Interviewing the Interviewer: A

Conversation with Hans Ulrich

Obrist
DECEMBER 06, 2011

by Cloe Floirat

Hans Ulrich Obrist Yang Fudong, Shanghai (2009)

At the age of 23, Hans Ulrich Obrist curated his first exhibition in his kitchen;
it included the work of artists including Christian Boltanski and Richard
Wentworth. He is now Co-Director, Exhibitions and Programmes, and
Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Since
the early 1990s, Obrist has mounted 150-plus exhibitions around the world,
hosted The Brutally Early Club (a breakfast salon before the sun has risen),
written catalogue essays and published numerous books. Obrist is the author
of The Interview Project, an extensive ongoing anthology of more than 2,000
hours of interviews with artists, architects, scientists, writers and engineers.
Cloe Floirat: I am interested in the form and the concept of the
interview itself, rather than an isolated interview about an artist, a
designer or an architects work. What is its role when it transcends
the traditional answer and question structure? A form of art
criticism? May it become an art form?
HUO: This is a very important question. Obviously interviews played an
important role in art history, at least since Vasari. Vasari was a great influence
for me, because I was always thinking: what will we know about the art of our
time if we look back in some century? Warhol too was an influence, because to
record everything at a certain moment is like creating a time capsule. I would
say the third historic influence on me was David Sylvester. He did this
wonderful book of interviews with Francis Bacon, which is one of my favourite
interviews book ever. You have a very rare in-depth situation because
Sylvester has interviewed Bacon again and again, and all over again,
throughout his life. The other influential character was Jonas Mekas. I think
without Jonas Mekas I would not have started to film my interviews.
CF: Did you initiate your first questions with the plan of making a
collection of interviews? Was The Interview Project premeditated?
HUO: I have always done this as a curator; I talk to artists. Little by little the
interviews were published and now there are artists holding seminars about
The Interview Project. It was not premeditated, there was never a strategy
behind it at all, it was never a conscious idea of now I want to write the
history of my time! That sort of grand gesture was not there. For me, it was to
be in the middle of things and in the centre of nothing. There was no master
plan and still there is not. It is more that, all of a sudden, there is an occasion
or a desire to interview someone; little by little there a system develops. But
the system comes a posteriori, not a priori.
CF: What does that system look like?
HUO: If this is the art world, [draws a square in the centre of white page, and
illustrates artists with dots inside that art-world square], I have interviewed
many great protagonists. First the artists I met when I was a student,
Alighiero Boetti I did not record these first conversations sadly. Everything
between 1986 and 1991, the first five years are lost. From 1991, I started to
record. Because I was a curator, I also wanted to know where curating comes
from, so I started more systematically to interview curators, like Pontus
Hultn. But if you want to understand the forces in art you need to understand
what is happening in other fields. From art I went into science; from art I went
into music; from art I went into literature; from art I went into architecture.
And gradually it is like a concentric circle, it goes from the art world to all
these other worlds, and then, from there, it goes into the multitude.
CF: In the first volume of your Interviews, what is the reason of
listing the interviews in an alphabetic order? Not chronological? Is

