!"#$%&' (!%)&&* – didascalia ⁄ caption

“Alberto Garutti”, !"# I would like to start this conversation and introduced me to other people in Domus, 901, by talking about gossip. A whole work his office. It was fantastic; the project of yours is based on gossip… worked very well. Its theme was love March 2007, stories that originated inside the hospi- pp. 116-123 $% It was the basis of a work that I did at tal. The general manager began by tell- the Sant’Andrea Hospital in Rome, cu- ing me about Doctor Bianconi who had rated by Mario Pieroni. The subject of married Doctor Ilaria, who worked in gossip is a very interesting one, and I’m cardiology. They had got married a few !"# thinking of the culture passed down years earlier. I wanted Bianconi to re- Hans Ulrich Obrist orally for centuries, and of today’s in- call the day he first saw his future wife $% formation circulation systems. After through that loving, special eye… All Alberto Garutti all, the Internet and blogs are really of us remember that look. They had magnified gossip scattered to infinity. “glanced” at each other by the coffee machine, on the ground floor. We went !"# I was part of the Zerynthia project. to see him together, and identified the exact spot where they met. Then I took $% Earlier on I had thought it would be some photos of that spot and hung madness to show works in hospitals. them in the hospital corridors, with a When you go into hospital you don’t small caption underneath: Dedicated care a hoot about art. People in there to Doctor Bianconi and Doctor Ilaria. are ill and suffering, and worried about The story of this first step sparked a their health. Then you see the peo- chain reaction in other staff members, ple who work there, the doctors, the eliciting a kind of friendly gossip that nurses… people who spend their lives enabled me to find other couples, oth- in wards and operating theatres. The er spots, and so to create a long series work had to start from these people. of images representing the hospital. My intention was to spark a mecha- One lady doctor told me she had had nism, to build up a system of relations a love story with a person whose iden- that would involve the hospital and tity she did not wish to reveal. “He is its staff, people who spend their daily here, and I still love him very much. lives in a place by no means associated But it is all secret,” she said. “Howev- with the exhibition of artworks. I be- er, I would like you to take a photo of lieve the artist outside museum spaces the spot where I first set eyes on him.” must shoulder a different responsibili- I was interested in being able to pro- ty towards the recipients of their work. duce a work that would somehow be They must “step down from the cele- self-generating, of which I would only bratory pedestal” erected by the art have to light the fuse and then simply system for their work, and go out to describe its propagation. To concern the spectator to construct a fertile and myself with dispersion as a natural, necessary communion. They must fall almost biological fact, to analyse the back into the reality of life as it is right spread of information by starting from now, at a time when art is seeking once the inherent meaning of the concept of again to live outside the museums, in gossip itself, always on the borderline close alliance with the collective dy- between truth and lies. This immaterial namics of society. Hence with archi- mechanism was established by chang- tecture and its contexts, the media, ing the canonical hierarchies between and above all with a public no longer artist and spectator. I confined myself confined to the select members of a to touching on life, by shifting a few narrow art system. For this reason I chemical balances between things. feel that the sphere of “meeting” is im- portant. As indeed it was in Rome. To !"# We are in the invisible hospital, in a create a work that would speak about sense… the people who worked at the Sant’An- drea, I went to see the general manager $% Yes. The work springs from and con- Courtesy of Editoriale Domus S.p.A, Rozzano (Milan). All and explained my project to him. Af- structs its sense on a connective tissue, rights reserved. ter a moment’s hesitation he agreed formed by a dense network of informa-

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tion thanks to the complicity of numer- new design strategies and, as we have ous people. seen for centuries, to produce works of But it is mainly a work geared to meth- the highest quality. It all springs from od, to the subtle and indistinguishable a meeting which is, I repeat, itself a limit between art and the reality of life, work! The work is elusive and only to relationships with a public space. in the tension generated to go out to- The meetings between people set the wards it, only in that moment, does it process in motion and are at the same come into being. time its integral part. The photographs are works and simultaneously tools to !"# And the same thing is said of design. construct the invisible loom of places Magistretti, Sottsass… they all say that, and of looking that make up the life of if there had not been enlightened en- the building… So you see, the work is trepreneurs, Italian design would never all this put together. And it is diffused, have existed… basically, just like the sound of voices, the whispering of people. $% Yes, I agree. I don’t think of the client as an entrepreneur or of the client as !"# Can we say that art is, in a sense, the of Popes in the past. I think of a new pretext for a conversation? client.

$% Certainly, but in the widest and deep- !"# Which new client? est form. Art is, after all, the art of meeting. What is a work if not an oc- $% The recipients themselves: us. I be- casion for exchanging views, images lieve the real clients are the recipients and imaginations, a meeting of people, themselves, as marketing tells us. The thoughts and cultures… in the same recipients are also the clients, without way as the exchange of goods occurs… being aware of it. Precisely for this Venice, for example, for centuries has reason I am very interested in sticking recounted its extraordinary quality to to reality; and to constructing works us. And it is a pre-eminent city of en- whose form is defined by different counters, of people coming and going contingencies with which the work re- and continually exchanging thoughts lates during its theoretical and physical through objects. development. And I refer to people I The question of art is very much tied don’t know, people I bump into during up with economic and political dynam- the process; but also to political and ics, and in my work adhering to reality economic institutions or bureaucratic means finding the actual sense of the regulations and social contexts. In this work. It is paradoxically in the nature way the clients can be of numerous of “being useful,” finding its force in different sorts. The work is the fruit of the “exchange,” with the spectator, different and heterogeneous tensions. the client, the museum, the city. I am interested in superimposing the roles !"# There is a splendid book by Rilke giv- of these actors and deliberately losing ing advice to a young poet. What ad- any knowledge of who the “owner” or vice do you give to a young artist? the “author” of the artwork may be. In any case, for centuries artists were $% How can I ever advise a young artist? “at the service of”: of cities, princes, I think art is unteachable. One may at- Popes, and big client-patrons. Clients tempt to provide a sentimental educa- are important: it is they who “com- tion in life and hence art. It is all very pel” us to find solutions. When Man- difficult. tegna was summoned by the Gonza- gas to fresco the Camera degli Sposi, !"# But if art is unteachable, what is the art he accepted the challenge and a small teacher’s job? space was transformed into a supreme masterpiece. Seemingly restrictive cir- $% I am interested in the people I meet on cumstances compel artists to develop the common ground of a work. This

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problem is faced by abolishing the stu- indeed are not recognised as art. The dent’s institutional status, which is no public will only see them as ordinary less intolerable than that of the teacher. items of furniture. I wanted to alter the What interests me is to create a “cli- public’s perception of the work: it can mate,” because in this way the course only be imagined, thought of, awaited. is self-generated. It is the same proce- It is in this immaterial tension that the dure that I use when I do my works. work is disclosed, fulfilled only in the The approach is the same. It is like the meeting with its spectators, who are dialogue with clients; the work springs asked to make a patient effort to look from a meeting… I believe it is increas- for it. ingly necessary to shift the question of The work functions like a litmus paper. art to that of the artistic state of life. It It is hidden in the belly of the museum is the critical, ethical and loving look while silently revealing its weak points that provides the key; it is that look and its rhetoric. We can in fact main- that radiates the things in an “aura”. tain that art is everywhere, that what And that is how the artist-public, we see everywhere is already poten- teacher-student, author-spectator hier- tially an exhibition; and to decide that archy is reversed, changed and thrown it is only our looking. I refer to what into crisis. I am interested in activating Blanchot called a “gift.” It is as if an these mechanisms. opposite process to that of Duchamp had developed. I think that the ob- !"# To catalyse… And the number of ject today, the work of art, has a great young artists who have come out of desire to get out of the museum. But your course is incredible, isn’t it? when the work of art returns to reality it loses its aura. And so it is precisely $% Yes, so it seems… Our encounters are the spectators and the artists them- head-on; we try to spot the errors… selves, who are the first real spectators, Being on good terms enables us to that can restore an aura to the work. At question everything. Errors, too, are a bottom, it is perhaps we ourselves who source of “wealth”. are the museum. I mean it is necessary, In any case art tends towards perfec- in my opinion, to make sure that we tion, so it is always imperfect! become little walking museums: spec- tators capable of assuming the respon- !"# You have talked about your lessons at sibility for looking. The museum is the Academy and at the University, but an entity that ought to teach people we haven’t mentioned museums. What to charge things with an aura: a place is your outlook on museums today? where people can be taught to create a difference between saying, “I touch $% To describe my outlook on museums I your hand,” and actually shaking it. again feel the necessity to talk about the figure that completes its sense !"# In this sense it’s like a battery, isn’t it? more than any other: the spectator. Let me explain. The process and the $% Yes, it’s a dynamo, a battery. path that make up my public works are overturned in the specialised space !"# What are your projects for architecture of art. While in the city it is the art- in 2007? ist who “goes towards” the spectator, in the museum it is precisely the latter $% I have a large number of projects… that has to assume responsibility for For example to close off the green the eye, and to move in an attempt area around the Sandretto Founda- to approach the work. With the work tion in Turin, which is already under entitled What happens in rooms when way; a square in a residential quarter the people have left?, furniture and in Monteriggioni, directed by the As- domestic and ordinary objects covered sociazione Continua, or in Camogli with phosphorescent paint are cam- for the Fondazione Remotti… a work ouflaged in the exhibition space, and inside the Deutsche’s Bank new head

