HANS ULRICH OBRIST

ISSUE 104
DECEMBER 2013/JANUARY 2014

THE ART ISSUE

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

ISSUE 104
DECEMBER 2013/JANUARY 2014

THE ART ISSUE

LIMITED-EDITION COVER
BY JOHN BALDESSARI

123

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

Each conversation Hans

Ulrich Obrist has informs
the next, expanding an
already vast, global epic.

The Master
Interviewer

By
Karen Marta
SURFACE

124

PORTRAIT BY LEON CHEW

Twenty or so years ago, when I first met Hans

Ulrich Obrist (whom I always think of as
HUO) in Zurich, he reminded me of Rimbaud.
Not only because he was roughly the teenage
poets age when he and I met, but also because I
felt he was making a new form of poetry, of art.
In time, I came to see how true my feeling was. I
was amazed that this very young man, without
funding and without institutional support or
commissions from art publications, had set out
on his own to record what he feared would
one day vanish or be forgotten in the greater,
more seemingly relevant cultural dialogue of
the moment.
His interviews were and remain his divine
passion: He has done more than 2,250 of them
since he began. Little has changed in HUOs
mission and his way of getting to the core of the
person being interviewedexcept that he now
interweaves this passion with his full-time curatorial work. Novelist Douglas Coupland wrote
in his introduction to Interviews: Volume 2:
We could have done one interview together,
and Id never have to do another interview
again. Id simply send people a photocopy of
our interview and declare, It doesnt get any
better than this. Learn from the master.
In earlier days, HUO sped from city to city
in Europe on trains and dwelled in their stations, whereas now the circumference of his
interviews has widened globally. Planes and
airports are his hosts. How many actual hours
is he ever on terra firma?

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Rimbaud transformed his genre, upending

the conventions of its meter and rhyme; HUO
has reconfigured the genre of the interview,
distilling and transforming the informational
mass of prose, with its disparate themes and
motifsand the usual who, what, when, where,
why, and howinto artifact, a poem of idea
and emotion. His interviews, like poems, focus
and synthesize thought into points of energy
and beauty.
Turning an interview into a poem would be
an interesting achievement in itself. A book of
such interviews would be like an anthology of
works by poets with varying interests. But the
aggregate, the sheer volume and international
scope of the interviews HUO has done over
the past two decades, gathers the individual
voicesthe individual poemsinto a master
poem, not one rooted in a single nation or
heritage, but a vital global epic. It is a unified
and unifying poem with a memory of the past,
which is our present inheritance and cultural
legacy for the future.
Perhaps his rush to travel and his urgency to
do more and more interviews in recent years
can be explained by HUOs desire to preserve traces of intelligence from past decades,
testimonies of those who have not yet been
recorded and whose memories might fall undeservedly into oblivion. The fruits of his desire
to preserve are evident in his many hours of
interviews with the visionary architect Cedric
Price and the many visits to Japan with Rem

Koolhaas to document the aging Metabolism

architects, whose important voices would otherwise have been lost.
People die, voices fade, but so too does the
very materialthe tapeson which those
voices have found sanctuary. Tapes, such as
the ones HUO used in his interviews years
ago and still sometimes uses, disintegrate. And
soon they will be as mute and dead as many of
the people whose voices they have held in their
fragile keep. These voices are not just historical
documents, but have embedded within them a
host of proposals for what HUO has referred
to as lost projects, poetic utopian dream constructs, partially realized projects, censored
projects. Are these dreams part of our future
inheritance? HUO himself has the dream to
one day curate a large-scale exhibition of unrealized projects. Preservation of his interviews
on tapes, the mandate of the Institute of the
21st Century, is a hedge against an amnesiac
future: The conversations bear seeds waiting
for the opportunity to flower one day. The
tapes are a strained, delicate net holdingfor
who knows how longan otherwise lost past,
which is to say, our future.

A version of this essay appeared in the 2010

Venice Architecture Biennale catalogue.

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
international projects at Londons 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 Holdengrber, director of the public-talks series Live From the
NYPL, for the engagement. He, like 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. Holdengrber
spoke with Obrist about the curators early
influences, his current projects, and the concept of the gesamtkunstwerk, a work that
integrates and unifies all forms of artor at
least attempts to. The comprehensive nature
of such a work ultimately makes it an unrealizable ideal, something to perpetually strive
for but never complete, which is precisely the
quality that makes it interesting to Obrist.
Indeed, many of the curators undertakings
his Interview Project, his Do It exhibition,
and the Serpentine Marathon series, to name
a feware works perpetually in progress;
theyre always being added to, reinvented,
and remade.

Hans Ulrich
Obrist

Paul Holdengrber: I would like to start

with what I take to be your ravenous, allconsuming appetite. Dorothy Parkers
line would fit perfectly for you: The cure
for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure
for curiosity. Talk to me about curiosity
and the fact that there may be no cure for
it, except perhaps curation or just talking
constantly.
Hans Ulrich Obrist: Its interesting that there
is this connection between curating and curiosity. It goes back to my childhood. My parents, when I was 3 or 4 years old, took me to
the library of the Abbey of Saint Gall, one of
the great medieval monasteries of the world.
It burnt down and then was rebuilt, and it
became this fabulous Rococo library. It made
a huge impression on me: this display, this time
capsule, where one could look at these books
only with white gloves on. Later, when I was
7, 8, and 9, my parents kept going back to it.
This was before I ever saw art. I realized little
by little that these monks were bringing all this
knowledge together. That was the beginning
of it somehow.

SURFACE

126

PHOTO: JORI KLEIN.

Paul
Holdengrber

impact on me that from then on I started to go

to museums every day.
PH: Thats a curious use of the word
magnetic. It implies that there is an
attraction so great that you stick to
something.
HUO: Thats exactly what it was. My ignorance of art developed into this magnetic,
almost addictive eternal return. I went back
every afternoon when there wasnt school
to look and look and look and look again.
It was like a school of seeing. It was a very
lucky situation, because I think a city without
a museum is a dead city. I really think that a
dynamic museuma museum as a laboratoryis as important as a great school in a city.
The Kunsthaus in Zurich, at that time, with the
visionary curator Harald Szeemann, became
my school. I learned much more there than
in any other school. I visited his Der Hang
zum Gesamtkunstwerk exhibition 41 times
as a teenager.
PH: How do you recall that it was 41?
HUO: Because I counted it.

PH: Napoleon once said of one of his generals that he knew everything, but nothing else.

PH: That says something about you, I

would say. Forty-one timesit makes
me think of the Talmudic idea that there
are 47 layers of meaning, and that in some
way you had to go back again and again
to see, see, see, look, look, look. It reminds
me of what Werner Herzog tells his students when they want to learn about film.
He says, Read, read, read, read, read!

HUO: I didnt grow up at all in the context

of museums, and I didnt grow up at all in the
context of the arts. The only place that my parents took me to that was a kind of museum
was that monastery library. Then, at a certain
moment, being completely ignorant about art,
I came across a sculpture by Giacometti at the
Kunsthaus in Zurich. That had such a magnetic

HUO: One can look and look and look again.

Its one of the main criteria of why something
is a great work of art: that its sort of inexhaustible, and there can be, over the centuries, different interpretations. Thats sort of the big
paradox of the exhibition, which became my
medium. With a limited life span, works can
last forever. >

127

Paul Holdengrber (left) in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist (middle)

and Rem Koolhaas at the New York
Public Library in 2012. (Editors note:
The event pictured and the interview
on these pages occurred at different
times.)

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

PH: Lets go back to those early years.

You mentioned you were 3 or 4 years old
when your parents took you to that monastery. It was kind of a wunderkammer. Is
that correct?
HUO: I remember that one had to wear felt
shoes. There was this silent walking through
the space.
PH: So it created the sense of entering into
a sacred space.
HUO: I suppose early childhood experiences
with books had to do with discovering the
world and trying to bring different forms of
knowledge together.
PH: Books have mattered to you greatly,
both as books written by others and the
infinite variety of books you yourself
curate or write.
HUO: Ive always believed that books grow
out of other books. There were many things
that happened in my childhood in Switzerland
that were influential. On my way to high
school, when I was 13, 14, 15, 16, there was
the house of Ludwig Binswanger, the psychoanalyst and founder of Daseinsanalysis, who
influenced Foucault. I would pass by this
abandoned house, and I decided to investigate.
I found out it was the house where Binswanger
had his clinic. It was, in my teens, a second
connection to the idea of the atlas, of the encyclopedia, of connected images and how they
produce meaning.
I would say the discovery of the writer
Robert Walser was another important aspect
of my childhood.

Hans Ulrich Obrist at age 21, photographed by German artist Thomas Ruff.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

PH: Its interesting, because with Walser,

you mention someone who spent so many
years in a sanatorium.
HUO: Yes. As a student, I founded a museum
in homage to him. He always paused on his
walk at a restaurant, and in this restaurant I
installed a vitrine. I invited artists to exhibit in
it, and we declared it the Museum of Robert
Walser. I saw that we can create a museum
every daythe museum is a daily practice of
invention. After the vitrine in the restaurant,
there started to be some articles, and people
from far away came to visit it. But it was just
a vitrinethere really wasnt a Museum of
Robert Walser. It was just my student museum.
PH: What is so interesting here is that, on
the one hand, there are those very early
childhood memoriesthe felt shoes, the
preciousness of the museum, the fact that
one had to prepare oneself physically, in
ones accoutrement, to receive the beauty
of that monastic libraryand on the
other hand, theres something very quotidian, something of the caf culture, one
might say, where a museum can exist anywhere, where there are no special shoes
that are needed. In a way, youre oscillating between those two worlds, one of
them a world thats confined and removed,
the other one much more in daily life.
HUO: It went from the library and the books
to the experience with works. In some way, I
think it was Calvino who said in his wonderful
book Why Read the Classics? that the idea is
more rereading than reading. Its a voyage of
discovery each time.

Malamud would have understood itwhereas

the later Wagner became very overwhelming
and oppressive. Its more that early Wagnerian
idea of the gesamtkunstwerk, which Szeemann
followed up with Rudolf Steiner, with Gaud,
with Joseph Beuys. As a kid, I heard this interview with Joseph Beuys, in which he talked
about an expanded notion of art. It was incredibly catalystic or cataclystic
PH: I like cataclystic. I think thats very
good.
HUO: I was thinking, What would this idea
mean in relation to curating? Curating always
follows art; its not the other way around. I
have heard that a curator sets the agenda and
an artist follows, but I think its the other way
around.
As a teenager, I thought about an expanded
notion of curating. That was the beginning of
my idea that one could curate literature, one
could curate a museum, one could curate
architecture.
PH: I think we should make a distinction
between an interview and a conversation.
Do you think your interviews are part of
an unrealizable gesamtkunstwerk?
HUO: I never thought of them as art. I dont
know how it started. With you, Im very curious about how your amazing conversations
started. But in my case, growing up as a single
child in Switzerland, I had a bit of claustrophobia, so I always had this urge to have dialogue.
I was looking for these infinite conversations
that would never end.

PH: Whats the difference between walking and talking and walking and thinking?

PH: Yes. Its unachievable in some way.

Its perpetual, always in motion, and never
finished.

HUO: Two readings are never the same, and

two walks in the forest are never the same. Its
an infinity of possibilities. Its also the idea that
its never finished. Its inexhaustible. The same
thing is true for a walk. One can always walk
again on a mountain or re-walk through the
forest. Thats the whole Robert Walser idea.

HUO: Thats why Im so curious to hear from

you about how your conversations started,
because for me, I always had these infinite
conversations, but initially they were somehow not recorded. They were just my research.
Theyre what brought me to curating. It was
always conversations with artists.

PH: For me, this notion of reading and

rereading is so important. Thanks to
you, I was recently at the Serpentine
Gallery, in conversation with British
essayist and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips.
Psychoanalytical sessions are really a form
of rereading. Theyre rereading ones past,
going over things, trying to figure them
out by closely examining them again and
again. A successful analysis offers us a
reading of ourselves.

PH: Since you ask, Im just so curious about people. I approach my subjectsand I wonder if this holds true for
youwith the inspiring methodological
invitation set forth by the historian Carlo
Ginzburg. He states that he approaches
and starts his research with what he calls
the euphoria of ignorance. For me, it
started the way I think it starts for us
in childhood: by our parents talking to
us. We begin our life in conversation
with our mother or father or the people
who take care of us. Were very fragile
as babies; unlike some other animals, we
need care. We need curation as children.
I began by simply wanting to participate in the conversation, having a
mother and father who were Jews who
left Vienna just in time and spent the

HUO: Its on a level with the ancient talisman, and that leads us to the idea of the total
book as Malamud conceived it. For me, it
went from the total book to the total work of
art, the gesamtkunstwerk. The early Richard
Wagner designed the gesamtkunstwerk in
a very participatory, open waymore as

SURFACE

128

129

war years in Haiti and then Mexico. I

wanted to talk so much and wanted to
understand. When I was 11 years old,
my mother said to me, Just remember, we have two ears and one mouth.
That, I think, was very fundamental.
Now what I like to do is listen to
people. I think you and I share that
curiosity. Something happens when you
ask people questions. In your case, I asked
you a question, and the next thing I knew,
there I was, in the middle of Switzerland,
imagining the little Hans Ulrich Obrist
walking around in shorts, looking at the
mountains, feeling lonely, and wanting
to talk.
HUO: At a very young age, when I was
16, I had by then visited all the museums in
Switzerland. I had also started to travel by
train and look at museums abroad. This desire
grew suddenly to meet the artists. I had seen an
exhibition of Fischli/Weiss and rang them up. I
said, I am a pupil, 17 years old, and Im a very
big admirer of your work. It was obviously
an unusual thing for a 17-year-old to do. They
were amused by that. They spent an afternoon
with me, and said that I should come back
next week. That was the day I decided what
I wanted to do in life: I wanted to work with
artists. I wanted to somehow become a curator.
A few weeks later, I went to see an exhibition of Gerhard Richter in Bern. I spoke to
him at the opening. I was so completely transformed and transfixed by this exhibition.
PH: You said there was an urgency, a real
desirean appetiteto meet the artists
in the flesh. Do you feel that there were
moments of great disappointment? >

Hans Ulrich Obrists new book Do

It: The Compendium (Independent
Curators International and Distributed
Art Publishers).

