Curating (Non-)Conferences
In 1993, the art historian Christa Maar invited me to the Akademie zum 3. Jahrtausend (The Academy of the Third Millennium). She wanted to involve curating in the Academy, which was very interdisciplinary and conflated scientists with architects, artists and other thinkers, which gave me a chance to begin dialoguing with contemporary science. One of the first conferences of the Academy evolved around intersections of the brain and computers. There I was first introduced to scientists alongside intellectuals and cultural thinkers, like the neuroscientists Francisco Varela, Ernst Pöppel and Wolf Singer, or science-fiction writers like Bruce Sterling. Christa Maar also introduced me to John Brockman in New York. All of the above is closely connected to his Third Culture and Edge approach to leave the ‘two cultures’ described by C. P. Snow behind and to consider culture more expanded. Brockman is interested in ‘the edges of culture’, as he told me in our first meeting. Having suddenly been introduced to such an interdisciplinary mixture of people was like a revelation to me. So I thought more about how to connect the arts and the sciences within my own curatorial work.
In 1995, Maar asked me to organize something relating to art and science for the conference Mind Revolution. I wasn’t sure what exactly to do, but my sense was that to force artists and scientists to collaborate felt wrong: that would be to dictate the production of new works in a rather authorial way. Instead, I thought it could be more interesting, and more unpredictable, to produce a context for chance encounters. Reflecting on the conferences I had already attended, I realized that the conjunction of scientists, artists and others was productive in and of itself. Often, however, the most interesting encounters didn’t occur during the official panel discussions, with their typical format of a presentation perhaps followed by a short question-and-answer session, but instead in the green room, cafeteria or restaurant where the participants went before and afterwards. Simply bringing interesting people together in a specific place and time was in and of itself the crucial thing. The coffee break, it appeared, was perhaps the most urgent, yet invisible, meeting point or junction at the conference.
Unlike exhibitions, which have been transformed throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first century, symposia, conferences and panel discussions have followed a very standard lecture or round-table discussion. So I thought it would be interesting to apply the idea of changing the rules of the game for a discursive event like a conference, similar to what I had done in exhibitions. A mischievous idea occurred to me. What if one had all the accoutrements of a conference: the schedule, hotel accommodation, participants with their badges, but dispensed with the ‘official’ elements of panels, speeches, plenary sessions and so on?
I suggested that we invite artists to Ernst Pöppel’s research centre near Cologne, in Jülich, where there were hundreds of scientists and laboratories. The idea was to create a contact zone where something could happen but nothing had to happen. And so the ‘conference’ we organized at the research centre, ‘Art and Brain’, had all the constituents of a colloquium except the colloquium. There were coffee breaks, a bus trip, meals, tours of the facilities, but no colloquium. The artists made their contacts, and having made them, they could go into town to produce works and collaborate with the scientists. At the end we made a little film, where everybody spoke about their impressions, and published a set of postcards. Now other activities are developing at the research centre without any need for more centralized organization.
Just as Cedric Price always talked about the importance of the ‘non-plan’ in architecture, ‘Art and Brain’ was something of a non-conference. Once again, the role of the curator is to create free space, not occupy existing space. In my practice, the curator has to bridge gaps and build bridges between artists, the public, institutions and other types of communities. The crux of this work is to build temporary communities, by connecting different people and practices, and creating the conditions for triggering sparks between them.
Several years later, in 2003 in Japan, I worked with Miyake Akiko to organize a conference called Bridge the Gap? at the CCA Kitakyushu, an art centre and school. The idea was to continue the ‘Art and Brain’ ‘conference’ but on a larger scale. The Chilean biologist Francisco Varela, who had been one of my scientific mentors, had recently died, and so we started with the idea of inviting some of his friends and colleagues. We also invited a lot of other artists, scientists and architects.15 We were interested in delinking our group from the world, to give them time and space, and so the location of the conference, at a remote house on the outskirts of Kitakyushu, became an asset. Participants had to fly to Tokyo, then take an internal Japanese flight, then an hour-long car ride. Finally, they arrived at a very old Japanese house, which was so remote that they couldn’t easily get away again.