164 '()*+,'*-. – Hans Ulrich Obrist

offices in Milan. The To Those Born odological and critical thinking about Today work will also be realised again the system of art. Briefly, the work pro- in an Italian city… I believe this work, ject is structured as a veritable Machia- done in 1998 for Bergamo and then in a vellian strategy, articulated on two lev- square at Ghent for the S.M.A.K. Mu- els that are the two sides of the same seum, has a strong relationship with coin. The first is more popular in daily architecture. I am trying to do it in all reality, the second for the art system the cities that have asked me to. The is more specialised and theoretic. The theme of birth is of a universal nature. first is good with the citizens, the sec- It leaves aside issues like nationality, ond is destructuring in relation to the language, religion and culture. It is a art world. For example, for the Istanbul work that relates with the city on dif- Biennial directed by Yuko Hasegawa, I ferent scales; it is visible and not visi- did the work on the Bosphorus Bridge ble; it produces a sort of narrative plan- which is the work To Those Born To- ning. People, institutions, the public day. All the lights on the bridge were space of a square or bridge constitute linked to the Zeynep Hospital and for a throbbing system, the story of life in every baby born a light was switched the city. The work is composed of signs on. In such a vast city I wanted to tell that recount “an elsewhere” that can its citizens about this operation of mine only be imagined: a birth, a mother, an through an advertising campaign. For expectation. This leads to the observ- the work was not aimed only at the er’s personal construction of a mental directors of museums, at the collectors image, constructing an invisible place and curators, but primarily at the citi- that we look at for a brief moment, zens; I wanted to use the language of that dilates public space. Every spec- advertising which is the one that gets tator “observes” their own part of it. across most easily to people. All over Here, too, the work is multiplied and the city there were big posters with the propagated in infinite ways, as many photo of the Bosphorus Bridge, and as the number of spectators… That is a little Turkish family gazing at it. A why when I think of this work I always brief caption said, The streetlights on picture to myself a physical map of the this bridge are linked to the maternity pulsating city, and a mental map of the ward of Zeynep Hospital. Whenever the city that every passer-by produces… light slowly flashes it means that a baby and then the image that I recount is re- has been born. This work is dedicated to ally an invisible nativity, it is painting. that baby and to the babies born in this city. I also did this type of operation !"# Let’s talk about the devices, which are in Japan, with the collaboration of the an integral part of your work. 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art and the University of Kanazawa. $% Every public work of mine is always accompanied by a dedication, which !"# Kanazawa, this new museum by the is a caption. The caption seems irrel- architect Sejima… evant but it is instead very decisive in my work because it becomes a sort of $% Yuko asked me to follow a new theme declaration of reaching out towards… which was: “The city is the museum. in this case, of the artist’s reaching out The museum is the city.” He wanted towards the citizens, the spectators. these works to be able to activate the I use this caption as a tool: I define it relation between citizens and the mu- as a double-entry key that activates seum under construction. In this case I different levels of appreciation of the also invited a number of families living work and is an integral part of it. Fur- in houses next to the museum. Thanks thermore, it belongs simultaneously to to the complicity and involvement of the art system and to that of the city. I university students, we managed to want the work to be comprehensible to place sensors in the homes of these everybody if it is to function, and at the families. At every movement, the sen- same time I want it to produce a meth- sor switched on a light on the outside

165 !"#$%&' (!%)&&* – didascalia ⁄ caption

of the building. To do this I had to go city, or with post offices that distribut- into these people’s homes… with gifts ed across the land. There, too, there is that I had brought with me in a suit- a dedication, a going out towards the case, from Italy. citizens, because we are in the city, not in the museum. A place that gives rise !"# So it was a reciprocal work, of ex- to an encounter with art, a “self-gener- change. ating” exchange.

$% Yes, it was. I think art is also the art of !"# This connection with Yona Friedman meeting, of reciprocality. It is no small or Cedric Price is very interesting. Is thing for an artist to enter people’s there a computer in your work? homes: at Watou, too, for an exhibi- tion curated by Jan Hoet and Giacinto $% My work changed enormously with Di Pietrantonio, we did a very similar the advent of computers. Recently work. In the exhibition space, lights I recounted that the tragic episode that had been installed in the walls of 9/11 was an epochal passage, and were turned on whenever anybody that since then art can no longer be moved beyond them… self-referential. Because new dynam- ics have been opened up, new mech- !"# A bit like Boetti’s annual lamp, Poliph- anisms whereby truly everyone of us ony. feels involved in a collectivised ego, as if the contemporary ego had a col- $% Boetti’s lamp goes on when… we don’t lective sensitivity. I believe, however, know. Here on the other hand whenev- that the real epochal passage was the er it is switched on it reveals that there computer, because our way of seeing is life inside the houses, that something reality, and architecture, has changed. is moving. A light that tells us about Our psychology vis-à-vis the world life. This work, too, is a dialogue. has changed and so therefore has our relationship with space, time and na- !"# This is also true of your work in ture, and with the architecture of cit- Bolzano, which is also a very architec- ies which are primarily relational sys- tural one. Can you tell us about it? tems.

$% Bolzano was in some ways also a very !"# I am interested in your work on re- difficult project. But this uneasiness of structured architectures. mine about being able to do a work in that context was also the mainspring $% At Peccioli in 1994, in 2000 at Colle that caused the work to come into be- di Val d’Elsa for “Arte all’Arte” I used ing. The difficulty created the assump- the whole of the budget for my work tions. The work sprang from the idea to get an old building renovated: the that nobody, as in other cities, takes headquarters of the Corale Vincenzo any interest in art and very few visit Bellini. On the opening day of the museums. So I had a small room con- exhibition the Colle musicians organ- structed where every three months a ised a concert for the public, made up work from the Museion, which is locat- of ordinary people and people from ed in the city centre, was exhibited. the art world. Through music, which is art, the members of the choir ren- !"# A museum in the museum. In a sense, dered what art itself had given them. therefore, it means taking the museum Here, too, my own contribution was to the city… minimal, sentimental and economic, with no precise hierarchies, far from $% Right. So when somebody passes, the arrogant personality cult of art in by even for a few moments, they are public spaces. The process of the work forced to see a work. As happened in is related through a caption engraved the distant past with churches, when on the front of the building; the text is little chapels were dotted around the now part of the city, and every time it

166 '()*+,'*-. – Hans Ulrich Obrist

is read it renews its sense. So the work continues to “function,” even though it may not be recognised as such.

!"# We are in a process and not in a prod- uct.

$% The occasion is one of “aesthetic” re- structuring, but the work is the whole methodological development.

!"# We have conducted this interview of ours first in a car, then in a bar and now again in the car. What is the link between the car and your studio?

$% The car is my studio by now. I get my ideas in here, in this kind of autono- mous capsule. But it is linked to the outside world, perhaps precisely be- cause one is not in any exact place. True, the studio is where the artist works, however I am constantly on the move. It is the movement of thought, the movement of reasonings and above all the movement that produces en- counters, exchanges. The studio is where I go to release energies accumu- lated in the outside world.

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“Attempt Two”, !"# Tell me then: is this book going to be a art has the capacity to be political. Three attempts book produced by the magazine, Ka- leidoscope, or will it be the magazine !"# Can you tell me something about your for a catalogue itself as a book or… vision of art’s ability to be political? raisonné of the work of $% I confess that I don’t know much about $% The work of art, to be such, has to be Alberto Garutti, it, and in a way I’ve chosen not to public. It can only exist through the know; I’ve let myself be guided by An- encounter with viewers. I’ve often ed. A. Viliani, Ka- drea [Viliani, ed.] and by our reflection worked in urban space and I’ve always leidoscope, Milan, together on the fate of a book on my sensed the danger of self-referentiality 2011, pp. 1-10 work that to some extent I’ve never in the art system and above all the role wanted to do. of the artist. A public work cannot be Translation by Shanti Evans Giacinto Di Pietrantonio has written aimed solely at an élite of specialized a lot for a book of mine, but I’ve al- viewers, but has to relate to a differ- !"# ways stalled for time with the intention ent type of community, to the city that Hans Ulrich Obrist of studying a method, a strategy that is, to a public of citizens with which $% would be as best suited as possible to it is necessary for the artist to hold conveying on paper the complexity of a dialogue. In this sense my work is Alberto Garutti a work that eludes even me from the political, precisely because it sets out ./ viewpoint of its editorial structure. to establish a web of relations and Stefano Boeri In this case it’s a small book through dialogues with the city understood which, with the collaboration of Chus as a body of people, of laws, of eco- [Martínez, ed.], yourself, Stefano, Luca nomic systems. When I work in urban [Cerizza, ed.] and of course Andrea space or in the surrounding territory, too, an attempt is being made to un- the procedures, the logic, even the derstand what might be the best ways thinking behind my projects have al- to organize and describe my work, its ways needed to take into account their often multiform processes which are viewers, that is people—and people hard to trace. are us, the others are us. The citizens are not just the people to whom the !"# It’s interesting in fact, because your work is addressed, but in a way also work—we talked about it for Domus the clients of the work. as well as in an interview that I’ve now published in the second volume of my ./ I think that there’s another very politi- 1. Charles Arsene-Henry, collection of interviews1—possess- cal dimension to Alberto’s work, which Shumon Basar, Karen Marta, es this aspect of non- (or even anti-) consists in the way he sets an example, (ed.), Hans Ulrich Obrist: Interviews, Volume 2. Milan: monumentality: you work a lot on in his being a reference for different Charta, 2010. non-objects and quasi-objects, on this generations of artists who have been idea of the veiled object… molded by a work in the field carried 2. At the end of August 2010, Boeri put forward his own out essentially around the Academy candidature as mayor of Milan $% Stefano, are you there? and around Alberto.3 This is another in opposition to the incumbent way, and a very important one today, People of Freedom mayor Letizia Moratti. ./ Yes, I’m here. of passing on knowledge, a very rare thing, a great resource… 3. Since 1989 Alberto Garutti !"# Ciao Stefano. has held the chair of Painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti $% What Stefano says is true; I like to in Milan and, since 2002, the ./ Ciao Hansino. bring this sense of the political into post of contract professor of my activity too. My work as a teacher the “Laboratorio Arte 2 (Art Workshop 2)” at the Depart- !"# Stefano, it’s urgent that you get on at the Academy is an extension of my ment of Architecture of the Skype… Skype is the future and the method of constructing works in public IUAV in Venice. mayor has to be on Skype.2 Alberto, space. The approach and the process have you ever thought of going into are identical. When I’m asked for the politics? plan, I always answer that “I don’t have plans,” and not as an ironic or critical Courtesy of Kaleidoscope Press, $% No, I’ve never thought of going into dig at institutions, but because the state Milan. All rights reserved. politics, but obviously I’ve thought that of improvisation contains all the think-

168 '()*+,'*-. – Hans Ulrich Obrist

ing at the root of the procedure itself. ourselves. It’s a luxury that is not always I want to deal with reality, to get to granted in the art system—I’m using the know, to go along with a precise con- plural because it’s not me who judges text. For me students, just like citizens and makes the criticisms, but we always or political and economic institutions, do it together, my students and I. are territories, ecosystems in which to work, exchange, hold a dialogue, with ./ The interesting, and if you like politi- no filter. My teaching work is very cal, thing about your work is the way similar to the process of creation of a you position yourself… site-specific work. If I think about many of your works, I really believe that only idiots think they are interventions that work al- it’s possible to teach someone how to most by tapping into flows, habits, create a work of art. What I believe modes of behavior, and that feed on you can do is to try to carry out an these to create a new meaning, to cre- operation of “sentimental education” ate a shift in significance. They don’t in life and thus in art. What matters stand on a pedestal with an inscription most at University or the Academy is saying “this is art.” to try to make sure that the figures of There is a correspondence, in my view, the teacher and the student meet on between this position you put yourself the common ground of the production in and your approach to teaching. I of the work. Perhaps art is also the fruit don’t know you very well but when I of this process of dialogue without me- see you working with your students, diations. If there’s one thing that I think when I see the students invading your I’ve always succeeded in doing over studio at the Bovisa, I see that you’re these years, it’s creating a climate, I’d always in the midst of them. You gov- call it an atmosphere, once again a con- ern the relationship from inside and text in which the course generates itself not from above. and propagates in a spontaneous way. And by this I don’t mean that it’s an Just as for my public works, what I do act of generosity or humility, because is construct a set in which I let things that’s not the case at all… happen, on the borderline between ca- pacity for control and the maximum of $% No, certainly not. In fact it’s the oppo- naturalness. site.