it to emphasize the manual aspect that the volume eventually

provides?
HUO: There are lots of different books from The Interview Project, and, each
time, there is a different rule. When you have a big archive of interviews, you
can start to edit in different ways. One is according to cities, for example we
have the Beijing Marathon and the London Marathon. David Sylvesters
interviews were published according to geography: his London interviews, and
his New York interviews. I can have them according to professions; I can have
all the curators interviews, like in A Brief History of Curating. Or I can have
them according to one artist, which is Sylvesters model for Bacon: all the
interviews I have ever done with Gerhard Richter or Olafur Eliasson, for
example. Or there is the Conversations Series with Walther Koenig Books: 21
books of in-depth interviews.
In Volume 2, the editors Karen Marta, Shumon Basar and Charles ArsneHenry wanted to show, as well the in-depth model, the broad spectrum of
The Interview Project. In Volume 1, the order is according to the alphabet,
and then for Volume 2 the three editors decided to do it according to birthdays
so highlighting the five generations occupied by the interviewees. But who
knows? We have to find out our own rules of the game, how to classify the
material. It is a very big body of texts. A great-unrealized project is to do
something online with it; that will be the next step.
CF: Do you consider yourself as an art historian?
HUO: I never studied art history; I studied social science and politics. I am
curator foremost, I am curator of science, a curator of music, a curator of
literature, a curator of architecture, but also I work as a critic.
CF: Of the different roles you play which one of them do you
assume when you interview someone?
HUO: When I am interviewing, I am just learning.
CF: A listener?
HUO: Yes and I am like a student, I want to be a student all my life. I think
the best thing in life is to be a student. When one stops learning it is terrible,
particularly when you develop a trajectory, then you start to become more and
more busy, and stop reading. And for me The Interview Project is to be an
eternal student. I still function like a student, with hundred of books at home.
When I do an interview I need to read all night long to prepare it, so it is the
same intensity as when I had seminar as a student. And usually that goes away
in life, but The Interview Project keeps me alive like a student.
CF: Robert Storr has said that you are an animator, but an
interesting one. At first I found it rather derogative, perhaps too
connected to talk-show culture. But then I appreciated that it was,
in fact, a very accurate portrayal of your purpose if one reflects on
the word animator in terms of the one who animates situations,
conversations and his ability to generate attention, just like a
motivator or a generator even.
HUO: Animator is one of my many roles, I am a researcher, I am a
fundraiser, I am a museum director, and I am definitely an interviewer. These
are just aspects of a generalist profession. I think in the idea of animating,
there is obviously a little bit of a negative connotation, because it has so much
to do with events culture and all that, so I preferred the definition of the
junction maker. What J.G. Ballard taught me is to make junctions and build
bridges. I think we live in a world where we have objects, quasi-objects, non-

objects. It is important also to have inter-subjective situations. I think my role

of curator is not just in the exhibitions I install in spaces like in the
Serpentine, or the exhibitions I install in time like Il Tempo del Postino and
the Marathons. But it is also in the projects that bring people together, and I
see this as a very important part of my curation. I want my work to be useful
for the world; I want it to be a toolbox. I do not want things that close down. I
was never interested in occupying territories. I want to liberate.
CF: You question artists about their references, their influences,
who from the past have inspired them. By stimulating the past, and
the forgotten practitioners, it generates a mise en abme in
producing art history. It generates some kind of family tree. Is it a
way to keep the past present?
HUO: It is clearly an aspect of what I often call the protest about forgetting.
Obviously, I have a lot of questions; I learn from an interview what it is very
interesting to ask the next person about. As Philippe Parreno says la chane
est belle; its a kind of chain reaction. I observed, for example, that if on
Monday I interview a film director, on Tuesday I interview an artist, on
Wednesday I interview an architect which is very often my week then, by
the end of the week, what the architect told me connects to what the artist told
me, connects to what the film director told me. There is a kind of strange
morphogenetic field, as Rupert Sheldrake calls it, different disciplines are
interested in similar things. So then I started to think, I have a quite extreme
schedule, if I push it even further then I could do the Marathon: 50
interviews in one day. We did the Marathon for the first time in 2005, in
Stuttgart, and then in London with Rem Koolhaas, and since then we have
done it many times. I have lots of papers like this, thousand of these papers,
and if I do an interview I take some of them. I do not script it in a linear way,
for me it never works if I have a list with all the questions. While people talk to
me and actually sometimes people become confused because they think I
am not listening to them I am actually looking what could be a great link to
the next question. Suddenly it is like a card game.
CF: You frequently question the existence of unrealized projects. Is
this a method to stimulate lost, forgotten or misunderstood
projects from the past? From that they are too often unreported
propositions and solutions for the art world and its future?
HUO: It is actually my most frequent question. The second most frequent is:
what advice to a young artist? And, finally, the question about the epiphany.
How did Benoit Mandelbrot discover fractal geometry? How did Gerhard
Richter discover over-painted photographs? But there is a reason that the
most recurrent question is on unrealized projects. I believe that we know very
little about them.
CF: They could still play a valuable purpose for the future? Like in
architecture, models and projects submitted for competition
remain unrealized, yet when they are not published they stands on
every architects website as visions.
HUO: That is right, but, for example, we do not know about the unrealised
projects of filmmakers, of scientists, and of artists, even less.
CF: If the California artist Amy Alexander would invited you to
self-interview, what would be the answer to your own question
about the unrealized project?
HUO: In 1986, when I was 18 years old, Alighiero Boetti told me this could be

