Hans Ulrich Obrist

ISSUE 104 THE ART ISSUE DECEMBER 2013/JANUARY 2014 HANS ULRICH OBRIST ISSUE 104 THE ART ISSUE LIMITED-EDITION COVER DECEMBER 2013/JANUARY 2014 BY JOHN BALDESSARI HANS ULRICH OBRIST HANS ULRICH 123 HANS ULRICH OBRIST HANS ULRICH OBRIST HANS ULRICH OBRIST Each conversation Hans Ulrich Obrist has informs The Master the next, expanding an already vast, global epic. Interviewer PORTRAIT BY LEON CHEW Twenty or so years ago, when I first met Hans Rimbaud transformed his genre, upending Koolhaas to document the aging Metabolism Ulrich Obrist (whom I always think of as the conventions of its meter and rhyme; HUO architects, whose important voices would oth- HUO) in Zurich, he reminded me of Rimbaud. has reconfigured the genre of the interview, erwise have been lost. Not only because he was roughly the teenage distilling and transforming the informational People die, voices fade, but so too does the poet’s age when he and I met, but also because I mass of prose, with its disparate themes and very material—the tapes—on which those felt he was making a new form of poetry, of art. motifs—and the usual who, what, when, where, voices have found sanctuary. Tapes, such as In time, I came to see how true my feeling was. I why, and how—into artifact, a poem of idea the ones HUO used in his interviews years was amazed that this very young man, without and emotion. His interviews, like poems, focus ago and still sometimes uses, disintegrate. And funding and without institutional support or and synthesize thought into points of energy soon they will be as mute and dead as many of commissions from art publications, had set out and beauty. the people whose voices they have held in their on his own to record what he feared would Turning an interview into a poem would be fragile keep. These voices are not just historical one day vanish or be forgotten in the greater, an interesting achievement in itself. A book of documents, but have embedded within them a more seemingly relevant cultural dialogue of such interviews would be like an anthology of host of proposals for what HUO has referred the moment. works by poets with varying interests. But the to as “lost projects, poetic utopian dream con- His interviews were and remain his divine aggregate, the sheer volume and international structs, partially realized projects, censored passion: He has done more than 2,250 of them scope of the interviews HUO has done over projects.” Are these dreams part of our future since he began. Little has changed in HUO’s the past two decades, gathers the individual inheritance? HUO himself has the dream to mission and his way of getting to the core of the voices—the individual poems—into a master one day curate a large-scale exhibition of unre- person being interviewed—except that he now poem, not one rooted in a single nation or alized projects. Preservation of his interviews interweaves this passion with his full-time cura- heritage, but a vital global epic. It is a unified on tapes, the mandate of the Institute of the torial work. Novelist Douglas Coupland wrote and unifying poem with a memory of the past, 21st Century, is a hedge against an amnesiac in his introduction to Interviews: Volume 2: which is our present inheritance and cultural future: The conversations bear seeds waiting “We could have done one interview together, legacy for the future. for the opportunity to flower one day. The By and I’d never have to do another interview Perhaps his rush to travel and his urgency to tapes are a strained, delicate net holding—for again. I’d simply send people a photocopy of do more and more interviews in recent years who knows how long—an otherwise lost past, our interview and declare, ‘It doesn’t get any can be explained by HUO’s desire to pre- which is to say, our future. better than this. Learn from the master.’” serve traces of intelligence from past decades, In earlier days, HUO sped from city to city testimonies of those who have not yet been in Europe on trains and dwelled in their sta- recorded and whose memories might fall unde- tions, whereas now the circumference of his servedly into oblivion. The fruits of his desire interviews has widened globally. Planes and to preserve are evident in his many hours of Karen Marta airports are his hosts. How many actual hours interviews with the visionary architect Cedric A version of this essay appeared in the 2010 is he ever on terra firma? Price and the many visits to Japan with Rem Venice Architecture Biennale catalogue. SURFACE 124 125 HANS ULRICH OBRIST HANS ULRICH OBRIST Few have mastered the art of conversation better