“For me, it's interesting how art can enter a society”
- Han Ulrich Obrist
Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2011, KHOJ Marathon, India. Courtesy KHOJ Marathon.
Hans Ulrich Obrist, the indefatigable artistic director of the Serpentine Gallery, is known for collaborating with many artists, scientists, engineers, and philosophers on long-duration projects that aim to open possibilities. Along the way, he relentlessly searches, pools, and archives new formats and forms of knowledge. Obrist's mediums, whether writing, curating, or recorded conversations, ladder up to his ongoing, living archive, of realized and unrealized projects. He attributes his most profound learnings to artists, often referring to those who have shaped his thinking the most, such as John Latham, Etel Adnan, and Edouard Glissant.
Those who follow Obrist's extensive body of work and long term projects are familiar with the many forms of his projects, from "do it," his quest to reclaim handwriting and his interest in how art can enter society. Our conversation touched several of these topics, mainly focusing on new models of artistic production, inspired by our mutual interest in the Artist Placement Group.
The Artist Placement Group (APG), founded in 1966 in London, was an experimental program founded by artists, Barbara Stevini and John Latham. APG focused on placing artists in business and government, working within those institutions and sharing skills, for specific periods. The goal was for the artist to be a more active participant in different contexts within society. Artist placements included British Steel Corporation, Department of the Environment, the Scottish Office, and the Department of Health and Social Security. Core participants of APG included Barbara Steveni, John Latham, Maurice Agis, Joseph Beuys, Ian Breakwell, Stuart Brisley, Hugh Davies, Andrew Dipper, Barry Flanagan, David Hall, Ian Macdonald Munro, Yoko Ono, Anna Ridley, Jeffrey Shaw, David Toop, and the Fluxus Group.
Our conversation took place on January 22, 2020. When we spoke, we dedicated it to an artist who influenced both of us, Jonas Mekas (December 24, 1922 – January 23, 2019). Also, I extend this dedication to Barbara Steveni (August 21, 1928 - February 16, 2020), who passed the month after this conversation took place.
Unintentionally mirroring Obrist's vitality, our conversation below took place in a taxi ride across New York City. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Artist Placement Group, Between 6, Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 1971. Courtesy Barbara Stevini.
BW: I watched your keynote speech at Voices: the Antidote to Globalization, and you were talking about APG.
HUO: Yes, the Artist Placement Group.
BW: Yes, Barbara Steveni, John Latham, and others. That is a model I have been interested in over the years and trying to figure out if that model can operate in a way that is productive and successful (to research, infiltrate, expose, create alternatives to the dominant ideology).
HUO: John Latham was a friend, so is Barbara Steveni. I saw them both because they often came to my house when I was living in Elephant in Castle in the mid nineties. I was also close to Rita Donagh and Richard Hamilton. And, of course, Richard and Rita always talked about John Latham, who was important to them. They owned this table with Latham's glass, one of the broken glass pieces in his house. Encouraged by Donagh and Hamilton, I, then, started to interview Latham in the nineties. We were interested in the APG thing from the beginning. For me, it's interesting how art can enter society. I just wrote the text actually on that the other day.
And, I always thought it would be important to realize that idea (APG). I experienced it when Peter Saville was made the artistic director at Manchester appointed by the mayor. And, that produced the Manchester International Festival because Peter Saville, the artist, and designer, told Manchester they needed to have a festival, where everything had to be new, so unrealized projects could happen. Peter Saville had also advised that Alex Poots should be the director of this Festival. And, it became this very experimental Festival. Amazing things happen when artists get involved. And that, of course, also happened with Latham.
BW: He placed himself in the Scottish government, right?
HUO: In the Scottish government.
Derelict Land Art: Five Sisters, John Latham (1921-2006), 1976, Wood, photographs, glass jar, and shale. © John Latham Estate.Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London.
BW: Their manifesto sketches out how artists could operate in this other space.