For three days we brought this group of incredibly busy people to a literal standstill. Normally they would give their lecture and immediately leave for their next appointment, meeting, and so on. In Kitakyushu we had rooms for official meetings, and also – inspired by online chat rooms – rooms for self-organized chats between participants. (There were a lot of rooms in the house.) The house also had a traditional Japanese garden, which allowed them to stroll outside. And we installed a reading room with all the published books by all the speakers, so if you met or heard an interesting person, you could find their books in the reading room. The speakers ranged from Rem Koolhaas and Marina Abramović to the mathematician Gregory Chaitin. Another talk was by the quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger, who was researching a mystery as inexplicable as any in the arts: how subatomic particles can become ‘entangled’ or linked to each other no matter how much distance comes between them. The whole experience was a bit like a salon for the twenty-first century.
In 2005, Hubert Burda, Steffi Czerny and Marcel Reichart began an organization called DLD. It very much brings the different worlds together on a continuing basis, bridging digital innovation, life science, the arts, design and urbanism. Yet, it is not just a mere conference: it is really about the production of reality, about connecting people who otherwise wouldn’t have encountered this way within the frameworks of knowledge production. As J. G. Ballard would say, it is about ‘making junctions’. Steffi, who connects practitioners from different disciplines in a wonderful and unique way, invited me to curate the DLD Arts section.
Each year has a different rule of the game and a different topic: Parallel Universes (2007) scrutinized alternative and extended ways of arts, Archives and Memory (2008) dealt with archival work and memories. A Black Mountain College for the 21st Century (2008) discussed new models of interdisciplinary art schools and education. Maps for the 21st Century (2009) evolved around how the notion of location has changed with the advent of the internet and mobile displays. Ever Clouds (2010) focused on cloud theories, concepts and digital cloud architecture. Solaire Solar (2011) developed around conversations between Tino Sehgal, Olafur Eliasson and Frederik Ottesen to build a solar aeroplane. Lights on Africa (2012) focused on energy in off-grid areas and a pre-launch of Eliasson´s ‘Little Sun’ project. Both the Ways Beyond the Internet (2012) panel and exhibition explored the concept of ‘Postinternet’ with emerging artists, who grew up with the internet as an everyday condition. All of these conversations brought together artists, architects, scientists and digital-culture thinkers. Reaching out to different worlds to connect them means going beyond the fear of pooling knowledge, something I think will become increasingly important as disciplines become ever more specialized.
Les Immatériaux
The bridges between science and art lead me to Les Immatériaux. It is difficult to write about an exhibition that one has not seen or experienced in person. But I need to make an exception for Les Immatériaux, organized by the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard with Thierry Chaput, director of the Centre de Création Industrielle, because it is necessary to underline its importance. The exhibition was a catalyst for many artists I have become cl
ose to over the years, such as Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, all of whom saw the exhibition when they were art students and continue to discuss it to this day.
Les Immatériaux was shown between 28 March and 15 July 1985, on the fifth floor of the Pompidou Centre in Paris. It was one of the first exhibitions to anticipate our digital future avant la lettre. At its core, it aimed to investigate the consequences of the shift from material objects to immaterial information technologies, or, perhaps in a sense, the shift from modernism to postmodernism. Indeed, the exhibition’s title may be translated as ‘Immaterials’ or ‘The Non-Materials’, reflecting for Lyotard not just a shift in the materials we use, but also in the very meaning of the term ‘material’. For the exhibition design, Lyotard conceived an open, labyrinthine parcours with one entrance and one exit but multiple possible pathways through. Walls were not solid structures but rather grey webs that stretched from floor to ceiling. Visitors wore headphones and listened to radio transmissions that came in and out of focus as they moved through the space. Such fluid nonlinearity exemplified the very conditions of immateriality central to the exhibition’s argument. The multiple pathways led to around sixty ‘sites’, as Lyotard called them, which were dedicated to different subjects and questions, from painting to astrophysics.
