A Protest Against Forgetting

Hans Ulrich Obrist
Interviewed by Gavin Wade

24 hour interview marathon, Serpentine Gallery, 28-29 July, 2006

I first met with the fast talking globetrotting Swiss curator and serial interviewer Hans Ulrich Obrist as part of a series of interviews of curators I was making in preparation for Curating in the 21st Century a symposium and book which I organised at The New Art Gallery Walsall in June 2000. Obrist was resident at Sir John Soane's Museum to develop an exhibition within the space. His time living in the museum allowed him to sensitively integrate artworks into its complex layering of artefacts and architecture intermingled in a labyrinth-like approximation of the workings of the mind. The exhibition was titled Retrace Your Steps: Remember Tomorrow¹ by Douglas Gordon and included film, sculpture, sound works and badges by Cedric Price for the guards to wear as conversation pieces. We both felt there was more to say at the end of our scheduled time and both agreed to continue the interview at a later date. Dialogue's issue on the artist interview prompted that return meet with Hans Ulrich now in his new position of Director of international projects and Co-director of exhibitions and programmes at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Obrist not only started his career by editing a book of interviews and writings by Gerhard Richter (1995)² but soon took on the interview as a compelling element of his curatorial practice which verges on the role of the archiving artist absorbing and sharing the knowledge of curators, artists and other creative practitioners before it is lost forever. Interviewing him 6 years later afforded a chance to weigh up any shifts in Obrist's thinking and the artworld's amnesia as Obrist's continuing battle against forgetting enters a new space with his current collaboration with Rem Koolhaas. Curator and architect together are conducting two 24 hour marathon interviews, the first took place in Koolhaas' rising planet of a summer pavilion in July, testing London's identity and skyline and the second will take place at the Frieze Art Fair in October. A mammoth Volume 1 of Obrist's interviews was published in 2003 ³ and more are promised, all to be designed by M/M Paris. One half of the design duo, Mathias Augustyniak joined us in a trialogue offering further insights into the workings of the HUO brain.

10 December 1999
Sir John Soane's Museum, London

Gavin Wade: I came to the talk you and Hou Hanru gave at the Cities on the Move exhibition at the Hayward Gallery (1999), and there was something that was mentioned about the idea of the exhibition as an evaluation, I was wondering is that a kind of new thing that you were thinking of? That you, say, go to South East Asia, in a general sense, and you bring back a form of evaluation of something that is evolving with artists and culture?

Hans Ulrich Obrist: I think I always see exhibitions much more as a complex dynamic system, you know, and at the beginning it's not really a hundred percent sure where it leads to. Something, which I've always very much liked, is the fact that exhibitions could be an ongoing conversation. And an ongoing conversation is like every show I'm involved in. It always starts out of conversations, with artists or architects and then develops into new conversations and triggers again new conversations between different practitioners. In a sense I don't think that it's necessarily an evaluation. It would be, for me, too much the idea that one would evaluate a certain given situation, which one then would try to put from one context into another context. But I don't believe in this idea that one would actually, you know, with an exhibition, try to represent a reality that exists elsewhere. I always think that an exhibition is a performative space, rather than a space of representation. An exhibition like Cities on the Move tries to push this to its boundaries or sometimes beyond its boundaries by really trying to be a performative space - the exhibition trying to be a performative city much more than a representation of cities. I think to a certain extent what is interesting about certain works of art is that they develop a dynamic form of standstill. That is also why the Sir John Soane's Museum is of great interest - as a model for a museum it's actually more like something which would happen in your mind, but it's a very dynamic thing of memory and it's like entering the brain of someone - it's a kind of dynamic form of visiting historical artefacts. And not only visiting them but also putting them in relation to each other, and actually when a visitor visits the Sir John Soane's Museum, two visits are never the same. There's a way in which the visitor connects with objects differently each time, and I think that's very interesting. In many museums there's this, kind of intimidation situation of the viewer consuming something and so on. This is not the case in the Soane's to this extent because of the scale and because of it being in a private house - it has a domestic context. If you look at visitors entering the house, they are signing a book; it's like a kind of contract.

GW: Yes, it makes you feel quite familiar with the space already.

