It was a very polyphonic situation, and continued changing up to the last minute – had we arranged it all beforehand, it risked becoming a dead situation. A few examples of the works performed: Liam Gillick’s piece opened the show and recurred at each of its intervals; in it, a player piano onstage played a song. But rather than a perfect piece of sheet music, the piano’s source music was a transcription of Gillick’s imperfect attempt to play, from memory, a Portuguese revolutionary song he had heard once, long before, at the birthday of a friend. Pierre Huyghe’s piece appeared interstitially between the others, in the form of three segments. In it, a troll and a large yellow monster fall in love. Tino Sehgal had the orchestra play a symphonic arrangement of ‘Aerodynamic’, a song by Daft Punk, the French electronic musicians. To this music, the stage curtain danced. This was achieved by two dancers, who, like puppeteers, skilfully manipulated the cords controlling the curtain’s rise and fall according to a choreography devised by Sehgal.
Anri Sala, meanwhile, used Vogliatmi bene, un bene piccolino, an aria from Madame Butterfly, to connect live opera to the sound technology of cinema. ‘I wanted to do something related to voice,’ he told me. ‘My idea is to re-enact the same aria but instead having one butterfly, to have seven butterflies, and instead of one Pinkerton, to have two Pinkertons. Five of them will be on stage, a distribution that we have in cinema in Dolby surround, where you have five different points in the space, and take two for Pinkerton, like a stereo.’ The intriguing combination of live and recorded methods, Sala said, came because he ‘felt desire for unmediated experience growing. It’s about how to be able to edit things in real time, instead of editing things when you edit a film. And also, to play with this magical moment that comes.’
Tacita Dean wanted to create an episode of silence. She paid homage to one of the twentieth century’s most famous compositions, John Cage’s 4'33'', in which no music is played. Dean filmed Merce Cunningham for the four minutes thirty-three seconds duration of Cage’s 1952 piece. The elderly Cunningham, an explosive and kinetic choreographer and dancer, simply sat still, shifting positions slightly for each of the composition’s three movements. It echoed the power of Cage’s ‘silent’ piece of music. Dean’s film was projected onto a screen on the stage such that Cunningham’s image appeared the same size as the audience watching him. He could have been the ghost of the event.
Matthew Barney produced a collision of narratives from Celtic and Egyptian myth, drawn from his own Cremaster series of films. For Barney, the project was a chance to restore the productive failures that the film-making process is designed to edit out. ‘In the course of editing,’ he said, ‘you remove the failure, which in a way takes away something that was very magical. Everything that happens in post-production, that kind of kills that moment.’12 The difficulty and the beauty of a live work, for Barney, had to do with his inability to remove such moments of failure.
During the intermission, Barney had a group of musicians dressed as military personnel marching through the foyer, and then the theatre, ending up on the stage. They carried a young girl on a stretcher. The orchestra played a score created by Jonathan Bepler, Barney’s collaborator. The house lights remained on. The girl was deposited on top of a dilapidated car, while a tableaux of dancers in Egyptian costume and guards in New York City sanitation uniforms attended the scene. A live Scottish bull was present, lending a Celtic aspect to the proceedings but also a symbol of Egyptian fertility rites. Barney himself played a funereal prince, wearing on his head a basket containing a small Egyptian dog.
In Trisha Donnelly’s sequence, singer Helga Davis took to the stage and began to sing to a beat played in the wings by Donnelly herself, who held and rhythmically pulsed metal percussive bells. After several minutes of sound came a flash, the screen filled with an image of Gary Cooper, and the chorus sang lowly in surprise, ‘Whoa … Gary Cooper.’ Then the song resumed, four massive black obelisks toppled onstage, Davis walked into a cube of blue light, and the orchestra stood and vocally resonated with the sound. Smoke and dark shapes billowed. Rirkrit Tiravanija created a puppet show of ventriloquists’ puppets sitting on the laps of three sisters, who sang as the puppets mouthed the lyrics. In Koo Jeong-A’s contribution, the curtains opened to reveal a large tree onstage, its leaves rustling. A scent specially designed by Jeong-A wafted through the air – later, in the Basel edition of Il Tempo del Postino, she was able to deliver the scent from beneath each audience member’s seat – but otherwise the audience was left to contemplate the presence of this living tree. The curtains closed and the piece ended.
