Hans Ulrich Obrist on Contemporary Art

You are starting your book choices with a writer of fiction – Etel Adnan and Master of the Eclipse.

Etel Adnan is in her mid 80s and she is one of my heroes. She is one of the great poets of her time and also a wonderful visual artist: so she bridges these two things. In the Serpentine poetry marathon we try to bridge literature and art. I’ve met her a couple of times and she’s a great inspiration. Her work gives one immense courage. I read her almost every day – it’s an addiction.

Her books are really about displacement. Master of the Eclipse is short stories, full of film-makers, poets, and it moves between geographies (she lives near San Francisco, but also in Paris and Beirut). It is also about war: she wrote in a letter that we are in ‘a constant fight against the apocalypse’ – meaning that this is a dark moment full of wars.

What is so key about Etel is also how many artists of the younger generation she inspires. And that’s how I found her. She is an artists’ artist. Etel Adnan is in the same tradition as many figures in the past who were painters and poets – but in both the poetry and short stories she is a unique voice. She is part of my project to map the 21st century, both in a book and an online map – I’m interested in how artists, web designers and poets, map our complex moment in  time. Etel did an amazing map for the book, which Thames and Hudson are publishing later this year.

On to Gerhard Richter’s Wald – a book of photographs.

For me Gerhard Richter is not only one of the greatest living artists and painters of our epoch, he is also one of the greatest inventors of artists’ books. The Wald book stands for a whole series of art books that Gerhard Richter has designed in the last few years. I chose Wald because it is one of my favourites, but there are at least 20 more I could pick – it’s an amazing, prolific activity to produce these books in parallel with his paintings. He has done dozens and dozens, from a gorgeous early book in the 1970s about ice, where he photographed the polar icebergs, to his atlas, which is amazing, to War Cut, which I edited with him, which was details of abstract painting. He would photograph an abstract painting’s details from many different angles and discover all these landscapes. It was micro and macro. Gerhard Richter actually did a book about me – he took a lot of portraits and then made a random collage of all my writings so that they became an absurd text.

In Wald he produced 285 stunning details of a very dense forest near his house in Hahnwald – they are almost abstract images. As always with Richter, he has an encyclopedic desire to put them into groups. Some are the branches, some the logs, some are diagonally growing trees, some are horizontal, some vertical. Then he interspersed text from a forestry magazine, but reproducing the words in a random order. So you have these very structured photographs of trees, which he took on his daily walks, brought together with text in a very complex book, which Richter designed himself – so it is an artwork. One is almost on a walk if one goes through this book, navigating through the forest and through the randomly arranged text and making one’s own connections. It really involves the reader.

Does the general reading public understand artists’ books? Don’t we still think about art as something that you see in a gallery?

Since the 1960s and the moment of conceptual art, more and more artists have produced their own books. In England you’ve got Gilbert and George, who are pioneers, or Richard Long, for example. They have done beautiful things with books.

So that is recent, but then is it really new? In fact it is a continuum. William Blake made books as artworks and now we have Gilbert and George doing it. There is a link between the beautiful artists’ books of previous centuries and Gerhard Richter too. Very often artists have thought very carefully about books as a vehicle for their art. It’s not just a book about their art, it’s more like a mobile exhibition.

Because a book is a tactile object – it’s personal?

Yes, when artists make books they do tend to become artworks because they conceive of them as an object. People can touch and hold it in their hands, which is an important part of it. But also the book is a constant presence. Very often these artists’ books are done in an edition of only 2,000 or 3,000 copies, so afterwards it is going to be in 2,000 or 3,000 libraries or households over the world. It is amazing if you think that in almost every city in the world there are some copies of these artists’ books, whereas a work of art only exists once – then when a museum isn’t showing it and it’s in storage, you don’t see it at all. I think artists are interested in the idea that books have an almost viral infiltration of the world. Books have an amazing ability to travel and then they pop up when we least expect it – books are magical.

Your next book is about Diaghilev and his circle. Is there a link to your own breakfast salon, the Brutally Early Club?

It is certainly connected. I believe that all the disciplines should meet and I have a very trans-disciplinary idea of art. Salons obviously bring people together who otherwise wouldn’t meet. I observed that in London everybody is so busy, it is such an intense city, therefore improvisation has become very difficult. So you can’t just decide, for example, ‘OK, tonight I will get together with my friends.’ It’s crazy. I need improvisation to survive, so I thought, ‘How can I inject improvisation into the London of the early 21st century?’ I realised that if I do it at 6.30 in the morning nobody can say,‘I already have an appointment’. As long as people can get themselves up we can arrange it the day before just by making a few phone calls.

The connection to Diaghilev is that inter-disciplinarity. Definitely, for me, he is one of the great curators of the 20th century. With his Ballet Russes, in the years between 1909 and 1929, he obviously revolutionised the world of dance. But they also gave incredible input into theatre design, into collaborations between artists, dancers and choreographers, between ballet, architecture, music and sound. If you think about these encounters – it was almost like a gesamtkunstwerk [an ideal synthesis of all the arts].

Composers of the importance of Stravinsky would do the sound, artists of the importance of Picasso or Braque or the Russian constructivists Goncharova or Popova would do stage sets. The dancers would be the likes of Nijinksy. Massine and Jean Cocteau are involved. And Diaghilev is the impresario who brings it all together and orchestrates it. In my very first exchange with J G Ballard, by fax, I asked him about my profession, about curating, and he defined it as ideally a kind of a junction making. Diaghilev is the great junction-maker of the 20th century. Curating is not only about bringing people into contact with objects. It is also objects and objects, and also about people and people.

They had a good time too – the pictures of Diaghilev’s parties look great.

Diaghilev is a constant inspiration. I also love his quote: ‘I do nothing but I’m indispensable.’ And these conversations between Diaghilev and Cocteau where they say ‘Etonnez-moi!’ [‘Surprise me!’] They wanted the opposite of routine.