Hans Ulrich Obrist: “Art Can Always Come to Us Through Different Channels”

TRANSCRIPT

Hans Ulrich Obrist: I never want to instrumentalize art in a way which reflects an agenda, which is not necessarily implicit in the artist and in the art. So that’s why I always develop my exhibitions out of the dialogue with artists. Then I think generosity is really important. I’ve always believed that generosity should be somehow the medium of the curator so that’s why I think a curator should never keep information for themselves. It’s about sharing.

Dan Rubinstein: Hi, I’m Dan Rubinstein, and this is The Grand Tourist. I’ve been a design journalist for more than 20 years, and this is my personalized guided tour to the worlds of fashion, art, architecture, food and travel, all the elements of a well-lived life.

On this program, we’ve met dozens of rock star names in art, painters, photographers, sculptors, gallerists, choreographers, directors and the architects that build incredible spaces for all of it. But curators, embarrassingly not so much. That’s why I was so excited to speak with my guest today, Hans Ulrich Obrist. As the artistic director of London’s famed Serpentine since 2006, he’s been at the forefront of his profession for decades and has become a household name in the industry.

Throughout his career, he’s produced dozens of shows that have examined and elevated the most daring and talented contemporary artists in the world. But beyond that, he’s helped to influence the very profession itself by pushing the role of the curator beyond the stereotype of a dusty academic and towards an outgoing, inquisitive creator of curatorial adjacent initiatives. With informal projects amplified by the emergence of social media, such as his much talked about Interview Project, which we’ll get into. All of that to say he’s no media darling slouch.

He’s written numerous books, is known for his brutally early morning meetings. He’s also said to buy a book every day and is constantly looking to identify the next cultural shift that will inform his exhibitions and initiatives. Perhaps to me, he’s a workaholics workaholic, precise, introspective, and always looking to elevate his game. Born and raised in Switzerland, you’ll learn today that Obrist was probably always destined for the job, curating exhibitions of postcards in his bedroom and later his kitchen, as a young impresario. More on that later.

I caught up with the one and only Obrist from his office at the Serpentine, to talk about the history and evolution of the institution, his lifelong love of trains, the future of curation, why he owns an Xbox, and if anyone ever says no to the most influential curator in contemporary art.

What was your earliest memory of life growing up?

Yeah, I grew up in a small town in the eastern part of Switzerland, in Weinfelden. It’s basically about 10, 15 miles from the Lake of Constance, the Bodensee and the Bodensee connect, Switzerland, Germany and Austria. So there wasn’t a lyceum in Weinfelden, and so one had to take the train every day to go to school. And obviously this idea, we would go during lunch break to Germany. One could swim to Austria, we would go to the movies in Germany.

So yeah, kind of crossing borders. I would never leave the house without my passport, right, because that’s how it is to live in a trislander, a triangle of three countries. And I suppose that was kind of important for me as a kid. Yeah.

And did they encourage you to do anything creative as a child? What did you like to do when you… Did you have art classes in school or did you show any kind of interest there?

No, school, it was not so much about art. No, school was really for me, about languages because I wanted to get ready to… I always wanted to move to a big city, so for me, Switzerland is a great country. It’s very decentralized. There’s a lot of wonderful cities, but it doesn’t have this kind of one big capital like Paris or London, New York or Madrid. And so I wanted to move to a big city. And of course for Swiss people, Paris is the closest sort of capital. That’s also a long tradition historically of artists and creatives moving there. Meret Oppenheim also Giacometti, the surrealist.

So I was kind of aware of that and I thought I should learn languages in order to be ready to leave at some point. So I learned French and Italian very early on. And then English of course, and then also Spanish and other languages, became a very multi linguist kind of upbringing. The school was kind of an opportunity to learn these languages. And I would say visual arts was quite autodidactic. I mean, my parents wouldn’t go to museums, so visual arts kind of arrived in our household through artworks being reproduced and artists doing things beyond the world of museums.

For example, the Swiss railway system had a timetable and they commissioned an artist every year to do the cover. So it was done that year by Claude Sandoz, who was then also the first artist I ended up meeting, was the first studio visit. The very famous Swiss artist, Jean Tinguely designed covers for chocolate boxes. And so my parents would buy these chocolates and I would be more interested in the box. So it’s interesting how art can actually come to us through different channels, not necessarily only through museums. And I would say that’s what happened.

And then I have also this memory that my parents would always go to Zurich to do shopping because there’s lots of things you couldn’t find in the small city, in the small town. So sometimes on Saturdays we would go to Zurich. And on Bahnhofstrasse, which is the main shopping area in Zurich, there was this artist who sold flowers. He was basically a migrant worker and also a self-taught artist, and he would sell flowers, but between the flowers, he would also sell little drawings. He was doing this very fabulous… It’s quite famous actually in Switzerland now, sort of posthumously, there are lots of museum shows, a big museum show now in [inaudible 00:05:57] devoted to him.

