," 1993, a poetic treatment of transitions between internal and external space, in the psychological, physical, and architectonic senses. These exhibitions revealed Nittve's rare ability to wed a theoretical or conceptual approach to an esthetic one. Curatorial work, as Nittve points out, has its own questions of craft; and, indeed, what I remember most vividly about his exhibitions is the simplicity and clarity of the installations. The question before me as I sat down with him in Malmo to discuss his new appointment: Will Nittve, with his reputation as a champion of the cutting edge, change the Louisiana or will the Louisiana, with its long-standing commitment to established as well as recent art, change him?

- DB

DANIEL BIRNBAUM: The Louisiana began as a museum of Modern art. What does it mean to lead an institution like that into the next century?

LARS NITTVE: The arrival of the new century obviously raises the question of how to define Modernism. Depending on how they've built their collections, this could be a time for a lot of museums of Modern art to redefine themselves. Take the Museum of Modern Art in New York: it's a truly magnificent collection, but the understanding of Modernism it reflects is mainly formal. It would take a lot of adjustments to modify it in a way that would link the collection naturally to the present. I don't say it's impossible, but in that respect the Louisiana, oddly enough, is in a better position.

DB: How so? What's the collection's strength?

LN: The museum is probably best known for its Giacomettis - 24 sculptures - though there are many other strengths: Pop art; some of the best of both Yves Klein and Anselm Kiefer. But I'm thinking more about underlying ideology. The founder, Knud Jensen, is something of a phenomenon in the museum world. He's never collected programmatically; his driving force has always been his intense curiosity. His openness has spared the Louisiana the deadlock that faces many other museums today.

DB: Even so, you've established yourself as a representative of quite specific forms of contemporary art. Which will change, you or the Louisiana, when you take over as director?

LN: At the Louisiana I'll have up to ten times more resources available to me than at the Rooseum. I'll still try to show international cutting-edge art, but that shouldn't be my only goal. My ideal is to create an interplay between contemporary shows and exhibitions of older art, and I don't see any real contradiction between the two: a presentation of a classic artist can be intellectually up-to-date, since the horizon against which we view art constantly changes. We accept the idea that Picasso changed our understanding of Cezanne; that process is continuous and ongoing.

DB: Perhaps the Louisiana has been concentrating too much on big popular shows?

LN: I don't think so - not if "popular" means attracting a large audience. Attracting a large audience is never a problem.

DB: The Louisiana is in fact one of the best-attended art museums in Northern Europe.

LN: Yes, and it has in any case run quite an ambitious program of contemporary art, with shows by Jeff Wall, Kiki Smith, Jana Sterbak, and many others, besides popular favorites like Monet, Bonnard, and Hopper. What's been missing, though, is a clear idea of the relationship between these different kinds of shows. The Louisiana's strength could be an ability to create interactions among the diverse parts of its program.

DB: Do you have a show in mind that you'd like to do at the Louisiana?

LN: I'd very much like to take a look at Turner, as the starting point for a discussion of our ideas of nature today. The idea would be to show how Turner's paintings mirror the conceptual construct of nature that was put in place at the dawn of the industrial age. Now, in our post-industrial society, we're living through the collapse of that construct. A critical view of Turner's work could be interwoven with discussions of science, technology, and representation - important questions for a lot of contemporary artists, often working in media outside painting.

DB: What projects did you work on recently?

LN: My last big show at the Rooseum was "Nutopi" [Nowtopia, which opened on June 2 and closed on September 1]. For the first time I worked with a group of artists who are all younger than I am: Rirkrit Tiravanija, Andrea Zittel, Dan Peterman, and several others from that generation, people now in their early 30s. Their work relates to the utopianism of the prewar avant-garde, but they don't see any possibility of realizing the utopian dream. So their works aren't utopian, but they're not dystopian either - they're something else, something related to those categories but really outside them. Perhaps that's a rather exact reflection of our present state.

I'm also planning "Sunshine & Noir," a big survey of Los Angeles art from the '60s to the present, to open at the Louisiana in '97 and then travel. I think it's important that Europe get a comprehensive account of Los Angeles art; most people here seem to think that all current American art can be traced back to New York.

DB: These are large projects, but they don't seem quite on the same level of ambition as the three big shows you've done in the last eight years, "Implosion," "Trans/Mission," and "Passageworks. "

LN: They're different, but I wouldn't say less ambitious, especially the L.A. show. I think it would be very difficult today to create an exhibition that pretended to offer a summary of what's happening in art internationally; there's no overarching movement that would give you a peg to hang it on.

DB: Do you think that kind of defining exhibition demands an overarching movement?

LN: No, you might be able to make an exhibition that took the absence of a movement as a starting point and theme. That could be a radical show. I was invited to submit a proposal for Documenta X, in 1997, which I did. I didn't get the commission, but I wouldn't have entered the running if I'd thought a comprehensive exhibition was impossible.

DB: Do you have any retrospective or revisionist afterthoughts about the large shows you've done?

