the very senior English designer who died in his 90s. He told me about the Festival of Britain in the ‘50s as if it was yesterday. Obviously, within this archive there are lots of different layers and it hasn’t been done with a master plan. At the very beginning I was fascinated with Balzac and when I went to Paris for the first time it was to visit Balzac’s house. I looked at all these maps that were drawn of the complex characters in his novels. There are so many characters and how they connect.You could say that the 2,200 interviews I’ve recorded are a form of big book and all these different protagonists are in one way or another related to each other. Maybe through digital technology, if we continue with tagging, it will be possible that ultimately they’re going to talk to each other.
movement. You do have artist collectives, but they’re not really movements with manifestos; you used to have Dadaism, and in the 60s you had Fluxus. In The Manifesto Marathon, we thematised this idea. We are here in Kensington Gardens next to Hyde Park and of course Hyde Park is the zone of free speech, it’s Speakers’ Corner, which today exists more on the internet. But still as an idea Speakers’ Corner continues to exist and is associated to Hyde Park. I had a very interesting conversation with Tom McCarthy who said that, all of a sudden, we can actually revisit (now that there are less of them) the manifestos and give them a different meaning. There was a whole debate over two days in our marathon about manifestos. Independently of that, Rem and I have pursued our research into Metabolism and we felt it’s interesting to understand what’s happening now. Very often we invent the future made out of fragments of the past, which comes back to your question about art history. I think (Erwin) Panofsky was right – we do reinvent the future made out of fragments from the past. I was thinking with Rem that it would be great to find a movement where all the practitioners are still alive and interview them about how that movement worked. It would be interesting from now to understand how thirty, forty, fifty years ago there was this movement with a manifesto and a book and all of that. So we looked into Fluxus but sadly many of the Fluxus members have died so it wasn’t possible to do a portrait.
Photo: Robi Rodriguez
H A N S U L R I CH O B R IST CON CEN TRIC CIR CLES
‘Art is a desire to be elsewhere’ Dedicated to the memory of Édouard Glissant, 21/09/1928 – 03/02/2011
Vanessa Austin Locke interviews the prolific interviewer and Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery. You can watch this interview at 125magazine.com Born in Zurich in 1968, Hans Ulrich Obrist began his career as a curator in 1991 with The Kitchen Show, an exhibition presented in his own kitchen that included the work of artists such as Christian Boltanski and Fischli/Weiss. From there he became curator for contemporary art at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and in 2009 he was ranked number one in ArtReview’s annual list of the art world’s most powerful people. His ongoing passion, The Interview Project, has seen him collect over 2,200 interviews with artists, architects and scientists, including Yoko Ono, Zaha Hadid, John Baldessari and Robert Crumb. Seventeen volumes of these transcripts have been published to date and he is on the verge of releasing a book co-authored with Rem Koolhass about the Japanese architecture movement, Metabolism. A staunch and ardent supporter of the arts, he sees his role as one of facilitator to artists and is famously quoted as saying that ‘Artists are the most important people in the world’. Hear, hear. Obrist’s first experience of escape is a beautiful, wide-eyed one. An escape from a mountain-cocooned childhood and adolescence, to the cities and knowledge and experience beyond. An ever-increasing expansion of concentric circles, each one escaping the last. While this must, by its nature, be fuelled by some form of dissatisfaction, one is inclined to look on it (in this case) as an expansion of desire rather than a retraction of discontent. Indeed, he speaks of several planes of exile; inner exile, outer exile and fictitious exile. It’s clear that while his outer exile is where he chooses to be, his inner exile is a most pivotal point of origin in actualising these other exiles, and as such is most precious. Vanessa Austin Locke/125: What does the word escape mean to you? Hans Ulrich Obrist: As a kid, I always liked Switzerland a lot. It’s a great environment for one to grow up in if one is interested in art because it’s got wonderful museums, historical and contemporary. I discovered Jacometti there as a child, an amazing museum landscape to grow up in and a very important place. Already I could say to some extent art was some form of escape because it was trying to find something, it was a search. So I started to travel. I left the village where I grew up and once a week travelled through Switzerland on a train and I’d go to all these museums and on all these journeys, in concentric circles, travelling beyond Switzerland all over Europe and then all over the world. It’s interesting because growing up in Switzerland, even if there are these amazing museums, there isn’t a big city like Paris or London or New York. So it felt important for me to start to do my curation work. I felt a very urgent situation to escape and I then went to Paris, to Rome and to London and started to live in these more global cities. Also, in Switzerland you’ve got the mountain. I curated one of my first shows in the Nietzsche house, with Gerhard Richter. So the mountains have been a very important place for me to write. But the mountains in Switzerland block the view to the sea, so there’s always that kind of escape to go beyond the mountains. It’s kind of geographical I suppose.
