For the book MAD Dinner, I interviewed Hans Ulrich Obrist, a leading curator, critic, and historian of art. Obrist is a prolific interviewer and researcher. We talked about how these practices influence his curatorial work, the value of non-commercial products and non-applicable models, and the lack of memory among architects.
Brendan McGetrick: What is the motivation behind your interviews?
Hans Ulrich Obrist: It’s a big question. In some kind of way, one could say that it’s parallel realities: on the one hand there is the curating of exhibitions – my main work is curatorial – but in doing that I’ve always had a sort of parallel activity, which is my research and knowledge production – and that’s the interview project.
The interview project actually predates anything else I’m doing, because everything started out of conversations. Whenever I do exhibitions and books, they are the outcomes of such conversations – conversations with artists, conversations with architects, scientists, all kinds of practitioners. So one can basically say that the conversations are not conversations for conversation’s sake, but are always working conversations. I am always working with these artists, architects, or scientists – either on a show or on a conference or a book, and very often the conversation is not only parallel to working on a project, but projects even grow out of the conversations. So one can actually call them “production of reality conversationsâ€.
For this reason, I think it’s very different from the notion of the interview in the way Marcel Broodthaers said, “Je tautologue, je conserve, je sociologue†– I tautologize, I preserve, I sociologize, I’m not sure how to say it in English, but it’s making tautologies, making sociology. That may be part of it, but it’s not the main part. The main part of it is the production of reality.
As you mentioned, through your interviews, you often speak with architects. But you yourself don’t come from an architectural background. What references or models do you use to process their particular methods of producing reality?
There are different layers to it I would say. I’ve always been obsessed with art, and so my home base is clearly the art world. However, in the early ‘90s I started to work with Kasper König at the Staedelschule, and at that time in Frankfurt there were architects like Enrique Miralles, Peter Cook, and Cedric Price, and there were also artists like Dan Graham who kept telling me that I should read Learning from Las Vegas and Delirious New York. For me, these were the most essential encounters of that time, they opened up a new world.
At the same time, it was also a very pragmatic thing. When you’re a curator, it’s very interesting to involve architects in the exhibition design, because exhibitions that don’t have an inventive display feature are doomed to oblivion. So you can either have an artist or an architect invent your display feature, and working with Kasper König, who had done shows like Westkunst and von hier aus, I was very inspired by the idea that he invited an architect to invent the display feature.
That’s why in all my shows from the ‘90s – from ‘Cities on the Move’, which we did with Hou Hanru, where we had first Chang Yungho, then Rem Koolhaas, and then Shigeru Ban to shows like Laboratorium, where we had the artist Michel Francois – I’ve always had architects or artists inventing a display feature.
How did your involvement with architects expand from this first, pragmatic layer?
With ‘Cities on the Move’, it became something else, because at that moment we felt it was important to do an exhibition on Asian cities, and we realized it should not be just representing cities, but more like imagining a city as a performative space. The idea was really to develop the exhibition as a city. So we invited a lot of architects and artists who are working in these Asian metropolises.
In the beginning, the architects sent lots of architecture maquettes, but little by little they realized – because the show was touring – that this is a laboratory and it might be more interesting to actually experiment with the format of the exhibition than to just send a maquette. So, little by little, these laboratories of ‘Cities on the Move’ negotiated a new way of involving architecture in exhibitions and that was a second layer – architects’ presence in my exhibitions.
Out of ‘Cities on the Move’ grew a very close friendship with Rem Koolhaas and that was sort of a third layer. Since we began speaking regularly, we realized that early in his work Rem also had an interview practice – because he interviewed Constant, Salvador Dali, and many others. And we thought it might be interesting to do some interviews together. We started to visit pioneers or architects who were important for my research – because, not having an architecture background, I’m always learning – and who were important for Rem in the ‘60s. So we went to see Venturi & Scott-Brown, Philip Johnson, most recently Christopher Alexander, all the Metabolists in Japan, and little by little we visited these pioneers together.
Are the 24 hour marathon interviews that you’ve been doing with Rem Koolhaas an extension of this?
Within my practice of exhibitions, there is always a way of working with formats, inventing new formats. But conferences usually don’t have that dimension, because a conference or symposium is a kind of boring routine: there’s a talk, and then there’s a panel, then there’s a Q & A, then the moderator is running out of time, and then, maybe, a dinner in a restaurant.
