Hans Ulrich Obrist. Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects. London, 2015. Part Two

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Hans Ulrich Obrist
Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects
London, Allen Lane, 2015, 544 pages

(review by Francesco Mazzaferro)

Part Two: On Art Exhibitions and Interdisciplinary Dialogue

[Original version: January-February 2016 - New version: April 2019]

Fig. 2) Some notes in the book

Go Back to Part One

What are the themes along which the dialogues develop between Hans Ulrich Obrist and contemporary artists or architects he interviews? There are at least two. The first is the evolution of the idea of art exhibition over time. The second is the dialogue of the different branches of culture, in particular between art and architecture (without excluding other disciplines). On all this, Obrist asks the opinions of stakeholders of very different age and generation. Together with him, they sketch the development of these themes across the second half of the twentieth century until today. In this part of the article we will dwell on the evolution of art exhibition and on the interdisciplinary dialogue in general. In part three we will devote ourselves to the dialogue between art and architecture.

The evolution of the idea of art exhibition

Confronted for decades with a notion of exhibition which (although in the unbroken evolution of new forms of avant-garde) continues to be characterized by the presence of art objects within a defined space (including installations), and therefore remains in the traditional framework inaugurated in the nineteenth century, artists are seeking new horizons, and conceiving forms of art shows at the limit of immateriality. It would be wrong however to see these concerns as a desire of pure extravagance. For Obrist they are not necessarily modern forms of 'art for art', but rather an exploration that goes beyond any form of impromptu, and adds (in some cases replacing) the temporal dimension of duration of the exhibition to that of space. Art forces the audience to confront itself with what has now become the scarcest factor in our lives: time, duration, the use of the day.

It is an area of interest for Obrist, but also for several contemporary artists, now weary of swift but ephemeral events. Since the days of Duchamp, contemporary art had tried to combine the idea of ​​time with that of space. But the solution was often to refer to an element of surprise, which would be disclosed hurriedly. Instead, the French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (1965-) dreams of performances covering long time cycles (i.e. fifty or a hundred years) and which would be "informed by a long process, an infinite practice" [8]. She is the one who invented, in 2009, the term 'cronotopos' as a special work of art. Currently, she has an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou whose title says it all: "Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, 1887-2058". "I was always frustrated to see how visitors would stop in front of a work of art for only a few seconds. This made me think that an artwork should somehow capture the visitor in a bubble of time and space. I had only one model to elaborate this, which was literature. You see, as soon as you have a potential narrative, the beginning of a text, then time appears. Back then, I used clues instead of text, creating a kind of trap that would keep the visitor contemplating the art a bit longer. By exploring the dimension of time, I think we’ve succeeded in bringing a mutation into the exhibition."[9]

The irruption of the time dimension explains not only the art marathons, lasting 24 hours, organized by Obrist at the Serpentine Gallery in London, but also the 'temporary exhibitions', of which he is one of the promoters. To him and to the French artist Philippe Parreno (1964-) we owe, for example, 'Il Tempo del Postino' [10] (the original title is in Italian, it means The time of the postman), a 'Group Show' performed first in Manchester in 2007 and then in Basel in 2009. Obrist and Parreno do not offer a space for artists, but put time at their disposal, offering an opportunity "to incorporate existing works into the project – together with music, light, performance and objects. The idea was to bring them all on stage and build a kind of scenography."[11] Parreno adds: “Il Tempo del Postino is a time-based exhibition. Artists had been invited to propose an art piece, a tableau, so to speak, that will be visible only for a limited moment. (...) This is a proposal to visit an exhibition space without moving – a journey through a museum without moving. Each of the artists appear next to each other, rather than with each other, according to an old idea of time-sharing, but they nevertheless still constitute a subject - raising once more the question of the collective, polyphony of voices as one subject."[12] The piece lasts three hours and is performed in the theatre for several successive evenings, combining aspects of opera and group performance.

