Ways of Curating
Page 16
15. The list of speakers: Marina Abramović, Oladele Ajiboye Bamgboye, Stefano Boeri, John Casti, Gregory Chaitin, Chang Yung-Ho, Olafur Eliasson, Cerith Wyn Evans, Evelyn Fox Keller, Carsten Höller, Hsia Chu-Joe, Ikegami Takashi, Rem Koolhaas, Sanford Kwinter, Mark Leonard, William Lim, Sarat Maharaj, Miyake Akiko, Mogi Ken’ichiro, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Israel Rosenfield, Saskia Sassen, Luc Steels, Wang Jianwei, Anton Zeilinger.
16. Many laboratories are physically situated in a particular building, but we decided it was important not to limit an exhibition to just those. As Latour wrote, ‘The very distinction between the inside of the laboratory and the outside, be it nature or society, is not so easy to trace anymore’ (from Laboratorium). Many are also invisible, forming part of the invisible city. Artists, social scientists and natural scientists have often thought of a city’s space as the ‘field’, while a controlled interior setting is the ‘studio’ or ‘laboratory’. But often the practices in which they engage are not so distinguishable by the location in which they occur. This is an insight I first gleaned from Kasper König, who believed the museum should be used as a relay that both concentrates activity and sends it out into the world.
Laboratory science depends hugely for its effectiveness on which aspects of a situation are considered relevant and which are not. As Latour later wrote: ‘Exactly the same divide between primary and secondary qualities exists in the very trope of artistic iconoclasm: ‘‘il faut épater le bourgeois!’’ What Philistines believe to be good taste is immaterial for a modern artist exactly as, for a neurologist, your idea of how your brain functions is of no interest whatsoever in mapping out electrochemical pathways.’ Latour is pointing out a hidden similarity between contemporary artistic and scientific practices, in which the important task is to discover which phenomena, amongst the noise and static of the world, warrant attention. According to Latour, by looking at the difficulties inherent in making these choices, for scientists and for artists the exhibition performed a meta-experiment on the different fields themselves. And interestingly, since Laboratorium, Latour has continued to curate exhibitions, as an adjacent practice to his research and scholarly writing.
Responding to the exhibition’s desire to hybridize positions and fields, Xavier Le Roy presented a choreographed work called Product of Circumstances. In it he blurred the lines between biography and theory, and between the lecture and performance. While this was presented in a theatre, Le Roy created a situation that eroded the usual separation of audience and performer. He kept lighting conditions equal on either side of the divide. He spoke about his history as a trained molecular biologist while also training in dance and playing basketball – for Le Roy, the body and mind are not Cartesian opposites, but elements in the gestalt of every human being. He presented slides from his biological research on the genes related to breast cancer, then segued into a performance of part of a dance piece called ‘Things I Hate to Admit’. The interplay between these two formats accepts the importance of both, while opening up an in-between space in which each, and their interconnections, can be explored. At another point, he sat on the floor of the stage, motionless and silent, for a minute.
Continuing to speak about his scientific research, Le Roy mentioned the choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s film MURDER and murder (1996) – a film that ironically speculates on breast cancer and its relation to sexuality. The lines between these different ways of thinking about the body merged in a new way. After this, Le Roy again broke off the lecture and performed an excerpt from another choreographed piece, before continuing to speak. He described the indistinct conditions his practice began to evoke: ‘my point of view within society changed, and I found myself in a blurred field of similarities between the social and political organizations of science and dance. I felt like a fugitive who actually never escaped what he thought he was.’ He then demonstrated sections of pieces by Rainer that he recreated in 1996. In a statement that perhaps summarizes many of Laboratorium’s concerns, Le Roy finished by saying, ‘I would like to suggest that this performance was about a contaminated body in its weavings of historical, social, cultural, and biological levels, being the place and time for a path of different thoughts unable to transform themselves into abstraction and theory.’
