Hans Ulrich Obrist | The Last Mythical Curator? | Reading HUO’s Memoir

If you think about art jobs, curator might be the one that moved over to the mainstream and even became recently a sort of a trend. Everybody became a curator, you curated your website page, your Instagram account, your ice cream shop. Like curating was just kind of zhuzing things a little bit. If anything, it trivialized the notion of curating rather than really bringing it into our collective consciousness. Who is the curator? What does the curator do? Full disclosure, I am a curator, so of course I'm also confronted with this question. Lots of people ask me what I do. And fuller disclosure, my kids at a certain point kept asking me, what is it that you do again? So I don't know, maybe curating is something that just doesn't stick, but I'll give it a go here. Talking about what a curator is is a great way to have a good insight into the mechanics and the intricacies of visual arts in general. What I'm going to do is to give you an account of a book I just read called Life in Progress. It is the memoir of perhaps one of the last mythical curators of history, I would venture. Life in Progress was written by Hans Ulrich Obrecht, who is the artistic director of the Serpentine Gallery in London, a former tea house that now has become one of the most important art spaces in Europe. Context is everything. So what makes me say that Hans Ulrich Obrecht is, well, first and foremost, mythical. And secondly, probably maybe the last one. Regarding the myth, he was hit by a car, age six, then decided to read all the books. He collected thousands of art postcards as a kid. His first ever exhibition was in a kitchen, his own kitchen. When he was a teen, at some point he decided, and I quote, that he didn't want to sleep anymore. He never cooked in his life. He eats out, he considers it to be a waste of time. He saw artists and exhibitions by taking the night train so as not to spend money on a hotel, and thus saw many, many, many things across Europe. Early on, he started recording his visits with artists, which he still does, and it's an ongoing project called Conversations with Artists. He did a 24-hour marathon where people could come and interview him. He created an early morning club where people would meet at around 6 30 a.m. in several spots in London because he wanted to counter the slowness associated with the size, the mega size of the city of London. And many more things. Building a myth basically relies on proposing new formats that are unconventional. But it also takes sticking to them and even turning them into some sort of routine, which is what happened with Hans Ulrich Obrist, with a lot of characteristics of his method as a curator. The reality is that nothing appears in a vacuum. Obrist inherited a legacy of what we could call the visionary curator. This is a curator that has worked with the generations of the 60s and the 70s, a period of great instability, but also of revolutionary visions of how art and life could blend together. The figure that heralds this new kind of figure in the art world is undoubtedly Harold Ziemann. Zieman was a Swiss curator, director of Kunsthalle Berne from 1961 to 1969. And the exhibition that marked this phenomenon of the visionary curator was his exhibition at the Kunsthalle, titled Live in Your Head When Attitudes Become Form. This exhibition gathered all the tendencies of the time, the most advanced and cutting-edge new forms of art making, such as minimalist art, conceptual art, land art, even arte povera from Italy. As the title indicates, there is a perception of art as an attitude, a behavior, a form of life that would originate in your head through a process rather than what we consider art to be: a well-crafted object, a painting, an image that is static. But another change was forming. Even though I referred to some movements of the time, the notion of movement was being discarded by artists. So I talked about the minimalists. This was a group of sculptors who were basically reacting against a sort of dogmatic and individualistic notion of art as expression and mostly painting by the abstract expressionists. And here I can talk about Donald Judd or even an artist such as Anne Truitt. But the movement in itself wasn't prescriptive. It was more of a group of people that gathered and reacted against a certain perspective or a certain very narrow sense of what art could be, and also theorized it. So artists were starting to verbalize their own volitions. Even conceptual art, who was very much defined by people like Saul Lewitt or Joseph Kasute, were more of a notion than a manifesto or even an organized form of movement with members. That's why it's always a bad idea to read very hasty and definitive accounts of some art history books out there, because during that time, artists were painting. You have someone like Robert Ryman. And that's why I talk about notions, ideas, verbalizing desires or visions of what art is or was at a certain moment in history, because these are not static notions of what art can be and the relationship it can have with its audience. And that's where the curator comes in. Harold Zieman made sense of this palpitating and intuitive grasp that different groups of artists were having about a sort of a wind of change that was coming upon society as a whole and their own practice as artists. And so the curator also makes sense of what might be happening as a whole, validates it in some ways if there is an exhibition in a big art institution, but also makes sense of the art of that time for people who are not familiar with the discussions that are being had in the background between artists, critics. So the curator becomes here a person who organizes exhibitions and projects through a certain angle, verbalizes tendencies, and who is an expert that sees them before everyone else. This is the visionary curator. This figure is often independent or has carved