Ways of Curating Read online

  In his childhood, Binswanger had been fascinated by the Faust legend. During his studies he discovered that the invention of paper money in Goethe’s Faust was inspired by the story of the Scottish economist John Law, who in 1716 was the first man to establish a French bank issuing paper money. Even more strikingly, the Duke of Orleans got rid of all his alchemists after Law’s innovation, because he realized that the availability of paper money was more powerful than all attempts to turn lead into gold. In Money and Magic, Binswanger traces the deep association between paper money, alchemy and the concept of eternal growth that underlies modern economics.

  Binswanger also connected the economy and art in a novel way. Art, he points out, is based on imagination and is part of the economy. But the process of money creation by a bank is connected to imagination, because the money is printed as a countervalue for something that doesn’t yet exist. So the invention of paper money is based on imagination, or a prospective sense of bringing into being something that has yet to exist. A company imagines producing a good and needs money to realize this, so it takes out a loan from a bank. If the product is sold, the ‘imaginary’ money that was created in the beginning has a countervalue in real products. In classical economic theory, this process can be continued endlessly. Binswanger recognizes that this endless growth exerts a quasi-magical fascination.

  In his book Binswanger pointed out that the moderation of growth has become a global necessity: he produces a way of thinking about the problems of rampant capitalist growth. Binswanger encouraged me to question the mainstream theory of economics, and to recognize how it differs from the real economy. The wisdom of his work is that he recognized early on that endless growth is unsustainable, both in human and planetary terms, but instead of rejecting the market wholesale, he suggests ways to moderate its demands. Thus the market does not have to disappear or be replaced, but can be understood as something to be manipulated for human purposes, rather than obeyed.

  Another way of interpreting Binswanger’s ideas is as follows: for most of human history a fundamental problem has been the scarcity of material goods and resources, and so we have become ever more efficient in our methods of production, and created rituals to enshrine the importance of objects in our culture. Less than a century ago, human beings through their rapacious industry made a world-changing transition: we now inhabit a world in which the overproduction of goods, rather than their scarcity, is one of our most fundamental problems. Yet our economy’s growth functions by inciting us to produce more and more with each passing year. In turn, we require cultural forms to enable us to sort through the glut, and our rituals are once again directed towards the immaterial, towards quality and not quantity. Perhaps that is a reason for the shift in our values, from producing objects to selecting amongst those that already exist.

  During the days I attended Binswanger’s lectures, I thought about the kinds of exhibition I could make. At the time, two shows, both of them in a domestic environment, were on my mind. In 1974, Harald Szeemann had created a small exhibition about his grandfather, who was a hairdresser, in his apartment in Bern. The second was in 1986 in Belgium, where curator Jan Hoet had hosted a show called Chambres d’Amis (Rooms of Friends) in a very intimate, non-institutional environment: he commissioned more than fifty artists to make works for an equal number of private apartments and homes around Ghent. It was a way of making a sprawling exhibition that also took visitors on a domestic tour of the city. And then both Fischli and Weiss and Christian Boltanski suggested to me that perhaps I was looking too hard, that the solution could be in my own flat, as with the Edgar Allan Poe story ‘The Purloined Letter’. And we began to think, and an answer occurred to us: my kitchen.

  The answer was pragmatic. I didn’t have access to an exhibition space in a gallery or a museum, of course, but I did rent an old flat in St. Gallen. I never cooked. I never even made tea or coffee because I always ate out. The kitchen was just another space where I kept stacks of books and papers. This was exactly the feature that Fischli, Weiss and Boltanski had independently noticed. The non-utility of my kitchen could be transformed into its utility for art. To do a show there would mix art and life, naturally. The idea took shape very quickly. Perhaps because the show’s concept was pithy and fitting for me, artists immediately responded to it. Fischli and Weiss thought it would be great to transform my non-kitchen into a functional kitchen. Then the exhibition would actually produce reality, they joked. Boltanski, meanwhile, liked the thought of a hidden exhibit in the kitchen. As art was conspicuous for its moments of high visibility in the late 1980s, he was attracted to the idea of something more intimate.