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

HUO: No, I think its always beenwhat did

you call it?a euphoria of ignorance. There
has never been a disappointment.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

PH: A secret garden, you say.

SURFACE

130

HUO: Yes. Curating is about enabling, facilitating, catalyzing, triggering, and helping to
produce reality. This 89plus project is bringing us into the future. However, Ive always
believed that if we want to invent the future,
we very often do so through fragments from
the past. That means to protest against forgetting, to look back. Its not because we have the
Internet that we have more information, that
we have more memory.
PH: Do you think the contrary is true,
that we have less memory?
HUO: It could be. Amnesia could very well
be at the core of the digital age. So many artists
work on memory and on protests against forgetting. A few years ago, Rosemarie Trockel,
the German artist, whom I met as a teenager,
said, You shouldnt only visit artists of your
own time. You should look back. She had
this idea that one should go talk to very, very
old peoplewho have lived a century and
have all this knowledgejust before they die.
She thought that it would be so wonderful to
research and go see them. I took Rosemaries
advice very seriously.
Whenever I give a lecture somewhere, I
ask, Is there a Louise Bourgeois in town? Is
there an artist, a writer, a philosopher, a pioneer whose work resonates and who has been
working for 90 or 100 years? Ive got 38 of
these interviews, and certainly one of the most
remarkable memories is when I interviewed
the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. He

PHOTO: COURTESY SERPENTINE GALLERY.

HUO: Yes, and I always return to that. Ive

developed my public activity as a curator since
PH: We read people, we see their work, 93its been going on for exactly 20 years
and then, when we meet the artists but if, for example, I were going to Poland to
or writersI wonder if this happens give a lecture at a museum, I would use that as
for youthey are not quite what a pretext to spend an afternoon with Czesaw
you experienced when you were experi- Miosz and learn from the almost-100-yearencing their work, whatever their work old poet [who passed away in 2004]. More
may be.
recently, after I attended a Google lecture in
Silicon Valley, I went to San Francisco to see
HUO: There have obviously been moments the engineer and architect Anne Tyng [who
when conversations went wrong. For exam- passed away in 2011], then 90 years old. I
ple, my conversation with Stanislaw Lem, would always have these parallel realities, and
the great futurist and fiction writer: He no that somehow has nurtured the whole practice.
longer wanted to be a science-fiction writer, I dont know if that explains it.
but claimed to be a scientist. There was a lot
of confusion. But these things are very rare.
PH: Well, it certainly expresses it. Its hard
Enthusiasm is my medium.
to explain it because its a work in progress. In some sense, it expresses the irresistible urge to use every possible occasion
PH: Well, you know the line of Emerson:
Nothing great was ever achieved withand opportunity for some kind of deep
transmission of knowledge. You were
out enthusiasm. Enthusiasm, in the etymological sense, is being transported by
talking about Miosz and Tyng. Theres
the gods, levitating in some form or fasha saying attributed to the Malian statesion. Celebration is what brings usyou
man Amadou Hampt B: When a great
and mein our shared outlook, together.
man dies, a library disappears with him. I
wonder what the relationship is between
HUO: Yes, completely, celebration.
these conversations we have and the notion
I learned everything from artists. From
that were finite, that death will haunt us.
Gerhard Richter I learned how to install an
In one recent case, Im filled with
exhibition, how to edit an artist book, and
sorrow. I was to interview Lou Reed about
how to find a title for an exhibition from doing
the Edgar Allan Poe: Terror of the Soul
this little show with him at Nietzsche-Haus
exhibition at the Morgan Library. We
when I was 23. From Christian Boltanski and
were going to have a walk-through of the
Fischli/Weiss I learned how to do a group
Morgan and speak. What happened hapshow. Then I started to work withthis is
pened. Lou Reed died, and this conversaa very big shortcut because we dont have
tion can no longer happen. His sudden
death is unfathomable. Im thinking of
time to go through the whole thingKasper
Knig, who ran the Stdelschule, and then all
those conversations I did have a chance
of a sudden Suzanne Pag, who ran the Muse
to have, of which you have had so many.
dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris. I found
Take, for example, Christopher Hitchens,
two museum directors as my mentors. But
whom I interviewed about his memoir,
early on, it was all from the artists.
Hitch-22, a year before his death. When
When I was 24, 25, my activity became
I asked him, Why do you write your
public. In my early years, I was like a private
memoir now? Why now, Hitch? He said,
Got to do it in time.
scholar of sorts. After five years, it became
very public. This led to the Interview Project.
One night, I was in Frankfurt, and I was a bit HUO: That leads to this idea of urgency, and
destabilized by this public attention. Thomas in some way Ive always believed that every
Bayrle, the great German artist and teacher day could be the last day.
of the Stdelschule, took me aside and said,
Look, youve got to understand that youre
PH: One of the things Ive always been
going to burn out if you keep going like this.
fascinated with is the relationship between
You can only do this if youve got several
aging and taste: what we go back to, what
secret gardens that you can nurture yourself
we remain faithful to, and then what we
transmit. I know this is very involved. Its
in. They dont necessarily have to do
not really a question so much as a query,
with curating. They allow you to disas something that haunts me, and that I
appear and recharge your batteries. I
think also haunts you in some way.
was thinking all night long about what
could be my garden. I realized I had
these gardens; I just hadnt formulated HUO: I suppose its a transgenerational projor articulated them. I had curiosityI was ect. Ive always, on the one hand, been focusing
speaking to artists, to scientists, to architects my research on the future. Like what Im doing
and I started to think, If I record these con- now with the curator Simon Castets, with the
versations, they could become a repository 89plus project, on artists born in 1989 and after,
of ideas that I can go back to and develop. the first digital-native generation. Mapping
It was really that night in Frankfurt when I is the wrong word, but its sort of engaging
began this secret garden of knowledge.
with that generation.

PH: And learning something from them.

131

was in his house and at a certain moment fell

asleep. The phone rang, and he answered, then
realized what had happened. He said, Youll
have a great difficulty to transcribe my silence.
PH: I remember visiting Louise Bourgeois
in New York toward the end of her life,
wishing to bring her for a public interview
to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
where I was working at the time. Without
hesitation, she responded, My dear man,
I no longer travel in space, only in time.
I was not aware that you were putting
together a collection of people over a certain age. So you have, on the one hand,
the 89plus project, and then, on the other
hand, a project of people 89 and over. Its
interesting that youre seeking a younger
generation to understand. I think we
have a lot to gain in knowing how the
generations younger than us look things
up. I mean, I work in a library: What does
it mean to look things up?
Recently, I interviewed the computer
scientist and composer Jaron Lanier, the
author of Who Owns the Future? In this
book, he writes, I miss the future. This
thought haunts me. I think what he
misses in some way is the potentiality of
the future as he imagined it. It brings to
mind the wonderful line from the French
poet and philosopher Paul Valry: The
futures not what it used to be. As a
person who coined the term virtual
reality, Jaron is left with the slightly foul
taste of what virtual reality has brought
about in terms of reality. He was more

Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rem Koolhaas

conducting a 24-hour-long conversation during the first Serpentine
Marathon in London in 2006.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

than a little critical of what Facebook, for

instance, has brought about. It puts us in
little pockets of reality: Were this or not
that. We have to categorize ourselves in
ways that limit us.
HUO: Im always wondering about my work
in these parallel realities. My work is obviously
very nonlinear. Im very inspired by these
architects who work on 30, 40 construction
jobs at one time and have these parallel realities. In terms of curating, Ive always been, in
a similar way, working on all these projects
all the time.
PH: Do you sometimes feel its too much?
HUO: Its never been too much, in the sense
that they all inspire each other. One comes out
of the next. As a curator in the 90s, I would
travel 360 days a year. At a certain moment, I
was at home five days a year.
PH: Only five days?
HUO: Yeah, in the 90s. Then, in the 2000s, I
decided I wanted to do more sustained work
with museums. I wanted to have the possibility to talk to the public about not only global
activities, but also local activities. I became the
curator of the Muse dArt Moderne de la Ville
de Paris, and then in 2006 I became co-director
of the Serpentine with Julia Peyton-Jones. This
has meant that since 2000 Ive spent most of
the week in Paris, and now in London. Ive
continued my research by going on trips all 52
weekends a year. Its the idea of editing time,
which Ive always found very interesting. Its
finding different rhythms of time.
PH: You were mentioning Calvino; I
love the series of lectures that he was to
deliver at Harvard [Six Memos for the Next
Millennium]. Alas, he died before he could
present them. He has one extraordinary
chapter on speed, quickness, and lightness.
He invokes the image of festina lente: take
haste slowly. In your case, theres a sense
of speech that has a gallop. You were mentioning before that you used to travel a
lot by train. I can hear the train of your
thoughts, the speed at which words try to
keep up with what youre thinking.

new rules of the game, and the curator picks

them up.
With exhibitions, weve had a whole centurythe 20th centuryof attempts at invention. Duchamp said, You only remember
exhibitions that also invent the new display
feature.

to do with the memory of what Studs Terkel

told me. In some way, all of these conversations lead to projects that cross-fertilize each
other. Its a complex, dynamic system with
many feedback loops.
PH: How do you prepare?

PH: Whats remarkable is that youre

fighting the current in our culture of
immediacy, of quickness. Interestingly
enough, Werner Herzog and I have been
invited to speak in Iceland, and Werner
said that he would do it under one condition: that we speak for five consecutive
hours.

HUO: With exhibitions, its usually a long

period of incubation and research. Its talking
to many people, putting a team together. With
books, its the same. With interviews, its usually reading a lot. Whenever I do, for example,
a conversation with someone whos not in the
art world, whose work I dont know that well,
its a discipline of reading. Its almost like being
back at university and having a crash course on
the person and reading everything I can find
about this person.

HUO: Yes, and that obviously leads to Werner

Herzog marching long distances on foot.

PH: Do you think that there is such a

thing as over-preparing?

PH: When you were on my stage in New

York with Rem Koolhaas last year, you
said that every day, wherever you are, you
buy a book.

HUO: Yeah, I think there can be over-preparing. I think there can also be over-organizing in
terms of exhibitions. I think its about finding
a mix between preparing and improvisation.
For conversations, I put notes together. Its the
system of ordering disorder. I can really start
to improvise. In a similar way, with exhibitions,
I always want a moment of self-organization
so that its somehow alive and organic. Very
often, projects like the Serpentine Marathon
evolve over 5, 10 years. My exhibition Do
It just had its 20th anniversary; the Marathon
is in its eighth year now. Many of these exhibitions and projects are long-durational. I
believe in this idea that one doesnt just work
on one project, then move on to the next thing.
PH: Of improvisation, theres a line I
always use by the French novelist Pierre
Mac Orlan: Improvisation is something
you prepare. Or Nietzsches line: A
dancer needs to know where he puts his
feet. That knowledge of where the feet
fall doesnt come completely naturally.
One also needs to have practiced in order
to do this and for it to seem effortless.
I wanted to ask you about the
Serpentine Marathon. Even the notion
of calling it a marathon: You obviously
know the Greek origins of it and why
there was such a thing as a marathon
when the Athenians announced that the
Persians had been defeated in battle. What
brought about the idea that you and Rem
Koolhaas would spend 24 hours speaking
at the first Marathon in 2006? I might add
to that: Whats the advantage of such a
long conversation? And did you at times,
like your friend Gadamer, just fall asleep?
HUO: The Marathons have a lot to do with
this idea of the rules of the game. The other
day Rei Kawakubo was telling me that with
each collection she invents a rule of the game.
Each collection is an invention. Exhibitions are
about coming up with new rules of the game,
recording dialogues with artists. Artists create

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HUO: Yeah, thats true. Ive got the Brutally

Early Club at 6:30, Ive got my early-morning
jogging habits, and then theres this idea of
buying a book every day. At the Zurich airport
this morning I bought Journey to the End of
the Universe by Urs Widmer, whos a Swiss
writer in his late 70s. Its his attempt to write
about the impossibility of writing an autobiography. He talks about this idea of: We live in
the future, we invent it, and then we remember
the future weve created.
PH: What are you most excited about
doing in the next year?
HUO: Im very excited about next years
Serpentine program. Im also looking forward to the moment of finishing my book for
Penguin [Ways of Curating]. And I hope that
my biggest unrealized project will be realized,
which is to have a conversation with Jean-Luc
Godard. Its a dream Ive never succeeded in
making happen. Which leads to my question
for you: Do you have someone youve wanted
to have a conversation with that has remained
unrealized?
PH: Yes. Leonard Cohen.
HUO: Amazing.
PHOTOS: MARINA PINSKY, COURTESY FOR YOUR ART.