In the education of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Philippe Parreno a key role was played by the exhibition 'Les Immatériaux' at the Centre Pompidou [13]. Gonzalez-Foerster says: it "was truly a memorable exhibition. (...) What I think was still 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." In short, the show was not limited to a display of objects, but reproduced an environment of freedom. "For me, the exhibition becomes fossilized when a series of objects are lit up like so many dots. Whereas it is freed when the idea of ​​moving through the exhibition becomes a decisive factor: when different sensorial levels are called upon; when we don’t remain stuck on the optic, scopic impulse; and where our actions are conditioned by what we hear. This synaesthetic dimension is fundamental."[14]

The idea by Philippe Parreno of ​​an "exhibition without objects, with projects" goes in the same direction: "For us it was so obvious that we even passed by the object to go directly to the exhibition without objects, but with projects, so we replace the object by the project and figure out that was a cool way to produce art. I still believe that to do an exhibition is an act of creation, only to me it was so obvious that without exhibitions, there is no art object."[15]

If, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Obrist sees a tendency to shift from the central role of space to that of time, experimental performances in the 60s of the twentieth century were born instead on the idea of a new relationship between the public and space. Obrist has the opportunity to collect the testimony of one of the inventors of Pop Art, Richard Hamilton (1922-2011). "I wasn’t very interested in architecture as a practice, but I was interested in interiors. I had the opportunity as a student, having earned some money in the 1951 Festival of Britain making models, to get a mortgage and build a house. I was already thinking about designing interior spaces even if I wasn’t too concerned with the exterior (that was what architects did). (...) What was particularly novel about the experience of exhibition as a medium was to learn about a form that requires movement of the spectator in space. There are other experiences you can have: you can sit on a chair in a cinema watching a moving image projected on to a screen; you can read a book; you can absorb information in different ways. But exhibitions present information in such a way that the audience is required to move within it rather than have it directed at the static spectator. I wondered a lot about this, which culminated in an exhibition I did with Victor Pasmore in 1957 called 'An Exhibit' [Hatton Gallery, Newcastle and Institute of Contemporary Arts, London]. I had begun to understand that there were certain things that can be done in space that were hard to visualize, hard to understand or to work with at the level of plan and elevation. Plan and elevation are the tools that architects had to understand space from time immemorial. Architects had to work on the plan, the distribution of space on a plane, then the elevations of the walls. This restriction to rectilinear planes and what could happen on them rather distracted one from the possibility of understanding the space as a whole. As soon as it came to paper, putting down the information and drawing, it comes back to 2D, plan and elevation. And so, I speculated about Antoni Gaudí and thought he could not have produced what he had done if he had not moved around in the space and made decisions on it."[16]

Obrist asks: "The elements in 'An Exhibit' were suspended. How did the system work?"[17] "I devised a system - explains Hamilton - where we could hang Plexiglas sheets of standard size anywhere within a 3D grid of one foot, eight inches. So, the possibility of hanging the sheets vertically, horizontally, and at right angles to each other was almost infinite. The exhibition had no subject. It was self-referential, in the Frank Stella sense of the term. I became aware that it would be impossible to conceive the relationships in the normal way of plan and elevation; it had to be created progressively in the space itself, moving from one element to another. Once the first mark was made, by putting a plane in that space, it led to the consequence of placing a second plane, and so on. The whole thing had to develop organically." [18] "What if... it was just a question of placing planes in relationship? ... The idea was that in the poster/catalogue, in Alloway’s words 'The meaning of “An Exhibit” is now dependent on the decisions of visitors, just as - at an earlier stage – it is dependent on the artists (...). It is a game, a maze, a ceremony completed by the participation of visitors.’ "[19]

Obrist discusses the future of art in real time and museums with the Serbian artist Marina Abramović (1946), perhaps the most famous contemporary art performer: "The basis of a real-time piece is the dialogue with the public. The public completes the piece. The public is as important as the artists’ work. We have to put the attention on the public, definitely."[20] "The more we stop believing in things, the more people come to museums to find some kind of art spirituality." [21] Museums have to adapt to this feature, and not vice versa: artists should not depend on the availability of museum spaces. "The museums have to be adapted, and have to be constructed, so that they can really be a space of experiment, a kind of laboratory, an experimental world, and not just show a finished product that no one can touch." [22] "We are here to serve society, like oxygen: to bring new awareness. I’d really like to actually think about the public. We always forget the public, but the public is the one that completes the work. The public is very, very important. (...) Wherever the audience stands to look at a work of art, is holy ground. Without the audience the art does not exist. Art is made for the audience, we are made to serve the society and we are here to make a kind of bridge."[23]