LN: When I was working on "Implosion," in the mid '80s, the prevailing debate in the art world was about the end of Modernity. So it was at that point quite natural to produce a historically oriented exhibition tracing certain lines from Duchamp and Picabia all the way up to artists of my own generation - Sherrie Levine, Allan McCollum, Cindy Sherman, and so on. That may have been the last time one could find a structure that in a rather unproblematic way could be taken as a starting point for a general investigation of the field of current art. But I didn't really create a structure in "Implosion," I dismantled one, and looked at the space that its breakdown opened up.

DB: In the catalogue, I remember, you quoted David Bowie's line "The vacuum created the arrival of freedom." Didn't "Implosion" suggest a certain nihilistic embrace of the breakdown it described?

LN: I probably can't deny that. And I guess it applies to all my large exhibitions, including "Nutopi": they all try to find material forms that somehow suggest a state outside or beyond our culture's hierarchies.

DB: "Trans/Mission," which came four years after "Implosion," seemed much more explicitly political.

LN: One of the goals in "Trans/Mission" was to evoke a process that had become conspicuous during the '80s: the increasing awareness of the pluralism of culture. The challenge was to try to mirror the global political and cultural situation without romanticizing what had been considered marginal or exotic. The writing of Homi Bhabha was an important inspiration for that show.

DB: Elsewhere you've mentioned "Magiciens de la terre" [Magicians of the earth, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 1989] as a negative inspiration for it.

LN: I want to stress this: "Magiciens de la terre" was one of the most important shows of that time. But it was in many ways a horrible exhibition. To fail to acknowledge artists from other cultures as artists in our sense of the word, and to deny them that status by calling them "magicians of the earth" instead, is to short-circuit the discussion before it's gotten off the ground. There were obvious traces of colonialism in "Magiciens." "Trans/Mission" was in a way my reply to it, and to some other shows dealing with multiculturalism.

DB: Did you see it as an advantage to be working in Malmo, a place on the margins in European terms?

LN: That was important. I wanted to confront the simplistic view of what "margin" and "center" mean. Just for example, the margin is something quite different for an Eastern European artist than for an artist from Iceland, South America, or Japan. And there are so many people today with double heritages, links and allegiances to more than one culture. Fariba Hajamadi and Anish Kapoor were probably the exemplary artists in "Trans/Mission." Cultural hybridity, once an issue only for exiles and emigres, has become a dominant human predicament.

DB: "Passageworks" seemed more poetic, less theoretical, than your earlier large exhibitions.

LN: Maybe that was my most personal large exhibition. It primarily dealt not with displacements in overall systems but with the paradoxical, often intimate spaces between them. Asta Groting's "Verdauungswege" [Digestive systems] were one departure point; another was Rachel Whiteread's seemingly straightforward inversion of ordinary spaces, her ability to turn them inside out. I was also interested in Genevieve Cadieux's meditations on the kiss and the scar. The whole show dealt with the passage between the inner and the outer.

DB: Still, wouldn't you say that the show's focus on the body made it typical of its time?

LN: Maybe. If so, though, I did manage to show that you can curate an exhibition about the body without drowning in blood and sperm.

DB: You've established the Rooseum as a respected art center in Scandinavia, but you haven't created that much interest in Scandinavian art in other parts of the world. Do you see this as a failure?

LN: No, I've never considered it my duty to promote Scandinavian art. If I'm interested in an artist, it's never because he or she is from a particular country. I do think that there are good Swedish artists, Ulrik Samuelson for example, who haven't gotten the international attention they deserve. The art system isn't perfect. On the other hand, there were artists in Sweden in the '60s and the '70s who did get a shot at international fame, but weren't so eager to pursue it.

DB: You've said you consider curating an equivalent to critical work. What are the most important theoretical references for your thinking?

LN: I do consider the curator a kind of critic; in art, actually, curating may even be the most effective critical tool of all. As far as references go, I'll probably never completely get rid of the traces of my background in Marxist theory. But I did try to disentangle myself from Marxism in the late '70s, and the most important theorist for me in that effort was Jacques Derrida. His critique of dialectics and of closed systems is effective and productive. Then, like a lot of people, I've borrowed some potent figures of thought from Jean Baudrillard. Otherwise I've been rather eclectic in the intellectual framework for my shows.

DB: Do you think it's a problem for an exhibition to rely heavily on theory?

LN: Ultimately, I don't think the idea behind a thematic show should be too complex. The art itself should provide the complications. What's decisive for an exhibition's success is curatorial craft - the choice of artworks, the rhythm of the installation, the ability to let the works' multiple meanings play off each other.

DB: You've produced three large critical shows; will you stop there, like Kant after his three Critiques?

LN: Oh sure - I've always seen myself as the Immanuel Kant of the art world [laughter].

DB: Is there anything you're particularly looking forward to in your upcoming shows?

LN: In May, a large show opens at the Louisiana, organized by two of the museum's curators, Anneli Fuchs and Lars Grambye, and four guest curators - Ute Meta Bauer from Germany, Iwona Blazwick from England, Laura Cottingham from the USA, and Bruce Ferguson from Canada. The title of the show is "NowHere," and it's actually the biggest ever at the Louisiana. We will take down the permanent collection to make room for this event. In a way, it's an attempt to produce a major exhibition at a time when, as I said before, it is no longer possible to link contemporary artistic production to a particular movement. It will be a polyphonous show for an era characterized by difference.