HUO: Exactly, and then, immediately, discussions with the guards are triggered, you know, there is much discussion with the guards. So visitors also start to talk to each other. For example, take the picture room where Richard Hamilton's painting is hidden behind other paintings on hinged doors behind walls, one has to wait usually until maybe seven, eight, nine people gather there until the thing is opened. So often you have four or five people waiting for some other visitors to arrive, engaging in discussion. And I think again, this idea of exhibition display triggering a conversation is very important, and I think in this sense we can really learn from the Soane's conditions.

GW: I've noticed in interviews and other texts that you've made, a push towards remembering, particularly the article or the internet discussion you had in the Phaidon book Cream ⁴, where you didn't actually get involved in most of the conversation but you just dropped in with this thing that most of them had forgotten about. You said 'don't forget about these people who have come before us.' You seem very aware of history and the history of curators, has the conversational idea come out of that history or is that quite a new innovation in curating?

HUO: I never want to overemphasise the importance of such curatorial questions, because I think to a certain extent they are not necessarily strategies and they are not necessarily theories, but they really have actually come out of conversations. To a greater extent it actually has all started with conversations and what I've been doing has always been an infinite conversation and nothing else really. And out of this infinite conversation there was a stage where, you know, I started to organise an exhibition in my kitchen because I was speaking to Richard Wentworth, to Peter Fischli and David Weiss, to Christian Boltanski and, you know, some artists feel that there are all these exhibitions spaces but they would rather do something in a more clandestine context. Boltanski said why don't you do it in your kitchen, you know, and it's always been a conversation really...

GW: Were you just talking to them because you were interested in their art?

HUO: Yes, that's always the beginning of the dialogue.

I don't want to historicise curating because, you know, it always feels a little bit pretentious to. I always feel it is necessary to mention Alexander Dorner and mention all these things. But the reason why I do it is actually not in order to sort of historicise things, but just out of not understanding why these things are not known.

GW: I want to actually see a chronological breakdown of important moments in twentieth century curating, people and exhibitions.

HUO: Well that's obviously important and you have the exhibition by artists also.

GW: Definitely, yes. But there isn't a document that relates exhibitions in such a way, the only thing I've found are things where you've mentioned stuff and then you can begin by looking back at things. But I am more aware of, you know, post-1960s shows. It's much more difficult to find out information prior to that.

HUO: I started to sort of get into the more historical issues related to this curating question, you know, again, out of conversations. I made for Art Forum a series of interviews, around 1995, 1996 and1997. First of all with Walter Hopps the great American pioneer from the 1950s and1960s, then with Harald Szeemann and Pontus Hulten from Stockholm. Yes, and the idea of these interviews was really to start a history of important curatorial positions in the 1960s and the invention of exhibition models. Through these persons, they are very familiar with the history of what came before them, you know, I mean Szeemann is completely familiar with Harry Graf Kessler and Willem Sandberg is completely familiar with Alexander Dorner. Little by little, through interviewing the protagonists of the 1960s, I got more and more information about the historical facts. But what is interesting is that in the 1990s this whole curatorial discussion has been so accelerated that actually people don't even really remember, but these people do remember because they actually have been very influenced indirectly. If you speak in London to someone like Norman Rosenthal, he would very often cite you Harry Graf Kessler. So it's very interesting, you know, a generation before us is very aware of this historical early twentieth century/late nineteenth century, you know, the references, Felix Feneon, Harry Graf Kessler etc. And I think it has a lot to do with the fact that throughout the 1980s, and the 1970s also but mainly the 1980s, a certain type of contemporary art exhibition and contemporary art museum has prevailed. But that is a rather static, you know, 'white cube' type of museum. Because if you think that Dorner invited El Lissitzky to make the Lissitzky room, the 'Kabinett der Abstrakten' in 1927, it would be quite a daring thing to do for a museum now, you know, to invite a contemporary artist not to do a show, but to actually hang the collection on to a room where the artworks of other artists would move. And these are just ideas I'm very interested in and I think we can learn a lot from. I think it's extremely, deeply, necessary right now to rediscover these positions. I think we can learn a lot from the Soane's in terms of the museum, you know, there are lots of different museum types and exhibition ideas we can learn a lot from. And I think it is very reductive, the white cube ideology, you know, how it's developed basically in the last thirty years in a very small part of the Western world, so as to say not only America and Europe. How this kind of white cube ideology, within thirty years has become such a strong ideology that that it's actually, kind of, you know, almost prevented anything else from happening. I'm not against the white cube but as Marcel Broodhaers said it is only one truth surrounded by many other truths worth being explored.

