“The Conversation Series”

Francis Bacon Gilbert and George Thomas Demand Wolfgang Tillmans Henri Cartier-Bresson Nancy Spero Robert Crumb Marcel Duchamp

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"What I’d like to know more about are the unrealized projects — projects that were too big or utopian." This question, put by Hans Ulrich Obrist to Thomas Demand in an interview conducted in 2006, is broached repeatedly in the first 16 volumes of the curator’s The Conversation Series, which include dialogues with some 17 artists, including Wolfgang Tillmans, Zaha Hadid, Konrad Klapheck, and Nancy Spero. The artists’ responses to the question are varied. Robert Crumb describes an impossibly laborious project to illustrate the Victorian sexual memoir My Secret Life. Gilbert and George cheerfully declare, "We do what we want." Demand himself regrets the absence of archival photographs, from which he might be able to elaborate a photograph of his own, of certain famous scientific experiments.

Obrist’s phrasing of the question hardly deviates: he is interested, he says, in the artists’ "unbuilt roads." You might almost suspect that, in the course of conversations about his subjects’ practices, conversations that are by turns blandly factual and fancifully digressive, it is the question Obrist has been dying to ask all along. He sometimes even prefaces it by saying it’s the question he likes to ask all his interviewees last, but in truth the conversations tend to run on once he’s asked it, the idea of the unrealized artwork suggesting further vagrant thoughts about the built, the unbuilt, and the unbuildable. The unrealized work seems at times even to function as the absent center of the artist’s oeuvre: the very realm of possibility (including the possibility of collaboration or dialogue) that intrigues the interviewer.

Maybe the insinuation of this question into each conversation is one of the rules of Obrist’s particular version of the interview game — or perhaps he is constantly alert for inclusions in the Agency for Unrealized Projects, the resource and archive of unmade art that he has been amassing at the Serpentine Gallery in London with its director, Julia Peyton-Jones. But the "unbuilt roads" question also remarks an avowed tendency of Obrist’s own interview practice. The dialogue, at least in conception, is infinite and unresolved. The Conversation Series is less the definitive arrival in print of various fugitive interviews than a sort of stacked conversational air traffic, endlessly circling and refueling. In fact, two of the interviews with Olafur Eliasson actually take place in the air: during the first, on a flight across Iceland, Obrist points to a Hertz car-rental advertisement and takes its text — "It’s the journey, not the destination" — as a motto for the conversation between artist and curator.

Obrist’s take on the interview form, in other words, is serial, recursive, and open-ended. He spirals back to the same artists time and again, all the while amassing a prodigious archive of new interlocutors that includes architects, writers, and scientists. In a conversation with Crumb, recorded at the Restaurant Train Bleu at Gare de Lyon in Paris, he claims: "I have always disliked artspeak. One of the reasons I started doing these interviews is that I think it is more interesting to read interviews with artists than to read long texts on artists." Inspired in part by David Sylvester’s interviews with Francis Bacon and Pierre Cabanne’s with Marcel Duchamp, Obrist has, since the early 1990s, recorded more than 1,400 hours of interviews: some of them public discussions or performances, others snatched in private or almost in passing. Considered in sum, the conversations constitute an experiment in critical and art-historical practice that is every bit as diverse and dialogical as Obrist’s exhibitions.

Something happens to this notion of serial interviewing as unruly and improvised practice, however, when the various conversations are bound together in a book. Obrist’s most celebrated interviews have been self-consciously provisional or occasional, such as interview marathons in London, Berlin, and elsewhere — public conversations with disparate cultural figures that aspire, as Obrist puts it, to the condition of a prolonged coffee break in the middle of an imaginary conference. The Conversation Series, by contrast, risks grounding Obrist and his collaborators too deeply in argument or polemic, the book thus becoming a vessel for opinion, or a work in itself by Obrist or the artist in question.

In practice, fortunately, the interviews still read as though in each instance the two principals are discovering the rules of each other’s games, or of some as-yet-imaginary game they might essay together. Of course, Obrist always knows the artist’s pitch in advance, but he constantly spots points on the boundary toward which they could move the action. This might entail noticing a book on a shelf behind the artist — as he does with Demand’s copy of a biography of urban planner Robert Moses — or (more often) alluding to a conversation with another artist so that a frayed sort of context emerges. (Obrist occasionally flags the interdisciplinarity of that context a little awkwardly, as when he responds to Demand’s mention of Nabokov by asking, "You mean the writer Nabokov?")

This dilation of the artist’s environment means that Obrist comes off as an extraordi-narily prolific name-dropper. His questions and interjections are filled with phrases such as "Richard Hamilton told me...," "As Pierre Boulez said to me...," and "When I inter-viewed Henri Cartier-Bresson...." But one has the sense that what’s being developed at such moments, quite despite appearances, is an expansively democratic sense of what conversations in the artworld might be — just conversations — and that they might potentially, and literally, given the range of Obrist’s subjects, include all of us. There is almost a paranoid impulse in Obrist’s interviewing everybody and then disseminating the results through further interviews, those in turn becoming the subjects of glancing asides in future dialogues. It is as if the artworld, and Obrist’s place in it, were merely a pretext for the ramification of a vast web of cultural, intellectual, and scientific connections.

This sense of a democracy of interlocutors in Obrist’s interviews, the suspicion that between and beneath these conversations others are going on even as he and his current interviewee speak, is partly a matter of the discursive form of the Q&A. In an interview with Paul Rabinow in 1984, Michel Foucault expressed an antipathy toward polemics, preferring instead the interview or dialogue. Questions and answers, he said, "depend on a game — a game that is at once pleasant and difficult — in which each of the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted form of dialogue." (The polemicist, on the other hand, "proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance.") Obrist’s interviews attempt to go further, to establish the rules for an infinite conversation and street plans for unrealizable routes. "The Conversation Series" originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' March 2009 Table of Contents.