"I'm sort of in a Zen place right now where things happen and you deal with them. Sometimes good things happen. But in a show that's this complicated you're always managing things, and when you've got 40 artists and hundreds of artworks coming in from all over the world that's exciting, but it's also like the invasion of Normandy ... or something."

Douglas Fogle, curator of "Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International," which opens Saturday, spoke earlier this month about the exhibition he had spent nearly three years developing that was now materializing on his doorstep.

Talking to Fogle, one senses intellectual energy flowing like a current of quicksilver beneath remarks that are at once savvy and studied, broad and open, compounding as he speaks.

A product of the Chicago 'burbs, with an overlay of time served in the California graduate school world and an outlook heavily salted with political and philosophical explorations, Fogle promises an alternative viewpoint to the traditionally New York-centric one.

Relaxed and confident, the 44-year-old curator punctuates his comments with humor and emotion. Modulations in his expressive voice, and pauses, tell as much about the subject as his words do, as in an exclamatory praise of an artist, an assertion tempered with a soft laugh or the wistful verbal caress of an artwork that is a stand-in for a component of the human condition.

Fogle, with his casual attitude and catholic interests, gained a local "cool rating" when he first moved here and participated in the Pittsburgh art and club scenes. A recent photograph taken at the end of a day that had begun at 4 a.m., showing him atypically somber with drowsy eyes and a 5 o'clock shadow, inspired a colleague to quip: "curator as rock star."

Asked whether he expected to be actively involved during the long run of the exhibition, he answered, "Yes. I am the curator of contemporary art. It is my exhibition. And I intend to take care of it."

Following is a conversation that offers an early look at the 55th International unfolding throughout Carnegie Museum of Art.

Q: Working down to the last minute is pretty characteristic of contemporary shows, isn't it?

DF: Absolutely. Especially with commissions. The wonderful thing about a show like this is that you are able to take those risks and see what happens and help an artist realize a vision.

Q: What percentage of the work is commissioned?

DF: It depends on what you call a commission, but maybe there are six commission-like things. Fifty percent of the work in the show is brand new, 60 percent or more has never been seen in the U.S., and 99.1 percent -- because [the Carnegie] owns a couple of pieces -- has not been seen in Pittsburgh.

Q: Has the expansion in numbers of international contemporary shows in recent decades diluted the effect of the International?

DF: No. This show's unique. First of all, it's the second oldest, only by six months, next to the Venice Biennale. It's a very different kind of show. This show is institutionally based. Many of those shows are not. They sort of find a pavilion, or sometimes different museums, and they parachute a curator in, and the curator travels around the world and doesn't live there.

The curator for this show is always Pittsburgh-based and part of the institution, and that's integral. It's so much part of the DNA of the programmatic function of this museum in this city -- it has been for 100 years -- that I don't think those shows dilute this. I think it's its own animal, and a really interesting one because of that.

And those shows may have 80 artists, 100 artists. And we have 40. Maximum. ... That's about as many as you can actually legitimately do and give them enough space.

Q: Curators of recent Internationals have presented more than one artwork by an artist and that's been very effective.

DF: I really think that a show like this, especially when it's based in a museum, is a way to celebrate artists, not a way to celebrate the curator and build the curator's career. My training at the Walker Art Center [Minneapolis] was about making a connection between the public and the artists. And we get to do that every three years here, and bring the world here, and bring Pittsburgh to the world at the same time.

And for me [it's also what] it's not about. There's a real fetishism of the new, the new, the young, the new -- and this isn't 40 25-year-old artists. It never has been that way. It's always been a nice mix. [The ages of artists in the 2008 International range from 29 to 89.]

Sometimes the youngest artist in the room, by the way, is 80 years old. In a room of people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, sometimes the most spry and interesting, lively people can be older. Sometimes young people have old souls and make work that's ... [his voice trails off]. It's about work, about the artwork. The show. And it's really about conveying that and getting that communicative message between our viewers and the artists themselves.

Q: There are so many considerations when pulling a show this large together.

DF: What's interesting to me is to actually try to do a show that represents a certain kind of moment. A certain kind of moment -- not the moment or every moment [laughs]. The word "universal" comes up in some of the things I've written but it's also very much about the particular. If you think of our Jean Jacques Rousseau [the 18th-century political philosopher], reading about the universal and the particular in political theory, you know it's subjective and objective. Nothing's ever really objective in that way. It's always about being situated in a place, and that curator is just as situated as the artworks are.

So, it's not like my last will and testament. That's not what I'm getting at. But it's a very personal show, I would say. And I'm very invested in it emotionally from work to work.

Q: That would be one factor that links the artworks.