The question was really: can my experiences from exhibitionmaking, which is an obsession with new formats, be transplanted into the world of lectures and symposiums? We did a first marathon in Stuttgart, and then with Rem we interviewed for 24 hours nonstop 70 practitioners and made a kind of portrait of London. We just did another one in Germany this Sunday, we did one in Dubai…
The relationship to architecture culminates in a fourth dimension, the idea of building architecture. That is a more recent experience, because, arriving at the Serpentine [Gallery] last year as co-director of exhibitions and director of international projects, I began working with Julia Peyton-Jones.
Julia, as director of the Serpentine, had invented a visionary, groundbreaking annual pavilion concept, where she showed that a small art institution can be an important client for architecture, by building [temporary] pavilions. She invited Zaha Hadid in 2000, and Toyo Ito and Libeskind, and many others to build a pavilion in the park in front of the gallery. So when I arrived last year that was an ongoing project, and Julia and I thought we’d invite Rem, who had never built in the UK before, together with Cecil Balmond to do this pavilion, which really became a structure for conversations. As Rem said, “A pavilion without content is a meaningless shape.â€
In relation to visiting these pioneers, what do you feel is the importance of memory in your work?
To some extent, within my own field, which is the world of art, there is a very strong emphasis on memory, but not in a static way. As neuroscience shows, memory is a very dynamic process in the brain – and I think [dynamic memory] is a particularly interesting topic in China now. Given the staggering amnesia in the world, I think the idea of memory as a protest against forgetting is incredibly important. The art world has a mechanism which is quite elaborate that encourages artists to talk about older artists and forgotten artists. Obviously, there are always artists who are forgotten, but in the art world there is a regular rediscovering of artists from the ‘60s and ‘70s and ‘80s. So every ten years one looks back again and sees what’s been forgotten.
That works through a mechanism where artists talk about older artists who’ve inspired them and through the multiplicity of museums, because nowadays, every small city has a Kunsthal and a contemporary art museum. So there are literally hundreds if not thousands of contemporary art museums, and that makes it a given that there is some sort of memory work going on. But coming from art, I was stunned by the absence of memory in the architecture world.
I met people who were for me great inspirations, like Cedric Price and Yona Friedman, in the ‘90s. From them I learned a lot for my own practice as a curator, through their questioning of the masterplan in the late ‘50s. Self-organization is something which curating had never really adopted, because you’ve always had this idea of the curator as a master planner. In French you even call the curator a commissaire, which is police vocabulary really, and so you [as a curator] always have this authoritarian role of drafting who is in, who is out. What I thought was so interesting about Yona Friedman and Cedric was: how can one adopt these almost cybernetic ideas of complex, dynamic systems with feedback loops and self-organization in the context of a larger show? I tried to do this with almost all my shows in the 1990s: ‘Do it’ or ‘Cities on the Move’ or ‘Life/Live’ or ‘Utopia Station’ more recently all have elements of self-organization.
And so, being so inspired by people like Cedric Price and Yona Friedman, I was somehow staggered that in the architecture world there are not really these mechanisms of memory. Particularly in the mid ‘90s, someone like Yona Friedman was almost forgotten. There was hardly any literature around, and so the art world became a sort of refuge where these pioneering architects could be rediscovered. And so we’ve organized dozens of exhibitions with all these people. It’s been a very collective effort. So, from that point of view, I think it’s extremely important to consider how these memory functions can also work within the architecture field.
What accounts for the lack of memory in architecture?
It maybe has to do with the fact that there are perhaps much less good architecture museums than there are art museums, and also that architecture is not yet so collectible. It’s interesting that it takes a long time until a building becomes a collectible item.
Now people have started to collect [Jean] Prouvé buildings for very high amounts of money, but that’s three, four, five decades after the fact. And it’s interesting that at the moment that there is an incredibly booming art market and design market, there is not yet a market for architecture. People of the generation of Yona Friedman have extraordinary archives, and it’s very difficult for them to find museums that can actually secure these archives for posterity.
I think that’s maybe the fifth dimension of my project – the idea of a protest against forgetting. What I’ve marked are these sort of beginnings in five or six steps, and from there it just started to flow back and forth between art and architecture. So the idea is that these exchanges are exchanges of reciprocity. It’s no longer just bringing work from one context into another, but it’s an oscillation between contexts.