./ A good climate, right: this is funda- ./ Yes, rather it’s an act of great strength, mental. Creating the right conditions because governing from within re- so that individualities can erupt. It’s quires a lot of power and provides the right way to teach, absolutely. great satisfaction. But it’s an act that can be considered political in a sit- $% All the things that happen in real life uation like the current one, in which and in the art world ought to go on in the Italian intelligentsia is essentially Academies and Universities, and in- self-referential. In 95% of cases it is stead unfortunately this doesn’t often incapable of producing anything but a take place. reference to itself. I have always sought a very personal dialogue too, without mediations and $% Yes, I agree with what you’re saying. filters, at times tough and direct. A It’s not generosity or humility. In fact clear, frank relationship, based on the my way of proceeding in the city has principle of loyalty, is at the root of our its origin precisely in the analysis of conversations in class. It’s not dema- the role of the artist when he works goguery. I consider this sort of attitude in public space. Always keeping a dis- a fundamental prerequisite in order to tance from any kind of populist dema- make the course dialectical and there- goguery, I define the process that leads by raise the level and the quality of the to the realization of my projects as works presented. “Machiavellian.” It’s a precise strate- We can allow ourselves to be hard on gy aimed not just at the quality of the

169 !"#$%&' (!%)&&* – didascalia ⁄ caption

work, but also at short-circuiting the work on the other hand is the multipli- system of art itself. cation of reality. And precisely for this “Machiavellian” because I use the en- reason my projects take place in sev- counter with the public as a tool, a sort eral contexts simultaneously, that of of picklock that will allow me to break daily life as well as the system of art… into the social mechanisms and urban My works are used and lived, they are contexts in which the work will be lo- modified and wear out, they are works cated. On the one hand the work fits always wedded to the present. Through into and puts down roots in the social a short text, a caption, the work is im- and geographic territory thanks to the mediately activated. relationship I establish with people, This is what happened for example while on the other it is directed at the with Storms, 2009, the work I creat- specific system of art, exploring its lan- ed for the first room to be opened to guages. For me the two processes are the public at the MAXXI museum in inseparable. Only through a dialogue Rome. with the recipients/clients can the work In a room of the new MAXXI museum the come alive, become a device capable lights will flicker when lightning strikes of constructing new visions and scenar- in Italy during a thunderstorm. This work ios, and fitting into the territory with- is dedicated to all those who will think out looking like an extraneous object, about the sky as they walk through. This imposed by its creator. short text was an integral part of the I started to work in this way at Peccioli work and was printed on the cover of for a project organized by Antonella 500,000 copies of City, the free daily 4. “Arte a Peccioli,” Peccioli Soldaini4: my intervention consisted in newspaper distributed all over Rome. (Pisa), 1994-1997. the faithful restoration of an old theater The process of dissemination of infor- 5. Petrit Halilaj, The places in the town that the locals themselves mation is part of the project because I’m looking for, my dear, are showed me after many conversations. the true heart of the work is not in the utopian places, they are bor- It was not just a question of participa- pulsating room in the MAXXI, but in ing and I don’t know how to make them real, 2010. tion. In that case my methodological people’s gazes. Thousands of gazes of approach became the very heart of the people walking through the city and, work: my role as the artist apparently even just for a moment, raising their dissolved in the community, with the eyes to look at the sky above them aim of creating a small short circuit and watching the birth of a new work between the present story and the col- of architecture as charged with mag- lective memory of the place, between netic power as the museum is. For me contemporary linguistic experimenta- the work coincided precisely with that tion and the energies, social and emo- infinite multitude of gazes and skies tional dynamics that gravitated around observed by the people of the city. At that theater. bottom it was a work on the theme of the sublime, of the relationship be- !"# This leads us to another question: a tween nature and art, of a very classi- new generation of artists works a lot cal and I’d say pictorial work. on the idea of “production of reality.” As I was saying earlier, the work is a For example, your student Petrit Hali- strategy, it spreads a voice among peo- laj has recently participated in the Ber- ple that propagates like an echo. I con- lin Biennale with a work5 that consists struct a scenario in which a new reali- in the construction of a house which he ty is produced that floats between my is going to live in after the Biennale. world, my way of looking at things, and This aspect of the “production of real- a sort of collective conscious/uncon- ity” seems to me to find a parallel in scious. many of your projects… What do you This is why I think it’s difficult to con- think? ceive a book on my work. Chus herself said to me recently: “Your book should $% Exploring the reality of life, going have no pictures.” It’s a problem that along with it, is the starting point of has to be solved. I’m very interested all of my works. The outcome of the in exploring this question with you be-

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cause I always expect to be able to see profession, do you have architectural and understand things about my work projects that have never been realized? through the eyes of others. I love the idea of being able to lose the first-per- $% Yes, there is one work: a work commis- son narrative in the pages of a book on sioned from me three or four years ago my own work, and thinking that the au- for the mouth of the Magra River, in the thor, instead, could take the form of a vicinity of La Spezia. Really it’s a pro- multiple and multiform “I,” exactly as ject that combines architecture, land- happens in my works. scape, art and to some extent engineer- ing. I was supposed to realize a work !"# Another aspect that I found myself dis- on the eastern bank of the river, along cussing with quantum physicist David the last stretch of the watercourse’s Deutsch is that of “parallel realities.” estuary, right at the point where the From this perspective, I’d be very in- Magra flows into the sea. Not far away terested in talking about you, Alberto, from those places lies Carrara, with its as an architect. quarries and dozens of workshops for the production of sculptures and piec- $% It’s not possible for me to think about es for building in stone. Instead of the working with art without thinking usual reinforced-concrete breakwaters about architecture too. My very meth- that protect our coasts, my project en- od of working is architectural. We were visaged piling up, dumping in the sea talking about it before: the theme of a large quantity of concrete casts, dis- acting in concert between people and cards, pieces of marble and fragments institutions, the potentialities and chal- of many sculptures of various sizes. lenges that the practical, technical and Some would have sunk into the sea, physical limitations and constraints of other parts would have remained flush the city impose, these are the starting with the surface of the water, others points for activating the mechanism of still would have partially emerged from the work. the river. The barrier that separated I’m interested in the possibility of fresh water from salt water would have interpreting the roles of the actors become a sort of landscape of stones on the stage in a fluid way, of being that contained the history of that re- able to mix up their functions and gion. properties. I think it’s an important theme today, at a moment in which ./ The theme of parallel realities that motivations of an economic and po- Hans raised is a fundamental one; and litical character seem to influence the it’s fundamental today in a metropoli- planning of public space more than tan urban situation where parallel re- anything else. alities are not just the overlapping of I have the sensation that it’s increas- worlds… ingly necessary to intervene in the new This theme also concerns the fact that maps, the new geographies that society today there are parallel realities which is drawing. The quality of the space no accompany the very condition of urban longer seems to be the main problem. life, the experience of moving around Studying what already exists may no and the whole bubble of production longer mean having anything to do of thoughts and images that each of us with the traditional techniques of inter- carries with him. preting the city. I would like it, indeed So the thing that interests me about perhaps it’s something indispensable, if your work, Alberto, and which in my now more than ever art and architec- view is your real work, as you may ture went back to holding a close, con- have already said yourself before, is stant and open dialogue. But it doesn’t the caption. In other words, the true seem so easy. work is not the fact that you construct technical elements that illuminate, that !"# As someone with a degree in archi- film, that color, that make things hap- tecture but who doesn’t practice the pen; your true work, that is to say the

171 !"#$%&' (!%)&&* – didascalia ⁄ caption

mechanism which really sparks off its tions, perhaps to hold an exhibition of meaning, a meaning that connects up them. Each caption a scenario. parallel worlds that would not other- The caption is a thin diaphragm; it’s the wise be connected, is the caption. physical object that gives form to the “Machiavellian” strategy. It’s a two- $% The function of the caption is crucial, faced device. It introduces people to and it’s through it that the work pro- the work and brings them closer to it, duces the real multiplication of parallel and at the same time it is an explicit realities we were talking of. It’s a trig- declaration to the public of the shift in gering device able to bestow narrative methodology that I’ve decided to put meaning on work, able to outline in- into effect. finite mental landscapes. This short text in some way invests the For example, during the Istanbul Bien- viewer with a responsibility, it makes nial of 2001, when I created the work him a protagonist and above all it To Those Born Today on the bridge charges his vision with an aura. over the Bosphorus, every viewer, pas- At a moment when our society is serby and citizen of Istanbul who read growing ever more ubiquitous, when the caption—which in that case took the museum and art are liquid, diffuse, the form of an advertising campaign— it’s increasingly hard to draw their would have imagined in some way the boundaries. For this reason I believe it moment of his or her own birth, would is the gaze of the viewer that has to be have unconsciously composed an im- charged with awareness and responsi- material, personal, unique and unre- bility. We are living in a time of contin- peatable image. Sometimes I try to ual change… I can even imagine that picture to myself the diffuse multitude some shifts of a sociopolitical character of these imagined births; it’s a parallel could almost be seen as biological phe- city, a parallel society. nomena, as if they were the result of a In fact, the caption, in all of the many higher design of nature. I’m referring, forms it takes, suited to each context (ad- for example, to the many migrations of vertising poster, stone slab, leaflet, free multitudes of people from one conti- newspaper and so on), in addition to dis- nent to another. I’m thinking of those seminating and distributing the contents huge ships full of migrants, clinging of the work itself, is the explicit decla- like insects to every mast or handhold ration of that “reaching out” to people, so as not to fall overboard, in order to to the viewers, of which I was speaking survive. It’s as if nature were coming to earlier: it is itself a political and method- our aid and strengthening the weaker ological statement. races, made more fragile by lifestyles that are now unnatural, mixing up eth- ./ In fact I think that with regard both nic groups, merging the so-called Third to your works and to your practice World with the First… While medicine of teaching, everything you do is a is weakening us instead of making us gigantic, continuous, prolonged cap- stronger, unconscious movements of tion. And this also makes it, if you like, peoples and races are producing a new “structuralist,” in the sense that it im- hybridization that is reinvigorating hu- plies a whole line of reasoning on the man beings. Migrations as biology. nature of discourse, on discursive logic, that I really like; or “Habermassian,” !"# The other thing that came to mind, Al- if you prefer, in the sense that it con- berto, when you were speaking of this veys an idea of affirmation of public new spirituality, was your sculpture of discourse. a Madonna which was shown at this year’s Art Basel… $% I’m very interested in this reflection of yours on the relationship between $% The sculpture you saw at Art Basel teaching and the caption as a tool for is the statue of a Madonna that was opening the doors to many parallel con- commissioned from me years ago for a texts. I’ve kept all the texts of my cap- church in Italy. Seeing it at an art fair