It's interesting to think about those massive industrial companies back then, British Steel and Esso Petroleum, what that would mean today. You know, would it be Microsoft? Would it be Google? I love what Paul Virilio said in the "Accident of Art" - if you want to transform a company like Microsoft, don't focus on its founder and CEO at the time, Bill Gates. Go work with the developers inside the belly of Microsoft for a more horizontal, grassroots transformation.
You mentioned this APG model was one of your unrealized projects. What is your vision for a contemporary APG model? Would you want to see every company have an artist on staff? Or, every government entity or every academic institution have artists on staff councils?
HUO: I had a talk with Mark Bradford recently, where he also talked about that. Mark emphasized the role of artists on the board of companies. I think there are probably a lot of artists who believe in this idea, too. It has a lot of currency among artists, particularly, also if you think about the fact that I think tech companies would be perfect for that. This idea connects to Billy Klüver and the New Experiments in Art and Technology. I went to speak the other day to Lillian Schwartz, and she had an office in Bell Laboratories in the nineties, working on early computer art. She saw these engineers every day. And so it's a different thing than a residency because a residency is a very short-term contact zone. Whereas, this was a much longer duration. I think we need to develop longer durational projects. In terms of real agency, an artist inside an organization is something other than an artist-in-residence because an artist-in-residence is never involved in executive decisions.
Everything I know I learned from artists - from Alighiero Boetti talking about unrealized projects to Rosemary Trockel, who told me about searching in cities for extraordinary woman pioneers. Down to Jonas Mekas, who taught me to record everything.
BW: He died a year ago, tomorrow, January 23. Jonas Mekas’s work in cinema verite and forms of essay has had a significant influence on me.
HUO: For you, as well. He's the reason why I started to record conversations. I was always meeting artists. And, I was sitting in a café in Paris, and he said, you know, you should record this.
I learned everything from artists. I always believe in transformative potential, and I think that society could benefit from it, particularly now.
BW: I like what you said about the board because of one of the challenges –
HUO: That's an extrapolation of Latham. Latham didn't say that.
Latham said, you know, to put artists in companies. But I think we need to take a step further. An artist could be on the board.
BW: He also said changing the time base, making it long-term because these companies are so focused on GDP and short-term economics. But what you've brought up is interesting because it gets the artist away from fabricating, going into the company, and using its tools to fabricate, rather than expanding to this higher-level socially-engaged position, which is almost like Beuys's idea of "social sculpture" in some ways.
I remember Nora Khan, Joel Kuennen, and I had a related conversation about this last year. I was thinking about how this model is a sort of Trojan horse. In my personal example, I’ve been thinking if/how I could leverage a research engine I started back in 2016, AMAZING INDUSTRIES, to be hired by a company as a left-leaning think tank (something David Harvey has brought up) of sorts driving collectivity, care, and transformation. AMAZING INDUSTRIES began in the form of research, interventions, and activism from outside the walls of Amazon to reflect Amazon’s labor record on itself. Is there a potent site of politics to explore from the inside of companies? How could artists start to occupy and shape that space? Even if it fails, I think these questions may be worth exploring because of the ripples they could make.
HUO: I am trying to find a text I wrote the other day about this. I think that we could give a couple of examples from Lillian Schwartz to Peter Saville. But, I think we should also refer to the current moment - we're living in an unprecedented crisis. And I think for that we can only address these big issues of the 21st century if we go beyond the fear of pooling knowledge.
BW: I agree. I've been thinking about this because my work intersects art, work, and the broader economy.
HUO: So, what is your background?
BW: Well, I'm an artist. One of my mentors, John Penny (British artist), introduced me to APG’s work, which I have found interesting. My practice is influenced by other socially-committed artists, such as Allan Sekula.
HUO: We worked together when he was in Utopia Station.
BW: I have been exploring technology’s impact on labor and the broader economy through a socially-committed practice working in documentary film and installation. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood outside Boston, and I try to look at the economy through the lens of working people. So much of my work arises from the relationships and conversations I have with workers, sites of employment and worker organizing, places, and spaces within the economy. Listening and sharing their voice is important to me as we try to grasp how technology is reshaping work, the economy.