The historian of science Peter Galison examined the development of early twentieth-century physics. He explained the scientific importance of image producers, inaugurated by Charles Wilson’s creation of the cloud chamber in 1895, an instrument that made it possible to image, for the first time, the previously invisible scattering of charged alpha particles. Galison also discussed an opposing tradition – that of electronic counters, committed to ‘anti-visual ways of approaching the microphysical world’ and utilizing logical inference and statistical data rather than direct observation. These traditions were eventually combined in the electronic imaging technologies that attended the new detectors of the 1970s, in which particles were smashed into one another and which required the building of vastly larger detector systems.
The unification of these two traditions was neither seamless nor immediate, Galison explained: ‘only bit by bit, literally, did they begin to form a common language, a way of speaking, and a common set of practices that would allow them to combine their ways of analysing data. Not a Gestalt change, but a hard-fought, step-by-step construction of an intermediate zone of exchange.’ What can be learned from this? ‘If one needs a slogan, it might be this: the solution of local problems demands a local language, a language both in a verbal and in a non-verbal sense.’ Galison’s final summary could have stood in for the entire exhibition’s own discovered position: ‘the laboratory is always an assembly of divergent parts, tied together with fragile, partial traditions. Words, rules, things – always under conflicting pressures, always bound together in pieces … We use the laboratory to search for means to bind, split and recombine the myriad partial subcultures of the world around us.’
Acknowledgements
My very special thanks to Asad Raza, who exuded great wisdom, enthusiasm, patience and friendship in producing Ways of Curating. Foremost thanks are due to the artists whom I have worked with, spoken to and been inspired by throughout my life. They are the reason for my activity. I would also like to thank Carlos Basualdo, Klaus Biesenbach, Daniel Birnbaum, Stefano Boeri, Francesco Bonami, John Brockman, Simon Castets, Bice Curiger, Steffi Czerny, Okwui Enwezor, Kate Fowle, Hou Hanru, Dorothea von Hantelmann, Jens Hoffmann, Maja Hoffmann, Koo Jeong-A, Sam Keller, Kasper König, Walther König, Rem Koolhaas, Bettina Korek, Gunnar Kvaran, Karen Marta, Kevin McGarry, Isabela Mora, Ella Obrist, Suzanne Pagé, Philippe Parreno, Julia Peyton-Jones, Alex Poots, Alice Rawsthorn, Beatrix Ruf, Anri Sala, Tino Sehgal, Nancy Spector, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Lorraine Two and Dasha Zhukova. In addition, I would like to thank the book’s editor, the excellent and unreasonably patient Helen Conford; the book’s agent, the steadfast Kevin Conroy Scott; its copy-editor, Richard Mason; and Charles Arsène-Henry, who initiated the project. For research help, many thanks go to Natalie Baker, Laura Boyd-Clowes, Chloe Capewell, Patricia Lennox-Boyd, Roberta Marcaccio and Max Shackleton. In Ways of Worldmaking, Nelson Goodman wrote that art and science are both of utmost importance to understanding our multiplicity of worlds; this book’s title was inspired by his.
A Note About the Author
Hans Ulrich Obrist is a Swiss-born curator and writer. He is the co-director of exhibitions and programs and the co-director of international projects at the Serpentine Galleries, London. His previous books include A Brief History of Curating; A Brief History of New Music; Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Curating but Were Afraid to Ask; Sharp Tongues, Loose Lips, Open Eyes, Ears to the Ground; Ai Weiwei Speaks; and nearly thirty volumes in his Conversation Series of interviews with contemporary artists.
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Copyright © 2014 by Hans Ulrich Obrist
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Original
ly published in 2014 by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, Great Britain
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2014
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Obrist, Hans-Ulrich.
Ways of curating / Hans Ulrich Obrist with Asad Reza. — First American edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-86547-819-0 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-71232-7 (ebook)
1. Art museums. 2. Museums—Curatorship. I. Title.
N408 .O27 2014
707.5—dc23
2014016970
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