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may be strange, but to tell the truth I are contextual, in the sense that they found showing it in a somewhat com- are public works which belong to the mercial context like Basel interesting. place for which they have been con- The work is not created through a gen- ceived… And at the same time they uine sculptural process. It’s a ready- propose new circuits of dissemination. made. I had a 19th-century Madonna sent from Naples, made a cast of it $% Yes, that’s true. My works are planned and then realized a copy in ceramic. in detail to be placed in a precise lo- It was a classical sculpture, the most cation, and simultaneously seek the traditional of icons, very beautiful. I maximum dispersion. The micro and call it “very beautiful” precisely be- macro scale almost always coexist in cause I didn’t make it, but took it from my works. In a way urban design and real life, from that popular context in the detail have a common root, the which the boundary between sacred, same conception. And I think I can profane and mysticism is very blurred. say that one dimension stems from Inside it, in a hollow part of the ceram- the other and vice versa; they are two ic work, I had a small device installed different approaches to space that ex- that made it possible to heat up the change roles during the planning and statue. The sculpture reaches the tem- the functioning of the work itself. My perature of the human body, around aim is to prepare a reaction, to or- 36.7 degrees: it’s almost as if it were ganize the relationship between the maternal warmth. So my intervention elements in order to leave them free consisted merely in raising the temper- for transformation. The work lives off ature of a statue, but twisting its mean- its propagation and perhaps for this ing in an invisible way. Thus the object reason I cannot know its limits and is located in a new territory, in a setting boundaries. halfway between the religious world, The work that is going to be realized that of the faithful, and the system of for Malpensa airport may be of inter- art, its iconography. est with regard to my way of thinking The work is not intrusive, indeed it de- about the problem of the context, as liberately gets mixed up and confused it is site-specific and at the same time with the endless number of religious dispersed, small and at the same time objects scattered around the world and very big. holds an intentional dialogue with pop- It is an intervention that completes ular culture—I’m thinking of the act of Pierluigi Nicolin’s competition pro- devotion of touching the Madonna’s ject for the new gate of the Milanese foot—producing a kind of aura pur- terminal. The work is a stone slab of posely on the borderline between that about one meter square that will be generated by an almost pagan cult and installed in the floor, flush with its sur- the one that the art system itself pro- face. It will be located at many points duces. It was partly for this reason that of Malpensa airport, but also in a se- the work was in the right place, from ries of places directly connected with my point of view, at a fair. it, such as the railroad stations linking It was not my intention to tackle themes the airport to Milan and Lombardy. linked to Catholicism with this work, My intention is to distribute this work but to deal with a certain widespread as widely as possible in the territory. culture, to explore that latent need for On the stone is engraved in Italian secular spirituality that our society ex- and English the sentence Every step I presses in the most varied ways. have taken in my life has led me here, now, which is also the work’s title. !"# I’d like to know to what extent some- Anyone can come across this slab—in one like, for instance, Michael Asher the bathrooms, in a corridor, near the is an important reference for you. I’ve platform, before getting on the train. chosen to mention Michael Asher be- It’s a work that speaks specifically to cause he leads us to the question of the passerby, to anyone who will lin- the context: many of your projects ger even just for a moment to read it,

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treading on it for a fraction of a sec- Inter, Internazionale Football Club ond. Despite its small dimensions, the Milan, the soccer team… work contains the story, the invisible account of its viewer’s life; that little $% The passion for Inter is a family thing, slab of stone is at bottom a very small a tradition. place, but one that contains many other places, cities and spaces that we ./ You have it too? have passed through in the past and a thousand others that we are going $% Very much! This year Inter has been a 6. In 2010 Inter was the first to pass through in the future. It’s a great thrill for everyone.6 Italian club in history to win work a public caption that constructs I think that supporting a soccer team the so-called “treble,” i.e. to win the championship, the na- infinite contexts. It’s a work on the is an expression of disinterested love tional cup and the Champions theme of time, in which past, present that it would be interesting to explore. League in the same year. and future are muddled up. And it’s There is something in it that is connect- strange to think of us three here hold- ed with that latent need for spirituality ing a conversation, when we are far which is increasingly evident in our so- away and simultaneously close and in ciety. And spirituality and art are two movement. Every step we have taken really similar things. in our lives has led us here, now. By now everyone is aware of creativity, everyone knows more or less what it !"# Which is your smallest work and which means, but abuse of the term has made the biggest? it a synonym for something “aestheti- cally enjoyable,” perhaps the very op- $% My biggest works are undoubtedly posite of the idea of art. It seems that those able to construct a sort of urban anything can be done in the name of design, works in whose conception is creativity. It’s the passage from crea- contained the aptitude for their own re- tivity to artistry that interests me: as if production and multiplication. For ex- creativity gave a push in the direction of ample, I’m trying to realize the work Ai artistry, which is at a higher level. And Nati Oggi in the greatest possible num- artistry has something to do with the ber of cities in the world. The dense net- spirituality of existence, they have the work of relations that it brings into play same underlying meaning. is growing. Birth itself, as well as being a universal value and so of incalculable !"# I’ve only got five minutes because I’m size, is also an event that has something off to the theater. I’m going to see the to do with the potential energy that a great Eleanor Bron. There are a few new life contains. The demographic urgent questions left. One of these changes in the world are interesting in- concerns your heroes—even though dicators for the future. we may be living in the wrong time As for small works… There are some to talk of heroes. In other words, your very small drawings that I’ve done, and influences, your “oxygen,” other prac- tiny objects that are scattered around tices that have influenced or inspired my house and amidst a sea of books. you… Every so often I find one after many years have gone by. They are very lit- $% That’s a very difficult question because tle works that vanish and occasionally there are a lot of references and works reemerge when I least expect it. They that have been an inspiration for me. make up a web of hidden objects that You’ve spoken of Asher, who is certain- run through the time of my life and my ly a great artist, but among the works home. I don’t see them and yet they’re that have influenced me in some way around. It’s like keeping my sensibility I would like to mention Titian’s The on charge… I run into them by chance. Assumption of the Virgin in the church I like to forget they exist. of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice. It’s a work of great contempo- ./ I have a question that is perhaps is just raneity. Looking at it I always feel I can a matter of curiosity: your passion for understand what Titian’s thoughts and

174 '()*+,'*-. – Hans Ulrich Obrist

reflections where when he had to solve figures looking at the Virgin, but along the problem of the work’s position, the a flight of steps, in an architectural space assigned to him by the clients. foreshortening somewhat in the man- The The Assumption of the Virgin is ner of Veronese, appears a boy who is a big painting behind the altar, locat- looking straight at the viewer. Observ- ed between two large windows facing ing that work, we are drawn directly west. During the day, sunlight pours into the altarpiece. Our real space into the apse of the church through enters that painting. In this work of these two large windows, meaning that Titian’s I find many of the themes that the work is always seen against the characterize my works: the possibility light, that is to say in the worst condi- of the viewer blending into the work tions of visibility. itself and the intersection of several I’m convinced that Titian conceived real and imagined spaces. the narrative and figurative structure of the picture in relation to this diffi- cult position. Thus he turned a prob- lem that was complicated to solve into a site-specific work of monumental and powerful beauty. The altarpiece is essentially split into two parts: in the upper section the figure of the Madonna and the heavenly scene are illuminated by a dazzling golden light; in the lower half, in a more earthly set- ting, Titian painted the human figures directly against the light, in very dark tones. So the artist has transposed into the work the visual condition in which the viewer finds himself in the space of the church, forced to look at the altarpiece against the light. But how could this unusual solution be justified in the visual narration of the picture? Titian divides the picture in two by painting a large cloud above which the Madonna floats; beneath it the people are covered by the shadow of This work has made a great impres- sion on me precisely because of its marvelous dialogue with the architec- ture. It is not just an accurate response to the space in which it was located, but an incredible project of painting conceived for a viewer blinded by the sun, a work designed to be seen with the eyes dazzled by light. Titian took inspiration from this limitation of the architectural space, and thus succeed- ed in increasing the power of his in- tervention, by setting his painting in relation not only to the building that houses it, but to the cosmos itself. And then, not far away, still in Venice, still at the Frari, Titian again: the Pe- saro Madonna. Here there are some