And he developed these very beautiful cow machines because he observed the cows in the summer going to the mountains, the cows coming down in winter and would make these almost like cinematographic cow machines and draw these cows. So I would sort of encounter… He was the very first artist I met when I was maybe 10 or 12, because my parents would sometimes buy flowers from him, and then I would see these drawings and I was fascinated. So it came to me through very unexpected doors and windows in a way.

And lots of kids collect things, even if it’s not art. Did you collect anything as a child, or as a teenager?

Yeah, I collected postcards throughout my teens and basically postcards of artworks. And I also installed somehow a pocket museum in my room at my parents’ home, where I built these cardboard rooms. Since the beginning probably of me being a curator, and I would start to install the postcards in lots of different ways and do temporary exhibitions with them. So yeah, that was definitely a kind of collecting endeavor. With all my pocket money, when I was 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, I bought these postcards.

Part of the lore of your early interactions with the art world are about when you were a high school student, and you would contact artists directly just as a fan and say, “Hey, can I meet you?” Is that true?

Yeah. After visiting Claude Sandoz who did the Swiss timetable, I then visited Fischli Weiss, the Swiss artist, Peter Fischli and David Weiss and they were working on this movie The Way Things Go, which is an amazing film of a chain reaction and that really unleashed a chain reaction in my own life. I then would just continue to visit studios and the artists would often recommend me to other artists, and it became a never ending series. It still continues today. I visit studios every day and of thousands of studio visits. So yeah, that’s absolutely true.

And of course, because I was so young, I was 16 or 17, it also made it easier because people thought it was very unique and special that such a young person would be so fascinated by their work. And so somehow all doors opened. I had really lots of amazing experiences and artists mentored me and gave me their time. It was very special.

What were they like?

At the beginning, I suppose there was this sort of idea… Just because I was 16, it was very unusual, so it was kind of a phenomenon. And there became kind of a rumor, this teenager going to studios. But then quite soon, because I would travel so intensely by train, I would… Trains have always been preferred medium of transport, and still today I travel a lot in Europe by train. I love night trains. At that time I would exclusively, solely travel by train, and I would have this basically inter-rail ticket young people can have, where you can travel for a month for very little money all over Europe.

I had no money for hotels, so I would really spend the nights on trains and 10 hours arrive in a city and make studio visits. And I suppose initially it was kind of a curiosity of a sixteen-year-old going to artist studio, quite soon, I would say after about a year, I accumulated quite a lot of knowledge and experience. And we have to also keep in mind, I think that this is the 80s, so we are basically in 1985, and that’s four years before Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. So we don’t have the internet and so I was always inspired by that.

Growing up in the eastern part of Switzerland, I think it’s always interesting, the first museums one visit as a child. My parents did actually take me to a museum. It wasn’t an art museum, it was a monastery library of these medieval books in Saint Gallen of these medieval manuscripts. I was very fascinated by these migrant monks, monks who would spend some time in the monastery and then carry the knowledge to the next city, to the next monastery and bring all the knowledge there, pick up the new knowledge. And in a way, that’s what kind of happened.

I would go to a city, I would visit many studios. I would go to the next city and tell the next city about what I had seen in the previous city. So after about a year of me having visited hundreds of studios, it was no longer just a curiosity. It became also interesting for the artists I visited, because I could relate things to other studios and to other exhibitions I had seen. And it became more like an exchange and not just a unilateral transfer of me asking questions. I could also tell some stories, but that certainly wasn’t the case.

When I was 16, I was just asking many, many questions because I was driven by a really immense curiosity, which I still am.

You went to school, I think, at Saint Gallen, the same place that you had mentioned earlier and studied economics and politics. Was that your parents’ influence or did you not want to study art history somewhere or something like that?

Yeah, that’s an interesting question. Thank you. Because actually it wasn’t related at all to my parents. I mean, my parents were anyway, they were thinking… I was saying, I’m going to curation, I’m becoming a curator. And they for a long time thought it’s some kind of medical profession because of the curare. It was kind of a good misunderstanding, so they were fine. But no, I felt that I was auto didactically already very advanced in terms of art history. And I made all this research and I wanted to study something else, which I couldn’t do on my own.

I felt a great sense of urgency in terms of the environment, and how we could actually bring in ecology into economy. And there was this famous, this very legendary and also well-known, I would say institute in Saint Gallen, the highest case, of course, still a very, very well-known school in Saint Gallen, but also it had this pioneering institute by Professor Binswanger for economy and ecology, how to actually introduce ecology into economy, something he already pioneered in the 80s, which is of course a major, major topic today and has become a bigger topic ever since.

I was very fascinated by that and by also in a way, the way Binswanger connected all of this to Goethe, because he came actually from Goethe and he was very interested in alchemy. But he was also very interested in Goethe as a writer, as a kind of very universally knowledgeable person who had done so much research in lots of different fields. Goethe actually was the economy minister in Weimar of his period, of his time. And so this idea that a novelist could be a minister of economy. For me, it always interesting how we can actually bring different art forms into society.

