Exhibition-making in a transnational context
A letter from Hans Ulrich Obrist to Hou Hanru
Dear HHR
Your text on Adel and Ming also made me think of the transnational condition of art. As Simryn Gill once told us at the very beginning of our Cities on the Move project: “Artists no longer belong to a geography; they live between geographies between geographies between geographies.”
The question of transnational exhibitions has been a key issue since the ’90s. Having been asked while at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris to curate several explicitly ‘national’ exhibitions – starting with Live/Life, an investigation of the British scene of the ’90s, then Nuit Blanche on the Nordic art scene, and finally, Traverses, on the French art scene around the beginning of the millennium, all co-curated with Lawrence Bossé – I often tried to turn the tables and investigate what we might call the post- or trans-national. More precisely, I’ve been interested in deliberating how an exhibition focusing on the post- or trans-national notion of national exhibition could be not about borderlines, but actually become a borderline.
A rudimentary interest in these processes was triggered years back by my desire to counter the prepackaged, top-down model of how I felt many traveling exhibitions migrated. One might call this the ‘blockbuster effect’ driven by the cost-effective distribution of a static work for maximum effect: namely, gate sales and visibility. Saatchi’s Sensation is an obvious case in point in the contemporary realm. But if this posed one model of globalization, I’ve been driven to explore other, more organic models. In opposing what he called the ‘irreversible’ aspects of globalization (uniformity, homogeneity), Etienne Balibar once described to me what he saw as the need for intellectual artists and exhibitions to become nomadic – physically and mentally traveling across borders – and how going beyond national boundaries would allow languages and cultures to spill in all directions, and broaden the horizon of translating capacities. “Exhibitions would vanish in their intervention,” he used to say. “They would be necessary but without monopoly; they would be borderlines themselves.” Thus my earlier accentuation: to become a borderline.
Exhibition as traveling laboratory
Live/Life looked at the amazing dynamics of the British art scene of the period. Aware that it was naïve to grapple with the entirety of such a vibrant arts scene and the risks of imposing a reductive perspective from the outside, urbanists like Cedric Price proved invaluable guides to questioning the master plan of such an exhibition and introducing in its place alternative models of self-organization.
Over the course of our research we became attuned to the incredible importance of artist-run spaces all over the UK, and began thinking about how to break up and open the exhibition. The idea, and one that I continue to champion, would be to organize a show where there would be many exhibitions within the exhibition, where a show would hide other shows. The exhibition in this sense became a polyphony of these different micro situations and our role, more than curating a master plan, was to somehow create bridges and links between these different temporary and autonomous domes within the exhibition.
But Live/Life did not travel and that’s probably its fundamental divergence with Nuit Blanche. Here we were again focusing on specific geographical boundaries although more diverse: artistic production of the moment in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland being our point of departure.
I like to think of Nuit Blanche as a kind of a traveling laboratory. It was the first of my collaborations with Gunnar Kvaran, then director of the Bergen Museum and now head of the Astrup Fearnley Museum, who toured the show through several Nordic countries, each time with a different video program driven by guest curators. So cinema, in addition to links with other fields of knowledge such as architecture, design and literature, drove this show; positions, the cinematic especially, which resurface prominently in more recent undertakings of mine such as Uncertain States of America.
The value of this long-term research is vital to the integrity and the vision of such shows. In fact, I think these are ultimately research exhibitions; they are not about representation, but knowledge production. The shows emerge from hundreds of studio visits encompassing a year or more, so they are actually also very slow – the opposite, maybe, of what one might consider the basis of today’s exhibition practice. Globalization is not only about speeding up, but slowing down; repeat visits, slow discussions, were absolutely key. This constant flow of dialogue gradually builds up the idea, the structure.
In Transverses we proposed a different rule of the game: each artist would invite another practitioner to do something in relation to or with his or her work to engage further collaboration. In essence, we began to view exhibition-making less as a continental thing, and more, to borrow poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s distillation, as an archipelago – a production of interconnected bodies of activity and knowledge.