  I embraced both ideas. Boltanski created a very hidden exhibit: he installed a projection of a candle, visible only through the vertical crack between the cabinet doors under the sink. The candle was like a small miracle where you would normally find the garbage or cleaning supplies. Above the sink was a big cupboard, and here Fischli and Weiss installed a sort of everyday altar, using oversized, commercially packaged food from a restaurant supply store. Everything was giant: a five-kilogram bag of noodles, five litres of ketchup, canned vegetables, huge bottles of sauces and condiments. The installation had an Alice in Wonderland sense about it. It produced a sense of wonder by giving an adult a child’s perspective. All of a sudden reality was, for the adults who beheld this oversized display, almost like it is for children. The only item we ever opened was a chocolate pudding. The rest of the pieces were kept intact as readymades, and eventually returned to the artists, who kept them in their basements – until they began to rot.

  Hans-Peter Feldmann decided to make an exhibition within the exhibition in my refrigerator. He found six eggs made out of dark marble, which he placed in the egg rack in the fridge door. And then he placed a board with small feathers on it on the top shelf, setting up a charming visual rhyme in and amongst the few jars and cans that had somehow found their way into even my most under-utilized fridge. Frédéric Bruly Bouabré produced a kitchen drawing with a rose, a cup of coffee and a sliced fish. Richard Wentworth placed a square mirrored plate on top of cans of food. No one attempted to make a spectacular intervention – instead they preserved the function of the kitchen, while subtly adding to it.

  Many features of the kitchen show mark my work as a curator to this day. For instance, artists shared in all tasks relating to my exhibitions, not just their individual pieces: Richard Wentworth named the kitchen show World Soup, while Fischli and Weiss took the exhibition photographs. Secondly, I continue to curate exhibitions in people’s houses, which brings a different focus and a special intimacy. To give a very different example, I created an exhibition at the neoclassical architect Sir John Soane’s house in 1999.

  Numerous are the posthumous museums and memorials devoted exclusively to one artist, architect or author and designed to preserve or artificially reconstruct the namesake’s original working or living conditions. Much rarer are the museums conceived by artists in their lifetimes as a Gesamtkunstwerk and preserved as such. Sir John Soane’s Museum is a case in point. In 1833, four years before he died, Soane established his house as a museum and negotiated for an Act of Parliament to ensure its preservation after his death. The house is a complex accretion of hallways, windows, hangings, plinths, mirrors and innumerable objects, with unexpected views around every corner. Soane’s holdings fall into four main categories: antique fragments, paintings from Canaletto to Hogarth and Turner, architectural drawings (such as Piranesi’s), and Soane’s own work in the form of architectural models and drawings.

  The artist Cerith Wyn Evans once told me: ‘I was always very stimulated and inspired by the relationships, the interstices in Sir John Soane’s Museum, the conversations that are happening between various narratives, various objects and these extraordinary vistas that you come upon by accident and then you catch a reflection of yourself. It is an incredibly complex, stimulating place, and no one visit is ever the same as the next.’ After a while, the idea
of an exhibition began to take shape, and, in the course of the following two years, it crystallized in conversation with Margaret Richardson, the Curator of the Museum.

  Although Sir John Soane’s Museum has regular opening hours and attracts some 90,000 visitors a year, it has acquired a reputation primarily by word of mouth. The paradox of a well-guarded and yet public secret as well as the permanent pull between visibility and invisibility are the considerations that motivate Cerith Wyn Evans, whose intervention on the staircase was almost invisible. The work slid into the existing context as it subtly changed the sound of the bells. Steve McQueen created a sound montage that revealed itself only at second glance.

