Curationism. David Balzer
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towed by planes above South Beach’s long, populous white-sand beach. I go swimming one day, looking up from the crashing waves to see a different banner: ‘HANS ULRICH OBRIST HEAR US.’ I laugh. It’s such an obscure plea – a knowing combination of unctuousness and plaintiveness. Hans Ulrich Obrist is one of the world’s top curators, and a few nights previous I had attended a panel discussion he had moderated between Kanye West and architect Jacques Herzog. (Obrist calls both, to varying degrees, friends.) Clearly, Obrist is here. But why?
The banner’s culprit was Canadian artist Bill Burns. Over recent years, Burns has made drawings, postcards, sculptures, watercolours and digital mock-ups addressing a variety of art-world authorities. The works express (and parody) the desperation and vulnerability felt by contemporary artists when fathoming the internationally known directors, curators and collectors who could make or break them. One Burns work is a proposal to affix a large sign to the roof of London’s Tate Modern reading ‘Hans Ulrich Obrist Priez Pour Nous’ (in English, ‘Hans Ulrich Obrist Pray For Us’). In Miami, Burns hired airplane banners every day to make similar appeals, not just to Obrist, but to other power or star curators, like Hou Hanru and Beatrix Ruf.
It’s likely the beach crowd stared up in indifference at Burns’ banners. Outside of Obrist, is Burns certain anyone he had appealed to by name was actually present at Art Basel? ‘I have no clue,’ he tells me. ‘The fairs are very big events, but they take a certain kind of personality to enjoy, like going shopping at Christmas.’ What would a curator do at Art Basel Miami Beach? ‘It’s true that curators over the last two hundred years have been understood as taking on a kind of public-service role. But now there’s a curious mixed economy in the art world. A curator’s job is often, at a fair, to cajole a collector into buying something for a museum – which I’m sure, for many, is not very pleasant. Artists, curators, collectors: we’re all part of a regime. I’m part of it as well. You are too.’
After seeing Burns’ banner, it occurred to me I was in eyeshot of the fuchsia tent of Untitled, one of Miami Art Week’s newest fairs, whose press materials emphasized its use of a curator, Brooklyn’s Omar Lopez-Chahoud. Lopez-Chahoud selected the galleries for Untitled, in some cases overseeing the arrangement of the fair’s booths and works. But Untitled’s gambit is not, in fact, novel. There’s Frieze London, and now Frieze New York, both of which rigorously jury their exhibitors, using curators to handle ‘special projects’ such as sculpture parks on their tent grounds. And Frieze’s template is arguably Art Basel’s, whose former director, Samuel Keller, pushed curation to the forefront of the fair’s brand (in Switzerland and in Miami), collaborating with Obrist as early as 2000 to launch, at first, a series of talks at the Swiss fair.
Now, within the sterile, chaotic confines of the Miami Beach Convention Center, there are, for instance, curated sections for artist films and videos. Art Basel Miami Beach’s Nova and Positions sectors, the former meant for gallerists to display new works and the latter for gallerists to showcase the work of a single artist, do not have apparent curators, but suggest a ‘curatorial sensibility’: things judiciously selected and sleekly arranged, granting the fairgoer an experience much closer to that of a gallery or museum. When one considers Burns’ (correct) guess that curators also come to fairs to acquire art for their respective institutions (or, more frequently, to function as advisors for trustees and the like who hold those institutions’ purse strings), the fair becomes not anathema to curators, but specifically tailored to them. They occupy – and when not occupying, compellingly inform – both of the fair’s essential roles, those of buyer and arranger-facilitator.
If curation is everywhere, it is also both strangely embodied and disembodied. The curator is no longer just an art-world figure. Within the art world, a select number of curators like Hans Ulrich Obrist dominate their institutions but also transcend them, playing roles in media and culture. Outside the art world, curation is powerful but also diffuse. Celebrities act as curators not just for exhibitions, but for music festivals and boutiques. We ‘curate’ in relation to ourselves, using the term to refer to any number of things we do and consume on a daily basis. Curators are visible in so many likely and unlikely ways. Are we witnessing their ultimate triumph, or a troubling, fascinating moment of their undoing?