GW: It has its usefulness.

HUO: Rem Koolhaas says that there is the Whitney type of museum, there's the open time factor, there's the Soane's type of museum, and let's put them all in the same building, you know. A museum shouldn't be reductive, I think there should be different forms of museum conditions, different forms of experiences if possible, that there is a freedom to move.

Hans Ulrich Obrist Sir John Soane's Museum, 1999 Photo credit: Gavin Wade

16 May 2006
Serpentine Gallery, London

GW: I was wondering, just to start off with, of how you think the landscape, the kind of notion of a curating landscape might have changed since 1999 when there seemed to be a much bigger lack of knowledge about the history of curating and how some of your own efforts have started to inform practices?

HUO: What is interesting is that there is, I think, still missing literature and a certain amnesia of curatorial history. And the other day when I arrived in London, it's the third time I have lived here because I lived here in the 1990s first when I did Take Me (I'm Yours), (Serpentine Gallery, London, 1995), and then when I did the research for the Life/Live exhibition (Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1996), and then I lived here a year on and off at the Soane's house when I did Retrace Your Steps: Remember Tomorrow (Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 1999-2000). And so coming back here I felt I'd go to see Eric Hobsbawm the historian and I was very curious, Hobsbawm having written The Short Twentieth Century⁵. I was very curious to see how the great living historian sees our, kind of, strange decade at the beginning of the twenty-first century. And he said something, which he had actually said before once to David Frost and to Simon Schama the historian on BBC Breakfast. He said that his work is a protest against forgetting, and that sort of whole notion, a protest against forgetting, I was thinking is a kind of a nice motto for our discussion really because that's really what the interview project is to a certain extent.

The interview project started somehow actually with David Sylvester, because when I was a kid in Switzerland, this book by David Sylvester on Francis Bacon, his interviews, was quite popular. I got a copy of this book when I was maybe, I don't know, sixteen or seventeen or even earlier and I kept reading this book and I thought it's actually really most exciting that an art critic would talk to an artist again and again and again and create this unbelievably intense dialogue. And this was somehow the blueprint really for a lot of my interview projects afterwards, later, sort of, not so consciously but it sort of entered somehow, because I've been doing these very, very long-term interviews with artists. I mean if it's Gerhard Richter or if it's Daniel Buren or if it's, you know, younger artists of my generation, you know, or very young artists like Anri Sala, I've interviewed them again and again and again.

GW: But that project in a way isn't so much about combating forgetting, as really mining in deep to make sure you get the real essence of what the artist or the individual is really trying to do, isn't it, that's why you would go back for more? Whereas the other idea of not forgetting...

HUO: Yes.

GW: I was just wondering when was the switch, when was the first time you realised that you'd done so many interviews that in a way you were beginning to be an archive of some kind?

HUO: It happened all sort of seamlessly because at a certain moment it became relevant to record the conversation. Also artists would talk about other artists and I would meet younger architects and they would all talk about Yona Friedman, so I would ring up Friedman and go to see him or, you know, at a certain moment Lawrence Weiner would say you should go and see John Chamberlain, so I would go and see Chamberlain and I would go back to that generation. Or Dominique Gonzalez-Forster would tell me about the ninety-five year old ex-student of Le Corbusier, Andre Wogenscky who lives with his partner Marta Pan, a sculptor in her 80's, in this strange environment, sort of a modern house of the 1950s in the suburbs of Paris. We would go with Dominique to see them. So to see someone with someone else - that added a lot to this archive. And it's also just to do with, you know, the engine for the interview project is really curiosity. I mean I believe that also with Dorner, you know, that if you want to understand the forces which are effective in the visual arts that we have to look at what happens in other disciplines. So I started to visit scientists like Benoit Mandelbrot or Ilya Prigogine and I started to visit all kinds of people who have had an influence on the art world from other fields. From mathematicians like Gregory Chaitin or Alain Connes or people from architecture like Rem Koolhaas or Zaha Hadid who have been a great inspiration for the art world. So at a certain moment, you know, that all happened in a sort of seamless way and it evolved like a complex dynamic system with feedback.