than Hans Ulrich Obrist‚ co-director of exhibitions and programs and director of Hans Ulrich international projects at London’s Serpentine Gallery, who, through his ongoing Interview Project, has recorded some 2,000 hours of his discussions with notable cultural figures. How, then, does one interview an ace interviewer? Surface tapped Paul Holdengräber, director of the public-talks series Live From the NYPL, for the engagement. He, like Obrist, Obrist has interviewed hundreds of personalities from numerous professions and walks of life; guests at the forum have included Patti Smith, Anish Kapoor, and Mike Tyson. Holdengräber spoke with Obrist about the curator’s early influences, his current projects, and the con- cept of the gesamtkunstwerk, a work that integrates and unifies all forms of art—or at least attempts to. The comprehensive nature of such a work ultimately makes it an unre- alizable ideal, something to perpetually strive for but never complete, which is precisely the quality that makes it interesting to Obrist. impact on me that from then on I started to go Indeed, many of the curator’s undertakings— to museums every day. his Interview Project, his “Do It” exhibition, and the Serpentine Marathon series, to name PH: That’s a curious use of the word a few—are works perpetually in progress; “magnetic.” It implies that there is an they’re always being added to, reinvented, attraction so great that you stick to and remade. something. Paul Holdengräber: I would like to start HUO: That’s exactly what it was. My igno- with what I take to be your ravenous, all- rance of art developed into this magnetic, consuming appetite. Dorothy Parker’s almost addictive eternal return. I went back line would fit perfectly for you: “The cure every afternoon when there wasn’t school for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure to look and look and look and look again. for curiosity.” Talk to me about curiosity It was like a school of seeing. It was a very and the fact that there may be no cure for lucky situation, because I think a city without it, except perhaps curation or just talking a museum is a dead city. I really think that a constantly. dynamic museum—a museum as a labora- tory—is as important as a great school in a city. Hans Ulrich Obrist: It’s interesting that there The Kunsthaus in Zurich, at that time, with the is this connection between curating and curi- visionary curator Harald Szeemann, became osity. It goes back to my childhood. My par- my school. I learned much more there than ents, when I was 3 or 4 years old, took me to in any other school. I visited his “Der Hang the library of the Abbey of Saint Gall, one of zum Gesamtkunstwerk” exhibition 41 times the great medieval monasteries of the world. as a teenager. It burnt down and then was rebuilt, and it became this fabulous Rococo library. It made PH: How do you recall that it was 41? a huge impression on me: this display, this time capsule, where one could look at these books HUO: Because I counted it. only with white gloves on. Later, when I was 7, 8, and 9, my parents kept going back to it. PH: That says something about you, I This was before I ever saw art. I realized little would say. Forty-one times—it makes by little that these monks were bringing all this me think of the Talmudic idea that there knowledge together. That was the beginning are 47 layers of meaning, and that in some of it somehow. way you had to go back again and again to see, see, see, look, look, look. It reminds PH: Napoleon once said of one of his gen- me of what Werner Herzog tells his stu- erals that he knew everything, but noth- dents when they want to learn about film. Paul ing else. He says, “Read, read, read, read, read!” HUO: I didn’t grow up at all in the context HUO: One can look and look and look again. of museums, and I didn’t grow up at all in the It’s one of the main criteria of why something Paul Holdengräber (left) in conversa- PHOTO: JORI KLEIN. PHOTO: context of the arts. The only place that my par- is a great work of art: that it’s sort of inexhaust- tion with Hans Ulrich Obrist (middle) ents took me to that was a kind of museum ible, and there can be, over the centuries, dif- and Rem Koolhaas at the New York was that monastery library. Then, at a certain ferent interpretations. That’s sort of the big Public Library in 2012. (Editors’ note: moment, being completely ignorant about art, paradox of the exhibition, which became my The event pictured and the interview Holdengräber I came across a sculpture by Giacometti at the medium.

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