I was always interested by this idea of John Latham and Barbara Steveni of the Artist Placement Group. How can we bring art beyond the museum, which is why I’m interested in public art. That’s also how art came to me. I wouldn’t be here today and I wouldn’t talk to you, and I would never have become a curator and a museum director if art wouldn’t have come to me. If people wouldn’t have made the effort to make exhibitions on biscuit boxes, on billboards in the street, if the timetable in Switzerland wouldn’t have commissioned an artist to do an artwork, if Hans Krüsi wouldn’t have brought his drawings to the shopping street of Zurich and sold them among flowers.

So this idea that we bring art into society, I mean there was of course a big discussion about that during the Roosevelt era with basically all these murals commissioned in post offices. And I think we need something like that for today. And of course, it today might not be murals in post offices. We’ve just done this project which opened last week, which inaugurated at the UN in New York, which I curated with Patricia Dominguez, the artist and Jeppe Ugelvig the curator together with R2030 and also the UN and the [inaudible 00:14:15] of Michael Tauber. So we basically invited 21 artists to do a billboard, a poster, a billboard for the UN Summit, which is happening this week in New York, the Climate Summit and the Future Summit and the General Assembly. And everybody who is going to attend the General Assembly is going to pass by our billboards and this involves lots of different collectives, younger collectives, but also well-known artists who have worked for a long, long time with climate like Maya Lin. And these billboards and posters will then go into the City of New York on bus stops and reach hundreds of thousands or millions of people. And I’ve always believed in that. And I think it has to do with the fact how I experienced my initiation to art and I really believe in the transformative power of art.

And so I think it’s our task, I think. I see it as my task also as a curator, a museum director, to always generate and facilitate and enable such situations where we can create contact zones for people with art who otherwise would not encounter art.

To give you another example, here in London, I’m the artistic director of the Serpentine. And so we in London create, for example, situations like the pavilion. So every summer we commission an architect, this year it’s Minsuk Cho from South Korea, to do a pavilion on the lawn that’s there from June to October for approximately a hundred days. And this pavilion doesn’t even have doors, it’s wide open for the visitors. So everybody who kind of visits the park can just stumble into it, can walk into it, can encounter it by chance. That’s art and architecture for all. And I think this idea, this effort now to kind of create situations where people can maybe experience art, architecture, design, exhibitions, music, all art forms without necessarily knowing, but all of a sudden having this encounter is important.

And when you started in your career, in your early career, and you’re working in these institutions and you had these fellowships and you worked in Paris, and because you didn’t study art history traditionally in the same way other curators may have, and you had already had so much experience and so many adventures, I guess you could say, before you even started working, what were some of your early days in the office like? Did you kind of struggle against coming into a museum where you had lots of senior curators or people who believed this is the way that things should be done and you’re the new kid? What was that experience like coming from your background?

Yeah, I mean, it was a bit of a challenge in France initially because in France, there is a quite academic system and you’re basically a conservator, you’re a museum curator, conservator after having gone to certain schools and not having done that was certainly unorthodox. But I think if you look at the history of curating, so many curators in the generation before me came from different fields, Kasper König came from anthropology, and I wrote a brief history of curating where I spoke to many curators from different backgrounds, from different geographies who all did pioneering work in the 60s, 70s. So they were one or two generations before me, and many of them came kind of from elsewhere. And also I think we shouldn’t forget that very often artists are really important curators. Lots of the really historic exhibitions, if you look at… I mean, I’m from Zurich, the city of Dada. I was born there before my parents then moved to the countryside and basically Zurich being the city of Dada, I mean the Dada movement, the Dadaists did their own shows. These are artists curating their own shows. The same was true for Duchamp with the surrealist exhibition.

So I think there was never really a problem with that because I think it’s also a fairly new profession the way I did it, because it wasn’t like a traditional museum role. I mean, I never really had a role in an institution which existed before my arrival. Institutions always created the roles for me. The Musée d’Art Moderne created this role of migratory curator. So my job was to migrate, not only to make research and then bring this content into the museum, but also to migrate within the museum because I had this formula [inaudible 00:18:44] and it could happen in the basement, it could happen on the plaza in front of the museum, it could happen in the cafeteria, it could happen in the exhibition spaces, it could happen where we expect it least. So that was the job of the migratory curator.

Then in London, I became co-director of the Serpentine. My initial title was director of international projects. So, again, a new role was created. That was before I then became artistic director. And so in a way, yeah, my early stages in the institutions had all to do with these new roles which were created. And I was also very inspired, I think, by this idea of Harald Szeemann who once explained to me, the Swiss curator, that was always… He was the curator at the time of the Kunsthaus Zürich when I went there first in the 80s and he did all these amazing shows. I grew up with Gesamtkunstwerk, the inclination towards the total work of art and very inspiring shows for me. And he explained to me that it’s important to be in the institution but also to be outside the institution, to kind of continue to have activities, and this is what I’ve always done. I’ve always worked globally and then brought a lot of this content into Paris, into the institution where I worked. And so it’s in that sense.

But office days, because you ask about office days, I mean, very often my office days, there is, of course, a certain part of the office days administration, a certain part of the office days is internal meetings. But I’ve always made sure that every day there is also artist meetings that I would not lose that connection and that the studio visits would always continue. And I would also always make sure that I’m not… I think it’s quite unhealthy to be too long seated at the desk. So I would often do meetings on the move. I would do meetings, particularly now since I’m in London, in 2006 I moved to the Serpentine. We are surrounded by the park, and I always consider the park to be my office in a way.

