Interview Marathon
A letter from Hans Ulrich Obrist to Hou Hanru
Dear Hanru
I hope your move to San Francisco went well and am very curious to hear more about your new city. I am in London now and to reconnect to the city (where I lived twice before in ’96 and 2000) in a multilayered way, I organized this Interview Marathon with Rem Koolhaas.
My interest in interviews was first triggered by two very long conversations I read as a student. One was between Pierre Cabanne and Marcel Duchamp1, and the other between David Sylvester and Francis Bacon2. These somehow brought me to art – they were like oxygen, and the first time that the artist interview as a medium became of interest to me. They also sparked my interest in the idea of sustained conversations – of interviews recorded over a period of time, perhaps over the course of many years; the Cabanne/Duchamp interviews took place over three long sessions, for example.
Collaboration with Koolhaas
The Serpentine Gallery Marathons are not intended as some form of talk show, but rather as research conversations. Developed with Rem, the interviews are not only about documenting things that have already happened, but ways of producing reality, as ongoing research that can lead to exhibitions, projects, publications and so on. The people being interviewed are not just from the field of art, however, but include figures from architecture, science, literature and many other disciplines. It is about venturing out from art into other fields and building bridges between them.
The idea of doing interview marathons originated last year in Stuttgart as part of the Theatre of the World festival. I had been invited to attend, and having little experience of the theatre context, wondered in what ways I could contribute. The answer came in the form of the city itself, by addressing how one can map a city and its constituent parts by means of a series of conversations with the people there – artists, architects, theatre directors, scientists, engineers and so forth. The intention was to create a kind of portrait of the city, for which Italo Calvino’s Invisible City became a significant trigger.
The interview marathons are more concerned with the rules of the game than facts and figures such as their actual duration or the number of participants. Each marathon has different rules, different criteria on which they function – thematic, geographical, spatial and so on. It is very much about questioning given formats, about exploring different platforms for discussing culture. Obviously the exhibition format has been questioned throughout the 20th century, but perhaps conferences, symposia and interviews have not yet been considered to the same extent. This project raises the question of how new display and communication methods can be created for such discursive events.
One of the main developments that has taken place since Stuttgart is the involvement of Julia Peyton-Jones, with whom I am now working at the Serpentine Gallery. The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, a major annual architectural commission conceived by Peyton-Jones and initiated in 2000, is this year being designed by Rem and Cecil Balmond, with Arup. Rem was keen to build an ‘architecture of content’, and for the Pavilion to be conceived with attention to the conversations, discussions and events that take place within it.
The notion of the city is an interesting one that I have worked with previously in exhibitions such as Mutations and Cities on the Move. Through discussions with Rem, Stefano Beoeri and Sanford Kwinter, it became clear that it is impossible to make a ‘synthetic’ image of the city. Out of this grew an interest in the idea of a portrait of the city, and from this came the idea of interview marathons. Oscar Kokoshcka pointed out that by the time one has depicted the city, it has already changed. Cities never sleep and are constantly changing. The marathons address the possibility of the impossibility of a synthetic image of the city and attempt to map the city in terms of both the visible and invisible. In this way the marathons reference radical experimental models in visual art, architecture, literature and music and offer ways of connecting them. The marathons treat the past as a tool box with which to make almost an archaeological slice of the present – a kind of Warholian time capsule, whether from the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s or ’90s, with each period offering different tools. It’s not only about the here and now, but the now in terms of memory. As Eric Hobsbawm said, we need to protest against forgetting. During an interview I conducted with him, he raised the idea of actually organising an international protest with this aim. It’s a beautiful idea and maybe the marathons can contribute to it in a modest way.
In Stuttgart it was the artist René Schtab who created an interview stage, whereas in London it will be the whole building, the architecture of Rem and Cecil Balmond’s Pavilion that will be used in many ways, not only for interviews, lectures and events (101 events throughout the summer) but also very much for performances, for exhibitions such as the China Exhibition, Uncertain States of America, and Thomas Demand. For the first time the Pavilion in London will also be a collaboration between the exhibition inside and outside the gallery. Inside the gallery is the Thomas Demand exhibition, which will actually continue inside the Pavilion with Thomas developing a special wallpaper for Rem.
