Art|36|Basel Art|Basel|Miami Beach Art|Basel|Conversations Transcripts

ABC | A36B | Art and Music | 071 Art Basel Conversations | Wednesday, June 15, 2005 | Bvlgari Pavilion, Basel

TRANSCRIPT | PREMIERE ART AND MUSIC

An evening of music and hosted conversations and chance encounters, in honor of all speakers of Art Basel Conversations

PERFORMING | MARTIN CREED | vocals, guitar KEIKO OWADA | bass KAREN HUTT | drums NORIKO UNO | slide-projection DAVID CUNNINGHAM | guitar, dinning music
Martin Creed | Thinking/Not Thinking (1:34) I was thinking And then I wasnt thinking And then I was thinking ... Words and music by Martin Creed Work #431 | P&C 2005 Martin Creed

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Martin Creed Artist; Wakefield, England Martin Creed was born in England in 1968. Writing and performing music has always been an integral part of his practice. Early pieces include Work No. 101: For Pianoforte and Work No. 117: All the sounds on a drum machine. After working on compositions for electric guitar, bass, and drums, in 1994 he formed the three-piece band Owada releasing in 1997 the album nothing (piano 508). Since that time he has performed regularly worldwide. In 1999 he began concentrating on solo projects, releasing Everything Is Going To Be Alright (Pier, London) and I Cant Move (Art Metropole, Canada). Most recently he made I Dont Know What I Want (2004, Serpentine Gallery, London) and has been putting together a new band. Martin Creed has played with his band in the following venues: Tate Modern; Tate Britain; Whitechappel Gallery; ICA; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Sydney Biennale 2004; Gavin Brown Gallery; Kunstverein Dsseldorf, Germany; CCAC San Francisco; Tonic, New York. Photo | Katie Guggenheim

ABC | A36B | Art Collections | 079 Art Basel Conversations | Thursday, June 16, 2005 | Bvlgari Pavilion, Basel

TRANSCRIPT | ART COLLECTIONS THOSE WHO COLLECT: ARTISTS AND ART PROFESSIONALS
How does being a collector or being closely attached to the creation of a collection affect the relationship with your role in the art community? How does the collection reflect upon your work as an artist? As a dealer? As a curator? What inspired you to begin collecting? What are the checks and balances that need to be respected in view of collecting as art professionals?

SPEAKERS | MARA DE CORRAL GOTTFRIED HONEGGER PIERRE HUBER YVON LAMBERT Host | RICHARD FLOOD

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Mara de Corral Art Critic, Independent Curator; Madrid, Spain Mara de Corral is an art critic and independent curator based in Madrid. Appointed director, together with Rosa Martnez, of the 51st Venice Biennale, 2005, she is presently working as a member of the Advisors Committee of Telefnica Foundation Collection in Madrid and advisor and coordinator of Coleccin de Arte Contemporneo (Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid). Since 1995 and until 2002 she was director of the Contemporary Art Collection of Fundacin la Caixa that she started in 1985. From 1990 until 1994 de Corral was director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa. Director of Visual Arts Department of Fundaci la Caixa, in charge of the exhibitions program in Madrid and Barcelona (1981 1991). Founder and director of Grupo Quince, a workshop, art gallery, and publisher of printed editions in Madrid (19711981). She is now a member of the International Arts Council, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Advisory Board Museu d Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). Patron member of the Centro Jos Guerrero de la Exma. Diputacin de Granada. During the past four years she has curated, among others, the following exhibitions: Painting for Themselves: Picasso, Mir, Guston, de Kooning. Late Works, Neues Museum Wesserburg, Bremen; Los Aos Ochenta, Culturgest, Lisbon; Helena Almeida, Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporneo, Santiago de Compostela; XXVI Bienal de Pontevedra: Space as project-Space as reality (El Espacio como Proyecto-El Espacio como Realidad), Pontevedra; Guerreo-de Kooning, La sabidura del color, Centro Jos Guerrero, Granada. XXVII Bienal de Pontevedra: Talking about space, time, and stories (Narrando espacios, tiempos e historias, Pontevedra; Joan Hernndez Pijuan: Volviendo a un lugar conocido, MACBA, Barcelona; Muse dArt et Histoire, Neuchtel; Malm Konsthall, Sweden; Galleria dArte Moderna de Bologna, Italy. Mir: Traspasando los lmites, Centro Jos Guerrero, Granada. Felicit ... Exposicin de los Alumnos premiados, cole Nationale Suprieure des Beaux-Arts de Pars. Julian Schnabel, Paintings 19782003, Palacio de Velzquez, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa, Madrid. Gottfried Honegger Artist, Collector; Zurich, Switzerland Born in Zurich in 1917, Gottfried Honegger studied graphic arts and worked as a window dresser in the late thirties. In 1948, he became a professor at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich (the visual arts school), named by then director Johannes Itten. In 1958, Honegger decided to leave academia and went to New York to become an art consultant. While there, he had an exhibition of his own work at the Martha Jackson Gallery. This marks the beginning of his career as an artist. In 1960 Honegger returned to Paris to continue his own work. Honegger won the Carnegie International Pittsburgh Bovard Purchase Prize in 1967, and represented France in the 13th So Paulo Biennale in 1975, created the stainedglass windows for the cathedral in Nevers (France) and important sculpture projects for the Muse de Grenoble and la Grande Arche de la Dfense in Paris. In 1999, the Fondation Cartier organized a retrospective of Honeggers work, called Mtamorphose. The work was installed by Jean Nouvel. The same year, Honegger received the Lgion dHonneur from the French Minister of Culture. Having been a collector in an ongoing way since starting his work as an artist a passion shared by his partner Sybil Albers-Barrier in 1990, the couple created LEspace de lArt Concret in Mouans-Sartoux, France, near Cannes. The art space also houses a childrens workshop where seven thousand children come each year to learn about art through experience. In 2002, inside the Chteau de Mouans-Sartoux, a new museum was created (inaugurated in 2004) to house the Albers-Honegger Collection, which was offered as a donation to the French state. [www.crdp.ac-nice.fr/eac/donation.htm] Pierre Huber Art Dealer, Collector, Collection Pierre Huber; Geneva, Switzerland Pierre Huber is a self-made man whose passion for contemporary art has been the driving force of his career at the top of the international art scene for the past thirty years. Born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1941, after completing his studies in the field of physical fitness, Huber created a number of fitness clubs before becoming a restaurateur. In 1984, he founded an art gallery. As an unconditional patron of the arts at every level, Huber strongly defends the role of the galleries and art fairs in the position as small and medium-size businesses with a real community mission to help the public discover new talent and as intrinsic partners of collectors and of museums in the ongoing conservation and communication of cultural heritage. Throughout the years, he has guided and invested in a number of important art ventures with countless institutions, as an active advisor and ardent patron. Within his duties as an active member of the advisory committee of Art Basel, he helped to restructure the fair during the crisis in the art world in the nineties, and encouraged the fair to select the best galleries of their time, and to maintain the equilibrium between the art market and the auction houses. In 1992, Huber launched Art & Public Gallery in Geneva, and in 1995 was the founding member of the Swiss Association of Galleries, which he presided from 1995 until 1998. In association with Lorenzo Rudolf, in 2005 Huber launched PH-LR Best of Arts, an innovative enterprise which will be active in the field of international art fairs. [www.artpublic.ch] Yvon Lambert Art Dealer, Collector, Yvon Lambert Collection; Paris, France; New York City, NY, USA Since his beginnings as an art dealer in the nineteen-sixties, alongside his activities as a gallerist, Yvon Lambert has assembled artworks representing art movements such as Minimal Art, Conceptual Art, Land Art, painting from the nineteen-eighties, photography and video from the nineties etc. His collection is made up of very coherent ensembles for each artist: Robert Ryman, Brice Marden, Carl Andre, Gordon Matta-Clark, Anselm Kiefer, Andres Serrano, and Douglas Gordon. Cy Twombly and Nan Goldin, absent from national collections, also hold an important place in the museum. The Lambert Collection was inaugurated in July 2000. It is the latest in Paris, a city whose stellar museum history has been constituted thanks to private collectors and benefactors, such as Campana for the Petit Palais and Puech for the Muse Calvet. This collection reveals itself to be a most original and exemplary testimony to the intense complicity, the ties woven between dealer-collector and artist. Yvon Lamberts collection of contemporary art is unique in France. In twenty-five years, it has only been exhibited on two occasions: in Villeneuve-dAscq and Tourcoing (1992) and Yokohama at the Contemporary Art Museum (1998). From the start, and in parallel with the activity of his gallery, Yvon Lambert assembled a collection which includes works by the strongest and most representative artists of Minimal Art, Conceptual Art, and photography and video of the nineteen-nineties. The establishment of the museum was achieved with the collaboration of the Ministry of Culture and Communication, the Country Council, the Regional Council, and the City of Avignon. The rehabilitation of the Htel de Caumont was commissioned to the architect Rudy Ricciotti, according to the program of the director of the Lambert Collection, Eric Mzil. Andre Putman designed the bookstore and restaurant interiors. Each year two large thematic exhibits are mounted, whether drawing on the chef-doeuvres from the collection or independent of them. The Htel de Caumont also maintains an acquisition policy of site-specific works, continuously enriching its exceptional holdings. [www.yvon-lambert.com]

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Richard Flood Chief Curator, New Museum of Contemporary Art; New York City, NY, USA Richard Flood joined the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in September 2005. Previously he was for many years deputy director and chief curator of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota. In that capacity, he has curated Sigmar Polke: Illumination, Brilliant! New Art from London, no place (like home), Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing, Matthew Barney, Cremaster 2: The Drones Exposition, and, with Frances Morris of Tate Modern, London he has co-curated Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 19621972. He is currently working on America is Waiting: The Art of Cultural Inquiry, 19791989, scheduled for exhibition in summer 2006. He has written extensively on contemporary art and film for Artforum, Frieze, and Parkett. He has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of Visual Arts, New York City, and is currently a lecturer at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and the Royal College of Art, London. [www.newmuseum.org]

082 | ABC | A36B | Art Collections Welcome | Maria Finders Welcome to our first Art Basel Conversation of this very busy week. Last night, we had the Premiere, with Martin Creed which was a very interesting, good way to start. Today we are going to talk about collections that are created, organized, or run by art professionals whether theyre artists, curators, or dealers. We have with us as the host of the Conversation Richard Flood, who is Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We have next to him Mara de Corral, Pierre Huber, Gottfried Honegger, and Yvon Lambert, all professionals in their own right, and Richard will be presenting them. I think that Richard is going to start with a few words. Some of this Conversation is going to be in French and itll be loosely translated simultaneously by myself, so Im going to try to do a good job; some of the Conversation is going to be English and it represents a little bit about how the show is, very international, so well try to do our best to get the information across. Introduction | Richard Flood Welcome and thank you for coming. I guess the one thing I should tell you is that we were all hoping that we would be given our choice of Bvlgari jewelery to wear during the panel but that was not offered but were all prepared, so forgive us the lack of adornment. Basically, todays Conversation is going to be about collecting and I think its something that each and every one of us is aware of; from the time we are tiny children we have the instinct. Maybe youre catching fireflies in a jar, maybe youre collecting stones or maybe you collect the sand from the beaches that you go to. I know people whose most treasured collection are the shells that go around their window ledges. And these collections get into our lives, and for some people they start becoming a representation of who they are. So maybe its blue ribbons, or maybe its Tupperware, or maybe its coupons, it stays with us. I dont think there is one person out there who doesnt have some kind of collection, even if its memories, which probably is the best collection of all. Today, however, we have a number of people who collect with a lot more intent than many of us and I think some of their reasons for collecting are probably fairly complicated. While for some it may be an extension of self, for others its also a way of defining the world around them. Well probe that as we go along. I want to very quickly let you see the collections that are going to form the topic of our discussion. The first person that well be turning to is Yvon Lambert who has been an art dealer since the nineteen-sixties. Yvon began collecting from that period forward and has amazing holdings of Minimal Art, Conceptual Art, photography, and video. He has an exhibition space in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture and Communication, the Country Council, the Regional Council, and the City of Avignon. If you are in Avignon, you can go see it and each year there are two large thematic exhibitions. So its an active, aggressive exhibition space. Yvon? Presentation | Yvon Lambert I started my collection very early in life and it was a passion that was born almost immediately. I worked with many artists that interested me personally but that I also defended in my gallery and they became part of my gallery collection. I also collect groups based on themes, groups of artists, and large selections of work from individual artists. For example, I have a large selection of Cy Twombly and Anselm Kiefer and many other artists, from whom I have many pieces. Also, I have concentrated on artists essentially from my generation, with artists who include Robert Ryan, Brice Marden, Carl Andre, Gordon Matta-Clark, Christian Boltanski, Andreas Serrano, Douglas Gordon, and Nan Goldin. All these works are now in the collection in Avignon, which is open to the public all year round and offers regular exhibitions within the space and also rotating exhibitions. This summer, you can see a retrospective of some of the best pieces. While the collection found a home at the Htel de Cuamont five years ago, it has been my work for the past forty years. This domain belonged to Joseph de Seytres, Seigneur de Verguires-en-Provence and Marquis de Chaumont who was himself an illustrious collector, which I did not know when I decided to install my collection there. I dont feel like Im the owner of that collection because Im hoping that one day it will become public and will be given to the state, so that it will actually stay together and persist as a united body of work. The collection is growing every day but now tends towards younger artists. Very young artists like Jonathan Monk or Jonathan Horowitz. My whole life I have been involved in the very complicated relationship to collecting, to the point of when I see an envelope with a beautiful stamp, I cut it out and keep it. So its an obsession. The collection, I hope, will reflect not only my life as a collector but my life as a dealer who collects. Thank you. (Translated from French)

ABC | A36B | Art Collections | 083 Richard Flood: The next to talk will be Pierre Huber who has began his art-dealing persona in 1984, he is an active member of the advisory committee of Art Basel and in 1992 launched Art & Public Gallery in Geneva, in 1995 he was the founding member of the Swiss Association of Galleries, he has an amazing catalogue that has just come out on the collection which has an astounding range of material in it; the Bechers, a young American artist, Slater Bradley, and a young German artist, Thomas Demand, alongside more established artists like Martin Creed, Mike Kelly, Sherrie Levine, Paul McCarthy, Cady Noland, Richard Prince, Rosemary Trockel, etc., astounding variety as well, so we turn to you.

084 | ABC | A36B | Art Collections Presentation | Pierre Huber My grandfathers passion for his stamp albums counted for something in my desire to begin collecting. When I was ten years old, I was on holiday, like every year, with him in Aarau, and I would sleep in the most intimate space in his apartment: a little room situated next to his lodgings. Its walls were covered in shelves full of albums and I spent a part of my nights living in this atmosphere. It was extraordinary to live in such a powerful spirit of a collector. Then, when I was thirty in 1961, I was a skier and we were in the mountains of Zermatt with the Swiss team and we had one day off every week. With a group of five fantastic friends, all great skiers, we were living in this beautiful countryside with the powdered virgin snow, with the blue sky, the sun, and here again I found this same powerful spirit in an atmosphere of what we would call in French, juissance, which means total pleasure. On June 12, 2005, I had the privilege to open a little part of my collection to the public, in the Muse des Beaux Arts in Lausanne. As I walked through the exhibition I realized that I really didnt notice what is going to be shown, but I had the same feeling of total exhilaration, and joy ... juissance. I can now say that this exhibition was one of the most fantastic experiences of my life. Originally, I did not want to do it, because Im a collector, a real Swiss-style collector, who collects for himself, in a very egoistical way, and I was even not interested in showing this collection. It was the relationship between the curator of my collection, Yves Aupetitallot, and myself that convinced me to do this show. And it was for me a revelation and showed me that now I will start a new way of thinking about contemporary art, and a new way to start a new collection. So we can talk more about this later. Thank you. Richard Flood: Our next speaker is Gottfried Honegger, a great Swiss artist who began his career after a stint in academia, went to New York as an art consultant, the perfect way to begin a collecting career and there he also had an exhibition of his own work at the legendary Martha Jackson Gallery. He later went on to win the Carnegie International Board Purchase Prize in 1967, Americas one shot at a kind of great international exhibition, he represented France in the 13th So Paulo Biennale of 1975; in 1999 the Foundation Cartier organized a retrospective called Metamorphoses, the work was installed, interestingly, by Jean Nouvel. Gottfrieds work and life as an artist and a collector has been shared with his partner Sybil AlbersBarrier. In 1990, they created the space for Concrete Art in Mouans-Sartoux, South of France, near Cannes. Interestingly, the place also houses a childrens workshop where seven thousand children a year come and learn about art through experience. In 2002 the Chteau began to function as a museum to house the Albers-Honegger Collection and has been offered as a donation to the French state. France is very lucky with this group of collectors! Presentation | Gottfried Honegger Id like to thank you for inviting me here. My companion Sybil Albers-Barrier and myself have been in the process of creating this foundation for the past sixteen years, inside a fifteenth-century castle, in Mouans-Sartoux, the set-up of the structure is almost like a huge village dedicated to art. The Chteau itself houses part of the collection, theres the childrens atelier, theres a music studio for sound-awareness and education, and this whole collection is really dedicated to opening the senses up for art. The museum is really dedicated to Concrete Art which is a Minimalist art. Its a very European-based art and its unfortunately disused these days, not really known by many galleries, not very well defended these days, so the museum is a place to preserve Concrete Art as part of the history of art and its dedicated to that. We bought a house in the same region, which has become an artists residence for all kinds of international artists to come and stay and work. This is the actual structure of the museum which was constructed with public and private funding. It offers a big exhibition room, a library ... There is also an atelier where they civilize children by teaching them art and music. This also features a temporary exhibition space for the childrens work. At the entrance of the Chteau an important piece by Ulrich Ruckriem already announces the kind of work you will see inside. The exhibition space is naturally lit, creating a softer setting to contrast with and to highlight the work. For Concrete artists, everything is art, its a whole, from the decorative arts to the painting, its one complete thing. This is the work thats been done now and the vision of a very important collection that has now been established, and we invite you all to come and visit us. (Translated from French )

ABC | A36B | Art Collections | 085 Richard Flood: Thank you Gottfried. Im going to speak a moment of our missing guest, Michelangelo Pistoletto, who couldnt be with us today because he is back in Italy and not feeling great, so hes deeply missed. As you probably know, he is one of the great Arte Povera artists and Im mentioning this because his collection is primarily devoted to Arte Povera, the movement with which he is most deeply associated, and he began it by trading with other artists, his colleagues, in Turin and Milan. The collection is now housed in a textile complex in a small town called Biella directly between Turin and Milan. And that complex is now a foundation called Citt dell Arte where he runs, for three months a year, seminars, where students come from all over the world to participate in classes and workshops that deal primarily with social sculpture and socially engaged actions within the culture, and politics as well. And at the beginning of September he and the students will be installed on an island off the Giudecca in Venice and if youre there in lovely September you can visit and get a good idea of what thats about. I mention that because I want to come back to something about what he does in the later discussion. Our final panelist is Mara de Corral who is breaking news, Mara is one of the directors of this years Venice Biennale which opened to wide acclaim just last week, were really privileged to have her with us because her job has only just begun, she has spoken to the press, she has entertained her professional colleagues and now she has to go back and deal with the people. I would submit that for all curators one of the great things about curating is the fact that every time you do an exhibition, youre building a collection and that collection, if youre lucky, ultimately has a record through a publication but again it also provides a memory for in the case of Mara hundreds of thousands of people, and thats pretty wonderful. Maras career is long and intricately tied up with Spain, although she is known far and wide for a variety of other things. Let me just give you a few things: as director of the advisory committee to the Telefnica Foundation Collection in Madrid, advisor

086 | ABC | A36B | Art Collections and coordinator of the collection of contemporary art for the Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid, one of the most beautifully-named cities in Spain and I havent got a chance of ever pronouncing it. From 1995 until 2002 she was the director of the contemporary art collection of the Foundation La Caixa, a collection that she began in 1985 and I think this was one of the really great moments in understanding how one extremely prescient person can all of a sudden cause an international situation in a city where previously that had not happened. And from 1990 until 1994 there was a golden moment at the National Museum Center of Art Reina Sofia where she was the director. Since then, now, Mara is a member of the international council for the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, she is on the advisory board of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona. This is a lot of influence, its a lot of weight, and Mara is going to talk primarily about the Caixa. Presentation | Mara de Corral Good morning, Im delighted to share my experience and my joy of collecting with you. Even if Ive been collecting when I was director of the Reina Sofia Museum, for a public, national museum, I want to talk today, as Richard said, about corporate collections because I think that corporate collections are the Cinderellas of the collections. Usually we do not think of corporate collections as being as serious as museum collections. And they dont have the glamour of the private collectors and, in turn, of the private collections. So, it is not so easy to collect for corporations. The Caixa is a savings bank and the president of the bank wanted to start to collect already in 1983. When we discussed this possible direction, I said that I did not think it was time for him and for the institution to start a collection, because collecting is really an engagement with art and artists and you cannot collect like you do exhibitions. You have to be really sure that what you want to build is a collection, a collection that may become a museum in the future. So after having this ongoing conversation for almost two years, we finally started collecting in 1985, and the first acquisition was Joseph Beuyss Schmerzraum, the room of pain which was an extraordinary way to start. For most corporations, serious collecting is sometimes difficult because if you really want to get the best works, as competitors you have the Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Center in Minneapolis, the Ludwig, the Pompidou, and you have to be the first, in the gallery, in the studio, in a fair, in a biennale, in documenta. You must discuss with the galleries and with the artist and convince them that your collection is really the best place for them to place the work. For twenty years, I have been collecting for Caixa, until we finished the museum (the Caixa Forum in Barcelona) and I could find a good home for my child. Its a beautiful museum, housed in the Modernista Casa Ramona, a former textile factory built in 1910, by Josep Puig I Cadafalch, and converted into a museum by Roberto Luna, an architect from Seville, who knows and appreciates contemporary art. I selected him because hes one of the few architects who really is ready to renounce his ego, and create a museum that is a fantastic space to show art. Over those years, we bought over nine hundred works. We started to collect from the eighties because we thought that the eighties in Spain, after having a democracy, was the time when Spain was incorporated in the international art scene. We, however, also collected artists from previous generations but only with works of the eighties, nineties, and after 2000. The other corporate collection I am involved with now is the Telefnica Foundation and Im doing two collections for them; one of Cubism from the nineteen-tens and twenties in order to contextualize the fourteen works of Juan Gris that they already had. This collection was just exhibited at the main building of Telefnica in Madrid last January, and a catalogue raisonn with more than fifty paintings was published. The other collection is of artists who use photography for expressing themselves and it starts with Bernd and Hilla Becher in Europe and John Baldessari in the U.S. It goes from the late sixties until the present. We have also published a catalogue raisonn of this collection, and it has more than two hundred-and-sixty works.

ABC | A36B | Art Collections | 087 In Conversation | Mara de Corral Gottfried Honegger Pierre Huber Yvon Lambert Host | Richard Flood Richard Flood: Thank you Mara. We have run through our presentations now and were hoping to get closer to you, the audience, and wed like to see more of you (change in the room lighting). We had arrived at a list of questions among ourselves earlier on and know that people have actually thought about the answers to these questions, so, well try some of them out, but I also hope that well be able to have a more free-form conversation as we go along. Here we have people who are creating open situations for the public to come and visit their art, and the one thing that Im really fascinated by you as collectors be it corporate or be it private concerns this intention in terms of what you hope to communicate to the public by making your collection available to them? Pierre Huber: For me to build a collection was more on the level of an intellectual pursuit. I understand, however, what Mara was saying about this competition; to be the first to go to the fairs, the big exhibitions, biennales etc. ... Its very interesting because my philosophy leans towards a more egotistical way of collecting. All this excitement about the art market and the way the whole system works today makes it very challenging for collectors, and they have to be very clever if they want to have a chance to grow their collections in the way they would like. In fact the reason that my way to collect has been more quiet is also influenced by this state of things. I wanted to avoid the pressure of being obliged to show the collection, because we have to be able to, in some way, be in competition with all these institutions like MoMA, like Reina Sophia etc. ... As soon as people know that we are collectors, we still need to be able to have access to the works and I must say my personal way to go ahead is to have my own philosophy

088 | ABC | A36B | Art Collections about my collection, and to not really collect what is dictated by the market or dictated by the auction houses. I think today what is very interesting is that art is not only what you find in the auction houses and I want to make sure that what interests me in art, which is the artist, which is the work of the artist, remains intact, and does not have to reflect what happens in the market but what happens in my own philosophy, and in my own vision. And when sometimes, and maybe many times, there is a connection, because for example Im interested in Paul McCarthy and Paul McCarthy is in the market, I can say that I bought Paul McCarthy when nobody in the market was interested. I did important work also with Mike Kelly, with other innovative artists, but they fit into the vision I had for the collection. Today, a lot of things have changed, because we are dealing with a fully global market and we are working in the spirit of mondialisation [globalization], so everything does not just center on the United States. Today we must consider China, South America, Iceland, and Switzerland, everywhere ... so, I agree with Mara, that a collector has to be very quick and very clear and decisive, and has to know about art history; who was Mondrian, and Malevich, and who are the significant artists today and who will be significant tomorrow. For me the world of art is always revolving, like a ball, and as a collector you shed light on certain parts at certain times, and not only focus on this kind of art or that kind for art ... it can be photography or installation, concrete or non-concrete, etc. Its everything, its so rich, its so fantastic, and what is important for a collector like myself is to evolve with all this richness, and this is my dream, to continue to help this evolution and the day that I am not going to be here anymore, its maybe that something is going to remain from all this in the form of a solid collection. Also, I must say that I really dont care if we have a building for the collection, it is all in my head and my experience with art will continue as long as I have the privilege to develop my own philosophy with the help of the artists. Richard Flood: Thank you. I think what youre saying is fascinating in so far as I think theres nothing a collector would desire more than the kind of intense personal freedom to create a collection without any restraints, without any barriers, but it occurs to me that when youre building a corporate collection its a much trickier kind of arena and I think, as we wander around the world, weve all seen many corporate collections and they can be very curious things. I know where I come from in Minnesota, General Mills, one of the great American grain companies, has a collection but its a collection that is based on paintings and sculptures that deal with breakfast foods. Its amazing to me what they actually manage to find, work of some quality that actually answers to this topic, however, this is perhaps a limited vision. Mara embarked on something that was much bolder and I think you were able to take that collection to very dangerous places. Could you talk to us a little bit about what you encountered on the road to having actually a great amount of freedom in building that collection? Were you also trying to shape it because they had a corporate desire to say something about themselves? Mara de Corral: Being the daughter of a collector and being a collector myself, it was only when I started to collect for the Caixa, for a public corporate collection, that I began to sense the difficulty of the task, because you have to forget about your own vision and taste. This is because, even if all collections have a name behind them and of course the Caixa Collection has my name, you have to be conscious all the time that you are building a public collection. And this is also a very special case because it was the first contemporary collection built in Spain. We were always aware of collecting as a museum and being the only people at that time collecting with this idea in mind, and we therefore had the responsibility of showing the art of our time. I have to say that my only constraint was to respect a certain quality level which was set to define our mission. The collection has nothing to do with the bank. Its part of a foundation which means it can never be sold and it is also part of the social responsibility of the bank, as a kind of return on their earnings, and which also means that the works must be made available for public showing. We started by acquiring key works representative of each artists career, like Joseph Beuys, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Juan Muoz, Donald Judd, and Gerhard Richter, among many others. We also have several works of Agnes Martin or Robert Ryman. All the artists are represented with a group of works of a certain moment that exemplifies their career, and makes their work understandable. I think it is a very exceptional situation. We received a European prize as the best public collection of contemporary art in Europe. We started to collect without an idea of having a building but the president was always interested in building a collection because in Spain all the provinces and all the cities were dreaming of having a museum but not of having a collection for the museum. The Caixa Foundation collection continues to be the most important contemporary one in Spain and they are still collecting with the same spirit. I left in 2002, when the museum was finished, a catalogue raisonn was published and I could make the first and second installation of the collection. Perhaps one of the most difficult things has been the selection of the works, because we never tried to have an encyclopedic collection, but to gather a group of artists, and make sure those artists are well represented. If you are ever in Barcelona, it is really worth visiting the collection at Caixa Forum. Richard Flood: I think one of the amazing things about the Caixa collection is that it is something that really has become part of a national heritage. It is the best collection of contemporary art in the country. It can be borrowed from and I think can also stand as a record of a moment in time and its great that they are continuing it. I wanted to ask Gottfried who, as he said in his opening remarks, is really creating a museum to honor a movement with which he is associated, so it has a very, very clear purpose, but Id like to know more about why you created this learning environment

