Ways of Curating

by Hans Ulrich Obrist

  As they told me in relation to the piece:

  We always think that waking is one of the most important moments of a person’s life. It is the beginning of a new day. You know, Welsh people call the early morning ‘morning wood’, because every male wakes up with a hard-on. And all sex advisers always say if you have a problem with erection, then do it in the morning. It’s a moment of purity, the time when everyone has their first idea of the day. When a young artist asks, ‘What would you advise us?’ we always say, ‘When you wake up in the morning, sit on the edge of the bed, don’t open your eyes, sit on the edge of the bed and think, “What do I want to say to the world today?”’ Because they are normally students, I suppose we also tell them, ‘Fuck the teachers.’ But, really, it doesn’t matter whether you have a computer, a brush or a pencil, just decide what you want to do and you’ll be fine. Waking in the morning is like staring into the abyss, looking into the universe.

  On my first trip to their house Gilbert and George taught me about the beautiful plaques that mark the homes of Londoners of the past. Later in my trip, I found one of the blue plaques at 33 Thurloe Square, near the Victoria and Albert Museum, marking the house of the museum’s creator, Henry Cole. By chance, I had seen it on my first trip to the city. It turns out he was a fascinating character and a true pioneer of exhibition-makers. Cole created not only the V&A but many of the landmark cultural institutions that populate South Kensington.

  A founder of museums, he was also the head of a department of the civil service, a designer of ceramics, a social reformer, the creator of a system of art schools, and the driving force behind a number of international exhibitions, most famously the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, which was held in the newly erected Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. Cole was a giant amongst nineteenth-century British administrators, and one of the first to demonstrate what could be accomplished at the level of institution-making. Like other great achievers of his century, his accomplishments are dazzling in their variety.

  Born in 1808, Cole was educated at Christ’s Hospital, one of the best private schools in Sussex, and the only one that offered poor boys such as him scholarships. He described the meagre meals and harsh punishments he received there in the notes to his autobiography, recounting episodes such as being beaten severely for refusing to return to a lesson in which he had already demonstrated proficiency by reciting Ovid’s Metamorphoses. These early disobediences only marked out more clearly the strength of will that was to define his professional life for many years to come. Cole did not feel he learned much of use at Christ’s Hospital, but the excellent penmanship he developed there got him his first job as a copying clerk. From an early age he had been part of a circle centred on John Stuart Mill, the great Utilitarian philosopher and advocate of rationalism in government. Cole worked in the public record service for years, transcribing parliamentary records and writing reports. At the same time, he wrote essays and articles in favour of social reform, and reviews of art, music and drama in newspapers.

  In the 1840s, when railways were shrinking the distances between cities, Cole also wrote for and edited the Railway Chronicle, one of the first periodicals to explore this radical change in the experience of space and time. Writing soon led him into the arts. Cole drew and played music from a young age, and as soon as he was able, he visited art galleries. He began to write art criticism and then guidebooks to architecturally and artistically significant sights, such as Hampton Court Palace, under the pen-name ‘Felix Summerly’ (public servants were barred from publishing under their own names). Cole followed these with a series of children’s books under the same name.9

  In nineteenth-century Britain, much of what we recognize as the modern world was coming into being. For the first time, industrially produced objects were available, and bodies like the Society of Arts were formed to promote the new possibilities for art and design. Cole became deeply involved in shaping these opportunities from many angles at once. He was an exhibition-maker, a writer, a designer, a bureaucrat and an advocate of design and patent law reform, and he started a monthly magazine in which to address all of these issues, the Journal of Design and Manufactures. He became the driving force in the Society and organized large exhibitions of new manufacturing processes. It was an era of rapid advances in design, technology and copyright practices, and exhibitions were the primary vehicle for information about these developments to circulate. All of Cole’s activities and interests coalesced in exhibition-making, and the work that made him a famous Victorian figure was organizing the Great Exhibition of 1851.