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Palazzo Reale, !"# You have taught at different schools, institution. With Angela Vettese and Milan like the Brera Fine Arts Academy in Marco De Michelis, we structured the st Milan, the IUAV in Venice, and the art seminars together with the archi- 1 April 2012 Fine Arts Academy of Bologna. Have tecture seminars of Stefano Boeri, until you ever thought about making your everything converged in a single sem- own Black Mountain College, of creat- inar. The connection between art and ing a new school? architecture is also a clear part of your !"# work. Please tell me something about Hans Ulrich Obrist $% No, I don’t think so. Though down- that. $% stairs from my studio a large space has Alberto Garutti recently been vacated, where it might $% I took a degree in architecture in 1971, be interesting to try to make something though art was always in my mind and happen with students, or something my thoughts. After all, it is also true else. A sort of extension of the work I that in the 1800s those who wanted have been doing for years inside insti- to become architects had to attend a tutions. While I feel very distant from school of Fine Arts. It was only in the any academic or classical conception of early part of the 1900s that the two schooling, my work as a teacher does disciplines were separated. Historical not reflect a sort of “lack of discipline” cities would not have had the same as an end in itself. My practice in Acad- degree of quality had it not been for emies or Universities is actually based the combined intervention of artists on a very precise method. It might be and architects, in fact I would say of interesting to apply certain constitu- “artists”, period. I consider every work ent principles of the course to parallel of quality an extraordinary cognitive practices, running alongside those be- experience, notwithstanding the disci- longing to the scholastic context. In a plinary context in which it can be filed certain sense, that is what I do in my away. The encounter between art and public projects. As I already mentioned architecture is necessary, I believe, be- in our earlier conversations, there is a cause it is capable of proposing a cog- certain assonance between the prin- nitive type of experience—revealing ciples that shape the structure of my new dimensions, opening up horizons, course and the working method I use proposing radical content. in the space of the city. !"# Like Emilio Primi you have produced !"# There is something that always struck very few catalogues, and they are all me about the experiences I had with out of print. There are a few publica- schools, since I started working as a tions, like the one by the publishing young curator with Kasper König in house Kaleidoscope, which are also the 1990s. At the time, König was the text books, but a true monograph director of the Städelschule in Frank- on your work does not exist. Where furt. In the daytime I worked with him, would you begin to make your cata- and in the evening I attended lectures; logue raisonné? it was as if I had become a student again. What I thought was magical $% I have never wanted to make a cata- about the Städelschule back then was logue. Some might say it is a form of the fact that the school of architecture masochism; actually, it is as if I had was a part of the school of art. That always wanted—probably fooling is where my passion for architecture myself—to demand everything of the began. I believe it was a fundamental work, without the need for any form experience, not only for me, but also of mediation. It is hard to explain, but I for many artists. Years later, I found believe this type of reflection has to do that spirit again at the IUAV in Ven- with the idea of a work that needs to ice, where I had begun to teach: the develop, to travel to spread its content, context was that of an art school, but independent of the existence of a cat- with very strong links to the architec- alogue. Actually I am very happy that ture school that is part of the same I have never produced a book. Fifteen

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years ago, when I bought my studio, I risky, because it meant shifting away remember that during the move I sud- from that social and political reality denly stopped the workers who were that was so much the center of the aes- loading a pile of catalogues onto the thetic practices of the time. truck: “Wait, put them here,” I said. And we threw them all away, because !"# Who were your heroes and sources of in the end I always hated those cata- inspiration in those days? logues. They were not the way I want- ed them to be. $% I grew up observing what was being shown in Italian and European galler- !"# Do copies of this catalogue still exist? ies at the time, namely Conceptual art. I was interested in its shared tenden- $% I have one copy, but by now it is very cy to develop autonomous codes and old and worn, the pages are falling out. languages. I perceived it as the context Sometimes I may show it to a friend, in which a new relationship was hap- in a private setting. This catalogue pening between environment, man contains some crucial passages on my and object, in which it was possible work, but it certainly does not contain to address the relations between word the works I would insert in a book that and image, analytical narrative and is supposed to narrate the process of romantic interpretation. For me, and my artistic practice in a reasoned way. for many artists, I think, fundamental A hypothetical catalogue raisonné on personalities for the construction of an my work should begin with the imag- international imaginary included Fran- es of the first exhibition I did in 1975 co Toselli, Françoise Lambert, Massi- in Milan, at the Diagramma gallery of mo Minini, with whom I still work. As Luciano Inga Pin. In that period Inga well as artists like Sol LeWitt, Donald Pin was an important reference point Judd, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta- for the artists of my generation, like Clark, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Wein- Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia, er, Richard Serra, and of course Mario Enzo Cucchi—the artists who would Merz and Alighiero Boetti. But it is later form the Transavanguardia group. interesting to see how at the Diafram- The exhibition at Inga Pin’s gallery was ma gallery a movement was generated very important for me, I remember it that was almost the opposite of the as a revelation, because it revealed cer- Conceptual. If you think about it, the tain aspects of my work, and also of my beginning of the Transavanguardia can way of being, which would then shape be traced back precisely there, with the character of all my artistic practice: the exhibition by Francesco Clemente the critical attitude, and uncertainty in 1975. Luciano did something very as the driving force behind research important. Though I was very timid, and knowledge. The most important I was a regular visitor at the galleries, work, the backbone of that exhibition, especially the four or five places where explored the theme of error, of doubt, the artists looked at exhibition space and came from certain writings and as a working tool: Gian Enzo Sperone thoughts of Montaigne, things I was in Turin, Salvatore Ala in Milan, L’At- reading at the time. It was entitled I tico and the gallery of Ugo Ferranti in believe I remember and it consisted of Rome, and also the gallery of Lucio a series of 32 black and white photo- Amelio in Naples, which purchased graphs showing me in the room where some of my works. I slept at the time, surrounded by the The encounter with Minimalism was objects of my everyday life, against the also very important for me, and the backdrop of a domestic context. approach to the idea of analytically In an extremely politicized historical retracing the process of construction period like the mid-1970s, paying at- of the work, narrating the process of tention to absolutely banal objects or making art, after having somehow tak- demonstrating interest in the idea of en the practice back to zero. I was in- an “individual narrative” was almost trigued by the artistic experimentation

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of Minimalism as a reaction to and a $% It was 1992. natural consequence of the ideologi- cal and political premises of the time, !"# That day I was with Peter Fischli and without which all conceptual art would David Weiss in Düsseldorf. The next not have made sense. The aspiration day their exhibition was going to open, to make clean forms and the idea of and we spent the night in a hotel in emptiness in the work of certain artists front of the television, but without see- of that period would have totally lost ing anything… value had they been deprived of that ideological and political pressure from $% So did I… which everything took form. Form and content cannot be separated, just as in- !"# Perhaps a kind of collective memory stinct and brain are inseparable. exists of that night. In an interview with Guido Molinari, you said that the !"# And when did you have the revelation Gulf War and the spread of the Inter- that took you beyond the gallery, be- net triggered a series of chain reactions yond the museum? that have also had an impact on the psychology of people and on our way $% I can also recall this passage very clear- of thinking and making art. If war has ly. Though my intention was never to changed geography, perception and go against the galleries, or against the the sense of space, the Internet has system, but to simply listen to what changed the conception of the world was happening in the world, to certain and of its complexity. Following this transformations that were happening epiphany, which we can position at the outside the art context. The shift to- start of the 1990s, what is the first work wards public art and the passage from in which we can see this shift, that no the museum to the city happened in longer has to do with the modern ego the same historical moment as the first but with an ego charged with a new Gulf War and the advent of the Inter- responsibility, which you felt could not net in Italy. I felt it was urgent, at the be overlooked? time, to deal with a reality in transfor- mation, apparently far away from the $% This passage coincides with the mak- gallery-collector-museum machinery. ing of a project that began in 1993-1994 The art system is very important— at Peccioli, for an exhibition curated only a simpleton could think that art is by Antonella Soldaini. Peccioli is a not also an economic reality—but the small town near Pisa, very beautiful danger, in those years more than ever in its simplicity. It was a town in the before, was that of getting closed up in avant-garde, and also quite affluent, too much self-reference, losing touch a virtuous town because it had the with the realities of life. For centuries management of the garbage dump of art had a relationship with life and the Florence. The curator asked me to do everyday dimension, with a positive, a work in the city, telling me: “choose ethical approach. In my view, it is nec- a square or a street.” But my concern, essary to ask ourselves every day about at the time, was not so much to find a the role and the ethical responsibility central spot that would give my work of the artist, and to do this we cannot great visibility, but to make the work help but confront the artwork with the be accepted by the townspeople. This historical reality in which it acts, and is why I dedicated the work to the citi- will act. How can we produce art if we zens of Peccioli. This was the first time do not listen to the world? As Alighiero my work had emerged from the con- Boetti put it, “to bring the world into fines of my home, getting beyond the the world”… idea of the domestic landscape that had characterized my practice until then. I !"# You mentioned the first Gulf War, I re- should point out that the “home” was call that day very well. not a private place for me, a place to close myself up and reject the world;

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quite the opposite, it was the place of thorities, I chose the one furthest from relations, with the telephone, the an- the center. On the outskirts of town no swering machine, the computer. It was one was interested in art, no one ever a place of personal but also interper- went to the museum. I thought, “al- sonal reflection, a microcosm in which right, now I’ll show you.” So I decided to activate different relationships. to build right there, inside the public The project done in 1996 for the exhibi- gardens, a small room, three square tion curated by Rita Selvaggio at Casa meters, designed as if it were a small Masaccio, in San Giovanni Valdarno— subsidiary of the Museion—the muse- the house where the artist was born, um in the city center—with the idea now organized as a museum—is anoth- that every three months, one work er revealing example of the shift of the from the museum collection would be ego you mentioned. displayed there. Every time someone, taking their kids to the park or going !"# Also in the small museum of Bolzano, to buy groceries, passed in front of the you invested a great deal of time, man- little museum a sensor would light up aging in the end to establish a relation- the inside. The passers-by were thus ship with the local residents… forced, if only for a few seconds, to come to terms with the artwork. Leti- $% Thinking precisely about this project, I zia Ragaglia, who had invited me to can undoubtedly say that concepts like make this piece and now directs the “difficulty” and the “limit”—themes to Museion, told me that, in recent years, which I would like to devote an entire this little room has become a very pop- chapter of my possible catalogue rai- ular feature of the neighborhood. sonné—definitely have something to do with making art. Even the history of !"# So the structure of your catalogue rai- art is the result of the overcoming of a sonné is beginning to take form. One limit. Just consider the limits imposed, chapter should undoubtedly be on for example, by the Church: to con- light, a feature of many of your works, form to an evangelical narrative, to the including To Those Born Today, done rules of liturgy, to the architecture of for the first time in 1998 in Bergamo. churches… Limits those artists capable For you, art has to do with light, just of producing and developing a project, as emptiness has to do with fullness starting in conditions of difficulty and in architecture. Light narrates reality, constriction, transformed into a formi- it is a metaphor of art, but also an ap- dable energy… plication of technology, as is clear in your work Storms (2008), done for the !"# What was the difficulty of the room- MAXXI in Rome. museum of Bolzano? $% The work Temporali began for Fondazi- $% In Bolzano I found myself in a condi- one Remotti in Camogli, a deconsecrat- tion of extreme solitude. Bolzano is a ed church that is now a contemporary difficult city in which two cultural re- art center. But the project has had fur- alities coexist, the Italian and the Ger- ther developments, as in the case of the man, and they are very different. The MAXXI museum, which commissioned difficulties ranged from managing to the work when the museum was still complete a site visit to finding ways to under construction. There too, every get into contact with the locals. But I time lightning struck, a system would was also asking myself, “what am I do- turn on all the lights installed in one ing here? I am spending public funds, zone of the building, via Internet. but nobody seems to care about art Here the light gave meaning to the here.” It was precisely this clash with darkness, and vice versa, just as in the an urban context that repulsed me, design of a building empty space gives this suffering, that triggered the work. meaning to full zones. For me, light has When they asked me to choose from great symbolic force; nevertheless, in the sites indicated by the provincial au- the public works it is important above