ABC | A36B | Art Collections | 089 for children, it seems to be an enormously important part of the idealism on which your adventure is based. Gottfried Honegger: Basically the Concrete artists are not only artists. Through their work, they feel that they have a role to fulfill in society, and this role is to keep a certain kind of order in this Disney World of art. Right next door to our Conversation today is one of the worlds most important art fairs, yet even for the best of collectors things are very expensive, things are very difficult to acquire and basically its a big zoo. In a way, its that the artist has to become a functional member of society, and because of this, theres no reason to have all these hierarchies, that the artist is on top and that the people are at the bottom. It all should be about bringing forth an exemplary philosophy of life and sketching out a cultural philosophy. If I may paraphrase Malevich, who said that his atelier was the street, this has inspired much of our work with children. I believe that our children need to be saved from a consumer society. You must be aware that sixty percent of French children are nearly deaf, probably from wearingwalkmen all day. Our children need to learn to re-think, to re-hear, to re-see, so what we are doing could be described as a re-education program. In short, what we have seen in the past sixteen years is that there have been amazing and immense changes happening to the children involved in these ateliers. There has been an awakening, a new generation, and of course because of this belief that society needs to deeply be changed, I believe that its very cynical for a bank to talk about banking and art together. Art should stem from a philosophy of life. My wish is to have children involved in this project more and more because I believe that the force of society should be creativity and this creative force can get us a little bit away from this consumerism, from the way society is built now, and this is why I place so much hope in the children and in the work they do. (Translated from French)

090 | ABC | A36B | Art Collections Richard Flood: I wish you could have been just a So, between them, they are two institutions created little more passionate when you are doing your in the South of France, a very privileged place for presentation! that kind of education. You must understand that in this region very little has been done in this field, Gottfried Honegger: Im too old to always be so we have created two very unique places for art passionate! education and discovery. The continuation of this education program was one of the conditions that Richard Flood: I think it speaks well of age. Just as made me decide to leave this collection to the state; Gottfried is preparing his gift for the people of its an integral part of the whole program. Many France, so too is Yvon and my question for you, times when these kinds of things happen in France, Yvon, is: at that moment and by the way, you both there are promises made but I wanted a guarantee chose some lovely locations for these places when that the education program would be ongoing withyou decided that you were indeed going to make a in the collection. (Translated from French) gift to your country, did that affect the way you were collecting? Did you in any way consciously begin Richard Flood: Thank you. I couldnt ask for this to have a mission that was going to shape the col- portion of the panel to end on a better note. I think lection so that it became a coherent gift or is your social responsibility is something that we too ofown passion for it the gift? ten forget about I dont want to preach but, at the same time, I love the idea that education is a part Yvon Lambert: As I said before, the collection of everything and, you know, if we assume our restarted very early and I decided very early to collect sponsibility towards the younger generation, I artists of my generation. The purpose of it wasnt think well end up in a better world for everybody. to make a museum collection, but rather to con- On that note of historical grandiosity, Ill open the serve the work of the artists that I defended in the room to questions and I dont know how is there gallery. There was already a first exhibition of the someone circulating? Yes, there is someone circucollection ten years ago in Villeneuve dAsq in lating ... Surely something? France. Upon seeing that exhibition, I realized that the collection itself had a unity and this is what Audience: I am very interested to hear whether you made me decide that I didnt want it to be separated. all feel that one day the private collections will be Because this collection needed a space, I was natu- seen by as many people as the existing museums, rally attracted by the South of France where I was even though they are more dispersed? born. And this of course was also to try to avoid this Paris-centric view that France often has. Richard Flood: I think the question was Do you see Avignon has a very rich heritage and the collec- a day when as many people would be seeing these tion could really find a home there, and with the private collections as in they would museums? support of the local authorities and of the state, the building could be acquired and developed Audience: ... whether theyll one day really rival into a permanent location for the collection. current museums especially since museums are Where I join Gottfried in his vision, is in the running out of funds? work that we also do with children. The collection is open to local classes and classes that are travel- Richard Flood: Will they rival museums? I kind of ing from all over France. There are ateliers in the think Ill just take this one quickly because as building and children can work in the presence somebody who comes from a collecting instituof the actual art pieces, and this experience is ac- tion and whose responsibility is to coherently companied by an important education program. shape a collection, I know that the big problem right now, and Gottfried referred to it earlier, is the fact that the marketplace is so insane. I mean when contemporary art is leaping in price over historical material, you know you have some kind of problem out there. While the problem is easily defined, how you settle it, I dont know. But I do think a number of private collectors have much greater access to the art of this time than do public institutions. The other thing that is happening has to do with re-discovering art; a couple of years ago all of a sudden everybody remembered Minimalism and work that had been very under-priced all of a sudden got to the right price and then transcended even that. I think Concrete Art could very well be the next re-discovery. I mean we are now seeing it with Latin American Modernism and were seeing it also with Arte Povera. You know anything that is under-priced this is all about capitalism and people who can come in and decide, okay, we are going to still keep kicking it up, meaning that, again to repeat myself, public institutions have less and less ability to compete. So the answer to your question is a qualified maybe. Audience: My question is directed to the art dealers on the panel and I just wanted them to offer some insights in regard to the last question: what are the checks and balances that need to be respected in view of collecting as an art professional? Richard Flood: I guess basically you want to direct the question in terms of the boundary between being an art dealer and an art collector? Audience: Yes, I think that one has these two responsibilities at the same time, there may be some areas of conflict and I would like them to address that.

ABC | A36B | Art Collections | 091 point is that if you have a conflict of interests, it can be ... anyway, in my situation, I must say I was always the best collector of my gallery, I have to be the best collector of my gallery because when we showed for example Cindy Sherman in 1985, nobody wanted to buy my film stills so I had two chances: one, to send them back to New York, and the other chance was to buy them myself, and I took the decision to buy them myself, so I was forced to be a collector and I did it. And this happened many times, but then, to continue this accumulation of the shows that I did, this gave me finally the idea that I had to become a serious collector. Because I am a perfectionist, the intellectual exercise of building my collection pulled me far beyond my role as a dealer, and often challenged my choices as a dealer. When I started to separate the work I sold from the work I collected, it became clear to me, about twelve years ago, that I might not have a chance to build a strong collection in Geneva. And while I was on the board of the museum in Geneva, I understood how difficult this was going to be, and that I had to take the responsibility myself to do this collection without taking into consideration what happens in the gallery or in the city where it happens to be located. So, in fact, I had to separate completely the philosophy of the collection and the work of the gallery and maybe with the new project that we have which is completely out of the gallery. Next year, I may end up being a collector and not be dealing anymore. The extraordinary chance that we have as a dealer is to have the right sources of information, but then you really have to go ahead alone with your philosophy of collecting without this influencing the program of the gallery. Also, because I am very hungry for art, what I show in my gallery is not enough for me to collect, so I have to collect other things that are happening in the program of the gallery. So I dont know if I have more or less answered you question?

Pierre Huber: I just want to say my position is a little bit different here from Gottfrieds, Yvons, and Maras because besides being a dealer, I am just a collector. I dont have a museum, I dont have Richard Flood: I mean, probably one of the great an institution and I really want to be just a collec- dealer refrains is Do me a favor, dont buy it. So tor, so this is the first point. And then the second weve now come to the end of our cycle here, many

092 | ABC | A36B | Art Collections of you have to get on to other business, others sightseeing. Maria, thank you very much for your incredibly coherent translations ... Maria Finders: Richard, I have great news for the speakers of this panel: Bvlgari actually has a gift for you, and its right downstairs. Wed like to thank you all, you can stay, theres still coffee downstairs and you can talk to the speakers directly, because the topic is very personal sometimes, its very directed to one of the speakers specifically, I think theyre going to be around for a little bit more, so please go downstairs and have a coffee with them and we can finish this way. Thank you for attending.

ABC | A36B | Architecture for Art | 099 Art Basel Conversations | Friday June 17, 2005 | Bvlgari Pavilion, Basel

TRANSCRIPT | ARCHITECTURE FOR ART ARTISTS AND MUSEUM ARCHITECTURE

What are the most ideal examples of museum architecture as seen by the artist? What are the most challenging architectural configurations for an artist to work with? How does museum architecture affect the relationship between art and the observer? What can artists do to influence architects and museum directors in their building choices? How does time affect the relationship between art and space?

SPEAKERS | VITO ACCONCI JOHN ARMLEDER ANDREA FRASER Host | JAMES RONDEAU

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Vito Acconci Artist, Architect, Acconci Studio; New York, NY, USA Vito Acconci comes from a background of fiction/poetry and art (performances, film/video, installations). In 1988, he started Acconci Studio, an architecture and design workshop. Their method is, on the one hand, to make a new space by turning an old one inside-out and upsidedown; and, on the other hand, to insert within a site a capsule that grows out of itself and spreads into a landscape. They treat architecture as an occasion for activity; they make spaces fluid, changeable, portable. They have recently completed a man-made island in Graz, a plaza in Memphis, a gallery in New York, a clothing store in Tokyo; they are currently working on a building faade in Milan, a park on a street median in Vienna, a plaza and streets in London, a perimeter of an apartment complex in Toronto, a garden for a hotel in Barcelona. A survey show, Vito Hannibal Acconci Studio, is traveling now through Europe.[www.acconci.com] John Armleder Artist; Geneva, Switzerland; New York, NY, USA John Armleder was born in Geneva in 1948 and lives and works in Geneva, New York, and around the world. Armleder has been active on the Geneva art scene since the late nineteen-sixties, and with Patrick Lucchini and Claude Rychner was a founding member of the Fluxus-type group Ecart there which existed from 1969 to 1980. Within that time, the group founded a gallery and a publishing house under the Ecart name. Since 1994 John Armleder has been a professor at the Hochschule fr Bildende Knste in Braunschweig, Germany, and at ECAL (cole Cantonale dArt) in Lausanne, Switzerland. John Armleder is a conceptual artist. He creates paintings, installations, and happenings. Since the beginning of the seventies important institutions have offered Armleder solo exhibitions, including the Kunst museum Basel in 1980; Living Arts Museum, Reykjavik in 1982; Knstlerhaus, Stuttgart in 1984; Muse dArt Modern, ARC, Paris; Kunstverein Dsseldorf and the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, in 1987; the Muse Rath, Geneva in 1990; Castello di Rivara, Torini in 1991; Centraal Museum, Utrecht in 1992; Wiener Sezession, Vienna in 1993; Villa Carlotta, Fondation Ratti, Tremezzo in 1996; Casino, Luxembourg in 1998; MoMA, New York in 2000; Kunsthalle Zrich in 2004. Many of these institutions have his work in their collections. Besides many solo exhibitions, his works have been presented in international events like the Paris Biennial (1975), Venice Biennale, Swiss Pavilion (1986), PROSPECT, Frankfurt (1986), Sydney Biennial (1986), Dokumenta Kassel(1987), Metropolis, Berlin (1991), Lyons Biennale (1993), Toyama Now, Triennial in Japan (1993), Posthuman (1993), Open Ends, MoMA, New York (2000). Countless publications have been written and edited by and about Armleder, including Maurice Besset, Suzanne Pag, and Dieter Schwarz, John M. Armleder, Winterthur: Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 1987; Lionel Bovier, eds. Hobert Besacier, Yves Aupetitalot, Christophe Chrix, and Parker Williams, Wallpaintings & Wallpieces: Catalogue Raisonn des Peintures Murales et autres Pices Murales, Grenoble: Le Magasin and Zurich: Caratsch de Pury & Luxembourg, 2005 and Lionel Bovier, John Armleder, Paris: Flammarion, 2005. Andrea Fraser Artist; New York, NY, USA Andrea Fraser is a New York-based artist whose work has been identified with performance, Context Art, and institutional critique. Since the mid-nineteen-eighties, she has produced site-specific performances, videos, installations, and publications with museums, galleries, and foundations throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America. She has created solo performances for the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (1986), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1989), the Wadsworth Atheneum (1991), inSITE in San Diego /Tijuana (1997), and the MICA Foundation in New York (2001). She has also produced major installations at the University Art Museum, Berkeley (1992), the Kunstverein in Munich (1993), the Generali Foundation in Vienna (1995) and the Kunsthalle Bern (1998). She represented Austria in the Venice Biennale in 1993 and participated in the Whitney Biennial in 1993 and the So Paulo Bienale in 1998. Between 1986 and 1996 she was also a member of the feminist performance group The V-Girls. Her performance scripts and essays have appeared in Art in America, Afterimage, October, Texte zur Kunst, Social Text, Critical Quarterly, Documents, and Artforum. A survey of her work, Andrea Fraser: Works 1985-2003, was organized by the Kunstverein in Hamburg in 2003 with an accompanying catalogue published by Dumont. In 2005, MIT Press released Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser, a collection of essays and performance scripts edited by Alexander Alberro and with a foreword by Pierre Bourdieu. [www.adaweb.walkerart.org/~dn/a/enfra/ afraser/.html] James Rondeau Frances and Thomas Dittmer Curator, Contemporary Art, The Art Institute of Chicago; Chicago, IL, USA James Rondeau is the Frances and Thomas Dittmer Curator for Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. He has been responsible for the museums permanent collection and the exhibition program for art from 1945 to the present. For the museum, he has organized solo exhibitions of new work by the artists Shirin Neshat, Thomas Hirschhorn, Olafur Eliasson, Stan Douglas, Rineke Dijkstra, Gaylen Gerber/Stephen Prina, Steve McQueen, Arnold Odermatt, Marlene Dumas, Yoshihiro Suda, Mark Manders, Margherita Manzelli, Roni Horn, Anri Sala, Iigo Manglano-Ovalle, and Magnus von Plessen. In 2001, Rondeau served as the co-commissioner for the United States Pavilion at the 49th Venice Biennale. In 2002, Rondeau was the curator for Art Projects and Art Video Lounge for the inaugural year of Art Basel Miami Beach. He has been published in Sculpture, Frieze, and Parkett magazines, and regularly contributes to catalogues, including publications for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Fundacin La Caixa, Madrid; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; Biennale of Sydney, Australia; Venice Biennale, Italy, among others. From 1994 to 1998 Rondeau was a curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT, where he organized exhibitions by the artists Cady Noland, Spencer Finch, Lee Lozano, and others. [www.artic.edu]

ABC | A36B | Architecture for Art | 101

102 | ABC | A36B | Architecture for Art Welcome | Maria Finders Welcome to the second day of Art Basel Conversations. The topic we are going to discuss this morning under the heading of Architecture and Art is Artists and Museum Architecture, or how artists perceive, live with, or work around museum architecture, and with all the technical problems were having this morning, you can imagine the technical challenges of building an important museum project. So today we are happy to welcome James Rondeau, John Armleder, Vito Acconci, and Andrea Fraser. This conversation is actually part III of the conversation we started in Miami in 2002 on the Future of the Museum, in terms of content but also in terms of packaging or architecture. This was followed with a part II in Miami in 2003, with Rem Koolhaas, Kathy Halbreich, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Terry Riley. So, while this is the third part of the same topic, this time we wanted the view of the artists whose work is subject to the success and shortcomings of museum architecture. James Rondeau, who is the Frances and Thomas Ditmer Curator of Contemporary Art, Department of Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, will be hosting this conversation. James? Introduction | James Rondeau Good morning, Im James Rondeau and Im really pleased to moderate todays discussion although I think what we have here primarily is a terrific opportunity to hear from three outstanding artists. That said, I do hope that we can move perhaps at the end of our program today toward a conversation that is both synthetic between us on the panel and, of course, with the audience. I also want to begin by thanking Maria Finders who organizes the Art Basel Conversations, and also to acknowledge the team of people who work with Maria to put this together: Sam Keller, Isabella Mora, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. The Art Basel Conversations has really become, I think, quite impressive not only in terms of individual lectures and panels but also in aggregate. The serial program now unfolds each year across two distinct locations Basel and Miami Beach each set of programs responding to, and extending, the preceding. I call your attention I think youve probably all seen it on your way up here this morning to these really impressive publications documenting each session from last year in Miami Beach. The topic today is artists critique of or engagement with museum architecture. We have on the screen one example of a succinctly emblematic work by Chris Burden, Exposing the Foundation of the Museum, commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1986. I thought at first that I would try to sketch a kind of supershort history of artists critical responses to abstract, or monolithic, as well as actual instances of museum architecture, including not only Chris Burden but also visual examples of work by Michael Asher, Ed Ruscha, Meirle Laderman Ukeles, Gordon Matta Clark, Louise Lawler, Katharina Fritsch, etc. Furthermore, much recent work and thinking around these questions has been framed by critical responses often considered under the rubric of nineteen-eighties and nineties institutional critique. However, I think instead I will defer this attempt at didacticism and instead turn to the artists on the panel. What I will say, though, in an attempt to frame some urgency for the topic, is that museums across the globe are clearly in an expansionist mode with no end in sight. What we have repeatedly referred to internationally as the Bilbao effect is, of course, now somewhat old news. But clearly the proliferation of such projects inspired by the starchitecture epitomized by Frank Gehrys Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao proliferates with major museum buildings attached to highprofile architects recently opened or planned for New York, Paris, Barcelona, Helsinki, London, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and the list goes on and on. There is a further, parallel development, perhaps best made manifest in spaces like MassMoca, in North Adams, Massachusetts or the recent Dia: Beacon. These two institutions, located outside of major, urban centers, have expanded their collections and exhibition programs within the context of destination facilities where the currency is not so much high design but just massive amounts of raw, relatively uninflected space. I think so many of these live issues recently have been channeled with an extraordinarily intense focus around the recent opening of the newly expanded Museum of Modern Art in New York. Consequently, we are seeing about fifteen years of anxious, critical dialogue newly honed and newly focused around discussions about Taniguchis Museum of Modern Art and the post-expansion identity of that institution. These issues swirled around a recent conversation in Artforum magazine an inter-generational dialogue between artists not unlike the one that we have here today with Daniel Buren and Olafur Eliasson. In that Buren observed: The proliferation of contemporary art museums is a kind of technical revolution that may be as significant for art making today as the invention of oil paint. There is, in other words, a strong sense that the topic of the museum is still an extraordinary and not yet fully understood phenomenon on the level of artists practice. One thing I think is clear throughout all of these various discussions and debates is that museums,

ABC | A36B | Architecture for Art | 103 museum management, museum boards, and leadership structures increasingly regard architecture as the solution to myriad diverse sets of problems, and often these kinds of growths and expansions are predicated in terms of populism and spectacle. These questions have occasioned volumes and volumes of critical, academic discourse as well as lots and lots of ink in the popular press. What Ive not seen and what occasioned the idea of todays discussion is a collectivized and focused response from practicing artists who are, after all, the most important tenants and among the most important constituencies for museums of modern and contemporary art today. That said, I want to turn it over to our panelists. I think the order of presentation today will be first John Armleder, second Vito Acconci, and third Andrea Fraser. With that, I turn it over to John.

104 | ABC | A36B | Architecture for Art Presentation | John Armleder Good. Well, good morning, thank you for getting up; I managed hardly to do that. The first thing I would like to say is a side announcement, I would recommend a talk tomorrow afternoon with Mr. Albert Hofmann and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Mr. Hofmann who introduced LSD and Im thinking of that because I have this projection right in my eyes and the effect is not so different, I guess, at least the side effects. James Rondeau: Did you want to actually kill this [the light]? John Armleder: No, no, I dont want to kill anyone its inspiring. Talking about early birds of whom I am not, it brings me to architecture and art which is, I guess, the topic today. Though I usually am embarrassed about talking because I dont really know exactly what to say, especially about such things, I get regularly invited to panels and when people listen to me and the funny thing is that they invite me again. So, there must be something wrong with me or the people inviting me! And the audience is coming so were a good group. This morning ... yesterday I had to travel to Lugano and I guess I slept most of the time on the train and dreamt about today and this early bird thing brought me to eggs and I think eggs are a very inspiring topic for what we are supposed to be talking about today. I dont know exactly why we have to talk about architecture and art. For a long time we had this idea that there was no difference but its true that we tend to, as artists, produce objects which are hosted in some kind of nest thus the egg thing. So then what would be the difference? I came up with this egg thing because it fit the conversation, I guess, and I tried to figure out exactly what kind of egg one would be. And somehow you have the feeling that the regular egg could be the art work and architecture would be a broken egg in which you fit a whole egg. And this is sort of the structural construction I thought of. When you look at whats happening to museums, fitted with artworks inside, they really look like broken eggs most often. So I think this sort of frames a lot about what were doing, its the same product, one being like a Russian doll fitting in the other one, and there is this kind of bizarre discrepancy which leads to lots of discussions, panels, and so on. And there is this bizarre way of having to say who did what. Again the egg story: where does the whole cycle begin? Its true that, in art, for a long time theres been this fetish about the signature, the authorship, and it seems to be accepted in a way that artists are not anonymous, that there is a credit to the author of an artwork and somehow it seems that, for a long time, not historically, Im talking about recent time, the architecture was not signified in the same way as the artist work. I believe this is getting leveled to the point where sometimes, and more and more often probably, one visits a museum for the architecture but not for the artworks, which is a beautiful thing because it means youre looking at the shell more than the content. No, Im not saying that theres no content in the shell, so its a sort of a perverse way of looking at it. Now what comes out of that? As food, I like eggs, and eggs are presented in many forms and I like most of the forms and now what Id want to say may seem very out of focus but think of it only as architecture and art. You can have scrambled eggs, you can have poached eggs, you can have soft-boiled eggs all these are variations, important variations on what we are handling. Lets think of soft-boiled eggs that can be peeled. In Germany, they put them into a glass and then they call them Eier im Glas, so you have like a soft shell, a soft-boiled egg, a soft thing which seems rigid because its all white like the food could be the china, and then its put in a glass shell which is transparent but hard. This is almost a museum model. Now theres another variation of that which I think is very exciting because its one of my preferred ones: its the poached egg which is a soft form set in boiling water and suddenly you have a finished form which is sometimes then plunged in jelly and you have then eggs in jelly. There is also the translucent version which is the thousand-year egg in China where the white egg is suddenly gray and its supposed to be a thousand years old. This is all about museums. I think Im covering almost all the topic now and Ill say where this comes from. Theres a theory that Bringhurst came up with and Mai-Thu Perret, who was here, talked to Parker Williams about that; it is a theory of the universe. And this theory of the universe is the hedgehog theory, hedgehogs being a very typical architectural device also. In his point of view we have all a hedgehog within us, probably in our bodies, as a matter of fact. And the universe itself is a huge hedgehog, we dont know whats beyond the hedgehog, but meaning, like the egg situation, we have a hedgehog in a hedgehog and were sort of in between. The interesting thing about a hedgehog is that its shell is spiked and is covered, which we dont see, with bugs. And this is why you shouldnt deal too much with hedgehogs. James Rondeau: Thank you very much. Well come around to the egg metaphor again, I think, in its various permutations. The possibilities are rich. But for the moment we will need to move on. Vito?

ABC | A36B | Architecture for Art | 105 Presentation | Vito Acconci What Id like to do is try to give a summary of different kinds of relations that I have had with museums, with the notion of the museum, first as an artist, then as an architect. In the beginning of my career I probably looked on a museum as a kind of unnecessary thing. A museum was something I wanted to avoid. And I think a lot of people in my generation saw a museum as something removed from the everyday world, everyday life, so at the beginning of my career in 1970 when I was first asked to do a piece in a museum, at the Museum of Modern Art, I did a piece that tried to use my space in the museum as my mailbox. During the duration of the show, I arranged that my mail be forwarded by the post office to the museum, so my space in the museum was my mailbox. During that three-month period, then, anytime I wanted mail, anytime I needed mail, I had to leave my house, take the subway, go up to the museum, and get my mail. Okay, time passed. By 1993 stuff was probably on the way, or maybe had already started to leave art and become design, become architecture. Museum of Applied Art, Vienna: This [slide] is a project at the Museum of Applied Art in Vienna, the central exhibition hall at the museum. The museum had recently been renovated, so we did project there, and I say we because by this time I wasnt working as a single person, a single agent, anymore. Once I realized that what I was moving to was design, I thought I couldnt work as a single individual; I had to work as part of a group of people, part of a studio of designers. So the project we did was to make a replica of this central exhibition hall and tilt the replicated room from one corner of the actual room. So as you entered the room, you were sandwiched between a falling room and a rising room. You could go out of the central exhibition hall into the lobby, and as you walked around this lobby corridor, you would enter on top of the space under which you used to be. Theres a tree that starts in the rising room, and went through

106 | ABC | A36B | Architecture for Art the falling room, and then went up into the skylight. By this time I wasnt thinking of myself as an artist anymore, I was thinking of myself and the people I was working with as designers, as architects. Storefront, New York: In that same year, 1993, I worked with Steven Holl on a project for an alternative gallery in New York, Storefront for Art and Architecture. We tried to do a kind of renovation of the space; we provided a new faade for Storefront, a new front for Storefront. It was a faade divided into sections. These sections could pivot both vertically and horizontally, so when a wall section pivoted horizontally, you could use it as a chair or as a table. Our attempt was that since this was an exhibition space we wanted to try to make the possibility of a constantly changeable space. You could have outside walls inside, inside walls outside, some walls open, and some walls closed. The Queens Museum, New York: In 2000 or 2001 we entered a competition for the renovation of the Queens Museum in New York, and, like a lot of things we entered and proposed for, we didnt get the project, but it gave us the chance to try to consider what a museum space could be. We tried to make a museum with extrusions and intrusions, parts jutting out from the museum, parts jutting in, on the roof, parts jutting up and jutting down. These extrusions held the museum walls, so from the extrusion you could bring in on tracks different partitions, different walls, so that the museum would be a constantly changing space. The way the extrusion and the intrusion worked: if you were in the extrusion from the museum, you were still inside the space of the museum, but at the same time you were in the space of the park around it. When you went into the intrusion, you were outside the walls of the museum, you were in the park, but now the park had kind of inserted itself into the museum, so the attempt was to make this mix of park space and museum space. conTEMPorary gallery, New York: This [slide] was a gallery we designed in 2002 in New York. Kenny Schachter, who I think before that had thought of himself as a kind of independent curator, wanted to have a gallery. It was going to be a temporary gallery; it was part of his house. So starting at the back door of the building, a steel wall enters the building, cut out of the steel wall is a door, cut out of the steel wall is the address of the gallery. The steel wall enters the inside, it splits, the top half of the steel wall becomes shudders for the window, the bottom half of the steel wall becomes a desk, a receptionists desk and chair. It was going to be a temporary gallery which made us think that we couldnt change the walls, we could only cover the walls, so we covered the walls with expanded galvanized-steel mesh panels, and as a by-product, we got a kind of a universal hanging system, you never had to make holes in the walls. Towards the back of the gallery, the top of the wall that separates the gallery from his childrens playroom is twisted and warped into the gallery space, it becomes a projection screen. These expanded metal panels can hinge together so they can act as seats, for example, they can act as shelves, sculpture stands. He has an upstairs space, the expanded metal panel turns the corner, goes upstairs, makes a kind of private gallery upstairs; a steel wall separates the private gallery from his office. Here the steel wall twists to make a more elaborate version of the downstairs desk; this time there is a shelving system, a seat for the gallery dealer, a seat for the client. Art in General, New York: Around the same year, a year after, we were asked to propose a renovation for an alternative gallery/museum in New York, Art in General. Art in General is a space, we realized when talking to the other competitors, that we had never gone to and none of the other competitors had ever gone to, which made us think that maybe Art in General needed to be more present, maybe they needed a kind of street presence. So its on the fourth and sixth floor of a building downtown, so we tried to give it a presence by making this kind of tube outside the building. The tube acts almost like a snake that climbs the building. Inside the gallery, the tube extends down the middle of the gallery, its changeable, it can change its shape so that the space can be different from show to show. Theres a tube down the side of the building, and this is where office spaces are, so the outside tube then comes in to make different possibilities for office space: larger spaces, smaller spaces, office spaces that might function as a kind of bubble, a kind of twisting bubble. Art Fairs: In 2003 we made some attempts at booths for an art fair, again for the same gallery person, Kenny Schachter. We made a booth out of fiberglass rods; the reasons for the fiberglass rods were they could bend, they could stretch, they could be weighted down by lead weights to make one kind of space, they could be extended further to make a larger space. The fiberglass rods were grounded in the gallery dealers desk in the corner. They spread out, they could hold art; in effect, there was no inside/outside, you could see through the walls. We made a second version of this where it extended further, fiberglass rods upon fiberglass rods, so theoretically you could just keep going like this. Another attempt at a project for Schachter at one point he had asked us, now that he had moved to London, he wanted to do his own art fair and asked us to do the building for the art fair. So we started by thinking about how we see an art fair, as a place where a number of galleries gather. Can you think of these galleries as a kind of conglomeration of bumps? So the bumps outside then would connote different gallery spaces inside. Possible Museums: Okay, I want to do a quick tour of what a possible museum could be. Im going to use projects that werent meant to be museums but use them as some possible illustration for what an alternative museum could be. Maybe a museum should be imagined as something thats full of holes. Once the museum is made of an architecture of perforations, the outside, the rest of the city, can come into the museum; at the same time, the museum can then spill out into the city.