A never-ending, infinite conversation
To return to the topic of the connections between disciplines, in the early 20th century Theodor Adorno said that we cannot understand the forces which are effective in the visual arts if we don’t look at other fields of knowledge. In this contact zone between the disciplines and through discursive events, knowledge production events, lectures and conferences, one can often observe an anticipated audience – when an architect speaks, an architecture audience turns up while hardly anyone from the art world does, and vice versa. This lack of crossover is something addressed by the interview marathons. In Stuttgart, one thing of note was that each speaker came with his or her own audience. Using a format of 24 hours for the interview marathons means that people can come and go as they please. There is very much a contact zone between those different audiences and the marathon intends to encourage such overlaps.
Rem and I have been developing the Serpentine Gallery Marathons with a team of advisers. Weekly and daily encounters and conversations with the advisers lead to further connections and other people who might be able to participate. This is very much how exhibitions evolve, but that principle can equally be applied to a discursive event such as the interview marathons. When researching exhibitions, such as with Harald Szeemann’s seminal exhibition When Attitudes Become Form, young artists speak about other artists and this fuels the process. Philip Parreno would say ‘la chaine est belle’ – it’s a beautiful chain and a never-ending, infinite conversation.
My collaboration with Rem began – as you know – in 1997 when you and I began curating Cities on the Move, and we went to see him in Rotterdam, followed by that amazing evening (the very next day!) with him in Hong Kong. He introduced us to young architects from Hong Kong and mainland China, and from there gave us addresses and we went to Singapore and met Tai Soo Kim and William Lin, and continued our journey to Korea, Indonesia, and all over Asia. It was really this one evening with Rem that triggered Cities on the Move, and it was immediately apparent that we could not do an exhibition simply about Asian art but rather that it would be a transdisciplinary exhibition about ‘the city’. The collaboration then intensified when the exhibition came to London and Rem and his colleague Ole Scheeren (with whom he now runs CCTV in China) did Cities on the Move with us at the Hayward Gallery, creating the exhibition design and inventing completely new typologies. Then two years later, after I had invited Rem into the art context, as it were, the scenario was inverted and we worked together on Mutations – a millennium exhibition about the future of cities in 2000 in France that Rem was asked to curate. Rem invited Stefano Boeri, Sanford Kwinter and myself to co-curate the show with him. It was here that I realized a project on the Invisible City; Sonic City and Rumour City were a part of that. Rem showed his Lagos research, and Boeri, his Uncertain States of Europe (USE) project.
Portrait of a city, portrait of a movement
I subsequently worked on my ongoing interview project, from Gerhard Richter and Gilbert & George to younger artists such as Philip Parreno, Pierre Huyghe, Liam Gillick and Rirkrit Tiravanija. These have been sustained interviews over the years, following the Cabanne/Duchamp and Sylvester/Bacon. The research for exhibitions such as Nuit Blanche, Cities on the Move, Live/Live, Uncertain States of America and so on included many interviews with younger artists, and through these I started to interview more and more architects and scientists, venturing into other disciplines in ways that relate to aspects of interest to artists. At this point, Rem and I decided to conduct some interviews jointly, so the dialogue became a trialogue! Together we went to see many of the older architects who have inspired him or influenced him earlier in his career. So we did a long interview with the German architect Oswald Mathias Ungers as well as Isozaki Arata, Giancarlo de Carlo, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and also artists like Wolfgang Tillmans. Thus the idea became to go and see someone with someone else, and this has become quite a regular practice. Then last year, still on this idea of how to make a portrait of a city, we explored how to make a portrait of a movement, which is as complex a task. We were looking for a movement that matters today and of which the protagonists are still alive and working. We observed that today there are fewer movements with manifestos, so we looked at Fluxus, but realised that for many of these ’60s movements the key protagonists have died. We settled upon the Japanese architecture movement Metabolism and interviewed all the protagonists – the architects, the critics, the industrial designers involved with Metabolism – over a period of three days non-stop. It was another marathon – a Tokyo marathon, which will lead to a book.
This idea of a portrait of a movement will also be evident as part of the Summer Programme this year at the Serpentine Gallery. There have, therefore, been many paths leading up to this collaboration for the Serpentine Gallery Marathons. And as Douglas Gordon would say, it has only just begun.
All best regards
HUO
1 David Sylvester and Francis Bacon, Looking Back at Francis Bacon.
2 Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues With Marcel Duchamp.
Next
https://www.art-it.asia/en/u/admin_columns_e/2Wzgpmk13v7a6l8ZVNby/
Previous
https://www.art-it.asia/en/u/admin_columns_e/v4zTs1LqA2MUSBHdgEiK/
Index
https://www.art-it.asia/en/u/admin_columns_e/9zBAU4WxiwpIvnY65VuF
Originally printed in ART iT No.13 Fall/Winter 2006