HUO: I think we need to learn from artists. I mean, you know, I just wrote a text – that's what I was looking for – on Gustav Metzger, who died in 2017. He was a friend and never stopped telling me that artists should create works that should address the dangers and pitfalls and destructive forces of extinction. And that we should use our agency to fight extinction. We did a retrospective with him at the Serpentine, and also the "Remember Nature" education project. I think artists like Latham and Metzger are toolboxes.
It's interesting that Richard Hamilton, Metzger, Steveni, Latham had this extraordinary radical experimentalism in England in the sixties, which serves as this toolbox today, which strangely is not well known in the United States.
BW: It's not.
HUO: We started at the Serpentine, a General Ecology project which is dedicated to Gustav Metzger.
Gustav Metzger, Flailing Trees, Manchester International Festival. Courtesy @WhitworthCPK
BW: Is this the marathon coming up?
HUO: No. It's more than that. Because we need to go beyond the marathon. We'll work with Brian Eno, David Adjaye, Etel Adnan, Torkwase Dyson, and many different artists. We have also appointed Lucia Pietroiusti as the ecology curator. So, of course, we cannot talk all the time about APG and then not do it. Ben Vickers, who's an artist, is our chief technology officer. And we're working on this Back to Earth project with the team that addresses the idea of slow programming, lots of cooperation with the public, and could be sustainable curation. I kind of think already in a way "do it" has addressed that because "do it" has somehow developed a model that is not homogenizing globalization, but is truly global. It is happening in 160 cities. And in that sense, you know, it is this idea of Metzger and Latham and Stevini, how we can go with art into society. These instructions of "do it" have been used in universities, in people's homes, and they are part of the curriculum, thanks to the Aggie Gund Initiative in New York City.
And, also companies, museums, corporations and governments should do it - they must look to artists for guidance on how to shape the future. And I think improving one's action is, of course, important. I'm flying less now. I started a movement for bringing back night trains. We can learn from Rose Wylie how to not buy new clothes all the time, but just repair them for decades with incredibly stylish stitching. Gianfranco Baruchello, the 97-year-old artist, really made us look at meat to be so disgusting that I'm now a vegetarian. You know, we can take artists as guidance, and I think in a way to make progress about sustainable practices.
Curating still is relevant, but I think it needs to be a different curating. As Metzger says, we need to use this platform with honesty and hope, and need to kind of in a way try to produce reality. And that's why I think it's about reality production, now. It cannot be about representation.
And for me, this idea of reality-production is we want to make this APG thing a reality. The doors are much more open than ten years ago. Some companies and governments seem to be more open, don't you think, as well?
BW: I think so in some cases. Not so much in Amazon’s case. But, for other companies, I think so. The reason is that they realize there that a reckoning of social and environmental crisis is coming. I think the boundaries of a company are shifting. Maybe Glissant has some words of wisdom about this in the idea of the mondialité.
I think there needs to be more of these Latham examples. A question in my mind, thinking about John Roberts and the deskilling/reskilling paradigm, is how does the artist skill shift in this context of companies and governments?
HUO: I just met, Muhammad Yunus, the economist who invented the microcredit idea. He, of course, talks about this idea of companies who focus on social benefit, and I think of this idea of profit-maximizing and the endless growth.
I studied in the eighties with Professor Hans-Christoph Binswanger. I don't know if you ever came across the Swiss professor. He passed away two years ago. He was very interesting. He was a big inspiration also on Tino Seghal, and he was my teacher. I wanted not to study art history because I had this done autodidactically, but study economy and ecology at university.
He talked about the limits of growth, and he spoke of this idea, also, that you should find the possibility of actually including the ecological dimension into the economic dimension.
Here you see Muhammad Yunus (showing photo). So, Muhammad Yunus talks about this idea that you have profit-maximizing companies, and then they say we have a certain percentage of social impetus. But then there is the danger that in the kind of frenzy of making a profit, it disappears.
