Archiving In Formation: A Conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist

Author(s): Markus Miessen and Hans Ulrich Obrist

Source: Log , Winter 2011, No. 21 (Winter 2011), pp. 39-46
Published by: Anyone Corporation

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Markus Miessen

Archiving
In Formation:
A Conversation with
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Ever since he can remember ; the London-based ' Swiss curator
Hans Ulrich Obrist has been archiving books and other related
curatorial material. This "stuff" has , over time, amassed into
a substantial archive that incorporates books, audio recordings,
DVDs, editions, letters, postcards, magazines, journals, and more
than 2,000 hours of filmed interviews and their transcriptions.
Obrisťs archive has been the basis for the more than 300 books he
has written and edited to date. Obrist and Berlin-based architect

and writer Markus Miessen first met in 200$, when they discov-
ered their shared enthusiasm for and interest in books and, more
specifically, archives.

MARKUS MIESSEN: Your archive today consists of around 30,000

books, letters, pamphlets, hundreds of recorded interviews, and so
forth, but I want to start this conversation with the very beginning
of your personal archive, at the beginning of your interest in books.
Could you tell us about when and how books started to affect you?

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: I grew up near St. Gallen and my

parents sometimes took me to the Stiftsbibliothek, the mon-
astery library in St. Gallen, a large baroque hall from the 17th
century. I discovered the monastery library before I encoun-
tered museums. I was very attracted to this library where you
had the original medieval books to marvel at, and where you
had to wear white gloves and silently walk around in Pantof-
feln [slippers]. It made a huge impression on me. It embodied
something that the 17th-century German Jesuit scholar
Athanasius Kircher articulated - that we could have all the

knowledge known to us at the moment united in one place

and in one person. That, of course, is no longer possible with
specialization and the exponential growth of knowledge.

MM: The Abbey of St. Gallen contains books that date back to the
ninth century, and the library became a World Heritage Site in

Ì9

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1981. What were the beginnings of jour personal archive ? When didjou start collecting books , and
when didjou become aware that jour librarj is actually an archive and not just a few books ?

HUO: Pretty early on it became an archive because I was obsessed with books. I bought a lot
of poetry books. You could hardly get into my room at my parents' house when I was in high
school because it was full of exhibition catalogues. When I finished high school at 19 and went
to university I rented an apartment with a friend in St. Gallen. It was quite a big apartment
and it was full of my books. I met Kasper König at the time and I started to apply his method-
ology of order and disorder.

MM: What does it entaili

HUO: You have cardboard boxes for each topic and each artist, and these are ordered and
labeled properly, but what is in the boxes is just all the content thrown in. It was order within
chaos, or chaos within order. I could not afford bookshelves, but I had these boxes. And the
boxes were just piled on top of each other, creating new walls and corridors. Books furnish a
room, as Lawrence Wiener once said.

MM: Was it some form of architecture!

HUO: It was my first attempt at architecture. I liked the idea of having an apartment without
furniture. I built beds out of book boxes. I felt it was important to have a physical connection
with the books. I had these huge walls and they would sometimes collapse, and then new
orders were generated. I liberated the boxes and let them come into the space, let them become
furniture that structured the space. Also, having a curatorial archive was purely functional
because it helped me to do my exhibitions.

MM: What form does the archive have now ? Canjou describe it ?

HUO: I don't have a single archive, but several different archives, which I should briefly
specify. First, there is the interview archive, which I began in 1994. It consists of approxi-
mately 2,000 hours of MiniDV video recordings. It contains all of my dialogues with artists,
scientists, and architects. It also contains the trialogues - the idea to go to see someone along
with someone else - and the public Marathon interviews of the last years. An important part
of the interviews is the project about the "pioneers," those people who have influenced the
artists and architects of our time, but who are not very well known themselves. It was Rose-
marie Trockel who encouraged me to interview very old practitioners who witnessed the 20th
century. We interviewed them to protect them from being forgotten. Finally, there are some
frequently recurring questions in my interviews; I called the archive of these recurrent
questions a "rendezvous of question marks."
There is also my archive of the exhibitions I have curat ed in book form - that is, where
the archive is the exhibition - which leads us to the "Do it" project, which began in 1993 in
dialogue with Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier. This is an archive of instructions for
artwork that can potentially be realized. It refers to the important role of instructions for art
in the 20th century. We asked the artists for instructions, which then could be interpreted by
different people in different situations, and these interpretations are collected as an archive.

