The Art of Curation

7/25/2019 The Art of Curation

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8/19/2015 H ans Ul ri ch Obr ist: the ar t of cur ati on | Ar t and desi gn | The Guar di an

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/mar/23/hans-ulrich-obrist-art-curator

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Hans Ulrich Obrist: the art of curationBehind every great artist is a great curator. But what do they actually do? Serpentine superstar Hans
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Ulrich Obrist reveals the delights and dangers of his craft while Yoko Ono, David Shrigley and more

pick their all-time favourite show

Hans Ulrich Obrist. Interviews by Stuart Jeffries and Nancy Groves

Sunday 23 March 2014 15.59 GMT

Hans Ulrich Obrist

One of my childhood heroes was Sergei Diaghilev. He didn't dance. He wasn't achoreographer. He didn't compose. He didn't direct. But he was, to use a term the writer JGBallard said to me in an interview, a junction-maker. Diaghilev was the founder of theBallets Russes: he brought Stravinsky together with choreographers, with Picasso, Braque,and Cocteau. He made art meet theatre meet dance.

Diaghilev and Cocteau tried to explain what they did with the words: "Etonnez moi!"Astonish me. I've never had an art practice, and I've never thought of the curator as acreative rival to the artist. When I became a curator, I wanted to be helpful to artists. I thinof my work as that of a catalyst and sparring partner.

It's worth thinking about the etymology of curating. It comes from the Latin word curare,meaning to take care. In Roman times, it meant to take care of the bath houses. In medievatimes, it designated the priest who cared for souls. Later, in the 18th century, it meantlooking after collections of art and artifacts.

There's a hangover of all those things in modern curating. When I curated my firstexhibition which followed discussions with the artists Fischli/Weiss (Swiss duo PeterFischli and David Weiss), Richard Wentworth, Christian Boltanski and Hans PeterFeldmann in the kitchen of my apartment in St Gallen, Switzerland I had a productive

misunderstanding with my parents. They thought I was going into medicine becausecurating means caring. I don't think they thought it was to do with art.

Today, curating as a profession means at least four things. It means to preserve, in thesense of safeguarding the heritage of art. It means to be the selector of new work. It meansto connect to art history. And it means displaying or arranging the work. But it's more thanthat. Before 1800, few people went to exhibitions. Now hundreds of millions of people visithem every year. It's a mass medium and a ritual. The curator sets it up so that it becomesan extraordinary experience and not just illustrations or spatialised books.

I started going to exhibitions in Switzerland when I was 10 or 11. As a schoolboy, I wouldgo every afternoon to see the long, thin figures of Giacometti. I'd just look and look. AsGilbert & George told me: "To be with art is all we ask." But the first epiphany I had in termof curating came when I saw Harald Szeemann's Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk (TheTendency Towards the Total Work of Art) in 1983. Szeemann had the idea of the exhibitioas a toolbox, or of an archaeology of knowledge, like Michel Foucault. That is howSzeemann displayed works by Gaudi, Beuys, Schwitters and others: the idea was that theseartists had created all-embracing environments. I went to see that exhibition 41 times.

Later, I was inspired by how philosopher Jean-Franois Lyotard curated the 1985
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exhibition Les Immatriaux at the Pompidou in Paris. It dealt with how new informationtechnologies shape the human condition, but what interested me was that, rather thanwriting a book, Lyotard made his philosophical ideas into a labyrinth in the exhibition. It'sdifficult to describe because he was producing the idea rather than illustrating it, but itinfluenced me and lots of other artists like Philippe Parreno, who I worked with later.

But there are dangers with curating. The Gesamtkunstwerk exhibition was very dense, ver

inspiring and interesting because of the danger that it became the Gesamtkunstwerk of thecurator rather than of the artists. But for me, it was important to be close to artists and notsubordinate their work to the curator's vision. I've realised that the curator's role is morethat of enabler. The Italian conceptual artist Boetti told me to pay attention to artists'unrealised projects. Many artists have not been able to realise their fondest projects. Myrole is to help them.

One of my favourite exhibitions is called Do It, which I co-curated with the artists ChristianBoltanski and Bertrand Lavier 21 years ago. It is still going. It was inspired by MarcelDuchamp sending instructions from Argentina to his sister to assemble one of his

readymades, and by John Cage's music of change, and by Yoko Ono's work. Lots of artistscontributed how-to instructions to do things in the gallery or elsewhere. It's been to morethan 120 cities, often to places where there isn't otherwise much of a contemporary artscene. Right now, it's in Salt Lake City. It can continue for the next 100 years.

Joseph Beuys talked about expanding the notion of art. I'm trying to expand the notion ofcurating. Exhibitions need not only take place in galleries, need not only involve displayinobjects. Art can appear where we expect it least. Hans Ulrich Obrist is co-director of theSerpentine Galleries. His Ways of Curating is published by Allen Lane.

David Shrigley

The exhibition that really sticks in my mind was the Sonic Youth show from maybe two orthree years ago that toured. It was curated by Sonic Youth and Robert Groenenboom. I hada piece of work in it and caught it in Malm. What struck me was the fact that there was alot of bad art in it, yet it was still fantastic. A lot of stuff wasn't art, or was art but bydilettante artists, but somehow it fitted together well.

It was all about Sonic Youth, their relationships with other artists and with art. There wereso many different types of work. Some exhibits were more like artefacts. In fact, the magicwas in the blurring of art and artefacts, of artists and musicians. Their journey, that was thpremise. So they had the Sonic Youth album covers made by some seminal artists: GerhardRichter, Christopher Wool, Mike Kelley. They even had their final album cover, which wasdesigned by John Fahey. He was the quintessential folk revivalist. He made these paintingthat he'd sell at his gigs.