The sheer variety of the different works was intriguing. Art is not linear, and the impact of such experiments are often not picked up the next day. But they sink in; such projects have an immediate effect but they also have a long-term effect. Exhibitions, I have noted, always plant seeds. Maybe in five or ten years a young artist will emerge whose talents were triggered by that show.
Live art, self-evidently, moves away from the idea of art as the production of material objects. I learned from my long-ago conversation with Eugène Ionesco that a work like his play La Cantatrice chauve – which ran every night for forty years – could be as permanent as any work in bronze or marble. In this sense live art can also be sculptural. A key inspiration here is the duo of Gilbert and George, who, more than any other artists, have explored this idea. They made a series of works in which they appeared themselves, as living sculptures, opening up a new form of artistic practice as a result.
The Manchester International Festival, the idea for which came from the graphic designer and artist Peter Saville, has a tirelessly innovative artistic director, Alex Poots. Under his direction, the festival has become one of the primary places in the world to experiment with live art. Il Tempo del Postino, in 2007, was our first such experiment. For the 2009 festival, we collaborated with Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery and its director, Maria Balshaw, to create Marina Abramovic Presents, in which visitors were given lab coats and taken through a collective drill by Abramovic herself, before being left to wander through the gallery. In 2011, the idea of living sculpture coalesced into 11 Rooms, an exhibition I curated with Klaus Biesenbach for the festival and the Manchester Art Gallery. Each year it grows by a room – its most recent iteration (in 2013) was 13 Rooms, in Sydney.
Our idea was to do 11 Rooms as a show in a traditional museum rather than in a performance hall or a theatre. The exhibition comprised a series of eleven rooms in the Manchester Art Gallery, in each of which visitors encountered a live situation. Every one of the eleven artists we invited was allotted a room in which to develop an instruction-based piece. And rather than happening over one evening, as with theatre, these pieces were enacted non-stop during the opening hours of the museum for the duration of the exhibition. At the closing of the museum each night, the human sculptures went home.
Once again the variation was rich: for the first occasion, we invited eleven artists who had been working on various non-object-based projects: John Baldessari, Tino Sehgal, Roman Ondák, Marina Abramović, Joan Jonas, Allora y Calzadilla, Lucy Raven, Santiago Sierra, Simon Fujiwara, Xu Zhen and Laura Lima. In one room, Ondák installed a piece called Swap, in which a person sitting at a table behaved rather like an auctioneer. He or she invited the visitors to the gallery to bargain for a small object on the table, in exchange for something they had on their person. They exchanged objects such as a small bottle of perfume, a lunch voucher, a deck of playing cards, a map – even, in one instance, a bottle of olive oil.
In the 1970s, John Baldessari had proposed a work in which a corpse would be displayed in a gallery, but made up as though it were a wax, or a realistic sculpture of the human body. Most live works take the form of a kind of tableau vivant, whereas Baldessari’s was a tableau maudit, a tableau of death. We tried to find a hospital, a medical school, a bequest, or any way we could procure authorization to realize Baldessari’s idea for 11 Rooms, but were ultimately unsuccessful.
> In another room of the show Joan Jonas remounted her piece Mirror Check (1970). A naked woman, after entering the small room and taking off a robe, begins to examine her body with a compact, handheld mirror. And in yet another room Marina Abramović re-created, using a performer, her work Luminosity (1977), which displays a woman on a bicycle seat mounted high on the wall, in a pose something like a crucifixion.