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It began rather small, with around 10 artists, and then became a book and a small exhibition.
Now, each time a "Do it" exhibition is shown, new instructions from local artists are added.
So far we have had 50 venues on five continents.
Third is my archive of unrealized projects, or "unbuilt roads." In 1985, when I was 17,
I met Alighiero Boetti in Rome - the same year I met Gerhard Richter, Annette Messager,
Christian Boltanski, and Fischli/Weiss. Boetti told me that a curator should not only propose
museum exhibitions to artists, but that it would be important to ask the artists which projects
they could not realize in the given conditions, projects that don't enter the existing formats of
the art world. Since then I am asking artists, architects, etc., about their unrealized projects.
I have archived around 800 unrealized projects so far. They comprise projects that are: 1. too
big to be realized; 2. too small to be realized; ?. generally unrealizable utopias; 4. dreams; and
5. censored or self-censored projects.
Then there are the archive of formulas, the archive of futures, the archive of maps, the
archive of manifestos, which all have led to book projects.
Another archive is, of course, my library. There are these 30,000 books: 20,000 in Berlin
and 10,000 dispersed over other places: Switzerland, London, and Paris. There is also an
archive in the basement at Christian Boltanski's place. He agreed to store them. Knowing his
work, I became a dead Swiss. I can say I died a long time ago. My life has also been between
cities. In the '90s I was a total nomad. I traveled 320 days a year. My time was divided between
Switzerland and Paris. Little by little I started to work more permanently for institutions,
first in the Museé d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and then for Villa Medici in Rome and
now at the Serpentine Gallery in London, since 2006. This meant that I had books in all these
cities because I have a habit of buying a book every day - usually several books. I had a fast
growing library in each of these cities. Living between cities also meant that the archive by
necessity was on the move. That is the connection between things. My books can be classified
as: 1. the books and pamphlets, which are mostly in Berlin; 2. the exhibition catalogues; 3. the
artists' books; 4. the magazines; and 5. manuscripts.
The laptop is a fifth, huge archive. The folder "my documents" contains 32,000 documents
and the archive of all my texts and email correspondence. Liam Gillick once wrote me in an
email: "My archive is the computer." Or, in the words of Francisco Varela, "The laptop is an
infolded monster" [un monstre plie'. The archive of my files and correspondence on the com-
puter is probably as large as the physical archive of my books.
Last but not least are the documents of the 200 exhibitions I have so far curated in museums

and other kinds of venues. My focus on archives has a lot to do with the fact that my medium
as a curator is the exhibition and the exhibition has a limited life - it has a memory problem,
because exhibitions are not collected. Exhibitions are just temporary constellations dispersed
all over the world. Only the oral history and exhibition photographs remain. Therefore, the
archive is a very important thing. Archives are a form of compensation in relation to the
fugitive nature of my medium. It is kind of complementary.

MM: This question of representing ephemeral exhibitions leads to jet another archive : the artist Joseph
Grigelj is working on an art project about an archive of jour exhibitions.

HUO: Joseph had this idea in the mid '90s that he wanted to make an exhibition about the work
of a curator and start to archive all my publications. I have regularly sent him packages with
the publications of my exhibitions and lectures since the mid-1990s - not only the catalogues,
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but notably the so-called "ephemera" - the press releases, announcement cards, posters, and
other exhibition prosthetics. He creates an exhibition and a catalogue out of this material.
Joseph told me that his goal is to "make the archived data body an active body: to create, as it
were, a three-dimensional bibliography that is both definitive' (as a research document) and
'diaphanous' (as a challenge to conventions and the representation of an ever-evolving prac-
tice)." For him, the emphasis is on "the art exhibition as a verb" and the network of human
relations that both constitutes and emanates from an exhibition. For the catalogue he is going
to create a completely new form of bibliography, which comprises publications as well as oral
texts. In Joseph's words, the project is an archive that is about "to offer and consider ways to
rethink the dynamic nature of exhibitions."

