Ways of Curating

by Hans Ulrich Obrist

  Laboratorium brought the philosopher and historian of science Bruno Latour to the exhibition format. Latour’s work contains insights about the networks of meaning developed in particular institutions, governing the kind of knowledge they generated – for instance, a hospital is a particular social space with its own rules, expected behaviours, protocols, nomenclature and web of relationships. The individuals circulating through these spaces form social networks, which generate particular ways of being. It struck us, of course, that science and art often emanate from a particular social space – that of the laboratory and the studio respectively – and so an idea began to develop that involved making a junction between the two. Thus, to enact this expansive understanding of the ideas behind Laboratorium, we spread the show out into Antwerp at large.16

  Latour came up with a brilliant concept for Laboratorium. He devised a lecture series called ‘The Theatre of Proof’, in which he would re-create important experiments from history. Latour’s intent was not to do historical re-enactments in order to celebrate and popularize past scientific successes, but to grapple with the difficulty of understanding and interpreting what an experiment means and says. Also, the fact that the materials needed for many famous past experiments are no longer available is a problem – as the chemist Pierre Laszlo pointed out, showing how difficult it is to gather materials for even classic chemical experiments of the past. Experiments, as Latour well knows, have an effect only when they are publicized. Therefore, staging them in public raised another layer of difficulties: attempting to translate what happens inside a closed room to the world beyond.

  Isabelle Stengers, a philosopher of science, gave a great example of this by curating a space devoted to Galileo’s experiments with billiard balls rolling down inclined surfaces; Galileo carried out these experiments while formulating the law of falling bodies, which governs how and why the planets move. In her lecture Stengers asked whether painstaking experimentation with the balls had generated the law, or whether Galileo had conceptualized it first and used the experiment only to double-check that the balls behaved as he predicted. The answer is neither and both: without an experiment the law remains in the realm of theory, but an experiment alone can only generate data, not the law itself. What Galileo’s experiment accomplished, as shown by Stengers, was to stage the proof by finding an action in the world – rolling balls down inclined surfaces – that is simplified enough to correspond to the equations that model how such balls behave. But this, Latour pointed out, involves focusing only on the time it takes the balls to roll down certain heights, while ignoring other elements such as the effects of friction, which do not apply to planets and stars in the vacuum of space.

  We also decided to experiment on the nature of the Laboratorium catalogue. A difficulty with such publications is often that they are planned and executed before the opening of the exhibition, which means they can’t incorporate results unanticipated during a show’s conceptualization stage. For Laboratorium, we designed a book machine: a publishing process that would run concurrently with the exhibition itself. We invited the designer and artist Bruce Mau to work at our headquarters at the Antwerp Museum of Photography for the show’s duration. Each day, he would take the content that had been produced that day in conjunction with the show, from sites around the city. He would lay this content out as one would for a publication, creating new pages each day for an enormous, constantly expanding catalogue. Visitors themselves could enter into the process. By the exhibition’s end, Mau had laid out about 300 spreads, 6,000 images and 18,500 characters of text. A copy of this giant archive, which spatialized the experience of the book machine, was then deposited in Antwerp’s main library as a master record of Laboratorium. The archive was too unwieldy to enter the book market, of course, so we subsequently edited these pages into a smaller version (which still clocked in at nearly 500 pages) that could be distributed more widely.

  Perhaps the most personal expansion of this exhibition space was undertaken by the artist Jan Fabre. He installed a tent and his childhood record collection in his own parents’ garden, the location of which visitors could find on maps. In the midst of their searching the city for aspects of Laboratorium, they came upon one of the most important, and easily forgotten, sources of inspiration: the enclosure of a childhood home, which so often acts as the controlled environment where the earliest, most dreamlike experiments are conducted.