What other forms of protest does your work involve?
I think the idea of going against the fear of pooling knowledge has always been key for me. Going back to my beginnings when I was at the Staedelschule working on projects with Kasper König, I had the experience of a small school where an art school and an architecture school were together, and I think it’s a great pity to separate art from architecture schools, because I think these encounters have been most productive.
Had I not been in the Staedelschule in ‘91, and had I not met Enrique Miralles, I might never have been immersed to this extent in architecture. But we can go further back in history and take an example like the Black Mountain College, which was so key for the ‘50s in America. There you also had a link between poetry, architecture, Buckminster Fuller came to do seminars… So for the future of schools, I think it is super important that this separation of art and architecture is brought back together, to bridge the gap.
In the context of advocating a reconnection between art, architecture, and other disciplines in the academic world, what are your thoughts on the way in which architecture has been drawn into a larger concept of “design,†mostly through the intentions and instruments of the free market?
To some extent, what is interesting about these collaborations and dialogues is that they don’t necessarily have to fulfill a demand – that can come in a second stage – but there has to be an inner necessity in order for these dialogues to happen. I think what is happening right now is less a question of the whole design industry and all of that having a demand for such collaborations, but I think, at the end of the day, it’s all to do with these sparks that happen in schools as beginnings.
If you speak to Brian Eno, he went to art school and got a spark there and then went into music. Things are very often not so linear, and I think that right now the idea of schools becoming so target-oriented – where immediately someone goes into architecture to become an architect – is too linear. That’s why I believe in the type of school where the unpredictability of nonlinearity is allowed to happen.
But I think there is a moment right now which is very interesting, where there are more contact zones. The danger is always that there is a consumerism of difference within them. It’s sort of a nightmare idea that everything will be “designâ€. So I think it’s extremely important that, within these negotiations and dialogues, difference is maintained.
Edouard Glissant has always emphasized that in our current form of globalization there are very strong forces of homogenization, and the question is how to resist these forces and develop models where difference is maintained and where we can find ways of actually increasing difference within the global dialogue. Not to refuse the global dialogue, which would be local atavism, and on the other hand not to embrace globalization blindly, but to negotiate a global dialogue Рhe calls it mondialit̩ Рwhich produces difference. That means that there are lots of new regions and new possibilities, but it also means that there is a point of view from which you start. At the end of the day, I think it is extremely important that there is an art world, that there is an architecture world, that there is a design world, and then it becomes more and more possible that these parallel realities have tangential zones.
But maintaining these differences and constructing these parallel realities would seem to imply actively resisting the expectations of the market and globalization, wouldn’t it?
That’s why I think the idea of non-applicable models remains so important. The danger, obviously, of it all becoming about design is it all becomes about an applicable model. If you think about Piet Mondrian… [The work of] Piet Mondrian is a non-applicable model, and I think it is incredibly important that, in the 21st century, we continue to strongly investigate into nonapplicable models. And it’s not necessarily the design context that will give us a particularly strong harbor for the investigation and research of such non-applicable models.
I’ve always felt that, in China, there is a sort of similar situation happening as happened in the west in the ‘50s and ‘60s and had happened in Japan during the Osaka years of the early ‘70s, when beginnings mean that there is an incredibly exciting dialogue happening between artists and architects and designers and so on.
For instance, if one looks at the artistic practice of Wang Jianwei – he collaborates with theater people, he collaborates with architects. Clearly he’s a visual artist, it’s not that he isn’t speaking from a point of view, but he makes all forms of bridges. Or if you look at Ai Weiwei and his parallel realities of being one of the leading visual artists, but also a leading architect. More and more architects and artists are working on buildings together, and this is something which is so exciting in China.
It’s not that, as it is very often in the west, the artist is invited at the very end to have a one percent decoration of an already existing building. Very often artists are involved very early on in China and there is a true art-architecture collaboration. All of these examples I think make the Chinese context particularly fascinating. And that’s one of the many reasons why, after having done ‘Cities on the Move’ with Hou Hanru, it became essential for me to continue to work in China in a more in depth way.