MM: All of the different archives you have described are closely connected to research. The archive
seems to be a tool that leads to new exhibitions or new books.

HUO: Yes, the main part of my archive is not a collection but a working archive that has been
put together from concrete research for concrete exhibition projects like "Cities on the Move,"
"Laboratorium," or "Do it." In the end, many of these materials are no longer needed for the
respective research projects. The idea, therefore, was to gradually make this material public.

MM: Is the archive itself also a work space ?

HUO: Yes. The Berlin apartment, for example, is a new kind of project. It is an apartment
where we do not live very often but where the books live. Every day I spend there something
happens: a photo session, a film, an interview. It is a work space, a hybrid work space, where,
as Panofsky once said, the future is invented out of a fragment from the past. The archive, in
that sense, is also a futuristic laboratory where these fragments contain sparks for something
to happen.

MM: The first time you made your archive public was at the Interarchive project at the Kunstraum
Lüneburg in 1999. Can you talk a little bit about this ?

HUO: This project was done with the art historian Beatrice von Bismarck, the mathematician
Diethelm Stoller, the sociologist Ulf Wuggenig, and a group of students from the University
of Lüneburg. I took about 1,000 boxes from St. Gallen to Lüneburg, and together we discussed
how this archive could be used as raw material, to explore possible - perhaps exemplary -
dealings with archives. Then we asked the artist Hans-Peter Feldmann to come up with a
model for the archive that undermines systems of order, undermines the certainties of static
archive ideas. Additionally, we invited archivists from other fields and countries to create
links between my archive and their archives. We also invited Christian Boltanski to work with
the students on their own archive and their families' photo albums. Koo Jeong-A developed
an architectural tower out of thousands of books.

MM: What were the main questions for y ou in relation to your archive in Lüneburg ?

HUO: One reflection was that the archive goes hand in hand with the question of memory:
memories of the past without nostalgia, anchored in the present and at the same time projecting

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an uncertain future. Memory as relations, oscillating between the particular and the universal,
the individual and the collective. The connection between archive and memory could be seen
as a context of the Lüneburg project and the "links" we made to other archives. The dimen-
sion of the context of archives and memory is the decisive one. The psychologist and historian
of science Israel Rosenfield told me that human memory, as opposed to memory in a machine,
is context dependent. We can store specific "memories" in machines and access them at will.
But for human memory, the context in which we try to recall something is an important fac-
tor in our ability to become aware of the memory. He concluded that memory is relationships,
both temporal relationships and spatial relationships - not a particular space or a particular
time, but a particular set of relationships.

MM: Were there other fundamental questions concerning jour Interarchive project ?

HUO: Yes, foremost the question of order and disorder. Georges Perec, who was a member
of the Oulipo group, published an essay collection, Penser/Classer [ Think/ Classify ], in which
he says that order entails disorder and vice versa. He speaks also of this depressing aspect that
all systems of absolute order do not admit chance, differences, diversity, and above all, that
they do not last. In other words, he has the idea that an order is always ephemeral, that it can
become disorder again the next day. He comes to the conclusion that every type of order can
be replaced by another kind of order.

MM: What consequences did you draw from this for jour project in Lüneburg ?

HUO: I invited Christian Boltanski and Hans-Peter Feldmann to Lüneburg to help us think
about archives. Hans-Peter came regularly and started developing different ways of catego-
rizing the material. He photographed the entire content of the boxes. Unexpected encounters
happened. And then he suggested that we classify the books according to different categories.
So we classified them according to 1. weight; 2. artists; ?. the alphabet; 4. color; 5. boxes; 6.
space; 7. time; 8. exhibitions; and 9. scent. Some books smell better than others.

MM: Did the experience of Interarchive change howjou look at jour own archive ? What does it
represent to j oui

HUO: It's a problem when you take your own archive too seriously. Doing a project like the
one we did in Lüneburg, I felt one needs to be more playful and subversive and undermine it
all the time. I thought it would be playful to do an "inter-archive" between the archives of my
peers who are curators and artists. With Hans-Peter it was not only about focusing on my ar-
chive, but making an in-between, between my archive and many archives. Very often archives
are only looked at and valued when the person dies or is very old. We wanted to look at our
contemporaries and create a map.

MM: How dojou view one archive in relation to other archives ?