The interdisciplinary dialogue

Obrist introduces the term 'promiscuity of collaboration’ [24], associating it with Grenoble, one of the capitals of European aesthetic experimentation. There were educated Ms Gonzalez-Foerster and Mr Parreno, in the last quarter of the twentieth century. A dialogue between artists - writes Obrist - has always existed; now, it is the time instead of a dialogue between different branches of human arts. And turning to Ms Gonzalez-Foerster, he asks: "You seem to me the perfect example of this development, in that you‘ve worked with musicians, composers, architects, and have made use of literature. I’d like to know if you also feel that there’s been a shift, a change in this sense." "Yes, it is very clear" answers Dominique. "I’ve come to realize that dialogue where differences are greater often ends up being more productive than dialogues with artists. In dialogues between artists, you always wind up with a similar language. As for myself, I am very curious about how other things function, whether in architecture or music or literature."[25]

The interdisciplinary dialogue contributes, according to Gonzalez-Foerster, also to a "complete renewal of this idea of ​​the exhibition through tackling other temporalities, other formats, other ways of working. And when you are, in that way, confronted with other ways of working – because architecture or music truly are different ways of working – you realize to what extent an exhibition can be fascinating in its laboratory dimension. That was also what your exhibition 'Laboratorium' [Gonzalez-Foerster is turning here to the exhibition which Obrist had curated along with B. Vanderlinden in Antwerp in 1999] was all about: the hypothesis that for people coming from different disciplines - for a biologist, an architect, a writer - the exhibition is a very satisfying form because it’s much quicker and far more stimulating. There are many architects who get excited right away about the idea of doing exhibitions, because they’re caught up in the deadlines, in constraints that are utterly different. So I think the exhibition is perhaps the experimental form par excellence."[26] 

Also 'This is Tomorrow', the first exhibition ever devoted to pop art, held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 1956, was an interdisciplinary event. A group of artists, architects, sculptors decided to propose a common reflection on the treatment of space and on visual illusions, inspired by the products of mass culture. Richard Hamilton speaks on it. "All these popular-culture images were related or contrasted with each other so that the way that we saw things could be informed by straightforward visual illusions."

"A few of visual illusions were taken from books, but many were made in the treatment of the space." "Visual distortions?" Obrist asks. "Yes. The kind of experience to be found in the Marcel Duchamp Rotoreliefs we had running. They’re an optical illusion. Marcel always found it wonderful that this should be a monocular spatial illusion. (...) These two themes, the new popular culture and the optics (…) were put together and presented in as dramatic and exciting a way as possible. The jukebox was running continuously and people could make a choice. They didn’t have to put a shilling or a sixpence in the machine, and this resulted in such constant use of the machine that no one got what they wanted because the choice might be playing an hour or two later. We also had a microphone in the last of the several chambers within the structure. A microphone on the wall with a balloon saying: 'Speak Here'. People would speak into it, but they did not know there was a loudspeaker (...) broadcasting what was said. Near a life-size cut-out of Marilyn Monroe was a giant bottle of Guinness: when you saw it from the front it reinforced this spacial disparity."[27]

For many of Obrist’s counterparts the main source of artistic creation is philosophy. It is the case of the American Elaine Sturtevant, (1924-), which in 1965 started a hitherto unexperienced practice: appropriation, i.e. the production, with small variations, of copies of artwork by other artists (as is the case with example of reproductions of some portraits by Warhol, even in this case of Marilyn Monroe).

"I guess repetition is difference, repetition expands limitations, repetition is... repetition is interior movement and so forth and so on, so it’s a very potent type of concept." [28] The American artist is confirmed in this conviction by the essay 'Difference and Repetition’ by Gilles Deleuze, published in 1968. Deleuze, along with Michel Foucault, became her point of reference. But the idea of replicating other people's art "certainly was not a pop-up idea. I have a background in Nietzsche, and Hegel, and Spinoza and Schopenhauer, and all those funny guys. In New York at that time the abstract expressionists and the pop artists were very, very popular - the abstract expressionists were all emotion on the surface, and the pop artists were about mass culture; this would of course trigger me into thinking about what the under-structure of art is. What is the power, the silent power, of art?"[29]

For another American artist of the same generation, Nancy Spero (1926-2009), the obligatory reference is also the 60's French philosophy: in this case existentialism. Spero notes that protest artists can express themselves without resorting to confrontation, or in "the way that describes women’s position philosophically; what Simone de Beauvoir said: not parallel, but an angle. Men’s art was more confrontational, like a bang." [30]. Art expresses resistance in different forms from that of the pure and simple opposition, as in the case of the series Black Paintings. "It is the time of Sartre, and it’s existential. These figures are stuck together. Usually they are male and female, but they can be many things: from males to females, from females to males.” [31] The paintings are produced by overlaying very light colours with dark colours: "So I used the best and most beautiful colours, and I painted and repainted and scrubbed and they turned very grey and very black and I would  scrub more and more and the images would appear. It was first painting and then scrubbing it out."[32]