As Lyotard explained in the exhibition catalogue: ‘We wanted to awaken a sensibility, certainly not indoctrinate minds. The exhibition is a postmodern dramaturgy. No heroes, no myths. A labyrinth of situations organized by questions: our sites … The visitor, in his solitude, is summoned to choose his way at the crossings of the webs that hold him and voices that call him. If we had answers, a “doctrine”, why all this trouble?’ For each of the different sites, Lyotard combined in various displays artworks, everyday objects, technological devices and instruments of science. In this respect Les Immatériaux (though I know it primarily from the catalogue and accounts of those who saw the exhibition) has influenced my projects on the relationship between art and science – both, for Lyotard, share a sense of astonishment. Les Immatériaux also inspired me to think about making exhibitions that are interdisciplinary.
The catalogue of Les Immatériaux is a rich toolbox. It is roughly the size of a magazine, with a grey cover on top of a slipcase containing seventy-two loose sheets of paper. Each site and topic in the exhibition is represented by one sheet. Additionally there are some explanatory sheets, including the exhibition plan and texts by Lyotard. Just as the exhibition did not have a fixed parcours, and each visitor could explore his or her own path, the sequence of these loose sheets could always be rearranged while reading. The catalogue is not didactic and linear, but rather is intended to be read in a nonlinear way. Its format inspired my exhibition Cloaca Maxima in Zurich in 1994, for which we also designed the catalogue as a slipcase.
Another philosopher who ventured from philosophy to curating is Daniel Birnbaum. Philosophy, as Birnbaum says, regularly goes into exile. By this, he means that it needs another discursive field to develop its concepts and to make them productive. Jean-François Lyotard talks about this in terms of a diaspora of thought wandering through other domains. In the 1960s this external sphere was no doubt primarily society itself, and much of philosophy took place in proximity to sociology. Furthermore, in the 1970s new ideas about the text and textuality became so fashionable that philosophy seemed to merge with a novel kind of high-strung literary criticism.
In the 1980s, ideas about the simulacra of the media turned the dialogue with art and the world of images into a very lively point of departure for philosophical exploration. What happened then? Through what new domains has philosophy wandered since? Technology, the city, architecture, forms of globalization. Yes, no doubt through all of these areas, and perhaps also through the exhibition as a medium for thought and experimentation. This curatorial turn of radical thought materialized for the first time in Lyotard’s Les Immatériaux exhibition, which in 1985 anticipated two decades of frantic exhibition production across the globe. Les Immatériaux was a large experiment about virtual reality and about the exhibition itself as a work of art. Lyotard was fully aware that this was a very provocative concept.
Les Immatériaux was followed by several other exhibitions curated by philosophers and scientists: Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (1990–91) and Julia Kristeva’s Visions Capitales (1998), both held at the Louvre in Paris; or, more recently, Bruno Latour’s Iconoclash (2002) and Making Things Public (2005) at ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany. Les Immatériaux changed the landscape not only for exhibition-makers, philosophers and scientists, but for artists as well. Here is Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s recollection of experiencing the show:
Les Immatériaux was a truly memorable exhibition. Strangely enough, my most memorable experiences have been in environments, complete environments … rather than exhibitions per se … What I think was really beautiful in Les Immatériaux was the exploration of all the dimensions of light and sound by means of infrared and text. The viewer’s movement was taken fully into consideration. For all those reasons, it was actually a very important exhibition.
Philippe Parreno once told me:
If you haven’t seen the exhibition, it’s hard for me to describe it. If I tell you how it was, it will sound like a dream. The show was surprising in the curatorial choices, in the manner in which objects and experiences were arranged. It was superb … Les Immatériaux was an exhibition producing ideas through the display of objects in a space. It was very different from writing a book or developing a philosophical concept. And that’s precisely what I loved in that exhibition.