And on sunny days or cloudy days when it’s not raining, it’s obviously not working when it rains, but whenever it’s not too cold and when it doesn’t rain, which is probably a majority of the days per year, I do most of my meetings as walks in the park. So that’s kind of an extension of the office. I love meetings. I think so many ideas are born when you go with someone on a walk. And I would do these meetings whilst walking. And, obviously, one of my early museums when I was a kid in Switzerland was this museum. After I had the postcards, I started a museum for Robert Walser, and Robert Walser is the great Swiss writer. He’s finally more translated now. Robert Walser has been very inspiring to Susan Sontag, and he’s been biggest inspiration to many visual artists and whoever listens to that and hasn’t read Robert Walser, I recommend all the books of Robert Walser, but particularly also Carl Seelig, the biographer of Robert Walser, wrote a very beautiful book about his walks with Robert Walser. And so I’ve always been inspired by this idea going on walks.

And one of the first initiatives that you worked on was The Kitchen Show that I think then led to a fellowship with the Cartier Foundation. Tell us what The Kitchen Show was, and if someone were to come and see it, what would they experience?

So yeah, The Kitchen Show, I mean, basically I’ve always had a lot of books. I’m always, as you can see here, surrounded by mountains of books.

There’s a lot of books behind you.

And I also buy a book every day, and I edit and write a lot of books. So books have been, I mean, that’s, again, my first visit in an art institution was in a monastery library. So it just shows how important it is, maybe, the first museum experience we do have during our childhood. And so my apartment was full of books and my artist friends would visit, Christian Boltanski would come, Fischli Weiss would come, and they would say, “You should cook. The kitchen is full of books. You can’t use the kitchen.” So in a way, the beginning of The Kitchen Show was really the artist suggesting to remove the books from the kitchen and Fischli Weiss brought these huge quantities of food, they build a kitchen altar. So that was the first exhibit, and then Boltanski projected a candle. Then Frédéric Bruly Bouabré sent little drawings from the Ivory Coast about milk and coffee and tea, and he inserted it into a kitchen gallery.

And so through that, it grew and I decided to kind of open it up and invite friends and acquaintances. So the show lasted three months. It had a budget of about $300. So it was very DIY. That’s what I could afford in my student apartment. And yeah, it had 29 visitors over three months. But it did become a rumor because the 29 people who saw it, they had a quite strong experience that they would tell it to all their friends. And then we did the book and the rumor kept growing. So exhibitions can actually over time become rumors. And I think also, I mean, what people would’ve seen, they would’ve seen a wide-open kitchen cupboard with oversized quantity of food, it’s a bit like when as a child everything appears big now and then later in life things appear less big.

So all of a sudden because these five liters of ketchup, 10 kilogram of noodles were these really huge quantities, you are sort of transported back into your childhood because it appeared so big. It was kind of a very beautiful piece. And then Richard Wendt was double, the sink. Then you had also, you had an exhibition in the fridge. So visitors were invited to open the fridge, and I suddenly had food in the fridge because I didn’t really cook. But in the fridge, there was a marble egg and there was some feathers, and that was the kitchen show in the fridge. So it’s a fridge exhibition by the late Hans-Peter Feldman, who sadly passed away, the legendary German artist. So in a way, it was my first show, and it was basically, I was for a long time thinking where I should begin and I wanted to begin with a really small show, and then from there, it could grow in a organic way.

And in all of these explorations, were you ever tempted to go into the gallery side of things rather than the curatorial side?

I mean, for me it was always about building bridges between people and I’m a junction maker, as J.G. Ballard described my activity, and I think in a way, no, I never really thought about going to the art market is not something which occurred to me. I was initially doing these exhibitions in unexpected locations because I wanted to bring art to the people in new ways. Then I got quite soon offered a museum job in Paris when I was like 24, 23 at the Musée d’Art Moderne, the Museum of Modern Art of City of Paris, which is obviously a childhood dream. I could finally go to Paris. I got a grant from the Cartier Foundation, I got the job in Paris. Then I started to work with, and that was Suzanne Pagé, she’s one of the really most important museum directors of the 20th Century. And so she became my mentor.

So my mentors were all museum people and were all working on public exhibitions. So it’s just what I learned to do also, and where I was in a way driven, where my curiosity drove me. And it has to do, I think, with this idea of creating dialogue, creating conversations, conversations between artworks but also between different forms of public, between… It’s not like one highway, it’s lots of different bridges. It’s bridge building, really, my activity. And then, of course, I also, from my second mentor, Suzanne Pagé was my museum mentor, Kasper König, who just passed away, the German impresario, he was my [foreign language 00:26:31] kind of exhibition maker mentor and that’s how I then learned how to make big exhibitions. I learned the craft of how to make a book, all of these very practical things, and also organizational things, and also just how to make a synthesis because I wasn’t used, I just was working in a very fragmented, small way. And Kasper taught me how to make bigger theme shows.