  As the full title, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, indicates, Cole’s ambitions were global. With his patron, Prince Albert, he had conceived of the exhibition as the first great international festival. Cole aspired to bring to Hyde Park nothing less than examples of the highest developments in manufacturing from around the world: spices, foods, minerals, machinery, engines, looms, bronze sculpture and plastic art. As he said in a speech announcing the event: ‘In short, London will act the part of host to all the world of an intellectual festival of peaceful industry, suggested by the Consort of our beloved Queen and seconded by yourselves – a festival, such as the world has never seen before.’ Half the space that visitors came to see was devoted to British works. In the other half, Cole allocated space to various countries in proportion to their amount of trade with Britain – so the exhibition produced a picture of the world that was also a picture of Britain’s relationships with the world.

  Cole’s vision was a modern and democratic one, welcoming all classes of people. He incorporated music, opening and closing the exhibition with a recital of Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’. Cole, always an optimistic reformer, believed the exhibition would foster greater cooperation between nations – these were the early glimmerings of a cosmopolitan understanding of the world. Reflecting another modern element, the exhibition budget came not only from a government subsidy but had to be raised privately, and Cole spent two years fund-raising. The building that was erected at great speed to house the exhibition was also a spectacular example of modern technology: an iron and glass design by James Paxton, 1,848 feet long and covering 19 acres, that came to be known as the Crystal Palace. The railways were persuaded to offer discounted fares to visitors, allowing thousands to visit the exhibition and giving an early boost to railway ridership. The Crystal Palace became an icon for the age of Victorian optimism, and a testament to the power of a new cultural format: the large-scale public exhibition.

  From their roots in the medieval processions of the guilds to today’s Biennales, roving exhibitions in temporary spaces have always played a significant part in the history of the format. In the nineteenth century, with the coming of industrialization and increasing global trade, exhibitions became a way to gather and display the multiplicity of produced objects and the developing techniques for manufacturing them.

  Cole’s career flourished at a time when modern democratic institutions and technological advances made exhibitions a crucial form of exchange and display. He went on to develop the entire South Kensington area as a district of museums, schools and societies, and became the first director of the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert Museum. In all of these endeavours he displayed prodigious quantities of energy and dynamism. In none of them did he work alone: his genius was for navigating amongst allies and opponents to achieve his goals within large collaborations. Cole played his unheralded role, that of the civil servant administrator, so skilfully and effectively that by the end of his life he was something of a national treasure, known as ‘Old King Cole’, after the children’s nursery rhyme.

  Architecture, Urbanism and Exhibitions

  From Henry Cole I learned that curating can be urbanism, that it can be about the mutations of changing cities. This understanding coalesced further when I was working with Kasper König in Frankfurt, where I began attending lectures at the Städelschule, an art school with a small,
embedded architecture department. These lectures whetted my appetite for the subject, which had cross-pollinated with art throughout the twentieth century. But I received an even bigger boost on a trip to New York, where I met the artist Dan Graham, who has a truly encyclopedic knowledge of architecture and whose pavilions are a form of art and architecture mixed. Graham gave me a blizzard of suggestions for books by architects I had to read, starting from Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas (1972). Graham also told me about mid-century Japanese architects who were completely new to me, and the connection to Asia was one I followed up on in the years to come.

  My first project that involved architecture and urbanism came about through a collaboration with the curator Hou Hanru. We curated an exhibition about art, urbanism and the Asian mega-city, which we ended up calling Cities on the Move. Hou and I had spoken very early on about Magiciens de la Terre, the groundbreaking 1989 exhibition curated by Jean-Hubert Martin – we had discussed what it meant that Western curators curate such shows and how interesting it would be if there was a meaningful back-and-forth between a Western and an Eastern curator. That’s when Hou Hanru and I decided to do an Asian show together.