The problem is that it’s become in fashion in Europe to work with China, and every museum wants to have a China show, but I think what’s interesting is not that. What I think is interesting is that we have a situation right now, and it’s very much like what Fernand Braudel describes in 15th and 16th century, when seismic shifts start happening and all of a sudden the centers of gravity are shifting. And now it’s definitely these new centers in China, India, and the Middle East which are so powerful. And being a western European curator, working in western European institutions, one of the great and urgent things to be done in the early 21st century is to show and map and make platforms for these extraordinary seismic shifts which are happening.
The idea of a non-applicable model is interesting in the Chinese context, because often there is a strong sense of practicality and usefulness that can makes things more interesting but can also limit non-applicable projects.
To some extent, one of the great strengths of art has been that it proposes that a non-applicable model may be an applicable model in very different times. It’s the idea of, in some way, resisting an immediate consumption and applicability. And I think that’s also why artists with more complex work usually, in the long run, are much more important and have a bigger resonance than artists who propose logos. And, obviously, some Chinese art, ever since the ‘90s, has been about providing easily recognizable logos for the western market.
But it’s very interesting that, in the long run, more complex artists win. It’s very interesting that someone like Huang Yongping… Whenever I’m in China and I speak to the youngest artists, I say, “Who is your hero?†And so many say Huang Yongping, and it’s interesting, because Huang Yongping is not at all an artist who’s been at the forefront of the auctions. He’s been an artist who has continued to work on very complex, unpredictable content which will take us another twenty years probably to fully understand. So I think he is a great example for such not immediately applicable models which continue to resonate. Art is not a sprint, art is a marathon. And the same is actually true for architecture, even more so. And I think there are great examples of that in Chinese art.
In talking about the importance of memory against the forgetfulness of the current moment, many of forgotten heroes that you mentioned, Cedric Price, Yona Friedman, etc., were masters of the non-applicable model. Do you think there’s a connection between the unwillingness to look at the past and the unwillingness to look at the future in a visionary, nonapplicable way?
At a certain moment Cedric Price, in the context of the World Question Center, was wondering why it was so difficult in industrial – now post-industrial – western society to make useful mistakes, and, to some extent, as Ma Qingyun pointed out to me, in China the idea of failure has a more positive notion. So perhaps, if it was translated, the writing of Cedric Price could find a great resonance.
That doesn’t answer your question, but it’s a very general question. I think it’s a possibility of an impossibility: on the one hand, to actually build and, on the other hand, to contribute to the history of ideas and change the course of things. That has a lot do with writing and books. It’s interesting because you’re doing this conversation for a book by an architect who invents the book as a new format. Because this is a very unusual book, it’s an unusual conversation, it’s an unusual idea of doing this many conversations, and that’s most interesting, because there are all these coffee table books about architecture and they’re completely irrelevant.
I think, to some extent, it’s reached a maximum degree of redundancy. I cannot see any more coffee table books with all the projects of an architect published in it – particularly if they are very heavy. However, what remains so fascinating about architecture is that architects sometimes succeed in using the book as a medium of their practice, and that’s something which Corbusier was the master of. You find it also with some of the contemporary practitioners – the early books of Christopher Alexander are another example of when a book of architecture becomes something not just about the work, but is a medium entering the history of ideas.
You seem to be identifying two poles – built architecture and theoretical architecture manifest in book form. Are the Serpentine pavilions an attempt at a middle ground, through temporary, experimental architecture?
I think the most underrated aspects of architecture’s presence are three things: pavilions and temporary buildings, exhibition design, and writing. These are three things that we’ve talked about a lot in this conversation, which are obviously, for me as curator, the keys of producing reality in terms of architecture.
That doesn’t exclude that in the future it will go elsewhere and beyond, because, being interested in the production of reality, I’m more and more interested in the idea that an exhibition is actually a city. Out of doing ‘Cities on the Move’, one can imagine curating and urbanism being more intertwined, but that’s the future.
What’s interesting is that these ephemeral, non-permanent architectures throughout history have very often created a lasting effect and contributed to the discourse of architecture. So it’s not that if a building’s permanent it’s historically more important than if it’s non-permanent.
