If we were to make a list of all the professions in the world and write a name next to them, for “curator” we would probably choose the name of Hans Ulrich Obrist. Born in Zurich five decades ago, Hans Ulrich Obrist is perhaps the most recognisable curator of the contemporary art world both inside and outside of it; his open approach to curating across many disciplines since the 1990s has paved the way for new combinations between art and other fields of human expression and knowledge. At the same time, he constantly collaborates with artists to question and reinvent the way we understand and experience art to begin with. A dedicated facilitator and self-proclaimed “helper” of artists everywhere, Hans Ulrich Obrist is at home in the art world but never ceases to travel and explore, both mentally and geographically. He discussed with us his ideas about curating in different contexts, the urgency of curating in the 21st century, and just why everyone uses the #curated hashtag on social media these days.
KIRIAKOS SPIROU: What is easier for you: Interviewing other people or being interviewed yourself?
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: It’s always an oscillation. I give interviews every day and I have conversations with artists every day. So both are part of the same ongoing infinite conversation, I would say. I’ve always liked to talk about my work because it’s a way of reflecting on exhibitions; it makes me think. It’s something that has always accompanied my exhibition-making and, as exhibitions are ephemeral and have a limited time span, there are all these different possible ways to trace them. One is, of course, through visual documentation and images, another is through the memory of the people who saw it, then you have film and technology, and then, of course, there is also the possibility to talk about an exhibition. I’ve always seen this as a part of my work, as a way to build bridges.
KS: You have turned your interviews into a whole body of work. Your Interview Project has been underway for many years. How many interviews have you done so far as part of that project?
HUO: I think maybe 3000 hours. It all really started with this idea of me having conversations with artists every day and, in a certain moment, I just found this trace, like a beginning of a private research archive. And then, little by little, I started publishing some. You know, most of it is still unpublished— I would say that about 90 percent of it is unpublished and might be published in the future. So the production of content is much faster than the publishing of the material. At some point, [filmmaker] Jonas Mekas told me in the mid-90s: “Why don’t you just put up a digital camera, so then you’ll also have it on film?” So many of the interviews are on film actually: I’ve got nearly 2000 hours of film. In fact, the film material has never been used, so it’s there for future exhibitions, or archives or online channels for the interviews to be shown.
KS: Now, looking back on the whole project, do you think the way artists reflect on their work or talk about their work has changed over the years?
HUO: For me, the model has always been David Sylvester’s book, Interviews with Francis Bacon, for which he spoke to Francis Bacon again and again throughout their many years of friendship. Little by little one gets closer to Bacon, and I think it takes a long time to have a conversation about the work. And, of course, the most interesting thing for me with artists is to have evolving conversations like Sylvester and Bacon, where I talk with the same artists again and again for 25 years, and little by little we talk about aspects and layers of their practice. And that, of course, changes over the years, because we grow very familiar with each other, friendship grows and it all becomes a kind of long, intimate conversation. So that’s certainly not changed. But, otherwise, I don’t see any major changes in terms of how artists talk about their work. I think it’s still the same as with the memoir of Cocteau and Diaghilev. That said, there are so many surprises in conversations, and I love surprises. An artist can change what I expect from the discussion, and that happens all the time.
KS: You are active on social media, so you must have noticed how online we often use words like “curating” or “aesthetic” or other terms that are associated mostly with the fine arts. Do you think this implies a shift in how we understand curation? What do you think about this?
HUO: I think this is interesting. I realised this shift was happening when I did the book A Brief History of Curating, which was a series of interviews I did with pioneering curators like Lucy Lippard, Anne d’Harnoncourt, Walter Hopps, Harald Szeemann… People that are like my professional grandparents, you know? People who have done amazing work and their history had to be written down. So I wrote down the history of curating through these protagonists, in retrospect from the very beginning of the 20th century. It was a way, for me, of recording our history of a century of exhibition-making through these conversations. I did this book mainly for myself because I felt I wanted a memory of these discussions. I wanted to find out where my own profession was coming from, but a history of curating was missing. And I always do the books which I’m missing—when I want to read a book and it doesn’t exist, I have to do it myself. Which is kind of an old recipe. So I did this book, and all of a sudden it exploded and became a bestseller. It was very unexpected, we didn’t really know why. But then we realised people from the design world, and the music world, and the architecture world were reading the book—our readership wasn’t only from the art world.
So ten years ago, all of a sudden, through the internet and the digital reality, everybody was interested in curation and in curating outside of the art world—curating of science, curating of architecture, curating of music. And that clearly marks a shift. So we can say there is an extended notion of curating. Already in the 60s, Joseph Beuys talked about the expanded notion of art. And as art always leads and curating follows, it’s normal that the case would be that, as there’s an expanded notion of art, there’s also an expanded notion of curating. That shift involves not only other disciplines but also what is actually being exhibited, because if you look at art history from the 1900s to the 60s, it’s mainly a history of objects. It’s actually interesting when you realise that. Then, in the 60s— and gradually more and more in the final decades of the 20th century—there’s conceptual art, that which Lucy Lippard calls “the dematerialisation of art”. And then we moved on to the non-object, and then, of course, Michel Serres talks about the quasi-object. The quasi-object is an object where meaning production occurs only when people interact and engage with the object, not otherwise. And last but not least there would be Timothy Morton’s hyper-objects, which are large systems that we come across in the age of the Anthropocene.