  We felt there was an explosion of creativity and new forms in Asian cities in the 1990s. Rather than formulate a theory about this from afar, we began to visit various cities and ask questions, letting artists and architects guide us to what they considered to be urgent. This was a similar process to that behind Harald Szeemann’s influential 1969 show When Attitudes Become Form, which came about when Szeemann visited Jan Dibbets in New York, who told him about emerging artists all over Europe and the USA, which in turn led him … exhibition-making is an organic process.10

  In the early summer of 1995, while researching Cities on the Move, Hou Hanru and I attempted to pay a visit to Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam. He was too busy to see us there, and was bound for Hong Kong the next day to continue his research on the Pearl River Delta. ‘Guys, we should talk about Asia in Asia, not in Rotterdam. See you tomorrow in Hong Kong!’ was his parting message for us. Hou and I took this message quite literally and bought plane tickets to Hong Kong immediately.

  The next evening we had dinner with Rem. That was really the key moment when Cities on the Move was born, because we discussed how it would be much more interesting to do an exhibition on cities rather than just on Asian art. Very often nations are imaginary constructs, as Benedict Anderson has said. Regions and continents are even more so, and it’s very important to acknowledge that we’re living in a transnational moment. It seemed important to go beyond national boundaries and focus instead on cities – because the driving force of the 1990s was really these urban mutations.

  The initial encounter with Rem Koolhaas in the run-up to Cities on the Move also stimulated my own professional involvement with urbanism in Asia, as well as my interest in the idea of the city as process, stemming from Rem’s own engagement with the rapid mutation of the urban fabric in the sprawling mega-city region around Hong Kong. Koolhaas encouraged us to track down and interview a number of architects in various important cities. We took his advice and travelled to Kuala Lumpur, Seoul and Djakarta, as well as to Singapore, where we met and interviewed the architect Tay Kheng Soon, whose research on the sustainability of mega-cities led to his vision of bamboo cities.

  Koolhaas communicated his own abiding interest in the Asian avant-garde architectural movement known as Metabolism. Accordingly, we travelled to Tokyo, where we met some of the protagonists of Metabolism for the first time: Maki, Kurokawa and Kikutake, as well as Isozaki. Eventually, Koolhaas and I would attempt to create a book based on an oral history of the movement, and together we recorded conversations with Kawazoe, Otaka, Asada and Awazu, along with other architects and thinkers linked to, and descending from, the Metabolists. The conversation with Koolhaas has continued ever since.

  While I was researching Cities on the Move, the artists Rita Donagh and Richard Hamilton, with whom I often discussed architecture and exhibitions, said it would not be possible to do a show about the mutations of cities without talking first with Cedric Price. They rang him, saying we were all very keen to hear what he had to say, and we met very soon after – that was the beginning of many years of ongoing conversations, sometimes weekly, sometimes twice a month. It demonstrated that simply introducing two people who one thinks should know each other can have a major effect on future artistic practice, whether through the impact they can have on each other’s work or through entirely new collaborations. It’s another form of curatorial practice, and I have continued it ever since.

  Price participated in Cities on the Move, and we talked often about the concept of the exhibition as a learning system with a potentially complex and dynamic series of feedback loops that can be brought into other contexts, and that eventually can have an impact in political circles. Cedric developed most of these ideas in the 1960s, at a time when cybernetic thinking was very much on people’s minds. This particular intellectual influence can be discerned in many of his projects and statements, for instance the idea that algorithms and computer programmes would facilitate architectural design – something we take for granted nowadays.

  From the time he opened his own practice in London in 1960, Cedric Price has been one of architecture’s most influential figures. Although very few of his structures were actually built, his visionary ideas and proposals for urban development have made a huge impact, and his influence on architecture today is immeasurable. Nowadays I often give lectures in architecture schools, and I find it extraordinary how his influence has actually grown even more over the last couple of years. Many architects have attested that Price was their greatest influence. And not only in Europe: he is also an immense influence on architects in Asia. One of the major themes, other than time and movement, that is central to Cedric’s thinking and his whole work is his opposition to permanence and his discussion of change. His ideas continually push against the physical limits of architectural space and the trajectories of time.

