There’s more to running a gallery than art, Tate Liverpool’s outgoing director Christoph Grunenberg tells Laura Davis

THE video of a masked man smearing his naked torso with condiments, a human figure with a rabbit’s head and 50ft penis and a kinky Santa’s workshop filled with melted chocolate launched Christoph Grunenberg’s tenancy as Tate Liverpool director with an intentional bang.

American artist Paul McCarthy’s first European survey exhibition shocked, bored, amused or thrilled visitors and critics depending on their sensibilities.

But one thing was certain – the bespectacled German curator had arrived and the Albert Dock gallery would never be quite the same again.

Within its Grade I-listed walls over the following 10 years there would be a replica supermarket, a head made of frozen blood, LSD tablets, the Turner Prize exhibition and landmark shows of work by Picasso, Klimt and Magritte.

Grunenberg arrived in 2001 with aspirations to build a more ambitious programme, collaborate with top-tier international galleries and build local interest in contemporary art. Ten years later, as he prepares to embark on a new challenge as the incoming director of Kunsthalle Bremen, he is able to say that he achieved every one.

“Being from the outside I came without any of the prejudices British people might have had,” he says.

“What I saw here was a beautiful city and a great gallery that would allow me to do a brilliant programme.”

He began as he intended to continue. As well as being an attention-grabbing exhibition, the McCarthy retrospective was a European premiere and had originated at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.

Future shows would involve collaborations with, among others, Kunsthaus Zurich, Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, the Albertina in Vienna and Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt (Grunenberg’s birth city), with the 2005 Summer of Love exhibition touring to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Before long, London-based critics were no longer asking why such significant shows were taking place in a provincial city – or not as often at least.

“There’s now an expectation that important exhibitions happen at Tate Liverpool and I think we are also still one of the very few venues in the country that stages exhibitions of this scale, complexity and importance, with so many important international loans and in collaboration with international venues,” says Grunenberg, 49.

However, more can be done to ensure that Britain, like countries in mainland Europe, have strong cultural scenes in all its cities, he adds.

“There’s been a lack of ambition in some places and sometimes a lack of funds, but I always think if you want to make something happen you just do it,” he says.

Behind every successful show are many months, often years, of work – persuading collectors to loan their precious paintings and Tate nationally to fund it.

For the Klimt exhibition, which set the Austrian artist’s work in the context of decorative art and architectural practice in turn-of-the-century Vienna, negotiations continued until just a few months before its launch.

“There were many moments when we did think ‘oh god it’s not going to work’ and that continued until fairly late in the game,” reveals Grunenberg.

Two key pieces, Judith and The Three Ages of Woman, both borrowed from Italian-based collectors, were agreed with just weeks to spare.

“That’s the boring back story of any exhibition,” he continues.

“What counts is what’s on the wall and most people don’t understand the wheeling and dealing that goes on behind the scenes.”

Neither do visitors guess at the lengths Grunenberg and his team have gone to source ingredients for some of the art works on display nor the legal hoops they sometimes have to jump through.

For The Uncanny, a solo show by Los Angeles-based sculptor, performance and installation artist Mike Kelley, the Tate Liverpool director purchased two blow-up sex dolls on his company credit card. The accounts department didn’t bat an eyelid.

A video work by French artist Niki de Saint Phalle, which features female nudity, threw up a legal problem.

“We were endlessly trying to find out how old this rather obscure actress was in this film from the 70s,” explains Grunenberg.

“Unfortunately she didn’t have a glittering career so it was rather difficult to find out. In the end we asked the filmmaker who told us she was definitely over-18.”

Then there are financial obstacles to overcome.

It took the director all his charm to persuade the Tate board to fund his 2002-3 show Shopping, which featured an in-gallery Tesco supermarket alongside important works by artists spanning the 20th century including Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Damian Hirst.

In exploring the relationship between modern and contemporary art and consumerism, this show began a theme of exploring art’s two-way connections to popular culture that would continue with Remix (pop music) and Summer of Love (1960s counter culture).

“At the opening of Shopping we had this fantastic £1 market by a Thai artist which had all these cheap, plastic products from Asia,” recalls Grunenberg.

“There was a stampede when it opened with people grabbing these very banal products and buying them because they were sold by an artist.”

During his time at Tate Liverpool, he has felt privileged to work with a wishlist of fascinating artists – among them “McCarthy, Jason Rhoades, the Chapman brothers were fantastic, a lot of the artists in Summer of Love I really enjoyed listening to them talking about their engagement with counter culture and experiments with drugs”.

But after a decade of cycling to the Albert Dock and coping with the breeze off the Mersey – once losing a pair of glasses to a particularly strong gust – on Friday it will be time to depart.

“It’s a very intense job, – an endless cycle of exhibitions, every three months sometimes – and 10 years feels like a natural time span to make something happen. There comes a point when it’s time to look for a new challenge,” he says.

“And in some ways nothing will ever beat the excitement and the exhilaration of Capital Culture year in 2008.”

Grunenberg’s successor will have his/her own obstacles to over come.

While Liverpool has a much healthier cultural scene than it did in 2001, the general picture is less rosy.

“I’m very worried about people starting to make compromises, people thinking more about budgets than about art and ideas and I don’t think Tate is immune to that,” he says.

“I do hope my successor will have the same authority and freedom that I have had.”