my life. I really did think artists were the most important people on the planet,
and I wanted to be helpful and useful for artists. He said I could get all of
these unrealized projects and try to make them happen, to produce them as
realities. And so the irony is that I have been gathering thousand of unrealized
projects, but whenever I want to do my big exhibition on unrealized projects it
fails. So my unrealized project is to do a big exhibition on unrealized projects.
And maybe even more to build a palace of unrealized project.
CF: Today is it still you chasing artists for interviews, or is your
prey lying in wait to be captured in their interview by Hans Ulrich
Obrist? To be part of his oral history?
HUO: Very often the desire has to come from me in the first place. Because it
is my way of questioning the world so it has to come from my desire to
understand the world. As much as it is a personal system within which it is
about this desire, there is also a certain degree of objectivity and also
collectively. The Interview Project now is a more collective project, it is more
known that it used to be. People know that I have done many interviews so
they say: have you ever interviewed this great 80-year-old composer? Or this
wonderful scientist? It could be nice to add it to your project. It is very
generous, and very wonderful that is has become a feedback loop. And the
Marathon obviously is a very new form of producing interviews. Each time it
produces a micro-archive in itself, and these interviews can then be published
again in magazines. But what is very important, what I said in the beginning,
there is not a master plan. It is very rhizomatic, it is a very Deleuzian thing.
What is also very important is that The Interview Project was always almost
like a broke heaven, its a zero-sum calculation; I never made any money with
it. But the money I make from publishing in magazines, catalogues and books
pays for the editing, the PhD students from different countries that work on
those transcriptions. But what I always did from the beginning and what is
very important is that I can keep the rights with the artist so that later I can
publish it again in any anthologies. There is always the thought about the
archives.
CF: Your interviews are by-products of other events. You use every
occasion to conduct them. In the most unexpected situation, you
always take out your video camera to record any exchange of ideas.
Is it also the case when you are being interviewed? Do you record
and collect those conversations too?
HUO: When I was a student I travelled in night trains and had my grand
tour, and after that I was really prepared. At 23, I did my first kitchen
exhibition; from then everything went pretty fast. I got a grant from Cartier
Fondation in Paris, I was invited to the Museum dArt Modern de Paris to do
Migrateurs, I was invited to work with Kaspar Knig. So between 1992 and
1993 my activity went from this strange obscure Swiss student travelling
around in night trains to see artists, to the most public voice of new curating.
But because it was like this that I had to go out in public, I think The
Interview Project was very important, otherwise one would burn out very
quickly.
CF: I met Markus Miessen two weeks ago in Berlin. He mentioned
The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict project in which you
are involved. How is this project connected to your Interview
Archive project?
HUO: With Markus Miessen I have been discussing how we use the archives

digitally. There is obviously the whole tagging technology, so we worked

together with Armin Linke and the Institute for the 21st Century, founded by
Karen Marta and Bettina Korek. And the Institute tries to help The Interview
Project, we get support to try to archive and keep it together. With Miessen,
Linke and the Institute we developed this tagging site for Cedric Price. The
beautiful thing about the tagging system we showed at the Venice Biennale
is that you can just click in Fun Palace and there everything that has ever
been said about the Fun Palace comes. So you could imagine once my all
archives are there, you could type colour red or colour blue, and then
everything an artist or an architect who ever mentioned something about the
colour red would start to speak. So you can actually make the living and the
dead speak to each other.
About the author
Cloe Floirat is a critic and cartoonist, based in Berlin
and currently a student on the Critical Writing in Art and Design
MA programme at the Royal College of Art, London.