Ways of Curating by Hans Ulrich Obrist

Author:Hans Ulrich Obrist [Obrist, Hans Ulrich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374712327
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Mentors

The museum is one truth, and this truth is surrounded by many truths which are worth being explored.

– Marcel Broodthaers

There was a man standing against the north wall of the Romerbrucke Heizkraftwerk, or power plant, barely visible. In 1990 I had come to Saarbrücken, in the west of Germany at the border with France, on an errand for my friends Fischli and Weiss. In this case, the job was a droll one. The power plant was host to a project inviting contemporary artists to create installations. Fischli and Weiss’s idea was to create a snowman, which they would install in a glass refrigerator, powered by the excess from the power station; as long as it generated electricity, there would be a friendly, unmelting snowman on display. It was a typical example of their work, expressing the plant’s function – to create the power to defy nature – in a charming way. And so I had driven my creaking Volvo to Saarbrücken with a snowman in the back – to be precise, it was a snowman dummy, a kind of test mannequin for Fischli and Weiss’s piece. I was to deliver it to the curatorial staff.

The man waiting for me and the snowman, it turned out, was the project’s curator, Kasper König, a man whom Gerhard Richter had always told me I should meet. In 1968, the year I was born, König was curating a celebrated exhibition of Andy Warhol’s work at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet. In the 1970s he had taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and he returned to Germany and organized large-scale museum tours de force in the 1980s. One of these, the 1981 Westkunst exhibition in Cologne, created a transitional moment after which the art world became more global, more porous. As König said in a conversation, ‘The title was a pun on the word Weltkunst (World art), and was meant as a conscious distortion of the kind of imperial ideology that we now consider old-fashioned.’ Intimating the shape of the shift in artistic centres that would mark the late twentieth century, Westkunst was a monumental full stop at the end of an epochal sentence.

König is a cultural impresario. As an independent curator he carries museums inside his head and yet, as director of Cologne’s Ludwig Museum, he was able to work within the constraints of an institution and open wide its potential. He uses the past as a toolbox to construct the future and has artists in residence at the museum to create a dialogue between the generations. He pioneered the concept of public art, erecting with his co-curator Klaus Bussman a series of installations and artworks all over the city of Munster every ten years in one of the most influential public art projects ever. His ideas helped me realize that art can appear where you least expect it and he taught me how to work with space – that art and architecture are intertwined.

When he was dean of the Städelschule in

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