  Science, as shown in Laboratorium, is not only about the generation of certainty and positive knowledge. It depends for its very impetus on the equally enabling, and opposite, state: doubt. Höller, an artist trained as a scientist, elaborated a project that highlighted this feeling. His Laboratory of Doubt was an attempt to take account of the fact that, in a culture of highly advanced scientific knowledge, the general condition of doubt and perplexity felt by most citizens has not been reduced. In Höller’s view, however, perplexity is not a negative condition, but an enabling one. He relates this to the paradox that as people in modern societies achieve high levels of material comfort, while not necessarily becoming happier than others, the ‘maxim of well-being’ is called into question. Rather than present answers in the form of what he called ‘unassailable knowledge’, Höller decided to present perplexity directly. The idea, as he said when I interviewed him about the project, was ‘to give expression to perplexity, but it doesn’t need to lead to anything. The idea was to confront the public in a state of perplexity so that the form may be found in the course of an exhibition, even if that means sitting on a bench and being perplexed.’

  Höller used money from the exhibition budget to buy an old car, a Mercedes station wagon. He had the car covered with stickers that read ‘The Laboratory of Doubt’ in different languages. With a loudspeaker fitted to its roof, he then drove through Antwerp expressing his doubts. The car became a vehicle for rumour; as an artwork it both spread rumour and expressions of doubt via the megaphone and functioned as a story that people passed on to each other. Höller was always interested in how artworks can be carried by rumours. They become part of what Italo Calvino calls ‘the invisible city’, and I think Laboratory of Doubt worked this way.

  * * *

  An axiom: an exhibition is not an illustration. That is, it does not, ideally, represent the thing it purports to be ‘about’, in the way that a science museum will sometimes show a simplified version of an important discovery or result. Exhibitions, I believe, can and should go beyond simple illustration or representation. They can produce reality themselves. Laboratorium was an attempt to put this into practice. Rather than invite scientists to summarize results or artists to bring along works, it sought to explore processes of creation, and the ground in which these practices are rooted. One of these grounds, is, of course, spatial. The scientist’s laboratory and the artist’s studio are formally distinct spaces in which certain kinds of activities are performed. But they are also historically and socially constructed: they are equally products of a particular time period. This was an exhibition where one had experiences, and therefore made mistakes. One often finds oneself in exhibition formats that are a bit too fixed, lacking innovation in either a spatial or a temporal dimension. As such, one must ceaselessly question these conventions and change the rules of the game.

  Curating the Future

  In 1968, Stewart Brand published the first Whole Earth Catalog, a countercultural DIY compendium selling useful products and disseminating information to anyone interested in creating new ways of life. A curatorial figure himself, who has organized conferences and created exhibitions, Brand recognized very early on that personal computers held the possibility for great social renovation – an intuition that came to him in 1962, he told me, when he witnessed Stanford computer scientists playing Spacewar, one of the first video games. Brand saw computing as another form of ‘access to tools’, as he described his famous catalog. Recently he told me that he believes curating has ‘been democratized by the net, so, in one sense, everybody is curating. If
you’re writing a blog, it’s curating. So we’re becoming editors and curators, and those two are blending online.’

  In the field of exhibitions, however, the potential of digital life is only just beginning to be explored – Paola Antonelli recently curated one of the first large-scale shows online, for MoMA, and websites like e-flux have begun to explore the communicative possibilities of the global digital network. But a new generation of younger individuals is beginning to contribute to contemporary art and culture. Born in the age of digitization, this group, referred to by novelist Douglas Coupland as ‘the Diamond Generation’, shares an irreverence for traditional notions of authorship and cultural heritage, something that is manifested in their work. They have instant knowledge and technological know-how at their fingertips, and they rely on digital social platforms to showcase their new ideas and culturally iconoclastic approaches. The celebrated young artist Ryan Trecartin was quoted as saying: ‘People born in the ’90s are amazing … I can’t wait until they all start to make art.’ The creative climate of 2014 validates Trecartin’s enthusiasm, as this new generation starts to enter the stage with a fresh set of radical and compelling artistic positions.