ABC | A36B | Architecture for Art | 107 Maybe a museum can be thought of as something like a walk, a walk through a city, a walk through a park. Maybe that walk can pass a combination of things; maybe it can pass nature-made things, but also person-made things. So maybe something like person-made trees can combine with naturemade trees. As youre taking this walk, maybe art comes over you, maybe art is on the walls, the ceiling, the floor, and you walk through a twisting surface of art. As you take this walk, the spaces can change: there can be horizontal spaces, spaces where there are vistas, you have panoramas of art but this can change to a kind of close-up space so now you might be face-to-face, close-up with art. As youre walking, youre in the middle in a crowd of people, a swarm of people but at the same time there might be kinds of withdrawal spaces, there could be places in a museum where a person can withdraw alone, either to get information about the museum; or maybe an art of the future is an art that might only be meant to be private, maybe its digital, maybe its electronic. As a parenthesis, it is important to understand that one of the great things about architecture as compared to art is that it can be renovated. Thats why architecture is more a part of the real world and art is somewhere other. Lets say the everyday world. Continuing this walk that could be a model of going through a museum, some spaces would be light, but more and more probably museums need dark spaces, spaces for digital media, projections. A museum might be composed of a number of rooms or maybe even a number of smaller museums, a conglomeration of many museums, so it could be constantly expandable, more little museums can be added to it or maybe the structure of a museum might be intertwining museums so one kind of museum twists around, twists inside of another kind of museum. Rather than enclosing itself in itself, a museum might do the opposite: it might start from the landscape, it might start from the ground and then stretch out, extend out to the rest of the city. Or maybe the museum belongs in the rest of the city, maybe the museum acts as something that

108 | ABC | A36B | Architecture for Art can attach itself to other things in the city. So a museum might act as a kind of leech onto whatever already exists in the city or it can go within buildings that already exist in the city, it can go inside buildings and force itself inside, acting as a kind of parasite, as a kind of virus, making the existing building turn inside itself. Or maybe a museum can move, maybe a museum is a mobile space that goes wherever its wanted or wherever its thought its needed for the time being; or possibly in the future everyone carries his or her museum on his or her back, people might carry their museum on their backs, they might let the museum out, the museum spreads over them, now the person in fact becomes a museum, other people can come in to visit that museum. Possibly, since a museum is or should be connected with the city, maybe a museum should be thought of as skateboarding, so a museum like a skateboard can go next to or over the head of other people in the city, it can head towards closed spaces in the city, as if its heading towards a hill, the museum can enclose itself inside a space or it can kind of surf a space and float along the top of a space. Now again, these are notions of a museum, but while, weve done projects for other spaces, we would love to do something like the museum I tried to present. Thanks. In Conversation | Vito Acconci John Armleder Andrea Fraser Host | James Rondeau James Rondeau: Thank you very much, Vito. I had no idea just a few minutes ago how incredibly prescient and intuitive John was to introduce this topic with the metaphor of the egg. So many embryonic notions: fragility, potentiality, and an incredible possibility of diversity. The egg is a fundamental ingredient that can be cracked, then scrambled, boiled, fried, whatever prepared in all the ways that John talked about. But one sees a core, a priori reality regardless of the ways it is morphed and changed and re-imagined. So I guess one of the questions that I have and that we might be able to get to is: when do the cooked eggs no longer resemble the egg? At what point does a museum stop being a museum? I think the end of your presentation is so extraordinary because it explodes the concept so fully that what remains is your practice and not the notion of the museum at all. That, for me, is amazing. I also want to introduce the artist Andrea Fraser who was going to begin with a video projection. We were actually going to go from the metaphor of eggs to the metaphor of fish, weirdly rounding out this meal. However, we are experiencing a significant technical problem and we will have to postpone the projection of the video until we can resolve the difficulties. Andrea? Andrea Fraser: Good morning. I planned to show a video called Little Frank and His Carp, which was filmed in the atrium of the Guggenheim Bilbao. A voice-over of the official introductory audio tour of the Guggenheim Bilbao, which describes the architecture of the museum, serves as the voice-over of the video. I enter the museum as a visitor with the audio guide and respond to the description of the architecture in the tour. Unfortunately, however, the video projector here has apparently been set up without sound. I dont really want to show it without the sound because

ABC | A36B | Architecture for Art | 109 the sound is the whole point. I had prepared to tion of art as a social field. My tendency has been speak about that piece so its very unfortunate. to consider museums less in architectural terms (See postscript below.) than in terms of their language, in terms of their rituals, in terms of their discourses, in terms of James Rondeau: Do you want to talk about it? their histories, as sites for sets of relationships that Thats one of the things you and I spoke about yes- are social relationships and as sites for fantasies terday. I also dont want to put you on the spot be- that may be social in character or may be sexual in cause I know your presentation was specifically character. In a way, with Little Frank and His Carp geared towards screening Little Frank and His Carp, I was moving back in time, at least for myself, to but one of the things that we discussed very brief- some of those early practices in the history of inly yesterday is what has come to be known more stitutional critique and re-engaging architecture. widely with you and a few other artists of your gen- However, if the video does engage architecture, it eration as institutional critique. It essentially still does so through the discourse of the museum has become its own genre. While the endeavor was and the medium of a tour. It still has much more really never focused specifically on architecture to do with how an institution presents itself and space, the ideological implications of the mu- through its architecture and the discourse around seum and its various operations the symbolic architecture developed by a museum like the capital of the museum, if you will emerges as a Guggenheim. The official introductory audio primary concern. Exactly twenty years into your tour, which serves as a voice-over to Little Frank practice you found reason to actually engage the and His Carp, is really a kind of masterpiece of spectacle of perhaps the most iconic piece of new ideology. It starts out with biological metaphors museum architecture to emerge in the last gen- describing the atrium of the museum as a heart eration: Bilbao. So what Im wondering about, and the visitors as blood who are being pumped maybe in a sort of roundabout way, is this: how do through the building, pumped through the galyou contextualize, or reconcile, site-specific mu- leries and walkways that are described as arteries seum-based practices having to do with architec- and then back into the central space of the atrium ture like some of Johns work, like so many of that is described as the heart of the institution. Vitos proposals, with the history of institutional And then it goes on to invite the visitors to apcritique? How does that arc ultimately hit the preciate the sensuous curves of the walls and to topic of museum architecture? Why now and what caress the walls. And I do what the voice-over tells does that mean? me to do. I caress the walls. And then I do a little bit more than caress the walls. Its very much a Andrea Fraser: Well, I have been associated with text of seduction and the video is about how muinstitutional critique and in fact most of the artists seums seduce their audiences, not only with lanassociated with that tradition, even if they dont guage but also with space. necessarily identify themselves under that rubric, One thing I was thinking of speaking about, parhave engaged architecture quite directly, particu- ticularly following Vito Acconci, an artist Ive allarly Daniel Buren and Michael Asher. My ap- ways admired and have been influenced by, is the proach coming out of that tradition had a lot to do way that we perform spaces and the way that we with moving away, at least initially, from that focus internalize architecture, and also internalize inon the institution as a physical and material place stitutions. Thats one way of understanding my and space, and to engage other aspects of muse- performance-based work in museums. I dont ums as well as of what we can call the institution make things to show in spaces, but I engage spacof art, which is much more than specific institu- es by performing in spaces, performing spaces. tions like museums and opens up a broader no- Part of the process of doing that, and particularly

110 | ABC | A36B | Architecture for Art in museums, has been internalizing the language of those spaces and other aspects of those spaces. I think thats something that we all do as visitors to museums and we all do as participants in the art world. As I wrote recently in another context, if we are all members of the institution of art, we are all part of the institution, and the institution is also part of us. Its also inside of us. Theres a museum here inside me with the Corinthian columns and the grand staircase and the mezzanine. Theres a system of organization: its the way we see things. There are objects and there are images and there are texts and there are voices explaining. Theres an archive that contains our memories. Theres a basement where we keep things that we dont want to show. Im interested in how we as individuals, as social subjects, and with our fantasies, and in our memories, and in our internalized discourses and language, were structured, in a way, like museums are structured. James Rondeau: Thank you Andrea. Thats great. I thought we could open up the floor to questions in a minute but I wondered if you want to comment a little, John, on the question of the performative aspects of the work under discussion because these are issues Andrea raises and it is something your work takes on in a significant way. John Armleder: Well, basically look at us here, were performing, and its sort of inevitable, you cannot avoid it. When youre in a space, you are activating it and youre being activated by it, its a known fact. But one thing I would just like to come up with and thats quite far from the jelly, the aspic, and all the ... , its when we talk about this subject, in a way we forget about the more emblematic type of museums which are shells to show objects in the ideal way to experience them. And of course now weve talked a lot about how to get away from that to do something which is an experience in itself, which in a way cancels the different details of the experience. For me, the last time I was on a panel I said my preferred museum is the museum of Scott on the South Pole because theres this little hut which is a museum, as a matter of fact, which is the house where Scott left to find the center of the South Pole and never came back. The South Pole [being] granted with the fact that theres no dust, this museum is a place where you go in, theres still the last cup of tea that Scott took before heading off, and nothing has changed and its the easiest museum to service, theres nothing to do, no dust, and theres no visitors also, so basically, its the perfect place. And, in a way, its the perfect show: theres the real house, the object is the architecture, theres nothing to be added. But, on the other hand, when you think of museums, above all the ones which were built between lets say 1920, or maybe even earlier, till the Second World War, all those museums had devices to experience the objects which were put on the walls in the best way possible. I think a very nice example is the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, the old one, and if you go on beside the galleries, which is a very small part of it, you have those U-shaped little boxes, I mean its like a row of little rooms and it seems quite boring, but if you look at it, you see that the perpendicular walls which face the corridor, its like a comb shape, those walls are always slanted, so that when you look at one of those U-shaped forms, as a matter of fact its not a regular U-shape, its slightly, the side walls are slightly slanted in, so you have a panoramic point of view. And maybe that panorama is a good metaphor also because what people try to do is to give a panorama about whatever is being shown that you could grasp fairly quickly because, after all, youre going into a museum today on a guided tour and youre already aiming straight for the cafeteria and to the shop where you can buy a postcard or a book and thats what you really do. You spend more time in the cafeteria and buying a book than actually looking at the works. But even if youre looking at the works, its a one-day experience, so if you have this sort of a screening which is usually panoramic, it performs, and when you think of it, around 1910, people understood that in a very good way. Today, theres a tendency that in front of the white thing you put a column or you put a tree which is very nice because in the odd case the tree is what youre looking at but very often today the experience is a complicated filter and the best filter before, and the only real one, was the guy waiting next to you and moving you a bit further because other people were coming in. James Rondeau: I think its great to compare what were hearing from Vito and also from Andrea. I think its also interesting for me to understand that Acconci Studio has a practice that is architectural, but that Vito still has a hugely meaningful practice as an artist Vito Acconci: I dont think I do. James Rondeau: Well, I think that your practice as an artist is in ample evidence in all of the un-built Acconci Studio projects. These register a way of thinking about formal and intellectual problems, a grappling with who we are and where we are now. I understand these proposals as works of conceptual art, independent of an architectural firm and contextualized by a forty-year career of thinking about space, body, performance, action, language. Vito Acconci: I dont know. If I think of architects that have influenced me most, its probably been Piranesi, Boulez not one built project. James Rondeau: I just think that un-built can be contextualized in a way beyond simply the unbuilt work of an important architect. You cannot go back to a more fundamentally conceptual practice that I think helps us to understand Vito Acconci: But I dont think conceptual is divorced from architecture ... James Rondeau: Well I think some aspects are, absolutely ... Vito Acconi: Sure, as it is from some of art ...

ABC | A36B | Architecture for Art | 111 James Rondeau: Yes. But I think there is a real point of engagement with the here and now. Not where we might be in a future but where we are in the present tense. Do you know what I mean? Andrea is doing it, John is doing it, and I think, looking at your work, built and un-built, it has the same effect. Such is the logic of the panel, in any case. But maybe in the interest of time and technical catastrophe we could throw it open for conversation and questions between all the panelists and the audience at this stage. If there are any ...? Is there anything that we have not addressed ? Weve gone on for a little over an hour Is there anything else that you guys would like to add together or jointly? Well then with that I just thank Andrea and Vito and John and I thank you all for coming.

112 | ABC | A36B | Architecture for Art Postscript Introduction | Andrea Fraser Due to technical difficulties that we greatly apologize for, Andrea Fraser could only show the video, Little Frank and His Carp (2001, Courtesy Friedrich Petzel Gallery) at the end of the conversation. It was meant to be showing during her presentation, as an integral part of the conversation. The discussion which follows this introduction was from an informal discussion between Andrea and the audience, after showing her video. Frank Gehry | Fish In 1981, Gehry designed a giant sculpture of a fish standing on its tail to occupy an atrium. The following year he put giant illuminated fish in a restaurant in Venice, California. He made fish lamps and sculpted the model for a kettle with fish for spout and handles. The first exhibition of Gehrys work, which took place in Minneapolis in 1986, was entered through the body of a giant fishlike structure. In numerous interviews, Gehry has credited this figure to his grandmother, who kept live carp in the familys bathtub in preparation for making gefilte fish. Little Frank and His Carp | Andrea Fraser In Little Frank and His Carp, (2001) Andrea Fraser plays the role of a museum visitor. She is filmed with hidden cameras, along with other visitors on an ordinary day, in the Guggenheim Bilbao. While touring the atrium of Frank Gehrys Guggenheim Bilbao, Fraser listens to the audio-guides uncut and unmanipulated paean to the buildings fishinspired forms. The official audio guide advises visitors, among other things, to caress the buildings powerfully sensual curves, which Fraser proceeds to do, with fitting sensuality, but barely earns a glance from passers by. Little Frank and His Carp | Discussion Audience: Was the video commissioned by the Guggenheim? If not, would you mind if they bought it and showed it at the museum? Andrea Fraser: It wasnt commissioned by the Guggenheim. I dont think I would have done it as a commission. I think if they wanted to buy it, I would probably sell it to them. Recently I was on a panel at the Guggenheim organized in conjunction with the Daniel Buren exhibition, and I decided not to show this at the time because I didnt think it would function critically in that context. I am not sure that its successful as a piece of institutional critique. It does run the risk of affirming the kinds of freedoms that museums are representing themselves as representing. The audio text, however, is just so extraordinary. I do think that the video performs a critical function just by putting this text into circulation. Audience: Personally, I very much like how this very imperial, English male voice I even asked my husband who is British, is this British? contrasts with your femininity. I am also very impressed with how free and vulnerable and voluptuous you are in this piece. Did you use this patronizing male voice on purpose? Andrea Fraser: Well, it certainly struck me also. For me, as an American, that voice and that accent does represent a kind of cultural authority. Its the voice of cultural legitimacy. One of the things I found so terribly funny about the audio tape is that this voice of authority and legitimacy is actually saying very odd things, like referring to Frank Gehry as little Frank. Theres a very odd collision, if you will, between the class-bound authority of the Queens English and the very folksy character of the fish story. On the one hand, you have this voice of authority, which becomes the voice of the museum. But, at the same time, you have the text which is infantilizing this monument of a man, who is the architect of the building. And of course there is an enormous amount of sexual content there, much of it attached to fantasies of size, which certainly have to do with gender. There are images of this childhood memory unfurling into fantasies of power and monumental scale and cybernetic bodies, all very vivid in this text. My position in this is to subject myself to this fantasy and then, in a way, to pose as the fish. But is this not the position we are always in as visitors? I guess this is one of the questions that is posed by the video. Audience: Just to pick up on that last question; I am quite sure that I recognize the very British voice on the tape as being that of British gay actor, which I think adds a very nice twist to what is being said. Andrea Fraser: Who is it? Audience: I dont remember his name, but he is one of those terribly British actors who came on the scene at the same time as Hugh Grant Andrea Fraser: Thats great. Audience: and of the same generation. I think its funny that you should pick this as a foreigner, this terribly colonial male voice. But once you know that this voice belongs to one of the most vocal of British gay comedians, it sort of adds another dimension. Andrea Fraser: Thats good to know, but Im not sure if it adds or detracts! Audience: The patronizing male voice is very common on museum sound tracks, and I think it could give way to a whole series of works. I was wondering if you have ever considered the possibility of a series and if you have ever considered doing this kind of work in other museums, like the Vatican Museum for example. (See note below.) Andrea Fraser: It actually goes back to my early inspirations when I was producing a lot of perfor-

ABC | A36B | Architecture for Art | 113 mance tours and even audio tours of museums from the mid-eighties until the early nineties. Of course, I listened to a lot of these tours, live, on audio, and also on video. One of my favorite examples was a video tape produced by the Metropolitan Museum called Masterpieces at the Met with Philippe de Montebello. I often quote it when I show some of my early museum-tour tapes. Toward the end of the tape, he walks into a room with a Rembrandt and he says, with his deep voice and aristocratic accent: We tend to enter a room such this and exclaim, here are the Rembrandts, as the mind-set of admiration clicks on. But are we really liking what we see? ... and so on. So you see it is a genre. Note | Andrea Fraser Reviewing the transcripts of the conversation on this day in October 2005, I was surprised to find the suggestion that I produce a piece based on the audio-guide of the Vatican Museum. In fact, I just completed a new video called A Visit to the Sistine Chapel (2005, produced by Brancolini Grimaldi, Rome)! Apparently, I owe the anonymous participant in the discussion above some credit for giving me the idea. I had no memory of the discussion. It must have lodged itself in my unconscious.

ABC | A36B | Public/Private | 119 Art Basel Conversations | Saturday June 18, 2005 | Bvlgari Pavilion, Basel

TRANSCRIPT | PUBLIC/PRIVATE THE FUTURE OF THE MUSEUM: PROFILE CHINA

Chinas cultural sector is growing rapidly in size, scope, and sophistication in parallel with the countrys staggering pace of economic development. Indeed the Chinese government has announced that it will build one thousand new museums by the year 2015. The capital, Beijing, alone plans thirty-two new museums by 2008, while Shanghai, host city of the 2010 World Expo, aims to have inaugurated one hundred new museums by then. At the moment, the homogenizing forces of globalization are also effective in the world of museums and museum architecture. For many, especially in the greater China region, the specter of cloning a Bilbao-like strategy is just too seductive. With this also comes a wave of eager developers who want to build more museums without considering their programs or their management. Does the future of the museum reside in China, and how will this museum boom affect the art world?

SPEAKERS | CHANG YUNG HO CHAOS YANG CHEN HOU HANRU CLAIRE HSU HUANG YONG PING ULI SIGG HUANGSHENG WANG GUAN YI Host | HANS ULRICH OBRIST

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Chang Yung Ho Architect; Beijing, Peoples Republic of China Born in Beijing in 1956. Received Master of Architecture degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984. Became a licensed architect in the United States in 1989. Has been practicing in China since 1992 and established Atelier Feichang Jianzhu (FCJZ) in 1993. He is the principal architect of Atelier FCJZ as well as the Head and Professor of the Bejing University Graduate Center of Architecture. He has won a number of prizes, such as first place in the Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition in 1987, a Progressive Architecture Citation Award in 1996, and the 2000 UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts. He has published four monographs to date, the latest one in English/French entitled Yung Ho Chang/Atelier Feichang Jianzhu: A Chinese Practice. He has taught at various architecture schools in the USA, including Ball State, Michigan, U.C. Berkeley, Rice, and Harvard, where he was the Kenzo Tange Chair Professor of 2002, and has lectured extensively, recently at Yale, Princeton, Cornell, SCI-Arc, Penn, Columbia, and Berkeley in the United States, Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong University, as well as Tunghai University in Taiwan. In the fall of 2005, he will become the Head of Architecture at MIT. [www.fcjz.com] Chaos Yang Chen Curator, Founder of CHAOSPROJECTS, Visual Thinking; Beijing, Peoples Republic of China Chaos Chen was born in Shanghai, and now lives and works in Beijing. She is currently founding CHAOSPROJECTS, a curatorial atelier focusing on research, exhibition, publication of visual culture, as well as public diplomacy. Chaos Chen started to be a curator for the Beijing Art Museum, which was followed by half a decade as a modern nomad, working consecutively in the Asia Society (New York), the Academy of Art and Design, Tsinghua University (Beijing), Kunst-Werke Berlin, collaborated with Aperture Foundation for Photography (New York) and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin). She returned to Beijing in early 2003 to work as the chief curator at the Millennium Art Museum (Beijing). The curatorial works by Chaos Chen include: Daily Life 100 Days (Performance Art, Beijing Art Museum, 1997); Fire over Earth (Asia Society, 1999); Tirana Biennial (2000); Pictures from the Surface of the Earth (Wim Wenders, photography and films, tour of China, 2004); Driving the Skyline (Frank O. Gehry and contemporaries, 2004); body temperature (contemporary Chinese art, 2005). While at the Millennium Art Museum, she initiated the OpenForum series, which embraces a variety of issues and discourses in art museums, a campus without walls. She is also a contributor to numerous professional art periodicals, i.e., Du Shu (Beijing), Art World (Shanghai), Art Contemporary (Shanghai), as well as Flash Art International (Milan). She was awarded the Henry Luce Scholarship (USA, 1998) and RAVE Scholarship (Germany, 2001). She served as a jury member for the CENTRAL Contemporary Art Award (Cologne, Germany, 2004). Hou Hanru Independent Critic and Curator; Paris, France Hou Hanru, born in 1963, Guangzhou, China, Paris-based independent critic and curator. His book On The Mid-Ground is published by Time Zone 8, Hong Kong, 2002. Curator of exhibitions including Beyond the 2nd Guangzhou Triennale, Guangzhou, China (20042006); 3rd Tirana Biennale, Tirana, Albania; Excessive, dense, speedy, complex, empty but humane contemporary creative activities (digitally) facing the postplanning urban world, Argosfestival, Brussels (Oct. 2004); The Fifth System Public Art in the Age of Post-Planning, 5th Shenzhen International Public Art Exhibition (2003); Z.O.U. Zone Of Urgency, 50th Venice Biennale (2003); Small is OK, Friart, Fribourg, Switzerland (2002); Gwangju Biennale 2002, Gwangju, Korea; Asianvibe, EACC, Castellon, Spain, (2002); Asian Party, Global Game 1, 2, Cutting Edge Asia, ARCO, Madrid (2001, 2002); Paris pour Escale, Muse dart moderne de la ville de Paris (20002001); My Home is Yours, Your Home is Mine, Samsung Museum, Seoul, Korea (2000), Opera City Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, 2001; Shanghai Spirit Shanghai Biennale 2000, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2000); Leaving the Island, Pusan International Contemporary Art Festival, Pusan Art Museum, Pusan, Korea (2000); Fuori Uso, Pescara, Italy, 2000; The French Pavilion, Venice Biennale (1999); Biennale of Photography, Centro de La Imagen, Mexico City (1999), Cities on the Move, Wiener Secession, Vienna, Austria, 1998; CAPC, Bordeaux, France, PS1, New York (1999) Louisiana Museum, Denmark, The Hayward Gallery, London, Bangkok, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Hong Kong, etc., Johannesburg Biennale, Johannesburg, South Africa (1997); Out of the CenterChinese Contemporary art, Pori Art Museum, Pori, Finland (1994); China/ Avant-Garde, China National Art Gallery, Beijing (1989). Hanru is a jury member of many international awards and art prizes, is a well-published writer and critic, and a well-travelled lecturer. [www.iniva.org/archive/person/30] Claire Hsu Executive Director, Asia Art Archive; Hong Kong, Peoples Republic of China Upon graduating with an M.A. in history of art from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Claire Hsu moved back to Hong Kong to co-found the Asia Art Archive in December 2000. As its first executive director, Claire Hsu has overseen all aspects of setting up the Asia Art Archive, from fundraising, communication, and marketing to developing the database, website, and physical archive. Programs and projects she has supervised for the Asia Art Archive include Space Traffic (2001), Museum Practice in the 21st Century: A Cultural Exchange with MoMA (2002), Paris-Peking Publication (2002), Links, Platforms, Networks (2003), AAA Talk Series (2003-2005), Archiving the Contemporary: Documenting Contemporary Art Today, Yesterday, and Tomorrow (2005). The Asia Art Archive is the first non-profit research center in Hong Kong dedicated to documenting the recent history of visual art from the region within an international context. The AAA is a new concept in archive documentation that dispels the idea of the library as a place of silence, a repository merely for books and catalogues for it also plays an active role in organizing programs to encourage research, dialogue, and understanding in the field. [www.aaa.org.hk]

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Huang Yong Ping Artist; Paris, France Born in 1954 in Xiamen, province of Fujian, China. Since 1989, he lives and works in Paris, France. Selected solo exhibitions: 2003: Om Mani Padme Hum, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, USA (2000): Taigong fishing: Willing to Bite the Bait, Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, USA (1997): Pharmacie, Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, USA; HUANG Yong-Ping, De Appel, Amsterdam, Holland; Da XianThe Doomsday, Art & Public, Geneva, Switzerland; Pril de mouton, Fondation Cartier pour lArt contemporain, Paris, France (1994): Kearny Street, Capp Street Project, San Francisco, USA; Chinese Hand-Laundry, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, USA (1993); La maison daugure, Galerie Fromen & Putman, Paris, France. Selected group exhibitions: 2004: So Paulo Biennale 26, 25, So Paulo, Brazil; Liverpool biennial, Liverpool, England; Left Wing, Left Bank Community, Beijing, China; Z.O.U-Zone of Urgency, 50th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2002) Huang Yong Ping & Shen Yuan, Centre dArt contemporain Qubec, Canada; International Triennial of Contemporary Art Yokohama 2001, Yokohama, Japan 2000: Voil, le monde dans la tte, Muse dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France; Continental shift, Muse dArt Moderne et dArt Contemporain, Lige, Belgium; 48th Venice Biennale, Jean-Pierre Bertrand et Huang Yong Ping, French Pavilion, Venice, Italy 1998: Unfinished History, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA; Johannesburg Biennale 97, Johannesburg, South Africa; Manifesta 1, Natural History Museum Rotterdam, Holland 1995: Unser Jahrhundert, Menschenbilder-Bilderwelten, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany 1994: HorsLimites, (LArt et La Vie 1952/1994), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France 1995: Huang yong ping et Matej Kren, Fondation Cartier pour lArt Contemporain, Paris, France 1993: Lifesize, Museo dArte Contemporanea, Prato, Italy 1991: Carnegie International 1991, The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, USA; Magiciens de la Terre, Centre Georges Pompidou et Grande Halle de la Villette, Paris, France; Chine Avant-Garde, China National Art Gallery, Beijing, China. [www.iniva.org/archive/person/204] Uli Sigg Collector; Mauensee, Switzerland Uli Sigg, born 1946, Swiss, completed his studies with a Ph.D. of the University of Zurich Law Faculty. He then worked as journalist and editor for various Swiss newspapers and magazines. From 1977 to 1990 he joined a global industrial group where he held positions in the Group Executive Committee and on the Shareholders Board. He established in 1980 the first joint venture between China and the West. In1995 the Swiss government appointed him for four years as ambassador to China, North Korea, and Mongolia. Upon his return to Switzerland he again joined the boards of several multinational companies in the field of media and industry. Presently he also serves as a member of the Advisory Board of the China Development Bank and other Chinese entities and advises global companies, such as the architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron in their successful bid for the Olympic stadium in Beijing. He has formed the most substantial collection of contemporary Chinese art. He also established in 1997 the Chinese Contemporary Art Award, an art award for Chinese contemporary artists living in China. He is a member of the International Advisory Council of Tate Gallery, London.