Instead, with Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-1996) the figure of the philosopher Walter Benjamin and the impact of his famous essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" on contemporary art impose themselves. For him, modernity brings to the disappearance of the aura of artworks. Benjamin leads Felix Gonzalez-Torres to the idea "that the work does not really exist; works are destroyed, because there is never an original."[33] After the encounter with the writings of Benjamin, Gonzalez-Torres begins producing stacks of paper sheets that viewers can detach and carry home, until all the work is finished. "When I started to make these stacks in 1981, it was because – it may sound funny – at that time in New York everybody was fighting for wall space, I mean, the walls were all already taken. When you were going to be in a group show, you had to get into a fistfight to get two inches on the wall. So I said, ‘Fuck the walls’, I’ll just do something on the floor." [34] 

The South African Ernest Mancoba (1904-2002), another one of the (almost) centenarians interviewed in the book, rebels against the 'dictatorship of philosophy' in the art of the Northern Hemisphere; in his opinion, philosophy has produced an artificial gap between abstraction and figurative, "which provokes, more and more, a terrible atomization in the very essence of life. In no domain more than in the arts has this systematic dichotomy caused such destruction to the very foundation of the human identity as both belonging to nature and sharing in the essence of an ideal being. (...) Hence we have lost the capacity to unite in our vision the outward aspects with the inner significance."[35]

It is African art, instead, which might put a stop to the drift of the dictatorship of art philosophy: "So when they see an African sculpture with, for example, an enormous head and short legs, they will consider it ugly and judge it ‘worthless’. But for an African artist, it is not so much the abidance by certain rules (though he, too, generally, works according to particular canons) that makes a thing beautiful, but its capacity to evoke the inner being, by the strength of the outward aspect. To that effect, he uses all means, both figurative and abstract. When in my younger days I made the Bantu Madonna, I worked along certain European or classical canons, which some believers in the conception of ‘progress’ in art will judge outdated. (...) And the viewer, I hope, if I am lucky enough to have been understood and heard, can feel – under the surface of the classical mould – an African heartbeat. At times, the inner spirit breaks through, first in the very innovation within the South African context of taking a black woman to represent the Virgin Mary, and secondly in the warmth of the pulse that, though provisionally contained by the strictness of the style, speaks up under the skin or surface and threatens to burst free." [36]

The dialogue between disciplines is also necessarily a comparison (in fact, a competition), with technologies, first of all photography. This recalls the old debate on the 'comparison between the arts'. Painters are exposed to competition of photography, but the results of the contest are somewhat unexpected: it is painting to win.

David Hockney (1937,-), the main living British painter, says, not without a certain degree of pride, that once “many people felt that photography had replaced painting. In reality, painting is taking over photography." [37] Hockney is an artist who has been thinking a lot about the relationship between art and optical instruments (and particularly on the camera obscura and the camera lucida), devoting full years to the study of Flemish painting (Campin, Van Eyck, Van der Weyden) and seventeenth century (Caravaggio, Rembrandt) in an attempt to find out what optical devices the artists were using to capture and combine images. On this issue, he devoted a lengthy essay, titled "Secret Knowledge", which will be the subject of a separate analysis in this blog as one of the major contributions of contemporary artists to the study of the art of previous centuries.

Hockney, who for long had also produced paintings assembling collages of Polaroid pictures, taken from different angles, and had even done later experiments with Photoshop, at some point decided to close with photography. "The first exhibition we did with the Polaroid was called 'Drawing with a camera' (...) Actually, I put the camera lucida drawings at the end of that show and it signalled the end of my experiments with photography. I felt that I understood the historical notion of what had happened, how the camera had become a big part of our lives. I realized that now I could chuck away the camera. You know, Van Gogh hated photography, and if you think about it, Cézanne and Monet were pointing out that they saw things in another way. And that’s been ignored now. Did you see the Picasso and Matisse exhibition in London [at the Tate Modern in 2002]? When I first saw that, I went with Lucien Freud and Frank Auerbach; we went very early one morning when it was empty, and we had two hours to ourselves. It was marvellous. As we were coming out of the exhibition into the back rooms of the museum, there were four very large photographs - probably recent acquisitions - hanging on the wall. Lucien Freud and Frank Auerbach walked straight past them, but I  stopped to look at them and I thought to myself: ‘Well, these photographs certainly make the world look awfully dull, whereas Picasso and Matisse had made it look awfully interesting.’ I prefer the excitement. The photographs were recent, meaning that we are kind of going backwards; we don’t understand what photography is any more, or what it did historically. Do you see what I mean? If you grasp history a bit differently, you come back to painting with an incredible confidence. You don’t care about the arguments that painting is dead and so on. I’d actually say that it was photography that is dying or at least changing. It’s becoming more like painting: that is what Photoshop is doing."[38]