HUO: To paraphrase Marcel Broodthaers, an archive is a truth surrounded by countless other

truths worth looking into. So the archive is one truth; it does not tell us the truth, but it speaks
of the truth, in keeping with Michel Foucault or the French historian and writer Arlette Farge.
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Her visionary book Le Gout de l'archive [The Taste of the Archive ], from 1989, is a passionate fic-
tional documentary of a female historian who immerses herself in 18th-century manuscripts
found in different archives in Paris. Farge describes the archive as a participatory field, as an
open field for activity. What Toyo Ito recently said about buildings also applies to archives:
that the facades of buildings are increasingly becoming a kind of membrane, that they are
becoming porous. The same applies to the borders of archives. That brought us to the question
of so-called links. The idea was to create links by inviting various archivists from all kinds of
disciplines and locations worldwide to show documents in Lüneburg. These different archives
were exhibited in display cases next to my archive for three months.

MM: And now, after the Lüneburg experience, how do you see the future of jour archive ?

HUO: To some extent, my archive is there to be used. I do not know what the next step is.
Maybe the archive could go on a journey. In general there are three considerations for the
future of my archive: 1. It could become a curatorial research institute within an existing uni-
versity; 2. It could become the foundation of a new school and help to generate an institution
where interdisciplinarity and experimental forms would be in the center of art education;
or J. The archive could become a new building. In this respect we should perhaps talk a bit
about the unrealized Tschlin project, which did not go ahead as the mayor did not want any
new construction in the village.

MM: Tschlin is a small Aljpine village in the Lower Engadine region of Switzerland where a few
years ago we developed a project to house your entire archive . The project was about, on the one hand,
finding a controlled, public, and accessible mode of representation for y ou, and on the other, creating
a remote place for concentrated research, a contemporary and highly interlinked version of St. Gallen.
The archive combined other programs as well : a summer academy, a small exhibition space, lodging,
a residency program, and a radio station, which could transmit material from the digital archive, like
the recorded interviews. The central idea was to establish one specific place dedicated to the archive,
which contained satellite projects and could also be nomadic and sent around the globe. So there are
two aspects: one physical, one virtual, each of which could potentially travel. But as you said, the project
did not go ahead.
Your archive contains so many different formats. How do you see this material to be archived in
the long term?

HUO: I imagine one zone for books, which is a more physical zone, then a zone for the digital.
It could be a digital architecture for all the interviews and a library for all the physical books.
Edouard Glissant said that institutions for the 21st century should be archipelagos, so you
could imagine that maybe there would be an archipelago condition where you have smaller,
plugged-in entities, which could then constitute the production machine. This could be for
conferences. Another, for young artists in residency. You could imagine a platform where new
conversations are happening 50 or 100 years from now. This would only be one part of it. It
would be surrounded by other stuff. It would be a very polyphonic situation.

MM: What do you think of the situation of the Harald Szeemann archive, which posthumously became
this museum-like space where nothing can be moved ? It became static, not a place for production but a
space for pure representation. How doyoufeel about an archive that becomes static?

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HUO: It is possible that when the founder's activity ceases his archive becomes a static object.
Allan Kaprow's archive is now at the Getty and it is wonderful because a lot of people have ac-
cess to it and are inspired by it. So it will be with Szeemann's archive, wherever it will be. But
I believe that is not the only possibility. The other possibility is that you define activities that
go beyond your own lifetime. Certain architects and artists manage to continue their offices
after their passings, either by becoming a brand, which has its problems, or by becoming a
different sort of laboratory. If you go to John Latham's house on Bellenden Road in Peckham,
it is now the Flat Time House and a lot of young artists go there and make exhibitions. It is
really an active place. It is not only about the memory of John Latham, because for him that
would be too monolithic. It is now about young artists and the future generations. In that way
he continues to live.

MM: Do you have a favorite archive ?

HUO: That would have to be the Aby Warburg archive, which now is threatened because the
University of London is planning to centralize its libraries and is weakening the autonomy of
the Warburg Institute. We need to protest against this. We really need to look into Aby War-
burg's architecture because it would be very interesting for the architecture of today to have
drawings of Aby Warburg's architecture, where, for example, the book would travel to you
on conveyor belts.

