Life and work
Obrist was born in Weinfelden, Switzerland on May 24, 1968. [1] His father worked in the construction industry finance areas and his mother was a teacher. Obrist grew up in the Alps near Lake Constance and says his interest in museums began when his parents took him to the library of a monastery at the age of 6. [2] In his childhood Obrist was "building museums curated in my bedroom" by decorating his room with postcards. From 1985 to 1991 Obrist was travelling and visiting various European-based artists and their studios, often sleeping on the train to his next destination to save money. The first artist he first visited were Peter Fischli & David Weiss. [2] [3] [4]
Obrist first gained art world attention at the age of 23, when as a student in Politics and Economics in St. Gallen, Switzerland, in 1991, he mounted an exhibition in the kitchen of his apartment entitled "The Kitchen Show/"World Soup" [5] [6] It featured work by Christian Boltanski and Peter Fischli & David Weiss. [7] [8]
museum in progress, 1993–2000
Some of his early projects Obrist curated for the art initiative museum in progress in Vienna, for example the legendary exhibition museum in progress with Alighiero Boetti on board of Austrian Airlines in 1993 (using images from Boetti's “Airplanes” series, both in every in-flight magazine and as a free jigsaw puzzle, given to passengers), [9] [10] Interventions in the daily newspaper Der Standard 1995 with artists like Christian Marclay, Lawrence Weiner, and Travelling Eye in the magazine Profil 1995/1996 with John Baldessari, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Gerhard Richter amongst others. [11]
Obrist has also been a jury member of the art project Safety Curtain, which museum in progress has been realizing at the Vienna State Opera with famous artists like Tauba Auerbach, David Hockney, Joan Jonas, Jeff Koons, Maria Lassnig, Rosemarie Trockel, Cy Twombly and Carrie Mae Weems since 1998. [12]
In 1993, Obrist founded the Museum Robert Walser and began to run the Migrateurs program at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris where he served as a curator for contemporary art. In 1996, he co-curated Manifesta 1, the first edition of the roving European biennial of contemporary art.
Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2000–2006
In 2003, Obrist curated, as part of the Venice Biennale, "Utopia Station"; an interview with Obrist about the project appears in Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World. [13]
By 2005, The Guardian reported that Obrist had interviewed to succeed Philip Dodd as the director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. [14]
Serpentine Galleries, 2006–present
In 2006, Serpentine Galleries director Julia Peyton-Jones appointed Obrist as her co-director of exhibitions and programs. [15] Since Peyton-Jones left the organization in 2016, Obrist has worked alongside successive co-directors Yana Peel (2016–2019) and Bettina Korek (since 2019). [15]
In addition to his role as the Serpentine Galleries, Obrist has been the international programs advisor to the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (since 2018) [16] and the artistic adviser to The Shed in New York (since 2018). [17] [18]
While maintaining official curatorial positions, Obrist is also the co-founder of the Brutally Early Club in 2006, [19] a discussion group open to all that meets at Starbucks in London, Berlin, New York and Paris at 6:30 a.m. The club was created so that Obrist could fit in conversations with artists before spending the day at his desk. It has since been replaced with the OM3AM Club which meets in the middle of the night at different locations, like 24-hour motorway service stations. [2] [20] In 2007, Obrist co-curated Il Tempo del Postino with Philippe Parreno for the Manchester International Festival, also presented at Art Basel, 2009, organised by Fondation Beyeler and Theater Basel. In 2008 he curated Everstill at the Lorca House in Granada.
In 2013, Obrist co-founded, with Simon Castets, the 89plus, an international, multi-platform research project with support from Google, conceived as a mapping of the "digitally native" generation of those born in or after 1989. [21] [22]
Obrist also acts as non-executive artistic co-director and as a senior advisor to LUMA Arles, which was launched in 2013 by Maja Hoffmann. [23] [24] [25] [26]
In 2014, Obrist curated the Swiss Pavilion at the 14th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, where he presented Lucius Burckhardt and Cedric Price - A stroll through a fun palace; [6] the building was designed by architects Herzog & de Meuron, and the program was developed with artists Liam Gillick, Philippe Parreno, Tino Sehgal and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. [27] [28]
In 2022, Obrist organized a Jota Mombaça performance staged on San Giacomo in Paludo to kick off the construction of an arts space operated by the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. [29]
The Interview project
Obrist's interest in interviews was first triggered during his student years when he read two extensive conversations. The first was between Pierre Cabanne and Marcel Duchamp, while the second was between David Sylvester and Francis Bacon. "These books somehow brought me to art," he has said. "They were like oxygen, and were the first time that the idea of an interview with an artist as a medium became of interest to me. They also sparked my interest in the idea of sustained conversations—of interviews recorded over a period of time, perhaps over the course of many years; the Bacon/Sylvester interviews took place over three long sessions, for example." [30]
Over the years, nearly 2000 hours of interviews have been recorded, [31] which he refers to as "an endless conversation". He began publishing these interviews in Artforum in 1996 and in 2003 eleven of these interviews were released as Interviews Volume 1. Volume 2 was published in Summer 2010. With the release, a total of 69 artists, architects, writers, film-makers, scientists, philosophers, musicians and performers share their unique experiences and frank insights.