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Huangsheng Wang Director Guangdong Museum of Art; Guangzhou, Peoples Republic of China Huangsheng Wang graduated from Nanjing Art Institute with a Masters Degree in art history. He holds several important functions within academia and art, as director of the Guangdong Museum of Art, vice-president of the Guangdong Artists Association, specially appointed professor of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, expert of the State Council, syndic of the Chinese Artists associate, and ranks in China as a first class artist. Wang has curated and co-curated a number of important exhibitions both in China and internationally which include Observation on Reality and Transformation of Art Language, Guangzhou, China (1997); Southern Context: Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary Chinese Art (I), Mantova, Italy (1998), He co-organized The Projects of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Guangzhou, China (1999), co-curated Virtual Future: Exhibition of Contemporary Chinese Art, Guangzhou, China (2001), organized and curated the 1st Guangzhou Triennial, Guangzhou, China (2003), co-curated the 1st Beijing International Art Biennial, Beijing, China (2003), and co-curated the 50th Venice Biennial (The Chinese Pavilion), Venice, Italy (2003). Wangs publications include an art-history series of research on the Chinese Painting Masters in Ming & Qing Dynasties: Chen Hongshou (Jilin Art Publishing House, 1995); Wang Huangsheng: Serene Universe (Liaoning Art Publishing House, 1996), as well as many other monographic painting catalogues. He has participated in the 8th National Art Exhibition; the 9th National Art Exhibition; Major Exhibition of Traditional Chinese Painting in 20th Century and Major Exhibition of Chinese Art. Wangs art theses and art criticisms are published in various professional periodicals at home and abroad such as Research on Art and Literature; Art; Art Observation; Art Trend; Art Gallery Magazine; Jiangsu Art Monthly and he is editor inchief of the Art Museum Periodical. [www.gdmoa.org] Hans Ulrich Obrist Curator, Muse dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Paris, France Hans Ulrich Obrist was born in 1968 in Zurich, Switzerland, and currently lives and works in Paris. In 1993, he founded the Museum Robert Walser and began to run the Migrateurs program at the Muse dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris where he now serves as Curator for Contemporary Art and where he has in recent years co-curated the monographic exhibitions on Olafur Eliasson, Philippe Parreno, Steve McQueen, Jonas Mekas, Yoko Ono, Anri Sala, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Doug Aitken. From 1991 to the present Obrist has curated or co-curated numerous international exhibitions including:World Soup, the Kitchen Show, St. Gallen (1991); Gerhard Richter, Nietzsche Haus, Sils Maria (1992); Htel Carlton Palace, Paris, 1993; The Broken Mirror (with K. Koenig) Vienna Festival (1993); Manifesta I, Rotterdam (1996); Cities on the Move, Secession Vienna and CAPC Bordeaux (1997), and Hayward Gallery, London/Kiasma, Helsinki/Bangkok (1999); 1st Berlin Biennial (1998); Antwerp Open (1999); Mutations: Arc en Rve, Bordeaux (2000); Mutations: vnement culturel sur la ville contemporaine Arc en Rve, Bordeaux (2000-2001) and TN Probe, Tokyo (2001); Utopia, 50th Venice Biennale (2003) and Haus der Kunst, Munich (2004); Yang Fudong and Jim Lambie, The Moore Space, Miami (2003). In 2005 Obrist is co-curator of the 1st Moscow Biennale, the 2nd Guangzhou Triennale and of Uncertain States of America (Astrup Fearnley Museum Oslo). The first volume of his ongoing interview project was recently collected in Hans Ulrich Obrist Interviews (Milan: Edizioni Charta/Pitti Imagine, Florence, 2003). Do It (Revolver), the first how to book on making art, was inaugurated at Art Basel Miami Beach, December 2004. [www.v1.paris.fr/musee/MAMVP]

ABC | A36B | Public/Private | 123 Welcome | Maria Finders Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Art Basel Conversations. Today we are happy to welcome such an impressive panel to Basel. We will be talking about the museum boom in China and the effect it will have on new and established museums, artists and curators. We will also discuss what will be happening in the next ten years. Its really the first time such a panel has been organized in Europe and maybe even in China. Hosting this discussion, and one of its most knowledgeable western purveyors, curator of the Muse dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Hans Ulrich Obrist. Introduction | Hans Ulrich Obrist Good morning everybody and many thanks to Art Basel and Bvlgari. Im extremely happy to welcome all our guests today, and Id like to say a few opening remarks to situate this panel, which fits into an ongoing series that has evolved over the last eighteen months about the Future of the Museum. The series was initiated at the first Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2002, with an intense debate between young architects Franois Roche and Fernando Romero. This was followed up by a conversation involving Terry Riley as moderator and Rem Koolhaas, Kathy Halbreich, and I, which took place at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2004. The presentations and discussion were about the museum projects (realized and unrealized) of Koolhaas, and Herzog & de Meurons new building of the Walker Art Center. However, one of the key focuses was the consequences of globalization in terms of the museum today. Consequently, about its effect as a homogenizing force, in the sense of a new world order which in a way dictates a silent modus operandi, resulting in museums everywhere looking more and more the same. This may be an undesirable side-effect of a loftier notion that douard Glissant refers to as mondialit. This term, however, implies a more ideal view of global dialogue which would encourage variety rather than complacency and, in turn, the multiplication all over the world of different types of museums. Out of the Miami discussions grew the idea of the panel for today, which will be the first to bring together artists, architects, collectors, museum directors, and art critics, around the discussion of the Future of the Museum in China. As you all know, there are numerous museums which have been constructed or under construction or being planned right now in China. This will definitely have an impact not only on the museum in China but on the ways and means being implemented in this gigantic endeavor, which will certainly influence the future of the museum of the twenty-first century beyond country borders.

124 | ABC | A36B | Public/Private Two very concrete events fuel the engines of this increase in museums: the Olympic Games in Beijing (2008) and the World Fair in Shanghai (2010), but one should not stop there. As we will hear later, the museum discussion is not only active in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, but also in Canton and many other cities all over China. For me, this is also a very personal issue, which I have been closely observing ever since I began working as a curator in the beginning of the nineties. In 1990, when I began my work in the art world, I had a grant from Marie-Claude Beaud at the Cartier Foundation and I arrived from Switzerland in Jouy-en-Josos where the Cartier Foundation was located at the time, about half an hour from Paris. My neighbor was Huang Yong Ping who just had arrived from China and we met and discussed very regularly. Ever since, the conversation with China and Chinese Artists has been on-going. Soon after Huang Yong Ping, I also met Yan Pei Ming, Chen Zhen, Hou Hanru, this whole amazing generation of artists and curators who actually, after 1989, had moved to Paris. I must also say that actually the amazing thing is that, more than ten years later, I moved into a new building in Paris and by complete accident Huang Yong Ping is again my neighbor. So Im very happy to welcome today the eight speakers that is, seven speakers plus my neighbor. But before our first speaker goes on, I would like to extend a very special thanks to Jonathan Napack, who is a writer, an art critic, and also the Asia advisor of Art Basel and whose enormous knowledge about China has been very, very important in preparing this panel. So Im very happy now to introduce our first speaker of today, Chang Yung Ho, architect in Beijing and very recently appointed Head of the architecture department at MIT. Presentation | Chang Yung Ho Thank you for your introduction. Since I only have seven minutes, I am going to move very quickly. I have been working in China on a number of projects with FCJZ (Atelier Feichang Jianzhu) ranging from private residences to large- and small-scale museums, government buildings, urban planning projects, and installations at the Venice Biennale and Centre Pompidou in Paris. This also includes museums for individuals, for private clients, such as a project that New Yorkbased artist Cai Guoqiang intended to initiate in his hometown Quanzhou. The project is a center for contemporary art events, the SMOCA (Small Museum of Contemporary Art) project, with a limited budget. The cost constraint inspires a proposal of recycling materials and parts of the old houses already on the site that are being demolished, such as timber, stones, bricks, and tiles, for the making of the new museum. Strategies taken on the ready-mades and a form-follows-material attitude lead to variations on the traditional roof configurations as well as the rediscovery of a local technique of mixing stones and bricks in the wall. More importantly, it could be also potentially a more ecological approach to building. Spatial structures of vernacular architecture are researched and transformed to create a design that may further highlight the local heritage. The present floor plan is the result of overlapping the two prototypes courtyard houses, Cheng and Liao, in the city. We are doing a private museum for a stage designer, Zhang Li, who is thinking of developing a collection in architecture and particularly focusing on the city planning of Beijing. The next project is our most ambitious museum project we are working on, Museum Town. Its in Sichuan province, you know, where the hot and spicy food is from. It will be located in a small town called Anren which has the most well-known sculptural piece from the Cultural Revolution which is called Rent Collecting Yard and its still there, intact. So our client is perhaps one of the biggest collectors of artifacts and artworks from the Cultural Revolution and hes by profession a developer, so together we conceived this Museum Town (Jianchuan Museum Town) which has twenty-five museums in the center but with a mix of residential, commercial areas, and work spaces and so on: it really is a new city. Its south of the old town of Anren (Sichuan). To plan the project, we photocopied the space of the old town and collaged it onto the site of the new museum town which used to be a fish farm and then we figured out the master plan and then we invited twenty-five architects from China from different generations: the oldest architect was eighty-eight years old, three years ago, now hes ninety-one, and then the youngest one was thirty-three, to work together. The idea was that there will be a collection of different kinds of architecture from modern to contemporary Chinese history. The collection has also a component from the Second World War as a kind of a sideline. We are also building a museum for the posters of the Cultural Revolution. Part of the museum is a bridge in the town so its a very public space where theres actually a tea house built into the museum and the roof garden is a park which can be accessed by anyone. So, as I mentioned earlier, there are twenty-five small museums in this town mixed with residential and commercial areas. The entire project is owned by this private developer and he in fact is developing his collection so fast that we feel like we have to plan a new museum for him every so often. Almost every few months there is the need for a new museum. Thank you.

ABC | A36B | Public/Private | 125 Hans Ulrich Obrist: Many thanks to Chang Yung Ho. Id like to say that each of the speakers will be invited to contribute to a polyphony of short statements which will then give us enough time afterwards for a more interactive discussion that we can then open to the floor. I think one of the things which I find so interesting right now in the context of China is this increasing exchange between disciplines, which can be observed at any given moment, and there is a convergence between science, architecture, and art. This amazing kind of energy is exemplified in the work of Chang Yung Ho who develops museums not only in dialogue with artists but actually co-designs museums with artists. Another important aspect of his museum is that it is not a continental museum (a monolyth) but closer to what Glissant refers to as an archipelago museum. Im now very, very happy to introduce our next speaker, Chaos Yang Chen. When we met, Chaos was a curator at the museum in Beijing, Chaos is now actually the founder of a new structure called ChaosProjects of Visual Thinking.

126 | ABC | A36B | Public/Private Presentation | Chaos Yang Chen Thanks Hans Ulrich. I was happy to respond to your invitation because roughly at around the same time in China we had proposed a similar discussion on museums, in response to the National Museum of Fine Arts buildings biggest expansion ever in the history of that museum. They are going to open to the public by 2008. In 1996, I began my work as a museum curator, right after finishing school. I still remember my first winter in Beijing, staying in a monks house which is actually part of the Beijing Art Museum. My colleague had this world map and as I walked into her section, I pointed to that map and I told her that in five years time, we could make this museum known to half the world. Of course in 1996, in the context of China, and of the Beijing Art Museum at that time, it sounded like a crazy idea of the young curators. But that winter I finished my first article which focused on museum studies and from then on I began traveling, like a modern nomad, from Beijing to New York, to Berlin and then back to Beijing again. During this time, I observed quite a lot and returned to China to put it all into practice. Before I started the Chaos Project, I was working for the Millennium Museum, which was at a turning point from the state-owned, municipalityowned museum to this atelier, curatorial atelier. As you probably know, when it comes to international exhibition exchange, there are several ways for the museums in China to go about things. Of course, loan exhibitions represent an enormous percentage of the projects. In most cases, these arrive as a package with very little customization. The curatorial department at the Millennium Museum, which I used to run, was very new at that time, and it only lasted for a very short period. It was, however, the only department to use the museum budget, a small budget, but it would manage the loan exhibitions as well as those initiated inhouse. The creation of own content is of course one of the corner-stones of mid to long-term expansion for the museum, but this was not the focus in China and the Millennium Museum was no exception. But we actually emphasized programming a lot; for example, Driving the Skyline was a re-interpretation of a whole package which already traveled throughout Asia for about two years. The name of the show was based on the slogan encapsulating the driving principle behind Frank O. Gehrys architectural creations, and was very focussed on architecture and how it affects cities. It was unusual for the Millennium Art Museum to host such an avant-garde exhibition. From here, we further expanded our work on architecture to host activities with film, and photography, including an exhibition of Wim Wenderss photography work in 2004. One of the basic goals was to add authorship to the museum program, and while lacking resources to do this directly with exhibitions, we decided to organize a series of open forums. During the open forum series no.1 on the urban situation, we actually invited the author of the Beijing city records, whose focus was extremely wellknown, to conduct a public discussion about the future of the city of Beijing. He also talked about the changes in the city over the past fifty years. Its actually interesting to work within the system in China because we are currently at a turning point, no matter which museum you look at. I would say that, on one side, you constantly need to respond to the conditions and constraints of the older and established museums, while, on the other hand, you are constantly energized by the strong and positive feedback from a young audience. Public debates add to this momentum, after every panel discussion we usually have a dozen young people wanting to be volunteers in the museum. So one of the major assets of the future of the museums in China is this solid support by the younger generation; without their support and response, we would not be able to conduct cuttingedge pilot projects. While open discussion is vital to the life of the museum, sometimes we do meet resistance. We had a panel discussion focussing on the nomadic culture and responded to the Genghis Khan exhibition. I cite this example because it illustrates another mission of the Chinese museum, which is to create a bridge between the past, the present, and the future, at the same time not just only to work with contemporary art as there is often a lack of connection with the past. This discussion was actually terminated because it raised touchy issues about Chinas empire breaking down into several parts and relates to the empire studies which were not approved by the authorities. Ultimately, we are trying to develop the museum as a campus without walls, or moving from an exhibition venue to a stage. Beijing is interesting indeed, for while it has the National Museums and it also is very cutting-edge and off-scene which may not be very visible yet, but in the very near future, I look forward that this flow of creativity will kind of merge into the museum world and the research world. These new directions will bring us closer to my prediction about the world map. Hans Ulrich Obrist: Many thanks to Chaos. I have the great pleasure now to introduce Claire Hsu as our next speaker. Claire has actually invented a new institution; she is the executive director of the Asia Art Archive and is going to tell us about a very important aspect of the whole museum discussion right now which is knowledge production.

ABC | A36B | Public/Private | 127 Presentation | Claire Hsu Actually, I am going to focus on the Hong Kong situation. Weve had a very interesting project going on in the past two years. The Guggenheim, the Pompidou, the Palace Museum Beijing, Guimet Museum, Norman Foster, Tadao Ando and Frank Gehry are just some of the names that have bombarded the news headlines over the past year in Hong Kong because of their involvement in the controversial, 5.1 billion US Dollar, West Kowloon Cultural District Project. For those who are unfamiliar with Hong Kong current affairs, a brief introduction to the West Kowloon Project is necessary to understand the future approach to museums and cultural facilities in this special administrative region of China. In 2001 the government held a competition for the master plan of a major cultural and creative industries project on forty hectares of reclaimed land located in the heart of Hong Kong, its harbor. The winning proposal by Sir Norman Foster envisioned the project as a leisure garden integrating a series of art, performance, and leisure venues within extensive urban parks, beneath a dramatic, all-enveloping glass canopy. In September 2003 the government issued an invitation for proposals from the private sector. Unlike the numerous lucrative deals struck between the government and the property developers in the past, this was unprecedented in the non-negotiable features set out. Alongside commercial and residential components, which would make up 70 percent of the entire area, a cluster of four museums of at least 75,000 square meters in area, a 10,000-square-meter art exhibition space, and multiple performance venues would be constructed. A giant glass canopy would cover 55 percent of the development; thats 250,000 square meters and probably costing 1 billion US Dollars to build, just the canopy. These elements were all to be included in the proposal. The developer would be responsible for not only building these facilities but for planning, operating, and managing them for a period of thirty years. There are several reasons for

128 | ABC | A36B | Public/Private this approach to cultural planning by the government. First of all, you have to remember that cultural facilities and museums in Hong Kong are run and heavily subsidized by the government. Take the Hong Kong Museum of Art as an example, one of Hong Kongs twelve public museums. Its annual operating cost equals about 8.2 million US Dollars, 7.8 million of which is subsidized by the government. The government spends 344 million US Dollars on culture every year which is a lot of money for a city with a population of 8.6 million and still commonly referred to as a cultural desert and, for a city where money talks there has been little private patronage of the arts. The government has devised a strategy to wean the arts sector from its reliance on government funds by luring the developers into taking on the responsibility of future cultural facilities through the irresistible moneymaking potential of the residential and commercial components from this almost priceless piece of land. Simultaneously, seven years into our return to the mainland, five of which have been steeped in economic depression, the government believes that in the West Kowloon Culture District lies the answer to Hong Kongs repositioning and re-branding itself into Asias premier cultural destination, serving the purposes of, on the one hand, attracting tourism and creating new jobs, while on the other hand making sure that Hong Kong is positioned to participate in Chinas future prosperity. In December 2004, after months of media fanfare and consultations, the government announced the three successful applicants out of five. Dynamic Star whose proposal included bringing the Pompidou and Guggenheim to Hong Kong, while City Cultural Park Ltd. would collaborate with the Guimet Museum, and Sunny Development who would work with Tadao Ando and Herzog & de Meuron to design the museums. Since January of this year, the three proposals have been exhibited in multiple venues in Hong Kong in what could be described as an elaborate spectacle without any expenses spared to entertain and lure in the crowds. The public consultation period ends in July when the winner will supposedly be announced. For many outside Hong Kong, this may seem like a brave and grandiose scheme to position Hong Kong for the twenty-first century, and while nobody in Hong Kong will dispute the fact that we do need new museum facilities, especially for visual art, the opposition from the community to the nature of these projects has been immense, with people taking to the streets to protest at the end of last year. The gripes include opposition to the single-developer approach, whereby one developer would have absolute control of the project. Hong Kongers have asked what the intentions of the developers really are and whether their interest truly lies in Hong Kongs cultural development, a fair question to ask considering the very nature of real estate development and the absence of support from the private sector of culture in the past. One of the main issues being raised on the peoples panel on West Kowloon made up of concerned members of the art community is that the single-developer approach whereby one company would have a say over the future of culture gives the government an escape route to formulating a strategic vision for Hong Kong. The most basic question of whether Hong Kong really needs four gigantic museums dedicated to art has to be asked, considering each one of these are bigger than the Bilbao Guggenheim, especially with attendance figures in Hong Kong revealing that the population prefers science over art. Will these new cultural facilities really address the needs or interests of the Hong Kong people? It would appear as in the case of many other countries in Asia hardware, bricks, and mortar, are the cultural blueprint, with collections, programs, and managements an afterthought. Last month, our Chief Executive Thung Cheehwa stepped down and the acting Chief Executive Donald Tsang announced that the West Kowloon project would not go through with the current specifications although it is still very much on the agenda. I would now like to finish by leaving you with one of the proposals rejected by the government for the West Kowloon Project. From the beginning, the Swire Consortium rejected the Norman Foster plan outright because, it said, it did not believe that culture should be separated from the city and grouped together like a Disneyland theme park. Instead they proposed a sustainable development that would link existing and new cultural areas along the harbor. In March this year, Swire unveiled their vision for Hong Kongs cultural development with a multi-museum complex designed by Frank O. Gehry and set right next to Hong Kongs main business district central. While the likelihood that this proposal is going to be realized in Hong Kong is small, it has provided a new platform for open debate and an alternative to the community for a cultural strategy or blueprint for Hong Kong. Thank you. Hans Ulrich Obrist: Many thanks to Claire. Im very, very happy now to introduce our next speaker Hou Hanru. Hou Hanru who has curated many exhibitions as an independent curator not only on Chinese art, many international shows, many biennales, most recently the Gwangju Biennale in Korea, the co-curator of the Venice Biennale two years ago, and now, actually the Guangzhou Triennale in Canton. Huo Hanru?

ABC | A36B | Public/Private | 129 Presentation | Hou Hanru So thanks, Hans Ulrich. I would like to give you a very quick and broad picture of the context of China and how this museum boom or this fantasy or this desire to build so many cultural institutions is manifest. I think China is going through this incredible urbanization as can be seen in the Beijing situation right now. If you were in Beijing ten or fifteen years ago you would not be able to recognize it today, so this is how Chinese cities are actually developing and along with this comes the museum euphoria. Larger-scale construction of new museums and new projects are happening but, very often, these projects happen so fast that it is far beyond the capacity of any possible planning and so the situation is like this: you build a building before you have the plan (a strategy). My term for this is post-planning, so I think the Chinese reality is a kind of post-planning reality. In this context, what happens is that, on the one hand, you have a lot of cultural institutions that are being built and a lot of events are being created, and on the other hand, they are becoming more and more politicized. In fact, theyre basically realizations of monuments, reflecting political agendas or very particular political ambitions. Very often, the reason for this situation is a very fast-paced urbanization and the construction of museums is not very much related to the necessity of cultural activity, to the desire or ambition of some decision makers. And because of the Chinese system, people who are in power can easily mobilize the masses or multitudes no, its not the multitudes, sorry, because the multitudes are not there yet, its only masses. Theres a distinction between the people, the masses, and the multitudes, but well talk about that later. So, on one hand these projects are set into motion because of the political agenda of certain politicians, who want to mark their passage to power by building monumental cities, which happened to include museums. On the other hand, however, this is very much related to very straightforward economic demands from the developers.