 And Suzanne Pagé showed me how we connect the collection to contemporary, art, we can actually use also and celebrate contemporary art by connecting it to history and not separating it from history and all of these things. So no, it wasn’t… It’s just my past. That’s my past.

(SPONSOR BREAK)

When it comes to these projects, obviously before you had lots of positions before the Serpentine, but you also did a lot of these personal initiatives even as an adult, and one of them is the interview project. And I’m wondering, again, this is something that has kind of taken on a life of its own. In your own words, can you describe what is the interview project? And why did you feel it was worth the time and the investment that you’ve put into it?

Yeah. Like a lot of things I do, they kind of grow organically over time, and I just happened to have always had these conversations with artists, and then also because I was very young at the beginning, artists often gave me advice. They would almost give me ideas of what I could do, or they felt they had to somehow, yes, give me advice from my trajectory because I was just beginning and learning and it was also fresh. So Alighiero Boetti told me that I should ask artists about the unrealized projects. Rosemarie Trockel told me that I should not only look at artists of my generation, but I should also look at pioneering artists of previous generations because very often amazing artists are forgotten, and my work could be to also protest against forgetting. I could actually revisit artists from previous generations and help them to gain visibility. So that was her advice.

So anyway, a lot of artists gave me advice and Jonas Mekas, the filmmaker, gave me this very precious advice I will never forget. We were sitting near Chatelet in Paris in a cafe, and I was telling him about all the artists I met that week, and he said, “But have you been recording it?” And I said, “No.” And he said, “One day you’re going to really regret that.” And I am really ever grateful to Jonas because if he hadn’t told me that this archive as it exists now might not exist because I then started to audio record, but then Jonas said, “You should also film it.” So then I brought the camera because it was obviously we thought these phones, so I needed a little video camera with these mini cassettes. And I really documented, I would say from 2000 onwards, almost earlier, even from ’95, ’96 onwards for now almost 30 years, all my conversations with artists and studio visits and exhibition visits.

And it’s an archive of probably about 4,000 hours, mostly video and some of it is sound. And so it was basically not from the beginning, this idea now there is this interview project, it just grew. And I mean, a lot of these conversations are research conversations, and then at the moment, people wanted to publish the interviews, they remind about the invitations from publishers to do books. And so little by little it turned into what now can be considered to be this interview projects. But it’s a very organic system, and I suppose it just has to do with the fact also that I wanted to kind of create an archive of the voices of the artists of our time.

And I suppose it goes back again to my childhood and adolescence because I was always reading Vasari lives of the artists, lives of the architects. And I think the way Vasari wrote the art history of his time, I thought it would be interesting to do that in a way for our time. And just also, I mean listening, I think part of this interview project is just also to listen that we… I mean, Etel Adnan, the poet, an artist and writer who also inspired me a lot and was a very dear friend of mine, she passed away in her late 90s. And Etel always talked about this idea that we have to learn to listen. And I think my entire interview project has also got to do with that, it’s about listening. It’s a project about the importance of listening.

The Serpentine Gallery is sort of quite this institution of contemporary art. And I’m wondering, if you were to ever meet somebody that has no idea what the Serpentine is, how do you describe it to someone who’s completely uninitiated?

Yeah, thank you. This is an interesting question because actually we no longer call it the Serpentine Gallery now, we got rid of the word gallery, we just called it Serpentine because we think it’s-

I’m showing my age.

Yeah. Because we think it’s interesting that it’s more open, and the idea that it’s not only, Serpentine is not only for people interested in art, it’s much broader. And we bring together art, and architecture, and design and have, of course, also different departments like technology and ecology. So the way I would describe it is that it’s basically a contemporary art space, it’s a Kunsthalle, as I would call it in German know. It’s a space with our collection, it’s a contemporary art space. But if you want to understand the forces effective in art, we need to understand what’s happening in science, in music, in literature, in architecture, and design. So the Serpentine in that sense is a kind of an interdisciplinary space anchored, of course, in art because that’s where we are coming from, that’s our home base as to say. But from there, we connect to all these other fields. It has free admission in a park. I mean, the park is a common, and it’s one of the things I love so much about London, one of the many things I love about London.

And maybe the thing I love most about London is this amazing presence of the parks because again, we can basically just walk and walk, and also so many people come to the park and then through their visit in the park, come also to the gallery. So it’s, of course, very important that like the park, the gallery also has free admission. So in that sense, it’s very much, as Tim Berners-Lee said in 1989 when he invented the World Wide Web, he said, “This is for everyone,” we believe that the Serpentine is art for all art forms, and that it’s for everyone. And of course, we have all year the exhibitions, we have two galleries. We have the Serpentine South and the Serpentine North Gallery for Bettina Korek our CEO, for myself, and the artistic director, and all our teams and our different departments, it’s so important that we can basically all year long have these exhibitions in both south and north, but then have in summer also the pavilion, which I mentioned before. The Pavilion, which has no doors, and is on this little piece of lawn in front of the gallery, which is architecture for art.