Gonzalez-Foerster and Parreno studied at the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques in Paris, which was founded by Pontus Hultén, Daniel Buren, Serge Fauchereau and Sarkis in 1985. Hultén once invited Lyotard to the institute. During this discussion, Lyotard spoke about his concept for a second exhibition, this time on the topic of resistance. This exhibition was not realized, but Parreno, who was present at that discussion, never forgot about it: ‘Lyotard wanted to do another exhibition, “Resistance”. “Resistance” isn’t a good title. You immediately think about a series of moral issues. But when I met him, I understood that he meant in fact resistance in another way. In school when you study physics you are told that frictional forces are not important – the forces of two surfaces in contact let certain axioms become uncertain. I think that’s what “Resistance” was supposed to be about.’ Whereas Les Immatériaux was an early reflection of the Internet age, ‘Resistance’ would be about the opposite: that in our age of many connections, resistance is also necessary.
Parreno, Birnbaum and I now plan to realize Lyotard’s unrealized idea at an intriguing site: an art centre being created by art collector, producer and patron Maja Hoffmann’s LUMA Foundation. Hoffmann invited the artists Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno, and the curators Tom Eccles, Beatrix Ruf and myself, to form a group with her to plan an experimental art centre far from any big city, which will be designed by Frank Gehry. It’s in Arles, in the marshland of France’s Camargue.
Hoffmann’s goal is to connect the centre to ecology. So, in 2012, we took a step towards that goal by creating an exhibition called To the Moon via the Beach, which took place in the Roman amphitheatre of Arles, a historical site popular with tourists and often used for bullfighting and festivals. Following an idea of Parreno and Gillick’s, the amphitheatre was in transformation for the duration of the exhibition. At the start, visitors encountered an arena covered in tons of sand. This terrain was transformed from a beach to a moonscape by a team of sand sculptors and also acted as the backdrop to a series of interventions from twenty artists, who guided visitors, reacted to the shifting landscape and produced works in and around the arena.
At the end, all the sand was moved to Arles’s Parc des Ateliers, a former railway construction site, where it will be accessible to the public as part of a temporary playground. It will then be re-
used once again in the foundations of the forthcoming LUMA centre – a new creation, production and exhibition centre specializing in contemporary art. As the philosopher Michel Serres said, perhaps part of today’s fundamental evolution of art could be to open oneself up to living species, to open up to life and to nature.
Laboratorium
In-betweenness, as the critic Homi Bhabha has written, is a fundamental condition of our times. This is an especially useful principle for my exhibitions involving science, where the idea has always been to produce an in-between space that allows for radical and unexpected combinations.
Laboratorium, which I curated with Barbara Vanderlinden in 1999 in Antwerp, was an interdisciplinary project in which the scientific laboratory and the artist’s studio were explored on the basis of the various concepts and disciplines they used. It was an attempt to create a bridge between the specialized vocabularies of science and art and the general audience, between the expertise of skilled practitioners and the concerns and preconceptions of the interested public. Throughout that summer in Antwerp, we established networks between the people of Antwerp and communities of scientists, artists, dancers and writers. To give access to all these communities, we provided visitors with maps and bicycles to explore for themselves.
We started with a method that is often used for historical exhibitions, but too rarely for contemporary ones: we created a think tank to develop ideas. This included different people with affinities to our organizing principle, like the artist Carsten Höller, who trained as a scientist. The discussion revolved around questions such as the following: How can we attempt to bridge the gap between the specialized vocabulary of science, art and the general interest of the audience, between the expertise of the skilled practitioner and the concerns and preconceptions of the interested audience? What is the meaning of laboratories? What is the meaning of experiments? When do experiments become public and when does the result of an experiment reach public consensus? Is rendering public what happens inside the laboratory of the scientist and the studio of the artist a contradiction in terms? These and other questions were the beginning of an interdisciplinary project starting from the ‘workplace’ where artists and scientists experiment and work freely.
Ways of Curating Page 14