  To bring the various elements of the exhibition into a cohesive whole, each of the artists contributed to the greater picture: Richard Hamilton designed the poster, and each artist created a postcard that was on sale in the museum. The works on view in the exhibition were numbered but not labelled, in keeping with the way Soane displayed his collection. Each visitor was given a foldout leaflet, conceived by Cerith Wyn Evans, with plans by Christopher H. Woodward. There were no didactic panels or sound guides, and visitors moved where they wished through the rooms, encountering unexpected works of art in unexpected places. Cedric Price created symbols for the show and gave a lecture in the old kitchen entitled ‘Time and Food’, and Douglas Gordon created the title of the exhibition: Retrace Your Steps: Remember Tomorrow. Like the works in World Soup, the works in Retrace Your Steps had a sense of playfulness, and both shows were self-organized – instead of beginning with a master concept or plan, they grew organically. Exhibitions should develop a life of their own, more like a conversation between curator and artist than an arrangement of their work to suit a pre-existing idea.

  The experience with Cerith Wyn Evans at Sir John Soane’s Museum led to an ongoing series of house museums. Next came an exhibition with Pedro Reyes at the Casa Barragán, the architect Luis Barragán’s home in Mexico City. After that I curated an exhibition at the poet Federico García Lorca’s house in Granada, produced by Isabela Mora, followed by another show produced by Isabela Mora at the Lina Bo Bardi house in São Paulo, Brazil.

  Robert Walser and Gerhard Richter

  When I was a student I had the idea of creating museums for two of my heroes: Sergei Diaghilev and Robert Walser; the former remains unrealized, but I was able to achieve the latter. Walser, born in 1878 in Switzerland, was an important modernist, an influence on Walter Benjamin and Robert Musil. Franz Kafka called him his favourite writer. His short stories and novels narrate the experiences of lonely clerks, assistants and other quasi-anonymous men. Walser’s narratives lack traditional plots; they reveal fragments and details no longer bound to a fixed point of view. His practice was based on walking. Susan Sontag wrote, ‘Walser’s life illustrates the restlessness of one kind of depressive temperament: he had the depressive’s fascination with stasis, and with the way time distends, is consumed, and spent much of his life obsessively turning time into space: his walks.’

  Walser had many different periods in his short writing life. In 1905 he went to Berlin, where his brother was a painter. And after this first exile, he then had a fictitious exile, in which he imagined in minute detail what it would be like to live in Paris. Like Joseph Cornell, who never went on a grand tour, Walser went on an imaginary grand tour. But soon after that he suffered a breakdown and in 1929 was committed to a sanatorium.

  In the clinic, Walser worked under self-imposed constraints that anticipated Oulipo, such as using only one page for a story or a chapter of a novel, writing in tiny script and never numbering his pages. He went into a kind of inner exile and began writing in minuscule letters, microscripts, which became smaller and smaller; it was even thought he had developed a secret form of coded writing. Walser wrote his microscripts in the privacy of his attic, and he told nobody about them. (Recently, Werner Morlang has deciphered these microscopic writings, a task that took him more than a decade, and showed that Walser’s microscript was not a secret code: just really, really small.)

  Towards the end of his life, Walser was transferred to a different sanatorium against his will. Thereafter, he never wrote again. Instead, he went on endless walks. Karl Seelig, a Swiss literary scholar, accompanied him on these walks, and wrote Wanderungen mit Robert Walser. It’s an extraordinary record of the time after Walser stopped writing and reading. On these walks, Walser and Seelig would occasionally stop for a drink at the Hotel Krone in Gais.

  Somehow Walser became known to many artists, who were interested in his practice. They often talked to me about him. And so in 1992 I created the Robert Walser Museum, which was really just a vitrine in the Hotel Krone restaurant. The midpoint of these walks seemed the right place to put the museum. The landscape is the foothills of the Alps. The whole business of the restaurant functioned as usual during the exhibition; only the one movable vitrine had been added. My idea was to establish a non-monumental, modest contemporary trace of Robert Walser in the area where he spent the last twenty-three years of his life. The exhibition was a supplement to – maybe also a distortion of – the daily life of this restaurant in Gais. The artists in our exhibition always drew connections to it. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, for instance, worked on Walser’s last walk in the snow.