On the relationship between painting and photography (in a historical context that recalls the old masters) Obrist discusses with Gerhard Richter (1932-), the main living German painter, who experimented with new techniques, including that of painting above a photograph. The Swiss curator initiates the conversation: "You also talk about photography as drawing – or as the camera obscura, which Vermeer used - in the sense of being a preliminary stage in the production of a picture. This reverses the primacy of photography, which is supposed to have given rise to modernism by breaking down barriers. You simply use the photograph, in making the picture, as a matter of course.” Richter replies: "In the traditional practice of painting, that’s the first step. In the past, the painters went out into the open air and sketched. We take snapshots. It’s also meant to counter the tendency to take photography too seriously."[39]

It goes without saying that artists live in their own time, and necessarily leverage on the electronic tools that permeate our society. Hockney, for example, explains that, before painting, he creates a design, produces an electronic scan, zooms it up to a very large size, and then paints over the magnified electronic scan. "Yes, the thing is we are using technology, but you don’t see that we are using technology. [Pointing to huge canvas] I mean, to do that great big painting I needed the computer, otherwise I couldn’t see it. But remember: that big painting was all done out by my hand only. Nobody else painted on that picture."[40]

The artist couple Gilbert Prousch (1943 -) and George Passmore (1942-),  universally known as 'Gilbert and George', tells how the universalization of information technology completely changed the way they work. George says: "Yes, we’re using the computer to continue our art. There will be changes, as there have always been changes in our art. When we first started to make pictures around 1969, we had a totally different studio and equipment. But then we changed that, and two years on we changed it again, and then we introduced colour and again changed the equipment yet again. So this is another stage." Gilbert adds: "We feel it’s another technology for expressing oneself in a faster way. Normally when we do a piece, they’re so laborious and handmade, so now maybe we’ll be able to cut down some of the hours and make more pictures. That would be amazing (...) We’ve always had the idea of projecting our ideas directly from our brains on to the wall. And now we’re nearly able to do this! This will be the perfect machine for us." [41] And he adds, to explain their own current solutions: "But now we take the image and we scan it instead of projecting it with an enlarger. That’s the big difference. Once you scan it, you can do whatever you want with it. Of course, we were also able to do certain kinds of things with the enlarger, but it was very limited. Now, once you take the image apart, you can do whatever you want. We used to have this colourating - a layer of yellow or red. But now the computer has layers like this – it feels like it’s been designed especially for us. But we only do one, and only the real piece is signed, and that’s it. In some ways (...) it is like writing with images and is very personal. The negatives are words - visual words you put together to create a story." [42]

End of Part Two
Go to Part Three 

NOTES

[8] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects, 2015, Allen Lane. Quotation at p. 69.

[9] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 65.

[10] See http://iltempodelpostino.com/. The piece lasts three hours.

[11] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 63.

[12] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 360.

[13] Already quoted in this post. See also Francesco Mazzaferro, The Dialogue Between an Artist and a Philosopher: Jacques Monory and Jean-François Lyotard. Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 53.

[14] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 55.

[15] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 367.

[16] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 438.

[17] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 439.

[18] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 439.

[19] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 440.

[20] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 261.

[21] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 255.

[22] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 255.

[23] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 256.

[24] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 50.

[25] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 50.

[26] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 51.

[27] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 445.

[28] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 84.

[29] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, pp. 85-86.

[30] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 324.

[31] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 324.

[32] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 325.

[33] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 114.

[34] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 113.

[35] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 104.

[36] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, pp. 104-105.

[37] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 39.

[38] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 33-34.

[39] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, pp. 159-160.

[40] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 36.

[41] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 189.

[42] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 216.