HUO: Its jumping universes, nonlinearity.

Many of these conversations grow ideas. For
example, when Liu Cixin, whos a Chinese
science-fiction writer, talked about the future
and mankind having lost its passion for exploring spacethe idea that we need a second age
of explorationit prompted me to make a
book on the future in China. Or when speaking to Studs Terkel many years ago, he basically told me, Conversations cannot only
produce conversations. He told me that at
a certain moment, when [publisher Andr]
Schiffrin told him he should write a book, all
of a sudden he actually started to write books
based on conversations. Thats interesting
because Ive now started to write a lot. It has

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

PH: Lets end with the words Leonard

Cohen. May our unrealized dreams
come true: that before we die, you speak
to Jean-Luc Godard, I to Leonard Cohen.
HUO: Lets make it happen.

(TOP TO BOTTOM) Artist John

Baldessari (middle) and Hans Ulrich
Obrist (right) at Art Catalogues at
LACMA in 2012. Scientist, engineer,
and inventor Danny Hillis being interviewed by Obrist at For Your Art in 2012.

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With Instagram, Hans

Ulrich Obrist showcases the
lost art of handwriting in
the digital age.

The Post-it
Man

By
Dave Kim

SURFACE

Hans Ulrich Obrist joined Instagram in

December 2012 and has since posted more
than 400 photographs of handwritten notes
from the distinguished people he meets. One
might expect the feed of one of the worlds
most influential curators to be a rich collage of
filter-enhanced art, architecture, and beautiful
people. Either that or a ghost town, an account
updated just a few times out of beginners curiosity before its busy user decided that real life
was more interesting.
Obrists feed is active but unassuming. He
averages roughly one upload a day. His posts
are pictures of scrawls on paper, not exactly
#wow material, and the messages themselves
are often cryptic or illegible (though Obrist
always types out the text and attributes the
author in a caption). Pay them some attention, though, and the images start to take on
a strange powerone thats not just linked to
the celebrity or cool factor of the artists, writers, architects, and public figures writing the
words.
Part of the notes power comes from the
startling reminder that we dont see much
handwriting anymore. Correspondence today
is rendered in computer fonts and emoji, and
its entirely possible to have a lengthy relationship with someone and never know how he
or she writes hello. Were probably missing
something important because of this; studies
have shown a link between handwriting and
personality, how the shape, size, and ligatures
of our script can reveal details about our inner
lives and character traits. Theres something
illuminating but oddly voyeuristic about carefully examining a note written by a stranger. It
feels like peeking at a private momenteven
when were reading a message from artist
Sarah Morris that proclaims: Nothing is private. Everything is up for grabs.
One also feels the pleasure of matching
texts with ones perceptions of their authors.
A haiku from Bjrkhandwritten or typed /
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135

galaxies colliding / coexist on axisis written

in blue highlighter ink with childlike unevenness, and it could easily be a lyric in one of the
Icelandic musicians ethereal songs. A suggestive memo from John Waters reads, Six fuzzy
beavers quickly jumped the narrow gapa
very John Waters rehash of the well-known
typographers pangram, The quick brown
fox jumps over the lazy dog. And the everaudacious Kanye West reminds us that good
taste is a gift but bad taste is a privilege, even
throwing in a doodle of a ninja for emphasis.
Eager to evaluate these gemsand the occasional dudare Obrists nearly 35,000 followers, and the opinions and commentaries left
in the comment sections are almost as entertaining to read as the featured texts. Consider
the public remarks made for a missive from
artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, who,
for her contribution, wrote, We need a new
password she said in a small notebook held
open by someones thumb. The following
comments are sic, with the handles switched
to fruit types for privacy:
@apple: Your thumb is a pen? Woah! You
are like Robocop or Stationary Manor
something
@banana: How the f is this art? Ve been
following u for months, and youve only
posted crap.
@orange: @banana dislike
@pear: @hansulrichobrist should write
@bananas comment on a post it and
Instagram it
@pineapple: yes please do that!
@kiwi: Clearly she has not listened to
Grayson Perrys BBC lectures Tut tut tut
And so forth. The fact that anyone can contribute anything to the comments is both the
best and worst feature of any open web platform, but for an Instagram feed like Obrists,
the miniature public forums created by these

posts reinforce the aesthetic and cultural value

of the posts themselves. Each like or response
adds to the aura of what is essentially an electronic record of a written record, a signifier
of a signifier.
Despite the irony of preserving analog content with a digital medium, Instagram seems
tailor-made for Obrist, whose projects tend to
be cumulative and ongoing affairs. His Do It
exhibition series and Interview Project have
been in progress for two decades; he is a painstaking collector who keeps adding to a body
of work and extending its scope, rather than
racing toward a completion date. Instagrams
single vertical stream helps to marshal the plurality of handwriting styles and personalities
Obrist encounters. But it also draws attention
to the evolution of the feed, which began a year
ago with photographs of people and objects
and is now dedicated almost exclusively to
these handwritten notes. Its development is a
fitting metaphor for how we ourselves evolve,
a virtue captured perfectly in a note to Obrist
from none other than Frank Gehry. THIS IS
MY HANDWRITING, the first line reads,
in nimble chicken scratches. Below it, in shaky,
inky cursive, is another sentence: This was
my handwriting.

For the following pages, eight of Obrists

friends sent Surface their own notesin the
vein of those on Obrists Instagram feedto
run exclusively in this issue.

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Bjrk, musician

Konstantin Grcic, designer

Etel Adnan, writer and artist

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137

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Marina Abramovic, artist

Koo Jeong-A, artist (Im Hak is not equal to Mongdal ghost)

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139

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Ziad Antar, filmmaker and photographer (A little bit of oil from the tree of life)

Olafur Eliasson, artist

Peter Fischli, artist

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Simon Castets

PORTRAIT BY KATHERINE WOLKOFF

It all began with a memorable line in a 2009
New York Times profile of artist Ryan
Trecartin, in which Trecartin says, People
born in the 90s are amazing. I cant wait until
they all start to make art.
Simon Castets and Hans Ulrich Obrist both
read the quote and found it
difficult to forget.
Castets recalls that he and
Obristjet-setting curators
with overlapping networks
kept running into each
other at art events around
the world after meeting at
the Yokohama Triennale that
Obrist curated in 2008. Later,
when they convened at the
Serpentine Gallery in 2012,
they returned to Trecartins
words. It sounded insane,
and we were kind of joking
about it, Castets says of the
Trecartin quote.
The two started thinking more seriously about
the idea. Little by little we
both saw that we had friends
of friends who actually were
from that generation, and
were doing very interesting
work, Castets says. These
observations set the groundwork for what would become
89plus, a multiplatform
research project co-curated
by Castets and Obrist that
explores the mindset, behavior, and output of innovators
born in 1989 and after. Artists,
designers, poets, mathematicians, and others around the
world submit their work to
89plus; those submissions
then become resources for
the programs research, exhibitions, or events.
Since debuting at the
Digital-Life-Design conference in Munich
last January, 89plus has organized different
iterations of events around the world: conferences at MoMA PS1, Palazzo Grassi, and
Art Basel Hong Kong; artist residencies at
the Park Avenue Armory in New York and
L.A.-based artist Doug Aitkens cross-country
Station to Station train project; and more. In
October, a two-day Marathon at Londons
Serpentine Sackler Gallery brought together
80 program participants, in addition to established creators like architect Zaha Hadid,
artist Carsten Hller, and designer Martino
Gampereach of whom dialogued with their

By
Allie Weiss
SURFACE

This 29-year-old curator

and Hans Ulrich Obrist
highlight talents born in
1989 and after with 89plus.

142

143

younger counterparts. (Hller introduced the

work of Valia Fetisov and Gamper dialogued
with designer Josh Bitelli; both Fetisov and
Bitelli were born in 1989.) Events in Miami,
South Africa, Madrid, and Latin America are
in the works.
Though such gatherings put 89plus on the
international art-world radar, the platform
remains research-based, with partnerships
at universities around the globe and a virtual
network to study the generation in question.
In the beginning, we were relying on recommendations from friends about peoples
works, Castets says. We had an overwhelming amount of data, but its not enough when

you need to address the reality that the bulk

of that generation does not live next to us. In
89pluss makeshift New York office, which it
shares with the New Galerie art space in the
Film Center Building, a map tracks the platforms upcoming projects around the globe.
Tacked below it, population data from the
U.N. conveys 89pluss inquiry in numbers:
approximately 23 percent of the Japanese
population was born after 1989, whereas its
69 percent in Timor-Leste and 67 percent in
Afghanistan.
Obrist and Castets decided on 1989 as the
anchor for the project in large part because

software engineer Tim Berners-Lee wrote the

proposal for what would become the World
Wide Web in that year. The teams research
explores how the web generation collects information and interacts with the virtual landscape.
Unsurprisingly, many of the participants at
the Marathon had a digital component to their
work: Niko the Ikon and Tierney Finster, winners of the Re Rebaudengo Serpentine Grant,
screened a semi-nostalgic music video that
they had shot on a VHS camera, while artist
Felix Melia created an art film for the popular
Generation-Y app Snapchat.
Embracing the new, though, doesnt mean
dismissing the old. When I was going to
high school, I had to look
something up in the dictionary or the encyclopedia, says
Castets. When youre looking up one word, next to it
you might see something
youve never heard of, and that
opens up a different possibility. Thats something you lose
[in the Google era], but at the
same time you gain a tremendous amount of other things.
Two elements unite the
rapidly expanding group
of 89plus participants: their
digital proficiency and their
young age. But Castets is
quick to dispel age as the
platforms focus. It is not
a project about youth, he
says. It is about a generation
that happens to be young at
this moment. Even so, he
hopes 89plus will prove one
potential advantage of youthful ardor. Recent art history
has proven many times that
people at age 22 or 23 were
not only active but also prolific and relevant and doing
some of their strongest work,
Castets says.
That line of thinking could
apply to Castets himself,
who in November stepped
into the role of director and
curator of the Swiss Institute
Contemporary Art in New
York. When announcing his
appointment, the institute
cited Castetss age as a way to
help the program expand audiences.
Ill bring people from my own generation
to the platform, Castets says. I actually think
thats one of the great privileges you have
working in contemporary artworking with
your contemporaries. Its an apt reminder:
Though the 20-year-old newcomers are worth
tracking and the 70-year-old masters worth
admiring, the in-between generations often
contribute some of the strongest work. Castets
and Obrist are prime examples.
Simon Castets with packed artworks by
Dan Rees at New Galerie.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

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Julia PeytonJones

Serpentine Gallery director Julia Peyton-Jones

may be an Officer of the British Empire and
a commanding presence on the London art
scene, but shes anything but intimidating. In
fact, shes gracious, elegant, and egalitarian.
Which perhaps explains her successdespite
many obstaclesat turning the once-fledgling Serpentine into one of the worlds most
respected public arts institutions. Before starting at the gallery in 1991, Peyton-Jones was
the curator of exhibitions at the Hayward
Gallery; prior to that, she was a practicing
artist and a lecturer at Edinburgh College of
Art. Her beginnings suggest an almost painterly outlook: Each decision Peyton-Jones
has made over the yearsfrom conceiving
the Serpentine Pavilion in 2000 to hiring codirector Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2006can
be viewed as a brush stroke. And todays
Serpentine, the cumulative result of that effort,
is her ongoing masterwork. Surface executive
editor Spencer Bailey sat down with PeytonJones for breakfast at the Pelham Hotel in
Londons Kensington neighborhood to discuss her role at the galleryand what its like
to work alongside Obrist.
Spencer Bailey: Twenty-two years ago,
the Serpentine was not the powerhouse
it is todayyou couldnt even put on a
show in the wintertime due to heating
issues. Youve been quite the problem
solver. Whats been your approach?
Julia Peyton-Jones: Its like when you look at
a painting youre doing and you say, It needs
a bit more red in the top right-hand corner.
You look at what youve done, and you always
say, Is it complete? Can I improve it? What
does it need now, what do I need to do? The
idea of change is actually embedded in it. You
never get to a point where its fixed. Of course,
this approach is a strategy, but its not a business plan.
SB: Would you say you have business
savvy? Youre clearly skilled at managing the public image of the gallery.

Spencer Bailey
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144

JPJ: When I started in 91, the building was a

terrible mess, a complete disaster. It needed
to be renovatedit was a whole fundraising
thing. And then, post-renovation, I had to
figure out how to use this new platform.
It was very usual for me to go out to dinner
and hear people say, Contemporary art? Oh
dear! Im sorry, but this is not serious. The
press would say to me, Tell me why this is art.
Tell me why my child of 3 couldnt do this. I
would reply, Dont disregard the Serpentine
as being a little tearoom, because youre wrong.
Its not. Its really completely different because
it can do all these things.
In the early days, we did a Man Ray exhibition that included loans from the MoMA, Tate,
and other major museums. It was organized
very quickly at a time when there was a huge
polemic about Man Ray and authenticity. Our
exhibition fell smack into that whole discussion, and we were able to hold our heads up.

145

The exhibition not only escaped the controversy, but was considered to be richer. We did
a show with Basquiat in the early 90s that
[industrialist and art collector] Peter Brant still
refers to as his favorite showing of Basquiats
workor at least he did 18 months ago. At
that time, there was a very urgent need to show
work by artists who were regularly discussed
internationally, and whose work had not been
seen in the U.K.
If Id sat down in 91 and said, Im going
to do all these things, I wouldnt have been
able to imagine it. But if youre living in the
moment, I think it becomes clearer. I wouldnt
say it becomes absolutely clear, but it becomes
clearer. The overwhelming desire is for us to
present programs that I think are needed for
our institution. Thats really it. And to develop
the institution for the programs we need to
present here.