out a profile as an independent author, an ideas person. Zemann was director of Kunsthalle Bern from 1960 to 1961, but later he founded the Agentur für geistige Gestarbeit, so sorry, we don't speak German, which means agency for intellectual guestwork and uses a German expression for migrant labor. So there's really with Zeeman the appearance of the freelance curator, or on the other hand, the visionary curator, the person who sees tendencies and who knows not only how to verbalize them and validate them, package them, but also to communicate these tendencies to audiences. But for the sake of gender balance, but also the fact that there is another important phenomenon in the 60s, 60s, 70s, that is not really an exhibition, but a book as an exhibition that I must refer to here, which is the 1973 book by Lucy Lepard, so Book as an Exhibition, called The Dematerialization of the Art Object. This is an abbreviated title. The long title, and I think it still has the pole position of the longest exhibition and book title in history, goes like this. Six years, the dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972, a cross-reference book of information on some aesthetic boundaries, consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, artworks, documents, interviews, and symposia arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, antiform, systems, earth, or process art occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia, with occasional political overtones, edited and annotated by Lucy R. LePard. So the book is an overview of a type of art that is more driven by protocols, language, text, instructions, and actions derived from the surrealist and dada obsession with the little pockets of life that are or can be seen as art or were seen by these movements, as almost pure art forms, such as dreams, for example. There was a real appreciation of life as art or art as life all throughout the 20th century. But the avant-garde picked this phenomenon with much more force and intention. These present as a bit more dry and detached in the 60s and the 70s because they deal directly with language and information. But if you look at the book, there are utopian art forms and art pieces and even texts, such as in the 1970 section, the work by Bas Yan Ada, which was a postcard sent in 1970 saying, I'm too sad to tell you. And it showed, so the picture part of the work, Bas Yan Ada sobbing, ravaged by tears, and no one ever knew why he was crying. So he would send these postcards to several people. And postcard art was actually an important part of this process of mixing or merging life with art. This attention to life as art formed the international movement Fluxus, for example, which is a sort of reoccurrence of these movements from the beginning of the 20th century, such as Dadaf, it also had other occurrences in Japan in the 50s, for instance, such as the movement Monoha, even though Monoha, which means the school of things, was far more interested in materials, non-industrial materials, but they saw the artist as a mere collaborator with the forces and the energies of nature, the world around you. So Lucy Leipard saw this movement as part of a wider political phenomenon that was encapsulated by the student uprising in 1968, more specifically May 1968. There's almost a form of material culture for the curator who is looking at society as a whole and seeing how art is being affected or affecting the changes that occur in society. And there's also another aspect in conceptual art that I think sometimes, and not to say often, goes completely unnoticed, which is the humor that certain actions intrinsically have, which is the case with Lucy Lepard's title. What she's doing with the title is what conceptualists were doing with art in general, which was to take the technique and the mechanics of a discipline and putting it forth as the work itself. And so, of course, the title comprises all the elements that are part of making a book as an exhibition. Lucille Pard has mitigated the impact that her expression, the dematerialization of the work of art, has had in our notion of what art is or can be. I think that more than Zeeman, this expression had a huge, huge impact. It became more mythical itself than the critic. I'm pretty sure that lots of people can quote this expression, but they can't trace it back to Lucy Lepard. That's how important this notion was in the art sector. But this case is a very curious case because Lucy Lepard herself was an art critic. She was also an educator. She's still with us. She lives in New Mexico. She even said in 2012 when an exhibition of all the art that is quoted in the book took place at the Brooklyn Museum. That now, quote, now the ideas in the air are quite literally floating around in cyberspace, those typed sheets of black and white snapshots look quaintly obsolete, unquote. So it's interesting because this sort of diagnosis that the curator brought at a certain point into the art sphere, and even outside of it, is something that can and will be discussed afterwards. It's not a static notion. It was an instinct that she had, and through this framework of looking at art as a sort of a list of instructions, as something that goes from the mind of the artist to the body of the spectator, is something that is still relevant today, much more so than the idea that art is not material, because in fact, as she so very well pointed at it, and not without humor, even photocopies are objects. So this is the inherited legacy that Oberist receives when he comes into the full as a curator himself. And in the book, Life in Progress, you have a sense that the artists he was having conversations with, who were his seniors basically, were instigating and sort of expecting the same type of behavior from him. On page 31 of the book, when Oberist realizes that he couldn't sleep anymore, he says, I returned regularly to Paris to see Christian Boltansky and Annette Messager. I