130 | ABC | A36B | Public/Private As you look at the big picture, 90 percent of the sponsorships for private museums in China come from developers. And of course this represents a perfect union or alliance between political and economic powers. And this is how things are happening. In the meantime, however, what is actually being substituted (taken over) regularly and rapidly is public space. Basically, most of the projects happening there are not in tune with greater public interest; its either for the interest of the cultural elite, including the political elite or the economic elite, or a place to manifest diplomatic needs. Very often the museums being built have basically no program zero program, and the program comes usually three months before the event happens. Very often, people with money and power come to the museums and say that they just want to rent the space, and do an event there, and the museums basically just dont have the resources or political status to resist these kinds of demands. In this situation I think so far the only successful art museum that is trying very hard to build up its own program is the Guangdong Museum that Mr. Wang is going to introduce later. But apart from that, most of the museums are really struggling to forge a path through these realities. The power of the developers is especially strong in Beijing. These spectacular new buildings are part of the new Chinese diplomacy and I dont have to mention this in Switzerland anymore with the Olympic stadium being built by Herzog & de Meuron and French architect Paul Andreus National Grand Theater, and the CCTV by Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadids new opera in Guangzhou, etc. There are some very interesting things being done by some younger Chinese architects who are trying also very hard to design museums apart from Chang Yang Ho. The fact is that the institutions dont have their own programs, which is not a problem per se, because it offers a lot of new opportunities. One can actually use the momentary demands from society and the institutions try to smuggle certain things into a non-established program and to preserve a certain critical freedom in the situation. So the ambition of different cities is to try to fund their own biennales or triennales, or other larger projects can also be an opportunity to preserve and promote certain critical strategies. I was involved with the Shanghai Biennale of 2000 and five years later people keep saying that was a kind of turning point in the Chinese public authorities accepting of contemporary art as something normal, less monstrous. Today, they even use contemporary art to decorate the good face of governance and we see that at the Venice Biennale where you had a Chinese pavilion this year (2005). So the whole process started more or less in Shanghai in 2000. The art museum asked me and a few other colleagues to do the Shanghai Biennale. Huang Yong Pings response to the invitation was to do a rather critical work in this institutional context. He went to Shanghai to do the research for his work and then came up with this project which is the replica of a bank building, a very famous building in Shanghai on the Bund which used to be the Shanghai Bank and which later became the Hong Kong-Shanghai Bank. This was the first building in Shanghai to resemble a colonial banking monument, lets say. And then when the Communists came into power in the fifties, it became the city hall, and later on the city hall moved to another, more spectacular, more monumental, almost North Korean-style building and the building became a bank again (Pudong Development Bank). Huang Yong Ping actually built up this large installation entirely of sand, so during the biennale exhibition, he created a beautiful building that fell apart slowly. In another piece, he actually tried to intervene in the institutional building of the museum, replacing the original lamp shades with a kind of colonial hat. This is a very clear suggestion to look back to the history of this city. During that biennale, Chang Huang Ho also had a project to redesign the space. When observing the 2004 edition of the Shanghai Biennale, one can understand that the Shanghai Museum is using the Biennale as its most regular program to build up its own image and the ironic thing is that, in the meantime, this institution must continue to manage all kinds of demands of exhibitions ranging from the most conservative to the most experimental. Basically, there is no regular vision. And so the Biennale has the function to regulate the image of this institution. As Hans Ulrich mentioned, I was involved with some public art projects, one of them is in Shenzhen, also in the context of a biennale of sculpture, organized by the local museum, and this museum is actually sponsored by a development company. So the company that runs this little town uses the museum as a part of this decoration of the company that shows art and regularly they do a sculpture biennale. And I have to particularly mention maybe two pieces. This [slide] is the one by Zheng Guogu. This is actually the museum building and the response of the artist was to reconstruct an illegal copy of the building somewhere else in the very center of this very nice town actually in the name of art you can make an illegal construction or building. For another piece, Yan Lei just simply asked this company to give him a piece of land in this town and close it with a fence for two years. And basically that would take away the chance for the company to make a lot of money during two years you can understand the real-estate value of this land and how much was lost. So sometimes the interesting thing is when this kind of opportunity is used to actually disturb the normal function of this crazy urban expansion. And I think that ultimately this is the function of art, if you need any in this kind of context. The last thing I would just simply mention very quickly is a new boom of some kind of in-between spaces which are not completely alternative but more like a typical phenomenon in China it is private initiatives that the authorities jump on to provide some kind of state legitimacy to and then appropriate them as tourist spots. In the famous Beijing 798 Factory built in the fifties, many galleries actually started renting spaces to open galleries and studios. It is only once this was in place that the government gave their permission for this thing to go on and within six months time

ABC | A36B | Public/Private | 131 it becomes the most trendy tourist spot in Beijing. So the artists have to move out now because the rent is getting so high, so this is a very interesting, typical phenomenon of gentrification happening in this kind of situation. Maybe we dont have much time to talk about the rest but simply I would like to mention as the last thing the project that we are doing with Hans Ulrich Obrist together with Huangsheng Wang at the Guandong Art Museum, its the Guangzhou Triennial. This is the second triennial, the first triennial was curated by Wu Hung, who basically did a retrospective of contemporary art in China in the nineties. And now we are doing something which is trying to be very different by connecting an international event to the context in China. Instead of making a large exhibition, we actually decided to do something which will last for about eighteen months, in the museum, having one space, which is called the D-Lab, the Pearl River Delta Lab, and inviting people to come and do research and debate etc. and exchanges with the public, to really try to engage the local community with these events. It will be a place where we produce new ideas and even some projects to be realized as a real construction, so Rem Koolhaas came and he is planning to build a small museum extension for the Guandong Art Museum during this period. So I think within this non-programmed situation we always can develop some post-planning strategies to regularly modify the situation. I think thats it, thanks. Hans Ulrich Obrist: Many, many thanks to Huo Hanru. I have now the great pleasure to introduce our next speaker, Huang Yong Ping. Huang Yong Ping is an artist and also a theoretician. He is one of the leading artists of his generation in China. In a way, he is a hero for many, many young artists today in China who always refer to him. Please welcome Huang Yong Ping

132 | ABC | A36B | Public/Private Presentation | Huan Yong Ping the third point is that we need to keep most of the existing structures and so that we dont build from scratch. But, actually, what they are doing now is just the reverse of what I said, so they started the building first and we dont know what it is going to be used for. While this is a practical example in Xiamen, I think that in other places in China similar things have happened. This constitutes a crisis because, you know, we have all this space, these areas and no real plan of how to use them. Its a problem. We might begin with a cultural institution in mind but in the end it is transferred into a commercial thing and thats what I am going to say. Thank you. (Translated from Mandarin) Presentation | Uli Sigg I understand my task is to bring the collectors view on the museum situation in China to this debate. Im very impressed by the new hardware that is being put in place all over China but, as a collector, my main concern is beyond the hardware, its the software of the museum, its the people, its the memory function of the museum. If I, as a visitor, go to museums in China, with a few exceptions, what I find is institutions that are lacking money, that are in bad shape, that are run by people who have no concept of running a contemporary museum, very often they are people who have been, so to speak, dumped into the museum by other departments. With few exceptions, this is rather alarming and raises the following question and brings us back to todays topic: how do we come from this situation to the museum of tomorrow? Another aspect; when I collected Chinese contemporary art, at some point I realized that neither an institution nor an individual in China was collecting contemporary art in a systematic fashion. Some institutions did collect a small fragment of contemporary art production, namely academic oil painting or sculpture, but till the year 2000, I would say, no institution ever acquired photography, installations, or videos from Chinese artists. So, in the museum of today and in the museum of tomorrow, there will be this gap of almost twentyfive years of art production, experimental contemporary art production, which somehow will have to be closed. Also from the artists perspective the lack of funding for the institutions presents an odd situation; the artist is faced with a choice of either sort of giving away his work for a nominal amount or selling it to a collector for a market price, so the museums even though by now they are full of good intentions lack the resources to acquire important works. So, these are just a few topics the museum of tomorrow will have to take care of. I also agree with Hou Hanru that there is this danger of this new hardware being politicized, being subjected to a use for which it was not intended and its very much in the hands of developers. We

ABC | A36B | Public/Private | 133 have seen examples of developers starting a museum idea, and then abandoning it a few years later, be it because of bankruptcy or be it because of turning their attention to something else that appears to be more exciting. We, therefore, dont face a very stable situation which might present many opportunities and I think its a good thing we reflect on these threats and opportunities now but I think I should pass the word to a real museum director who will now give his view about these issues. Hans Ulrich Obrist: Many thanks to Uli Sigg. I have the great pleasure now to introduce our next speaker, Huangsheng Wang, director of the Guangdong Museum of Art. Huo Hanru has already talked a little bit about the importance of the Guangdong Museum as one of the very few institutions in China with a program. What makes the museum particularly interesting is also that it takes into account the whole new reality which has been described by many speakers here today which is actually this logic of developers. One of the consequences of this logic is that after entering into negotiation with one of the big developers in Guangdong, it was decided that a side venue of the Guangdong Museum would be created in the form of a big condominium, along with a new building of Rem Koolhaas. So welcome to Huangscheng Wang.

Intro: In December 2003, the flamboyant real-estate developer Lin Jian (his motto: when everyone goes right, I go left) opened a space called the Left Bank Gallery in his Left Bank Community development, lending one floor of a raw, unfinished building to peripatetic independent curator Gu Zhenqing only to order him to dismantle Huang Yong Pings Bar Project, marking the third time the piece (a life-size mockup of the U.S. EP-3 spy plane captured on Hainan Island) had been censored in China [see Artworld, January 2003]. The piece was finally shown in Shenzhen, Hong Kongs Tijuana, later the same month at the He Xiangning Museums Center for Contemporary Art. Hans Ulrich Obrist: Many, many thanks to Huang Yong Ping. Id like also to mention that actually In 1989, I left China. The first time I came back, it Huang Yong Pings next exhibitions, one of his big was in 2000. Thats why I will focus on projects I exhibitions, will be a retrospective at the Walker did in one city that I am so familiar with, Xiamen, Art Center curated by Philippe Vergne. where I was born. In 2001 when I went back to XiaI am very happy now to introduce our next men, the local government told me that there were speaker, Uli Sigg, and Id like to invite you all to go two spaces, or two places where they wanted me to and see the exhibition of his collection in Bern, not work, and needed my opinion and ideas. One used far from here. Actually, Hou Hanru and I have visto be a fish market built in the nineteen-seventies ited Mr. Sigg whilst we were researching for Cities and I thought it was a good idea because in China on the Move, and his extraordinary collection in the demolition takes place everywhere and we should Swiss embassy, he was at the time Swiss ambasmake use of the old sites and old buildings for cul- sador to China and he is, one can probably say, the tural purposes, and this very helpful and useful. pioneer collector of contemporary Chinese art. On this site there are still some fishermen making nets. The site is 90 m long and 21 m wide. Xiamen is not a big city, it used to have 200,000 people fifty years ago and now we have 1.5 million people. The Xiamen Cultural and Art Center used to be an engineering factory and it was designed by Americans, and now we are transforming it into an art museum, a library with a total area of 15,000 square meters. And the factory, built in the nineteen-eighties, actually was removed and the inside is very spacious, with the art museum space being around 3700 square meters. When they asked my opinion, I said, first you need to define the purpose of the future ideas and what is going to be built and also, secondly, before your transformation, you need to have a group to discuss the project. And

134 | ABC | A36B | Public/Private Presentation | Huangscheng Wang Good morning everybody. It is very difficult to talk about a museum in general terms, so maybe I will focus on the present. Just now, the preceding speakers put forward a lot of criticism of China. We also share many of the same feelings at the museum. As the director, I try my best to work at getting over these things. Today, I would like to talk about the autonomy of museums. From now and into the future, there is a tendency towards development and it is unprecedented. Of course we have a lot of problems: economic, cultural, and political ones. And we are also facing the issue of globalization and the influence of the information age and image age. Within these circumstances, what kind of role should the museum play? What kind of position we are in? These are very urgent and realistic subjects which demand a lot of thought. Of course, with the onset of the information era ... before we dealt with the information in a very simplistic way ... we now deal with information that is multi-channel, multi-facetted, and multi-dimensional and we have to judge whether we should exceed the regular ideology and way of thinking. A chaotic situation is provoked by a confusion of information coming from all sides. This brings up the issue of how a museum can manage all this, including letters, images, and sound. How should we receive it and replicated or restore it is of primary importance. We cannot deal with the rich, multi-facetted information in a simplistic way. Therefore our selection process is challenged and we try to preserve some autonomous thinking while trying not to be fixated on only one subject. We are in an era of images and this sometimes helps us to actually avoid thinking and weakens our imagination. Up until now, we have been trained only to use, understand, and accept very clear and uncritical, flat images that express a flat thinking. In my opinion, these images make it impossible to reach tranquility and fatigue in a pleasant way. An image duplicates and expands if we look at it too much. This diminishes our resistance, and, inevitably, it intrudes on our lives, taking over our homes to our work sites, from the streets to our entire visual environment. Mostly the sense of these images has been defined for us by others, which keeps us in the passive role. Its up to us to allow others to develop their own capacity to visualize and I think, as an art museum this means constantly using the images and disseminating them with regard to the society that nurtures them. As a museum we have responsibilities and obligations and I think that we should be in constant interaction with society. This [slide] is an exhibition The Era of Mao Tsetung, the time period is starting from 1949 to 1972 that we are showing, together with a symposium. The symposium, however, was held in Yennan, that was the Founding Fathers workplace. All these images are related to the era of Mao Tsetung. And this [slide] is the first Guangzhou Triennial, its a laboratory which was one of the exhibits, reflecting an images influence on people today. We have collected photography from 1951 to 2003 and altogether we have over six hundred pieces. Parts of this collection will be exhibited in Germany in 2006. One of the reasons art in China has been politicized to a large extent is that we lack the autonomous systems or mechanisms to allow people to present and even sell their work. What impressed me most on this visit to Basel is that it made me understand that today in China now we lack an art fair like the one in Basel. I think that this could stimulate the art mechanism. But right now, we are all very busy, working together to reach our goals. (Translated from Mandarin) Hans Ulrich Obrist: Many thanks to Huangsheng Wang. I am very happy now to introduce our last speaker of this morning session, Guan Yi of Guan Yi Contemporary who is a collector and, as he told me this morning, has founded his own museum in Beijing. By now, its actually not one, but four museums as the collection is growing at such a rapid pace. Guan Yi? Presentation | Guan Yi This [slide] is my museum 2003. And this is how it has grown in 2004. The museum is located in a very remote area in the suburbs of Beijing in what used to be a factory. I think it is a suitable location because it lies on the physical margins of the social system and because this reflects the reality of contemporary Chinese culture. Our method is to collaborate directly with the artists and to create a place to present the artists works, for instance Huang Yong Pings works take a lot of space here. He understands space very well, so his use of the space is very accurate. My future vision of the museum is based on my imagination and on my idea of space. I think that where we place a work contributes to make it more meaningful. There are a lot of museums established in China now. I think, however, in reality this reflects more the needs of the developers than it does of the public. The developers are like dragons, but actually they are afraid of what they are dealing with when it comes to art. I dont know what the future will be, anything can be possible, but right now, everything is exaggerated. I would like to talk about the reality of contemporary art in China. I think its like the story of the naked emperor. Nobody wants to talk about what is really going on. The main problem is that the collectors have doubts about contemporary art and culture. From traditional art to modern art, we just moved forward, without adopting a process of aesthetics education. China used to be a semicolonial society, now it jumps into a socialist society and it lacks what is in between, the capitalist or the industrialized period. Right now, Westerners have very high expectations about what will be happening with Chinese arts. Indeed, this is partial due to the fact that China is the largest socialist camp in the world and it is developing very rapidly. China has good art but it doesnt have so many good artists. Actually, the contemporary Chinese art is disconnected from the reality of China. So many museums being built in China this is a trend but very few people really

ABC | A36B | Public/Private | 135 understand art and theres a lot of speculation and I dont think this is a good attitude. I think Westerners should face the cultural reality of China, and that their view should not be based on a simplistic political description of things. I contacted a lot of Western collectors of Chinese arts and I think many of them dont understand the work. Now I would like to have some slides about my works, which include Huang Yong Pings piece of the American airplane which went down in Hainan, the American spy plane. Also we have work from Yan Lei and have had an exhibition designed by Hou Hanru. My collection has a lot of installations, but I also collect videos and photography. (Translated from Mandarin)

136 | ABC | A36B | Public/Private In Conversation | Yung Ho Chang Chaos Yang Chen Hou Hanru Claire Hsu Huang Yong Ping Uli Sigg Huangsheng Wang Guan Yi Host | Hans Ulrich Obrist Hans Ulrich Obrist: Many thanks to Guan Yi. I think there are many points that have been brought up by our speakers so that we could begin to discuss some of them in depth. We just observed in Guan Yis presentation his position to create a museum around the work of the artists, and how this affects the way he views the museum space. So if we are taking the artists work as a starting point, it could be interesting to discuss to what extent this may influence the evolution of the local museum and the global museum. Could this be a key to produce a different kind of museum in China? Another aspect, which we have discussed in previous panels, is the relationship between the public and private museum and how to measure the role each will pay in the articulation of the museum of the future. It is also important to consider that, in China, new public museums are not only being built in terms of the 2008 and the 2010 rendezvous, but also for many other occasions. In the meantime, many Western companies and private collectors have already announced plans to establish projects in China in the coming years. Locally, Chinese collectors, and the great example of Guan Yi, are already busy founding their own museums. So, how will these different scenarios affect the future of the museum in China? Maybe Chang Yung Ho could start? Chang Yung Ho: I think the question of public and private in China at this point is a very complicated one because, to some extent, it could be that these two types of museum can be combined, so that the difference is actually blurred. But I dont think the question is whether they are public or private, but as Mr. Sigg said in this presentation, its really about the software and about how these museums will eventually be managed. Hans Ulrich Obrist: Anybody else who wants to react to that? Huangsheng Wang: I think as far as the existing museums in China go, there is a big difference between public and private, because the public museums are financed, supported by the state, but they have restrictions, of course, in terms of the way they are managed. The private museums have a strong advantage of having good management, they have autonomy, but we hope that in the future the financing will be stronger and ongoing, to enable them to continue, to independently do a lot of things. But now, due to financial reasons, the private museums have to depend on the plans of a consortium of big companies, so when the stability of the economy has problems, there will be problems for those museums. Recently, I heard that the Nanking Szechuan Group has built in Nanking two rather big museums with substantial collections, and I think that this is a good thing for China. On the public museum side, in Guangdong, we are also building our collection, 30 percent of which today is contemporary art. (Translated from Mandarin) Hans Ulrich Obrist: Are there other comments or answers? Hou Hanru: I just want to mention one thing concerning the notion of the public or the private sphere, which actually isnt so clearly understood in China. In Chinese society you have a political kind of public institution and then you have all the rest. The rest is not necessarily private institutions, but privately-operated ones. So in between, you dont actually have a social structure for something that could be referred to as public in the European sense. This creates a very interesting confusion about what a public museum is or what a private museum is, which generates an interesting instability in the whole thing. When we are talking about private and public, the borderline in between the two is constantly shifting all the time, You have to always negotiate to preserve the publicness of an institution, which is not really systematically defined by its status. To explain, take the example of a private collection which has a very strong public function like the one of Guan Yi. While his personal efforts have created the institution, it demonstrates the public importance of contemporary art in Chinese society. Consequently, you can go to a so-called state-run and statefunded public museum in which they are doing things which have nothing to do with the interest of the public. This happens all the time. Hans Ulrich Obrist: Yes, Mr. Sigg? Uli Sigg: Frankly, Im at a loss to come up with a new museum concept for China which is distinctly different from any other. Basically the needs of the Chinese public are the same as they are for the others. In the Western world, you all have been thinking a lot about how to come up with new concepts that cater to a much more critical and demanding audience than the Chinese audience is at this very moment. If there is a difference, however, when we are speaking about contemporary art, while the Chinese public is maybe far less informed, it is somewhat more eager to learn. For the time being, their view is considerably different to the entertainment function we attribute to contemporary art in our part of the world and this should be stressed. But in which way this would result in a new museum concept would be best left up to the experts here. Hans Ulrich Obrist: But maybe what I wanted to actually ask you, in terms of the public and private question, is how you see the future of your own collection, because you are showing it now in a public institution. Do you see the future of the collection as becoming part of a public collection, or do your rather imagine founding your own museum one day?

ABC | A36B | Public/Private | 137 Uli Sigg: Well my intent is to stay around for a few more years, so I dont have to finalize my concept of what to do with my collection yet. In the end, in an attempt of trying to close the gap of twenty-five years of experimental art production in China, it might make sense if my collection ultimately would go back there. For this to happen, however, a few preconditions would have to be respected, for instance there are still a number of works in my collection which cannot be shown in China and to me it would be quite important that such limits would cease to exist. I see a very rapid opening process and I am confident that these hurdles will go away but I have not yet come up with a final solution of what I will be doing. Hans Ulrich Obrist: That actually leads us to another point I wanted to discuss with all speakers: this question of freedom. In his very interesting book actually which was mentioned earlier about Chinas new order, Huangsheng Wang talks about that very problematic notion of freedom. He points out that terms like free and unregulated are largely ideological constructs, as he says, masking the intervention of highly manipulative, often coercive, governmental actions. He aims to demonstrate something which he actually sees as a kind of true social, political, and economic democracy in China. So I was wondering how you see that notion of freedom in China now. Obviously there is less censorship now than even five years ago. Also, its very ironic that one of the very rare cases of censorship, which was Huang Yong Pings Airplane, was actually the result of a complaint by Western embassies and not by the Chinese government. So I was wondering if maybe, around this issue of freedom, Huang Yong Ping can tell us a little bit more about the story of the Airplane which we saw before in Guan Yis collection. Huang Yong Ping: With regard to the question of freedom: I feel that theres no place in the world that has true freedom and our talent is to create a freedom in an apparently un-free position and as an artist how I transcend this borderline

138 | ABC | A36B | Public/Private constitutes a challenge for me. I am not saying that all my works will challenge freedom, but I think that ultimately it is very precious for me to reach a truly free state. (Translated from Mandarin) challenges many other cultural institutions automatically, so we are all waiting to see whether the major umbrella can come up with a better solution, a better policy-making process. Otherwise, this is becoming one of the more serious chalHans Ulrich Obrist: When we were preparing this lenges to the healthy development of contempoconference, Chaos had told me that she wanted to rary Chinese culture. talk a little bit about her work in a public museum and we touched on some of these issues. Chaos? Guan Yi: I would like to talk about something. Just now we talked about freedom and I think what Chaos Yang Chen: I think that whether a museum Huang Yong Ping said is very interesting. Many is publicly or privately initiated, as soon as it has people ask me if I have a lot of constraints as a privisitors it will always be public. When you actually vate collector. I think constraints exist everywhere work in a public museum you see the policy chang- but we should not pay too much attention to them. es. Whats interesting is that China has a pretty big During the first biennale exhibition we had all budget for culture. In fact, its proportionally even sorts of constraints from the American, French, larger than that of Switzerland, Germany, and the and Chinese governments around Huang Yong Netherlands, all famous for their strong support Pings work, but in the end, were kept the piece in of the arts. So, on one hand you have a group of very our exposition. Actually, in China we say Some small private players, and on the other hand you good things now exist; its up to you to maintain have strong public funding. But when it comes to them. Maybe sometimes the government doesnt the Chinese budget for culture, we should prob- constrain you; its you, yourself who is posing the ably go back to what Huangsheng Wang was say- constraints. When you really understand contemporary art, ing, that while its large, it is attributed to only certain types of art, usually of the one-dimension- and how the Chinese public views it, you can solve al kind. So, its not that China does not support these problems. We can say we dont have a very culture. Its that the support is just not diversified good cultural basis, but with the international exenough. Particularly, the support does not go to change and the information age, I think the situthe younger generation, the ones that need sup- ation has greatly changed. From the perspective port the most. I think that probably the GDMoA of our Museum of Art and in my experience, I can [Guangdong Museum of Art] is the best one to sup- prove that among the younger generation and we port young thinking and young artists work as even did a survey about this there is great interest producer and as supporter and not only as a venue in our exhibitions and in contemporary art in gento show the works after they are finished. But when eral. The first biennale in Guangzhou during the we go back to the cultural industry as a whole, first two months was visited by 80,000 people. there is a bottleneck caused, in a way, by the gov- Maybe this is not very large, but in China for conernment afraid it might lose its hand in determin- temporary arts, this is a substantial audience. During the future of culture in China. Earlier, there ing the whole process the engagement and the was support that was supposed to be more diversi- participation was enormous and people were very fied. Today, the government says that culture interested. (Translated from Mandarin) should be industrialized, and should be a profitmaking process. They now believe that its impor- Hans Ulrich Obrist: This is very interesting. Before tant to leave certain parts of the culture in this we open the discussion to the floor and you can free, undefined (and unregulated) market space. address your questions to the speakers, I wanted This, in turn, actually challenges the museum and to somehow address a last question to all of you and maybe start with Guan Yi. I found your method of starting a museum from the art works, and not from a given architecture, amazingly interesting. This means that you are presenting art works which nobody else can actually show, no other museum, like Huang Yong Pings enormous Airplane which fits into this idea. This is something we know for example from the Dia Art Foundation, which has in a certain way invented an ideal museum built around accommodating certain types of work. So, I wanted to ask you if you have a dream museum, and how you see the evolution of your museum in the years to come?

ABC | A36B | Public/Private | 139 architecture is art and its important to see how to add cultural factors to this art? Also, how do we more accurately describe the relations between people and the society? (Tranlated from Mandarin)

Hans Ulrich Obrist: This leads to a question for you, Claire, because you have been telling us about the current situation in Hong Kong and obviously there is a very ambitious plan there going on, which implies developers, foreign museums wanting to take their stand and all this is to be set in place by very well known international architects. So, what I wanted to ask you, keeping in mind the Hong Kong situation, which is also about art and about the artGuan Yi: The reason for me to start my work as a ists, what would be the dream museum at this collector goes back to the nineteen-eighties, but point, that would make a difference in that city? let me explain more. We have a cultural utopia in China, and I am idealistic and I think that the Claire Hsu: Well I think, unlike in Guan Yis case, source of contemporary Chinese art lies in the be- where the space and art work closely together, this ginning of the last century. There was a revolution- unfortunately is not the path being taken by the ary named Chang Wen Pai. He went to Paris and Hong Kong government and by the developers, met a Chinese artist who was living there. They whereby a building is planned first and it is decided talked about how to replace religious education afterwards what is going to be put in it. We should with aesthetic education.This was a utopian ideal; begin by thinking what collections we actually the creation of a cultural utopia, and I was heavily have, and by assessing what our strengths are. influenced by this. And after I went into business, There has been a lot of discussion about the this idealistic thinking diminished, but came back global approach and the local approach; there are when I began collecting. some camps who strongly believe that bringing the I am a fan of architecture and art and now I see Guggenheim to Hong Kong would be an answer that Western artists like Olafur Eliasson offer a new for a city with very little history of museum manexpression of the physical experience. I think that agement and very few collections. While we have an architect is very similar to an artist in the way one of the strongest collections in the world for they relate to imagination. As for the question Chinese modern ink painting, our collections for posed by Hans Ulrich, I think I attach more impor- contemporary Western or even Asian art are very tance to idealism and to space and to building an limited. So one of the arguments for Bring the accurate expression of that space. The question of Guggenheim over, is that they will have to focus space is related to all the social problems facing us, on expanding their collections to include contembecause in China, in this process of massive urban- porary Asian and local Chinese art, and at the same ization, we see the way the space is developing and time give us access to their collections from all over changing and so I am very sensitive to this. Huang the world. In the other camp, you have those that Yong Ping is also thinking how to use this space to argue that Hong Kong can build its own museum express his artistic ideas. I had worked with a lot of with its own distinctive flavor. Suggestions and architects in China and I think that there is a prob- discussions have included proposals to build a lem in their understanding of art and I think they museum for Bruce Lee or a museum for Cantonese attach more importance to form. But I think that opera, for example, and these really are dreams for

140 | ABC | A36B | Public/Private different pockets in the community in Hong Kong. There are a lot of different voices in the community who are coming out and saying This is what speaks to Hong Kong and this is the direction we should be going. Hans Ulrich Obrist: Youre mapping all of this in the Archive? Claire Hsu: Were mapping all of this and if you need any information, you can get it from the Asia Art Archive (http://www.aaa.org.org.hk). The idea is to make information on the area as accessible as possible. Oh yes, and we have a booth in the hall of Art Unlimited as well, so if you need any more information, please come and see us. Hans Ulrich Obrist: I have actually a very last question now and then we open it to the floor. It is a last question to Chang Yung Ho because I thought that its good we bring the discussion back to architects and ask him about his dream museum. Do you have an unrealized museum project, from all your unrealized museum projects, because I know there are several, that is your favorite, which you would like to see built in the future? Chang Yung Ho: Actually I do have one and its my dream museum. Its a museum totally built with two kinds of materials: one is all recycled material, because I see the concept of museum always related to the notion of time, so I would like to see old materials being re-used in a museum designed to actually express that idea. The next idea maybe contradicts the first one, so in that case I would have two museums, ideal museums. The second museum would be a piece of architecture that is so light that it could be built out of materials like plastic, so that its actually not permanent, because the collection of a museum, even if its called permanent, expands and changes all the time. So, I would like to see a museum which is formless, almost shapeless, so it doesnt even require a foundation, and then it can go through a metamorphosis when the needs change. Hans Ulrich Obrist: So thanks to all of you. Are there questions from the floor for any of the speakers? Audience: I quite agree with the collector (Uli Sigg) who said it seems that you have the hardware but the software has problems. Now I think the biggest software in a museum is the artists work, but the biggest software in the system is the artist himself. So why dont you consider allocating part of the space, whether it be private or public, to studios for artists, because I suppose, just like everyone else, in China it must not be very easy for an artist to have a space and I would actually like to give this question to Huang Yong Ping. Huang Yong Ping: And I think that Ill answer like this: an artist has made a lot of work in his life and it sits like a lot of burdens and hangs there and so he has only himself to shoulder it. So, if you come to my studio, on the walls I have no paintings hanging there. And I would want others to shoulder those burdens for me, but I prefer to do this on my own, in private. (Translated from Mandarin) Hans Ulrich Obrist: More questions? Audience: This is to both the Hong Kong representative and the mainland Chinese: do you have any tax incentives for business people to build private museums? Claire Hsu: No, we dont have a legal system in place that can offer tax incentives. I think this is the same case for all us. And its something that needs to be addressed, yes. Hans Ulrich Obrist: Anybody else wants to answer this? Huangsheng Wang: In China for museums, it is said that we have tax preferences but for my museum it didnt work out and we are making efforts in this regard. (Translated from Mandarin) Uli Sigg: Although taxes are not a very entertaining topic, in China a lot of legal structural work still needs to be done to promote art. For instance, I have established an art prize for contemporary art in China and for that purpose I wanted to set up a foundation. It is almost impossible to set up a foundation unless you provide a large sum of initial investment and also create a tax-free space for donations etc. The work still has not been done but the Ministry of Culture, which at present should be addressing these issues, seems to be working on it. We just dont know about the outcome yet. Hou Hanru: Maybe this is not about taxes at all, but about again going back to the idea of the public sphere. The idea of non-profit is such a strange concept for most of the people in China. Its almost impossible, or unimaginable, that someone doesnt make money in China, so non-profit makes almost no sense in that context. For the authorities or the public sector, if you are not doing anything that is making money that means you must have another political agenda behind it. If for the private sector, you dont make money, youre simply stupid. So basically theres very narrow space, I cannot say theres none at all, but basically theres not a clear space where you can talk about the non-profit. So the whole tax system, I mean people who are designing the tax system would not take this into consideration at least for the next few years to come. And this is why Ulis project, like many other peoples project who are trying to build up non-profit structures, is very, very difficult to be realized. So basically, for example a lot of artists rent spaces which exist from maybe five days to five years or even longer, but most of them have to end up being a gallery. Otherwise they would never be able to survive, so the question is again coming back to this notion of the lack of public space.

