With a penchant for alliteration and jokes, Yanyan huang travels the world in search of big game. In her first blog post with OC she interviews contemporary art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Yanyan Huang: During tonight’s talk you asked John Baldessari about the epiphanies he’s experienced throughout his life and career. He mentioned: "conceptual art is pointing at things," "talent is cheap," and "be in the right place at the right time." Have you ever had such epiphanies?
Hans Ulrich Obrist: One of the first epiphanies that triggered my obsession for art was the Giacometti collection at Kunsthalle Zürich. I was 12 years old and would visit the gallery after school.
The second was when I began to meet artists: it was like I was reborn. At the age of 17, I visited the studio of Peter Fischli and David Weiss. At this time (1985), they were just about to work on an amazing film called The Way Things Go, a film of chain reactions. I decided I wanted to be a curator after visiting their studios and speaking with them. Out of this grew one of my first exhibitions held in my kitchen and in a hotel room.
A few months later I met Gerhard Richter, prompting another development. He had a big show in 1986 in Switzerland and invited me to his studio. This is a dialogue that has continued ever since. We collaborated in 1992, at Nietzsche's house in Sils-Maria (where Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra). I organized Gerhard's work, particularly photographs he did of the Swiss mountains. All my early shows had to do with this idea that art can happen unexpectedly in unexpected locations.
Fischli and Weiss suggested I go to Rome to meet with Alighiero Boetti. I spent a day with him where we discussed the concept that artists should be involved in a global dialogue. This triggered in me a whole other way of working. From then on, I never stopped. I had infinite conversations and these conversations led to more epiphanies or moments of insight. It's always a dialogue. I started thinking about how I could expand the notion of curating. How could I curate science, literature, and music? I started exploring these fields.
YH: You realized it was important to contextualize your ideas within other fields of study?
HUO: I thought it could be interesting to curate in different fields: to curate in science and literature museums and in the context of architecture. This led to Cities on the Move and other museum mutations.
YH: Have you found similar themes underlying the different fields of art, architecture, and science?
HUO: There's not one thing that connects everything together, but many. I’ve been working with the Institute of the 21st Century to archive my conversations. Within the digital interview
An anomaly within the art world, Hans Ulrich Obrist operates as an auteur who takes ideas from the past, present, and future and stitches them together to provide a well-founded framework. Hans' approach to his work is organic: ideas come from conversations and spill over to provide the fuel for the next project, ad infinitum.
Yanyan Huang: During tonight’s talk you asked John Baldessari about the epiphanies he’s experienced throughout his life and career. He mentioned: "conceptual art is pointing at things," "talent is cheap," and "be in the right place at the right time." Have you ever had such epiphanies?
Hans Ulrich Obrist: One of the first epiphanies that triggered my obsession for art was the Giacometti collection at Kunsthalle Zürich. I was 12 years old and would visit the gallery after school.
The second was when I began to meet artists: it was like I was reborn. At the age of 17, I visited the studio of Peter Fischli and David Weiss. At this time (1985), they were just about to work on an amazing film called The Way Things Go, a film of chain reactions. I decided I wanted to be a curator after visiting their studios and speaking with them. Out of this grew one of my first exhibitions held in my kitchen and in a hotel room.
A few months later I met Gerhard Richter, prompting another development. He had a big show in 1986 in Switzerland and invited me to his studio. This is a dialogue that has continued ever since. We collaborated in 1992, at Nietzsche's house in Sils-Maria (where Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra). I organized Gerhard's work, particularly photographs he did of the Swiss mountains. All my early shows had to do with this idea that art can happen unexpectedly in unexpected locations.
Fischli and Weiss suggested I go to Rome to meet with Alighiero Boetti. I spent a day with him where we discussed the concept that artists should be involved in a global dialogue. This triggered in me a whole other way of working. From then on, I never stopped. I had infinite conversations and these conversations led to more epiphanies or moments of insight. It's always a dialogue. I started thinking about how I could expand the notion of curating. How could I curate science, literature, and music? I started exploring these fields.
YH: You realized it was important to contextualize your ideas within other fields of study?
HUO: I thought it could be interesting to curate in different fields: to curate in science and literature museums and in the context of architecture. This led to Cities on the Move and other museum mutations.
YH: Have you found similar themes underlying the different fields of art, architecture, and science?
HUO: There's not one thing that connects everything together, but many. I’ve been working with the Institute of the 21st Century to archive my conversations. Within the digital interview