125: Do you ever feel the need to escape from the place you escaped to – to regress, as it were? HUO: Raffi, the great writer, says that you always carry the place you were born with you, no matter where you. Édouard Glissant shows us in La Cohée du Lamentin that you can really only understand the world if you start from a very specific spot, which is a spot from where you see the world. It is very important to have that place. Raffi says you carry that place no matter where you go, so in this sense you never escape. There are different forms of exile and I think it’s interesting that there is this notion of inner exile and outer exile and the author that was the most important author for me in my childhood, and he’s still an author I return to all the time, is Robert Walser. Robert Walser is this amazing 20th Century Swiss poet and novelist, his brother was a famous painter so he emigrated early on, on his trajectory, he spent time in Berlin and that was his outer exile. He then went to Paris, fictitiously, and wrote a fictitious Paris exile while he never actually lived in Paris. So there’s his outer exile and then there’s his fictitious exile and his inner exile. In the later part of his life he returned to Switzerland and he started to write. His handwriting got smaller and smaller and smaller so people thought it was some kind of secret writing and it’s only over the last couple of decades that a literary scholar has actually shown us that this is not secret writing, you can decipher it and in years and years of work he deciphered Robert Walser’s text and now we can read it and they are the famous Mikrogramme (micrograms). So outer exile, inner exile, fictitious exile. Another distinction is obviously the distinction between voluntary and involuntary exile. My exile was and is a voluntary exile. I wasn’t forced to go into exile but very often there is political exile. I think that is a very important distinction that there is voluntary and involuntary exile and sometimes it is a mix of both. 125: Do you think art is escape? HUO: No, I don’t think it is escape. In some ways art is a desire to be different, a desire to be elsewhere. In this sense, that desire to be elsewhere is connected to escape but I think it would be reductive to think that art is an escape, because I think very often artists produce reality. And very often artists anticipate things. So that’s why very often you can say art is ahead of its time; there’s a kind of presentment or anticipation. 125: Do you think in moving from one art movement to another, artists and their art are trying to escape themselves? HUO: I think there are lots of different ways to approach this. If you look over the last couple of decades there has been a more non-linear situation of many different parallel realities. We no longer have this linear move from centres. Paris lost the avantgarde to New York, after the Second World War, and where did it go then? Today we have more of a polyphonic archipelago of many different centres. So in this sense it’s not linear; it moves from one place to the next but it’s everywhere. In a similar way we can say, in terms of art, that there is no longer this idea of a linear thing where one style follows the next or one movement follows the next but we are in a situation when lots of parallel realities co-exist. Look at the Japanese context. We are just doing this book with Rem Koolhass which he and I co-author, which is called Project Japan. It’s a book we’ve been working on for the last ten years where we’ve interviewed all the protagonists of the Japanese architecture movement,Metabolism.There are still movements and because today the situation is more atomised, you don’t have this idea of collective artist
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125: Are you more interested in what people do say in interviews or what they don’t say? Are Marathon interviews a way of breaking people down, stopping them editing themselves, getting at something else, something new? HUO: That’s interesting because very often it’s a repeated conversation. That’s the Francis Bacon/David Sylvester thing because I think very often you’ve got practices where speaking publicly is part of the profession. And then you’ve got practices where speaking publicly is not part of the profession. It wasn’t Francis Bacon’s main activity to speak about the work; he did it rarely and it creates a different situation for the interview and means that maybe Francis Bacon, little by little, revealed aspects of his work and talked about his work and it’s just got to do with taking the time because these things very often take ten, twenty years and I think that’s what it’s about. I don’t really have a technique for the interview. It’s somewhere between chance and control. So I prepare - very often I over prepare, because I try to read everything about a practitioner before an interview. I read as much as I can so it’s almost like being at school again and what I liked so much about university is that one reads so much and then after, in life, one gets more and more busy institutionally and with time, the schedule gets very tight and ultimately I have less and less time to read. So the interview