ABC | A36B | Public/Private | 141 so familiar with the arrangement, the legal system is completely different. So, Hanru and the others, they are referring specifically to the mainland situation. Hans Ulrich Obrist: I think Chang Yung Ho wanted to say something? Chang Yung Ho: I just want to add to what Hanru is saying here in a different way. Terms like private and public are Western notions, and Im fully aware of that. In China the two are different concepts, and I dont know how to translate this precisely but one is the official or the official side and the other concept is the mind, or peoples private space. So one is of course related to the state level of operation, while the other one is like the grass roots movement or something like that. Hanru is saying that maybe it should be called state and society, so in a European situation the notion of public is reinforced through the state, which is what, in a way, socialism is about. Socialism is related to state. But in China, for the moment, the fact that we have private collectors like Guan Yi being a major supporter of art, this actually operates on a society level, which is in fact the grass roots level, which normally would represent activities that are oriented to the public. So that has to be understood to get a sense of whats going on in China. I dont think I am giving a very clear explanation but thats the basis of a very important notion that I am trying to get across. Hans Ulrich Obrist: There was a question from the audience?

Audience: This is not exactly a question, but I would like to just comment on what I picked up from this wonderful panel today. I think that the point about software and hardware was very interesting. But I see the situation as a triangular system, where you have hardJonathan Napack: This is just a small point, but ware, software, and the other very important Hong Kong and mainland China share many of part of the triangle, which is the public itself. What these issues, however, for those that might not be about these ideas for museums? Are they really

142 | ABC | A36B | Public/Private accessible to the public? I mean that on all levels ... I mean in terms of transport, entrance fees, etc. My feeling is that one should never pay to go into a museum, and I think its ridiculous that even in this country, which is so well supported, we have an entrance fee into a museum. Now this points to a number of issues, including education. I think that the idea of having an art fair in Beijing or Shanghai and all of the big cities, and to invite foreign artists to create a specific dialogue with contemporary Chinese artists would greatly stimulate exchange. Art fairs are also exciting and also places of entertainment. I mean I just see art as show business today. Thats certainly what the Basel show is about, and hopefully it doesnt turn into a bankers paradise. I see bankers walking around here selling art to each other, and I think thats a real pity if that actually occurred. But on the grass roots level of the people and education, I think thats all possible when the actual spaces are in place, and then I think it could be a very exciting future. I think its wonderful what can occur, so Im very excited about it and I thank you very much. Guan Yi: Id like to comment on what you just said. I have a dream museum in my mind. In the recent past, because of the increasing number of visitors who visit my collection, I started to study these visitors and noticed some of them also have relations with the National Music Center and that some want to begin collecting. Then I also noticed when I am flying that theres a lot of space in airports; how interesting it would be to make use of it as an art space, perhaps not for physical work, but one could think about playing some music as art. So, I think we should have a museum without walls thats very public and without borders. But the big question is how to bring this dream museum into reality and how to protect it in the future? Im still thinking about this. Perhaps we put art in the subway stations for the general public, and then maybe they would notice it and this is one of my biggest wishes. But a lot of work may be needed to realize my wish and to coordinate with the government because there are a lot of public spaces in China that we need to complement with art, and this is my wish, but I dont know what the result will be. (Translated from Mandarin) Audience: It seems throughout the entire discussion you have been talking about the level of participation of the audience, of the public. For me this brings up quite an interesting question. I think I understand better the level of awareness of the audience and the changes to be. But I am not sure if this is linked to the art, or if the art is linked to the change, and in that case the audience are more like visitors in a museum or maybe they are more attracted by the fact that they could be involved in art projects. I want to understand better this situation of audience expectations and awareness, rather than audience participation. I would like to ask Huangsheng Wang and also Hanru and Chaos also, if its possible. Huangsheng Wang: The awareness of the Chinese audience has been changing progressively. For example we have an interesting piece by Xu Bing. Everyday there are a lot of visitors trying to practice their English handwriting with his works and they are very interested during the exhibition and a lot of visitors were just sitting there for a long time, observing. So from the point of view of the museum we have done a lot of work, for example organizing some students to participate in activities or symposiums. During the biennale we invited artists like Xu Bing and Huang Yong Ping to give lectures in the universities. When Xu Bing gave a talk at the University in Guangzhou, the whole hall was full of people. During the exhibition we have a volunteers team, and it includes Feng Boyi and also there are guided tours for the visitors. (Translated from Mandarin) Hou Hanru: The quantity of the public is something important but its not the most essential thing. Its the quality of the participation of the public which counts most for me. You have works which are being shown often as a kind of fashion and everyone comes to look at it as, whatever they can call it, experience. There is another kind of work that actually creates situations where the public can become active in the process and that, I think, should be a topic which is much more important now in China. I tried to explain that the lack of the public sphere is not because there is no place where people can gather, but there is basically no structure, especially no intellectual structure, which actually can create a possibility for people to have a quality conversation or a conversation on more than Have you eaten? (this is very Chinese, a kind of hello). So, a really interesting example is the piece I showed earlier, by Zheng Guogu who reproduced a museum, he copied a museum, as an illegal building in the center of the town where there used to be a public park. And suddenly the residents felt that this work took away this so-called public space and it generated a five-month discussion in this community. The work ended up being a community center. So this is a very interesting transformation because of the quality of conversation among people and I think this illustrates the use of art I mean this is very bad wording to say use of art, but in such a specific context one can actually use, or take advantage of, the presence of art to generate a real debate within the public sphere. Chaos Yang Chen: I would like to respond to this question on several levels. First, the audience I get in touch with directly in most of the cases is very demanding and extremely well prepared. Many times the museum staff does not feel well enough prepared to receive them. One example is that in one of the biennales in Shanghai a work by a South African artists, William Kentridge, was hidden in a very small room in the side wing of the museum, but the general public was waiting in a queue outside the room and the ones already inside the room did not want to come out, because they wanted to see the piece again and again. Second is audience participation in public discussion, they always seem to raise the right and most timely issues that you would expect from the

ABC | A36B | Public/Private | 143 best audience you would ever imagine to have. During the discussion with Wim Wenders, for example, he was talking about the war as a symbol and then referring to the end of the Cold War. When the floor was opened, one member of the audience raised the issue of private memory versus collective memory. The problem is we just dont have the sustainability to keep this kind of program happening more frequently. Hans Ulrich Obrist: So we have a few more questions, and I would say then, for reasons of time, we take these two last questions and then continue this as a more informal coffee break. Audience: Im not sure whether I interpreted the answer of the museum director from Guangdong correctly, but I think he was articulating tranquility as a cultural or an aesthetic objective, so I was wondering if the panelists had any other kind of cultural or aesthetic objectives that they had a particular affinity for? Hans Ulrich Obrist: I think thats for Chang Yung Ho? Chang Yung Ho: Sir, I think the question is about tranquility in the architecture of museums? I think for me at least its the general question regarding architecture today in China and I fully understand that when Europeans go to China, when they see the energy and the level of activities in China, they get very excited. And we have many friends who just cannot sleep when they come to China. This is not just because of jetlag, but due to the high energy and excitement. But when we come over here as Chinese to Europe, I think that a balance of life really needs a healthy dose of tranquility, so in China not only for cultural facilities but for a more balanced life, we do think that architecture, if its possible, should provide some tranquility, some serenity, to the people so that in the end people still can come down to taste the full flavor of tea or artwork.

144 | ABC | A36B | Public/Private Hans Ulrich Obrist: So we have a very last question Hou Hanru has an answer, yes? Hou Hanru: I would just add something about this tranquility because its a very interesting clich question about how spiritual the Chinese are, but I really think there two kinds of tranquility: one is deaths tranquility, another one is lifes tranquility. I would rather go for life, because my life is not long enough to bother with death. So I think its a question about what the role of art in the society is. I think that art has a role, at least among many other possibilities, to create interruption in everyday life, a kind of disturbance. And this interruption for me actually is a moment of void, emptiness, but this emptiness has to be dynamic, has to be a kind of counter-dynamic against the dynamic reality. So you can have tranquility in a totally noisy context. But that has to be on another register, against the frequency of the real. So I dont know if this makes sense? Hans Ulrich Obrist: And we had a very last question? Audience: Id like to ask Mr. Huang, you live in Paris and youre an artist in Paris, my question is about government regulations. How do they help artists to build their circles in life, to support them economically and culturally? If you were living in China, could you have gained the reputation you have acquired? Huang Yong Ping: In China we say that the artists are like small fish, they cant stir up big waves. And if you dont move too much, you can live very well and if you dont intervene, then youll live better. (Translated from Mandarin)

ABC | A36B | The Curators' Circle | 151 Art Basel Conversations | Sunday June 19, 2005 | Bvlgari Pavilion, Basel

TRANSCRIPT | THE CURATORS CIRCLE NEW PRACTICES IN CURATION

Is the future of curation institutional? What is an independent curator? How important is conservation in curatorial practice? How does an institutional curator maintain an autonomous practice? In what ways has curation changed in the past five years?

SPEAKERS | MASSIMILIANO GIONI RUTH NOACK GILANE TAWADROS NICOLAS BOURRIAUD Host | MARIA FINDERS

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Massimiliano Gioni Co-curator 4th Berlin Biennale, Artistic Director Fondazione Nicola Trussardi; Milan, Italy Curator and art critic, Massimiliano Gioni is the artistic director of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in Milan. With Maurizio Cattelan and Ali Subotnick, he is curating the 4th Berlin Biennale for contemporary art (March, 2006). He was the co-curator of Manifesta 5, San Sebastian, Spain (2004), and part of the curatorial team of Monument to Now, Athens (2004). In 2003 he curated The Zone for the 50th edition of the Venice Biennial. In Milan he has organized since 2003 for the Fondazione Trussardi various solo shows and public projects by Darren Almond, John Bock, Maurizio Cattelan, and Elm green and Dragset. As associate curator he worked on the exhibitions Uniform. Order and Disorder P.S.1, New York (2001) and The Fourth Sex. Adolescent Extremes, Pitti Discovery, Florence (2002). Former US editor of Flash Art magazine, Massimiliano Gioni has written widely on contemporary art, publishing articles in Parkett, Flash Art, and Carnet, and contributed to books and publications on many artists. With Cattelan and Subotnick, he runs the minuscule exhibition space The Wrong Gallery in New York, edits the magazine Charley, and holds a regular column in Domus magazine. [www.berlinbiennale.de] [www.fondazionenicolatrussardi.com] Ruth Noack Curator, documenta 12, Independent Curator and Art Historian; Vienna, Austria Ruth Noack is an independent curator and art historian, currently working for documenta 12. She studied art history, audio-visual media, and feminist theory in the USA, Britain, Germany, and Vienna, Austria. Writing regularly for art journals since 1990, she acted as president of AICA Austria (Association Internationale des Critiques dart) in 2002 and 2003. She started curating exhibitions in 1992, many of them together with Roger M. Buergel. Exhibitions such as Scenes of a Theory: The work of art as agent of filmic discourse, Depot, Vienna (1995) point to her interest in film theory, a subject which she taught at the University of Vienna and the University of Applied Arts continuously from 2000 onwards. At the latter institution, she was a full time lecturer in 2002 and 2003. She has also taught the theory and practice of curating at Lneburg University. Recent exhibitions include Things we understand, Generali Foundation, Vienna (2000) and Organizational Form, which started at Galerija Skuc in Ljubljana in 2002 and continued on to the Galerie der Hochschule fr Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig as well as the Kunstraum der Universitt Lneburg in 2003. Also co-curated by Roger M.Buergel is her current series of exhibitions, The Government. Changing its face and its specific focus in each new installment, this exhibition has made its way from the Kunstraum, University of Lneburg in 2003, to the MACBA, Barcelona (there, Buergel acted as sole curator) and Miami Art Central in 2004, as well as the Sezession, Vienna, and Witte de With, Rotterdam in 2005. Ruth Noack lives in Vienna and Kassel. [www.documenta.de] Gilane Tawadros Founding Director of inIVA (Institute of International Visual Arts); London, England Gilane Tawadros is the founding director of inIVA (Institute of International Visual Arts), London, a contemporary visual arts agency based in London. Since it was established eleven years ago, inIVA has achieved international recognition for its ground-breaking program of exhibitions, publications, education, research, and multimedia projects that cut across diverse local and global contexts. Responsible for the overall artistic direction of inIVA, she has curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions including Sonia Boyce, Brighton Art Gallery and Museum (1995); Map, Beaconsfield (1996); Mona Hatoum, Newlyn Art Gallery (1997); Victor Grippo, Tate Gallery, St. Ives (1997); Carl Cheng, Newlyn Art Gallery (1997); David Medalla, Tate Gallery, St. Ives (1997); Keith Piper, Royal College of Art (1997; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (1998); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, (1999); Avtarjeet Dhanjal (1997); Simon Tegala (1998), Yinka Shonibare (1998) Shen Yuan, Arnolfini, Bristol and Chisenhale Art Gallery (2001); Andrew Lewis (2002); Johannes Phokela (2002); Mayling To (2002); Alia Syed (2002); Veil, New Art Gallery, Walsall; Bluecoat Art Gallery & Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, Modern Art, Oxford (2003) and Kulturehuset, Stockholm (2004); Fault Lines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes, 50th Venice Biennale (2003), Zarina Bhimji (2004); Sutapa Biswas (2004); David Adjaye (2004). As a writer and critic, Gilane Tawadros has written extensively on contemporary art, most recently she edited Changing States: Contemporary Art and Ideas in an Era of Globalisation (inIVA, 2004), has served on the editorial boards of Art History and Third Text and acted as a member of the board of Artangel Trust and more recently the Forum for African Arts and the International Foundation of Manifesta. She is currently working with Autograph ABP on developing a landmark new visual arts building in Rivington Place, East London. Opening in 2007, it will be the Great Britains first home for culturally diverse visual arts and photography and will be a platform for ideas, experiences, and artworks from every corner of the globe. [www.iniva.org] Nicolas Bourriaud Co-director Palais de Tokyo, Curator, Author; Paris, France Nicolas Bourriaud, born in 1965, lives and works in Paris. He is Director of Palais de Tokyo, site for contemporary creation, with Jrme Sans, which they conceived and developed since 1999. Art critic and writer (Relational Aesthetics, 1998 and 2002 ; Postproduction, 2001 and 2004), he regularly collaborates with Beaux-Arts Magazine, Art Press, Flash Art. Founder and Director of the magazine Documents (19922000), he also works as a curator on Touch, San Francisco Art Institute, 2002; GNS and Playlist, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2003 and 2004). He was co-curator for the 1st Moscow Biennale in 2005, and will co-curate with Jrme Sans the 2005 Lyon Biennale. [www.palaisdetokyo.com]

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154 | ABC | A36B | The Curators' Circle Welcome | Maria Finders Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen. Were absolutely impressed to see how many of you are here on a Sunday morning so early, we apologize it is this early. We have quite an interesting discussion today about new practices in curation. Talking about curation could last ten minutes as it could last twenty-four hours, so were going to try to find a kind of a middle road to that. With us today is Nicolas Bourriaud. Nicolas is the co-director of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, hes also, this year, the artistic co-director for the Biennale de Lyon. He was one of the co-curators of the 1st Moscow Biennale, and probably does a hundred projects that we dont know enough about and hell tell us about them. Massimiliano Gioni, next to him, is the cocurator of the 4th Berlin Biennale with Maurizio Cattelan and Ali Subotnick and hes also the artistic director of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi which has a very interesting program without a physical space they do a lot of in situ pieces throughout the city of Milan and thats a very good project. Ruth Noack is now, we can say it, curator of documenta 12. She is also an independent curator and an art historian and has done some fascinating shows, notably one in Miami, The Government which was one of the most astounding shows Ive seen in the past years. Gilane Tawadros, has a very interesting project in London which is called inIVA and youll tell us a little bit about that from what we can see inIVA is a cultural development project, a resource center, a database, and many other things, dealing with art issues from a very global perspective. What were going to start with is basically, each of the speakers is going to present a little bit about what theyre doing, and then were going to try to have a conversation about curation. So were going to start with you, Gilane. Presentation | Gilane Tawadros Actually the images Im going to show are from a forthcoming project called Alien Nation about race and science fiction and Im going to get to that in the end. Id like to, however, start with a rather sacrilegious use of these artists works to talk about curating and some issues that for me are quite pressing about being a curator. There is an idea about the independent curator as this lone individual, a kind of maverick, outsider, an impresario, but increasingly what weve seen over the past five or ten years, has been that individuals have been compelled to get closer and closer to institutions and thats for a range of very good reasons: to have an infrastructure, to have resources, to have financing, and this has had some implications which well talk about. On the part of the institutions, theyve been keen to bring in independent voices into the institutional framework, in a way to refresh their artistic and curatorial vision, and to keep some kind of dynamism going. And theres a parallel here between what happened in Britain with a plethora of artist-led spaces in the eighties, initiated by artists showing their works and those of other artists which were in fact the driving fuel for the whole YBA (Young British Art) Movement. Without such venues, the YBA Movement would not have grown so quickly nor had the same kind of impact. But today, spaces have become constricted and those artists have become very much a part of mainstream institutions and there are hardly any artistled initiatives now left in the UK. The institution that Ive run for eleven years, inIVA, has in a way tried to be an independent curatorial initiative with an institutional structure and its done that by creating a model of working as a production company. Thats the best analogy that we could find for it. And that structure has meant curating exhibitions, publishing, running research, education, multi-media projects, without a permanent base but by working nomadically, peripatetically across different sites in the UK and internationally. And it has also done something else which is work with curators, artists, and writers consistently, and has done so without a star curator. This is because I dont think its possible for a single institution to encapsulate or to carry within itself the possibility of different and diverse perspectives all in one go. And so theres a question there about how one can actually incorporate difference and, if you like, independence within the institution. This brings up the question of what strategies either individuals or institutions can deploy in order to do that. What inIVA has been able to do, is to be light footed, to take risks, to be, if you like, the outsider, looking back into the mainstream institutions. Also, it has worked with artists who arent established, who dont have a dealer and who havent yet been validated within the mainstream. But there are obviously costs. One of the things I think that we should talk about today is the question of independence, not just of working independently in the sense of being freelance but the question of allowing for independent thought, see critical thought. How one really brings new ideas and perspectives, and that this is not just based on geography, but rooted in politics? How can one inject difference within what is becoming the flat-level, undistinguished playing field of curatorial practice? One of the ways in which in the UK thats been possible has been through a very lively publicly funded sector, artist-led initiatives and institutions like inIVA were financed to the tune of 90 percent of their turnover. But increasingly what were seeing is a privatization of that public sector and with that privatization comes certain loss: loss of risk taking, loss of independence and critical thought because quite frankly you cant sustain that and there are pressures that come from funding bodies, from private finance. One of the important issues is the way in which people have been reluctant to think about difference at home, to think about the politics within a local agenda, within a local geography. Its all too easy, I think, for us to go abroad, look for difference, look for ideas, look for new possibilities in another space, and in many ways these are like colonial adven-

ABC | A36B | The Curators' Circle | 155 tures abroad. Its interesting when you look at the whole way the notion of the avant-garde developed. Of course this is very much a military term, picked up by Christian missionaries but there was always this notion that you were going to discover uncharted territory, a new terrain. The concept behind this project Alien Nation is really inspired by nineteen-fifties and sixties science fiction movies, made during the McCarthy Era. These movies often had a subtext around the idea of the alien, the outsider, who posed some kind of threat to the stable, settled status quo and security of the nation state. In that case it was often seen as the threat of communism, but now those same narratives that were deployed in the science fiction movies are again being used by politicians and by the media but in this instance they are talking about asylum seekers, about migrants. The fear of the other, of aliens, still remains very strong in our culture, if anything, its becoming a more powerful issue, and I guess what I want to say is that the challenge for the independent curator, and for the institution, is how to retain that space of being an alien, of being an outsider, of being on the inside but looking in, from an external perspective, from a critical perspective, and speaking and acting on the basis of that different outlook. Maria Finders: Ruth?

156 | ABC | A36B | The Curators' Circle Presentation | Ruth Noack mind, Untitled Rope Piece (1970) by Eva Hesse. This is a work about making connections on a threedimensional plane, without hierarchy. Weaving between the knots and the threads admittedly results in a bit of chaos, it in fact captures an accurate picture of the complexity of relations. Somewhere in this image resides the place of the curator. This is not to say that the curator has no power or no responsibility, but that he or she is never autonomous, and, in fact, they are lucky in that respect. They have help from at least three sources: the artworks, the specific place of an exhibition, and the public. A good curator takes these sources very seriously, not just as factors that need to be figured in somehow, but as points of origin. It is, however, neither the sources themselves nor the individual curators that determine the outcome of a show, but how the relations between these factors and how they have been reflected upon and engaged in. In the light of my next curatorial task, documenta 12, I want to make one final point. Documenta has never been a show for the art world. Its public consists of a mass audience. We have to find a way to bridge the gap between viewers and our highly specialized field, without falling into the trap of fetishism or didacticism. Contemporary curating must focus on education, on finding ways to show that engage the viewer. The act of viewing art must not necessarily mean to acquire knowledge or to consume what we are looking at. It means to acknowledge the artworks incommensurability and to let this change us. Presentation | Massimiliano Gioni I dont have any images, Im fairly unprepared so I might actually react to some of the points that were raised and maybe we can also really start a discussion. First of all, part of this panel I think was dedicated to the issue of the independence of the curator and, as you were saying, I think this is quite an incredible myth that we should simply get rid of. If we were really independent curators, we wouldnt be here on a Sunday morning in a place that is called the Bvlgari Lounge, so lets not pretend to be independent. Curators are always dependent and I think the issue at stake here is how you make that dependency creative. Personally, the way I work is reactive, never a conscious decision but I came to it by trial and error. At one point I realized that for me, personally, things get interesting and creative the moment you have an institution to deal with and that whatever you do is somehow part of that institution and you try to play within that context. For example, I work in an institution in Milan thats called Trussardi Foundation and the idea since I started there was to close down the exhibition space, so to cancel basically the institutional aspect of it and to migrate in the city. Another project that I work on with an artist and a friend, which is called The Wrong Gallery, is a sort of parody of the gallery system and its really a very small physical space which is nothing but a glass door that operates as a gallery. And I think, again going back to the issue of dependence or independence, sometimes mimicking the institutions and changing their meaning can be a way to operate and find small spaces of freedom, but I think its very important that we really recognize that, as curators, we might think of ourselves as independent but we are really not. The second issue in a way relates also to the myth of the author. You know, a good twenty years ago we went through a phase where everyone seemed to be dead: the author was dead, the text was dead, the critic was dead, and so maybe its time also to kill the curator and forget about it.

ABC | A36B | The Curators' Circle | 157 In a way, we are taking this word a bit too seriously and as a joke I always tell myself that if you write the word curator in Italian (or in English for that matter), the Microsoft Word spell check doesnt even recognize it as a word. So you might wake up at 9.30 to come to a conference on a topic that means absolutely nothing to a good 90 percent of humanity. I think we should really keep this in mind so that we dont take ourselves too seriously and then maybe this way, you can spend your time in a more interesting way. Also this idea of the death of the curator makes me think of something else: when you go to the movies, or to the theater, you want to see a beautiful movie in a comfortable or interesting theater and you dont want the guy who just sold you the tickets to keep telling you Look here, look there, this is criticism, this is an institution. I think part of the responsibility of the curator is actually to disappear and I realize this will raise many other discussions because there are different ways in which you can disappear. In fact its a problem whether you can disappear or not. But I do think we should look at other places and other experiences in which the role of the curator is more invisible and discreet. I think this is all I wanted to throw on the table. Maybe Ill pass it on to Nicolas?

What is wrong today? That curating follows a neoliberal model. The curator has become an artist/ subject, a figure that one might associate with people like Jackson Pollock, as he is shown in the photographs of Hans Namuth. We see Pollock depicted as the sole creator and his art an outflow of his genius. This idea, however, is a total myth. It is a myth in Jackson Pollocks case, whose artistic production was in part determined by his wife, Lee Krasner, and whose image was in part created by Namuths photos. It is a myth for the curator as well, who depends on all kinds of frameworks, independently of whether he or she works inside or outside of an institution. Gilane talked about the curator star; well, we all know that stars are merely images produced for consumption. What we need today is a discussion about curatorial methods and I am glad that Art Basel, amongst others, has started to engage in this discussion. Do we know what we are doing? I am going to sketch out two models of curating, and the first one takes the form of a triangle. The three points of the triangle are the author, the builder of the canon, and the custodian. We can take a figure like Harald Szeeman as the prototype for the author. As influential as his shows were, we should not forget that the most mythical one, When Attitudes Become Form, had a framework of corporate self-representation, without which it might not have come into being, (it was sponsored by Phillip Morris.) The builder of canons can easily be associated with the curatorship of documenta 10 and 11. Maria Finders: Can we please turn up the lights Catherine David and Okwui Enwezor both estab- so we can see the public? lished canons differentiated from the mainstream at the time. Finally, you have the often anonymous museum custodians, who are in fact the people who do the brunt of the work on which we all depend. Whereas the first model of curatorship, the triangle, relies on individual subjectivity, the second one emphasizes relationality. When I try to picture relationality, a work of art comes to my

158 | ABC | A36B | The Curators' Circle Presentation | Nicolas Bourriaud I certainly agree with Massimiliano when he says that the difference between independent curators and institutional curators is certainly irrelevant, surely. I dont believe its still a very convenient way to put things. I think the curator today is somebody who goes from one network to the other, like from the private to the public and from the public to the private and back again, at least when I think of my own experience. Its not like youre stuck in one circuit and obliged to stay within it for the rest of your life, or at least I hope its not. But this is also debatable. The fact is something else that might be more interesting to discuss, and this is the idea of disappearing. Of course there are ways of disappearing which make you more present than before, so we have to be careful about how to do it. Sometimes showing is important in defining what a curator it. Its somebody who points at things and says This might be more interesting than this, and this is the function that the market doesnt like it very much. We may also have to address these issues because the boundaries between the curator and the critic are not very clear-cut. A curator should be somebody whos able to make distinctions, selections between different products, lets say, or different values and its a bit worrying, actually, for the system, in a way. But exactly whats asked? Criticism, for example, is a value that today is not that popular and I remember that there was this question like Is money the best art critic today? or something like that which is somehow frightening but somehow very interesting also, because it might be true, in a way. The fact is, lets think about the roots of this strange activity. I have this feeling that a long, long time ago, the first curator was perhaps the first trader. So you had these people going from one tribe to another bringing things that the other tribe didnt have and it was about connecting different localities but also about bringing something new and unknown to a place. And of course the first traders were considered as very dangerous exactly because of this. And something remains from this somehow, because today, were going from one place to another to bringing new and unknown information. Suppose if you curate a show in Asia, or Dakar, Senegal, or Paris, France, there is a totally different level of information and youre supposed to bring something to the situation youre confronting. So, for me, information is a key issue. This is especially because, for the first time in human history, I dont think anybody from any field can actually gather all the information that is available in their respective field. If I take for example art, I am not able today to know everything thats going on in my own field of expertise; not in the way I would have twenty or thirty years ago. Today, it is absolutely impossible. Thats something which is fascinating and important. Were reaching the critical mass of information which makes us, all of us, unable to handle the huge amount of data that is produced by our own field of activity which is absolutely stupid, in a way, but thats the way it works. So I think our type of job is no longer based on knowing things, or on accumulating data. We are back to the model of the old scholar; what makes the difference is our ability to cut pathways within culture, to produce itineraries, to trace routes and point to ways out, to circulate in the field of art. So thats our job, in a way, navigators within the huge amount of information with the ability to pave roads related to the notion of display and the display of information. But its an information landscape built on the accumulation of the production of art. In Conversation | Massimiliano Gioni Ruth Noack Gilane Tawadros Nicolas Bourriaud Host | Maria Finders Maria Finders: Is there a tension between what Massimiliano was saying and what you are saying? Because Massimiliano talked about disappearing, while Nicolas is talking about the curator taking the responsibility of setting a course of navigation, or mapping out a certain path. Is there necessarily a discrepancy between on the one side disappearing and on the other side making things visible when we refer to the role of the curator? Nicolas Bourriaud: I would like to add just one sentence to what I just said: you need a road to get lost, to be able to get lost, yourself, by choice. If you dont have the map, you know, its not possible. Ruth Noack: Im absolutely against disappearance. I think it is extremely important to be there to take the flak, to take the criticism, and to take responsibility for what you have done. The question about the pathway refers back to the market. It is the classical idea of the explorer who is going to new frontiers and in fact a lot of our culture from the Middle Ages on, or even earlier, has been determined by this kind of exchange, by migration of forms. We have been more connected and global for a longer period of time than we tend to think. The problem with Nicholas image is that it suggests a need for information rather than a need to find ways to structure what we are confronted with. For instance, rather than bringing information to an audience, one might help them to make sense of the local via a planetary perspective; how to take the local seriously, without taking it out of context. An exhibition can help reveal the universal aspects of the local.