While it can be said of professionals from many fields, it is particularly true of curators that no two are exactly alike. There is certainly no one quite like Hans Ulrich Obrist, who is affectionately known in the art world by his monographic acronym, HUO. One could begin by citing his dependable inclusion in the art-world ‘power lists’ that have become so omnipresent over the past five years or so. In 2009 to 2013, Obrist – with, in some years, his co-director at London’s Serpentine Galleries, Julia Peyton-Jones – made the prestigious Top 10 of ArtReview’s Power 100 list every year, taking first place in 2009 and second in 2010 and 2012. While ArtReview’s Top 10 is sometimes broken by curators – Christov-Bakargiev was No. 1 in 2012 due to Documenta – it is more typically occupied by dealers, collectors and directors. If ArtReview is to be believed, Obrist is nearly as powerful as Larry Gagosian, the billionaire ‘superdealer’ with galleries in New York, L.A., London, Rome, Paris, Geneva and Hong Kong.
And while Obrist is not as wealthy as Gagosian, his influence, despite or indeed because of his singularity, is as representative. The New Yorker’s Nick Paumgarten described Gagosian as occupying ‘an ecosystem of his own’ – so does Obrist. As the world’s most famous contemporary-art curator, Obrist sets a remarkable precedent, acting as the archetype for the professionalization and domination of his field.
Ubiquity and its attendant commitment to industry are Obrist’s hallmarks. In May 2013, New York–based collector-oriented website Artspace put Obrist first in its ‘8 Super-Curators You Need to Know’ piece, claiming he is renowned for ‘being everywhere at once.’ This trait is cited repeatedly by Obrist’s friends and admirers. A profile of Obrist on the New York Observer’s Gallerist blog, also from May 2013, is titled ‘Marathon Man,’ with the kicker ‘UBIQUITY.’ Writer M. H. Miller makes the wild claim that, ‘Over the course of a single cigarette, I once witnessed [Obrist] roll up to an art fair in a car, run inside, come back out murmuring to his companion about what impressed him, then get back in the car and head to the next event, like some kind of highbrow European Roadrunner.’ Modernist café-society photographer Brassaï timed his fly-on-the-wall exposures to the duration of a cigarette’s burning; in the 2010s, the cigarette can be used to measure the frenetic pace of the internationally mobile curator.
Hans Ulrich Obrist was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1968 to non–art-world parents, yet his legend begins early. In an interview for the December 2013/January 2014 issue of Surface, of which he is the cover star, he speaks to Paul Holdengräber about formative experiences. Obrist, who has a celebrated memory, was struck by the vast Abbey library of Saint Gall at the ripe age of three. He came across a Giacometti sculpture at Zurich’s Kunsthaus shortly thereafter, and vowed to ‘go to museums every day.’ By the early 1980s, the pioneering curator Harald Szeemann was at Kunsthaus Zurich, and Obrist, now a teenager, soaked up his influential programming, visiting his Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk group show forty-one times. (Obrist remembers this ‘because [he] counted it.’) By sixteen, Obrist claims to have visited all the museums in Switzerland. By seventeen, he had cold-called Swiss art duo Fischli/Weiss and asked to visit their studio. They got on, and this precipitated more artist visits: Christian Boltanski in Paris at age eighteen; Gilbert & George and Gerhard Richter in London soon after. This was the genesis of Obrist’s reputation for hyper-travel, the youth-discounted InterRail Pass getting him across Europe. ‘I was everywhere, all the time, but I had yet to produce anything,’ he tells Ingo Niermann in his 2011 book, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Curating But Were Afraid to Ask. ‘Those were apprenticeship and journeyman years, a European Grand Tour.’ In 1991, at twenty-three, Obrist curated his first group show in his kitchen, featuring Fischli/Weiss, Boltanski and other names that were or were to become art-world royalty.
Having already formed important mentorship relationships with curators Kaspar König, currently director of Cologne’s Museum Ludwig, and Suzanne Pagé, currently artistic director of the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation, Obrist began Migrateurs, a curatorial project for the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (MAMVP) under the supervision of Pagé, who was director at the