So he said we just need companies in which the betterment of society is their aim. They're there for social concerns. And it's interesting because there are always two possibilities. You can have artists on the board of each of the top 500 companies and next to every mayor. It's like the Manchester example with Peter Saville, which was extraordinary. An example of that APG's sort of post-APG model, which is not known in the US, that Peter Saville case study where he transformed Manchester.
Hans Ulrich Obrist and Mark Bradford in conversation at Frieze Masters Talks 2019. Screenshot courtesy online video.
BW: There is also Lucas Aerospace (and the Lucas Plan), where workers tried to pivot their company going under into a force of social good making proposals for engineered products that improve society.
HUO: And, I think in a way, it's interesting that all of these models should almost be brought together at some point in a book. You look at what CERN is doing - we did the conference the other day. CERN is bringing artists in residence. The thing that Mark Bradford and I launched in the Frieze debate and that conversation is online. It's about artists on the board. But, then, of course, you also have this possibility, which is another thing that artists actually could become founders of companies. There have always been artists who are interested – I mean, you know, Duchamp did his "Rotoreliefs," of-course he never sold them. Olafur did the "Little Sun" project, which is, in a way, a non-profit company.
BW: I think one model is artists who can traverse the business and economic spheres, to enter that space with new language and actions to erode and tame the dominant ideology. Another model is artists who cooperatively build models of mutual aid outside the system and focus more on abolishing than the taming of the current system of capitalism.
I wonder how that traces back to the lineage of arts training – because many art schools don't talk about these skills at all. Many of them are stuck in models of modernism - training individuals to make things, encouraging artists to market themselves. I wonder if there needs to be an update to John Roberts and Boris Arvatov's work about art and production, demystifying new models of collectivity and production.
HUO: The idea of artists having founded companies, there is, of course, also an element of fiction in it. Some artists invented fictitious companies or fictitious museums - Marcel Broodthaers and the Department of Eagles, Duchamp has the Rotorelief.
Marcel Broodthaers, Museum of Modern Art, Eagles Department: Publicity Section, 1972
Or, you have Fabrice Hyber, who came up with the idea of a company with unlimited responsibility in the nineties. Andrea Zittel with A to Z. And, so there's a whole list of artists who invented their own company. That's a whole other theme, I would say — the artist Res Ingold, with the fictitious Ingold Airlines.
BW: The power of these projects is that they exist outside the boundaries of the art world. That is real power because they can breakthrough.
HUO: Maybe we should not only think about corporations or companies. I think it is relevant. But I think we also need to think about government. Let's not forget that Latham's most successful placement was when he put himself into the Scottish government, and they wanted to remove this coal heap.
BW: On the river, right?
HUO: Yeah. He understood that this could be a sort of a memento mori of dying energy which we need to get rid of. Because he already then understood that the coal age has come to an end. He realized it in the sixties/seventies. And, so he wanted to have this memento mori to say it was about entropy. It's also very related to Smithson, to land art.
And so then, of course, he explained to the government that if you remove this coal heap, then you're going to spend a lot of money. But, if you keep it, you're going to save a lot of money, and you will have this sort of monument/anti-monument of a bygone age, of the coal age. It's a very interesting example of this placement, him being in government.
There are all these different possibilities, the artist placing themselves or getting placed in government, the artist placed in companies. Analog to that is, of course, if you have artists founding companies, you also have artists who go beyond this idea of just being in residence but who take over countries. The artist, Edi Rama, whom I've interviewed many times, he's now the prime minister of Albania.
I did a talk at some point for Creative Time in DC, just before the last elections. It became a longer piece for Artsy, where I talk about artists going into politics. So Eileen Myles wanting to be president of the United States because Eileen Myles ran this campaign for President of the United States in 1992 with MTV and she says, you know, a woman can't run alone, so she ran with her dog. So, we revisited that for Creative Time, and I connected to Tania Bruguera, who announced during my conference that she wanted to run for President of Cuba. I also spoke about Theaster Gates's production of reality in Chicago. And at the same time, you know, we have Bruce Conner who tried to run for governor of California, and there is a whole campaign with badges.