So, in that sense, we could say that curating is not just a curating of objects anymore. Of course, it continues to be also a curating of objects, because we still have a lot of objects—sculptures, paintings, the work that is being made, so it’s not that these have disappeared—but in addition to that, there is also a curation of non-objects, quasi-objects and hyper-objects. And that whole composite reality, of course, relates to an expanded notion of curating.
KS: In what way is this extended notion of curating part of your own practice? How does it affect your own work?
HUO: That’s an interesting question. I think I’ve always been driven by an immense kind of curiosity, and I want to understand not only what’s happening in art but also what’s happening in science, music, literature, architecture… I think we can understand what’s happening in art only if we understand what’s happening in other disciplines. Ever since I was a teenager I travelled all over Europe and all over the world to research and did thousands of studio visits. But I did the same with science and music and architecture: I would just go and visit architects in their studio all over the world, I would go and see scientists, have conversations with them. And, of course, that going outside of the art world and speaking with other practitioners started to influence me in many different ways. For example, I started bringing science or music or literature into my exhibitions. We did the show Laboratorium in the late 90s in Antwerp with Barbara Vanderlinden, where we brought together art and science, and asked scientists to do table top experiments. I also started bringing architecture into exhibitions, like Cities on the Move with Hou Hanru, which was a big Asian show where we bridged art and architecture. So I would bring these other disciplines into the context of art and artists, to make it more pluri-disciplinary. I would bring music into my exhibitions, think about exhibitions that could have a soundtrack. I would bring in design. And, of course, at a certain moment there is also the reciprocity, where I would be invited by the design world, or the architecture world, or the music world, or the literature world to curate exhibitions in their field. And that had a huge impact on me. I was invited by the theatre world to do a conference, or some kind of play in 2005, and I thought that we could put my Interview Project on stage; that was the first Marathon, which has now become the Serpentine Marathon. Without an invitation from the theatre world I would have never invented a marathon. So it can be very creatively influential, or inspiring, to find yourself suddenly in another context and not in your home.
For curating, it’s maybe similar to what David Hockney describes for painting. He’s David Hockney the painter, but then he browses other fields: he goes into art history, he writes a book, he makes a film, goes into technology and then comes back to painting. I will always be in the art world: I have a craft which is to curate exhibitions, but then I will step out of the art world and move around, and then bring those experiences back to the art world. So I learn from all these experiences, and these are all connected to me growing up in Switzerland very near to a monastery library. As a child, I would always go with my parents to this monastery library and look at the medieval books from the tenth, 11th century, from the Middle Ages. And I would read about these monks who went from monastery to monastery and learn everything they could learn and then move on to the next monastery and bring the knowledge they had, and at the same time take on board new knowledge. And I always felt, not in a religious way but in a secular way, that this model of the migrating monk is somehow an analogy to my work. I’ve lived in many cities: I’ve lived many years in Paris, I worked in Rome for Villa Medici, now I’m in London for many years. I learn everything from these cities and try to give everything I know back to them.
KS: I would like us to go a bit deeper into this idea of what it means to curate in the 21st century. There have already been overlaps in the past century between art and other fields, so what is it that makes our times particular in that sense?
HUO: I think our time is a very specific time, in that we realise more and more we live in a world of depleted resources. I spoke a lot about this with Gustav Metzger, of course. Then we talk about ecology, and we need to talk about extinction. There is, I think, a mass extinction happening: Elizabeth Kolbert talks about the “sixth extinction”. Species are disappearing. Our own species, humankind, is an endangered species, and at the same time lots of species disappear but also cultural phenomena disappear: we have languages disappearing, for example. My own Instagram is devoted to the saving of handwriting, the celebration of handwriting and doodling. You know, Steve Jobs hated the idea of a stylus, so the iPhone and the first smartphones never had a stylus because he wanted it to be a minimalistic object. So this means you couldn’t digitally sketch and doodle, and handwriting is very endangered. So I wanted to bring digital and analogue back, to host a celebration of handwriting on my Instagram. All that has to do with resisting this extinction. At the same time, we have extinction through the homogenising process of globalisation that leads to the disappearance of different phenomena. And then we have a counter- reaction to this process, which leads to lack of tolerance, which leads to a lack of common future, which then leads to new forms of nationalism and racism. We need to resist both of these, and we need to find a third way.