PORTRAIT BY LEON CHEW

SB: Over the past 20 years, there has been

a cultural shift in the U.K. in how people
think about architecture and art. What
changed?
JPJ: At the heart of it, we became less of an
island. I remember well a lecture Hans Ulrich

Serpentine Gallery director Julia

Peyton-Jones in the new, Zaha Hadid
designed Serpentine Sackler Gallery.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

gavehe was on a panel at the South Bank, at

the Hayward. He talked about the Eurostar
and how it changed the psychology of this
country. Thats something that I think is absolutely true. We stopped being an island, and in
a way got over colonialism, too. We realized
how small we were, and how big the world
was. The demographics of London began to
change, which was massively vital in changing
the culture of the city and country. Also, the
fact that were a financial center is a huge asset.
It was a kind of opening up. It was a psychological and literal opening up of the country
to new ideas, new inspirations, new influences.
At the heart of it, culture plays a massive part
of that, and I think it was triggered by Frieze,
which absolutely blasted everyones conventional ideas about what art could be, how it
could be shown, by whom, and to whom. The
formulaic way to do things the way theyd
always been done no longer applied. Here was
this group of artists who were wildly different.
It was exciting, stimulating, engaging.
SB: How did the Serpentinethis small
gallery on a small islandbecome one of
the most influential galleries in the world?
JPJ: If you run a public institution, it comes
with a responsibility, crudely put, to bring
people in and educate them. We obviously
want to do that at the highest level possible. I
want as many people to come as we can possibly fit in the building. If we have up to 800,000
people in one year, I would be delighted.
Thats the purpose, thats what we do. I look
at it from the viewpoint of: Okay, do we need
more red in the top right-hand corner? What
else is needed to make the picture more complete? Talking about painting is perhaps an
old-fashioned idea, but I think the principle
is there.

JPJ: In the 90s, we held a series of gala dinners with Diana, Princess of Wales, who was
our patron, and Vanity Fair, which was our
sponsor. When she died, and Vanity Fair
was no longer sponsoring us, we wanted to
do something for our 30th anniversary that
would be in no way compared to those galas of
the 90s. The idea was hatched that we would
ask Zaha Hadid to create a pavilion. I wanted
there to be something that was resolutely different and would also encapsulate everything
the Serpentine stands forsomething of-themoment, forward-looking, surprising. We
asked Zaha to design a structure for the same
amount of money as it took to hire a tent back
then, and she did it.
The thing that was unbeatable and super
important about this pavilion was our absolutely incredible position in a Royal Park. We
were not allowed to keep it up for more than
a day. Which wasnt a problem, because we
were doing shows that only lasted three days
for these gala dinners. The brilliant thingand
what changed everythingwas that Chris
Smith, Secretary of State for Culture, Media,
and Sport, who was a visionary man, came to
this dinner. He was responsible for the Royal
Parks. He loved the pavilion, and I said, Well,
can it stay for longer? He said, Of course,
why not? He had the gift to change everything. That opened up that possibility, and it
stayed up for a month.
The next year, the great decision was to do it
againor not. There was an immense amount
of to-ing and fro-ing, but we did do it again.
We invited Daniel Libeskind, and what was

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

incredibly exciting about that was that he and

his wife, Nina, were extraordinary in the way
they embraced the project. I mean, we had
absolutely no money. I dont mean we had a
couple of thousand pounds. We had nothing.
No money at all. And we were also dealing in
a discipline that we had no knowledge of. We
had knowledge of working with artistswed
commissioned them many timesbut architecture was not the same. Still, we did it. It was
like a thriller: Are we going to get what we
need? Are we going to find somebody to pay
for it? Is the scheme going to fly?
SB: This brings up an interesting point:
What happens to the pavilions after
theyre taken down?
JPJ: Theyre all sold. Because we still have no
money to do them, the financial package is
a very simple one: We get support from the
construction industrywe have people who
sponsor the pavilionsand the sale of each
one contributes to no more than 40 percent of
its cost. Usually theyre bought by individuals.
SB: The early pavilions must have seemed
like daring ventures to a lot of people.
JPJ: When you do something thats very public,
with which you have no experience and no
money, its like, Hmm, hows this going to
work? But it remains an incredibly exciting
project. The risk is there from the outsetthat
hasnt changed. And the outcome is completely undetermined when you start. You
really have no idea, just as you dont when
youre commissioning artists.
A couple of years ago, somebody described
us as amateurs. I was very offended. I was
like, What are you talking about, amateurs?
We are very professional! Then I thought,
Absolutely, were amateurs. And how fantastic
is that? Because it means that we dont know
enough. And if we ask something thats a complete taboo, we dont know enough to know
its taboo. We can be fearless in a way. We dont
know what the boundaries are because nobody
else is doing it.
I was asked recently, Whats the definition
of the exhibition program? And the answer
I gave was the definition of the Pavilion program, because I think they can be transposed.
We ask the architects or artists to design a
pavilion that encapsulates their architectural
language and pushes their architectural vision
to the limits. Were encouraging them to do
something within the context we provide.

Daniel Libeskinds Serpentine Pavilion

in 2011.

SB: Do you see the Serpentine as a

painting?

SB: How did you start the Serpentine

Pavilion program, for which you commission a different architect or design team
each year to build a temporary pavilion
on the gallerys lawn?

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146
1

SB: You chose Zaha Hadid to design the

new Serpentine Sackler Gallery, located a
short walk from the Serpentine. Why did
you hire her firm for the job?
PHOTO: HELENE BINET.

PHOTO: COURTESY DANIEL LIBESKIND.

JPJ: Not in a literal sense. But I do see it in

terms of an approach to making something. I
come from a generation when going to art college was seven years: I did foundation, undergraduate, postgraduate at the Royal College,
and I always worked throughout that time.
The two things ran in tandem, and happily
so. While being resolutely in the world of a
student, I was always very fascinated with
how you make your way in the world and
generate a self-supporting construction. That
ranged from being made head of the kitchen
department at Bonhamsat the time, there
were three auctioneers: Sothebys, Christies,
and Bonhamsto doing the most menial jobs.
That was all somehow part of the fascination
of engaging with life.

JPJ: It was an interesting situation because she

didnt have until now a building in the center
of London. We chose Zaha because wed had
a long history with her: one unrealized project and three realized projects. She had done
the pavilion in 2000, the Lilas installation

147

in 2007, and another project for one of our

summer parties, which was not our commission, but it was brought into the context of
the Serpentine.
I told her, We need to do this. Its an opportunity. Its against the odds that were going to
get it, but we really need to do it. So we did
the Sackler design, which was something that
was formulated very quickly from a drawing.
We put together the business plan, and then
began a series of interviews with the Royal
Parks. Not only were we not a frontrunner,
we were the least likely of the candidates to
get it. The feeling was that we had a building
in the Royal Park and that it was somebody
elses turn. Once they awarded the building
to us, the Royal Parks said, When are you
going to start? They put us on an incredibly
tight timeline. We were successful in the bidding only because wed raised all the money.
I dont know how it works in the U.S.,
but in the public sector in the U.K., when
you decide youre going to build a museum
or adapt a museum, you do the scheme, and
then you say to funders, Would you like to
support it? Its a process that can take years,
decades in some cases. But this was not the
case with us. We were told, as soon as we got
it, You need to start. And if you dont start,
you will be paying rent in spite of the fact.
The Department of Commerce picked Zahas
scheme, which was part of our business plan,
so there wasnt an opportunity to say, Oh,
lets recast this and go out to competition.
Not that we would have wanted to.
SB: Whats Zahas relationship to the gallery now?
JPJ: Shes a very dear friend of our chairman,
Lord Palumbo, whos also chairman of the
Pritzker Prize. Shes one of our advisors for
the pavilion and is a trustee of the gallery. She
often says, Oh, Julia, you never listen to my
advice!which is not true. We do absolutely

Zaha Hadids Serpentine Pavilion

in 2000the debut of the Pavilion
program.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

SB: Zaha may have started the pavilions,

but Hans Ulrich started your annual
Marathons, the weekend-long forums in
which speakers from various fields give
short talks on a given theme.
JPJ: Yes, and the Marathons are very much a
part of the way the Pavilion program developed from the time Hans Ulrich joined the gallery in 2006. The Marathons are extraordinary.
In the same way the Pavilion is an exhibition
of architecture, the Marathon is an exhibition
of ideas. Its a wonderful concept and really
at the very heart of our collaboration and the
starting point of our discussions. We talked a
great deal before we decided we were going to
work together.
SB: How do you and Hans Ulrich collaborate at the gallery?
JPJ: Were both co-directors of exhibitions
and programs, so the job is divided between
us. Hes director of international projects, and
Im director of the institution. We have a very
fluid relationship. The program is where we
connect at the heart of everything. But hes
an excellent fundraiser, very good at tableseating plans. I was an artist and have been a
curator for all my life. Its the idea of one plus
one equals eleven. Hans Ulrichs knowledge
of culture is astonishing. How lucky we are,
how lucky I am, to be able to have this fantastic collaboration that is, as you might imagine,
quite stimulating and productive.
SB: When did you first meet Hans Ulrich?

SB: The Serpentines not simply a contemporary art gallery. Its also exhibiting
architecture and design. Its multidisciplinary. Do you view it in that way?

JPJ: Im interested in making things more than

anything else. Thats not limited to architecture. Im fascinated by this idea of making
something where nothing exists. That relates
to things across the board. Its about making
an institution. I suppose this sounds a bit
grandiose, but its not meant to be. Im quite
interested in doing things that are not possible.
If youre the size we are, everything is a gift.
Were in a Royal Park, we have to tend to the
building, we cant go outside it, we have very
limited money, very limited resources. So what
do you do? First of all, you accept it, and then
you say, How am I going to improve the
situation? And then you begin to put things
together. That means you can do everything
youre not expected to do, and not allowed to
do. That can be done in a wide variety of ways.
We regularly say to each other, Lets think the
unthinkable. Lets think, What if? We set our
standards high, and then go from there.

JPJ: Of course. However, I think its very difficult to make those claims unless one can really
substantiate them. If you want to talk about
being multidisciplinary, you have to be able
to cut it next door to institutions that do that
discipline. Im not sure were there yet, though
it is our intention and desire. Its not to say we
dont do itwe do. But its the question of our
level of ambition. If you take the Marathon or
the Pavilion, they are very clearly distinctive
projects that occupy that terrain. Other people,
of course, do wonderful architecture projects,
but I think its true to say there is no other
organization thats doing a project like we do
on an annual basis. Weve inhabited that space.

SB: Whats been the biggest shift at the

Serpentine since Hans Ulrich started?
JPJ: Connection. He doesnt say it so much
now, but its this idea of being a juncturemaker. I think what he sparks in mewhich
is a fascination of hisis making those connections. And also a sense of play, in the best
possible sense. Hes obviously very serious,
intense, all of that, but at the heart of it, hes
amusing. Theres a common ground. Its an
open discussion, always. And thats exciting,
because there are no boundaries in the sense
of I cant say this or We shouldnt discuss
that. Its very open, and within that openness,
you discover possibilities you didnt see before.
Thats what makes change possible.
The connections are his neurological connections, which are enormous, but theyre
also his connections to people across all disciplines. Thats whats incredible. Obviously,

Sou Fujimotos Serpentine Pavilion in 2013.

SB: So youre finding voids that exist in

the art world?

SANAAs Serpentine Pavilion in 2009.

SB: Hans Ulrich is certainly interested in

architecture, but you seem to be the one

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PHOTOS: FUJIMOTO, IWAN BAAN. ZUMTHOR, JOHN OFFENBACH. SERPENTINE SACKLER, LUKE HAYES.

JPJ: We were introduced by the artist Richard

Wentworth, who mentioned him to me.
Richard was a trustee at the time. I invited
Hans Ulrich to curate a show called Take
Me, Im Yours in 1995. We continued to
stay in touch. I later went to see him lecture,
and following it, we went out to dinner. We
took a taxi together to his hotel. I dropped
him off, and we were laughing about the fact
that the Hayward needed a new director. We
both were really giggling about who would do
that. Not because its the Hayward, but this
idea of who would be the director of a public
institution like that, how unbelievably hostile
it is. We began this conversation that lasted
a year about what it meant to be a director
of an international institution and what the
possibilities were, what the limitations were,
how things could change. It was a conversation about ideas. In the end, I thought, This is
ridiculous. We talk every single day, hes completely fascinatingwhy arent we working
together? I then invited him to come to the
Serpentine. We devised these rather lengthy
titles, but actually theyre very descriptive of
what we do.

the Marathon is a very particular, signature

thing of his.

who has spearheaded it at the Serpentine.

When did you personally become interested in architecture?