So I did a text, which you can see online, about all of that. You've also got, of course, an artist running for president, and that's a whole other option. I think one of the things for me at the moment is the most exciting is what's happened in London.
We had several experiences. First of all, one was with a taxi driver. I usually always walk to work through the park. But this was a very rare occasion where I would take a taxi because I came back from a trip early one morning and then the taxi driver dropped me in Kensington Garden. Of course, because it's 6, 7 am, he assumed I would work at the Serpentine. He said, "I always wanted to talk to someone who works there to tell you the story of my daughter because we came to the park on a sunny Sunday last summer. And, on Sunday, because it's open doors, my daughter was running through the pavilion." So, he said he wanted to thank us because she had a revelation. And, wants to become Zaha Hadid, and she studies architecture as a vocation. But the second part of the story is a really important story. I then said, "Have you visited the exhibition?" He said, "No, I've never been to a museum. I've never visited an exhibition." I said, "Why? It's free admission." Because in England, you have this wonderful thing – which is key for this age of inequality – of free admission.
In any case, there was a silence in the car, and then he said, "because it's not for people like us." Do you see? And that leads us to what Arthur Jafa said. When we did the Arthur Jafa show, he said, first of all, I don't want to do a solo show. I want to invite artists from YouTube and Instagram into the museum. But he also said, which was interesting, I can't accept that you're just in Kensington Garden and wait for people to come. You need to go into these boroughs. And we realized that in the boroughs around London there is a very big percentage of kids who have never been to central London.
So then we said we should follow Arthur Jafa's example and go with our programs into different neighborhoods. So we applied for an open competition opened by the extraordinary mayor, the leader of Barking and Dagenham, which is where the Ford plant used to be. When Ford closed big parts, the entire borough lost their jobs. It's one of the boroughs with the highest unemployment rate.
Our Civic Curator, Amal Khalaf at the Serpentine, won this competition to do education and art in this borough, Barking, and Dagenham. So, while the Serpentine is in Kensington Gardens, this neighborhood is also where we did this project with Hito Steyerl to analyze the inequality of this neighborhood, where she realized it's one of the neighborhoods with the biggest inequality in Europe.
Thanks to Arthur Jafa, thanks to his remarks, we entered into this Barking and Dagenham project and now appointed Suzanne Lacy to be our artist in residence. So that's a placement with Suzanne Lacy. And, it's a partially unrealized project, but we brought Pedro Reyes into city hall to work with the mayor and the mayor's office in London. So it wasn't a residency, but it was kind of like a placement.
BW: I love these examples of listening.
HUO: By the way, I would very much appreciate it if you could send me some links to your work.
BW: Yes, I will. My most recent film was "Truckers" (2020), which is opening in a show about AI at The New School by Christiane Paul, PhD.. It includes interviews with truck drivers about how AI is reshaping their work. Truckers are the frontline "cartilage" (as my friend, the filmmaker, David Claessen referred to) between a job and AI. They're sort of stuck in this middle layer. And I think it is fascinating to listen to truckers (their stories, their experiences, what it is like to become threaded through new technological systems). No one talks to them about self-driving trucks.
HUO: That's exactly what Studs Terkel told me about listening. I'm a pupil of Studs Terkel. I went to Chicago to learn from him how to do interviews.
We talked a lot about manifestos. And I think the 21st century should be more about listening. As Etel Adnan always says, the great poet, there's a feminine quality of listening. Not only listening to each other but listening to plants, listening to trees, listening to the planet.
But it's interesting also you see that in a way, my friend Edouard Glissant, not only encouraged me to think about mondialité, which we did with "do it." He also encouraged me to think about how we traditionally go to specific places to see an exhibition, but that means that they are invisible to large sections of society. This is why we have to go beyond and create new engagements and new models of exhibitions – that's the text I wrote yesterday – which are more mobile and can reach a broader audience.