Examples like Alvar Aalto’s pavilion for the [1939] World’s Fair in New York or even more important obviously is the Barcelona Pavilion of Mies… There was recently a big Lopud conference by Francesca von Habsburg about this very topic. One of the highlights was a speech by Beatriz Colomina about the idea of the pavilion of the future, and Colomina shows us that Alison and Peter Smithson’s House of the Future, Corbusier’s l’Esprit Nouveau pavilion from ‘25, the Parallel of Life and Art exhibition at the ICA in ‘53, Bruno Taut’s Glass House from 1914, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion from ‘29 or even more recently another great example is Teatro del Mundo of ‘79 from Aldo Rossi. This is all history… All of these are, as Colomina shows, ephemeral exhibition architectures that are as much part of the history of architecture as permanent buildings. They become part of the canon and push the envelope of what architecture can be.
I think this idea is also true for exhibitions. Colomina says, “Exhibition pavilions in the 20th century acted as sites for the incubation of new forms of architecture that were sometimes so shockingly original and so new that they were not even recognized as architecture at all.†She refers then to Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion, which is now understood as one of the most influential buildings of the last century, but was actually seen by nobody, no?
This idea can then be pushed even further. I interviewed recently the visionary Ken Adam, who is one of the key set designers in cinema history. For me, Ken Adam is one of the great architects of the 20th century: he designed many James Bond movies, but he also designed many of the key movies of Stanley Kubrick, such as the famous war room in Dr. Strangelove. The famous war room in Dr. Strangelove is as present in many of our minds as many permanent buildings – probably more present. There’s this famous story that, when Ronald Reagan was elected into the White House, he arrived on the first day and was completely lost because he couldn’t find the war room. He had taken it for real.
So, out of this anecdote, we can conclude for sure that Ken Adam has produced some form of reality, and even if that stage set has gone a long time ago, it’s going to exist forever. I think a similar thing is true for pavilions, because pavilions can be rebuilt very often. The Barcelona Pavilion is an example. It’s also potentially possible for the Serpentine Pavilions; in the future they could be rebuilt or restaged. However, they are a priori ephemeral.
Now there’s more attention given to pavilions, but the most underrated part remains exhibition design, because you still don’t find any books or images in architecture catalogs, economically it is not interesting, it’s not a big industry. But I think that a similar thing is true [in exhibition design] as what Colomina points out for pavilions. This idea that they are sites for incubation of new forms of architecture I think is also true, because exhibition design is, to some extent, a very low budget operation.
Exhibitions usually don’t have big budgets and usually ask for a very high degree of improvisation, but it is in these contexts that very often a great invention is made. If you think about when Alvar Aalto did the exhibition for the pavilion of the World’s Fair in New York, he developed this undulating surface, and when I saw an Aalto retrospective the other day, there was this point that that idea had influenced so many architects, and it’s a simple, ephemeral exhibition design that Aalto had invented for a pavilion. So I think one of the key things to come in the next years is, in a similar way to what is happening with pavilions, to also create more awareness of exhibition architecture.
In the virtual world, for example Second Life, people are building their own environments and relationships though semi-architectural means. What’s your impression of virtual art and architecture as a perhaps even more ephemeral means of expression?
Rem Koolhaas and I just conducted this interview marathon in Germany and we interviewed generations of German architects from Gottfried Boehm, who’s in his late 80s, to much younger architects like Jürgen Mayer H. And one of the things which was an umbilical chord throughout these conversations was the idea that it is not a question of either virtual or actual. Maybe what is more interesting right now is seeing how the two are intertwined, and how, to some extent, more and more built architecture has many virtual dimensions and virtual architecture produces reality, in terms of built architecture. If you look at the town hall that Jürgen Mayer H. has designed in Germany… All of a sudden the town hall no longer has the functions it used to have, because most of it is digital – people vote digitally, people no longer come to the office for all these things, they’ll soon probably order their passports digitally. So, all of a sudden, the whole situation of a town hall completely changes, and one can no longer separate one from the other, because there is this huge digital building there, which is a town hall, but then there is also a physically built building.
I think also, to some extent, it is interesting to think about it in relation to television. When television was invented, obviously radio had to be reinvented, but it took a long time from the invention of television until a great art work had been created with this new medium – probably until Nam June Paik. And now, even if there are very interesting initiatives happening in terms of virtual reality artworks and all of that, I haven’t yet seen the Nam June Paik of virtual reality. I’m sure that his or her arrival is imminent – no doubt whatsoever. But it usually takes a little bit of time from the moment a medium is invented until the moment a great artist or architect makes a great piece with it.
*****
Originally published in MAD Dinner (Actar, 2007)