ABC | A36B | The Curators' Circle | 159 frankly I believe there are more interesting discussions that need to happen about art beyond the bla-bla-bla about the role of the curator. This is what I think should disappear. I feel that sometimes we really give the curator too much emphasis for something that I personally believe should always be in the background. The art should be in the foreground and the artist should be in the foreground. You see it at fairs and so on; how come there arent so many artists panels? How come its expected that there are mediator roles and youre expected to have someone else to talk about the art? I think thats what I meant by disappearing; that sometimes there are more interesting voices than ours on the topic of art. Whenever curators get together, I think there is a specific jargon and there is a specific set of troubles, and problems, and issues that always surface like, for example, one of the recurring metaphors are networks, trade, geography, geopolitics and I believe this is a sort of sclerosis of our language. Its quite incredible because it seems that since curators have started talking, they always talk about a certain set of topics. And if you go back in the history of art and the history even of curating, you know, I think of Andr Breton as a brilliant curator, and back then they were talking about things that had nothing to do with geography, with geopolitics, with neo-liberalism. While I think its interesting to explore these issues, I always find it frightening that as curators we end up talking about the same things all the time. Why dont we talk about imagination? Why dont we talk about romanticism, feelings, unconscious? Im not just speaking about irrational issues but I think there is a whole range of topics and emotions that when curators sit together we no longer analyze. Personally, I find it a bit depressing and thats why I mean we should sometimes step into the background. Art is not really only about that, I think.

Gilane Tawadros: Of course youre right that art Massimiliano Gioni: Maybe I will just go back a bit isnt about that. But in a way, why have curators at to what I was saying about disappearance because all? The logical thing is for us is just to allow artists Im not saying we need to be irresponsible, but to talk about all this, for artists to be here. It would

160 | ABC | A36B | The Curators' Circle be much more interesting, in a way, to have artists here talking about curating and the limits of curatorial practice. The point here, however, is that youve set it out like a polarity, as though somehow these (artists and curators spaces) are mutually exclusive spaces. Its not impossible to talk about the texture of work, the physical experience of work, the sensuality of work, to engage with artistic practice as a physical space you know. Its not only possible; its even possible without translation. Its about an engagement between you and an artwork and thats what I find interesting, that untranslatable space, where there are limits to language. Were talking about the visual but fundamentally, language is inadequate to the task. But where I disagree with you is when you say that curators spend too much time talking about geopolitics, geography, and so on, because these things are not irrelevant. You know, in the last ten years whats happened has been that artistic practice and curatorial practice have become part of the force of globalization, so you cant ignore that as a context, for artists, for artistic practice, or for curatorial practice. So somehow we need to find the balance right there between talking about the work and the context in which it is seen. its about our everyday experience that we are talking about. This is not something that is trendy, or relevant, but problematic within the field of art, its just, you know, what we have to deal with, all of us, every day. So I guess its kind of relevant, somehow. Besides that, I think there is also another notion which is super important that you mentioned which is translation. This idea of translating things is a very underrated notion. In his latest book, Bruno Latour writes about modernist times, discussing this idea of progress which is considered so important, so of course every human group was judged on its ability to reach the highest level of the Western, industrialized countries. The other groups, not attaining this level, were just late; so there was no need to translate anything because, sooner or later, they would catch up and also gain access to our fantastic level of industrialization. Translation should begin now, says Bruno Latour, and we have to explain things to each other and we have to start discussions. Its the first time in history that we think its interesting to have a discussion with aboriginal tribes, for example. Thats something relevant, and its not totally out of focus. So translation has only begun, and discussion has only begun, because were living in a very specific system of thinking which is Nicolas Borriaud: I totally agree that we cannot based on this notion of globalization which creignore the context. Of course it would be interest- ates totally unseen effects in the art field, so, in a ing to talk about imagination and the unconscious way, we as translators try to address this. or whatever the topics that Andr Breton was talking about sixty years ago, but we have to deal with Gilane Tawadros: Whats really important about a specific context. Funnily enough, you know, it this idea of translation is that if theres going to be happened a few times that I participated in a a distinction between the idea of the colonial adround-table about curating that there is always venturer who goes out and the curator, in a way, somebody who says I should not be here, lets give becoming this person who makes everything visthe mike to the artists every time [laughter], ible, translates everything so that its publicly conthats something that will always figure, that sumable. We have to have a degree of consciouscomes back, and thats okay. The fact is, I prefer to ness here, its partly humility but partly undertalk about art too, actually, to be honest. But Ive standing that there are limits to translation, that been asked to answer a specific question so Im there are some things which are expressions or going to try to do it. Of course, you know, this set certain metaphors that you just cant translate of problems that youre mentioning, Massimilia- from one language to another. There are going to no, are a bit like jail. We are caught in this never- be gray areas, spaces that we cant see or know, ending set of problems, but its not only about art, which relates to what youre saying as well about data, and its also about the relationship one has to the art work. The language that translates a visual and sensual experience also has its limits. Thats really, really important to understand, otherwise theres no room for anybody coming to the work to bring their own ideas and experiences and to engage with the work, and thats the interesting point.

ABC | A36B | The Curators' Circle | 161 must be really good, despite which artists are involved in it. So it seems that the hierarchy of the authorship of a project has completely changed and Im just wondering, from you guys, how do you feel about that? Do you want to be the number-one person running that show, or signing it off? Does it have a to be the Nicolas Bourriaud show or is the artist first? And this brings us back to what we were talking about previously about disapearing; Ruth Noack: I would agree that this limitation is it doesnt mean to abandon your project but you the interesting point; we should be looking at what just dont have to be the Steven Spielberg, you is impossible to translate. Let me add that we must want your artists to have this role. also be aware of the fact that translation changes everyone involved. That is why I prefer forging Massimiliano Gioni: But I think, to use your metacorrespondence over translation as a curato- phor, Steven Spielberg is the artist, in a way, hes rial motto. not the curator. I dont know what would be an art The process of translation is never neutral, and world equivalent to this, but you could say that you it affects us all in an individual way. In Rosa Mar- go to see a Spielberg movie the way you would go tinezs show for the Venice Biennale the individu- to see a Picasso exhibition, to use a very cheesy al works where ethicized exactly because she metaphor. I think also, by now, there are so many applied an equal measure to each of them, thus curators and also so many institutions, and the privileging the status quo of the mainstream. In positive aspect of this is that there is not really one stark contrast to this, the curator of the Central hierarchy but there are many voices and that is Asian pavilion chose to contextualize the works, quite liberating. You know, people sometimes thus giving each piece the space in which it could complain about the fact that there are too many establish its identity, beyond just being consid- biennales. I think its totally okay because also the ered as art from Central Asia. If I had to choose quantity in a way helps to erase the model and albetween these two forms of translation, Id rather lows for more freedom. And then I also think, and take the second one. maybe Ill sound idealistic or cheesy or stupid again, if you have a show with good artworks, it Maria Finders: There was something we started functions properly. Even to use your example, I talking about earlier which has to do with this po- dont think its so much about the curatorial assition of authorship. In the film industry, when we pect of the Central Asia Pavilion but simply the fact go see a Steven Spielberg film, do we go to see it that there are better works there, than some of the because Steven Spielberg made it or because Tom works in the Arsenale. I think also, going back to Cruise is in it? And then the cinematography is this issue of translation and place and so on, I kind of relevant and we discover that the actual might be conservative but in a way I think the artwork itself is not made by Steven Spielberg at all, work makes its own context. So yes, its true, we its made by all kinds of producers and studios etc. have to translate and we have to present it, but I But you know, the selling of that authoriship, is still believe that masterpieces create their own really name-based. In the art world, it used to be context and they create their own public. This is that a museum would give value of the art show as also in the tradition of literary criticism; its a wellits author. One would say, I saw it at the MoMA known fact that a text produces its reader. So in the or I saw it at the Guggenheim or whatever. Now artworld, why do we always have this anxiety that they say Oh, its a Hans Ulrich Obrist show, so it we need to explain and we have to know the exact

162 | ABC | A36B | The Curators' Circle context the work comes from. I believe that artworks generate their own place. We go back to masterpieces because of what they are and what their presence evokes. And I think thats what I look for in an artwork; that its not an artwork that necessitates a translation but its an artwork that generates its own public and its own interpretation. You know, I believe we wouldnt go back to a Renaissance painting if it brought nothing with it, but I might be wrong. Gilane Tawadros: The problem I have with this idea is that I believe that when we talk about works by Titian or Rubens as masterpieces, we neglect that were educated in order to understand Titian and Rubens because they have been deemed to be part of our culture and theres a long history of art that allows us to understand this work. But I think with contemporary art there are so many works that are extremely good art but they are very, very complex. Artists nowadays actually self-educate themselves; they do a lot of research in order to come up with forms, with content, with structures. Its not self-explicatory any more, a certain level of complexity is there and in my experience the public has not kept up with this, we dont have the bourgeois public anymore who has been educated to understand whats going on. We have a mass public and so we have people who understand a Steven Spielberg film, they might not understand it to the full extent but they do connect to it because they have been force-fed this kind of imagery. But they cannot connect to work that is actually dealing with issues that are very important if they are not conscious of these issues, or dont have the reference points. So I think that an artwork nowdays doesnt necessarily stand on its own, independent of its context, if it ever did. Massimiliano Gioni: I dont think art works ever did stand by themselves but they do produce in a way the inherent knowledge that they are supposed to be read with. Theyre in a way complementary to the culture of the viewers, who can see the work or understand it. Nicolas Bourriaud: Thats an interesting point. Actually I dont really agree with the idea that the artwork produces its own context. I think its a bit idealistic, somehow, because on the one hand you say that the curator is a person who is totally dependent on the context, while, by some kind of magic operation, the artwork is not dependent on the context but is totally able to provide and produce its own context it doesnt work like that, I dont think so. I think if you put a Titian besides a Sandro Chia and in another room you put a Titian besides a Jeff Koons, you have two different sets of meanings. Im sorry but none of these pieces create their own context ... nothing creates its own context except in lets say a fairytale ... Massimiliano Gioni: No, its the context thats inherent in the artwork and can convey the same experience. Its like saying a book doesnt ... Gilane Tawadros: Can I join in, because I think there are some important issues here? One is this idea that somehow Spielberg or lets say Maurizio Cattelan operate in different spaces. This for me is wrong. What I can agree with you on, Massimiliano, is actually these things all come out of the same context, theyre a product of the same moment, not that Spielberg and Cattelan are the same, but they come out of the same cultural space. I also dont have a problem with the idea that some things require education or explanations and other dont. On the other hand, you know, if you take a Masaccio painting, the context there was clear in the sense that they addressed the papal hierarchy, informing viewers of the importance of paying their taxes to the Pope and so on. There was, at that time, a high degree of shared cultural understanding that did not need any translation. But what you failed to mentioned, and its really important, is that the media doesnt necessarily provide a critical context for engaging with work but rather provides a context for consuming work. So, you know, one has to wonder whether when there is a Damian Hirst show, if everyone is going there because theyre really in tune with what Damian Hirst is talking about or because Damian Hirst has become a kind of media star. People feel, therefore, that being engaged means going to the show and seeing it, in the same way that youve got to go and see the latest movie because its the thing that you can share and talk about with your contemporaries. So I dont think in that case, whatever you think of Damian Hirst, its a masterpiece creating a context for itself. There is a context being constructed about the value and validation of that work. When you have work by an artist whos completely unknown, while it may be the most extraordinary piece of work, there is not the same process of validation by museums, media, critics, curators. This is not a shortcoming necessarily of the work itself. It has to do with the way in which work is presented, framed, validated and so on. Ruth Noack: I disagree with you on the idea that a Spielberg film is on the same level as a work of art. Without wanting to idealize the artworld, I still believe that forms of production and consumption are decisive. Moreover, the museum has long become the preferred space of a mass audience. People might look at films in their own home, but the cinemas are in a crisis. While throughout the twentieth century the public space of the cinema had a highly social significance, it has completely lost its meaning today. Meanwhile the public space of the museum has become an economic factor. Guggenheim Bilbao, I believe, makes its money through sales in their bookshop. And the fact that the Guggenheim is trying to branch out into China is indeed food for thought. An even deeper problem emerges here; the contemporary museum is structured as a space of spectacle and hardly any money is put into doing research or taking care of the collection. The funding of these important activities is not in the budgets of state or private sponsorship. In other words, museums have been going down the drain.

ABC | A36B | The Curators' Circle | 163 Maria Finders: I think before we go to questions from the audience I really feel compelled to talk about something which is a little more serious. Were in an art-show context here. I mean this is Art Basel. The selection of galleries to get into Art Basel, as we all know, is very tough. The reason why its so tough is because whoevers selected here, we assume, offers work that is decent, legitimate, and will gain in value, and all the different things that collectors need to know before they buy something. Unfortunately, in your roles, all of you, you are part of that whole equation. What you show in the exhibitions you curate goes up in economic value. You can imagine the pressure on the curators of documenta, in the context of this whole economic system. Everyone wants to know who youre going to show, because theyre going to want to know who the collectors are going to notice and eventually, going to buy. So this, for me, is the more serious side of this. Of course theres the art and the passion and pointing to the right direction, and translation for a dumb public but I think when it comes down to the crunch what you select has an impact. What is each of you thinking about this, and do you feel that pressure? Ill ask Nicolas first and then well go down the line. Nicolas Bourriaud: Wow. Whos that Steven Spielberg youre talking about? Is he in documenta ... is he in the show? Thats a tough question, actually, because its kind of the unconscious of this profession somehow. Maybe Im totally dumb, which is another possibility, but I dont really feel this pressure, but of course it exists. Of course were producing values for the market; of course, I would be super-naive not to think about it. In fact, you dont think about it when you create shows, but its just a side effect of what youre doing, a kind of leftover that you have to cope with. How can you avoid it? Massimiliano Gioni: Its very difficult to answer in one point I have a few points. First of all, as I was saying, a very positive effect of the proliferation of exhibitions and biennales is that the list is less

164 | ABC | A36B | The Curators' Circle reliable. So, as a suggestion to the collectors in this room, if you want to buy by checking out the names of the Berlin Biennale or the Lyon Biennale or documenta, you might not be on the right track. Theres a tendency to bring in young artists because biennales are, historically, occasions in which you show whats new and this novelty is very helpful for the market and I think we should not loose sight of this. An important part of the discussion now youre going to kill me but about translation is also about the market, because, for example, for most of the work we have seen coming out of under privileged countries included in biennials all over the world, this proliferation has been incredibly helpful for the market because normally an artist from Poland costs 10 percent of an artist from Zurich costs. In other words, sometimes the geographical aspect is not necessarily innocent and its very much related to the market. But again, since we have so many shows and so many museums, simply just checking out the list of exhibitions is not necessarily a good idea. I think in the long run again I probably sound idealistic and stupid the collections that pay off the most are the ones that are very focused, either on specific tastes, or thematic, or kinds of research. Now I think we have a lot of name-dropping in the way that people handle their collections, and sudden fashions or trends are started in Basel and in other art fairs, but I believe in the long run it pays more that you look into a collection in which you see some kind of coherence or some kind of research and some kind of passion for some pieces or for a kind of discourse that you cannot acquire if you simply cross-reference the list of the important shows. I think another issue is that, personally, I always have the feeling that nowadays galleries are very quick in getting to artists and actually they get there a little earlier than biennales which, paradoxically, takes away the pressure of discovery from the biennales. As a joke I would say that today its more difficult to remain an unsuccessful artist than being a successful one because anyone can have a gallery. Ruth Noack: Most artists, even highly respected ones, cannot live off their art. Thus, if showing good art at documenta helps the artists, lets go for it. If they find a market, all the better! But the success of documenta 12 will have very little to do with the artists list, even though we will be showing only the best artists what do you expect? And sure there is pressure, as in every high profile job, but then again documenta is the zenith, once youve done it you can only come down, so in a way, there is no pressure at all. Its just a once-in-a-life-time opportunity to realize a vision on a grand scale and with a great team and a highly interested public. Gilane Tawadros: I think the point youve raised, Maria, is very, very important. Of course were part of the art market, we may not be Hollywood yet but, whether we like it or not, this is now a multi-million-pound industry and we have to be cognizant of that fact; and, absolutely, Massimiliano, youre right that pushing the kind of geographical boundaries of where biennales happen has fed this art market because like every market it needs new products. Certainly curators are part of that market; were part of that process of validating work and adding value not critical aesthetic value but commercial value so it would be extremely naive of us not to acknowledge that. But the reality is that there are still many, many artists who dont have dealers, actually, there are still many, many spaces which are not part of the art circuit, the process of distribution, of validation, of presentation even, so its important not to think that this world, no matter how big its become, is somehow all-encompassing because actually its not. There are still lots and lots of spaces, theres lots of work which museums, galleries refuse to show because they consider it to be too political, too contentious, too difficult, or it hasnt got a dealership behind it and therefore doesnt get shown. So actually I think thats why those are probably the most interesting spaces now, some of the most interesting things going on are actually out of sight of these main systems of distribution and presentation and there will always be those spaces, I

ABC | A36B | The Curators' Circle | 165 think, I hope. This is where some of the more cut- Ruth Noack: I want to end by saying that I believe ting-edge ideas and practices frequently happen that the dichotomy between institutional and aunot always, but often. tonomous curatorship is false. The notion of the autonomy of art and the individual is a conseMaria Finders: I think you can all make a final quence of the formation of the bourgeoisie. Our comment before we start taking questions from problem today might rather be that the bourgeoisie the audience, if there are any questions or if every- is in decline. And why shouldnt there be a market? one wants to go for coffee. We need to make sure that museums and other public institutions have enough money and experMassimiliano Gioni: I just want to add something tise to do their job. We need to stop putting the about the market, that I hope you will not misun- emphasis on the number of visitors and start lookderstand. I just wanted to say that market doesnt ing at the level of complexity of shows. And institunecessarily equal evil. The way its been posed tions should take their public more seriously. here is like You are accomplices of the market and as we were speaking I just wanted to say that Maria Finders: Absolutely! Ladies and Gentlesometimes galleries do an incredible job and col- men, it just might be more comfortable if youd lectors do an incredible job. Personally, I am also like to speak to the curators that we adjourn and thinking, when I think of collectors, I feel that if I we can all go down and have coffee and you can risk with an artist, Im risking what my name? just meet them instead of doing a very formalistic Collectors are risking sometimes more than cura- Q & A. Thank you very much. tors do. I dont mean to say that the market is great but again it can be creative and interesting on many levels. Nicolas Bourriaud: The fact is, you know, there are some artists, like for example take Fernando Botero, he sells a lot, he has many, many collectors and he was not at documenta or in any of our shows. The problem might also be the opposite: do we still have an influence on the market? That might be a bigger problem. Or could it be that Fernando Botero is going to be in the next documenta? Im sure not, but you never know. But this is an interesting aspect because there are many, many artists actually who dont need us, somehow. Gilane Tawadros: The other thing is that there are often private dealers now who I see are taking more risks in terms of investing large amounts of money and commissioning new works than public-sector galleries in the UK. Private galleries are prepared to say to an artist Here, make a new work and Im prepared to invest all this money in you and I think thats also an interesting paradox of where we are now.

ABC | Speakers Directory | 171 Art Basel Conversations | ABMB05 | A36B

SPEAKERS DIRECTORY | Acconci Vito | 100

Aitken Doug | 056 Armleder John | 100 Ataman Kutlug | 059 Boeri Stefano | 057 Bourriaud Nicolas | 153 Brand Michael | 040 Broad Eli | 028 Burden Chris | 058 Chen Yang Chaos | 120 de Corral Mara | 080 Creed Martin | 074 Flood Richard | 032 | 081 Fraser Andrea | 100 Gardner Gates Mimi | 041 Gioni Massimiliano | 152 Golden Thelma | 042 Halbreich Kathy | 043 Honegger Gottfried | 080 Hou Hanru | 120 Hsu Claire | 121 Huang Yong Ping | 121 Huangsheng Wang | 122 Huber Pierre | 080 Lambert Yvon | 081 Lindsay Arto | 020 Medvedow Jill | 044 Noack Ruth | 152 Obrist Hans Ulrich | 019 | 046 | 122 Phelps de Cisneros Patricia | 029 Rachofsky Howard | 030 Rauschenberg Robert | 018 Rifkin Ned | 045 Riley Terence | 060 Rockefeller David | 031 Rondeau James | 047 | 101 Sigg Uli | 121 Tawadros Gilane | 152 Yung Ho Chang | 120

172 | ABC | Speakers Directory Art Basel Conversations | ABMB05 | A36B | ABMB04 | A35B | Index A-Z A Acconci Vito | Architect, Artist, Acconci Studio, 20 Jay Street #215, Brooklyn, NY 11201 P +1/718-852-6591, F +1/718-624-3178, studio@acconci.com, www.acconci.com Aitken Doug | Artist | 303 Gallery, 525 West 2nd Street, New York City, NY 10011 P +212/255-1121, F +212/255-0024, info@303gallery.com, www.303gallery.com Armleder John | Artist, Caratsch de Pury & Luxembourg, Limmatstrasse 264, CH-8005 Zurich P +41/1-276 80 20, F +41/1-276 80 21, info@DPLZ.com Ataman Kutlug | Artist | Blue Medium, 216 W 18th Street, No. 703B, New York, City, NY 10011 P +212/675-1800, F +212/675-1855, www.bluemedium.com, www.kutlug-ataman.co.uk B Baldessari John | Artist, Baldessari Studio, 2001 1/2 Main St., US-90405 Santa Monica, CA P +310/399-5402, F +310/399-7825, www.baldessari.org Bauer Ute Meta | Curator, Alte Schnhauser Strasse 35, D-10119 Berlin www.berlinbiennale.de, www.oca.no, www.documenta.de, www.firststory.net Birnbaum Daniel | Director Portikus, Leinwandhaus, Weckmarkt 17, D-60311 Frankfurt am Main P +49/69-21 99 87 60, F +49/69-21 99 87 61 info@portikus.de, www.portikus.de Boeri Stefano | Editor in Chief Domus Magazine, Via Gianni Mazzocchi 1/3, IT-20089 Rozzano P +39/02-824721, www.domusweb.it Botn Paloma | Collector, Es Arte Deleitosa S.L.; C.Transversal Tres, ES-8-28223 Madrid P +34/917990885, F +34/913512795 contact@palaisdetokyo.com, www.palaisdetokyo.com Bourriaud Nicolas | Co-director Palais de Tokyo, 13 avenue du Prsident Wilson, FR-75017 Paris P +33/1-47 23 54 01, F +33/1-47 20 15 31 contact@palaisdetokyo.com, www.palaisdetokyo.com Brand Michael | Director, J. Paul Getty Museum | 1200 Getty Centrer Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90049 P +310/440-7300, www.getty.edu Broad Eli | Collector, Philanthropist, The Broad Art Foundation, 3355 Barnard Way Santa Monica, CA 90405, curator@broadartfoundation.org, www.broadartfoundation.org Buergel Roger M. | Director documenta 12, Museumsplatz 1, AT-1070 Vienna P +43/1-526 40 64, F +43/1-526 40 84 vienna@documenta.de, www.documenta.de Burden Chris | Artist, Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue, New York City, NY 10021 P +212/744-2313, F +212/772-7962, info@gagosian.com, www.gagosian.com C Cardiff Janet | Artist, Luhring Augustine Gallery, 531 West 24th street, New York, NY 10011 P +1/212-206-9100, F +1/212-206-9055, www.luhringaugustine.com Chen Chaos | Curator, 9 Dongwei Road, 8-2-1201, P.R.C-100024 Beijing P/F +86/10-65 43 58 59 de Corral Mara | Co-curator Venice Biennale, Balbina Valverde 19, 28002 Madrid P +34/915625712, expoactual@expoactual.com, www.labiennale.org Creed Martin | Artist, Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse 270, CH-8031 Zurich P +41/44-446 65 23, F +41/44-446 80 55, www.hauserwirth.com D David Catherine | Director Witte de With, Witte de Withstraat 50, NL-3012 BR Rotterdam P +31/10-4110144, F +31/10-4117924, office@wdw.nl, www.wdw.nl Dennison Lisa | Deputy Director and Chief Curator Guggenheim Museums Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128 P +1/212-423-3680, F +1/212-423-3641, www.Guggenheim.org