finished school and made lots of studio visits all over Europe. And I knew that being an exhibition organizer was likely to be my profession. My first exhibition had to be out of the ordinary. I had to find something. Are you enjoying the episode? Well, I sure hope you are. If so, well go to Substack, Joanna, Pierre and Evers, Exhibitionistas, or both, and find out what I'm writing about from the little seeds that I'm planting here in the episodes. Here at Exhibitionistas, the artwork is the starting point. And then it's an adventure through words, images, video, sound, and so many other art wonderment tools that we have around us. Books, you have plants, you have pets, you have thoughts, you have feelings. Art sparks a multi-sensorial, conceptual, mystical, spiritual experience that I love to explore here in Exhibitionistas and I love to share it with you. If you're more of an Instagram person, we have an Instagram account out there for you, Exhibitionistas underscore podcast. We're also on TikTok, a bit more sporadically, I must say, can't be everywhere. If you want me to be everywhere, well don't forget, donate. I keep the prices super low at least until the end of the year. And as you probably have noticed, everything now is exhibitionistas with a new design. The Substack page, the podcast, the YouTube channel. So go to the show's notes, you know, the little blurbby description that comes with each episode, and click on the links, Discover the Exhibitionistas Media Project, and go even deeper into your art wonderment adventure with me, Joanna Pierre Nevis. Thank you so much for listening, and thank you so much for your donations, your memberships, and your words of encouragement and suggestions. Keep them coming. I will tell you that this book is a bit of a roller coaster, I will admit, because it has two very distinct parts. There is the first part where we kind of race through Hans Ulrich Obrist's childhood, teenage years, up until the time where he comes to London. And then there is a second part that is more of a self-exploratory moment where Obreist tries to evaluate where he's at. And this is because the book was written during the pandemic, which was, as we really want to forget, a really curious time of introspection, and it was also a time of absolute abandon. So I will blame the latter for the very, very strange experience that is reading the first part. Aubreist has many qualities. One of them is not writing in the way that draws you into the situation he's describing. To give you an example, the first sentence, sentence and paragraph, May 1968. That's when I was born. That's it. Obreist is incredibly reliant on a reference. He will refer to many, many, many things: people, places, projects, and he relies on you, the reader, to either know what they mean or do the research in order to find out. Referring to May 1968, after my short introduction, of course, is a reference to that very specific legacy of those revolutionary times and how, in some ways, he was passed on the torch to carry this sort of energy of the curator into the new times. But this is not what happens in the beginning of the book. This book was published by an imprint of Penguin Books called Alan Lane. And I have to read the little blob in the jacket, in the interior jacket of the book, because it says a lot about the state of publishing nowadays. So it goes like this, and I quote: When Hans Ulrich was a young boy, he was knocked down by a speeding car, hospitalized for weeks. He discovered the healing powers of art. Once he was able to travel again, he began to set out alone on night trains to meet artists in their studios across Europe. So when you read this, if you know nothing about contemporary art, and if you don't know the character at least and the figure that is Aubrist, you think, oh, this is amazing. I'm going to buy this. And through the life of this curator and the intense and vivid descriptions of what he felt, of how he discovered art, where art took him, and the healing minutiae of his progress, it is a life in progress. I will maybe have a more embodied and inner sense of what contemporary art does to a life. Nothing of the kind. That does not happen. In fact, the accident does happen. It is described on page five, if I'm not mistaken. Yes. In a single paragraph, and so if you're curious, I can read it to you. When I was around six, I had an accident that undoubtedly triggered many things in me. I was knocked down. By a car that was travelling too fast as I was crossing the street outside school. I was taken to hospital in a serious condition and had the experience of being very near to death. These long weeks in hospital, I believe, instilled a sense of urgency in me. Hovering between life and death, totally immobilized, I was full of a feeling unfamiliar to a child that each day could be my last. My mother has always said that I was profoundly altered by the experience. Most people don't get to rub shoulders with death until later, much later. Too late, in a way. It was uncertain whether my condition would improve or whether I would even survive. Since then, and up until very recently with the exhibition It's Urgent, organized with Maya Hoffman at the Luma Foundation in Al in 2020. I have had this feeling continuously to get things done. When you are immobilized for months and for a long time afterwards, you can't do any sport, you develop other interests. In my case, the accident and its aftermath pushed me further towards books. And so he decides he needs to read all books, and that's why he can't sleep. There is no sense by the author of how a human expects a human to account for such a life-changing experience. And you also have a sense that the human obrist doesn't have a sense how the human obrist went through this. It's a very strange disconnected account from any personal inkling that we might have into the everyday life, into how other people have affected it, other encounters