I read every morning 15 minutes of Édouard Glissant, because he was the first writer to say that we need “mondialité”, that we need a third way, we need a global dialogue that doesn’t annihilate difference but produces difference. And so, for me, it’s very important to read every morning Édouard Glissant, and find out how we can resist these homogenising forces, how we can resist also the reaction and counter reaction, how we can find a global dialogue that produces difference. To give you one example of an application of this methodology: I’ve just come back from Milan, where we had the finissage [closing] of Take Me (I’m Yours) at Hangar Bicocca, which is an exhibition I started more than 20 years ago with Christian Boltanski at the Serpentine. He told me that many artists, including himself, were interested in this idea of dissemination, that the artwork wouldn’t be confined in the museum but you can take it home, to find other circuits of distribution. So we came up with this exhibition, Take me (I’m Yours) where the rule of the game is that the viewer can take all the objects away. You can put them all in a bag and take the exhibition home if you want to. That exhibition started at the Serpentine in 1995 and has been touring now for 23 years. It has been to Paris, New York, Copenhagen, and we’ve now reached our most recent iteration at Hangar Bicocca in Milan. Every time we do a new version of it in a local context. So this is a global concept, an exhibition that tours all over the world, but when it goes to a city I’m not just shipping the idea, I’m not just imposing the idea without looking and listening to the local context. So in every city, it’s a very different exhibition. That is mondialité. It’s a global exhibition, it’s all about generosity but, at the same time, it’s not homogenising globalisation, because it changes wherever it goes.
KS: Do you take this wider public into account when programming for a venue or when curating? For example, does your approach to the Serpentine programme differ from a concept for a private museum? How do you take this wider public into account when you develop concepts for exhibitions?
HUO: Yes, it’s very important for us. To give you an example, a taxi driver dropped me off at Kensington Gardens one morning, it was like 7 am, and he assumed I worked there because it was so early, it was outside opening hours. So he wanted to tell me a story, he always wanted to talk to someone from the Serpentine. Last summer he came to the park on a Sunday with his daughter and she ran into the pavilion—you know we always commission an architect to build a pavilion in the summer in the park. So his daughter ran into the pavilion and he had to go and search for her. And he said he would never have gone into a museum or an art show because these things are not for people like him. But because we put it in the middle of the park and his daughter ran right into it, she was completely transformed: she now reads architecture books every day and wants to become an architect.
I think we’re very conscious that in a sense we are a public space, right in the middle of a place as accessible as a park. This doesn’t mean that we are not doing specialised exhibitions which very much have to do with knowledge and research, but I think one doesn’t exclude the other. It always has to do with expertise and very specialised research but at the same time, we need to build bridges, so that more people have access to that. I was close to Alain Robbe-Grillet, the French novelist of the Nouveau Roman, who passed away many years ago. He wrote very specialised books that were at the forefront, the avant-garde of literature at that certain moment, but at the same time, they were accessible. Or at least they seemed more accessible. So the one doesn’t exclude the other, it can be both. It’s what I call MAYA: Most Advanced Yet Accessible—or Acceptable, either way works. Again, it’s all about building bridges, particularly in this moment of time when it’s very, very important to not be a specialist, to not already like art or have a connection to art in order to visit a place where art is shown. We need to connect to new audiences who have never been to an exhibition, like the story of that taxi driver. For me, that was very important feedback about the work we do.
KS: You also curated an exhibition in Athens last year. How was your experience there?
HUO: It was very exciting for me to do this show of Maria Lassnig, because I was in very close dialogue and friendship with her for many years. One of my first exhibitions I did with Kasper König in the early 90s was a show called The Broken Mirror, which was like a survey of painting at the time. And we rediscovered, in a way, Maria Lassnig, who wasn’t very visible back then, at least not outside Germany and Austria. So a mini retrospective of Maria Lassnig was part of this show, and then I edited the book of her collected writings, and we started a very close friendship. We’d always see each other four or five times a year in Vienna, and we had long letter exchanges, you know, before email arrived. It feels strange now to send letters in an envelope with a stamp, because nobody does it anymore, but I have all these letters from Maria, which we’re now doing as a book. She wrote me her last letter, which remained unfinished on her table when she passed away—a very moving letter where she said how she could not live without art.
In my last meeting with Maria Lassnig, she told me that she always went to Greece on holiday and grew so inspired by Greek mythology. She did these portraits of herself inserted into mythological scenes. Whenever she was in Greece for a few weeks she would make these watercolours, but they were never really exhibited. So when I asked her what could a next project we could do together be, she said it would be nice to bring these paintings about Greece back to Greece. To basically bring them back to where they were made. There were also paintings in this series because when she came back from holiday she would take the watercolours and transform them into larger paintings. And all of a sudden these mythological paintings with her own figure were not in a Greek landscape: she would transplant them into the Austrian mountains. So we wanted to show these paintings. For me, one of my great aims in life is to help realise artists’ dreams. In every conversation, I ask artists what is their unrealised project, and if the project is exciting I try to make it happen. I was very glad that we did the Athens show during documenta, because it was happening in so many venues and people were walking all around Athens. My experience of documenta in Athens was this kind of an archipelago; there were all these places and people roaming, and besides documenta they would also come and visit our Maria Lassnig show. So it made me very happy to realise Maria’s last dream.
Originally published in Dapper Dan magazine, issue 17, March 2018. Interview by Kiriakos Spirou.