But then the day I became conscious that it's important to have this memory element, this protest against forgetting, was a day about six or seven years ago with Rosemarie Trockel in Cologne. Because I was with Rosemarie in her studio, and Rosemarie said I know that you're doing this interview project, you should focus really on memory, you should really focus on hundred-year-old people, you should interview them all, you know, all the great artists and architects. Rosemarie and I made a list that day of who these hundred-year-old people would be. Nathalie Sarraute, you know, who was still alive then, Paul Ricoeur the philosopher and Oscar Niemeyer the architect, and I've done this ever since quite systematically. It's very incomplete but there are these sort of different branches of the interview project, and there's not been a master plan, it happened little by little. So there are the interviews with the centenaries, the people who are eighty, ninety, a hundred, there was that rhetorical sort of aspect, and then there are the interviews where one would go with an artist to see his or her hero. I mean for example, I would start to go with Rem to see all the old architects who have inspired him as a student, so we would go to see O.M.Ungers, Venuri Scott Brown and Philip Johnson. I would say that's the second part of how to go back to the past. Then the third part is obviously this whole idea of going in to other fields, science and all of that, and having great figures of inspiration from those fields, which very often then leads also to the previous generation.

GW: Have you had discussion, or at that point was there any sign of thinking of parallels to other societies or roles of individuals within societies? And I'm thinking of the notion of maybe a non-Western idea of certain individuals within a community being the recipients and holders of knowledge to be passed on from generation to generation. Perhaps I'm imagining an African community where maybe one person is born in to the role and taught the names of every family member who's connected or the family stories. And then if they tragically died, that history would be wiped out because they're meant to pass it on to their children. Your tracking down and interviewing has this feel about it, a sense of instinctive social archiving.

HUO: Yes, I mean if I go to see Pierre Klossowski, you know, who has been friends with Walter Benjamin, or if I go to see Hans Georg Gadamer who was friends with Martin Heidegger. So through my interview project the whole twentieth century has been told to me, but not through books but through people who knew those people. Your question leads a little bit also to the curatorial history, because at a certain moment I was thinking OK, I'm doing these different interviews, and I was thinking there was a kind of missing literature on the father or mother figures within my own field which is curating, and it's always reduced to Harald Szeemann who is very important but, you know, he's not the only one, there are other heroes. And Szeemann himself has said how important Hulten was and Seth Seigelaub and also Jean Leering. I mean Szeemann mainly pointed out not Leering but Sandberg to me, he liked Sandberg a lot. And so at that moment I thought it could be an interesting subject, to go and see all these father and mother figures of curating in a certain way. And that if they tell me their story, you have the whole twentieth century curating as told by... So I would see Anne d'Harnoncourt who is the daughter of Rene Harnoncourt, who is at the very origin of MoMA, who died tragically quite young. In some kind of way, and as most of this story is oral history, you know, and your African example has to do with oral transmission and most of curatorial history is oral history, you know, there are almost no books on Sandberg, but there are his recorded radio conversations. The same is true for Leering and all of those people, you know, it's very much a story which can only be told because it's not yet been written.

GW: Is that actually partly due to the idea of the curator being behind the scenes and being invisible, that it was almost rude to be seen or heard? Maybe that's the thing, that at a certain point it didn't become so rude for the curator to be visible.

HUO: Yes, in my whole way or arguing, there has always been this whole rhetoric about the curator being invisible, Duchamp told Walter Hopps 'the curator should not stand in the way' and I think that it's very important.

GW: That's a quote, is it?

HUO: Yes, which is rather nice, no? And I still believe in that, so I don't think the curator has to be visible at any rate, but obviously you have a point, it might be related that it wasn't decent to be seen, but that's not the only reason. For example, Jean Leering, the great curator of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven who did this exhibition called The Street: A Form of Living Together (1972) which was such an influence on Cities on the Move (1999), you know, many people have quoted it as a key reference. I did a long interview with Leering who passed away this year. I could not publish this interview anywhere, even in Holland. It didn't come out during his lifetime, and now it will be translated for Paul O'Neill's forthcoming publication. So finally, Leering's interview will be published there. And then I'm working on a book where all these curatorial heroes, so as to say, our father and mother figures will be gathered. So it's Walter Zanini who under the dictatorship put forward the Sao Paulo Biennale, who is marvellous, so Zanini is in, and then Yona Fischer who in the 1960s and 1970s did pioneering curatorial work in Tel Aviv, Israel. So it's not only a Western history.