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all for its narrative immediacy. The in Brescia, in January 2008. “Alberto, idea of “narrative quality” has a very I would like to do a show of yours,” strong relationship with the works To Minini said, “but enough of these pro- Those Born Today and Storms: they jects in the city! I want you to make detect and reveal, encouraging the paintings, because I have to sell them.” passer-by to imagine something. In the I made paintings that speak of the city, work Storms I have simply attempted of places. Samples is a family of mono- to put the enigma of art into relation chrome paintings, whose surfaces bear with the enigma of the universe, with a a thin black line that almost dances context that is equally unconceivable, on the canvas to make a calligraphic as Borges said. This was a work on na- form. The length of the line is equal ture, on this strange, indefinable thing to a relationship and a distance, ex- that exists above us. plained in the titles: I walked from Fon- dazione Sandretto for 1221 meters, until !"# Another chapter of your book could be I reached the UBI bank; or I walked for about nature… 1556 meters to reach the Assumption of the Virgin by Titian. Using a pedom- $% Yes, of course. Basically the work I did eter, I measured the distance between with Francesco Bonami at Villa Manin, two places, and based on this I then in a town in Veneto called Passariano made an abstract drawing on a colored di Codroipo, has a lot to do with the background. Though the drawing does idea of nature. Villa Manin was a con- not represent the route in any way, temporary art center built inside a no- the path is somehow contained in the bleman’s estate from the 1700s, with an abstract composition. Each of the dis- enormous, spectacular park containing tances indicated represents the physi- very old trees. When they asked me to cal space that separates the patrons of do something there, I decided to build the various works, the institutions that a large enclosure, whose perimeter purchased them, the nerve centers of would form, on the lawn, the historic the city, for political or economic rea- coat-of-arms of the Manin family—a sons. To respond to the dealer’s request geometric result that only the swallows to make works to sell, I made a work can see, though, because you can rec- on the very idea of selling, disguised ognize the form only from the air. A as a painting, with its own calligraphy. space cut out of nature, off limits to In this sense, I like to connect Samples human beings—the work is entitled As to the pure idea of selling and trade. I if nature had left out men. While the am interested in bringing out the role park is perfectly groomed by four gar- of money as a tool of negotiation: the deners, inside the enclosure nature can exchange of goods, thoughts and cul- grow wild. tures has nourished complex cities like Venice for centuries. What else is a !"# I’d like to conclude this interview with gallery, in the end? A cog in that com- a question regarding another possible posite machinery that is the city. Sam- chapter of your catalogue raisonné: ples appears to be a very simple, cal- drawing. I am thinking above all of the ligraphic, aesthetic work, with gentle series of works Samples (2008). Do you forms, nothing more than a “collection draw on an everyday basis? What is the of samples,” as the title says, precisely role of drawing in your work? in the mercantile sense of the term: an- yone who would like to purchase one $% Drawing is very important for me, of these works need only selected the drawing and painting. For the exhibi- background color—pink, blue, beige— tion at the PAC, I would like to bring and decide with me on the distance to a big painting, and some drawings. be measured—from my studio to his Samples is a work that is composed of house, from the entrance of the foun- drawings—but I could also call them dation to that of my house, and so on. paintings—which began for an exhibi- The work is made exactly as ordered tion at the gallery of Massimo Minini, by the client, representing this encoun-

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ter through the distance that separates us and, at the same time, now connects us. As if it were a portrait or a view. In short, it is an ancient story, artists have made portraits and views for cen- turies…

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Locarno !"# Your retrospective at the PAC will take undermining their work in any way. 7th August 2012 place parallel to the exhibition of artists Paradoxically, it is only by maintaining who have taken your courses. What is this lateral position, I believe, that it is your degree of involvement in that pro- possible to make things work and to ject? produce a certain type of radicality.

$% I am very much involved in the show, !"# Most of the interesting young Italian !"# though it might not be very evident. I artists have been your students. On Hans Ulrich Obrist wanted to keep a certain distance from this occasion, for the first time, we have $% the project: it seemed like the most the list. Something like when Michael Alberto Garutti natural way to behave. So together Craig Martin did the exhibition with all with Paola Nicolin, we decided to ask his students from Goldsmiths in Lon- Luca Cerizza to be its curator. Over don… the months, I have perceived a certain enthusiasm on the part of many of the $% This is the first time I have had a chance artists invited to participate. Roberto to add up the number of my students Cuoghi, for example, an artist I really who have later become respected art- love, is making a special work about ists: there are 69 of them. Then we can me for the occasion. add the new generation, those taking the courses right now. Strange, isn’t !"# A portrait? it? Everyone thinks Garutti has been pulling all kinds of strings to get his stu- $% Yes, he has already done a casting of dents into the art circuit, while what I my face. It is supposed to be a secret, do is the exact opposite. until the opening, but I want to tell you: Cuoghi will make my death mask. !"# What is your teaching method? It’s I thought that was moving. probably a question of alchemy. Like when they asked Stanley Kubrick how !"# Is it a work that belongs to the series of he had managed to make his films… mutant portraits, like the one he made of Dakis Joannou? (Megas Dakis, 2007, $% First of all, it has to do with the later- ed.) al position we were talking about. The question, though, as we have already $% No, this is a casting of my face and my said in the past, is another one, I think. hand. Simone Berti will also do some- I believe that art cannot be taught. The thing about me. So, as you can imagine, true problem is to manage to under- my involvement in the show is clear, stand how the sensibility of a person but the position I have chosen to as- who takes a course and tries to learn sume is lateral. I think that is a position something from another person works. of greater force. For me, the initial approach with the students is very important. The first !"# The opposite of putting yourself at the year is fundamental, because in the end center, as Deleuze would say, in the I simply work on removing the dross. It middle of things but in the center of is very difficult, at times painful, but it nothing… needs to be done.

$% Exactly, it is a position I have always !"# So it is not a matter of adding, but of decided to take, not just regarding my subtracting. own work, the teaching, but with re- spect to systems in general. So also for $% My objective was—and still is—to this reason I have chosen to simply stay reach level zero. Many young people there and observe this exhibition, in reach the Academy or the Universi- order not to pose any limits to the pos- ty burdened with cultural sediment sibility for all the artists—especially the that, in my view, is an impediment to younger ones—to be the protagonists interpretation of the problem of the of the work, and with the aim of not contemporary condition: we might say

182 '()*+,'*-. – Hans Ulrich Obrist

that they are at a level of “thirty be- !"# In front of the other students? low” with respect to the level required to work on art. My job is to bring them $% Yes, always in a group. It is a very use- to “ten below,” then “three below,” ful way of understanding how I can “two below,” “zero.” When you have penetrate into certain mechanisms. At reached zero, then maybe you can get the Academy I use the same procedures into positive territory. So the whole I have used to make my public works. problem is to remove the encrustations When I am asked to intervene in public created by Italian scholastic culture. space, before making the work I visit the place different times, I meet the lo- !"# So you have to undo the damage cal residents, and I know this may seem caused by previous education. How is invasive and irritating. With the stu- it possible to do that? dents I use the same procedure. Always starting with a straightforward, frontal $% First of all I talk a lot with the stu- relationship, based on maximum hon- dents, with each of them. When I dis- esty. The students understand perfectly cuss things with a young person, after that if they can establish a good rela- a while I think I can understand if he tionship on a personal level, they will or she has the potential to become a never be subjected to the judgment of good artist or not; it is something I can the “professor.” To create an atmos- immediately sense. I can grasp, in an phere means working so that the course informal conversation, passages that self-generates, then, and every student have to do with the work. The personal can bring a vision, a sensibility, and relationship with each of them is very thus contribute with their complexity important, because the real problem to the construction of the course as an is not to teach how to make a work of organism. art, but to establish a sort of empathy, a shared sensibility. The real problem is !"# So the situation of “creating the con- to meet on the common ground of the ditions” is similar to what Cedric Price work, also activating a critical capacity says about urban planning, when he says regarding institutions and the figure of that those who design cities should not the professor. I can say that I am also create a top-down master plan, but the critical with the students, in the sense conditions that make self-organization that I am never interested in the work possible. Did you learn this over time, or of a diligent drudge who brings me a did you have a revelation, or a mentor? correct piece of “homework,” with an eye on getting good grades. What I $% Probably I have just done what I wished truly want is simply to be able to meet my teachers would do with me, when the student on the common ground I was a student. My father, who was a of the work. To be able to create an professor of Latin and Greek, always atmosphere in the course, so that an- repeated this phrase: “first duty, then yone who enters the Academy does pleasure.” While I tell the students: it to rethink his experience up to that “first pleasure, then pleasure,” because moment, to “bring the world into the if it is not fun to work in the Academy world,” as Alighiero put it. and to work on art, good results cannot be achieved. !"# Creating an atmosphere also means creating a situation that triggers rela- !"# This is another rule: “first pleasure, tions among the students… then pleasure.” Excellent. Is this a teaching you wanted to formulate to $% Yes, it means not only relationships then transmit to others? between students, but also reflection on their life, the things they like, their $% Yes, to give it to others, but in terms of story, the reasons they are there… I talk what I might say is an almost amorous a lot with them, about everything, but impulse. As in a love story, it is not an never in private, always in a public way. impulse of ego, it is just as egotistic as