The show made you realise that that's what curating is: it isn't necessarily about showinggood art to its best advantage. It's about making an exhibition that's really good. You canmake a good show without having good art in it. That's not to say you can't have both, just
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that it's possible without both.

My eyes glaze over when people want to talk about curating. I think good curation isworking with someone who can do something you can't. That goes for any goodcollaboration. The best is when you're making a show together and finding it all out as yougo along. Some curators are academics, but artists aren't or at least I'm not.

Yoko Ono

When I do a show, I'm hands on. I almost do the whole thing myself. Over the course of mycareer I've been lucky to work with many creative curators. Their role is to give meprotection and encouragement. Not in the sense of changing what I do, but allowing me todo what I want to do. They have helped me to understand what I like.

Alexandra Monroe gave so much love to me and my work that she made Yes [Ono's firstmajor retrospective] very easy for me. I would sometimes wonder why she would select aparticular work - but she says: "Look at this it's important, Yoko." And she is often right.

Jon Hendricks [curator of Ono's current Bilbao show] has also been very supportive justby going to places on my behalf and saying: "Yoko doesn't like that."

Hans Ulrich is one of those people who jump around a lot. He flies around in his mind, justas he is always flying around the world. And when you meet that mind in transit it's veryexciting. It gives me a sense of my own power. My feeling is that Hans is not just a curator.His duty is to nurture his own knowledge and tastes as much as the artists he works with.

John Baldessari

The collector Virginia Dwan had a remarkable gallery in LA, which later moved to NewYork. She was instrumental in exhibiting many European and New York artists whohad never shown on the west coast before. The show I most remember was Yves Klein atDwan Gallery in the late 60s: it was all blue paintings. It made me rethink what I was doingVirginia had to close the gallery in the end. She wasn't making a profit. The message is thatit wasn't about selling art.

I think a good curator is like a good chef. They understand the city's needs and fulfil andchallenge them. How do curators and artists work with each other? Ideally, it's a

collaboration in which one inspires and challenges the other. The best thing a curator cando is elicit the response, "I didn't know you could do that," from the public. The worst thinis to present a show that is no longer relevant.

Mark Wallinger

The Mnster Sculpture project was founded by Klaus Bussmann and Kasper Knig in 1977and happens every 10 years. Kasper has been the curator throughout. It's an amazingproject and I was lucky enough to be part of it in 2007 one of 33 artists that year .
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My work was to encircle the city with this thin line that was barely visible. I rememberhaving a meeting in a Mnster cafe with Kasper where I said: "I want the circle to go arounhere but I need a set of compasses or something." Kasper just lobbed a saucer across thetable, I drew around it and half an hour later we were in the town council office with thechief surveyor asking me how many metres above sea level I wanted it.

Kasper is a sounding board and an enabler and an enthusiast for all the artists he works

with. Mnster is a personal place for him. It's not like those shows where internationalcurators get dropped in. His relationship to the city is critical to the whole venture.

Taryn Simon

The exhibition that stands out for me is Horst Ademeit at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum fr Gegenwart in Berlin, 2011. In a small, often overlooked area of the museumwas an overwhelming amount of meticulously ordered material by an artist I'd never heardof before. After being rejected by his parents, his wife, his school, and even his teacher Joseph Beuys Ademeit abandoned drawing and painting for photography and writing. He

shot more than 6,000 Polaroids in isolation over a 14-year period, which engulfed theroom.

In the margins of the Polaroids, and in seemingly endless calendars and booklets, hehandwrote notations at a scale that borders on indecipherable. He was studying the impacof cold rays, earth rays, electromagnetic waves and other forms of radiation on his healthand safety. He protected himself with magnets and herbs from what he perceived to bedangerous invisible forces, while obsessively creating this trove of records and evidence.The exhibition felt almost like an invasion of privacy as if you were seeing somebody'ssecret world.

Philippe Parreno

I was really influenced by early shows at the Pompidou, particularly Les Immatriaux,curated by Jean-Franois Lyotard in 1985. One of the first to imagine our digital futureavant la lettre, it was enormously influential, its title reflecting not just a shift in thematerials we use, but also in the very meaning of the term "material".

Lyotard created an open structure, a maze with one entrance and one exit, but multiple

pathways through it. Walls were not solid structures but grey webs stretching from floor toceiling. Visitors wore headphones and listened to radio transmissions that faded in and ouas they moved through the exhibition. Such fluid non-linearity exemplified the veryconditions of immateriality central to the show's argument.

What makes for a good curator? Passion, curiosity, intelligence. Hans, Daniel Birnbaum(director of the museum of modern art in Stockholm) and I are working on a project: thesequel Lyotard planned to Les Immatriaux, which never took place. Ours is calledResistances. Humans want to simplify events in the world in order to understand them. Foexample, it's easier to say that the force of gravity is stable but actually it's not. It oscillates
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TopicsSculpture

David Shrigley

Yoko Ono

Gilbert & George

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Lyotard believed that art was about that, about resistant forces that make things not totallyhow we think they are. That's a really beautiful way to define art and art curating.

Gilbert and George

Crucify curators.

("Crucify a curator" is one of the many one-liners from Gilbert & George's latest triptychScapegoating, at the Bermondsey St White Cube, London, in July.)
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The Art of Curation