than the artist that we might recognize in the book. So it makes for sometimes unintentionally hilarious moments. For example, in this first part, the only times that he mentioned his parents is by describing any activity that they might have, as pedestrian, pedestrian as it might be, that could lead to him finding out how he could leave his little Swiss town and see art elsewhere. My parents shopped in Germany. They were living in Switzerland. My parents had a Volvo, and so they had to drive me to various places. His parents were incredibly relieved to get rid of him and send him over to another member of the family who would then take on the huge task replying to his constant questions. Apparently, little Hans was always in search of knowledge. He read all the books and he started collecting postcards, art postcards, because he lived very near the place where Abi Warburg, who was an art historian, very, very famous for a sort of a huge breakdown that he suffered when he came back from the United States after having encountered the ritual of the serpent, that is a ritual of the community of the hoppy in New Mexico. And so this figure of Abby Warburg is incredibly important because he started organizing these panels with imagery that conveyed in the gestures of society, so in everyday photographs as much as in art historical important sculptures and paintings and pieces in general, and he started interlacing this sort of material culture through different images that didn't produce a hierarchy of thought about gesture, let's put it that way. And as soon as Little Hans knew about Warburg, so he went by this house that looked like the haunted house, it had a bad rep in the neighborhood, and at a sort a certain point he found out who had lived there and became fascinated with the figure of Warburg. And so all his childhood, all his teenage years, until his young adult years are a sort of very swift, very rapid, accelerated pace from stepping stone to stepping stone until he became an established curator. Everything goes very, very, very fast. One of the things that is the most, I would say, myth-building in the book is not really the postcard collection or the intellectual child who asks too many questions. It is, in fact, when he realized that in going to a museum, he was looking at the art of someone who was living and producing what had so impacted his imagination somewhere else in a studio, realizing that the art that he saw in the museums was created by living people led him to the conclusion that maybe perhaps he could meet these people. And that's where the myth for me was built, which is this absolutely incredible instinct of calling the museum. The telephone plays a very, very important part for this myth. And asking if he could be put in touch with the artists. Of course, the person who replied to the phone call said, Well, I would need to find out. I can't just give you the person's phone. And then going back to him, calling back, giving the phone number of the artist in question after having asked permission to the artist. And then Hans Ulrich Obrecht calling the artist, a major figure in contemporary art, and actually managing to book a studio visit, to which he couldn't go because he was a teenager, he was 17, 16. And so he had to ask his parents for a way to get to those places. And that's how his adventure started. The artist who agreed to receive Hans Ulrich Oprist in his studio was Claude Sandors. And a little bit later, he did the same thing with the exhibition of The Artist You Officially Advise. He contacted them and he managed to book a studio visit with them. This time he bought what is called what was at the time the Flash Art diary. And I remember it, I saw a few of them, which was a sort of um telephone book of the art world, well, with addresses and museums and artists. And so you would have listed the artist's contact. So this was before email, this was telephone only, landline. And so he writes quote, the magazine Flash Arts had just published an art diary, a book that contained artist addresses. Well, it also had other addresses. So I obtained the phone number, officially advised, called them, and told them that I was obsessed with their work and the exhibition I had seen. We arranged to meet one Wednesday afternoon. Once again, I took the train later. When I had passed my driving test, I would sometimes use my father's old Volvo. And it turned out to be probably the most crucial visit of my life. When I arrived at their studio, I saw their famous chain reaction, the way things go. It set off a real chain reaction in my own life, as this visit led to so many others. So for those who love Fishley and Vice's work as much as I do, it is crazy to think that this very famous video, an improbable and absurd chain reaction between objects, was filmed and he was there. He saw the thing in the making. And he was 17. Hans Ulrich Obris, so page 39, says that his life was, quote, a continual quest for mentors. It still is, unquote. And I think this pretty much describes what we get from the first part of the book, which is that it's a huge list of encounters. So Hans Ulrich Obris works a little bit through compilation. He's kind of a collector of experiences and encounters and people. He started getting interested, for example, in architects. So there is this very clear notion of accumulation at dizzying levels. It is in contact with his mentors, as it were, that he starts devising the possibility of making exhibitions. It is through received instructions that certain stepping stones of his career are established. He is the kind of person to whom you say something that then it becomes a new phase in his life. There are two crucial moments in the book. The first one is when in conversation with Boltansky and Annette Messager, they ask him what he wants to do with all that art, all everything that he has accumulated. And he says, quote, a single encounter can sometimes change