project also maintains my reading discipline, particularly if I do an interview with somebody not in the art world. If I interview a scientist, I need to read everything about quantum physics. It’s a crash course. So that sort of learning is interesting. I have a lot of notes and then I start somewhere but I don’t really know where I will go because if I draw it, it would be far too predictable. What I get as a first answer determines what I’m going to (ask next). So the question causes consequences in terms of the answer and the answer causes consequences in terms of the question. It’s a complex, dynamic system with feedback tubes and that system is open, so all of a sudden I can improvise a question, so it’s very prepared but it’s open for chance. That I think is something which has evolved very little in the process. The other thing is also talking about things one has never talked of before, going really into terra incognita. As Christian Boltanski pointed out, the biggest danger is that we always repeat each other, particularly if one gets interviewed every day; there is a certain limited number of answers and you just always answer the same thing. So very often I would look at a conversation someone has given and try to find out something which hasn’t yet been discussed, because then we go into a new area. For example Gerhard Richter, who is the artist with whom I worked a lot, I found out after a certain time of working with him so much that there has never been an interview in which he talks about his relationship to architecture, which is really key to him. He’s been fascinated by architecture for his own paintings, so we had this conversation because we found it had not yet been done. And this idea of going, within the conversation, to somewhere one has not been before is also exciting because then it isn’t a repetition and it becomes more exciting for the person one talks to because that person goes into terra incognita.
125: Why do you interview? HUO: It’s a very interesting question because in some way it just happened. James Whistler once said “art happens”, and maybe I could say interviews happen. I’ve always had conversations and dialogues with artists. Since my early childhood and adolescence I was magnetically attracted to art and I went to see Jacometti every free school afternoon, and then more contemporary art, and little by little I started to make studio visits. When I was seventeen I met (Peter) Fischli/(David) Weiss. They were just about to do this film of a chain reaction. Exactly seventeen years after being born (I was born in May ‘68 in Zurich, so this was in ‘85) I knew that that’s what I wanted to do in life, I wanted to be with artists and to spend time with artists. As Gilbert & George would say, “art is all we ask.” I could modify that quote and say that being with artists is all we ask. Then I began to ask how could I be a utility because I wanted to be useful to art, and that’s a definition of curating that I rather like, curating being a utility to art. The curator as an enabler. So I was starting to think what I could do and started curating my Kitchen Show. Obviously, curating has always been at the centre of the work and that’s what I do every day. That’s my daily practice. At some point I realised that I have this parallel activity, that I always talk to artists and that I didn’t remember things which were said. I started to think maybe I should record them, but I was very insecure about how to do it because I didn’t want to create an artificial situation. These conversations were so informal, they were really brainstorming about ideas and thinking processes and very often they were working conversations and trying to find something. So I started to think and I read David Sylvester. It’s interesting that you mentioned the Sussex Archive (The Mass Observation Archive, The University of Sussex), which I wasn’t aware of, but I was somehow aware of David Sylvester’s archive, his many interviews with Francis Bacon. I read his book as a teenager. I was also very inspired by Brassai who interviewed Picasso many times. I was very inspired by a marvellous book, which I cannot recommend enough to everybody, which is Truffaut as a young filmmaker talking to his hero and master Hitchcock, and it is a really extraordinary invention of a format of an interview. This book is still one of my most beloved books, as is the Francis Bacon and David Sylvester. So I read these books and started to think, as I speak to these artists all the time, if I were to start to record it, maybe in 20 or 30 years I could do something similar to Sylvester or Truffaut, but really go into depth. I have this curiosity to go beyond the art world; I work with science and with architecture, so the interview approach also became my way to find out about these fields where I wasn’t as knowledgeable as I was in art. The interview approach is my school. And the fascinating thing from these conversations is always how we can learn from one another. I carry into each conversation what I know but I learn a lot of new things and hopefully it’s also interesting for the person who I discuss things with because I tell lots of other things, so it’s an exchange.
