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by Cloe Floirat
At the age of 23, Hans Ulrich Obrist curated his first exhibition in his kitchen;
it included the work of artists including Christian Boltanski and Richard
Wentworth. He is now Co-Director, Exhibitions and Programmes, and
Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Since
the early 1990s, Obrist has mounted 150-plus exhibitions around the world,
hosted The Brutally Early Club (a breakfast salon before the sun has risen),
written catalogue essays and published numerous books. Obrist is the author
of The Interview Project, an extensive ongoing anthology of more than 2,000
hours of interviews with artists, architects, scientists, writers and engineers.
Cloe Floirat: I am interested in the form and the concept of the
interview itself, rather than an isolated interview about an artist, a
designer or an architects work. What is its role when it transcends
the traditional answer and question structure? A form of art
criticism? May it become an art form?
HUO: This is a very important question. Obviously interviews played an
important role in art history, at least since Vasari. Vasari was a great influence
for me, because I was always thinking: what will we know about the art of our
time if we look back in some century? Warhol too was an influence, because to
record everything at a certain moment is like creating a time capsule. I would
say the third historic influence on me was David Sylvester. He did this
wonderful book of interviews with Francis Bacon, which is one of my favourite
interviews book ever. You have a very rare in-depth situation because
Sylvester has interviewed Bacon again and again, and all over again,
throughout his life. The other influential character was Jonas Mekas. I think
without Jonas Mekas I would not have started to film my interviews.
CF: Did you initiate your first questions with the plan of making a
collection of interviews? Was The Interview Project premeditated?
HUO: I have always done this as a curator; I talk to artists. Little by little the
interviews were published and now there are artists holding seminars about
The Interview Project. It was not premeditated, there was never a strategy
behind it at all, it was never a conscious idea of now I want to write the
history of my time! That sort of grand gesture was not there. For me, it was to
be in the middle of things and in the centre of nothing. There was no master
plan and still there is not. It is more that, all of a sudden, there is an occasion
or a desire to interview someone; little by little there a system develops. But
the system comes a posteriori, not a priori.
CF: What does that system look like?
HUO: If this is the art world, [draws a square in the centre of white page, and
illustrates artists with dots inside that art-world square], I have interviewed
many great protagonists. First the artists I met when I was a student,
Alighiero Boetti I did not record these first conversations sadly. Everything
between 1986 and 1991, the first five years are lost. From 1991, I started to
record. Because I was a curator, I also wanted to know where curating comes
from, so I started more systematically to interview curators, like Pontus
Hultn. But if you want to understand the forces in art you need to understand
what is happening in other fields. From art I went into science; from art I went
into music; from art I went into literature; from art I went into architecture.
And gradually it is like a concentric circle, it goes from the art world to all
these other worlds, and then, from there, it goes into the multitude.
CF: In the first volume of your Interviews, what is the reason of
listing the interviews in an alphabetic order? Not chronological? Is
my life. I really did think artists were the most important people on the planet,
and I wanted to be helpful and useful for artists. He said I could get all of
these unrealized projects and try to make them happen, to produce them as
realities. And so the irony is that I have been gathering thousand of unrealized
projects, but whenever I want to do my big exhibition on unrealized projects it
fails. So my unrealized project is to do a big exhibition on unrealized projects.
And maybe even more to build a palace of unrealized project.
CF: Today is it still you chasing artists for interviews, or is your
prey lying in wait to be captured in their interview by Hans Ulrich
Obrist? To be part of his oral history?
HUO: Very often the desire has to come from me in the first place. Because it
is my way of questioning the world so it has to come from my desire to
understand the world. As much as it is a personal system within which it is
about this desire, there is also a certain degree of objectivity and also
collectively. The Interview Project now is a more collective project, it is more
known that it used to be. People know that I have done many interviews so
they say: have you ever interviewed this great 80-year-old composer? Or this
wonderful scientist? It could be nice to add it to your project. It is very
generous, and very wonderful that is has become a feedback loop. And the
Marathon obviously is a very new form of producing interviews. Each time it
produces a micro-archive in itself, and these interviews can then be published
again in magazines. But what is very important, what I said in the beginning,
there is not a master plan. It is very rhizomatic, it is a very Deleuzian thing.
What is also very important is that The Interview Project was always almost
like a broke heaven, its a zero-sum calculation; I never made any money with
it. But the money I make from publishing in magazines, catalogues and books
pays for the editing, the PhD students from different countries that work on
those transcriptions. But what I always did from the beginning and what is
very important is that I can keep the rights with the artist so that later I can
publish it again in any anthologies. There is always the thought about the
archives.
CF: Your interviews are by-products of other events. You use every
occasion to conduct them. In the most unexpected situation, you
always take out your video camera to record any exchange of ideas.
Is it also the case when you are being interviewed? Do you record
and collect those conversations too?
HUO: When I was a student I travelled in night trains and had my grand
tour, and after that I was really prepared. At 23, I did my first kitchen
exhibition; from then everything went pretty fast. I got a grant from Cartier
Fondation in Paris, I was invited to the Museum dArt Modern de Paris to do
Migrateurs, I was invited to work with Kaspar Knig. So between 1992 and
1993 my activity went from this strange obscure Swiss student travelling
around in night trains to see artists, to the most public voice of new curating.
But because it was like this that I had to go out in public, I think The
Interview Project was very important, otherwise one would burn out very
quickly.
CF: I met Markus Miessen two weeks ago in Berlin. He mentioned
The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict project in which you
are involved. How is this project connected to your Interview
Archive project?
HUO: With Markus Miessen I have been discussing how we use the archives