a life. It can replace five years at university like a shortcut. And my meeting with Christian Boltansky and Annette Messager was one such shortcut. I asked them what they were working on, and they replied that they didn't really work on artworks, on objects, but on exhibitions. And I realized that the artist of the second half of the 20th century was not necessarily only a producer of objects, but rather someone who could use exhibitions as their medium. As Boltansky put it, what you need to understand is that it is often exhibitions that people remember as having changed the rules of the game. I wrote this down in my notebook, but it is actually imprinted in my brain and has stayed with me ever since. This lesson that he receives in the very, very, very beginning of his life as a curator of how artists are no longer inventors of concepts, makers of movements, and object producers, but they actually work for this very specific format of the exhibition. And to give you a parallel, before podcasts, you wouldn't have podcast episodes, right? An episode of a podcast that you are as you are listening to now is not going to be the same thing as a BBC documentary. They are very different beasts, and so with artists. And afterwards, he talks about this big marathon of exhibition visiting that he did, and he recounts it as such, and how a conversation then leads to his first exhibition. In Germany, Joseph, so quote, in Germany, Joseph Boyce had just founded the Green Party, and I was passionate about that, and wanted to understand the environment and its ecosystems in order to stop the destructive obsession with economic growth that was threatening our planet. I continued making my studio visits, but people began to be puzzled that nothing seemed to come of them. In fact, they were like a three or four year long grand tour, always by night train. I could cover 30 towns in 30 days without spending too much money, no hotels to pay for, only food. Three or four years later, I was visiting Christian Boltansky again, and I told him that I felt ready to create my first exhibition. And he replied, You should do it in the kitchen. The curator Harald Zeman had already mounted an exhibition in his own apartment about his grandfather. And I was reading Robert Museel at the time, who said that literature or art can emerge where you least expect it. Boltansky loved kicking around bizarre ideas, and that's what we did when we were together. And he always had this desire to rewrite the rules. So we were on the same page as it were when it came to this idea about the kitchen. I went back to Switzerland and discussed it straight away with Fishley and Weiss and some other artists, explaining how I intended to mount my first exhibition in the kitchen of my little student flat. I obviously didn't have much money, my budget was 200 Swiss francs, but I did have a do-it-yourself mentality. I created the opportunity without waiting around for someone to offer me something, and the exhibition took place in 1991. And that is the famous First Exhibition in his kitchen. Something that is very derivative in the sense that, and this goes out all throughout the book, that really Obrist is someone who is carrying a legacy and the imprint of the very revered and powerful artists he has discussions with. And then later on, when he produces the exhibition in an abbey where he where he had done a visit when he was very, very young with his parents, and when he recounted this to another artist, I think it was Fishley and Weiss, they said, Well, you should do an exhibition in the abbey because books were so important to you. He is so absorbing, so encyclopedic. The way things are contextualized for Obreist and anything that pertains to his life, to his choices, always comes attached with the advice of someone or a quote that was important to him. For example, when I read the text where he describes his accident on page five, he talks about his exhibition at Luma Foundation. And the next paragraph, he says, we are lucky in Switzerland that we get to learn foreign languages from a young age. The concept of multilingualism that Edouard Glisson speaks about is part of the education system. So really, this the emotional and personal impact of any happening in a life is totally absent from this book. And the book is really weaved through encounters with people. And you have a sense also that this idea of the curator that I pointed at earlier, of spotting talent, of being the first one to sort of validate a group of people or a certain kind of new development in contemporary art making, but also the notion of when you validate a new thing, you are judging, you are choosing the best. In a way, your peers, so the people you can have a dialogue with. And there's this notion as well of the people that are met all throughout this life in progress, are people who are great conversationalists who are able to convey what their work is about and are able to mark Obreist in a certain way. There aren't many descriptions of impactful solitary moments with the art that he talks about. Rather than talking about the art, there is this sort of accumulation of references to people that eventually are met in real life as people. But there's something missing. There is a very circular, very much of a circular movement between the curator and the artist where the artwork, the experience of the work, is measured within that circle and not really in connection to audiences. Let me just give you a sense of Ubrix's career until today, where he is the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries with a lot of other responsibilities and side projects. Because he had amassed so many contacts in the art sphere, his kitchen exhibition had 29 visitors. So it wasn't a blockbuster, but the people who came to see his exhibition were really important people, the connections of the artists that were in the exhibition who were already, if not super established