  The year 1989 was marked by several paradigm-shifting events: while the collapse of the Berlin Wall heralded the beginning of the post–Cold War period, Tiananmen Square became marred by student protest and mass bloodshed. The Russian army left Afghanistan after a nine-year occupation, and the first Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite started orbiting the earth. Perhaps most significantly, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal in which he outlined his idea for what would soon become the World Wide Web. We are now seeing the beginning stages of the maturation of the first generation who never experienced a world before these historic developments. Could there be some connection between such seminal global events and the creative production of these young artists, writers, activists, architects, filmmakers, scientists and entrepreneurs?

  Together with the curator Simon Castets, I have begun an investigation charting the work of those born in or after 1989. 89plus, as we call the project, is a form of international research that follows the development of this generational shift through various platforms, including conferences, books, periodicals and exhibitions. The introduction to our global study was presented in an eight-person panel at a conference in Munich in January 2013. Since then, continuous research, recommendations from all over the world and an ongoing open call have shed light on the growth of a young, globally connected network of peers, which can be followed on an 89plus website through an evolving set of network visualizations. 89plus is an attempt to discover, assist and, ideally, empower a generation as they cross borders and foster a worldwide community of ideas. The aim is to provide an opportunity for young people from virtually all parts of the globe to have their ideas heard, showcased and implemented on the world stage.

  The economist John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote that ‘change comes not from men and women changing their minds, but from the change from one generation to the next’. Is this true? How can we track this kind of change? Can we, in addition, help a new generation take advantage of their special historic circumstances? These are the questions that the 89plus project investigates, while bringing together individuals whose places of origin are as different as their practices, and whose voices are only starting to be heard. In this sense, the project presents a unique opportunity to understand how a younger generation’s discourse is instituted through the networks they build.

  In October 2013 we brought this network to Zaha Hadid’s just-opened Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London, and held an 89plus marathon of talks, lectures, presentations, interviews and performances. We are already starting to witness visionary acts of digital curating, and curating will surely change as a generation native to digital tools begins to develop new formats. This generation has grown up in an entirely new world. Perhaps by learning from them, we can learn something about our future.

  Notes

  1. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (1989 and 1992).

  2. In the late 1990s this collaborative spirit resulted in the formation of an association of curators, the Union of the Imaginary, to which I belong. Its official goals are ‘to promote discussion and collaboration among curators; to develop a progressive understanding of the role of curatorial practice; and to fight homogenization and instrumentalization at every level of culture’.

  3. See also the detailed description of different techniques in Markus Heinzelmann, ‘Verwischungen. Die übermalten Fotografien von Gerhard Richter als Objekte der Betrachtung’, in exh. cat. Gerhard Richter. Übermalte Fotografien, ed. by idem, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen et al. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz 2008), pp. 80–88, here pp. 84ff.

  4. As famously quoted by Mario Merz.

  5. I had met Gordon in 1991. He was part of a younger generation of artists with a new spirit of collaboration. At our first meeting he told me, with characteristic boldness, that the 1990s would be a decade of promiscuous collaboration. This turned out to be completely true. Gordon also helped to change my understanding of cities. I was invited to give a lecture in his home town of Glasgow by the ‘Transmission’ artist space. On that trip I realized that Glasgow was as important for art as any big city. During the 1990s, as the contemporary art world expanded, art was being produced in many more places.

  6. An example would be his ‘Stacks objects’, piles of offset prints that visitors are welcome to take home. Gonzalez-Torres redefined the social contract between artist and museum visitor, in effect substituting generosity for tight control. It’s hard to think of a better metaphor for a new inclusivity, a welcoming of the public, than this. Whether he marks out spaces with garlands of light or sets out his unstable ‘Stacks’ to vanish or decorates spaces with posters, Gonzalez-Torres’ works always provide the beholder with opportunities for real action. With a conscious proximity to conceptual and minimal conventions, he creates deviations of form that continue to put the beholder/object rapport to the test. Gonzalez-Torres starts from what is nearby in order to see what is already there in another way. His influence on the succeeding generation is impossible to overstate.

