Mind over matter

ArtForum, Nov, 1996 by Hans-Ulrich Obrist

HUO: After "Monte Verita" you did "Gesamtkunstwerk"?

HS: Yes, needless to say a Gesamtkunstwerk can only exist in the imagination. In this exhibition, I started with German Romantic artists like Runge, a contemporary of Novalis and Caspar David Friedrich, and the architects during the French Revolution; then I included works and documents relating to major cultural figures like Richard Wagner and Ludwig II; Rudolf Steiner and Vassily Kandinsky; Facteur Cheval and Tatlin; Hugo Ball and Johannes Baader; Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet and Schwitters' Cathedral of Erotic Misery; the Bauhaus manifesto "Let's build the cathedral of our times"; Antoni Gaudi and the Glass Chain movement; Antonin Artaud, Adolf Wolfli, and Gabriele D'Annunzio; Beuys; and in cinema Abel Gance and Hans Jurgen Syberberg. Once again it was a history of utopias. In the center of the exhibition was a small space with what I would call the primary artistic gestures of our century: a Kandinsky of 1911, Duchamp's Large Glass, a Mondrian, and a Malevich. I ended the show with Beuys as the representative of the last revolution in the visual arts.

HUO: Since the '80s you've focused on several big retrospectives which you organized for the Kunsthaus in Zurich: Mario Merz, James Ensor, Sigmar Polke, and more recently, Cy Twombly, Bruce Nauman, Georg Baselitz, Serra, Beuys, and Walter De Maria.

HS: Again I was lucky. After ten years of thematic exhibitions I felt the need to return to the artists I had always loved. When Felix Baumann, director of the Kunsthaus in Zurich, gave me a job with the museum, I was able to offer artists a large retrospective or a special installation in one of the biggest exhibition spaces in Europe. Of course, I tried to make the shows as splendid as I could. Actually Serra and De Maria each did site-specific installations: Twelve Hours of the Day, 1990, and The Zoo Sculpture, 1992, respectively. With Merz we pulled down the walls and all his igloos formed an imaginary city. Having worked with these artists at the end of the '60s, it was great to do major exhibitions with them all these years later. After a twenty-four-year wait, I was able to realize the Beuys exhibition in 1993. I secured most of his important installations and sculptures. The show was my homage to a great artist: I had always thought that after his death one ought to make an exhibition reflecting his concept of energy, and I was pleased when his friends who came to the show told me they felt like Beuys had just emerged from one of his sculptures.

HUO: How significant have group shows been to your curatorial practice?

HS: In 1980 I created "Aperto" for the Venice Biennale to show new artists or rediscover older ones. In 1985 I felt that a new kind of "Aperto" was needed, there was still a predominance of "Wilde Malerei," and I wanted to introduce the somewhat forgotten quality of silence. The show I mounted was called "Spuren, Skulpturen, und Monumente ihrer prazisen Reise" (Traces, sculptures and monuments of their precise voyage) and it was introduced by Brancusi's Silent Muse, Giacometti's Pointe a l'oeil, and Medardo Rosso's Ill Child, and included sculptures by Ruckriem, Twombly, and Tony Cragg at the end of the space, works by Franz West, Thomas Virnich, and Royden Rabinovitch in the center, and in triangular rooms works by Wolfgang Laib, Byars, Merz, and Tuttle. It was sheer poetry. This show was followed in Vienna by "De Sculptura," in Dusseldorf by "SkulpturSein" (To be sculpture), in Berlin by "Zeitlos" (Timeless), in Rotterdam by "A-Historical Soundings," in Hamburg by "Einleuchten" (Illumine). In Tokyo by "Light Seed," in Bordeaux by "G.A.S. (Grandiose, Ambitieux, Silencieux)." As you can see, the titles of the shows became very poetic. They don't weigh on the artists and their works.