artists, artists who already had a career. And so one of the people who went to the exhibition was Jean de Loisy, who at the time worked at the Cartier Foundation, whose director was Marie-Claude Beau. And so he invited Aubriz to do a sort of a three-month internship or on some sort of bursary of some kind. And so Aubriest then moves from Saint-Gallen to Paris, where he then eventually becomes a curator at the Musée d'Art Moderne. He worked with Suzanne Paget, who is another one of these mega figures of the time. She was the director of the Museum of Modern Art of Paris for many, many years. And in some ways, she became his mentor and um worked with him in a capacity that nowadays you wouldn't really find in an institution, typically. I'm not saying that there it doesn't exist anymore, but he was someone who worked almost like a talent uh scout. So he would go around the world and try to find interesting artists to bring into the museum. And that's something that granted him the status of the globetrotter curator. And that is a term that I inherited when I was studying as a curator. For us, the figure of Zemen was kind of God, and then you had the son of God, who was Obrist, who was the Globetrotter curator, a curator who worked with institutions, but in a very specific way, what he does now at the Serpentine, which is artistic direction. So you forego all the administrative issues and structural issues of the institution, and you work mainly on the artistic side. And in commercial galleries, by the way, as a sort of an addendum, I will say that you also have in big, big galleries the artist liaison, who's the person who doesn't do the sales but who manages the artist in their studio, the storage, the archive, etc. In the chapter that he calls a method, page 55, where, well, he talks about the method of recording the um studio visits with artists in general and the archive that he has kept ever since. And that I find really, really admirable because one of the things that characterizes art history, I would say. Unlike other areas, such as medical research, for example, the archive and what remains in contemporary art does not really rely on academia. So academia is something. And then on the other side, you have the living archives, spontaneous archives, I would call them. And Giorgio Vasari really is sort of the ex libris of this tendency, which is that whatever makes it to history is in a sense the artists, and I think that's true of a lot of history, actually, not only art history, is the people who have the hubris, the arrogance, the care, the attention, the dedication to either archive their own work or have someone else archive it for them and narrate it and historicize it for them. And that doesn't happen a lot. In a nutshell, I have a list of things that I will offer as this proposal of Ubrist as a mythical curator. First of all, this total devotion to art to the point of not really having a personal life. We do know about his partner. He mentions her at a certain point in a very simple but quite heavy and hefty sentence, which is that it was the most important day of his life when he met uh Ku Jung A, his um then and still partner to this day. Then there's also this view of curating that has changed across times that also contributes to this mythical status. So the first one is this. Was this encyclopedic uh collection of encounters with artists and then architects and then scientists and musicians and all sorts of intellectuals and great figures of his time, which led him to at first think about curating as being a sort of a witness, but then he meets Bruno Latour, who was someone who theorized ecological systems and philosophies, who passed away recently, a big, big figure in philosophy and uh scientific areas, um, epistemology. And Bruno Latour talked to him about self-organizing systems. And so he moved on to thinking about curating as a sort of a self-organizing system and as setting up something more open, like an open structure that would also be uh in motion, dynamic, in a dynamic relationship with the art that it receives and the people who visit it, and also the way it lives beyond the walls of the exhibition. And so he starts devising a conception of curating which goes beyond the walls of the White Cube that he doesn't really favor. I remember when I lived in Paris, I would hear about the fact that Aubriz never said no to a meeting. He was always open to receiving people. I mean, there was always some sort of behavior that stemmed from a total devotion to art that ended up being um quite mythical, and this devotion also to finding new formats. And that's why I think the myth builds itself because it pretty much depends on this notion of innovation. And I remember that when I arrived in the arts sector as a potential professional in it, the idea of innovation was incredibly important to the point where I once had a conversation with an artist who is a little bit like Nilo Toroni, who would always use the same brush and would just put an imprint of the brush at certain determined um spaces between them on the canvas, and that's what characterizes a lot of his work. Uh, or on Kawara, for example, who did the date uh paintings for decades. There and an artist such as those ones, I won't name them, told me that he was increasingly annoyed with collectors who would say, Well, you always do the same thing, why don't you now start with another project other than being interested in this very specific type of living and creating? And I ended up meeting said curator in a dinner, and I remember I remember saying, you know, why? Why is commitment to a form of language something that is frowned upon nowadays? So there's this mythical idea of the artist as researcher. And I think, and we'll get to that point, that that is a crucial uh difference, I think, in the way aubreists created a sort of a phenomenon post-the revolutionary period, where indeed change was a brewing was necessary