Young at art.

From 1989 to 1997 Eva Presenhuber ran Zurich's Galerie Walcheturm, turning this singular institution - the space depends on a board of trustees though it also offers work for sale - into one of the major venues for new art in Switzerland. With Jason Rhoades' current show, Presenhuber launches a new collaboration with Galerie Hauser & Wirth. Located in a massive refurbished brewery at Limmatstrasse 270 (home to the Kunsthalle, the Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, and several innovative galleries), "Hauser & Wirth 2" can only grow in status as one of Zurich's prime destinations for contemporary art. Taking Presenhuber's place at Walcheturm is art historian and critic Claudia Spinelli, previously curator of the Project Room at Zurich's Helmhaus. I invited Waicheturm past and future to talk about the gallery's legacy, and their respective new roles.

HANS RUDOLF REUST: Today, as a result of your directorship, most of the artists represented at Walcheturm (with the notable exceptions of Gerwald Rockenschaub, Candida Hofer, Fischli/Weiss, Jean-Frederic Schnyder, and Franz West) are young, often exhibiting for the first time. What was your guiding concept when you began there nine years ago?

EVA PRESENHUBER: I started from scratch as a gallerist, coming out of art school in Vienna. My vision of a gallery was rather idealistic - as it still is. I try. hard to distinguish between art and pseudo-art, no matter what generation it's from. When I started out, I was inspired and encouraged by two Swiss artists I'd gotten to know in Vienna - Ugo Rondinone and Urs Frei - who were fresh out of school. I wanted to present new art as well as internationally recognized figures, people like Angela Bulloch and Douglas Gordon, with whom I'll continue to work at Hauser & Wirth 2. It remains important to me to discover new artists, like Urs Fischer, an artist in his early twenties who had a show at Walcheturm last August. On the other hand, Dieter Roth is also important to me; he's been a virtual myth for some time now, of course, but he remains commercially undiscovered.

CLAUDIA SPINELLI: The Walcheturm model - the combination of a commercial gallery supported by a hoard of trustees - is an ideal way to promote young artists. My approach has also been heavily marked by personal association with artists, for instance with Lori Hersberger and Susann Walder. Hersberger creates ironically sentimental environments using wall-size movie projections, air balloons, kitschy colors, and soft, fleecy rug swatches. Walder is an original self-portraitist; her works have an altogether unique stylistic eclecticism. We're all the same age, and we share similar experiences, going back to the youth uprisings in Zurich of the late '70s and early '80s; our creativity emerged in the wake of those events. Now, in place of the subversive mobility and spontaneity of that time, a highly professionalized attitude dominates. But the underlying premises are the same: young artists are still starting from the idea of "the end of the new" - recombining and recycling an enormous stock of found images.

HRR: Does Hauser & Wirth 2 mark a real departure for Zurich?

EP: My partnership with Iwan Wirth actually goes back five years. I knew him first as a collector who was truly receptive to artists' visions - and who wasn't afraid to buy on the spot. I was astonished to meet someone like that in Zurich. Later he became a board member of Walcheturm. We shared an interest in Rondinone and Frei right from the start, or more precisely, our interests in these artists developed together.

HRR: Will the partnership change in the new venture?

EP: Our basic direction won't change. But success, of course, raises the level of support one has to provide to promote artists. Finally though, the role the work will assume internationally is up to the artist; I don't think that you can simply push someone into a position in the market.

HRR: With such small distances between centers, and highly developed transportation and communication networks, Switzerland functions in many respects like a single city. On the other hand, real exchange between linguistically divided cultures in many ways remains a myth. What is decisive, though, is Switzerland's status within Europe as a crossroads for people, money, and ideas. Under the circumstances, can there be a specifically Swiss art?

CS: I think it's dubious to judge the achievement of a particular artist by the extent to which he belongs to a particular country, or, for that matter, even to a local scene. At the start of an artist's development, milieu is no doubt important, but good work ultimately has to exist apart from its context.

EP: I do think, though, that individual artists can "make" a scene. Of course, there's always a subculture that functions up to a certain point - beyond which individuals go off on their own to find commercial representation.

CS: Unfortunately, within Switzerland there's no scene that has survived intact. Artists aren't fighting for commercial success collectively, the way for instance those around Damien Hirst did in London.

HRR: Why is that?

EP: Public-sector subsidies are also very good; you can live on artists' grants until you're thirty. Switzerland's public institutions and galleries have very rich international programs, so people are quite well informed, which creates a receptive environment for artists. Nevertheless, young artists have to get beyond the sometimes insular environment in Switzerland's relatively small urban centers.

CS: Fortunately, younger curators are relatively open-minded and less fixated on geographic criteria. They're working much more thematically. For me, the multicultural impulse, for instance, is far more interesting the more interconnected it gets - when the global activates a given (and always purely accidental) site.

EP: That is a complex matter. I still see differences in mentality between the linguistic regions: the aesthetics of the John Armleder circle in Geneva, say, are different from those of Fischli/Weiss' circle in Zurich, and that's just one generation. Switzerland is also usually thought of as the most American country in Europe. Not in terms of scale, of course, but in terms of how people think: very pragmatic, and a tad puritanical too. We can't forget how incredibly influenced by America we are - and that the reverse is much less the case.

CS: I try to discover common points between artists in different places and to promote an exchange between them. That's why I'm also working with people outside my scene, for instance the Scottish artist Ross Sinclair, or someone quite young, like Costa Vece. I value curiosity and openness most; after all, when you're involved with art, you do want to be surprised.

Translated from the German by David Jacobson.