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Donnelly Trisha | Artist, Casey Kaplan, 416 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10014 P +1/212-645-7335, F +1/212-645-7835, www.caseykaplangallery.com E Eliasson Olafur | Artist, Werkstatt & Bro, Tor 5/Eingang 1, Invalidenstr. 5051, D-10557 Berlin P +49/30-425 38 48, F +49/30-428 51 479 studio@olafureliasson.net, www.olafureliasson.net Elliott David | Director Mori Art Museum, 6-10-1 Roppongi, Minato-ku, JP-106-6150 Tokyo P +81/3-6406 6102, F +81/3-6406 9352, www.mori.art.museum F Fernandes Joo | Director Museu Serralves, Rua D. Joo de Castro, 210, PT-4150-417 Porto P +351/22-615 65 32, F +351/22-615 65 33 dir.museu@serralves.pt, www.serralves.pt Flood Richard | Chief Curator, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 210, 11th Avenue, 2nd Floor, New York City, NY 10001, P +212/219-1222, F +212/ 431-5328 newmu@newmuseum.org, www.newmuseum.org Fraser Andrea | Artist, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, 535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011 P +1/212-680-9467, F +1/212-680-9473, info@petzel.com, www.petzel.com G Gardner Gates Mimi | llsley Ball Nordstrom Director, Seattle Art Museum, 100 University Street, Seattle, WA 98101-2902 P +206/654.3100, www.seattleartmuseum.org de Galbert Antoine | Collector, La Maison Rouge Fondation Antoine de Galbert 10 bd de la bastille, FR-75012 Paris P +33/1-40 01 08 81, F +33/1-40 01 08 83; www.lamaisonrouge.org Gillick Liam | Artist, 860 United Nations Plaza #17G, New York, NY 10017 www.airdeparis.com/liam.htm Gioni Massimiliano | Co-curator 4th Berlin Biennal, Auguststr. 69, D-10117 Berlin P +49/30-28 44 50 38, F +49/30-28 44 50 39 info@berlinbiennale.de, www.berlinbiennale.de Golden Thelma | Director & Chief Curator | Studio Museum Harlem, 144 West 125th Street, New York City, NY 10027 P +212/ 864.4500, F +212/ 864.4800, www.studiomuseum.org H Hadid Zaha | Zaha Hadid Architects, Studio 9, 10 Bowling Green Lane, UK-EC1R 0BQ London P +44/20-7253 5147, F +44/20-7251 8322 mail@zaha-hadid.com, www.zaha-hadid.com Halbreich Kathy | Director of the Walker Art Center, 725 Vineland Place, Minneapolis, MN 55403 P +1/612-375-7676, F +1/612-375-756 info@walkerart.org, www.walkerart.org Hasegawa Yuko | Director, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa 1-1 Kakinoki-batake, Kanazawa, JP-920-0999 Ishikawa www.kanazawa21.jp/en/ Hessel Marieluise | Collector, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, NY 12504-5000 P +1/914-758-7598, F +1/914-758-2442, ccs@bard.edu, www.bard.edu Hoffman Erika | Collector, Sammlung Hoffmann, Sophienstrasse 21, D-10178 Berlin www.sophie-gips.de Hoffmann Jens | Director of Exhibitions Institute of Contemporary Arts,The Mall, UK-SW1Y 5AH London P +44/20-7766 1426, F +44/20-7306 0122, www.ica.org

174 | ABC | Speakers Directory Art Basel Conversations | ABMB05 | A36B | ABMB04 | A35B | Index A-Z Holzer Jenny | Artist, 80 Hewitts Road, Hoosick Falls, New York, NY 12090 Honegger Gottfried | Artist, Parc Vallombrosa, 6, Avenue Jean-de-Noailles, FR-06400 Cannes Huang Yong Ping | Artist, Gladstone Gallery, 515, West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011 P +1/212-206-9300, F +1/212-206-9301 info@gladstonegallery.com, www.gladstonegallery.com Huber Pierre | Art Dealer, Collector, Collection Pierre Huber, Geneva, Switzerland Art & Public, 35, rue des Bains, CH-1205 Genve P +41/22-781 46 66, F +41/22-781 47 15, www.artpublic.ch Hsu Claire | Executive Director, Asia Art Archive, 2/F no.8 Wah Koon Building 181-191 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong P +852/2815-1112, F +852/2815-0032, info@aaa.org.hk, www.aaa.org.hk Huangsheng Wang | Director Guangdong Museum of Art Er-sha Island, Guangzhou 510105, Guangdong, China P +86/020-87351289, F +86/020-87351085 I J K Knig Kasper | Director Museum Ludwig, Bischofsgartenstr. 1, D-50667 Cologne P +49/221-221 21125, F +49/221-221 22600 info@museum-ludwig.de, www.museum-ludwig.de Koolhaas Rem | Office for Metropolitan Architects, Heer Bokelweg 149, NL-3032 Rotterdam P +31/102438200, office@oma.nl, www.oma.nl Koons Jeff | Artist, Jeff Koons Productions, 601 West 29th Street, New York, NY 10001 P +1/212-226-2894, F +1/212-226-5916 Kvaran Gunnar B. | Director Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Dronningens gt. 4, Postboks 1158 Sentrum, NO-0107 Oslo P +47/22-93 60 62, F +47/22-93 60 65, www.af-moma.no L Lentz Wilfried | Director SKOR, Ruysdaelkade 2, NL-1072 AG Amsterdam P +31/20-672 25 25, F +31/20-379 28 09, www.skor.nl Lambert Yvon | Art Dealer, Yvon Lambert Gallery, 108 rue Vielle du Temple, FR-75003 Paris M Martinez Rosa | Co-director of the Venice Biennale 2005 Gsol 3, tico 1, ES-08017 Barcelona P/F +34/932055716, www.rosamartinez.com Medvedow Jill | James Sachs Plaut Director , ICA (The Institute of Contemporary Art), 955 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02115 P + 617/266-5152, F+ 617/266-4021, info@icaboston.org Mesquita Ivo Costa | Curator, Rua Par 222 # 71, BR-01243-020 So Paulo N Neto Ernesto | Artist, Galeria Fortes Vilaa, Rua Fradique Coutinho 1500, BR-05416-001 So Paulo P +55/11-30 32 70 66, F +55/11-30 97 03 84 galeria@fortesvilaca.com.br, www.fortesvilaca.com.br Noack Ruth | Independent curator and art historian, Documenta 12, Museumsplatz 1, AT-1070 Vienna P +43/1-526 40 64, F +43/1-526 40 84, vienna@documenta.de, www.documenta.de O Obrist Hans Ulrich | Curator Muse dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 11 ave. du Prsident Wilson, FR-75116 Paris P +33/1-53-67 40 00, www.mam.paris.fr

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P Pedrosa Adriano | Curator, Alameda Itu 285/171, BR-01421-000 So Paulo, www.insite05.org Phelps de Cisneros Patricia | Collector, Philanthropist, Fundacin Cisneros, Fundacin Cisneros, Centro Mozarteum, Final Avenida La Salle, Colina de los Caobos, Caracas 1050, Venezuela, P +582/708-9697, www.coleccioncisneros.org Philbin Ann | Director & Curator Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture, 10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90024 P +1/310-443-7032, F +1/310-443-7069, www.hammer.ucla.edu Q R Rachofsky Howard | Collector, The Rachofsky Collection, The Rachofsky House, 8605 Preston Road, Dallas, TX 75225 P +214/ 373-3157, F +214/ 750-9766 Rauschenberg, Robert | Artist, Galerie Jamileh Weber, Waldmannstrasse 6, CH-8001, Zurich P +41/1-252-1066, F +41/1-252-1132, info@jamilehweber.com, www.jamilehweber.com Rifkin Ned | Under Secretary for Art, Smithsonian Institute, PO Box 37012, SI Building, Room 153, MRC 010, Washington, DC 20013-7012 P +202/ 633-1000, info@si.edu, www.si.edu Riley Terence | Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture, The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019-5497; www.moma.org Rondeau James | Frances and Thomas Ditmer Curator of Contemporary Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, Dep. of Modern and Contemporary Art, 111 South Michigan Av., Chicago, IL 60603-6110 P +1/312-443 3678, F +1/312-443 0195; www.artic.edu Ruf Beatrix | Director Kunsthalle Zrich, Limmatstrasse 270, CH-8005 Zurich P +41/1-272 15 15, F +41/1-272 18 88, www.kunsthallezurich.ch S Sardenberg Ricardo | Artistic Director CACI, Centro de Arte Contempornea Inhotim Rua B, 20, Inhotim, Brumadinho, BR-35460-000, MG P/F +55/31-3571 6638, info@caci.org.br Shearer Linda | Alice and Harry Weston Director of Contemporary Art Center of Cincinnati 44 East Sixth Street, Cincinnati, OH 45202, www.contemporaryartscenter.org Sigg Uli | Collector Advisory Board of China Development Bank, Former Swiss Ambassador for China, North Korea and Mongolia BANFA AG, Schloss, CH-6216 Mauensee P +41/41 921 30 11, F +41/41 921 30 20 Sterling Bruce | Futurist, 3410 Cedar Street, Austin, TX 78705 Official Blog/Beyond the Beyond, www.blog.wired.com/sterling T Tawadros Gilane | Founding Director of inIVA (Institute of International Visual Arts) 6-8 Standard Place Rivington Street, UK-EC2A 3BE London P + 44/20-7729 9616, F + 44/20-7729 9509, info@iniva.org, www.iniva.org U V von Habsburg Francesca | Director Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Himmelpfortgasse 13/9, AT-1010 Vienna P +43/1-513-98-56, F +43/1-513-98-56-22, www.tba21.org

176 | ABC | Speakers Directory Art Basel Conversations | ABMB05 | A36B | ABMB04 | A35B | Index A-Z Vergez Juan | Collector, Laboratorios Phoenix S.A.I.C.F., Humahuaca 4065, AR-C1192acc Buenos Aires Vilardell Mercedes | Collector, Zanglada, 3, ES-07001 Palma de Mallorca W Wagstaff Sheena | Head of Exhibitions and Displays Tate Modern, Bankside, UK-SE1 9TG London P +44/20-7401 5191, F +44/20-7401 5052, www.tate.org.uk Weisman Billie Milam | President Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation 275 North Carolwood Drive, US-90077 Los Angeles, CA X Y Yung Ho Chang | Principal Architect of Atelier FCJZ, Head and Professor Peking University Graduate Center of Architecture, Jing Chun Yuan No.79 Jia, Peking University, P.R.C.-100871 Beijing P/F +86/10-82622712, fcjz@fcjz.com, www.fcjz.com Z Art Basel Conversations | Index by topics

ABC | Speakers Directory | 177

Premiere ABMB05 | Robert Rauschenberg | Artist, Captiva, FL, USA Hans Ulrich Obrist | Curator, Muse dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Paris, France Arto Lindsay | Musician, Producer; New York, NY, USA; Bahia, Brazil A36B | Martin Creed | Artist; London, UK ABMB04 | Janet Cardiff | Artist; Berlin, Germany Trisha Donnelly | Artist; Los Angeles, CA, USA Liam Gillick | Artist; London, UK; New York, NY, USA Jenny Holzer | Artist; Hoosick, NY, USA Jeff Koons | Artist; New York, NY, USA Paul Morrissey | Film Director; New York, NY, USA Ernesto Neto | Artist; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Host | Daniel Birnbaum | Rector of the Stdelschule Art Academy, Director of Portikus; Frankfurt am Main, Germany A35B | Lisa Dennison | Deputy Director/Chief Curator Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Guggenheim Museums; New York, USA Olafur Eliasson | Artist; Berlin, Germany Zaha Hadid | Architect; London, England Kasper Knig | Director Ludwig Museum; Cologne, Germany Gunnar B. Kvaran | Director of The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art; Oslo, Norway Bruce Sterling | Author, Journalist, Futurist; Austin, Texas, USA Host | Hans Ulrich Obrist | Curator Muse dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Paris, France Art Collections ABMB05 | Eli Broad | Collector, Philanthropist, The Broad Art Foundation; Santa Monica, CA, USA Patricia Phelps de Cisneros | Collector, Philanthropist, The Fundacin Cisneros; Caracas, Venezuela Howard Rachofsky | Collector, The Rachofsky Collection; Dallas, Texas USA David Rockefeller | Collector, Philanthropist; New York, NY, USA Host | Richard Flood | Chief Curator, New Museum; New York, NY, USA A36B | Maria de Corral | Art Critic and Independent Curator, Co-Director 51st Venice Biennale, Member of the Advisory Committee of Telefonica Foundation Collection; Madrid, Spain Gottfried Honegger | Artist, Collector lEspace dArt Concret, and Albers-Honegger Collection; Chateau Mouans-Sartoux, France; Zurich, Switzerland Pierre Huber | Art Dealer, Collector, Collection Pierre Huber; Geneva, Switzerland Yvon Lambert | Art Dealer, Collector, Yvon Lambert Collection; Paris, France; New York City, NY, USA Host | Richard Flood | Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Walker Art Center; Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA ABMB04 | Paloma Botn | Member of the Board and Arts Committee Coordinator, Fundacin Marcelino Botin; Advisor art collection Grupo Santander; Santander/Madrid, Spain Antoine de Galbert | Collector, President and Founder of La Maison Rouge; Paris, FR Hans-Michael Herzog | Director, Daros-Latinamerica AG; Zurich, Switzerland Marieluise Hessel | Private Collector, Founder and Chair, Center of Curatorial Studies, Bard College; New York, NY, USA Ricardo Sardenberg | Centro de Arte Contempornea Inhotim; Belo Horizonte, Brazil Host | Adriano Pedrosa | Curator, Writer, Editor; So Paulo, Brazil

178 | ABC | Speakers Directory Art Basel Conversations | Index by topics A35B | Juan Vergez | Private Collector; Buenos Aires, Argentina Mercedes Vilardell | Private Collector; Palma de Mallorca, Spain Francesca von Habsburg | Chairman Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary; Vienna, AT Billie Milam Weisman | Director Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation; Los Angeles, CA, USA Host | Maria Finders | Curator Art Basel Conversations; Basel, Switzerland ABMB02 | Harald Falckenberg | Private Collector, Founder of the Sammlung Falckenberg; Hamburg, Germany Katerina Gregos | Independent Curator, former Director Deste Foundation Center for Contemporary Arts; Athens, Greece Eugenio Lpez | Private Collector, President La Coleccin Jumex; Mexico City, Mexico Host | Adriano Pedrosa | Curator, Writer, Editor; So Paulo, Brazil Architecture for Art ABMB05 | Doug Aitken | Artist; Los Angeles, USA Kutlug Ataman | Artist; Istanbul, Turkey Stefano Boeri | Editor in Chief Domus Magazine; Milan, Italy Chris Burden | Artist; Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY, USA Host | Terence Riley | Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture, MoMA; New York, NY, USA A36B | Vito Acconci | Architect, Artist; New York, NY, USA John Armleder | Artist; Geneva, CH, New York, NY, USA Andrea Fraser | Artist; New York, NY, USA Host | James Rondeau | Frances and Thomas Ditmer Curator of Contemporary Art, Department of Contemporary Art, the Art Institute of Chicago; Chicago, USA ABMB04 | Kathy Halbreich | Director of the Walker Art Center; Minneapolis, MI, USA Rem Koolhaas | Architect, Oma; Rotterdam, The Netherlands Hans Ulrich Obrist | Curator Muse dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Paris, France Host | Terence Riley | Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture, MoMA; New York, NY, USA A35B | David Elliott | Director Mori Art Museum; Tokyo, Japan Joo Fernandes | Director of Museu de Serralves; Porto, Portugal Yuko Hasegawa | Chief Curator, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art; Kanazawa, Japan Rosa Martinez | Co-director of the Venice Biennale 2005; Barcelona, Spain Host | Stefano Boeri | Architect, Editor in Chief Domus Magazine; Milan, Italy ABMB02 | Maxwell L. Anderson | Former Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art; New York, NY, USA Richard Gluckman | Architect, GMA GluckmanMayner Architects; New York, NY, USA Public/Private ABMB05 | Michael Brand | Director, J. Paul Getty Museum; Los Angeles, CA, USA Mimi Gardner Gates | Illsley Ball Nordstrom Director; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle WA, USA Thelma Golden | Director & Chief Curator, Studio Museum Harlem; New York, NY, USA Kathy Halbreich | Director of the Walker Art Museum; Minneapolis, MN, USA Jill Medvedow | James Sachs Plaut Director of the ICA; Boston, MA, USA Ned Rifkin | Under Secretary for Art; Washington DC, USA Hosts| Hans Ulrich Obrist | Curator, Muse dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Paris, FR James Rondeau | Frances and Thomas Ditmer Curator of Contemporary Art, Department of Contemporary Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, ILL, USA

ABC | Speakers Directory | 179

A36B | Yung Ho Chang | Principal Architect of Atelier FCJZ, Head and Professor, Peking University Graduate Center of Architecture; Beijing, Peoples Republic of China Chaos Chen | Curator, Founder CHAOSPROJECTS|Visual Thinking; Beijing, Peoples Republic of China Hou Hanru | Curator; Paris, France Claire Hsu | Executive Director, Asia Art Archive; Hong Kong, Peoples Republic of China Huang Yong Ping | Artist; Paris, France Uli Sigg | Collector, Advisory Board of China Development Bank, Former Swiss Ambassador for China; North Korea and Mongolia Huangsheng Wang | Director Guangdong Museum of Art, Ershadao Island Guangzhou; Guangdong, Peoples Republic of China Guan Yi | Collector; Beijing, Peoples Republic of China Host | Hans Ulrich Obrist | Curator Muse dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Paris, France A35B | Erika Hoffman | Private Collector, Founder of Sammlung Hoffman; Berlin, Germany Wilfried Lentz | Director SKOR; Amsterdam, The Netherlands Beatrix Ruf | Director/Curator, Kunsthalle Zrich; Zurich, Switzerland Host | James Rondeau | Frances and Thomas Dittmer Curator, Contemporary Art, The Art Institute of Chicago; Chicago, IL, USA The Curator's Circle A36B | Massimiliano Gioni | Co-curator 4th Berlin Biennal; Berlin, Germany; Artistic Director Fondazione Nicola Trussadri; Miliano, Italy Ruth Noack | Curator, Documenta 12, independent Curator and Art Historian Gilane Tawadros | Founding Director of inIVA (Institute of International Visual Arts); London, UK Host | Nicolas Bourriaud | Co-director Palais de Tokyo, Curator, Author; Paris, France; Co-curator Biennale de Lyon, 2005 ABMB04 | Rosa Martinez | Co-director of the Venice Biennale 2005; Barcelona, Spain Ann Philbin | Director and Curator, Hammer Museum of Art and Culture; Los Angeles, CA, USA Linda Shearer | Alice and Harry Weston Director of the Contemporary Art Center of Cincinnati; Cincinnati, CI, USA Sheena Wagstaff | Chief Curator, Director of Exhibitions and Display, Tate Modern; London, England Host | Ivo Costa Mesquita | Independent Curator; So Paulo, Brazil A35B | John Baldessari | Artist, San Diego; CA, USA Ute Meta Bauer | Freelance Curator; Vienna, Austria Roger M. Buergel | Exhibition Organizer, Author, Director Documenta 12; Vienna, Austria Catherine David | Chief Curator, Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art; Rotterdam, The Netherlands Host | Jens Hoffmann | Curator, Writer, Director of Exhibitions, Institute of Contemporary Art; London, England The Future of the Museum ABMB02 | Yona Friedman | Architect; France and Hungary Franois Roche | R & Sie. Architects; Paris, France Fernando Romero | President, Laboratorio de la Ciudad de Mxico (LCM); Mexico Host | Hans Ulrich Obrist | Curator Muse dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Paris, France

180 | ABC | Art Lobby | Participants Art Lobby | Participants 2005/2004/2003/2002

Art Lobby | Participants | 181

ART LOBBY | Art Lobby is a salon-style contact platform in the Art Unlimited Hall of
Art Basel. It serves as an open and experimental space hosting various forms of activities such as personal encounters with art-world personalities and special guests, interviews, featured artists, short presentations, roundtables, opinion talks, and chance meetings. A choice selection of invited guests engaging in ongoing discussion and debate with informed visitors or commentators in passing. The activities of Art Lobby are free and open to all visitors of Art Basel. Participants at Art Lobby 2005 Mariana Abramovic | Artist; Amsterdam, Netherlands. Doug Aitken | Artist; Los Angeles, CA. USA John Armleder | Artist; Geneva, Switzerland Christophe Cherix | Curator Cabinet des estampes du Muse dart et dhistoire; Geneva, Switzerland Martine de la Chtre | Galerie martinethibaultdelachtre; Paris, France Michle Didier | Editor; Brussel, Belgium Jim Drain | Artist; Providence, RI, USA Christopher Eamon | Curator Kramlich Collection; San Francisco, CA, USA Didier Fiuza Faustino | Artist; Paris, France Ryan Gander | Artist; London, England Lars Henrik Gass | Festival Director; Kaiserslautern, Germany Annet Gelink | Annet Gelink Gallery; Amsterdam, Netherlands Irene Gludowacz | Author; Munich, Germany Carol A. Greene | Greene Naftali Gallery; New York City, NY, USA Karin Handlbauer and Donata Fuchs | Mezzanin Galerie; Vienna, Austria; Art-Law Centre; Geneva, Switzerland Anthony Hayden-Guest | Editorialist Samuel Herzog | Journalist NZZ; AICA, Basel, Switzerland Albert Hofmann | Scientist; inventor of LSD, Basel, Switzerland Renate Kainer | Galerie martinethibaultdelachtre; Paris, France Christoph Keller | Revolver Books; Frankfurt am Main, Germany Pamela Kramlich | Collector; San Francisco, CA, USA Joshua Mack | Contributing Editor; Modern Painters Peter Mosimann | Attorney-at-law; Chairman; Basel, Switzerland Maurizio Nannucci | Artist, Florence, Italy Hans Ulrich Obrist | Curator, Muse dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France Meet Ousseynou Wade | Director of the 7th Dakar Biennale (Dakar), 2006 Diana Widmeier Picasso | Author; Paris, France Julian Radcliffe | Director, Art Loss Register; London, England Marc-Andr Renold | Attorney-at-law, Lecturer at the University of Geneva; Co-Director, Allen Ruppersberg | Artist; New York City, NY, USA Georg von Segesser | Attorney-at-law; Zurich, Switzerland Christoph Schifferli | Collector; Publisher Editor, Zurich, Switzerland Kristina Solomukha | Artist; Paris, France Karl Schweizer | Attorney-at-law; Managing Director, UBS Art Banking; Basel, Switzerland Marc Spiegler | Art World Journalist Joanne Tatham & Tom OSullivan | Artists; Glasgow, England Judd Tully | Editor; Modern Painters

Billie Milam Weisman | Director and President; Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation; Los Angeles, CA, USA Alexander Wolff | Artist; Berlin, Germany Bruce Wolmer | LTB Group Editorial Director and Art+Auction Editor in Chief Karen Wright | Editor of Modern Painters; London, England Participants at Art Lobby 2004 Albrecht Lothar | Director of L.A. Gallery in Frankfurt and Beijing; Germany, China Berg Eddie | Executive Director FACT; Liverpool, England Brderlin Markus | Curator ArchiSKULPTUR Fondation Beyeler; Riehen/Basel, Switzerland Craig Patsy | Editor; London, England Eskildsen Ute | Director of Photography at the Wolfgang Museum; Essen, Germany Haye Christian | Founder of The Project Gallery; New York/Los Angeles, USA Herzog Samuel | Art Critic, Journalist; Basel, Switzerland Icelandic Love Corporation, The | Artists; Reykjavik, Iceland Jolles Claudia | Editor kunstbulletin; Zurich, Switzerland Jonsdottir Edda | Director I8 Galleri; Reykjavik, Iceland Lakra, Dr. | Artist; Mexico City, Mexico Manzutto Monica | Director Kurimanzutto; Mexico City, Mexico Marcus John | Film Producer, The Story Department; New York, NY, USA Menz Marguerite | Art Critic; Geneva, Switzerland Nourbakhsch Giti | Director Gallery Nourbakhsch; Berlin, Germany Obrist Hans Ulrich | Curator Muse dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Paris, France Pia Francesca | Director Francesca Pia Gallery; Berne, Switzerland Perret Mai-Thu | Artist; Geneva, Switzerland Reyle Anselm | Artist; Berlin, Germany Ruby Andreas | Architecture Critic; Cologne, Germany Schindler Annette | Director of [plug.in], Art and new Media Basel; Basel, Switzerland Schrmann Rudolph | Neutral, Strategic Creative Director, Partner; Zurich, Switzerland Smith Mike | Mike Smith Studio; New York, USA Spiegler Marc | Art World Journalist; Zurich, Switzerland Sterling Bruce | Author, Journalist, Futurist; Austin, Texas, USA Vaney Anne Lena | Curator, Editor; Paris, France Waltener Shane | Editor, Modern Painters Magazine; London, England Participants at Art Lobby 2003 Armleder John | Artist; Geneva, Switzerland; New York, USA Armstrong Matthew | Former Curator UBS Art Collection; New York, USA Bechtler Cristina | Private Collector and Editor; Zurich, Switzerland Bellet Harry | Journalist, Le Monde; Paris, France Bonami Francesco | Manilow Sen. Curator, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art; Chicago, USA Brgi Bernhard Mendes | Director Kunstmuseum Basel; Basel, Switzerland Cesar Claudio | Founder/Chairman Cesar Foundation for the Visual Arts; USA Elgiz Can & Sevda | Private Collectors, Founders of 4L Contemporary Art Museum; Istanbul, Turkey Faustino Didier Fiuza | Architect; Paris, France Frances Fernando | Director Fundacin Coca Cola; Spain Glaus Bruno | Co-Author Kunstrecht; Zurich, Switzerland Gregos Katerina | Curator and Art Critic; Athens, Greece

182 | Art Lobby | Participants Art Lobby | Participants 2005/2004/2003/2002 Gilbert & George | Artists; London, England Gschwind Rudolf | Director Cesar Foundation for the Visual Arts; Switzerland Herzog Jacques | Architect; Basel, Switzerland Herzog Samuel | Journalist, NZZ; Basel, Switzerland Jetzer Gianni | Curator, Kunsthalle St. Gallen; St. Gallen, Switzerland Joachimides Christos | Curator OUTLOOK, Cultural Olympiad Athens; Athens, Greece Keller Eva | Curator Daros Collection; Zurich, Switzerland Knsel Pius | Director Pro Helvetia; Zurich, Switzerland Knig Kasper | Director Museum Ludwig; Cologne, Germany Leutenegger Zilla | Artist; Basel, Switzerland Marketou Jenny | Artist; Athens, Greece Moisdon-Trembley Stphanie | Free Lance Curator; Paris, France Mosca Barbara | British Council, Swiss Chapter; Berne, Switzerland Nicol Michelle | Curator, Co-Founder Glamour Engineering; Zurich, Switzerland Obrist Hans Ulrich | Curator Muse dart Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Paris, France Richner Rosemarie | Foundation Nestl pour lart; Montreux, Switzerland Rosenthaler Lukas | Director Cesar Foundation for the Visual Arts; Switzerland Schwander Martin | Curator Bloise Collection; Basel, Switzerland Steiger Rolf | Director Cesar Foundation for the Visual Arts; Switzerland Studer Peter | Co-Author Kunstrecht; Zurich, Switzerland Szeemann Harald | Art Historian and Curator; Tegna, Switzerland Ursprung Philip | Art Historian; Zurich, Switzerland Vitali Christoph | Director Fondation Beyeler; Riehen/Basel, Switzerland Volz Jochen | Curator Portikus; Frankfurt am Main, Germany Participants at Art Lobby 2002 Arnold Skip | Artist; Los Angeles, USA Beyeler Ernst | Galerist, Museum Founder; Basel, Switzerland Bousteau Fabrice | Editor in Chief Beaux Arts Magazine; Paris, France Casapietra Tiziana | Director Attese Onlus; Milan, Italy Costantina Roberto | Director Attese Onlus; Milan, Italy Delvoye Wim | Artist; Belgium Esche Charles | Director of the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art; Malm, Sweden Frei Georg | Art Dealer; Zurich, Switzerland Herzog Ruth & Peter | Private Collectors; Basel, Switzerland Huber Pierre | Art Dealer; Geneva, Switzerland Jankovski Christian | Artist; Berlin, Germany Koons Jeff | Artist; New York, USA Lamunire Simon | Curator, Director of Version, Professor ECAL; Geneva, Switzerland Pons Alfonso | Private Collector; Venezuela Rondeau James | Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, The Art Institute of Chicago; Chicago, USA Rubell Don + Mera | Private Collectors; Miami Beach, USA Ruyter Lisa | Artist; USA Sigg Ueli | Private Collector; Zurich, Switzerland Stone Howard + Donna | Private Collectors; USA Stooss Toni | Art Expert and former Director of the Museum of Fine Arts; Bern, Switzerland