and it was a new form of being in art. What change do you produce after revolutionary change? And I think that's kind of what also creates this kind of mythical position. Another thing that contributes to this myth of Obrist is this unique position he has as a sort of a philanthropist or a philanthropy magnet, while also being a sort of a networking master. So he can draw into the museum that he works for or the project that he's um producing, people who are as powerful as they are important, as they are socially, artistically, creatively valid, as they are wealthy. I mean, he has this address book that is so unique and he has such a unique access to people who are game changers, that as a curator, especially as a curator who is working with very, very high-flying institutions, artists, galleries, that gives you a sort of very specific kind of power because you draw in an intellectual energy as much as you draw in the resources to take projects further and to make them possible. Another mythical quality, this is connected to something that Alighiero Eboetti suggested to him. Apparently, he interviewed Doris Lessing, who also told him that there is this thing of self-censoring your own projects and artists, whereby you think this is too, this is too bold, this is too audacious, it will never be made. And so for him, his guiding line of curatorial practice is to always go into an artist studio and ask, okay, what is it really that you would like to do and haven't had the means to? And again, this is very specific of the other mythical status, the previous one that I flagged up, which is this accessibility and easiness in resources, which means that you are only working with a certain kind of artist, the artist who has ambitious projects, because they're already showing their work. So it's the very definition of the established artist. And what I've noticed in his curating when it doesn't work, which was the case with the Judy Chicago show at The Serpentine, is that he's always trying to find the thing that the artist hasn't done. And sometimes you just need a good old classic exhibition. That's all you need, because the work is good. You just need to have it here in London because we have never seen that body of work. And there's something about having a globalized, globetrotting vision of the world. Are you serving the artists or are you serving the audiences? Because if you're working with high-flying artists and the artist has shown a specific body of work that is very, very representative uh representative of their work for audiences that haven't seen it a lot, but the artist has recently shown it, so they want to do something else. Are you going to say yes to the artist because otherwise they are bored and less involved in the project? Or are you thinking about your audiences that have never seen really an exhibition that gives a really good sense of what the work is? What are you going to choose? And the mythical curator of your is definitely paying more heed to friendships and to the relation with the artists and the scientists and the researchers than really to the mission of an institution. Because that's their specialty. They are managing the talent, as it as they say in the entertainment industry. Then there's bringing technology, AI, but also gaming to the forefront of the program at the serpentine. So there's a really weird thing at the serpentine, which is connected to this curiosity that Aubriest shows to have and this openness to whatever happens as a phenomenon in society, as a cultural phenomenon that is also traversed by engineering, technology, etc. Really admirable, because other institutions are extremely Luddite. I mean, they're still getting over the fact that the hashtag doesn't work anymore. As I was reading Life in Progress, I was thinking, is it the first biography of a curator that I'm reading? Because Giorgio Vazari was an artist who became an art historian because he wrote lives of artists in the Renaissance. And Aubrist replicated that formula because he recorded the conversations with artists. But then as a curator, and he, mind you, wrote this book because he was it was asked to, so it wasn't his idea. But this notion of a curator writing their own biography is a strange exercise. Creating your own myth and therefore being in this sort of elevated aspirational sphere of creative existence means that when you the people you're meeting are already established, they're already maybe past their most creative, inventive projects. That leaves the myth as a sort of a, in the perspective of 2026, a sort of a really incredibly and impressive structure that stays at the surface of things and doesn't go in depth into topics. The question here for me and the limitation of this high-rising, high-flying, globalized accumulation, um obsessed collection, um uh encyclopedic um relationship to things. Emma Kunz is mentioned quite a few times in the book. I mean, not many, the book is not huge, but it's a very small book. But there's one or two instances where she's mentioned, and there isn't really an exploration of what could art become if then it is um in articulation with alternative medicine, with the placebo effect, which is a psychological effect that can be connected to shamanism, then what is art doing in there? What role does it play? What roles then museums play? And what is the more traditional art doing in that way? Is it also participating in that sort of influence? Um, is it poetic? It there aren't many questions that are asked, and we come to a point at the end of the book where Aubrist is talking about a project that happened that I visited actually, called The Call at the Serpentine with uh Dryhurst and Herndon, who are a duo of artists. I think they're a couple, by the way, who are working with AI. And I remember that that show was advertised, it wasn't a year ago, it was two years ago at the end of the year, as really being part of this quite, again, admirable