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it is altruistic. It is a game of exchange. about that garment. This sister was im- Otherwise what good would it be to be portant for a thousand reasons: for her an artist or to make an artwork, were dress, for the way she occupied space, it not an experience aimed at knowing for the way the draped material moved, and exploring a new worldview? the type of fabric, the workmanship, because there were two sheets of cloth !"# I have always had mentors, great art- that concealed a body… and then, be- ists and curators from whom I have cause at the school from which I had learned. Jean Rouch, the film-maker, been expelled, the nuns wore precisely for example, taught me that one thing this type of habit. that can be transmitted is courage, the idea that we need immense courage. !"# I met Cuoghi for the first time more What do you think? than 10 years ago in Milan, when he was wearing his father’s clothing. $% I think that among the generating ac- tions, the motors of the world, there is $% His father was ill, and then he passed a perhaps even stronger force, namely away, and Roberto wanted to take on the impulse of love. Behind this type the physical form of his father. Here of “motor” there is a mechanism that too there is a strange similarity, be- escapes us, which is that of the conser- cause one of my very first works was vation of the species. Before courage, I one in which my father was the indirect think about the loving impulse as part protagonist. I had asked him to put on of our genetic and evolutionary course. all my clothes—jacket, trousers, rain- Actually, I truly think art has to do with coat—but backwards. I then asked him biology: I like to imagine that it is part to put his hands in his pockets, there- of this type of biological process. fore in back of him, and I took his pic- ture. This black and white photo dates !"# The transmission is not just genetic back to the 1970s, it is quite disturbing but, as Richard Dawkins says, it is also because you see a person whose face memetic: the transmission of ideas, of is made of hair, an almost Magritte-like memes. figure, surreal, a bit strange.

$% Another crucial point lies precise- !"# This could also be an anchor point for ly in critical awareness. “What is the the exhibition. The photo of your fa- thought of the work?,” I always ask ther would have been a good start… each student. In this sense, when I told you about the self-generation of the $% There are also other works that some- course, and when you asked me about how relate to that one. For example, the hidden secret of my teaching, I told a small series of photographs I had you that the dialogue is so intense and completely forgotten, also dating back authentic that all those who take part to 1975, which was what led up to the in our encounters have to take respon- first exhibition at Massimo Minini, then sibility for their role and, therefore, Galleria Banco. That same sequence of also for the course. Taking responsibil- images is also connected with a work I ity, without compromises; the process made much later in Milan, in 2011, at is also very tough, and for this reason Hangar Bicocca. The work is composed many try to escape. of five black and white photographs, in Just the other day, Roberto Cuoghi told which there is a sheet of paper I had me why he signed up for my course. He hung on the wall, which moves… said that in the courtyard of the Brera Academy he had seen a nun walking, !"# Papers fly… wearing a very beautiful blue habit with red trim, and he followed her. Af- $% Yes, this object becomes the protago- ter a few minutes he entered my class- nist, it has a life of its own. And I found room, and he saw this nun at the center myself, thirty years later, watching it of the room, and I was talking precisely descend from the ceiling of the Hangar.

184 '()*+,'*-. – Hans Ulrich Obrist

!"# I am very interested in this idea that about it, especially regarding the eter- everything, in the end, is already con- nal paradox of the retrospective: I was tained in the first work. struck when you said that in a few min- utes you manage to realize if you are $% Everything is already there in the work looking at an artist, or not. Is it totally Horizon, too, the black and white crys- a matter of intuition? tals I made starting in 1984, of different sizes and forms, which I showed in my $% I think so, it is like falling in love. I room at the Venice Biennial in 1990. am very open to others, and this helps Speaking of “horizons,” I don’t re- me, perhaps because through them member who told me, quite recently, I want to understand the things I do that very few artists live by the sea. I not know about myself. When I am answered instinctively that maybe this faced by a young person—timid, like type of explanation would make sense: any student who enters a classroom that the sea is such a powerful, enig- for the first time at the Academy and matic place—it spreads out an indefi- has to talk with a professor—I would nite, unreachable line before us—that feel really terrible if I thought, even seeing it every day, for an artist, might for an instant, that I was behaving be unbearable. the way my professors used to behave with me. The student sees me as an !"# Many works exist connected with the important point of reference, and it is idea of an unreachable horizon, by art- a little drama, because obviously I can ists like Caspar David Friedrich or Ger- never really be that. When students hard Richter, though they did not live seek me out, and rely on me, I shift by the sea… all my attention towards them. Often it is a totally absorbing process: I am $% …their gazes look out on the grand extremely interested in them, so much enigmas of landscapes and distances. It so that in certain situations I am not interests me to think about the idea of able to perceive the tragic sense of a horizon that expands, and is enriched such a strong bond. At a certain point as it expands. The further up you go, the time comes to be on your way, the the more the problems get complex. time of death. I was talking about this the other day with Roberto, in the stu- !"# Like Segantini who wanted to see his dio, and I told him: “Well, with this mountains, set off from Milan to go to death mask I’m getting a head start!” Engadin, higher and higher The end of everything is a gorgeous problem, one I hadn’t ever thought $% The idea of the gaze contains the expe- about until a certain age, and it defi- rience of a spatial dimension that ex- nitely has to do with the relationship tends along a horizon and, likewise, the with young people. This is why it is a horizon line can be metaphorically jux- fantastic, but also tragic, relationship. taposed with the very concept of “ex- istence.” You mentioned Caspar David !"# Many artists who teach told me it made Friedrich and Gerhard Richter, two of them aware that great artist are rare. my great passions. All this reminds me of something about you: I met you in- $% I think the opposite is closer to the directly many years ago, when I was in truth. All human beings start out with Sils Maria (1992, ed.), where I had gone an excellent chance to become who to see a little exhibition in the house of knows what, maybe even the president Nietzsche, and I bought a little book of the United States, but along the way signed by Richter. that chance is often altered by the en- vironment in which they live, by the !"# That was my second exhibition, as people they meet… My work, in this a student, after the one I did in my sense, is also very political, it attempts kitchen. But let’s get back to your ex- to prompt critical reflection on the edu- hibition, since I have a lot of questions cational institution. Every time you use

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the word “teaching” I feel a certain dis- !"# What does that mean? comfort, because I don’t want to be a professor in the usual sense of the term. $% They might not like it. Viewers will Everything I do inside the University have to sign a release, to accept a situa- and the Academy is entirely part of my tion I will impose on them. I will show work as an artist. some of my earlier works that may not be familiar to many people, and then !"# This is interesting, because it brings us of course a whole block of works that to Beuys. Beuys talked about teaching have been important for me over the as a part of his social sculpture. last twenty years. They are often public works, so of course there is the risk of $% Of course, but in the case of Beuys this falling into a documentary form when statement has to be inevitably posi- you bring them into a museum, which I tioned in a precise ideological-political detest. context, while in my case it does not start there, it becomes that later. My !"# Architecture has the same problem. approach, to use a rather generic term, There is nothing more boring than ar- is “artistic.” I mean that the question chitecture exhibitions showing only is about how “to poetically live your models. life.” How can we not experience, every day, an elementary pain that $% The work To Those Born Today, which accompanies us in life and therefore I have done in many public squares, crosses an infinity of fields, from pol- starting in Bergamo and then in Ghent itics to ecology, education to architec- and Istanbul, and which I will bring ture? Well, that pain, in my view, has to the PAC, is one example. To avoid to do with the sense of the artistic I an approach of documentation, when was talking about. It is something that Fondazione Pistoletto asked me to is a part of our very existence: the take the work to Biella I went to the awareness that everything eludes us, hospital in Bergamo, to the maternity of “loss” as a condition that is so un- ward, and talked with the director of avoidable as to generate, by reaction, the hospital, who was very courteous an ethical idea of reconstruction. This and interested. I got them to give me is why I talk about biology. Of actions the addresses of all the families that and transformations that are set in mo- had had a child when I first installed tion precisely as natural forms of sur- the work. Then I went to see them, I vival. You and I, perhaps, would not photographed each family with the be here were we not motivated by an child, by now quite grown up. Each ethical idea of reconstruction. in his or her home. In this way I pro- duced a work composed of fifteen pho- !"# Your practice very often goes beyond tographs, a cutaway of the city and the the object. How is it possible to do a society, in this case of Bergamo. There retrospective of your practice? Mar- is the home of the clerk, the home of cel Duchamp said we recall only the a wealthy woman, of an immigrant exhibitions that also invent an exhibit from outside Europe… as a whole, a design. The exhibit design is the instru- little overview of the society. Then, in ment that enters the memory. I would every photo, there is my jacket, which like to ask you to tell me a bit about nobody sees, but if I tell you about it this idea of retrospective, and if you you can find it: in one case it is left on already have an idea about the exhibit the sofa, in another on a chair, in yet design in the space. another it is hanging from a coat rack. A bit as if I wanted to stay there with $% There will be a very new work that them. The To Those Born Today is thus occupies the entire exhibition space, a presented not through documentation, work that might be a little bit jarring for but through what the public work has the audience. produced: its artistic quality has pro- duced another reality.

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!"# This is interesting because it creates a a symmetrical exhibition inside a sym- photographic link with the works at the metrical architecture. The works in the start of the itinerary. So you want to left wing of the building were equal to put a few works from the start of your those in the right wing. The exhibition career, and perhaps these, in particular, was specular. are epiphanies, otherwise you wouldn’t put them there… !"# Like twins.