In Tino Sehgal’s 11 Rooms piece, titled Ann Lee, visitors were confronted by a live protagonist of around twelve, with a distinctive fringe and tendrils of hair tucked behind her ears. Moving slowly and eerily, the protagonist introduced herself as Ann Lee and explained her origins in a manga comic book, and as an animated character in videos by Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno. She explained that it had always frustrated her to be stuck in a comic book or videos, unable to talk to visitors in museums, and so she had decided to come to life, posing questions and riddles to the visitors.
Of Pavilions and Marathons
In 2006, I moved to London to work with another inspirational figure, Julia Peyton-Jones, whom I was introduced to by the artist Richard Wentworth. Having begun as an artist herself, Peyton-Jones became director of the Serpentine Gallery in 1991. At that time, it was a rather quiet gallery housed in a former tea pavilion in Kensington Gardens. She quickly began to transform it into a very dynamic place where the newest and most forward-looking art and artists could be exhibited. Peyton-Jones and I collaborated for the first time in 1996, when she invited me to curate an exhibition at the Serpentine called Take Me (I’m Yours), in which artists made works that the visitors could take home, influenced by the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
Peyton-Jones has built the Serpentine into a global institution. She first began to build up its programmes, beginning new curatorial initiatives, research projects, and developing support for more and more ambitious exhibitions. She has been unafraid of taking on collaborators – another favourite adage is ‘one plus one equals eleven’, and I believe that together we have become an effective example of how an institution can be run through co-directorship. A second building – the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, designed by the architect Zaha Hadid – was recently opened a short distance away from the original gallery; the cord that links the two spaces is a walk across the park.
Peyton-Jones has been emphasizing the gallery’s setting in the park for many years. In 2000, she had the idea of a temporary pavilion for the Serpentine, and invited Zaha Hadid to design it; Peyton-Jones then expanded this into a yearly programme, using a simple rule: only architects who had not yet built anything in the UK could be chosen. The programme is a combination of urbanism, architecture and exhibition, and gives the public a chance to experience the work of a globally important architect. Each summer, the pavilions draw tens of thousands of visitors to Kensington Gardens.13 By the time I joined Peyton-Jones at the Serpentine in 2006, these seasonal, outdoor architectural structures seemed to be a great opportunity for new types of content to fill them during their temporary lifespan. We also wanted to give the city an image of itself in a temporary structure. We began to think about content that might play some of the same roles as an open-air music or theatre festival: somewhere you could wander around, see or hear or experience something, then wander off and have a meal or coffee, or fall asleep in the park, and then return for more.
Around the same time, I was working on the Theatre of the World festival in Stuttgart. Thinking about what could happen on the stage there, I had the idea of simply distending a conversation in time into a conversation marathon composed of many conversations. The intention was to create a kind of portrait of Stuttgart. I felt we could address how one can map a city and its constituent parts by means of a series of conversations with the people there – artists, architects, theatre directors, scientists, engineers and so forth. So we organized a conversation lasting twenty-four hours, a conversation marathon, and we came up with quite an incredible list of practitioners to participate.14
Back in London with Peyton-Jones, we put her invention of the Serpentine pavilion series together with my conversation marathons. In 2006, we commissioned a pavilion from Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond, for which we wanted to create an event. In addition to curating art, architecture and science, for example, we wanted to see whether we could also curate conferences – in other words create new rules of the game for the field of conferences. From that impulse, the Serpentine Marathon was born, as a kind of twenty-four-hour polyphonic knowledge festival where all kinds of disciplines meet. And so Koolhaas and I invited many different speakers, and the programme culminated after the twenty-four hours. We didn’t go to sleep but stayed onstage for the duration and spoke to seventy-two Londoners. It was an attempt at making a portrait of the city and it concluded with an urgent ecological message from Doris Lessing, which completed the Marathon.
Normally, when you invite somebody from the architecture world to give a talk, it’s mostly the architecture crowd that attends; when you invite somebody from the art world, the art-world types attend. Each speaker attracts a particular audience to his or her field of interest, yet there’s little crossover. But through the twenty-four-hour Marathons, it’s possible to cross and combine disciplines a bit: as a visitor you could turn up at three in the morning to listen to a range of people and even after that you might stay on to listen to an interesting young graphic designer. That then leads to something else, and the whole experience moves beyond particular disciplines to involve the city itself.