PHOTO: IWAN BAAN.

listen to her advice. And she has been an

incredible supporter.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

JPJ: No. Its not so opportunistic. Not that

I have any problem with opportunism, far
from it. Its more to do with the way we move
into other disciplines: The artists, architects,
or designers we show are interested in that
discipline. It comes out of a need rather than
Hmm, what do we feel like today? Ah, lets do
dance! Its programmatic layering thats very
important, rather than just bolting things on.
One project weve started is an engagement with literature through our Bridge
Commission audio walks. Because were in
a Royal Park, we cant commission artists,
architects, or designers to make an umbilical
cord between our two buildings. Its just not
possible. So we decided to commission writers to write a short story for the time it takes
to walk between one building and the other.
Theres one story a month, 12 a year. Its an
international group, and the idea is that at the
end of the year well have a library of contemporary writing. Its something thats incredibly
appropriate for the Serpentine. When we talk
about it, people smile.
Thats really what I would call the interdisciplinary programming we need to be
doing in the future, the kind that comes out
of a need for the institution and has an obvious resonance with what were doing. Thats
really the future. If we do that in all the disciplineswhich has always been our intention
for the two buildingsthen we will make the
Serpentine an organization thats thinking in
a very interesting way about its position, its
relationship to its context, to the public, and
also to culture overall.

Peter Zumthors Serpentine Pavilion in 2011.

The recently completed Serpentine Sackler Gallery, designed by Zaha Hadid.

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In addition to his many

interviews, doodles by Hans
Ulrich Obrist offer a look
into his life and mind.

By
Paul Chan

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Character
Sketch

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Hans Ulrich Obrist has been drawing since he

was a teenager in the mid-1980s. This was the
time when he first started meeting artists in
Switzerland and elsewhere through his travels.
These first encounters with artistsAlighiero
Boetti, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Gilbert
and George, Gerhard Richterwere what
made him decide he wanted to work with artists and that curating would be his work, even
though he admittedly didnt really know what
a curator did.
Obrist took night trains all over Europe,
going to as many as 30 cities in 30 days. It was
during these trips that he started to draw. At
first, the drawings were systematic notes and
sketches about exhibitions, and simple lists
of things he had seen and artists he had met.
According to Obrist, these drawings served
no real purpose. Whats more, he generally lost
them as soon as he made them.
As Obrist began his career as a curator, he
continued to sketch. Over time, what he made
changed and diversified. There were still the
drawings related to exhibition-making. But
during the 1990s, Obrist began his Interview
Project. And during those recorded conversations with artists, philosophers, scientists,
writers, and anyone else who piqued his curiosity, Obrist would write notes and sketch
out ideas and images that came up as he was
interviewing. He also began to do more public
speaking. As a result of nervousness, he began
to obsessively write and sketch before and
sometimes during a lecture or speech. These

151

drawings, inspired in part by Georges Perec

and the Oulipo movement in France in the
1960s, are essentially a form of public notation.
The presence of paper plays an important
role in Obrists drawings. A fair number of
them are made on hotel stationery. There
are also papers from the various institutions
where Obrist has worked or curated. There are
drawings made over printouts of emails and
texts, like a kind of contemporary palimpsest.
Layers upon layers of notes, names, and ideas
that exist on the same plane but evoke radically
different parallel realities.
Obrist loses the pens he uses to draw as regularly as he loses the drawings themselves. He
often draws with pens from the hotels where
he stays. Many pens come from stewards and
stewardesses on flights, and from lobbies of
offices he passes by. He claims to never own a
pen longer than a day.
Looking at just a few of Obrists drawings,
one would get a sense of a fertile, frenetic, and
possibly obsessive mind. Yet their intensity
and variety betray a semblance of continuity
between concerns and attitudes that he returns
to over and over again. Seeing many of them
in a sequence, its possible to feel as if one is
looking at the rhythm of how he thinks. Even
though some drawings are much denser than
others and some are just one or two words
on a piece of paper, one can feel the pulse of a
mind at work and at play.
Obrist has never paid much attention to his
drawings. To him, they were merely working

documentsa kind of toolbox. This is why

theres no annotation of any kind for them.
Obrist simply didnt keep track; they werent
that important. What was more crucial for him
was the moment that was experienced in the
process of listening, making, talking, or doing
whatever it was he felt worth doing. The drawings are merely expressionistic remainders of
what was not consumed as fuel for planning
an exhibition, editing a book, or imagining a
Marathon. Still, hes conscious enough about
drawing as an essential act in the process of
his work that he carries around piles of paper
in his suitcase when he travels, in case something strikes him as worthy of remembering
on paper.
Obrists sketches teeter on the edge of
being recognized as artworks. They are certainly beautiful and enigmatic. And they
captureas any work ought tothe act of
becoming something neither predicted nor
pre-established.
Are they real works? Who knows? Then
again, nobody who recognizes what they
really are cares.

This is an edited version of the introduction

to the forthcoming book Think Like Clouds
(Badlands Unlimited), by Hans Ulrich Obrist.

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HANS ULRICH OBRIST

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HANS ULRICH OBRIST

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Paul
McCarthy

Who is Hans
Ulrich Obrist?

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PHOTO: JOSHUA WHITE, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH.

Friends &
Collaborators

Artist

I met Hans Ulrich a long time ago, in the mid90s at a dinner in Zurich, through [art dealer
and gallery owner] Iwan Wirth.
One time, he had come to L.A., and I
had a model that I had made of the White
Snow installation [that was shown at the
Park Avenue Armory earlier this year with
the exhibition title WS]. Id given up on it
and decided that I would move on to another
project. I figured Id maybe come back to it
in a couple of years. I was kind of okay with
just leaving it in the studio. Hans Ulrich saw
the model, and we had a talk about it. I dont
know how long it was after thatmaybe six
months or a yearwhen he called me and
asked, Could we put the White Snow piece
in the Armory? I didnt know what it would
mean. It was a one- or two-month process of

157

figuring out if we would do it. Then I decided

that we could go for it.
It was all super risky because of how large
it would be. Once we decided to do it, it was
all about trying to get it done. Then, once it
was done, the reality hit: Could we even move
it? By moving it, would we destroy it? The
gamble was really big. There were all kinds
of issues, including the [explicit] content of
the piece. They werent sure they could show
it. Even after the piece was made and being
moved therethe trucks were leavingthe
Armory was still asking, What have we
agreed to do?
All the way through, Hans Ulrich was
completely supportive, always positive, while
knowing there was the possibility that it might
not happen. A lot of people wouldnt have

taken that kind of risk. It had to do with really

wanting to see it done, and for me, it might
not even have happened if he hadnt shown
up. Its very typical of him to be positive and
supportive of the artist. Art is what he cares
about. As told to Bettina Korek

A scene from Paul McCarthys WS

(2013) at the Park Avenue Armory.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

Jacques
Herzog

Samuel
Keller

Founder and senior partner,

Herzog & de Meuron

Director,
Beyeler Foundation
My earliest memories of Hans Ulrich go back
Since I moved from Art Basel to the Beyeler
to the mid-90s. He was a character I would Foundation, weve done numerous projects
come across at biennials: a pale, young, tall together. I helped him realize his Do It book
man schlepping around a large bag with lots and the Tempo Del Postino exhibition at
of documents, usually catalogues, always run- Basel. Currently were collaborating on the
ning around at a very fast pace. At that time, 14 Rooms live art show hes co-curating with
there werent so many people at all the big art Klaus Biesenbach for Basel next June. I also
events around the world. Whenever I showed invited him to curate an exhibition of Gerhard
up somewhere, Hans Ulrich was often already Richter [which will be shown at the Beyeler
therebut only for 24 hours.
Foundation from May 18 to Sept. 7, 2014]. It
The first project we did together was in 2000 will be both Richters and Han Ulrichs first
when I was the director of Art Basel. At that large-scale exhibition in Switzerland.
time, art fairs were just galleries showing artWe see each other quite a lot, and we comworks in booths. I thought they should have municate at least once a week. After we found
a stronger cultural component; involve art- out that were both very hard to reach, we
ists, curators, and collectors; and educate the started to call each other every Monday mornpublic. Hans Ulrich seemed to me the right ing. Sometimes its not possible because were
person to create new platforms for dialogue in on a plane, or were far away, but in general we
the art world. So I invited him as the first guest talk on Monday mornings. Thats our profesof whats now Art Basels Salon. Although he sional relationship, but were also friends. He
came half an hour late, it was an instant success. never takes holidays, but if he did, he would be
Through that, I asked Hans Ulrich if he would one of the people I would go on holidays with.
be willing to work with me and a small team to Hes an adorable man, a genius and generous,
create a series of talks, panel discussions, publi- and a bit eccentric, with a big heart and a great
cations, and artist interviews during Art Basel, sense of humor.
Ive always loved his interviews, especially
which we named Conversations. Hans Ulrich
wasand isthe spirit, the director, the mas- when theyre live. When hes speaking with
termind behind that. From that moment on, an artist, the conversations show how much
weve never stopped collaborating.
Hans Ulrich is the artists best friend. Hes

so direct. Thats not his character. His magic

somehow is that he can be influential and be
present without being intrusive. Its kind of an
absence of intentionality.
I think whats super surprising is that you
dont really know what Hans Ulrich does, but
you know he does so incredibly much. We
could say nice things about Hans Ulrich that
everybody else would also say: Hes amazingly
connected, he knows all artists, all architects,
all curators. He knows everything and everybody. Hes like a living network. When youre
with him, you feel connected to other people,
other projects, other ideas.
He has an almost nonphysical presence,
something fugitive. His constant traveling
enhances this impression. I often wonder how
he can physically and mentally bear that. How

David
Chipperfield

can one bring things down to the ground with

such a way of living? The great thing about
him is not that he does so many projects, but
that so many projects come out well and are
innovative and new and interesting.
Being around Hans Ulrich is very often
sheer pleasure. You feel he makes the moment
very special. I think this is a very extraordinary and artful way of living. In this sense he
is like an artist himself. He says, This is the
moment, this is what we have to do. As told
to Spencer Bailey

Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiweis

Serpentine Pavilion in 2012.

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158

Architect

PHOTO: LUKE HAYES.

Weve known each other more than 20

years. Hes interviewed me quite a few times.
Through the Serpentine Pavilion project [in
2012] we really started to understand better
what we could do together, how we would
work with artistsin this case, Ai Weiwei. I
think we started to appreciate what the other
did. Since then, we have made this collaboration more intense. We have two or three ongoing projects.
The Serpentine Pavilion project was very
fast. Pierre [de Meuron] and I could see how
helpful and how stimulating it must be for an
artist to work with Hans Ulrich when hes
doing a show, because hes so encouraging,
hes so dear and careful. We always felt he was
so supportive, but he would not come and say,
Lets do this and not that. He would never be

really doing everything to make the artist feel

comfortable, to make the artist look good, to
give the artist a platform for what she or he
would like to communicate. Hes never as
manicured as critics, trying to put himself up
front or showing how intelligent he is, how
much he knows about the artist. Theres a level
of confidence and trust between him and the
artists. In that, artists reveal things that they
would not usually share.
Hans Ulrichs brain is so big, and it works
so fast. If his brain were a muscle, it would be
a big bodybuilder; it would look like Arnold
Schwarzenegger in his best days. If you ask
him to generate an idea, he just cant stop generating them. For every opportunity you give
him to have an idea, he will find plenty. Ideas
come to him all the time.
Hes someone whose horizon extends
beyond art and into science, architecture, literature, film, and so on. He has a broad sense
of the world. Hes also someone who doesnt
want art to be in an ivory tower; he wants art
in life, he wants it to reach a large public, and
he still wants it to be able to preserve its intrinsic qualities. Hes a fantastic agent for art and
artists in the world at large. As told to S.B.

Ive never really worked with Hans Ulrich,

but he has been a continual presence in my
life, the most energetic, purposeful person Ive
ever met.
Theres a story he likes to tell about us. I
travel a lot. I always arrive at Heathrow early,
semi-conscious. I have a bowl of cereal, read
a newspaper, and stay in my bubble. I use
plane time to sleep, even on a short haul. So
Im going through security, and Hans Ulrich
is calling my name. To my surprise, were

159

both on the same plane to Berlin and seated

next to each other. He takes on board a suitcase on wheels and a briefcase. How long
are you staying, Hans Ulrich? I ask. Just a
day, he says, leaving me wondering what he
could have in such a big suitcase. On board,
he opens the suitcase, and its full of papers, a
huge wad, like a mobile office. His underpants
and shirt are in his briefcase. It was charming.
We talked for the hour-and-a-half flight. Such
is his enthusiasm to spark ideas.

Hans Ulrich is a very free spirit, continuously curious. I remember one time at an event
in Morocco his plane was delayed and we kept
getting messages that he was stuck somewhere.
He eventually arrived at 11 p.m., and was due
to depart at 6 the next morning. Yet at midnight he headed off to see a certain institution.
Id turned in by then. His almost childlike
enthusiasm is contagious. He has an incredible
charge. As told to Nonie Niesewand

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

John
Baldessari
Artist

it], but what was shown was the correspondence. Hans Ulrich is somehow still convinced
it can be done. He fills me with optimism. In
his mind, anything can be done. I really like
that attitude. As told to B.K.

John Baldessaris Double Vision:

Lewitt (2011). (OPPOSITE)
Baldessaris Double Play: Eggs and
Sausage (2012).

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IMAGE: COURTESY THE ARTIST.

We just worked on a show together at the

Garage [Center for Contemporary Art] in
Moscow, 1 + 1 = 1. It was from a whole series
of works that had been spread over four or
five gallery shows. It came about when Hans
Ulrich called me up and said, How about
doing this as a show at the Garage? I said
great, because I hadnt had the opportunity to
unite these works and see them together.
I also participated in two other Hans Ulrich
shows, 11 Rooms in Manchester and 13
Rooms in Sydney [both co-curated with
Klaus Biesenbach]. For Manchester, the idea
was to realize a project I had proposed for
the Information show at MoMA [in 1970].
MoMA had said no, and then somehow Hans
Ulrich found it and said, Why cant we do it?
Manchester made assiduous efforts [to realize

IMAGE: COURTESY THE ARTIST.

