Ways of Curating

by Hans Ulrich Obrist

  The temporary exhibition can also serve as a reciprocal contact zone mediating between museum and city and inventing new exhibition formats. The current multiplication of biennials means that rather than copying the formats of other ones, the challenge is to provide new spaces and new temporalities. It is urgent to generate a situation that is receptive to interesting, more complex spaces, combining the large and the small, the old and the new, acceleration and deceleration, noise and silence. Biennials today need to provide new spaces and new temporalities in order to achieve Glissant’s mondialité: a difference that enhances the global dialogue.

  One great potential of the biennial, or the triennial, is to be a catalyst for different types of creative input in the city: biennials are a form of urbanism. The multiplication of these events is reflected by the multiplication of artistic centres. The competitive quest by museum directors and curators during the twentieth century for the one iconic art centre has been overtaken in the twenty-first century by the emergence of a multiplicity of possible centres, and biennials are making an important contribution to this. They can also form a bridge between the local and the global. By definition, a bridge has two ends, and as the artist Huang Yong Ping points out: ‘Normally we think a person should have only one standpoint, but when you become a bridge you have to have two.’ This bridge is always dangerous, but for Yong Ping the notion of the bridge creates the possibility of opening up something new. By resorting to the notion of chance, one can gain access to enlightenment.

  Often the biennial is a trigger for a dynamic energy field that radiates throughout a city. This works particularly well when all the exhibition spaces and institutions in a city participate in a joint effort to form a critical mass. Biennials and other large-scale exhibitions can also trigger many self-organized side events in a city. One great potential for a biennial is that very often it becomes a spark or catalyst for something else in the local scene.

  Biennials are a continuously articulated struggle between the past, the present and the future. This is a vision of history under constant negotiation. Assessing past biennials is hardly a novel idea. What, then, of the future of the biennial? We should emphasize that visions of the future both evolve over time and proliferate. The future of the biennial, in other words, is both varied and plural.

  Utopia Station

  Biennials are both places and non-places. This contradiction animated a project I executed with the art historian Molly Nesbit and the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, as part of Francesco Bonami’s Venice Biennale of 2003. We called it Utopia Station. Utopia, that venerable subject of philosophical thought, is a much-debated proposition with a mixed reputation. From its earliest incarnation, in Plato’s Republic, through Sir Thomas More’s eponymous book of 1516, it has represented an island of good social order, an ancient search for happiness, freedom and paradise. But by the twentieth century, its status as a topic for contemplation had taken a polemical turn. Theodor Adorno and other materialist thinkers derided it as a conceptual no-place (‘no-place’ being Utopia’s literal meaning), a fantasy of an exotic vacation from insistent, plaguing social problems. It became a desert island of cliché. The contemporary Iranian film-maker Abbas Kiarostami, when asked if he had any unrealized or utopian projects, refused the idea of Utopia altogether, preferring to fix matters in the present, taking one hill at a time. If art is about dreaming up new possibilities, then how could one partially rehabilitate this category? Taking on this question, Nesbit, Tiravanija and I decided to set our sights on the middle ground, or station, between the island and the hill.

  Utopia Station took shape as a conceptual as well as a physical structure, a place and a non-place. It encompassed contributions from about sixty artists and architects, writers and performers, coordinated into a flexible plan by Tiravanija and the artist Liam Gillick. Gillick also put forward a very valuable critique of the concept of Utopia that guided us: ‘The question for us,’ he asked, ‘is do we leave this utopian question to these people to fight over, or do we reclaim it through the use of analytical tools that are more rigorous at identifying the way things work?… why use such a flawed, dysfunctional, accusational tool for an exhibition title?’ His answer was a suggestive non-answer: ‘How could an exhibition like the one in Venice perform tasks of refusal in relation to the utopistic legacy while retaining some reconstituted sense of how things could be. In other words, how could it become a free-floating non-defined sequence of propositions that wander in and out of focus and avoid being lodged within the consumable world of the concept.’

  Gillick and Tiravanija’s plan comprised a long, low platform, part dance floor, part stage, part quay. Along one side of the platform was a row of large circular benches, so visitors could watch the happenings on the platform, turn their back, or treat their circle as a conversational pit. The benches were portable and one could also line them up like a row of big wheels. Along the other side of the platform was a long wall with many doors, some of which opened so visitors could investigate the other side of the wall. Some opened into small rooms containing installations and projections. The wall wrapped around the rooms and bound the ensemble into a long irregular structure. Over it floated a roof suspended on cables from the ceiling of the old warehouse where the Station was located. Outside the warehouse lay a rough garden into which visitors from the Station ‘spilled’.

  The Station itself was filled with objects, part-objects, paintings, images and screens. Visitors could also bathe in the Station, or sleep or daydream or picnic. In other words, the Station became a place to stop, contemplate, listen and see; to rest and refresh, to talk and exchange. Its programme of events multiplied and came to include performances, concerts, lectures, readings, film series and parties. They defined the exhibition as much as its solid objects did. People came and went, some eager to leave, others not sure what to say. These forms of doubt and tension, as pointed out by one of the artists, Carsten Höller, are as meaningful to a utopian project as certainty. The Station, then, produced a series of activities more complex than a mere exhibition, with many ideas and things recycled or put to various uses. It incorporated aesthetic material into another system that does not regard art as inherently separate from the world itself.