GW: I think you've already mentioned some of your principles of curating, which I think then must tie into the interviewing because the way that you mentioned how you went around the world and how you meet all of these people. Previously you have talked about how you don't believe that curators should be creative as a reason in itself, but that if you're creative by being led or pushed by an artist or architect to go somewhere, and they're telling you to do this thing and that would be the thing that you were led to do.

HUO: That's my methodology.

GW: But then how does the actual act of interviewing compare? I think, the interviewer cannot be invisible, which is a parallel to the notion of the curator, that to believe that the curator is invisible or the interviewer is invisible is about denial or producing an artificiality, which could be interesting if that was the point.

HUO: But that might be a parallel between curating and archiving, right?

GW: Yes.

HUO: And there are also differences so I think it's important when you talk about parallels to talk about differences.

GW: Yes.

HUO: And I think both kind of exist. And I mean definitely, you know, there is a kind of a parallel, but I think that it's kind of... because I'm doing this book right now, which comes out next month, which is about all the prefaces ⁶. And it was sort of a coincidence because I was in a cafe in Paris with Caroline Schneider and she said I we want to do a book, and I had just bought this book by Jean Oury, who is this French psychoanalyst who did this incredible, free, open clinic called La Borde with Felix Guattari. And so he had just brought out a book of prefaces and I had bought it that day because I thought it's kind of interesting that somebody would make a book out of all his prefaces just for a type of text and then gather them, so I thought maybe I should do that sort of book. So I told Caroline and we did this, out of the prefaces in a catalogue, in a sort of a strange chronology. Rem Koolhaas wrote the preface for this where he sort of analyses the difference between the interview and curating.

Something I should maybe say beforehand in terms of how these interviews happened, that obviously progress cannot be separated from my travels. I've been on the road non-stop from 1991 - 2000 and I still travel every weekend, so it's shorter journeys but still a lot of journeys. Very often there is a reason, it's either a lecture or to curate a show or I'm invited to make studio visits. At a certain point in time there is also the question of what is the sense of all of these travels. As a side activity, I started then to think for me to make that sort of whole journey, in the sense that it's very important that I do research in these different places. And so I've started to record interviews and obviously I had certain questions that I would always ask. When I went to Brazil, I would say who is an artist here of many young artists, who is a pioneer who will be the kind of Louise Bourgeois or it could be a hero. A few immediately said it's Lygia Pape, then I would go to see Pape who would talk to me about the late Mario Pedrosa who is this incredibly important curator in the 1960s. And we would be there with Adriano Pedrosa, and then we would meet with some other friends who would talk about Zanini. And as I seldom sleep, you know, and I'm always run very late, I would end up in these people's houses usually by midnight or two in the morning. And so it's really a very strange time thing because I would just... one thing would lead to the next. It's very much about a post planning condition ⁷ and it was very often that I go to see the other one, and it's not that I know I want to interview this person, but one thing leads to the next. It's sort of an ongoing flaneur.

To come back to the thing about the interview, Koolhaas says curating as a profession is about thumbs up or down, sort of a system that picks displays and judges. He was always shocked and astonished by the certainties he found to the curatorial fields of what is good and what is bad. That sort of idea that he says on the one hand, as a curator, one is always committed to this process, but at the same time that actually the commitment to the interview which I have is maybe a kind of a counteraction to a sort of curating stranglehold. That the interviewer is somehow in this regard also the opposite of the curator, that the interviewer is curious where the curator's mind is made up. Where the interviewer is promiscuous, unedited and expurgated, the curator is selective and exclusive.

GW: But he's talking about power relations in some ways, like the difference in power of who is guiding or who is leading or who is listening. In some ways it sounds a little bit like that, that the curator may have to listen to an artist in a different way than an interviewer may have to listen to an interviewee. Because for the interviewer, the next question could be completely based on whatever the interviewee says, whereas with a curator, maybe you don't have to do as much post planning as[c1] a curator. I mean I think post planning in curating is really exciting because it looks quite real and maybe...

Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewing the Big Tail Elephants at Beyond,
Guangzhou Triennial, Guangzhou, China, 2005
Photo credit: Gavin Wade

HUO: But that's what we've been interested in and what brought us together in the Guangzhou Triennial, where you curated the post planning section. So that is definitely the case. Koolhaas is probably right that a lot of my sort of post planning ideas came from the interviewer into the curator. So I would go and see Yona Friedman and Cedric Price who would tell me about new plan and post-planning and I would then incorporate that into curatorial practice. So there will certainly be a dialectic between the two, and it's not, I mean for me these interviews have very often to do with, I mean things get fed back afterwards into exhibitions so it's a back and forth really, it's a dialectic I would say. He also says that basically it's a humble process, I think that is important in both cases.

GW: Humble?

HUO: Yes, that it's a kind of a humble process, the interview is about listening and not about sort of imposing questions. And he says it's about posing normal questions with such urgency that they lead to corners of unexpected revelation. It needs omnivorous attention. He says also that it's about an effort to preserve the traces of intelligence of the last fifty years to make sense of the seemingly disjointed, a hedge against the systematic forgetting. And then he says, you know, that obviously a lot of these, elements of the interview, they are also built into the practice of curating.

GW: Can you tell me about the interview marathons at Serpentine? They seemed to me like an extension or a play on this notion of the infinite conversations that is mentioned at the start of your interview book.

HUO: Yes, so at a certain moment the theatre festival of Stuttgart, you know, the biggest theatre festival in Germany called Theatre of the World, it happens every couple of years in a different German city, they came to see me and they say, we want visual art in the theatre, could you curate something? And so I thought what could happen on a stage? Obviously it would be an interview, but it would have to be an interview marathon. And then I was thinking about Italo Calvino and I was thinking of how one can map the invisible city. And so I was thinking maybe it's good to, before we do this in a big city like London, to test it in Stuttgart, because I was a bit insecure. And we did a twenty-four hour marathon. We've just looked at the list we have made for London and this is quite an incredible list of all these practitioners in London, that you actually end up with an incredible list even for a place like Stuttgart from Werner Spies, an art historian who is from Stuttgart, to Gunter Behnisch the architect, to Weiderman the great German graphic design pioneer. So in some kind of way what it became is really also this idea of a portrait. I think it is interesting this idea that, I mean we've always thought with Stefano Boeri about this impossibility, and when we did Mutations⁸ that it's kind of impossible to do a synthetic image of a city because the city is so complex. The late Oskar Kokoshka pointed out, when he was making a city portrait that the city, always by the time the painting is done, has already changed, so how can you do a synthetic image of the city. This sort of idea of an interview marathon is also to do with a very partial portrait, that you say people are cities, cities are people, and then through all these practitioners you very much get a sort of an idea of petition. Some come at night, some come during the day, some stay the whole marathon and then, you know, we found out after the marathon in Stuttgart that lots of dinners had been triggered which of course I wasn't part of because I was sitting there, but a lot of people went off at two in the morning and said let's go and eat, what is still open? So the only restaurant which is open in Stuttgart, there were all these people meeting each other after the marathon. And so it's almost like you build a community, because the visitors come to know each other and are not just consuming a lecture and going home. The other thing which it obviously also tries to create is that in a city like London, like in any big city when you push the button, you know, you push the button, and then you invite somebody from the architecture world, you have the architecture crowd who comes and you have somebody from the art world and you have the art people come. We had the other day here, an amazing talk by Tony Benn and there was hardly anybody from the art world, you know, it was just one hundred people from politics. So what is interesting, you see, is that each speaker brings his audience and it's his field, and it's not crossing. And through these marathons it's obviously possible to cross it a little bit because you come at three in the morning to listen to people and afterwards you have a young graphic designer and maybe you stay, and then that leads you to...

GW: Are you're doing two marathons with Rem Koolhaas? What's the difference between the two?

HUO: The timing, because we're doing one the end of July and we're doing one during Frieze Art Fair. So during Frieze the whole art world is in town, and so for this reason Frieze will be very much about the impact of globalisation on the art world and the one in July will be about London, and so it's very much about what Cory Doctorow says in his great novel, it's about people coming to town and people leaving town.