  Price’s conviction that buildings should be flexible enough to allow their use to serve the needs of the moment reflects his belief that time – alongside breadth, depth and height – is the fourth dimension. He was resolutely opposed to a top-down vision of architecture’s place in society, as a way of prescribing people’s way of living and of dictating change. In a very revealing statement, Cedric once said to me: ‘At the beginning of the twenty-first century, dialogue might be the only excuse for architecture. What do we have architecture for? It’s a way of imposing order or establishing a belief and that is the cause of religion to some extent. Architecture doesn’t need those rules anymore, it doesn’t need mental imperialism, it’s too slow, it’s too heavy and anyhow I as an architect don’t want to be involved in creating law and order through fear and misery.’

  Cybernetic thinking played a crucial role in the development of Price’s own architectural thinking, especially with respect to ideas such as transience, evolution, change, chance – what the computer theorist Peter Lunenfeld calls ‘the unfinished’, that is, incompleteness. At a group show I curated with Margaret Richardson at Sir John Soane’s Museum, Price developed badges for all the guards. He asked me to interview all of them and write down their stories. I brought him the stories and he then made drawings of them, which were worn by the guards as badges.

  We also collaborated on a portable museum, called the Nano Museum, in the mid-1990s. Hans-Peter Feldmann (in this case a sort of readymade architect) had found a two-part picture frame, about two by three inches, which became the museum’s structure. Cedric then created the museum’s first show by folding a paper cup into the confines of the frame. This frame then became a minuscule museum on the move, not unlike Fénéon’s mobile Seurat show, which I carried around with me wherever I went for several months, showing Cedric’s exhibition to almost everyone I encountered. At two by three inches it was perhaps the ultimate example of spatial extremes in my curati
ng trajectory. It also came to symbolize the idea that museums might one day disappear from our lives: the next artist to exhibit in my Nano Museum was Douglas Gordon, who after receiving the empty picture frame in which he was supposed to develop his show, tragically lost it in a bar in Glasgow.

  Biennials

  Biennials have become a global phenomenon. Over the last two decades the Venice Biennale (first held in 1895), New York’s Whitney Biennial (begun in 1932) and the São Paulo Biennial (founded in 1951) have been joined more recently by important biennials on all continents. The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a multiplicity of art centres on all continents. Since the 1990s, biennials have contributed considerably to this new cartography of art.

  Critic and curator Lawrence Alloway described the Venice Biennale of 1968 as ‘an orgy of contact and communication’; this gives a good sense of how important these events had already become to the formation of collaborative ties that lead to new artistic projects. Alloway also pointed out that the Venice Biennale was a kind of goal for all exhibitions to aspire to, which has allowed the exhibition to be seen as a stand-alone structure – itself something of an artwork.

  We are living through a period in which the centre of gravity is transferring to new worlds. Opposing what he called the ‘irreversible’ aspects of globalization (uniformity, homogeneity), the philosopher Étienne Balibar once explained to me the need for artists and exhibitions to become nomadic, physically and mentally travelling across borders. He described how going beyond national boundaries would allow languages and cultures to spill out in all directions, to broaden the horizon of translating capacities. In this way, Balibar said, ‘Exhibitions would be borderlines themselves.’

  An example of this principle occurred in 2002 at Documenta, the exhibition in Kassel, Germany, that is held every five years. The 2002 edition was curated by Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash and Octavio Zaya, under the artistic direction of critic, poet and curator Okwui Enwezor. Instead of trying to make a standard exhibition on one site, they created a series of five symposia, called ‘platforms’, around the world. The exhibition itself was conceived as the fifth of these platforms, rather than the primary event, stressing that contemporary art should be understood through an ‘off-centre principle’. Rather than standing at the centre of these creative platforms, the viewer of Enwezor’s Documenta was made aware there were other activities going on elsewhere, and therefore a comprehensive view was not possible. Enwezor’s goal, as he put it, was to achieve ‘provincial modernity’ – in the spirit of Édouard Glissant’s idea of a ‘poetics of relation’.