I met Hans Ulrich when I was in Paris doing

a show with Marian Goodman [in 1997].
Marian asked if I would like to have dinner
with this young guy who was in town, and it
was Hans Ulrich. I kept calling him Hans, and
Marian said, No, its Hans Ulrich.
Hans Ulrich and [artist] Meg Cranston
did a lot of the work on [my two volumes
of collected writings]. The books are a way
of understanding and going back and thinking about what was going on in my head. Im
glad I wrote things down. Its good to review
my thinking process, what was absorbing me
and what was interesting me. I never thought
it would be two volumes. That was Hans
Ulrichs idea, and then I jokingly came up with
the title [More Than You Wanted to Know
About John Baldessari].

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HANS ULRICH OBRIST

Klaus
Biesenbach

IMAGES: COURTESY THE ARTIST.

Director, MoMA PS1, and

Chief Curator-at-Large,
MoMA

(TOP TO BOTTOM) John Baldessaris

Double Bill: and Duchamp (2012).
Baldessaris Double Bill (Part 2): and
Lger (2012).

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162

I met Hans Ulrich on a night train in 1993 on

the way to the Venice Biennale. At the time,
there were no cheap flights, so you took night
trains. I remember I locked the compartment I
was in. I pretended I was sleeping and that the
compartment was full. In Innsbruck, Austria,
somebody entered the compartment and
brought in all his papers and books. I wanted
the light out; he wanted it on. He wanted to
read and work, and I needed to sleep. In the
morning, we started to talk about contemporary art. Thats how we met: fighting over a
train compartment.
The first thing we worked on together was
research. Hans Ulrich used to have an apartment in93 and 94 on Crampton Street in
London. We called it the Crampton Street
Disaster. He and his partner, Koo Jeong-A,
and I stayed there. He wouldnt sleep at the

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time. He had the Leonardo da Vinci rhythm:

He would sleep for 15 minutes every three
hours. We would wake up at 5, get ready,
walk to Burger Kingwhich opened at 5:30
or 6and then we would do constant studio
visits until we dropped. Weve frequently been
working together ever since.
My relationship with Hans Ulrich is rooted
in the 90s, when the Internet wasnt so ubiquitous. We used to do these telephone conferences. Actually, we still do them. Last year,
when Hurricane Sandy happened, we were
in the midst of a telephone conference. It got
so loud on my side that at some point Hans
Ulrich said, Whats going on? I said, Hans
Ulrich, my phone is going to die soon. There
is a flood in front of my building, I have no
electricity anymore, and I see that the power
station is on fire. These long brainstorming

sessions and phone conversations that weve

continued since the 90s have accompanied
real life.
I consider Hans Ulrich a pacemaker, a catalyst, an encyclopedia, an idea machine, and a
very close friend. We were, in the mid-90s,
on the advisory committee of an institution
in Japan. We travel the world with each other,
and its always about art and facilitating for
the artists. Hans Ulrich makes everything into
a serious series by his never-ending curiosity and peripatetic moving-forward. Hes an
incredible gentleman. He has the best manners.
Hes a very, very curious curator who tries to
meet and hear and see every significant image
and idea in the world, literally not leaving anything out. As told to S.B.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

Olafur
Eliasson

Anton
Vidokle

Artist

Founder, e-flux

Ive known Hans Ulrich for, I dont know, 15

years or so. I did some of my first exhibitions
with him, and whats important to me is that,
in a way, we are still working on the thing we
started on. Clearly, there is a dimension of the
never-ending story, and as time passesas the
years go bythere is a certain value in this.
I think we have done maybe eight, nine,
or 10 interviews now. Which isnt really true,
actually. We have only done one interview,

and it has taken 10 years or so. That we dont

repeat ourselves is not totally true, but generally speaking, there has been, I think, a pretty
straightforward trajectory. Think about it: In
an hour or so, you cannot capture 10 years.
When I sit down and talk to Hans Ulrich, the
conversation is not just 10 minutes old; its 10
years old. Theres a certain depth of friendship.
I mean, its incredible.
Hans Ulrich keeps asking, not about how

you do things, but why you do things, and

this, I think, is valuable. One can say that the
core quality of Hans Ulrich is that hes not
about formulas; hes more about the relevance
to the time in which we are right now. This
is why making an interview over 10 years
obviously takes this whole other dimension. I
dont know whether anybody will ever listen
through all of them. As told to B.K.

is a conversation, and the scientists were

completely ignorant of what the conversation was at the timethey were stuck in 19thand early-20th-century art ideas. (Has this
changed? No.)
In terms of working with Hans Ulrich, I
leave the art up to him and focus on the science. We havent been trying to bring artists
and scientists togetherintentionality kills
these projects. Science is a methodology for
representing knowledge; art is something else.
Artists can be inspired by science: They can
attempt to make it visible, and it can be the
canvas. Turning that around and having scientists do art doesnt make them artists.
The project with Hans Ulrich that I liked
the most was in Iceland, where he interviewed
me in front of an audience. This was about
three years ago. Olafur Eliasson was there.

So was Marina Abramovic, with Dr. Ruth.

Hans Ulrich and I have done several projects. One was Maps for the 21st Century
at the Serpentine Gallerys Map Marathon [in
2010]. Another was Information Gardens
at the Garden Marathon [in 2011].
Hans Ulrich is one of a kind. In a world
where almost everybody puts on yesterdays
newspapers as ideasin a world where most
people have never had an original thought
almost everything out of his mouth is interesting and fresh.
Ive never thought about my relationship
with him, except that were good friends. I
bring the scientists to the party, and he brings
the art. As told to B.K.

intuitive and knowledgeable interviewer

the Conversation Series interviews we did
were excellent.
Hans Ulrich is a superb curator and has
done a great job at the Serpentinethough
my opinion is biased, as Im a trustee of the

gallery. I like so much of his work, but his

shows with Rem Koolhaas were especially
memorable. He has a very sharp mind and
so much passion. Hes a lovely guy and good
friend. I love his energy and sense of humor.
As told to N.N.

John
Brockman
Founder, Edge Foundation
I remember Hans Ulrich came to visit me at
my farm to do an interview. I think it was
the best interview that anyone has done with
me. It was February 1999, and it was titled
Brockmans Taste for Science, or How to
Entertain the Worlds Smartest People.
Im interested in science and art, but Im
not at all interested in this conflation of
people talking about art and science together.
I learned about science by working with artists.
John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Nam June
Paikthey would give me books. Scientists in
the McLuhanist sense were like the beacons
of the avant-garde, sending signs to the public
about what was coming up next. If I had an
Edge Foundation event with [mathematician
Benot] Mandelbrot, every artist would come.
But when the artists presented their work to
scientists, it would be like ships passing. Art

Zaha
Hadid
Architect
I think we first met while I was designing
the 1998 exhibition at the Hayward Gallery
[Addressing the Century: 100 Years of Art
and Fashion]. Weve done some great interviews, talks, and panel discussions together
around the world. Hans Ulrich is such an

SURFACE

164

Hans Ulrich and I met in Madrid about 14

years ago. We started spontaneously talking
at an exhibition, and I gave him my email
address. I had just started e-flux, and he was
curious about it. He sent me a really long text
in German about art and the InternetI guess
he assumes that everybody speaks every language that he does. As a joke, I did one of the
early versions of automated online translations, before Google, and it was completely
incomprehensible. It sounded like a robot had
written it. When he saw it, he went, Wow, this
is incredible. Its better than the text that I sent
you. Weve been friends and collaborators
ever since. Weve done many projects together
in all sorts of capacities. Sometimes Im an
artist and hes a curator; sometimes Im a publisher and hes a writer. Our roles constantly
reverse. Its a very unusual collaboration. Its
never the same.
The Agency of Unrealized Projects is something that came about when we were going to
a conference in Rotterdam. Both of our planes
arrived at some insane hour. We were on the
street in Rotterdam at 5:30 in the morning,
which was too early to check into the hotel,
and we had nothing to do. We ended up in a
caf and had breakfast together. He was telling
me about this book, Unbuilt Roads, that he
had published in the early 90s. It was a book
of unrealized art projects for which artists sent
him projects by fax that were unrealized for all

165

sorts of different reasons, from censorship, to

loss of funding, to ideas that are unrealizable
by definition. He was fascinated by this idea,
and I became interested in it, too. Everything
in our world is a product of someones idea.
This building is an idea, this table is an idea,
this pen and notebook is an idea, each of which
has reached a moment of realization. But for
every idea that gets realized there are probably
thousands that dont. If you imagine the world
as a kind of iceberg, where physical reality is
just the tip of unrealized ideas of all sorts, it
becomes really fascinating.
Unrealized ideas are particularly interesting in art, because, for example, in architecture
there is a tradition of presenting them. This is
because most architecture projects are in fact
never realizedthey remain proposalsbut
there are exhibitions, there are books that
circulate and are discussed, and in this way
unbuilt structures enter the discursive space of
architecture. In art, however, its really tricky,
because if an artwork isnt made, it just does
not exist. For me, what was interestingand
urgentwas to create a place for ideas that
have never seen the moment of realization, and
to develop a circulation mechanism for things
that are unmade: unwritten books, unmade
films, unwritten concertos, unmade objects.
When Hans Ulrich and I were talking at
breakfast that morning in Rotterdam, I suggested we open an agency for this purpose.

I meant it as a real agency: one that would

administer unrealized artworks and amass
an archive. This archive would sometimes be
displayed somewhere, and perhaps someone
could go through it and select something for
realization. We started from there.
Unbuilt Roads was comprised mainly of ideas
by artists Hans Ulrich knew personally. I suggested to make the agency radically open, so that
anyone could submit an unrealized project. This
is because its not only artists who have ideas to
make art. Im completely fascinated by unrealized art ideas by people who are not artists, or at
least not professional artists. We created a very
simple online form in which you could submit
text and images, and we circulated an open call
for unrealized art projects. So far, weve received
several thousand submissions of all kinds.
For me, this almost becomes like a topographical survey of the contemporary artistic
imagination. To date, the agency has done three
exhibitions. Each time we present the agency,
the archive keeps growing, and now were
about to take the crucial step and put the whole
archive online. In theory, we dont see an end
to this because theres not a lack of unrealized
projects. We plan to continue until we collect
them all. As told to S.B.
An illustration of Hans Ulrich Obrist
by artist N.S. Harsha for the Agency of
Unrealized Projects.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

Peter
Fischli

Tino
Sehgal

Artist

Artist
We met through [writer and curator] Jens
Hoffmann. It must have been 2001. Jens and
Hans Ulrich rang the doorbell to my studio,
and I came down. They were in a taxi, and
we went for a ride. Im not sure if it was an
appointment. Maybe they just showed up,
which seems unbelievable nowadays.
Our first collaboration was when Hans
Ulrich invited me to be part of Do It,
and then I was part of an exhibition called
Manifesta 4 in 2002. He saw my piece there,
and he immediately asked me if I wanted to
do an interview, which I guess is his way of
talking to people. Although it was a proper
conversation, it turned out to be a very enjoyable moment. We published it a few times, and
weve done a number of interviews since.
Im not sure hell like me saying this, but in
a way Hans Ulrich was saved by art. For him,
its a psychological necessity.

I think Hans Ulrich has very nice gestures.

With one particular gesture, hes kind of an
introvert and extrovert at the same time. He
speaks, then his arms open, and he kind of tilts
his head. I once pointed it out to him, and he
tried to replicate it, but he didnt have the right
attitude. I then tried to replicate it, and I also
failed. As a person who has a love for choreography, its definitely something to watch out
for. If you cant understand what Hans Ulrich
is saying, just check out his gestures!
Asking why people are fascinated with
Hans Ulrich is like asking Coca-Cola for its
recipe. Its just a very specific mixture. Hes
modest, hes obsessive, hes very intelligent,
hes very extroverted, and yet hes also very
shy. He combines a lot of opposites somehow.
What I often say to people when they first
meet him is: Its very easy to overestimate
him, and its very easy to underestimate him.

A lot of people think they have him figured

out, and after a while they realize its not that
straightforward. As told to S.B.

Philippe Parreno and Liam Gillick. The list

of artists in the show ranged from Lawrence
Weiner to Daniel Buren, from Uri Aran
to Klara Lidn and Anri Sala, from Rirkrit
Tiravanija to Pierre Huyghe. In 2010, he was
the nominator of a selection of photographers for the Prix Dcouverte des Rencontres
dArles. This show then traveled to the
Garage in Moscow under the title How Soon
is Now?
Hans Ulrich is an original innovator, a
researcher, and a brain. His interviews in
books or on video are incredible. He tours
the planet with them. He is ubiquitous. Ive
seen him pop up at Inhotim [art center in

Brazil] at a conference, and in Munich, where

he has invited me twice to the Digital-LifeDesign conference. Each year, I see him in
London, Paris, or Arles for our think tanks
with my core advisory group: Beatrix Ruf,
Tom Eccles, and Philippe Parreno. Ive also
seen him in New York, Stockholm, Dubai,
Sharjah, Venice, Turin, Zurich, and on top
of a Swiss mountain. And in the Caribbean,
where he took off his shoes, but not his Agns
B suit. As told to S.B.