It made me think about the homogenized globalization and monetization already in the world. And then Glissant, of course, anticipated that we would have the homogenizing forces. Still, we are also going to have the counterreaction of new localisms, nationalisms, lack of solidarity, which is exactly what we can see in the world now. And that's why we need this idea of a mondialité, a global exchange which listens, which is not imposing, which is not homogenizing, which is not monetizing. Etel Adnan says this very beautiful thing that the world needs togetherness, not separation. Love, not suspicion. A common future, not isolation. And that's, for this very reason, these projects, it's so urgent I think to do all these possibilities because society needs art more than ever before, I think, right now.
For these reasons, we're outlining here because of society. But also because of hope. Because I do believe that, as Gerhard Richter said, "Art is the highest form of hope." And it's a moment where we mustn't lose hope because it's a very challenging moment for everyone and a majority of people. It's a challenging moment also because of the whole extinction crisis, culturally and even environmentally. It leads to a lot of depression. The idea of hope is a super important antidote to not lose hope, in a way.
I think we need new formats. As we also need new neologisms. I think the idea of AI – I think it also has a lot to do with Paul Klee when he talks about art needs to make the invisible visible. I think algorithms surround us. First, that we don't understand, and, second, that are invisible. And, I think McLuhan said in the sixties in the preface to his famous book about media, he said that art could be an early alarm system. And I think today again, art can be an early alarm system, but it also can help us to make the invisible visible. That's another text we can send you. I wrote a text about AI. And, I think in relation to these possibilities, artists have to make the invisible visible. We need, of course, new experiments in art and technology. And that's why at the Serpentine we started these new experiments in art and technology. And so we did an oracle with Jenna Sutela. We worked with the tech pioneer Suzanne Treister. We had Ian Cheng's BOB, and we had Pierre Huyghe's project. We had Hito's project with AI, and she says, you know, there is AI, but there is also AS.
Suzanne Treister, SURVIVOR (F)/BLACK HOLE ASI, 2016-19 Courtesy the artist, Annely Juda Fine Art, London and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York
There is artificial intelligence, artificial stupidity. So if I forget, please remind me to send you this AI piece. That piece came out of a gathering we staged at the Google Cultural Institute, where we brought together AI researchers and engineers, like Kenric McDowell, and the director of the institute. We combined them with artists with Rachel Rose, with Ian, with Hito, and out of those conversations, I wrote a text about what happens when you bring artists and engineers together. That's kind of the new Billy Klüver. We thought we needed a new name for it. Billy called it EAT. And we thought it's neater to call it NEAT - New Experiments in Art and Technology.
You know, for me, a lot of it is unrealized. I mean, I'm not only always asking artists about their unrealized projects, but I also have a whole roster of unrealized projects that I want to do, which isn't realized. And, of course, the whole APG thing, if you think about these 500 companies, that I would like for each of them to have an artist on board, we've so far failed, but I have a firm belief that we can get there.
There are so many unrealized projects. I have different categories in my unrealized projects sort of realm. Of course, it's not only the APG thing, but it's also a lot of artists, want to produce reality, but they can't because there are very few categories of what an artist is usually invited to do. There are the group shows, the museums, thematic shows, solo shows in museums and galleries, art fairs, biennales, and sometimes public commissions. And as Boetti said, that's a very limited roster. And, artists very often have other ideas of social sculpture, as voices, and I think in that sense, I archive all these unrealized artist projects to make them happen. And I'd be very curious to know about your unrealized project next time. And, then it's not only about archiving them; I always have this unrealized project to one day do a big exhibition on them.
Serpentine Pavilion 2018, designed by Frida Escobedo, Serpentine Gallery, London (15 June – 7 October 2018) © Frida Escobedo, Taller de Arquitectura, Photography © 2018 Ste Murray