Obrist has also published a series of books called "The Conversation Series," which features the longer interviews in his archive. To date, 28 books have been published, each containing a lengthy interview with cultural figures including John Baldessari, Zaha Hadid, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Yoko Ono, Robert Crumb and Rem Koolhaas. A number of Obrist's interviews have also appeared in the Berlin culture magazine 032c , including those with artists Elaine Sturtevant and Richard Hamilton, historian Eric Hobsbawm, and structural engineer Cecil Balmond of Arup. [32]
More recently, Obrist initiated a series of "marathons", a series of public events he conceived in Stuttgart in 2005. [33] The first in the Serpentine series, the Interview Marathon in 2006, involved interviews with leading figures in contemporary culture over 24 hours, conducted by Obrist and architect Rem Koolhaas. This was followed by the Experiment Marathon, conceived by Obrist and artist Olafur Eliasson in 2007, which included 50 experiments by speakers across both arts and science, including Peter Cook, Neil Turok, Kim Gordon, Simone Forti, Fia Backstrom and Joseph Grigely. There was also the Manifesto Marathon in 2008 and the Poetry Marathon in 2009, which consisted of poems read aloud by artists and writers including Gilbert & George, Tracey Emin, Nick Laird, Geoffrey Hill, and James Fenton. [34]
The 2014 Extinction Marathon: Visions of the Future [35] linked the humanities and the sciences to discussions of environmental and human impact on the world today. It was programmed with artist Gustav Metzger whose research addresses issues of extinction and climate change. Notable participants included artists Etel Adnan, Ed Atkins, Jesse Darling, Gilbert & George, Katja Novitskova, Yoko Ono, Susan Hiller, Marguerite Humeau, Trevor Paglen, Cornelia Parker amongst notable model and actor Lily Cole and founder of The Whole Earth Catalog and co-founder of The Long Now Foundation Stewart Brand.
Curatorial practice
Obrist is an advocate and archivist for artists, and has said: "I really do think artists are the most important people on the planet, and if what I do is a utility and helps them, then that makes me happy. I want to be helpful." [5] He is known for his lively pace and emphasis on inclusion in all cultural activities.
Obrist's practice includes an ongoing exploration of the history of art institutions and curatorial practice. In his early 20s he began to research the topic. "At a certain moment, when I started doing my own shows, I felt it would be really interesting to know what is the history of my profession. I realized that there was no book, which was kind of a shock." [31] He has since helped to rectify this gap with exhibitions on curating and a book entitled A Brief History of Curating. This volume, which is part of Obrist's Interviews project (see above) compiles interviews from some of the leading curators of the 20th century.
While the history of exhibitions has started, in this last decade, to be examined more in depth, what remains largely unexplored are the ties that interconnected manifestations have created among curators, institutions, and artists. For this reason, Obrist's conversations go beyond stressing the remarkable achievements of a few individuals...Obrist's collected volume pieces together "a patchwork of fragments," underlining a network of relationships within the art. [36]
In keeping with his desire to explore the world of art and view it as an open system, Obrist has long advocated a participatory model for his activities. One early project, 1997's "do it", is an ongoing exhibition [37] that consists of instructions set out by artists for anyone to follow. In his introduction to the project, Obrist notes that "do it stems from an open exhibition model, and exhibition in progress. Individual instructions can open empty spaces for occupation and invoke possibilities for the interpretations and rephrasing of artworks in a totally free manner. do it effects interpretations based on location, and calls for a dovetailing of local structures with the artworks themselves. The diverse cities in which do it takes place actively construct the artwork context and endow it with their individual marks or distinctions." [37] (sic)