Maja
Hoffmann
Founder, LUMA
Foundation
there. We had the idea to not bring artwork,
but rather just bring him the things that he
needed in a kitchen, like special, food-size
packages for restaurants. He filled one part of
the kitchen with all of that stuff. He had no can
openers. There was one big crate of chocolate
cream, which he was able to open without a
can opener. At the end of the show, the cans
were all gone.
Hans Ulrich is one of the most curious
people Ive met. Hes always hungry for new
things: Whats next, whats next, whats next?
Hes really sharp, always looking at the future,
but also very curious about the past. Hes not
only super interested in the field of artthat

wouldnt be enough for himbut also architecture, philosophy, music, every field.
As told to B.K.

Fischli/Weisss Rock on Top

of Another Rock (2013) at the
Serpentine Gallery.

SURFACE

166

PHOTO: MORLEY VON STERNBERG.

One day in 1985, Hans Ulrich called us and

asked if he could come to our studio. He was a
teenager. It was pretty exceptionalnormally
curators or collectors came. He was very interested, wanted to know everything, and asked
smart questions.
During our third or fourth meeting, he
came up with the idea for a kitchen show.
We went and saw his apartment. He had no
use for his kitchen, because he didnt know
how to cook, so he wondered what he could
do with the room. Normally a kitchen is the
most useful room in an apartment, but not for
Hans Ulrich. He transformed it into an exhibition space and asked if we could do something

I met the young Hans Ulrich Obrist in 1992

at Jan Hoets Documenta 9 on a rainy evening outside of the show. [Parkett editor] Bice
Curiger introduced us. From then on, we
kept bumping into each other, with a sudden
increase since 2006 or 2007. I have a lovely,
delightful relationship with him. Starting this
year, hes a member of the LUMA Foundation,
which I founded in Zurich in 2004.
LUMA has helped the Serpentine Gallery
produce three pavilions: SAANAs in 2009,
Peter Zumthors in 2011, and Sou Fujimotos
this year. We also worked on a group show
[in 2012], To the Moon via the Beach, for
Arles, which Hans Ulrich co-curated with

167

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

Bice
Curiger

Philippe
Parreno

Editor, Parkett

Artist and filmmaker

I met Hans Ulrich when he was 16 years old.

It was 1984, and we had just started Parkett.
I think it was before we even published the
first issue. He showed up at the office, and
there was this very, very young person saying,
Oh, I have heard you started the magazine.
I want to buy the special-edition issue you
announced, done by the Italian artist Enzo
Cucchi, but I cannot pay for it in full. Can I
pay you 20 Swiss francs every month? We
were, of course, touched. I mean, we were
just in love with this young boy immediately.

He then started to follow us to gallery openHans Ulrich has his wonderful energy to
ings so he could sneak in with us to the din- connect totally different worlds, totally differners afterwards.
ent intelligences, and he creates a sort of new
Karen Marta was at the time the New York geography of intelligences. I think its like an
editor of Parkett, and she always was great image of a moment of history. Nobody does
in sending me stuff I should know about New what he does. He breaks up the boxes where
York. She had sent me an article from The things are usually stored, and he connects
New Yorker about Walter Hopps, and I them on a lively, energetic level. He doesnt
thought he was an incredibly important just do another dead thing, but a very lively
figure. I told Hans Ulrich to read it, because thing. I think he one day should become the
I knew that he had aspirations to also become curator of one of those World Expos.
As told to B.K.
an important curator.

Stefano
Tonchi
Editor-in-Chief, W
evolution of art and what art means to different generations.
Hans Ulrich makes his office wherever he is.
Last time I saw him, we were in Hong Kong.
We were having breakfast at the Peninsula, and
there he was with two other curators, three
artists, and suddenly the breakfast room of the
Peninsula became his personal office. We had
great conversations.
His knowledge reminds me of a humanist,
like somebody from the Renaissance. He can
go from science to architecture to pop culture
to entertainment to fashion to design. Theres
nothing he cant talk about. Hes this Leonardo

da Vinci type of guy. At the same time, hes a

kind of magician. He appears and then disappears. Its like real and virtual. Sometimes
you wonder: Does he exist? Or maybe there is
more than one of him! As told to S.B.

SURFACE

168

IMAGE: COURTESY PILAR CORRIAS.

Hans Ulrich is a good friend. Ive always been

one of his fans, even if I have not read everything he has writtenits too much. You need
to be like a marathon runner to read it all.
Hes very well known for not sleeping, but
thats just what he does. He reads everything.
Hes in his own time zone somehow. There is
no way to say where he is, because he doesnt
have a time zone. He text-messages me in the
middle of the night or whatever the time is
where he is.
Im very interested in his 89plus project.
We wrote about it in W magazine recently. I
think its a very interesting way to look at the

[Artist] Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster mentioned Hans Ulrich to me and said that we

should meet. I knew he was a young curator,
and Id seen some of the talks he was doing at
the time. Wed kind of been moving around
each other for a while. Then, when he organized the show Alien Seasons in 2003 at
the Muse dArt Moderne in Pariswhere he
was a curator at the timewe started working
together and talking nearly every day.
I think hes one of the only great curators
todayor the last one. The joy for me is that
with Hans Ulrich the conversation never stops
when a project is finished. Normally, people

169

move on to something else. Hans Ulrich never

does that. For him, its never complete. Hes a
true believer in art, and when you believe in art,
you have to keep doing and redoing. Things
have to be reinvented. Hans Ulrich knows that.
He has fantastic intuition. In many ways, hes
an inventor.
The show that was a breakthrough for
himand mewas Il Tempo del Postino. It
was one of the most important things Ive ever
done, and it was a true encounter between him
as a curator and me as an artist. Both of us had
been convinced that the only way to measure
art is to do so through time, that there is no

art without the exhibition, and that an object

exists only when its exhibited. An exhibition
is all about the negotiation of an objects presence and its appearance.
One memorable time with Hans Ulrich
was when we went to Ireland. We drove for a
while, and we were talking nonstop. After 10
minutes, he said, Why are they all honking at
us? Its really weird. And we realized we were
driving on the wrong side of the street. That
was a funny thing. As told to S.B.
Philippe Parrenos In Preparation of Marilyn:
Biometric Portrait (2012).

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

During a visit to Milan in February 2001, Hans

Ulrich Obrist met with 20th-century Italian
architect and designer Ettore Sottsass to conduct one of several interviews with the legend,
who passed away in 2007. The following is an
edited version of the previously unpublished
conversation.

Ettore Sottsass

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Id like to begin this

interview with the catalogue of your first
exhibition, held in 46, which you curated
with Bruno Munari.
Ettore Sottsass: I was living in desperate
straits in Milan, quite penniless, and we were
working on so-called abstract or concrete art,
as it used to be called then, with immense
enthusiasm. People just didnt want to know
about it. Actually, I could be described as an
outsider back then. I was a pupil of Luigi
Spazzapan, a gestural painter who worked
in a very graphic style. Just thinkgestural
painting already in 38, 39! Even my own
abstract art was halfway between gesture and
figurative representation. It wasnt unrecognizable as such, but underlying it was a form
of figuration. The abstract art of Munari or
[graphic designer] Max Huber or Max Bill
was by contrast a much more concrete form
of abstraction, much more downright, more
geometrical.
HUO: Lets examine the importance of
fluidity and circulation between separate disciplines.

SURFACE

170

PHOTO: ARMIN LINKE.

Hans Ulrich
Obrist

ES: However you look at it, I feel the task of

the designer or the architect is to design the
artificial environment, from objects to architecture, spaces, and so on. Each design corresponds directly or indirectly to an idea one has
of life, of society, of the relations between the
individual and society. It corresponds to the
form of the weltanschauung [or worldview];
it remains the basic cultural background. And
this happens in whatever you do. Whether I
design a vase or design architecture, there is
always this background, this basic cultural
background. The difference, then, is only
technical. Its clear that if Im designing architecture, I need to know things that are not
the same as what I have to know to design a
glass vase, and to design a glass vase you need
to know things that are not the same as what
you need to take a photograph. But apart
from these technical differenceswhich are
certainly important because they have an effect
on what I can design and conditionthere still
remains, deep down, what I think of life, why
I do things, what I imagine happens when I
design something. So I dont see the point of
any clear-cut distinction between disciplines.
Take the Renaissance. It was hardly an accident that the Renaissance was a period when
many artists imagined, above all, a new kind of
life. They imagined a new society, a new vision
of the world, a new, say, interpretation of the
potential of life. They didnt make a major distinction between Brunelleschis dome and the
design of, say, some other work of architecture.

171

They tackled the technical differences that

might influence the way they used these different vocabularies, but nothing more.
HUO: Whenever your writings are
published, there are always lots of questions, discussions that cause upheavals
in artistic circles. And this happens not
just here in Italy but also abroad among
younger architects, with debates over
what you assert fearlessly. Your position
is immensely relevant because you speak
rather critically about the world of highly
specialized architecture. You have defined
a much more transversal approach in
practice, and for this very reason, perhaps,
you also interest young architects today.
ES: The important thing is to think about
whats happening. For example, I come from
the mountains. I was born in Innsbruck,
Austria. I spent my childhood surrounded by
woods, mountains, high crags. I have a sense
of weight thats quite different from Norman
Fosters, though I have no idea where he was
bornat any rate, he has an idea of weight
quite different from mine. Weight riles him,
but it comforts me. If a thing is heavy, I feel
laid back about it. If its flying through the air,
then I start to worry. So there are these different strands in our visions of the planet, of the
cosmos, and the feeling we have, right from
the start, about these things.
HUO: I find nowadays that its really
interesting to try to grasp our relationship to certain developments in science.
Its interesting that scientific progress
began a big debate about uncertainty.
ES: About unreality. >

Ettore Sottsass (left) and Hans Ulrich

Obrist in Milan in 1999. (Editors
note: The taking of this image and the
interview on these pages occurred at
different times.)

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

HUO: They talk about uncertainty. This

is the doubt.
ES: Its a doubt thats developed in my own
mind. But I think Im not the only one to
feel this. I believe its valid for scientists, too.
A few years ago, I began to have some sense
of the scale of the cosmos. I told myself our
planet is in the solar system, which belongs to a
galaxy, and in this galaxy there are hundreds of
thousands, perhaps millions, of solar systems,
and there are several billion galaxies. Well, at
this point I said to myself: I cant understand
what all this means. Even the fact that we could
see the earth from the moon or from the sky
stunned me. It confirmed the fact that this
planet is a paltry orb spinning in a void. From
one minute to the next it could blow up or
collide with something, or just die slowly of
cold, or whatever. I feel that in olden times
the whole effort consisted in trying to reach
some point, to identify reality; today, its just
the opposite. Today, we cant get a grasp on
anything. Existence is fragmentary, because
we no longer accept the logic that we hoped
would tie up everything. Even that great scientist strapped to a wheelchair, Hawking, said
this: If we could find a formula that holds
together the universe, Id know what to think
of God. The fact remains that this formula
cant be found! It doesnt exist!
At any rate, the same problem exists in
everyday life. When I read a newspaper, for
example, I cant grasp the dimensions of whats
happening between here and, say, the Middle
East, between here and New York.
HUO: As for science, I asked myself a lot
of questions quite recently, after reading
a book by a famous cyber expert who
worked in the 50s for Olivetti. You, too,
since the 50s have worked in that field,
and I wondered if you had any contact
with scientists.
ES: No, but when I worked at Olivetti on electronics, it was back in 1959 or 1960.
HUO: When you were working on that
first big computer [the Elea 9003]?
ES: Yes, a huge computer. It was in Pisa; I
arrived by train. Then I had to get a horsedrawn carriage, because there were no taxis,
and it took me to the outskirts of Pisa, where
there was a 19th-century villa surrounded by
a garden. Inside there were all these whitecoated engineers walking among miles and
miles of cables snaking across the floor. Even
electronics in those days was a bomb of uncertainty. It still worked with valves, valves of
colossal dimensions. Now, not so many years
later, we all have nice little packets of electronics in our pockets.
HUO: You were one of the first to speak
about a planetary and global influence. Many of your writings were very
advanced in this respect; their topicality seems very significant. There is a

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

presentiment even in the use you make of

the terms planetary or global that is
really worth exploring, given the dimensions they have achieved today. On the
one hand, all your work is research into
archetypes, or rather into global elements,
while on the other, you also studyyou
explorethe local in great depth. This
presents us with a paradox, a fertile contradiction, dont you feel?
ES: I feel very deeplyeven if one is an atheist, even if he doesnt seek the truththat
we are all compelled, conditioned, to act out
a comedy. Were doing it here, too, at this
moment. You ring me, you arrive, we do these
things. At this moment, the comedy is reduced
to these actors: you, me, and our photographer friend. You know theres this humdrum
routine, and theres also this, say, humanity.
What would be interesting, or at least Id find
it interesting, would be to understand, or try to
understand, what the essence of this humanity
is. Not its relationship with the cosmos, but its
inner essence. Why we are men, what we are
doing as men, what responsibilities we have
as individuals with respect to society, and so
forth. I find this is the most fascinating part of
thinking at the current time. Heidegger already
had this fixation with trying to understand the
human essence. Why do we think? Why do
we have these relationships? How far can we
develop this line of argument, this comedy?
How can we control this comedy or at least
know something about it? If you did an exhibition in a kitchen, for example, that would
interest me greatly. To me, its like saying:
Okay, weve got to eat, we talk about eating,
and we feel were intellectuals in this place, a
place where you eat.
HUO: About your research into kitchensI read a really interesting article
dating from 92. When did you start
working on this topic?
ES: I cant really say. I think some time in the
60s.
HUO: There are a lot of photos you took
of kitchens.
ES: Yes, there are a lot, partly because first I
was married to a lady by the name of Fernanda
Pivano, a writer well known in Italy for
translating and writing about contemporary
American literature, and she couldnt even
make a cup of tea. For reasons I wont go into
now, we split up, and I met another young
lady, Barbara Radice, and she has a lot to say
about cookinghow its done. She talks a lot
about it, not fervently, but almost as if it were
a sacred ritual. For example, the other day she
asked the chef at the Torre di Pisa how many
minutes a certain kind of pasta had to cook.
The chef, a woman, said, Minutes? I just look
at the pasta. Meaning she didnt need mathematics, or to measure time, but a visual, sensuous contact with the pasta to know if it was
cooked or not. She needed years of experience.