GW: When I was looking through your Interview book I could only see a number of set questions the main one being your end question of wanting to know what people haven't been able to do, their unrealised projects. And the other question is the one that you've mentioned about getting them to tell you who are the other people you should find in the world in a way. Will that still work for the marathon interview?

HUO: Rem Koolhas and I are going to ask the questions, so it's not like I would do the interviews on my own. But the thing which is for sure is that I'm going to stubbornly ask my only reoccurring question which pops up again and again, because it's the only question which pops up in all my interviews and that's the question about the unrealised project. I find it so fascinating as an archive, this whole idea of what hasn't worked out. First of all its projects which are about failure because I think in China failure is positive, and I think in the Western world we very often forget the benefits of failure, we are scared of failure. And then the other thing is that in the architecture world a lot of the reality is produced by architects publishing unrealised projects, whilst in the world of art the unrealised projects are never publicised. That's why we, together with Julia Peyton-Jones, decided when I started at the Serpentine, to realise a new three-year plan, and as one of the things we're going to do here, we're going to install the agency of unrealised projects. Actually we are not only going to publicise them but also try and make them happen in terms of their productive reality.

24 hour interview marathon, Serpentine Gallery,
London, 28-29 July, 2006

HUO: Hello Mathias. Mathias is designing all of the books related to the interview, the series for Walter Koenig Books.

GW: So you've been able to capture an essence of what an interview might be or how an interview might be an artwork or something like that in the way that you've been able to approach the books?

Mathias Augustyniak: I think it was more related to the way Hans is having a conversation with... instead of having a conversation with one person, he's starting many conversations at the same moment and they are ongoing conversations. It's just like it's starting, it's maybe like an organ, you know, you start a note and the notes respond and you call them harmonies of conversations. And in the layout we try to get this kind of harmony of conversation by starting some conversation in the layout. Because these interviews, I think if you just read them from start to end, I don't think it's really a way to read them. It's more like when you look at a landscape, you have another look and then you might kind of start to focus on the modern points of this landscape.

GW: The first interview book works like that in a certain way, because I would go in to go and read the interview with Yona Friedman and then that interview would end and depending on who's next, I might go and read that one, and then there might be certain curators I'd track down. But you kind of stumble across things by doing that somehow.

GW: Hans Ulrich, can I just ask you what is your unrealised interview, the one that you still haven't managed to make happen?

HUO: There is, you know, the unrealised project which is always going to be unrealised and it's referred to in the interview book, this book is dedicated to On Kawara, but few people know it is also on the cover, it's a very secret code. Because the microphone on the cover is a photograph by Hans Peter Feldman, and it's switched on so you can see the word ON, and that's our match to On Kawara. Because, you know, On Kawara never gave an interview in his life and he will never do an interview in his life. So it's a necessary impossibility, that's the big unrealised interview.

24 hour interview marathon, Serpentine Gallery,
London, 28-29 July, 2006

¹ Retrace Your Steps: Remember Tomorrow, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 1999-2000
² Gerhard Richter, Han Ulrich Obrist (ed), Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting - Writings and Interviews 1962-1993. Thames and Hudson, London, 1995
³ Hans Ulrich Obrist, Thomas Boutoux (ed), Interviews. Charta, Milan, 2003.
⁴ Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carlos Basualdo, Francesco Bonami , Dan Cameron [et al], Cream: Contemporary Art in Culture. Phaidon Press, London, 2001.
⁵ Eric Hobsbawm, Ages of Extreme: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991. Abacus, London, 1995.
⁶ Hans Ulrich Obrist, Don't Stop, Don't Stop, Don't Stop, Don't Stop. Stenberg Press, New York and Berlin, 2006.
⁷ Han Ulrich Obrist uses the term 'post-planning' as per Hou Hanru's use of the term - 'you start to build a bridge and find out on the way where the bridge goes' (email correspondence from Hans Ulrich Obrist, Sept 2006).
⁸ Rem Koolhaas, Stefano Boeri, Standford Kwinter, Nadia Tazi, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Mutations. Actar, Barcelona and Arc en reve Center d'architecture, 2000.