  Utopia Station took place first in Venice, the city of islands, but it continued afterwards in other cities. It didn’t require architecture, only a meeting, a gathering. We had several in Paris, in Venice, in Frankfurt, in Poughkeepsie, in Porto Alegre, in Berlin. As such, the Stations could be large or small. We maintained no hierarchy of importance between gatherings, meetings, seminars, exhibitions and books; all of them were and are equally good ways of working. There was no desire to formalize the Stations into institutions of any kind. When we met with the philosopher Jacques Rancière in Paris, he spoke about the difficulties in putting the idea of Utopia forward, because as an idea it had never interested him. What did interest him was dissent, the manner in which ruptures could be concretely created in speech, in perception and in sensibility. We should contemplate, he said, the means by which utopias can be used to produce such ruptures.

  We organized one of our bigger Stations in Poughkeepsie, New York state, where Nesbit teaches at Vassar College. Just as a blizzard was about to blow in, the artist Lawrence Weiner reminded everyone that the artist’s reality is no different from any other reality. Liam Gillick asked that we avoid a utopian mirage, and instead requested that Utopia become a functional step that moves beyond itself. Martha Rosler told the story of arriving to see the space in Venice as night fell, only to discover an interior of darkness. But Utopia, she said, is what moves. The film-maker Jonas Mekas warned us against an obsession with ideas, since dreams, he said, could succeed only if we forget about ideas. Anri Sala showed us a videotape of Tirana, in which the artist Edi Rama – then mayor of Tirana, and now prime minister of Albania – had painted the walls of an apartment block as a geometric vision, a sense of hope embedded – literally – in concrete. Our hero Édouard Gl
issant came. He spoke of the desire for the perfect shape. Only by passing through the inextricable, he told us, can we save our imagination. In that passing through would come what he calls the tremblement, the trembling that is fundamental to our passage.

  The exhibition used Utopia merely as a catalyst to fuel other ideas. Consequently, it left any comprehensive definition of Utopia to others. Our aim was simply to pool our efforts, motivated by a need to change the landscape inside and outside, a need to integrate the work of many artists so that we might be integrated into a larger kind of community, a bigger conversation, another state of being. Each present and future contributor was asked to create a poster for use in the next Station and beyond; wherever it can hang, it can go. In this way Utopia Station evolves images, even if it does not start with one.

  Each person who created a poster was also asked to make a statement of between one and two hundred words. The statements mounted up. Stuart Hall and Zeigam Azizov elaborated on a proposition: the world has to be made to mean. ‘The bittersweet baked into hope,’ wrote Nancy Spero. Raqs Media Collective called Utopia a hearing aid. ‘This probably will not work,’ goes the Cherokee saying cited by Jimmie Durham, who added that the ‘probably’ is what keeps people alive. There were hundreds of statements like these in the end. They were all available to read anywhere via the website e-flux, an artist-run initiative founded by the artist Anton Vidokle, which has become a central information clearinghouse for the art world. Inevitably, certain figures began to be repeated: ships and songs and flags, potatoes, Sisyphus, figures familiar from the history of discussions of Utopia. Utopia Station became an archive of experimentation.

  Ballet Russes

  Utopia Station was an attempt to bring all the disciplines together. It followed in the footsteps of one of the greatest multi-disciplinary impresarios of the twentieth century, Sergei Diaghilev, creator of the Ballets Russes. The King of Spain once enquired of Diaghilev, ‘What is it then that you do in this troupe? You don’t direct, you don’t dance, you don’t play the piano, what is it you do?’ Diaghilev answered, ‘Your Majesty, I am like you. I don’t work, I don’t do anything, but I am indispensable.’ Born to a wealthy Russian family in 1872, Diaghilev was the son of trained musicians. He loved music and singing, though he never reached a level where a professional career was possible. He had an early epiphany in St Petersburg while visiting Leo Tolstoy, the giant of the nineteenth-century Russian novel. Diaghilev became convinced that his future lay in the field of art, and he underwent a lengthy education in many artistic fields of endeavour.

  Diaghilev studied law but became a critic and aesthete, starting a magazine called The World of Art in 1898. After the magazine folded, he began to curate large exhibitions under the same title. His interest lay in comprehensiveness: at the Tauride Palace in St Petersburg, for example, he curated a show of over 4,000 portraits by Russian painters. Much of his activity was based on an overwhelming capacity for socializing and friendship – through curating he rapidly made contact with the luminaries of art, literature and music, and he retained many old friends for life. Out of this ferment Diaghilev was to make a parallel move from curating to the field of dance. Like Félix Fénéon’s, his was a holistic approach to the arts that underwent many shifts over his lifetime. And like Fénéon, he has always been one of my greatest curatorial inspirations.