SURFACE

172

HUO: I read your texts on kitchens

by chance, as well as your other books,
during a period not far from when I first
began to take an interest in the work of
Italo Calvino. I often wondered whether
or not there was a connection between
you two.
ES: No, I knew him, but only casually. We
never went beyond wishing each other good
evening, and we never worked together. But
as for what youre saying, in 56 I went to
America for the first time, and I met George
Nelson. We EuropeansI dont know if
we can say we Europeansbut we who
belong to these cultures on this side of the
Atlantic, we have death in our pockets. We
can never forget this destiny. When I used to
talk with George about death, he said, We
Americans never talk about death. Theres an
architect from San Diego whos been working
with me for years, Johanna Grawunder, and
whenever she sees something even indirectly
connected with death, she says, Thats very
strong. Why is this? By contrast, in India, I
found it very consoling. When you look out
the hotel window every half-hour, you see a
corpse being carried off, wrapped in a shroud
and strewn with flowers. This ability to relate
to this inexplicable phenomenon is consoling.
HUO: So you think the architect ought
to make these things visible in his work?
Or other things that are more important
to you?
ES: Its no use asking me this because by
now I think theres nothing to be done. This
is because we now live in an industrial culture. We invented the machine a few centuries back, and I feel the machine fulfills its
own destiny just as bronze, say, meant a new
way of waging war, of killing. The fact that
a lot of products can be mass-produced with
machinery, resulting in masses of products,
inevitably means that we have to sell these
products; we have to give them to someone,
and selling them inevitably entails all the possible forms of persuasion so people will buy
them. The upshot is that we think less and
less because were increasingly conditioned.
For all these reasons we can no longer say,
I wish the world was like this or like that.
The point, if there is one, is to find a way to
navigate our way through this destiny.
HUO: How do you think we can reverse
this process?
ES: I dont see a way. Anyway, Im not someone who wants to change the world.
HUO: How do you view the city? Say,
Milan, or the city in general, the planning issues involved?
ES: The city is jam-packed with cars. In
Milan, you can hardly move, and we all keep
saying: Hell! Its full of cars, how can we
keep going in a city like this? But as long as

173

Fiat or Mercedes keep on turning out 2,000

automobiles a day, theyve got to go somewhere! And if we tell Fiat to quit making cars,
therell be thousands of people out of work. I
feel this kind of impossibility, this thing I call
destiny, something inevitable.
HUO: Its also interesting to see whats
happening in Asia. There are a lot of
Westerners, planners, who tell the politicians, Youve got to prevent the kind of
problems we already have from taking
root here.
ES: Thats inevitable. It would be like telling someone who lives by the sea not to go
out in a boat, not to go fishing, or someone
who falls in the water and cant swim not to
drown. True, theres a life jacket, but thats
not the solution. Thats why we increasingly
talk about humdrum, everyday things, about
private peace and quiet.
HUO: About a micro-utopia.
ES: Yes, I think so. Andrea Branzi sent me a
text where he says that we can only work on
the micro-situations. Thats why I think the
Dalai Lama enjoys a certain success. [Laughs]
Its got nothing to do with it, really, but classical Buddhism, not the institutional kind, had
this idea of working on our micro-existence,
on micro-gestures, micro-events.
HUO: In connection with what youre
saying, theres also a text from 1988
devoted to houses, in which you describe
these micro-entities that appear in every
culture.
ES: Which of my texts was that?
HUO: The one in which you describe
places you visited and the impression
you got of them. Your description, which
is very precise, shows theres always
someone who has developed houses by
adapting to the given conditions, just as
mushrooms adapt to a forest.
ES: Its a situation that becomes clear if you
travel. For instance, in Myanmar you see
houses that clearly correspond to a definite
world. At the same time, the environment
determines the way the house is built. If
theres a stream and the women have to
fetch water, then the house is built near the
stream. I could give plenty of other examples. In mountain areas, the houses are made
of stone; in deserts, of hangings. All of us
carry around our own cultural symbols.
There are peasant houses where they hang
a sheaf of corn over the door for good luck.
Then there are bank buildings that have
massive doors that overawe you, so when
you go and ask them for money, they make
you feel: Watch out! Youre coming in here,
and were going to make mincemeat out of
you! >

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

HUO: How do you see the question of

housing in the city?
ES: As long as humanity goes on growing
at the rate were growing now, the distance
between one person and another is going to
grow bigger, like the distance between one
place and another. So this idea that we can go
from house to house on foot as one did in the
Middle Ages, or the idea of the piazzathey
just get lost. People living in a group of houses
all gathering in a kind of outdoor salon or
piazzathats simply unattainable nowadays.
In Milan, I only ever visit one or two districts,
thats all. All of us living in big cities just really
live in one or two districts.
HUO: But what about the subway system?
ES: True, but if one of the young women who
works in my office says she has to leave home
at 7 a.m. because she has to be here at 8, I
instinctively feel, Poor thing! In New York,
its even worse, because you have a two-hour
train ride every morning and two hours every
evening to get home. You get home and your
house stands in the middle of a garden, but its
no use, because when you get home you have
to hit the whiskey to get over the traveling, and
thats no solution either. We all know about
American and English garden cities, but you
get home so shattered from hours of commuting that you no longer feel the house belongs
to you. You ask me what I think about the
problems of the city, but I dont know what to
answer. Ive often asked myself how I would
conceive a big city. We worked on a master
plan in Korea, a project for the layout of an
urban area around Seouls big international
airport, one of the biggest in Asia. Theres a
lot of competition in airports, between Japan,
Korea, China.
HUO: Because theyll soon be having the
World Cup.
ES: Perhaps, but at present theres also competition for business. To build this airport
[in Korea], they filled in the sea between two
islands. For 10 years theyd been unloading
soil between one island and another, and
they asked us to put forward some ideas for
a master plan. The project grew out of this.
We asked ourselves: What should we do in
a place like this? The only thing we could
think of was to lay out some big express roads
running through the center of the city and
some other minor roadsfirst semi-private
and then privatethat became increasingly
convenient for people to use, easier for children, for women. We laid out big pedestrian
precincts linked by express roads. This is not
such an unusual concept after all; it was one of
Le Corbusiers ideas. We also thoughtbut I
guess this was an ideological utopiawe could
create a city without ghettos, to avoid having a
working-class zone, a middle-class zone, and a
zone for the rich. We thought that these different zones should overlap. But I repeat: I dont
know whether this can really be achieved.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

Anyway, we proposed a form of zoning to prevent what happened in Beverly Hills, where
there are big chic areas with peaceful streets
and then huge tenement blocks in the outer
city. I feel we have to think a bit more carefully
about these situations. In short, planning is a
makeshift science!

HUO: Can we go back to the question

I asked you earlier, about your interest
in other disciplines, the interdisciplinary
approach so obvious in your work? One
thing that comes out in your texts is the
experienceor rather, the attemptto
found the Global Tools design school.

HUO: In a text of yours I read, you

describe an imaginary journey through
your drawings, and you speak of an
archive. Id really like to see this place. The
text also speaks of a cupboard as a mysterious, scented place.

ES: Its not that I founded it. I was part of the

Archizoom Group with Andrea Branzi, plus
some other people, especially some young
Florentines. In Florence in the late 60s and
early 70s, there were some very aggressive
groups that came from the political protests
of 68, and we were all beginning to question
our role. We asked ourselves about the professional position of designers in relation to
industry. It was a period when I was hardly
working any more. I no longer worked as a
designer. I only worked for Olivetti because it
was a rather special company. But it was there
that I first refused to see myself as an industrial
designer in the classic sense of the word.

ES: Yes, I once wrote about this cupboard

where I keep all the paints, the papers, my
instruments for drawing, and whenever its
opened, it gives off a wonderful perfume.
HUO: What about the archive?
ES: Some time ago I published a book of
photos with an English publisher, Thames
& Hudson, titled The Curious Mr. Sottsass.
Theres also an edition in French. For the
occasion of its release, about five years ago,
I began to organize my photo archive better.
Ive almost finished.
HUO: Whats the importance behind this
concept of traveling?
ES: Well, curiosity. Theres an almost paranoid form of curiosity to see whats on the
other side of the fence and also the urge to
see if some things are confirmed or not confirmed by it. But actually I believe you travel
to confirm your ideas, and whatever you cant
confirm you discard as you travel. In a certain
sense, you redesign yourself when youre traveling. But then there was a moment when I felt
the need to get away from Italian provincialism, even European provincialism.
HUO: During these trips, did you meet
any artists and intellectuals?
ES: Sometimes I did, sometimes not. I went to
Japan a number of times and always met architects. On one of my trips to India, I stayed
with [painter] Francesco Clemente at his place
for a month, and I learned a lot there: for
instance, this idea of accepting the corruption
of things, the destruction of things, as destiny.
I learned that in India, because the people there
dont care in the least if things wear out. They
have a much more tenuous idea of life. Life
wears out, you grow old and wear out, marble
wears out, roads change and this is a concept
Western culture tries to avoid. We repaint the
house, we keep things repairedeverything
has to look new all the time, everything has
to be under control. That kind of suppleness
the Indians have, the fact that problems of this
kind dont exist for them, strikes me as wonderful. All this is very obvious in Francesco,
who is not just a painter but a thinker. At any
rate he paints amid this permanent uncertainty,
awaiting this destruction.

SURFACE

174

HUO: Meaning opposition.

ES: Yes. In this context, we founded Global
Tools, which lasted just a few months because
the more extremist youngsters tried to destroy
any intellectual operation. It was the period
of the Cultural Revolution in China, and they
were dismissive of everything. This experience of ours didnt last long. The idea was to
retrieve elements that had disappeared from
design or had never been part of it.
HUO: Did you try to redesign some social
aspects of the design profession?
ES: In a sense, yes. We hoped to have a gallery
we could use to hold exhibitions, to present
our work together, without too many constraints. In the end, we found a gallery, but the
gallery owner happened to be a big steelmaker,
so those extremists objected, We cant work
in this gallery because well be conned by the
steelmaking capitalist.
HUO: In Global Tools, there always
appeared this sense of resistance to priorities, to the exaggerated importance of
the visual sense in our culture.
ES: More than the visual sense, it was resistance to the priority and the predominance
of the intellect over the senses. The whole
of Functionalism, as the word itself shows,
was a hope that the intellect would succeed
in controlling design all the way through.
Insteadand this was the noveltywe found
confirmation of our ideas in India and many
other places. What I think is that, first of all, we
read the world sensuously. We also catalogue it
and intellectualize it, but the source of everything remains the senses. To a Functionalist,
the surface of this table is a geometrical square;
to me, its a piece of plastic, warm or cold.
HUO: So Global Tools was also a revolt
against Functionalism?

175

ES: Not against it. We tried to go beyond it. We

were never against anyone. I come from the
Functionalist schoolGropius, Le Corbusier.
When I was young, they were my myths, and
Ive never forgotten them, Ive never despised
them. But Ive always thought all this wasnt
enough, that we could go much further. To
those generations, the word functional
meant ergonomics more than anything else:
the relation between the human body and
physical space, a relationship based on measurement. But to me, functionality often
involves issues that cant be measured.
HUO: Having begun with a question
about your first exhibition, Id like to
finish with a question about exhibitions
and museums. The point you mentioned
is fairly traumatic: the overriding need
to bring back all the senses to museums,
because they are totally excluded.
ES: Yes. I think, for instance, that a museum
of design is out of the question. It just cant be
done. An object has a value because we can
touch it and use it. Even a museum of architecture is almost out of the question in terms
of my idea of architecture. Architecture is a
space where you can walk: You pass through it,
you touch it, you see the light. I really believe
a museum of applied design done like the few
Ive seen is pointless. They generally take a
razor and put it on a pedestal. But a razor isnt
a sculpture, its a razor. Even a chair is a chair,
and you have to sit on it. So theres a big difficulty in doing a design museum.
The same is true with a contemporary art
museum. Conceptual art comes out strangely
in a museum. You go there and see a white
room with a line and you say, Heck, is that
meant to be strange? At times, I think museums ought to be enormous, underground,
gigantic archives, with the part the public
visits just putting on temporary exhibitions
that closely reflect what is happening outside,
historical changes, etc.
HUO: So, underground, thered be an
infinite archive, and above, changing
appearances?
ES: Each person would visit the museum
a number of times because every exhibition would be different. I dont think theres
much interest in museums conceived the way
they are now, as museums of institutional
representation.