Parallel realities
A letter from Hans Ulrich Obrist to Hou Hanru
Dear HHR
Thanks so much for your letter. I fully agree with you and Toni Negri that the new resistance is ‘in-between’. Your reference to Toni, whom we visited in prison in Rome some years ago, made me think of another great Roman visionary: Alighiero Boetti.
In 1986, when I was 18 years old, our lyceum traveled to Rome on a school trip, and my friends Fischli/Weiss strongly recommended that I pay a visit to Alighiero Boetti. That meeting with Boetti changed my life, and became the trigger for so many things. The point Boetti stressed was that the art world was boring as it was, limited to a very few, homogenized formats which kept repeating themselves: gallery shows, museum shows, biennales and occasionally public art projects. He told me that there were so many other possibilities for making artists’ dreams reality, but that only a very small percentage of our potential was being used. He advised me to pursue parallel realities or, to borrow your words, to “search for new models of production, presentation and communication of contemporary art works”. His speech was a manifesto against boring, predictable and formatted curating.
Agent of unrealized projects
The first concrete result of my conversation with Boetti was Cieli ad Alta Quota (1993) which he and I curated with museum in progress on board the entire fleet of Austrian Airlines airplanes, in which tens of thousands of jigsaw puzzles designed by Boetti were disseminated into the world.
Following this experience I started asking artists for their unrealized projects trying to find out which ones could not happen within the framework of the current formats of the art world and then to help make these projects happen, i.e., TO PRODUCE REALITY, to transform ideas into reality.
For each planned project that is carried out, hundreds of other proposals by artists around the world stay unrealized and invisible to the public. Unlike unrealized architectural models and projects submitted for competitions, which are frequently published and discussed, public endeavors in the visual arts that are planned but not carried out ordinarily remain unnoticed or little known.
Based on an archive of unrealized projects that I have compiled over the last 10 years and to which I continue to invite submissions by artists, I am trying to give life to these as yet unachievable plans, by making them available to the public to be disseminated, discussed and most importantly, to be realized. This brings us to the Agency for Unrealised Projects, which Julia Peyton-Jones and I founded at the Serpentine Gallery in collaboration with e-flux.
One such example of a particularly exciting, so far unrealized project is the Pyramid project invented by Ingo Niermann in Germany. Here is a list of some of the key pyramid topics integrating quotes from Cairo-based novelist Gamal al-Ghitani’s Pyramid Texts.
ALWAYS PYRAMID The pyramids were always with him
BEGINNING PYRAMID Beginnings are an instant, one containing place and time
CIRCUMAMBULATE PYRAMID See ‘visiting pyramid’
CENTRE PYRAMID The reason for his presence in the city
CLEAR PYRAMID / OBSCURE PYRAMID What seems clear on one occasion is obscure on another
DAY PYRAMID / NIGHT PYRAMID Day is born of night and night emerges from day … How the pyramid’s appearance changed throughout the hours of night and day
EYE PYRAMID / MIND PYRAMID Sometimes the mind will see what the eye cannot, and sometimes the eye will grasp what the mind cannot
LOVE PYRAMID Love without knowledge is impossible
MEMORY PYRAMID Eric Hobsbawm’s protest against forgetting
PATH PYRAMID Each path leads inevitably to another
VISITING PYRAMID They are for visiting, not for dwelling in
WONDER PYRAMID ………
The Unrealised Projects project is also related to my many interviews, which I conduct as part of the research. My final and only repetitive question concerns the interviewee’s unrealized projects – things they have never been able, but aspire, to produce. It is also a list and I have a Perecian interest in lists.
This is not happenstance, but stems from my exploration of alternative exhibition structures. Do It,, which began in 1993, offers an example. The project asked how an exhibition can exist merely as a set of instructions and, consistent with Fluxus game-play of the 1960s, called on artists to offer propositions for the creation of artworks. Hundreds upon hundreds of these have since been churned out and the project has migrated organically over the Internet and into more than 40 locations from museums to schools. It is an exercise in dynamic knowledge-production that is positioned, through its lightness, flexibility and unpredictability, as an interesting alternative to the stereotypical global blockbuster exhibition model.
The absurd thoughts occupying our greatest minds
This fascination with lists is also evident in Sogni/Dreams, undertaken with Francesco Bonami in 1999. Last is The Future Will Be… (see “Curators on the Move 7”), an enquiry that began informally by surveying a close group of friends a few years ago and has since ping-ponged through a trans-generational network of nearly 100 artists, architects, designers, historians and philosophers. If these exercises succeed in familiarizing audiences with the expansive, even absurd, thoughts occupying some of our greatest minds, they will have fulfilled their basic charge. It is my ultimate hope, however, that they inspire new forms of cultural dialogue and can perhaps even serve as a template for related ventures to come.
For the past two years I have been working on the Formula Project, in which I asked a group of artists, writers, architects and scientists to contribute an equation for the 21st century. Beyond this guideline, no further rules were dictated and although invitees were permitted to complement their submissions with a brief text, the success of this endeavor resided in its elegant simplicity: the crystallization of a potentially complex idea into a single equation.
This constituted a familiar task for a small fraction of participants, yet it was also, and intentionally so, a provocation for the vast majority of those typically occupied in the production of texts, images and tangible structures. In the end, all would be bound by the rules of the game.
The Formula Project was inspired by an interview I conducted with Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD. At the end of our conversation, Hofmann drew the equation for LSD on a piece of paper. The power and utter simplicity of this notational gesture immediately struck me and seemed an interesting point of departure for this whole project.
The result is a kind of flânerie that has grown out of coincidence, chance, resolve and through the earnest efforts of those who have participated. It provides unique insight into the working methods and mere curiosities of these individuals and is testament to the vital role that formulas play in contemporary culture. In the end, it asks a very fundamental question of us all: what is your formula, what is your equation?
Each of these projects proposes different rules for the game of trying to resist the homogenizing forces at work in the art world. As Pierre Huyghe once told me (when explaining his Association of Freed Time), after a certain point, certain forms of action always produce the same kind of conditions and therefore the same kind of results.
And this is what needed to be renegotiated, which meant finding a way to go beyond the trivial questions of ego and production that are brought to bear in an exhibition.
Something else had to happen. An exhibition not as a solution, a production with a happy ending, but a point of departure. It’s a beginning, a shift, an adventure.
This letter, DEAR HANRU, TO MANY FUTURE ADVENTURES. They have only just begun.
Ever yours
Hans Ulrich
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Originally printed in ART iT No.21 Fall/Winter 2008