And then of course, as we are in the park, we also really believe in public art where we go art into the park. So for the moment, we have a Gerhard Richter sculpture in front of the gallery, we have always in front of the gallery, there is a platform where we always exhibit public art. But then sometimes in collaboration with the Royal Parks, so our landlord, and in dialogue with them. We also go deeper into the park and we now have the biggest pumpkin Yayoi Kusama ever created, she placed it near the lake in the middle of the park. So this idea of public art is also part of our campus. Of course, the South Gallery is the older gallery, we’ve had for longer and for more than 50 years, that has been an art gallery is basically initially a former teahouse turned a gallery. And then the newer gallery is the North Gallery across the bridge, which was converted by Zaha Hadid, it’s the late Zaha Hadid’s only building in central London. And it’s a very almost like cathedral-like cafe space, which she designed. And then a much more, I would say, more sort of historic space for art because it’s a former Munition depot that was more like a renovation of that space. And we have exhibitions in both of these spaces.

I would say the North Gallery, because one thing, and that’s maybe the last thing in answer to your question I wanted to say, because I think that’s also what changed. I think it’s important for institutions in the 21st century that we also invent new departments. And so that’s why about 12 years ago we created a department for technology because we realized that there is no CTO, and that most museums don’t have a CTO. So then because is the CTO, we found a tech department, which today has five curators and where we can do in-house video games, we had the Gabriel Massan Show, which we produced here. We’re now working on an AI project with Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst. I mean, this year is the year of AI at the Serpentine. And it began with Refik Anadol and his large nature systems ethically sourced data, sets and now culminates this autumn with Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst, where from the Refik Anadol images and AI we go to the sound and AI and where they work with choirs all over the UK on a basically data set that can be experienced by the visitors, almost like an instrument. So one can play this instrument as a visitor Holly’s and Matt’s instrument.

So we can say, to sum it up, that these are our experiments in art and technology, new experiments in art and technology, and they happen mostly in the North Gallery because it’s a space which is less light floated, whilst the space in south has amazing light and is the perfect space for painting, is the perfect space for sculpture, is the perfect space in that sense for more traditional art forms. So also for installations, we’re going to have this autumn, actually a Gesamtkunstwerk going back to the show, which inspired me as a student, Gesamtkunstwerk, this idea of a total work of art. We’re going to have a Gesamtkunstwerk by the young artist from Los Angeles, Lauren Halsey, who has an amazing practice connecting to the city, and she’s going to do that also in London, and is bringing here a completely transformative installation with mirrors and floors and fountains. So yeah, this is basically the serpentine.

And the pavilion, as you mentioned, the first one was Zaha Hadid, I think it was around 2000, right? That was the very first one for the Pavilion.

Pavilion started in 2000 when Julia Peyton-Jones, the then director invited Zaha Hadid to do the first Pavilion. And then I joined in 2006 and Rem Koolhaas, Cecil Balmond was the first Pavilion I was involved.

And it’s been such a launchpad for people’s careers in the world of design, and it’s been a major, I mean, in my opinion, sort of a major force in the marriage of the art world and the design world in terms of how we think about these two things. Why do you think that the pavilion has been successful and so popular, and so beloved and become such an important sort of initiative out there? It’s also one of the very few places where a designer or an architect or even an artist can create a space like that in such a beautiful space for such a long period of time. And why do you think it’s been successful?

I think there are different layers to the project because obviously the project, I would say evolved over the last 24 years. And initially the way it was defined, and that’s still relevant, is of course, is the idea to open up the field of architecture for architects from abroad, and to architects who have never built here. Because, I mean, London is such a global city for many different things, but for a long time international architects didn’t really build here. If you think about Mies van der Rohe, you think about, [inaudible 00:40:03] think about many of these architects of that generation, Mies van der Rohe has an amazing unrealized project, which our former chairman, Lord Palumbo, actually wanted to realize here, it was never built.

So yeah, the idea really was with Zaha driving it, that there could be more voices, and that architects who haven’t built here could build, which is why there is the rule of the game, that the architect who build, until today the rule of the game, that the architect who built the Serpentine Pavilion, who designed the Serpentine Pavilion has never built in the UK before. And that of course, led to initially a series of very well-known architects who have built everywhere. But here, I mean, you take Gehry or Koolhaas or Hadid themselves, I mean, it’s fascinating that Zaha had lived in this country for so many years, but had never built here until she did the Serpentine Pavilion, which is kind of extraordinary, same for Koolhaas. Then of course, Gehry, Sejima, SANAA Nishizawa, or Nouvel, I mean, these are [inaudible 00:41:09], these are all examples of architects who built most of them in France, in Germany, Italy, but they had never built here. So it was really important for us to give this, or even Niemeyer had never built here, to give these architects for the first time a platform in the UK.