$% Yes, of course. But there will also be $% Yes, like twins! Once they asked me to other works from that period: the Ri- design a house for two entrepreneurs cami. I didn’t want to sacrifice those, or from Verona, who were twins, and I the wood pieces with holes, or the large thought about a house entirely based striped oil paintings I showed in 1990 at on a mirror image. the Villa dei Giardini in Modena. Villa dei Giardini is an 18th-century !"# This exhibition is not very well known. work of architecture, surrounded by a park. I was invited by Flaminio Gualdo- $% You are right, there were only about ni, then the director of that exhibition twenty people, and I never published space, and I decided to place a table of anything, but I have the documenta- my design in the first octagonal room. tion, though unfortunately it isn’t very The table is the place of encounter, con- good. versation, socializing, and it is also a bit animal-like (I once designed a table !"# All this will go into the book, created to under which to sleep). Then there was go with the exhibition. I think the book a large work made in black and white should have 1,000 pages. chip composite and cement: a floor, 6 x 4 meters. Alighiero Boetti liked it a $% It is important to have a book in which lot, he walked there with his red socks; all the stratification is evident. Since somebody must have the photos. I also there are all the photographic works on have some works by Alighiero, includ- architectural space of the 1970s… ing one with a dedication to “Garut- ti’s son,” because Francesco (Garutti, !"# So at the start the link with architecture ed.) had just been born and Alighiero is photographic. couldn’t remember his name… Then, on one wall, there was an embroidery $% Architecture is the great mother. The on beige silk, a black embroidery, with visual arts would never have happened the measurements of my house. In the without architecture. When I think of second room, a wall with a large paint- painters, I imagine them inside rooms, ing with white and blue stripes, paint- inside houses and palaces. Even per- ed with oils, on the right; and then, in spective, if you think about it, was born the back to the left, a large piece of in a territory, Europe, and Italy, in a wood with veneers. Turning back, af- particular way, where architecture has ter having crossed the large hall with a defensive conception, the city has a the table at the center, on the axis of defensive conception. So from a spatial symmetry of the villa, one entered the dimension of this time, people thought other wing of the building and encoun- it would be fantastic to ask painting tered a large black and white floor, of to knock down the walls, to make the the same size and position as the first space complex. one. Then came an embroidery, just like the first one, in the same position; !"# Where painting is born, as Werner Her- in the next room, a large painting with zog shows us in his very beautiful film white and blue stripes, in the same po- (Cave of Forgotten Dreams, 2010, ed.). sition as its counterpart. In short, at the end of the visit, it was clear that $% …you say a thousand pages… and to the backbone of the whole project was think that I have never wanted to make precisely the architecture: I had made a book! Maybe because I have never

187 !"#$%&' (!%)&&* – didascalia ⁄ caption

found the people with whom to have used to seeing art, but also about the a dialogue. Maybe my relationship casual visitors, on weekends, with their with the students comes from this, I kids, who come to the museum: they feel good with them. I don’t feel like a too will have to assume this responsibil- teacher, I feel like a student. ity. So I imagine that there will be many people who will leave the museum, to !"# But there are many possible ways to be able to comment as they please! make a monographic book. Boetti called me in 1990 because he wanted !"# In this way you also produce an enor- to make a book, for which he asked mous archive. all his friends to choose their favorite work by him. I wrote about Mille Fiu- $% Yes, definitely. The real protagonist of mi. It would be nice to ask fifty of your the work is the viewer. In my public friends to write about one work. work, for example, the captions are a fundamental device to explain mean- $% Great… that is so in tune with my way ing, because I want people to under- of thinking about the work. stand the operation I set in motion. The caption fully embodies my meth- !"# Two books could be made: one of the odological approach: the artist comes opening, layered—and in chapters— down of the pedestal to put himself at and one at the end. the service of the viewer, who is the true protagonist. In the museum just $% That would be fantastic. the opposite happens. I believe that visitors, when they enter !"# We could take up Boetti’s very gener- the museum, have to take responsibili- ous attitude: that way you will never ty for their gaze. This is why I made the have the expert who writes the book phosphorescent furniture that makes and monopolizes the thought of the up the work What happens in rooms artist. Though I respect that approach, when the people have left? (2001) and I don’t think it would make sense for glows only when the museum is closed. your work. It is hard to recognize that furniture as artwork, but I was interested precisely $% I would be pleased. And the idea of in that difficulty. I wanted the viewer to calling on people to write a text about make an effort, to try to find the work. my work is very connected to my prac- At the PAC the spectator is under mi- tice, as in the work Horizon. crophone surveillance. I hope the mi- crophone work changes the sense of !"# Tell me about this new work. the exhibition: it is a classic retrospec- tive that will be transformed into some- $% There will be old works and there will thing else by this work. be the public works, but there is one work that holds them all together. An- !"# It has a dual code. I also like the idea yone who enters the space will have to that artists never know what viewers sign a release and declare that they are say about their exhibitions. willing to accept one precise condition: in the PAC there will be 28 microphones $% Yes, and I don’t want the recording hanging from the ceiling, which will re- devices to be hidden—that is unpleas- cord everything that happens during the ant—I want the system to be stated, show. I want to then make a small pub- and I know that many viewers will then lication that contains this self-generated tell lies. Some may forget about the script. The spectator will lie, make com- presence of the microphones and speak ments, even say foolish things. They the truth. Others might play with the will certainly no longer be free to be situation… just any viewer. They will have to take responsibility for their role. I am not !"# …some will do a performance, know- talking only about the visitors who are ing the mikes are there…

188 '()*+,'*-. – Hans Ulrich Obrist

$% So you can understand that the whole the work keep its aura, its status as art, meaning of the exhibition changes. we as viewers—the artist is the first viewer—have to make ourselves into !"# Will the microphones be like “little walking museums,” that is, we Duchamp’s coal bags in the Surrealist have to look at things and charge them exhibition of 1938. How will the mikes with an artistic gaze, with “artness.” be installed? Will there be playback in This is the shift I was talking about real time via Internet? before, which transforms the problem from art into “living life in an artistic $% No, absolutely not, I want everything way.” Today all this is speeded up even to be silently gathered. more by the media and the question, if possible, is even more crucial. !"# The idea that the exhibition is a cuta- way of a conversation is also very nice. !"# As Picabia said, the museum risks to be People talk in homes, usually in the a cemetery, while here, through these museum they feel a bit intimidated, so voices and microphones, the retrospec- they talk less. tive is present, we are not in the past.

$% Indeed, it is about the responsibility of $% The presence of the microphones will the viewer, who has to decide whether produce an interesting interaction with to talk or not. It is a complex problem. the documentation in the show of cer- tain public works. Anything said about !"# …Adorno also talked about it. the work and recorded will update even the most dated operations, bring- $% There was this problem in the phospho- ing them into the present. rescent furniture work too: on the one hand, there is the easiest way to ap- !"# This has the potential to be not a book proach the work, the emotional route of one thousand, but even ten thousand (if there is a poetic idea in that work, pages! It would be the longest piece of it is that of imagining houses when the theater of the absurd in the history of people are not there, imagining fur- theater, because it would be a sort of nishings that when people are absent theater of life. All these transcribed and the house is empty, see the light of monologues, dialogues, trialogues, pol- the day and the night, hear the noises, yphonies, may also might want to send the insects, the beep of the answering a message… this too is possible… like machine); on the other, there is the stepping out onto the balcony, each problematic issue of the responsibility person can have his say… of the spectator. It is like saying: “Dear viewer, while in the city I provide a $% It will happen. As you said, the work caption and come towards you, in the almost invites the viewer to stand on a museum you have to take responsibili- little stage, to talk. The work is this. ty for your role and seek the work. The work is there.” !"# Will there be other new works in the exhibition? !"# Duchamp says the viewer does 50%, here the viewer does more. $% There will be a very new work in the show, which is very important to me: a $% Duchamp takes an object, puts it in a stack of sheets of colored paper with all museum and the object becomes an art- the captions of my public works. work. In an increasingly ubiquitous so- ciety like the one we live in, everything !"# The viewer then can go to the various is public, and it is as if the museum had places, and see the works. become more liquid. If you take the museum away from the artwork, the $% Exactly, it is a walk in the landscape. bottle rack goes back to being a bottle The caption, for me, has been so impor- rack, it loses its artwork aura. To make tant that I have made a work about it.

189 !"#$%&' (!%)&&* – didascalia ⁄ caption

!"# There is the idea of a cartography of $% That reminds me of the work Every the work, a map… step I have taken in my life has led me here, now (2010). $% Actually the PAC project was conceived to be a map that inside an institutional !"# Which, again, is linked to the theme of space like the one designed by Ignazio the retrospective. Gardella organizes old and new works, through a system of references, connec- $% Yes. This is the last public work I made; tions and codes it is up to the specta- it should have been scattered every- tor to grasp. The itinerary is paced by where. The more it is spread out, the sculptural works, like the ceramic Ma- better it works. Exactly the opposite of donna (2007), a giant poster printed for what usually happens in the art system, the Istanbul Biennial in 2001, the bench- where the unique piece is worth more. es made for Fondazione Zegna, and This work, though small, contains the also projects that were never realized, voyages of all the people who read it seen here as fragments of interrupted and want to think about it. Because the narrations. This is the case, for exam- message does not address the audience, ple, of the enclosure designed for the it addresses the reader. It says: all the garden of Fondazione Sandretto in Tu- steps “I” have taken. rin. It was commissioned by Francesco Bonami and Patrizia Sandretto Re Re- !"# This is somehow linked to what Law- baudengo in 2004-2005. The enclosure rence Weiner says, namely that in art was supposed to follow the edge of the we don’t care about generations. All garden, which belongs to the city; it was the steps have brought you into this never made because the city was about present, in which we take part. to host the Olympic Games and the city government was deeply in debt. The $% It is precisely the idea of the present, project for the aluminium enclosure fea- another recurring theme in my works: tures metal disks of different colors and when a light turns on, a child is born, a diameters: each piece harbors a secret, lightning bolt strikes… And that work a message in code, found during my at Villa dei Giardini in Modena… many visits to the working class neigh- borhood where the foundation has its !"# …could be done again, in an identical facility. I was looking for evidence, se- way. And photographed. In parallel crets, stories of the difficulties experi- with the exhibition in Milan, or after enced by those who lived and worked it… in those zones, in a constant condition of segregation, exclusion. The fence $% It would be fantastic. After all, the would have contained the codes of exhibition also contains the series of many conversations with the workers of the Skeins, cardboard tubes around Fergat, who had worked in the factory which a very slender nylon thread is that was demolished years ago, where wrapped, whose length corresponds to Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo the distance between my house and the now stands. door of the S.M.A.K., the houses of the This, on the other hand, is a large paint- collectors who commissioned the work, ing done in 1990, the only one I cannot and so on. explain. (On a computer screen, he in- These works are the mother and father dicates a large canvas with white and of the work of the drawn line. blue stripes). I think this is an enigma in the show, a sort of acceleration of the !"# They are also linked with cartography. horizon. I don’t know, but looking at it The red thread! Everything is around is like being blinded by something, like the captions, the public work, the car- when you stare at the sun. tography of threads, the voices: it is a !"# I am very happy that we are finally in multiple cartography, many dimensions the same place, here in Locarno, after of cartography. The exhibition will be so many travels… very amazing…

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