The Marathons developed into a series, and the year after making the first pavilion with Koolhaas and Balmond, a Serpentine pavilion was created by Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen. Eliasson thought that the year before there had been so much talking, and it would really be better now to do something, so we stopped talking and we did an Experiment Marathon. That changed the format itself – the Marathons were no longer strictly interviews, but hybrid combinations of conversations, performances, presentations and experiments. They became, essentially, time-based exhibitions. As their name suggests, they are essentially temporal rather than spatial experiences.
The year after that, in Frank Gehry’s pavilion at the Serpentine, we were inspired by Speakers’ Corner in the northeast corner of Hyde Park. Traditionally, Speakers’ Corner is the place in London reserved for anyone to get up on a soapbox and speak, where members of the public have a forum to deliver radical lectures, speeches, manifestos, denunciations, appeals, rants. Today, of course, this happens mostly on the Internet, but Speakers’ Corner is still a vibrant place for debate. Manifestos, of course, have played a major part in the history of art, and we thought it would be interesting to do a Manifesto Marathon, for which we invited sixty-seventy participants to produce a manifesto. Because we are living in a time that is more atomized, artistic movements are less cohesive, which raises the question: are manifestos still relevant? Or, maybe unilaterally prescribed manifestos are very twentieth century, and the twenty-first century is more like an exchange.
The year after, in SANAA’s pavilion at the Serpentine, we hosted a Marathon about poetry. Especially in this age in which the market plays a much bigger role in the art world than ever before, I thought it was important to look at the world of poetry. All the great avant-gardes of the twentieth century had connections to poetry. It is fundamental to culture. And so we invited poets and artists to read poetry. The year after that, we thought it would be interesting to find a theme that connected to technology. Since my first meeting in 1986 in Rome with Alighiero Boetti, who was making his world maps, I had been fascinated by the fact that maps play such a large role in the contemporary art world. Like Boetti, many artists are obsessed with maps. I suddenly realized that maps, and the whole idea of navigation systems, have become, along with social networks, one of the biggest topics on the Internet. So we brought together artists, web designers and architects to think about mapping in the twenty-first century.
In 2011 we commissioned a Serpentine pavilion by Peter Zumthor with
a garden by Piet Oudolf, who created the floral displays for architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s High Line park in New York. Over many conversations we started to think that maybe the theme here should just be the garden itself. The garden, of course, is an idea with which so many artists, architects, poets and novelists have been obsessed, from ancient Greece’s Arcadia, to the Islamic world’s majestic gardens, to the British landscape designer Capability Brown, to the writings of Hélène Cixous on gardens as cemeteries, to modern landscape architecture. The German author and film-maker Alexander Kluge once told me that the medieval concept of the hortus conclusus, or enclosed garden, performed many of the same functions as an exhibition. Equally, it’s a very relevant notion with regard to the Internet. As Kluge wrote in his text for our catalogue, the Internet is a garden of information. Eventually, for our Serpentine pavilion Zumthor built a simple, monastic cloister, a hortus conclusus, where people could sit in contemplation within Oudolf’s garden. Can there be such a thing as a cloister on the Internet? To try and answer that question, in October 2012 we invited sixty-seven participants from all fields, as part of a Marathon, to discuss the following idea: what counts as a garden in the twenty-first century?
The Marathons are not only about the here and now, but about the present in terms of memory, a ‘protest against forgetting’ in the historian Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase. During an interview I conducted with Hobsbawm in 2006, he raised the idea of organizing an international protest with this aim in mind. It’s a beautiful idea and so we organized a Memory Marathon in October 2012, centred on Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei’s pavilion. They had produced a pavilion of archaeology and memory, a refuge for thinking. Hobsbawm died on 1 October of that year, and the Memory Marathon was a tribute to him.
Ways of Curating Page 13