MM: What, then, are your favorite artworks in relation to archives ?

HUO: There are many artworks that have been truly important to me. In 2000, Christian
Boltanski, Bertrand Lavier, Suzanne Page, Laurence Bossé, and I curated the exhibition "Voilà:
le monde dans la tête" at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. We invited more than
60 artists to exhibit, as the title said, the world inside their head. One point of departure was
the writings of Georges Perec - the questions of the rules of the game of an archive and of
possible derives. The show focused on artists' works about archives without false nostalgia
and without naive techno-futurism. Instead it was a show about living memory. We brought
together a wide range of diverse forms to record humanity. And we showed works from the
entire 20 th century - from August Sander's Menschen des 20 Jahrhunderts [. People of the 20th
Century ], an encyclopedic series of photographs from the 1920s, to Douglas Huebler's Variable
Piece #70, which is a utopie attempt to record all of humanity. A kind of portrait of a whole
century was Hans-Peter Feldmann's 100 Jahre [100 Years], which consists of 100 photos of
protagonists from the age of eight months to 100. Also, Hanne Darboven and On Kawara re-
mind us that human beings exist in time, while Christian Boltanski's Les abonnés du téléphone
[The Telephone Subscribers ] reminds us that the human being exists by its name and its place - so
we assembled different attempts to record humanity in space and time.
Also, artists' atlases in the tradition of Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne have been very important.
Gerhard Richter's Atlas stands out as a chronological retrospective cartography of his world.
It is much more than an archive: it is one of the great artworks of the 20th century. Another
"atlas" we could talk about is Sichtbare Welt [Visible World] by Fischli and Weiss. In Visible
World , created between 1987 and 2001, the act of classification is revalued, becoming a means
of fostering links by way of the artists' observation of correspondences and contrasts in the
details of everyday life. The work is a collection of 3,000 small-format photographs arranged
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and displayed on a specially constructed 90-foot-long light table. The immense collection of
images is drawn from the four corners of the world, taking in an array of the manifold natural
and built environments in which contemporary existence is played out. But Visible World can
never be seen in its entirety; it denies the total view. I have personally seen the work many
times, and when I last saw it, at the 2010 Gwangju Biennale, many things were revealed to me
that had not shown themselves before. Visible World is a map of life as we know it, but it is ever
alert to its provisional nature, asking questions about what, how, and under what conditions
we can come to recognize, understand, and interpret.
A last, very important aspect of "Voilà" was the biographical archives. For example, Andy
Warhol's Time Capsules are obsessive collections of the artist's life, like Jac Leirner's collection
of plastic bags. Then there are the many collections of Gilbert & George. For the exhibition
I made a documentary with them, The Secret Files , in which they comment on their multiple
and extensive archives. It showed once again that one archive always hides another archive.
Furthermore, we had works from Chris Marker, Jonas Mekas, Chantal Akerman, and Domi-
nique Gonzalez-Foerster, which all oscillated between the question of the archive as an objec-
tive inventory on the one hand and as fiction and biography on the other. Likewise, Anri Sala's
Intervista opened a protest against forgetting between the subjective history of his mother and
the collective history of Albanian dictatorship. And, finally, in Georges Adeagbo's work La
Resurrection de Edith Piaf [The Resurrection of Edith Piaf', in which he arranged a display of
paintings, objects, records, etcetera, biographical archives also played a role.

MM: Many of the works jou just described are no longer single framed objects but installations that
draw a relation between different objects. These artists seem less interested in creating new objects than
in drawing new connections between existing objects.

HUO: Yes, and maybe even in art generally the question of relations is becoming more im-
portant than the traditional object. Tino Sehgal recently said that the notion of art that was
generated via the material arts - sculpture and painting - in the early 19th century, and was
fully articulated and established by the 1960s, is now detaching itself from its material origins
and venturing into other realms. From this we could conclude that intersubjective archives
will be the subject of ever-increasing focus in the 21st century.

Markus Miessen is an architect, spatial consultant, and writer. He is the author of numerous books,
INCLUDING, MOST RECENTLY, THE NIGHTMARE OF PARTICIPATION (CROSSBENCH PRAXIS AS A MODE OF CRITIC ALITY).

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