"When Hans Ulrich Obrist asked the former director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Anne d'Harnoncourt, what advice she would give to a young curator entering the world of today's more popular but less experimental museums," writes Museum of Modern Art curator Christophe Cherix in his preface to A Brief History of Curating, "in her response she recalled with admiration Gilbert and George's famous ode to art… 'To be with art is all we ask'."
These words are also a good description of Obrist, whose name is usually prefaced with descriptions like "über-curator". Since 2006 he has been the Serpentine's co-director of exhibitions and programmes and director of international projects, a post created by the London gallery in a successful attempt to charm the Swiss curator and writer out of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
Obrist's boundless energy is shown by his extracurricular activities. He has curated biennials in Berlin and Guangzhou, triennials in Moscow and many more exhibitions worldwide. He interviews artists, curators and theorists whenever he can.
But the danger with a wunderkind - to use another epithet often attached to Obrist - is that there is often a perception that such beings have fallen to earth, without any intellectual lineage or context.
Anyone in the business of myth-making should be put right by this book. This is the third volume in the Zurich publishers JRP Ringier's Documents series, and it frames Obrist's own work.
It contains 11 extended interviews with some of the most influential curators of recent years, including Harald Szeemann, Lucy Lippard and Pontus Hultén. It is, as Daniel Birnbaum, the director of this year's Venice Biennale, comments in his postface, "about Obrist's precursors, his grandparents".
While this book is presented in an interrogatory format, the interviews are nevertheless very much conversations, with topics ranging from the role of the museum to the figure of the curator. (Birnbaum quotes Suzanne Pagé telling him, "The curator should be like a dervish who circles around the artworks.") One of the most interesting threads concerns change and its implementation.
Born in 1968, Obrist is too young to have seen how social revolution filtered up into curatorial practice. He therefore relies on his interlocutors to explain. Johannes Cladders, who, as director of Mönchengladbach's Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, brought Joseph Beuys to international recognition in the 1970s, speaks of taking up an "anti-museum" position.
"Not a negative, but a very positive phrase," he tells Obrist in his 1999 interview. "A process of constant creation, so to speak. Although the institution itself does not make works, it takes on the role of the viewer, eventually making social consent possible and thus making works of art."
Cladders' exhibitions with Beuys turned the thinking of contemporary curators on its head. Many of Obrist's interviewees testify to the effect that the polemical German artist had on their own work. But there are also some wry admissions among the high thinking.
Szeemann, perhaps the most significant postwar curator of contemporary art, relates what happened when he invited the Viennese actionists to participate in Happening and Fluxus, an exhibition he staged in 1970 at the Kunstverein in Cologne.
The actionists arrived fresh from a trial in Austria, in which three of their group had received prison sentences for sedition, and they filled the Kunstverein with revolutionary treatises and a pregnant cow. It was, Szeemann says laconically, "very messy".
Arguably, he got off lightly - the actionists were capable of far worse - but the anecdote is revealing, and Obrist's skill in teasing out such information is evident. Mistakes are honoured as part of curatorial thinking.
But although this book talks to curators, it never forgets readers in their role as viewers. To be with art, to paraphrase Gilbert and George, is the beginning.
Louise Gray is a freelance writer
These words are also a good description of Obrist, whose name is usually prefaced with descriptions like "über-curator". Since 2006 he has been the Serpentine's co-director of exhibitions and programmes and director of international projects, a post created by the London gallery in a successful attempt to charm the Swiss curator and writer out of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
Obrist's boundless energy is shown by his extracurricular activities. He has curated biennials in Berlin and Guangzhou, triennials in Moscow and many more exhibitions worldwide. He interviews artists, curators and theorists whenever he can.
But the danger with a wunderkind - to use another epithet often attached to Obrist - is that there is often a perception that such beings have fallen to earth, without any intellectual lineage or context.
Anyone in the business of myth-making should be put right by this book. This is the third volume in the Zurich publishers JRP Ringier's Documents series, and it frames Obrist's own work.
It contains 11 extended interviews with some of the most influential curators of recent years, including Harald Szeemann, Lucy Lippard and Pontus Hultén. It is, as Daniel Birnbaum, the director of this year's Venice Biennale, comments in his postface, "about Obrist's precursors, his grandparents".
While this book is presented in an interrogatory format, the interviews are nevertheless very much conversations, with topics ranging from the role of the museum to the figure of the curator. (Birnbaum quotes Suzanne Pagé telling him, "The curator should be like a dervish who circles around the artworks.") One of the most interesting threads concerns change and its implementation.
Born in 1968, Obrist is too young to have seen how social revolution filtered up into curatorial practice. He therefore relies on his interlocutors to explain. Johannes Cladders, who, as director of Mönchengladbach's Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, brought Joseph Beuys to international recognition in the 1970s, speaks of taking up an "anti-museum" position.
"Not a negative, but a very positive phrase," he tells Obrist in his 1999 interview. "A process of constant creation, so to speak. Although the institution itself does not make works, it takes on the role of the viewer, eventually making social consent possible and thus making works of art."
Cladders' exhibitions with Beuys turned the thinking of contemporary curators on its head. Many of Obrist's interviewees testify to the effect that the polemical German artist had on their own work. But there are also some wry admissions among the high thinking.
Szeemann, perhaps the most significant postwar curator of contemporary art, relates what happened when he invited the Viennese actionists to participate in Happening and Fluxus, an exhibition he staged in 1970 at the Kunstverein in Cologne.
The actionists arrived fresh from a trial in Austria, in which three of their group had received prison sentences for sedition, and they filled the Kunstverein with revolutionary treatises and a pregnant cow. It was, Szeemann says laconically, "very messy".
Arguably, he got off lightly - the actionists were capable of far worse - but the anecdote is revealing, and Obrist's skill in teasing out such information is evident. Mistakes are honoured as part of curatorial thinking.
But although this book talks to curators, it never forgets readers in their role as viewers. To be with art, to paraphrase Gilbert and George, is the beginning.
Louise Gray is a freelance writer
By Hans Ulrich Obrist
£15, JRP Ringier & Les Presses du Réel
ISBN 978-3-905829-55-6
£15, JRP Ringier & Les Presses du Réel
ISBN 978-3-905829-55-6