And then I would say in 2012, when we had Sou Fujimoto, something started to shift because we realized that it would actually be fascinating to use this platform we now have, because obviously because all these well-known architects have built the Serpentine Pavilion, and it was always very experimental. I mean, again, Zaha Hadid gave us the mantra, she gave us the motto, there should be no end to experimentation, that’s what she wrote down. For my Instagram account, I have this Instagram account where I post handwritten notes, it’s a kind of movement to celebrate handwriting. And Zaha wrote for my Instagram, “There should be no end to experimentation.” And that’s really the motto of the scheme, but that’s also the motto of the scheme, but that’s also the motto of our entire organization. It’s not only true for architecture, it’s true for all the art forms. We never want to stop experimenting. And so, then it felt important to use this launchpad because obviously, because so many well-known architects had done a pavilion, it became, the scheme became well-known and famous, and we realized that we can actually use it to enable younger architects to have more visibility and to make the architecture world more diverse, more polyphonic. And that seemed a nice thing to do. So, that’s why since 2012, we went more and more into a younger generation. And that’s, of course, what’s happened even more so over the last couple of years with Sumaya Vally, who, at the time, lived in South Africa, who now moved to London. Sumaya was not even 30 when we appointed her.

It’s the same is true, Frida Escobedo was in her 30s. She had never built really outside Mexico on exhibitions, but no buildings. And she soon after the Serpentine won the competition for the Metropolitan Museum. She now also is doing the Pompidou and a lot of international work. The same thing is true for Lina Ghotmeh. She is building globally now, the architect who is between Lebanon and Paris. So, yeah, I would say that it’s very exciting, I think for us, and that’s something we want to pursue over the next couple of years into the future, that we can really give a platform to these younger generation of architects and in a way, create a situation where they can then build their unrealized projects.

In that sense, as you say, that’s when the Serpentine then became, the pavilion became a launch pad for younger generations of architects. It wasn’t that from the beginning. At the beginning, it was a launch pad for well-known architects into the UK because very often, the architects would then build in the UK. They would do the pavilion and then would do a big building, but now, it’s a launch pad for hopefully careers and trajectories. And we also think that it’s really, really important that the architecture world, it’s important to make it more diverse and more inclusive and create the possibilities for more voices to have visibility and presence.

And you’ve written many books about curating that you’ve mentioned before, about the history of curating and how to be a curator, and you’ve studied it so intensely and you’ve devoted your life to it. And now that we’re emerging into this new, I guess you could say, maybe a post-pandemic era, if I ask you what is a curator?

There are so many definitions. It’s certainly true that today, this notion is used in an almost infinitely wide way, so that almost everything is being curated. The way I use it, it’s, of course, still always somehow connected to exhibitions. So, that’s why I think in a way, it’s sometimes interesting to actually go back to this notion of what in German we call the Ausstellungsmacher, the exhibition maker, somebody who makes exhibitions. But I’ve always defined it a bit broader than that in the sense of that when JG Ballard, in our conversation, wanted to discuss what is a curator, and then he came up with this definition of the junction maker. I think the junction maker is a quite good definition of what I do, because I make junctions between artworks and exhibitions, junctions between people, institutions, between different audiences, as well.

And then, of course, it’s not only objects. I think it’s important that we keep in mind that today, if you think about exhibitions, there are objects, but there are also non-objects. Since the ’60s, we have dematerialization of art, that’s Lucy Lippard. It’s also quasi-objects, that’s Michel Serres, objects which only make sense when you engage with them, which came meaning when you play with them and you engage with them. And then hyperobjects, that’s Timothy Martin, that’s wider systems, the weather. So, in that sense, it’s junction making, junctions between people, between objects, between quasi-objects, between non-objects, between hyper-objects, something like that.

And for someone who might be, I consider you at the pinnacle of your career, does anybody say no to Hans Ulrich Obrist?

What do you mean by no?

Like how you call somebody up and you were like, “I’d like you to loan something for an exhibition, or I’d like to work with you on something.” Has anyone ever just said, “No, thank you”?

Yes, of course. There are always artists who just don’t want to exhibit, or they don’t want to necessarily have shows in museums, or they don’t want to have necessarily shows or don’t want to do books. Certain artists don’t want to do interviews as a principal. So, there is always situations of projects which are unrealized. I always wanted to work with Jean-Luc Godard, a filmmaker that remained an unrealized project. I always wanted to do a show with David Hammons, but David Hammons doesn’t like to do museum shows. He always resisted this idea of museum surveys. So, that’s an unrealized project. So, no, luckily, there are these unrealized projects one can dream of.

And the major role of a curator, and especially yourself, is to help educate the public to create connections, as you say, these junctions. And it helps us to define, at least in the press, to define the cultural era we’re in as a part of the conversation. So, we’re doing this interview in the fall of 2024, what era are we in? If someone were sleeping in hibernation for 30 years and they woke up and they just said, “Oh, Hans, where are we today? What’s going on? What is the era we’re in right now? “

I think it’s an interesting question. Yes, it’s your biggest question so far, because it’s very broad. No.

It’s very broad.

Yeah.