  It was Gonzalez-Foerster’s first show in Switzerland, also my own first collaboration with her, and one of the first projects produced for the Robert Walser Museum. She positioned the vitrine in the entrance to the hotel, setting it upon a small white rug, and she placed within it a book of photocopied images of people in snowy surroundings. The intimacy of the work was matched by its initial reception during Easter of 1993, at an opening attended by only around ten people. In many different ways, the installation created a subtle interruption in the fabric of reality for this restricted audience and for this short span of time. Gonzalez-Foerster’s work therefore set the tone for the museum’s subsequent exhibitions. While their traditional format puts the highly static human-to-object relation centre stage, she showed that, today, the object-exhibition may be cast in dialogue with, or in opposition to, a focus on shared experiences between individuals.

  For Gonzalez-Foerster, snow is a ‘reverse obsession’ that contrasts with her predominant theme of tropicalization – how cultural activity, such as modernism, is reframed in warmer climes – and as she revealed to me some fifteen years after the installation was produced:

  I feel this snow scene is just as important as tropicalization, in fact. It’s really the first time I’ve been so obsessed with snow. Perhaps that’s because it was just a fact of life when I was growing up, just as it must have been for you. But now I’ve discovered its beauty and the incredible excitement that can accompany it. It also makes me think of Robert Walser and his relationship to snow – his last winter walk into the snowy landscape.

  On Christmas Day 1956, Walser had died of a heart attack in a snowy field near the mental asylum where he had been committed decades earlier. On the occasion of the opening of Gonzalez-Foerster’s installation it began to snow outside. Another interesting thing happened during the opening: the grandson of Robert Walser arrived. But this was impossible, because he didn’t have a grandson. The person was a businessman from Turin, who told us that he was conducting biographical research on his grandfather. We invited him to dinner and then it came to light that he was the grandson of another person called Robert Walser, who also came from this region and was the inventor of a certain ballpoint pen.

  Of all the different relations of the visual arts, I think that the relation to literature has been neglected in recent years. The ‘bridges’ between art and music, art and fashion, art and architecture, and so on, are stronger than ever, and I have always worked on these relationships. But the whole ‘bridge’ to literature is missing, and I continue to try to work on this. For me it has always had to do with the dialogue between Robert Walser and the fine arts, and with the larger relationship between art and elsewhere.


  * * *

  At the same time as I was working on the Walser Museum, I organized my first exhibition with Gerhard Richter – in 1992 in the Nietzsche-Haus Sils Maria. I had met Richter for the first time at his opening at the Kunsthalle Berlin in 1985, when I was 17, after which I began a series of formative visits to him in Cologne. I often met him in Sils Maria and we sometimes went to the Nietzsche-Haus, the house where the great philosopher stayed over several summers and wrote parts of Also Sprach Zarathustra. Richter would take a lot of photographs in Sils Maria, especially of the Alps that tower above the town, and then paint on them. And so we had the idea of organizing an exhibition of these overpainted photographs at the Nietzsche-Haus.

  This was also the first time that Richter showed overpainted photographs as autonomous works. The photographs were taken in the area around the exhibition venue, the Alpine landscape of the Engadine, and with their small formats they fitted very discreetly into the existing interior of the Nietzsche-Haus. A simple way to describe Richter’s Sils overpainted photographs would be to say that in them the concrete becomes abstract and the abstract becomes concrete, as the eye darts from brushstroke to photographic image in the same work. They are really dialogues between painting and photography.

  Since first overpainting photographs in the late 1980s, Richter has increasingly engaged with this technique. The earliest examples listed in his catalogue raisonné date to 1986: large-format photographic prints overpainted using both a squeegee (leaving characteristic streaks of paint) and a brush. In 1987 and 1988 Richter overpainted just a few small-format photographs; in 1989, however, he started to extend and to work on this technique with a new intensity. Many of the early ‘paint-overs’ were made using motifs that Richter had photographed on his regular visits to Sils Maria, some of which were included in his Atlas. Leafing through the Atlas from that time, one soon encounters several plates with shots of the vast mountain-sides of the Alps against a blue sky. These are followed abruptly and surprisingly by the first paint-overs, in the same format: the shapes of the streaks of paint partly obscure the landscape yet also call to mind steep, craggy cliff-faces, so that already at this early stage there is palpable tension between the photographic motifs and the oil paint.