The Nanomuseum
A letter from Hans Ulrich Obrist to Hou Hanru
Dear Hanru,
Thanks so much for your inspiring text on Pelin and public art. Today I want to write about some issues related to my most recent exhibition, Everstill, at the Federico García Lorca House-Museum in Granada, Spain (through July 2008).
The first is the bridge between art and literature, which I feel is not emphasized enough in our times. All the main avant-gardes of the 20th century had strong ties with literature, ties that continued even into the ’60s with almost immediate contact zones between Robbe Grillet and artists from Robert Rauschenberg to Sol Lewitt. In the current century, dialogues between art and music, architecture and fashion have occurred much more frequently than dialogues with literature. Is something missing?
The second – which I will focus on today in light of your comments on public art – is the small-scale exhibition, which at the moment is being almost forgotten. I think that now, when art and exhibitions are venturing into the large-scale, and when more and more museums are building new wings, it is urgent to keep in mind that there can be different experiences in terms of scale.
Ever-bigger vs. small
Everstill is the fourth in an ongoing series of contemporary art exhibitions in house-museums that I started to curate in the early ’90s. The series launched with Sils by Gerhard Richter at the Nietzsche Haus in Sils Maria, followed by Retrace your steps: remember tomorrow at the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London and The Air is Blue at the Casa Barragan in Mexico City. Since these museums have the dimensions of a home, visitors do not have the same relationship to the works on display as they would within the cavernous spaces of monumental museum architecture. The gulf between the museum and the world of living experience, criticized by Adorno, has been bridged.
The interesting thing about holding exhibitions of contemporary art in contexts where they would usually not take place is that the context and scale trigger works different from those the same artists would do in a more monumental setting. Here, for example, we can mention various interventions with the Lorca house: Philippe Parreno’s with the window and Rivane Neuenschwander’s Macchi IN SITU, re-inhabiting the house with new ‘personal effects’. Gilbert & George spent an afternoon in the Museum, the resulting photograph framed and placed in Lorca’s bedroom. Other works include Pedro Reyes’ realization of an unrealized film of Lorca, and John Armleder’s filming of Lorca’s original manuscripts in the archive in Madrid.
The works on view will be numbered but not labeled – in keeping with the way Sir John Soane displayed his collections. There are no didactic panels or sound guides; visitors are encouraged to move where they wish through the rooms encountering unexpected works of art in unexpected places.
In an increasingly event-driven culture, sustainability and legacy are at the core of what an art institution should be and they embody the guiding principles of Everstill. One of the key questions is how to reintroduce slowness in an ever-accelerated world of exhibitions.
The idea of different scales of exhibitions is key. We live in a moment of extreme globalisation where, as Edouard Glissant shows, the homogenizing forces threaten to erode differences and variety of space and time. The reinjection of small museums into the context of ever-bigger museums has therefore always been part of my practice.
Showing art on the subway
Before the series of house-museum shows I had already launched the Nanomuseum, which grew out of a discussion with Hans-Peter Feldmann, a visionary artist based in Düsseldorf who also ran a shop selling all kinds of objects, including little picture frames. I bought one of these small frames and the idea emerged of how the frame could become a portable museum and host exhibitions anywhere. It was representative of the lightest possible structure a museum could have and at the same time, a kind of parody of nanotechnology. It would be a completely free museum so that there wouldn’t be any constraints on having regular exhibitions – there might not be a show for three months, and then there might be two per day. There are all kinds of possibilities, after all, when you have time as freedom rather than constraint.
Functioning as a migrating conversation, wherever the Nanomuseum goes, it not only keeps track of its findings, but also stimulates dialogue. There’s always someone (either I or whoever is carrying the museum around with them) showing the museum to friends or other people, including passersby, and it is an excellent pretext for a discussion. It’s a bit like what Douglas Gordon once said, “The object is only there to trigger a conversation.” So it’s not about the object, but about what it can instigate.
The Nanomuseum is completely self-organized in its structure or governance. The Nanomuseum has a nano-budget. Everything is nano. And as there are really no nano-budgets, there are no nano-sponsors!