DF: I really do feel that there's a logic -- even if it's my logic, which may not be always apparent. There is a logical connection between artists in terms of their materials, in terms of their content, in terms of the feeling you get from the work. And some of it gets more abstract and some of it's more figurative and some of it's more directly engaged with the world.

But the artists I have chosen ... Richard Wright [for example] and Mark Manders and Paul Sietsema ... who's coming in a couple of minutes to find me -- they all make very different things. You wouldn't look at them and say, "Oh, that's very similar." But it makes perfect sense to me because of the kind of work and the issues dealt with in the work. There's something poetic about all of them. There's something about the handmade about all of them. There's something very touching and emotional about all of them in some weird way.

Gaston Bachelard, the French philosopher, in his book "The Poetics of Space" talks about the very subjective and poetic relationship we have to architecture spaces and shelter. It's a very beautiful book. And that has always been a very influential book to me.

Anyway, I think that a lot of the work in the show does connect, even though it's very different kinds of work.

Q: And those connections reveal themselves over time. Is longevity part of the definition of a successful art work?

DF: I think so, [one] that gives [in] multiple different ways over the course of time. I would encourage people to see the show more than once precisely for that reason. And to see the different seasons when the light changes, where there's natural light in the gallery for example.

Susan Philipsz is doing a piece in the Sculpture Court [with speakers] called "Sunset Song." It's her voice singing a 19th-century murder ballad called "The Banks of the Ohio."

Q: So, even though she's Scottish working in Berlin, it's an American folk song?

DF: It is. And she didn't know the Ohio River started here. I assumed she chose that [song] because she knew ... and I just told her the other day and she said, "You're kidding me."

But the wonderful thing about the piece, talking about the seasons and whatnot, is that there's a solar panel on it. When the sun starts going down, the song starts slowing down, her voice slows down ... and then it stops. And then the sun comes up, and [the piece] comes up. So it comes up with the sun, with the rhythm of the Earth in a way.

The Doug Aitken projection on the building will only be available after sundown. So when the galleries close and the show's over the show begins again with his work.

Q: The exhibition doesn't seem to shy away from life's passages, from death for example.

DF: I don't think this show's about death. But I think there's an acknowledgment in the show of a certain kind of cycle of life, of interaction, interactivity. I think there's a lot of hopefulness in the show, but I think there's a real sensitivity to the world and our place in the world and our relationship to the world and our movement through the world. I guess, that's what I would say, and yeah, I'm still working through that. The other day I was thinking, "Well, is the show melancholy?" No! I think there's some really fun and interesting things in it. But there is a sense in some of the work of the passage of time, I guess is what you're getting at.

Sharon Lockhart's film is about the passing of time. It's about these kids and this subjective experience of time that you have as a child, as opposed to an adult. Summer. Think about that. When you're a kid it lasts forever. It seems to at least. We're lucky to get a week or two off in the summer and it takes at least one week to get out of your life a little bit and your work life and then you have one more week and its over. ... That kind of wonder of childhood, and subjective experience of time, ties me back into that idea of Bachelard and all these poets.

It's a really busy world out there, and I think that artwork can slow you down a little bit and make you think -- ask questions of you and have you ask questions back of it. I do think people can talk to work.

We grow up watching film, so we think we know how to watch film, and we do because we've learned the grammar of film from when we're babies. We don't learn the grammar of contemporary art, and I don't want people to feel intimidated by it. To get people to slow down looking is the best thing you can do as a curator or an educator in terms of thinking about objects that are in front of you, that have been made by human beings as artworks. I think there's a lot of that in the show.

Q: You said people "can talk to work."

DF: Yeah. I mean that metaphorically, but I think people can have a dialogue with an artist through an object.

Q: You gave the first ever International title, "Life on Mars," to this show, and while that's catchy the content seems to be more vast than that.

DF: [The title's] supposed to be open-ended, and it's supposed to invite you to think about what it might be before you [see the show]. And I liked the title because David Bowie was a hero of mine. He still is, as a musician, but also in terms of his cultural references and stuff.

But, the whole metaphor [in my catalog essay] about the Pioneer 10 space probe, it's what we do as humans. We call out into the void because we want someone to answer. We want to connect with somebody. It's the basic need everybody has. Culturally, it's going to be very specific in terms of where you're located and who you are and how old you are. But I do think at some level it's something we all want -- to talk to somebody.

And I think that's what hopefully artwork can do. Help you talk to the artist and help you talk to each other and ...

Sietsema enters and, in mid-sentence, Fogle is snatched away to the galleries to tend to the final tweaking of the exhibition that he's traveled such a long way with.