125: Is it a two-way conversation when you interview? HUO: I do believe it is reciprocity, it is about giving of knowledge and things one would tell each other and stories. From the beginning I always went to see a lot of art and travelled a lot and made a lot of research and the fact that I would tell lots of things about what I’d seen may be interesting for the person that I talk to. When I edit my interviews I very often shorten my question because I think they’re difficult to read, these interviews where the interviewer talks too much, because it’ really about the person one talks to and I very often reduce my comments there and my editing very often consists of making myself shorter and trying to amplify the voice of the person. But the whole thing is a path, it’s only just begun, there are many formats you haven’t tested, but I think on the path, I’ve little by little started to think about new formats. That’s The Marathon. The Marathon was invented in the theatre world in Germany, where we have a 24hour nonstop interview and then when Julia Peyton-Jones started to collaborate at the Serpentine she invented The Pavilions in 2000. I came up with The Marathon and we combined it and we started to do The Marathons in the Pavilions. These are interviews but they’re also performances. We did a poetry marathon, now we’re working on a garden marathon and then the interview marathon also started to travel because it’s a way to also research in a city one doesn’t know. I’ve been to Delhi many times, so The Interview Marathon there was a great way to deepen my knowledge of Delhi and at the same time, when I do an interview marathon in a city it brings together a lot of people who otherwise don’t meet each other because I invite artists, architects and scientists and very often in cities the disciplines are quite segregated. I work with local curators of course because I’ve got to have their view on the situation and together we would curate a list and a theme and then we would invite all these different practitioners from a city, and we’ve done it in many different places; in London, in Delhi, in Berlin, in China, and then very often one would have a situation where it creates new junctions. But it’s not only about the two-way conversation. I think there is a saying, ‘two’s company, three’s a crowd’, but very often it’s also a polyphony. It triggers conversation between people who come and visit, it triggers conversations with participants in the green room. When we do these marathons there are new encounters of people who haven’t met and that is as important as the interview and so the dialogue leads to a trialogue. So someone would tell me an artist and say, “Have you ever interviewed this great pioneer?” so we would go and see him or her together. These are the threesome interviews and then the marathons are the polyphony. ‘
125: So it’s a learning process rather than a search for truth or an attempt at preservation? HUO: It’s more about learning, but it was interesting to then publish them as texts; some students told me they would like to read them so we started to transcribe them. But that wasn’t the master plan; that happened on the way. It is always a searching. You mentioned this truth aspect. There is searching for the truth in it but there is also something which is a protest against forgetting and that leads to your next question. It is about preservation. We live in a society where everything is always about the new and the next thing and for me as a curator that is a very important part, I create new platforms for new talent and it’s something I’m deeply excited about, to research and find new artists and show them. But I realise that it’s as important to revisit practitioners from the past, particularly at the current moment when there is more and more information, this incredible explosion of information; amnesia is actually present. There’s a lot of amnesia and it doesn’t mean that because we have more information that we remember. When I realised that I thought it would be interesting to go and see very old people, to go and see pioneers who worked in the ‘50s or ‘60s, whose eyes saw a century. We just recorded another interview with Oscar Niemeyer who is now 104 and he can tell me about lots of great pioneers in the 20th century, and the same thing is true of A Brief History of Curating. I went to see many curators in their 70s, 80s and 90s, recording their history, trying to make a history of my own profession, learning from them, so that aspect also became important. On the one hand, they are conversations of producing things together with artists or architects, on the other repeated conversations with artists who I see every week, but at the same time it’s also trying to preserve traces of the past for future generations by revisiting practitioners who have been around for 80, 90 or 100 years. I’ve got about thirty interviews now with centenaries artists, philosophers and architects whose eyes saw a century, and I’m most fascinated by this. We went to see Robin Day,
Vanessa Austin Locke
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