The Nanomuseum has no permanent collection. All the shows are temporary. The idea is that it should eventually all be printed in a book and then everybody could do their own Nanomuseum. Commercial publishers, however, seem uninterested in nano-books, ergo, thus far no one has actually agreed to publish it. I think it’s important that it can make trajectories across disciplines and through different activities. As Robert Musil once said, “If art still exists, it is where we least expect to find it.” You wouldn’t expect art to happen on an airplane, in a taxi, or on the subway, but those are exactly the places where the Nanomuseum has often been shown.
Not surprisingly, the Nanomuseum is quite famous in Japan, and articles have been published about it there – thanks in part to Ozawa Tsuyoshi’s Nasubi Gallery, which was like an exhibition within the exhibition, and related to the local research. For Cities on the Move in London (which of course you know), we invited London-based artists to exhibit in the Nasubi spaces; Helsinki the same.
The end and beginning of the museum
The Nanomuseum is a portable laboratory in the sense of what the great scientist Francisco Varela once commented: in establishing a discipline of research and science, one is bound to the invention of a topographical place. Varela was certainly one of the most important thinkers on autopoiesis and self-organization within an art context. Experimental/subjective science, which played a major role in the 19th century, has disappeared increasingly from the Western world over the course of the 20th century and survives only within the traditions of Buddhist, Hindu, and Taoist thought. For the Laboratorium show that I co-curated with Barbara Vanderlinden at the Museum of Photography in Antwerp, Varela conceived of a kind of subjective portable laboratory. An instructive text was pinned to the wall next to a large pillow on wheels on which one could sit and meditate:
“Become the laboratory by standing still or sitting on the cushion provided. Proceed to do nothing. Relax your posture and attitude, and lightly observe whatever comes into experience. That’s the experiment. Note the specific manifestations of the mind as if they were data. Repeat this gesture of full presence, of mindfulness, as many times as you can. The laboratory is now portable and you may carry it with you wherever you go. Keep track of your findings!”
And it’s obviously interesting to think that if the Nanomuseum is embedded in a moving topographical place such that the experimental procedures can actually be carried out wherever one wants, then it becomes a very different kind of situation. Which means it’s also, as Varela rightly pointed out, a museum that invites the viewer to keep track of his or her own findings, and that’s exactly the experiment. It’s not a specific manifestation of a mind, as if there were data to be ordered. It changes from exhibition to exhibition.
Once the Nanomuseum was exhibited within the Sir John Soane’s Museum where Cerith Wyn Evans did a memorable piece by photographing the Nanomuseum as a museum within the museum, injecting Polaroids of the Nanomuseum which show the museum in the museum and photographing them again like an infinite mirroring to create a dense, imbricated kind of reality. Then there was a show by Cliff Marko, who actually brought the Nanomuseum into a sound dimension by making an homage to Schnittke. Gabriel Orozco developed a series of computer drawings so that the Nanomuseum would change every day. Similarly, Hans-Peter Feldmann showed random pictures in the Nanomuseum such that it never remained the same.
Douglas Gordon’s project has never happened – actually the museum had temporarily disappeared in a pub in Glasgow, but then reappeared – hence the unrealized project. It happened where we didn’t see it. Nevertheless we are bringing the Nanomuseum project to an end. It has a life cycle and then it will die. Why should the Nanomuseum last forever? As Ito Toyo and other Asian architects have already pointed out (and Cedric Price pointed out in Europe), buildings can die like people do. Douglas Gordon will do the last show, and that will be the museum’s funeral and burial. But this is not to forget the possibility of resurrection.
The Nanomuseum has much to do with the idea of the mobile museum. It’s also interesting to think of it in relation to recent ideas of Anton Zeilinger, the Austrian scientist who was actually the first to prove the teletransportation of light through experiments. Zeilinger thinks that within ten years, we’ll be able to teletransport matter, and that would not only be Star Trek in terms of ‘Beam me up, Scotty’, but would also mean the teletransportation of the museum. So instead of dying, there is a second possibility that leads us to the end or the beginning of the museum.
The Nanomuseum has only just begun.
All the best
Hans Ulrich
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Originally printed in ART iT No.19 Spring/Summer 2008