phenomenon of the Serpentine being the only institution that has actually a section, a department that is technology, the technology department, with several curators, assistant curators, um, who are commissioning work that is related with gaming, AI, technologies, etc., digital technologies. So that is quite remarkable. And so I was really interested in visiting that project. And that project associated choirs, so real choirs across the UK, with an AI that would learn from um becoming from the data set of those recorded choirs. And as a spectator, you would enter a sort of darkened space of the serpentine, and it was serpentine north, if I'm not mistaken. So there's two serpentine buildings, one south and north, and you would enter into a space in the middle with a microphone, and the whole artwork around it was sort of liturgic with interferences, as in replacing the saints with um robots and skeletons and babies. There were babies everywhere. They didn't, in some ways, emulate baby Jesus, it was something else. And they were white with golden um colours, and so there was a microphone in a space that looked a little bit like the entrance to another realm, whatever it was. It made me think of the series Six Feed Under, where it was this mortuary house, and then you would sing into the microphone, and the AI would absorb records, so your voice is recorded in there, and then it kind of translates it, and the sound that it made really by mere chance, I suppose it's probably not always like that. It just felt like the depths of hell were screaming back to you back at you. It was very peculiar, but it was an interesting experience. Aubriz mentions this project, and as ever he describes projects in great um factual um specificity without the description unveiling really the deeper layer of meaning of these projects. So up to the last page, I'm still not sure what what it is that we take from these projects and what they are really, apart from this one that I really experienced. And so he ends the book by saying, quote, Herndon and Dryhurst have emphasized the multisensory experience of the exhibition. I can attest to that. During a conversation in July 2024, they said, quote, one thing that is key to all our work, whether it's a concern or an exhibition, is that there's a visceral visitor experience that is immersive and emotional. We're trying to show the beautiful human experience that goes into training models. The experience in the space itself will be moving. Unquote, and so now I go back to Aubreist's voice. Their words speak to the importance of artists in harnessing the potential of AI to create extraordinary experiences. It is through these shifts in perception that we might better understand how to navigate the evolving terrain of AI while learning how we might govern and gain self-determination over data in the future. And to me, this is a bit disappointing because if he is the only curator who is working in this way with artists in big institutions, then the fact that the only thing that I'm told is that it's new perspectives, extraordinary experiences. For me, that is not enough as the role of art, particularly now in 2026, we're in November after the massive heists of Bitcoin by North Korea. And when Instagram is full of people telling us that 70% of our data is already collected by AI in the hands of Silicon Valley um tech maniacs who believe in eugenics and are transhumanists and have these very, very strange theories about beliefs and technology and about energies and the future, hierarchies between humans that are very dated and speak to things that are very dangerous in our recent history. That is worrisome. And if all you can tell me is that it's a moving experience, aubrist obviously is always under the microscope because he is the most famous one, because he is everywhere, because he makes a lot of projects. And deontologically, there was a moment there where you cannot just make like 500 biennials and at the same time work for one of the biggest institutions in contemporary arts in uh the Western world. It is too much. You have to leave work for others because otherwise your voice becomes the rule. And the way the little corner of art that you're creating for yourself will pervade everything else. And we need more voices. We need more people. The myth of the curator is the myth of the art critic, it's the myth of the big genius male artist. There's also a prevalence of male interlocutors in Aubriz's life. Um, there's a few women, of course, but those that really stay that are prevalent, that are quoted as being the major instigators of change in approach and curating are Ballard and Fishley and Weiss and these big male figures of the creative sector of visual and visual arts in particular, which is fine, but that means that the myth takes up too much space. And it is true that you need a plurality of voices. What is a curator? What do we do? Are we important in any way? What does it say about the future of curating? What does it say about what we want from an exhibition and an institution? I would say less chasing different formats and novelty, more depth of relationship with audiences, and a deeper understanding of the frame that current society brings into the exhibition space through our audiences. I think that is absolutely crucial. But I also think that we're only human, that we do what we have the power to do. And if there's anything to say about maybe having too much power in contemporary art, it's that regulating institutions and really thinking about what we do and how we do it seems to be more and more urgent as time goes. So, curators, we do what we can, but it is really important to think about the whole system in general and what we can bring specifically as the type of mission that we have, the type of institution that we work for, and the type of geography that we inhabit and its people. See you next week. Take very good care of yourselves.

Bye bye.