  7. These have recently been collected by Luc Santé in the book Novels in Three Lines (2007).

  8. I met many people who came by, and that was the beginning of this ongoing conversation which remains one of the most active aspects of my working method. Like the kitchen show, it was very private and clandestine for the first two weeks. During the first few weeks of the show, the porter, having no idea what was occurring upstairs, would announce visitors over the hotel telephone like this: ‘You have a ‘‘client’’ here.’ But unlike my kitchen show, which took place in the small town of St. Gallen in Switzerland, this was Paris, and from the third week on, the intimacy gradually disappeared. By the show’s last day, Libération and Le Figaro had reviewed it, and there were people lined up in the street to get in. The artworks from the exhibition were reproduced as postcards and put in a printed yellow slipcase/box alongside an exhibition brochure.

  9. In 1843, as Christmas was becoming the dominant holiday in Victorian London, Cole even published and sold the first commercial Christmas card under the Summerly name, as Elizabeth Bonython and Anthony Burton point out in their biography The Great Exhibitor: The Life and Work of Henry Cole. ‘Felix Summerly’ did not stop at writing, however: in 1846 he submitted under the Summerly name a design for a tea set that won a competition sponsored by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

  10. When Attitudes Become Form was influential enough that the show was restaged in Venice in 2013 as When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013 by curator Germano Celant in dialogue with Thomas Demand and Rem Koolhaas.

  11. For a long time Parreno’s ideas formed an inspirational agenda, but putting on an exhibition that would work along the lines he suggested remained unrealized. It could have happened in lots of different contexts, but we couldn’t find an o
pera, a theatre or museum willing to host such a project. It seems that there remains a lack of institutions for such grand interdisciplinary endeavours. In 2007, however, the Manchester International Festival was founded. This biennial festival’s goal is to bring together music, opera, theatre and the visual arts, very much in the spirit of Sergei Diaghilev. Its founding director, Alex Poots, invited me to realize our hitherto unrealized project.

  12. ‘I always felt,’ Barney said, ‘that in the middle of the Cremaster cycle, that there were situations, if they could be witnessed by an audience, that were nearly perfect situations, but what made them that way was the failure…’

  13. The full list includes pavilions by Hadid (2000), Daniel Libeskind (2001), Toyo Ito (2002), Oscar Niemeyer (2003), Alvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura (2005), Rem Koolhaas with Cecil Balmond and Arup (2006), Hadid and Patrik Schumacher (2007), Olafur Eliasson and Cecil Balmond and Kjetil Thorsen (2007), Frank Gehry (2008), SANAA (2009), Jean Nouvel (2010), Peter Zumthor (2011), Ai Weiwei and Herzog & de Meuron (2012) and Sou Fujimoto (2013).

  14. I’ve often thought about the impossibility of producing a portrait of a city with Stefano Boeri; when we did ‘Mutations’ in Bordeaux we were concerned that it is impossible to produce a synthetic image of a city, because the city is so complex. As the late Oskar Kokoschka pointed out, when he was making a city portrait, that the city has already changed by the time the painting is done, so how can you do a synthetic image of the city? The idea of an interview Marathon was also, then, the idea of a knowingly partial portrait – people are cities, cities are people, and then through all these practitioners you get an idea of the score of the city. Some come at night, some come during the day, some stay the whole Marathon, and then we found out after the Marathon in Stuttgart that lots of dinners had been triggered – which of course I wasn’t part of because I was sitting there – but a lot of people went off at two in the morning and said, Let’s go and eat, what is still open? So there were all these people meeting each other after the Marathon at the only restaurant which was open. And so it’s almost like you build a community, because the visitors come to know each other and are not just consuming a lecture and going home.