Listen, if I can stump you…

But I think it’s a great question to answer because I think in a way, if you look at an institution, you’ve been asking ourselves a lot this question in relation to the Serpentine. And we’ve realized that if you think about what it means to run an organization in the 21st century, we cannot just continue business as usual. We need to think about what is the time we are living in, what is urgent. And that means also to change the institution and to basically come up for this reason with new departments, with whole new, and if you look at what happened at the Serpentine over the last years, we’ve created three new departments, one can say. We started with Edgewell Road and then with our Radio Ballad Project to bring art really into society. That’s what we call our civic projects. And that is certainly something which I think is very, very important because we live in an age of extreme inequality. And I think it’s important for museums to also go with their activities into contexts where maybe art is not accessible. So, that would be one thing.

The second thing is we already touched upon is, of course, it’s a nature of technology. It’s an age of extreme transformation through technology, which is why we’ve got our new experiments in art and technology at the Serpentine with these experiments with AI. And that’s definitely to do, I think, with our time with the extreme present as once we called it with Schumann Bazan [inaudible 00:49:48]. And then I would say, and I think a lot of these questions will come up in the exhibition of Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst about ethical data and also about what it means actually for an artist to live in the age of AI, what does it mean for the entire ecosystem of art?

And then I would say the third thing is, of course, the extinction crisis is the environmental dimension of everything we do, which is why we decided to not only thematize this through projects like Back to Earth and exhibitions and working with artists campaigns related to environment, but to actually have a department. We have the General Ecology Project. We, again, a similar way how we actually, with Ben Vickers early and appointed as Chief Technology Officer and developed a tech department with Lucia Pietroiusti, more than 10 years ago, appointed an ecology curator. These three aspects show you how, actually I think we have to change in terms of our time, how institutions also have to transform, and I think it’s only the beginning.

And you told Art Basel for a video that you did, that you have an Xbox in your office, and you mentioned that you’ve done some games with the institution.

Yeah. You can see that it’s true.

Oh, yes. Oh, okay. I can see that. Are you someone who plays video games or why do you have one in your office?

Yeah, I’m quite passionate about video games. It’s a research, really, and it’s related to work because I’ve realized over the last couple of years that more and more artists are engaging with video games that, we’ve been about more than 3 billion people. That’s more than a third of the population plays video games. The average age is 35, so that means it’s not only teenagers somewhere in the basement of their parents. It’s basically people in their teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, all generations up somehow playing video games. And it’s today bigger than the music and the film world together. So, obviously, more and more artists are interested in that because also today, it’s much easier to build worlds with game engines because these engines are available. If you look at an artist like Rebecca Allen, visionary artists who did already great video games in the ’80s, she had to basically invent her own engines and her own systems to do these games.

Today, that’s much easier. And I think as artists are interested in Worldbuilding, they, at some point, come to video games and I think it’s really fascinating to map this today. We’ve done an exhibition called Worldbuilding, which was in Stoschek collection in Dusseldorf, and then went to the Pompidou, this was in Julia Stoschek collection in Dusseldorf, this exhibition Worldbuilding, and then went to The Centre Pompidou in France, in Metz. It’s now continuing to tour. As I mentioned, we also developed video games at the Serpentine, like the Gabriel Massan game. And I think there is a great potential today really for art exhibitions to bring also new audiences to the museum. To give you another example, we basically organized an exhibition with cars and Fortnite and the cute. And so, the Serpentine North Gallery was replicated virtually on the landing page of Fortnite, and it was there for 10 days. That means 152 million people came into contact with the Serpentine and saw the Serpentine in Fortnite.

And that led to the fact that tens of thousands of teenagers all of a sudden would bring their parents to the gallery. But usually, it’s the other way around. Basically, parents would bring their children to the museum. Here, it was the other way round. And I really think it’s also a great potential to connect a new generation, a younger generation to the museum through this work with video games.

And you’ve worked with so many and a few that have overlapped with the people that I’ve talked to for this podcast. And I believe you knew Gaetano Pesce, who sadly passed away recently. I was wondering if you could share a memory of him.

Yeah, with Gaetano, we met with Gaetano many, many years ago because I used to be the art editor for Domus. When Stefano Boeri did Domus, we collaborated on art pages, and at that time, we did a booklet with him and a special issue of a collaboration with Domus. To share a story, I would say it’s the last story when we collaborated with Bottega because he created these amazing chairs for the Bottega Show, where every chair was different, because obviously, his whole idea was always to create a design, which would be multiplied and repeated, but also different, and he created a book where every book is an original, every book cover is different. And he also created a chair, a series of chairs. So, basically, every visitor to the Bottega Fashion Show would sit on a different chair, and two chairs would never be the same. They had original drawings on them or all of that.

And that happened a year or two before he passed away. And let me find this passage here, because, yeah, “Life is beautiful, most beautiful, and one has to be able to know how to live it.” That’s the last thing he told me. It was such an optimistic message.

Thank you to my guest, Hans Ulrich Obrist, as well as to Nicolas Smirnoff and Molly Taylor for making this episode happen. The editor of The Grand Tourist is Stan Hall. To keep this going, don’t forget to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter, The Grand Tourist Curator at thegrandtourist.net, and follow me on Instagram at @danrubinstein. And don’t forget to follow The Grand Tourist on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen, and leave us a rating or comment. Every little bit helps. Til next time!

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