A polyphony of centers
Uncertain States of America commenced at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo in 2005 and has since passed through the Center of Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York; the Serpentine Gallery, London; the Reykjavik Art Museum, and is presently on view at the Herning Kunstmuseum in Denmark. It will later travel to Poland, France, China and Russia – perhaps beyond. What I want to stress here is the extent to which Uncertain States also functions as a multi-centered toolbox.
The polyphony of centers is something that has come to define the art world over the last two decades. If the 1980s system was still very much dominated by competition for who is the center – this famous idea of Paris having ceded to New York – this jostling seemed to become less and less relevant over the course of the ’90s. I realized this first in ’91 when I went to Glasgow to give a lecture on Transmission and came to understand what an incredibly dynamic position this otherwise regional city had in the art world. I began talking to Douglas Gordon about this and our conversations really alerted me to this dynamic: Europe as a polyphony of cultural centers.
When Daniel Birnbaum, Gunnar Kvaran and I began research on Uncertain States, we thus began with the premise that New York City no longer rules supreme and did some intense traveling across the country to identify other burgeoning scenes. Portland, Oregon, for example, proved to be a very strong local pocket of music, cinema and art. One could say the same for San Francisco, Los Angeles and now Miami. I don’t intend to downplay the continued importance of New York – many of this show’s artists practice there – but I think it’s vital we acknowledge the density of activity in these other areas as well.
Because the show is very much a learning system, we’ve been able to adjust and add to it along the way. Shannon Ebner and Reena Spaulings were two new additions to the Serpentine version. And then there’s a very strong reader that Noah Horowitz and Brian Sholis put together which, keeping with the theme of the exhibition, compiles writings around art and cultural politics in America since 2000. This was one of the first projects we considered pursuing before the show began in 2005, but it took over a year for us to get the vision and resources in place. A prototype version, co-published with the Astrup Fearnley Museum, was released in conjunction with Uncertain States of America at the Serpentine and Sternberg Press will be releasing a more formal, expanded version in December. It’s another great example, I believe, of this slowness I mentioned before and the research-driven aspect of these projects.
I think it’s important, at this juncture, to return to Glissant who’s been an unparalleled influence in terms of how I’ve negotiated these knowledge-production ventures and my approach to globalization at large: understanding how to trigger and reinforce global dialogue while still enhancing differences. In the art context, the pre-packaged exhibition is a very dangerous undertaking: shipping the same show from one venue to the next is uninteresting, and at the extreme may even be opportunistic. So I think it’s essential that we continue to stress local research and open-ended dialogue. It’s a process not of rejecting global dialogue, but of entering dialogues between the local and the global and of always keeping in mind that they must produce difference. Glissant calls it becoming a ‘different engine’.
To conclude, a few words about China Power Station, my most recent project and another in the ongoing collaboration between the Serpentine Gallery and the Astrup Fearnley Museum. Here we opened the Battersea Power Station to the public for the first and last time before the site’s redevelopment. The project involves an exhibition of new video art from China – Yang Fudong, Cao Fei, Gu Dexin, Jia Zhangke and others – but is also about architecture, sound and design. The installation comprised three floors of the Power Station’s east wing, Ito Toyo’s pavilion, which includes a café run by Alan Yau, and a parallel project curated by Universal Studio presenting a flea-market-type array of goods by younger Chinese clothing-makers, publishers and so forth.
Again, this is a long term initiative: what started in London will become more of a historical exhibition in Oslo this year and will later reinvent itself when the show migrates to China, where we also intend to produce buildings. So the project is a new chapter: not about representation but about producing reality; not about contemplating space and historical processes, but about entering them, making them real.
I’ll look forward to your thoughts on this or whatever it inspires.
Very best regards
HUO
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Originally printed in ART iT No.15 Spring/Summer 2007