  Diaghilev took a long time before coming to the ballet, his greatest legacy, where he created an unprecedented sensation in his time. Before this, in 1906 he curated a show of modern Russian art which travelled throughout Europe, and he made his first trip to Paris. He then became fascinated by opera and ballet, seeing them as a modern form of Gesamtkunstwerk. Although ballet had reached a high point in nineteenth-century Russia, it was not yet a celebrated art form. Nevertheless Diaghilev poured his energies into promoting it from 1909, when he founded the Ballets Russes, producing twenty years of ballet performances amidst wars, crises and social turmoil, until his early death in 1929. Often beginning a new season with no money, he was a master of cajoling and cadging investment from every quarter to realize his grandiose ambitions. He introduced the short-format, half-hour ballet, began the practice of commissioning major composers to write original work, and stimulated the art of choreography by demanding innovation.

  Diaghilev turned the commissioning of new works of art into a recognizable form of producing reality, hugely expanding the scope of ballet by inviting the greatest artists, composers, dancers and choreographers of his time to collaborate on the extraordinary ballets his company produced. His visionary productions created a twofold effect. On the one hand, he brought the best international artists to the Russian stage. On the other, he brought the Russian avant-garde to the attention of the larger Western world, both by curating exhibitions of Russian art early in his life and later through the global tours of his ballet company. Most of all, Diaghilev and his ballets were the toast and sensation of fashionable and artistic Paris. His productions had an effect on other artistic movements – for instance, Fauvist painting is often understood to have been influenced by his productions’ use of colour. In his time, he was the most famous theatrical producer alive, and yet Diaghilev’s work exceeds any description that limits his influence to the theatre or dance. As his biographer, Sjeng Scheijen, has written, ‘The labels customarily attached to him – those of impresario and patron – fail to do justice to the powerful influence he exerted on the arts in the early part of the twentieth century. His goal of developing his own variant of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, without ever really producing creative work of his own, makes it difficult to place him or assess the value of his achievements.’

  Diaghilev’s was a completely interdisciplinary form of curating, although it was not recognized at the time by that name. He was, first and foremost, a collector of artistic sensibilities, befriending a young Pablo Picasso and collaborating with Georges Braque and Natalia Goncharova. His mentors and advisers included literary giants such as Oscar Wilde, and he invited Anton Chekhov to edit a literary journal. In music he promoted and worked with Igor Stravinsky – whom he commissioned to write Le Sacre du Printemps – Sergei Prokofiev and Claude Debussy, among many others, and in dance he worked with such towering figures as Nijinsky and George Balanchine. He also commissioned Coco Chanel to make costumes for him.

  For Diaghilev, the artistic world was promiscuous – his work brought together the giants of each contemporary field in order to create unexpected productions. In so doing, he joined many worlds to create a larger one. Perhaps his most characteristic statement of what he sought from these collaborations was his injunction to Jean Cocteau: ‘étonnez-moi!’ (‘dazzle me!’). The toll his exhausting work ethic took on him, however, led to illness and death at the age of only fifty-seven. Diaghilev died in Venice, as the musician Nicholas Nabokov wrote, ‘in a hotel room, a homeless adventurer, an exile, and a prince of the arts’.

  Time and Exhibitions

  On 1 January 2000, I was speaking on the phone with Matthew Barney and he mentioned something interesting: there was, he said, a new hunger amongst artists for live experience. This phone call proved prophetic, and stuck with me: artists ever since have increasingly been experimenting with live situations. Gradually I developed a project around this new hunger with Philippe Parreno. Parreno had explored the notion of time and exhibitions in an essay called ‘Facteur Temps’ (‘Postman Time’). He pointed out that visual art ordinarily does not dictate the time a visitor must stand in front of it. In fact, this is one of the defining characteristics of art in museums and galleries: it allows visitors to have control over their time. They can stand in front of Manet’s Déjeuner sur L’Herbe for ten seconds or two hours, making their own judgements as to how long the painting deserves their attention. Rarely does visual art behave in the way theatre does: by dictating time. However, an exhibition that functioned in this manner would expand the ways in which visual art has historically been understood: a time-bound visual group exhi
bition would be a new experience.

  Over several years of conversation, Parreno and I discussed bringing artists together to do a time-based group show: the rule of the game was that instead of giving each artist space in a museum or gallery, we would give them an allotment of time.11 We assembled a group mostly from the generation of artists who had been thinking about and working on the issue of time: Doug Aitken, Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler, Tacita Dean, Thomas Demand, Trisha Donnelly, Olafur Eliasson, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Koo Jeong-A, Anri Sala, Tino Sehgal and Rirkrit Tiravanija, with Darius Khondji and Peter Saville, and music conducted by Ari Benjamin Meyers.

  Together we conceived of the idea of a visual art opera, in which each artist would be responsible for a set amount of time during an evening at the Manchester Opera House. With the festival director, Alex Poots, we invited the artists to Manchester in 2007 for the MIF (Manchester International Festival) and developed a score for the evening. The idea was that, like an opera or an exhibition, the score would allow Il Tempo del Postino, as we called the event, to be replayed – and it was, in Basel two years later – but never in exactly the same way.