A NEW AREA OF SOCIAL IMAGINATION

Hans Ulrich Obrist // London

A conversation with Asad Raza, Home Cooking, April 16 2020

The following text is an edited transcript of an interview between artist Asad Raza and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, excerpted by The Site Magazine guest editor Matthew Claudel in collaboration with Obrist. The interview was initially a part of Home Cooking, “an open-source digest of activities, poetry, movement, and live events begun in March 2020. Founded by Asad Raza and organized in collaboration with Marianna Simnett, with daily contributions by artists, critics and thinkers, Home Cooking provides new contents every day under a detailed schedule.”The interview is available here.

Asad Raza (AR): When you began curating shows, you had no formal position or institutional backing. It started with an exhibition in your own kitchen. You were doing things with the currency you had—and friendship. That resonates today, it can be inspiring in the present moment.

Hans Ulrich Obrist (HUO): The key thing is that we can always learn from artists. I was thinking a couple weeks ago, what can we do now? I think it needs big ideas about what we can actually do for art in the world. This is such a precarious and difficult moment. It’s about saving lives and saving livelihoods. That brings us back to the moment of the Great Depression in the 1930s.

When I started a couple months ago to think about what we can do, I remembered a conversation I had with a photographer, Helen Levitt. When I met her, she was almost 100 years old, and I learned a lot from her wisdom—about photography—but there was particularly one very interesting moment in the conversation when she said, basically, “Should there one day be a very big crisis in the world, we should not forget the legacy of the New Deal, and what the New Deal did for us.”

So we should look at Roosevelt’s New Deal as decentralized, government art patronage, and how to connect artists to the social environment… They created basically an art project in the WPA (Works Progress Administration). A very important [part of it]: in over 100 cities they installed community art centers. These helped break down the notion that art could only be appreciated by a limited number of people.

If you look at these past models, it’s not about copying them, it’s not about nostalgia, but the future can sometimes be invented with fragments from the past. It’s fascinating to think how we can use this and what it can mean now for the current moment.

AR: How do we bring many more artists in, and connect it to the public sphere – to transform the public sphere in new ways? There seems to be a pessimism today that we can’t influence how the world is organized. Does this crisis mean an end to the way things have been organized in the past?

HUO: Completely. It is a possibility to define—or maybe “search for,” because “define” is too big. We can search for, and make, an attempt towards a new era of social imagination. That will create new possibilities for art.

We need to think about a new era of social imagination. It’s very interesting what these new models during the New Deal tried to do with that. Rifkin wrote a Green New Deal, talking about how we can address ecology [with a new era of social imagination]. We need to think how a new New Deal can—not repeat the New Deal—but could actually address exactly that same question.

Of course, so far, all of these solutions are based on “the national.” It’s all on the national level. We’ve never been more national than we are now. It all happens basically within the confines of the nation-state. In some countries a lot of support is given to artists right now, and in some countries there isn’t. In the majority there isn’t. We need to think about transnational politics. When it comes to such a plan, a new New Deal, it is interesting to think how we can actually realize it all together, by everyone collaborating in a kind of trans-national way. That’s the kind of thing I’m thinking about when I’m thinking about a new era of social imagination. It’s very important it’s collaborative, that now everybody works together.

AR: What does this mean for museums? How does their role change from a “cemetery of objects” to support that kind of social imagination, as a dynamic entity.

HUO: There is a very strong link between pragmatist philosophy and the New Deal and the pragmatism of do it. (1) Alexander Dorner always said the museum should be a laboratory for experiments, artistic experiments. But of course, if you think about the new era of social imagination, [this can be] also experiments of social imagination. The project that was most inspired by Dorner was a show in Antwerp called LABORATORIO. We tried to apply the idea of a museum as a laboratory. Artists were invited to show their studios, their laboratories. At the same time we had scientists installing their science labs.

AR: The great thing about the art world is that it can be an anti-disciplinary world. It can be a meeting ground between disciplines, a churning of the soil.

HUO: Latham and Steveni founded the Artist Placement Group… It can very much be about public private partnership. The idea was that every government structure, every private corporate structure, should employ an artist. If that could happen [today], it could be as effective as the Roosevelt plan. It can produce a lot of work. Not only would it produce a lot of work—as Latham and Steveni said, it would actually bring art into society. And this is so important, to bring art into the production of reality. That is what Latham and Steveni wanted to do. In a way, on a daily basis, to produce reality.

We decided with the Serpentine to go to Barking and Dagenham. It’s one of the neighbourhoods in London with the highest unemployment rate, but with an incredible mayor—we decided to work with him. There’s a whole project now with a number of artists in residence there. We now have an office there. It’s another form of production of reality. Definitely inspired by Latham and Steveni, and the Artist Placement Group.

It’s not just about making museums free. That’s not enough… If you think about the idea of a museum as a laboratory, the most important thing is that we allow artists to change an institution. Each time we work with an artist, ideally afterward the institution is no longer the same. The art is a process of transformation… to plant something in the DNA of the organization.

AR: What provisions are nurturing you during this exceptional time?

HUO: Andrei Tarkovsky said we are lacking rituals. In a moment of crisis we need to reinvent rituals. We all have been thinking about rituals over the past few weeks. I started on a daily walk in the park. I started doing this ritual of daily conversations with animals, where I ask them about their unrealized projects. We need to talk about new rituals. (2)

Notes:

do it is Obrist’s ongoing curatorial project, in which he invites artists to create works in the form of instructions: things you can do, actions you can take. Independent Curators International is re-launching do it (home), the book version of the project, in response to the Covid-19 crisis. See here.
In a follow-up conversation, Raza asked Ulrich to give examples of the rituals he was performing. The two shared various rituals old and new: asking animals about unrealized projects, rituals of childcare and childhood, pantomimed tennis, and the deep, ritual pleasure of writing and receiving hand-written letters.

Author Bios:

Hans Ulrich Obrist is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries, London. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show “World Soup” (The Kitchen Show) in 1991 he has curated more than 300 shows.

Asad Raza combines experiences, human and non-human beings, and objects in his work. Often exploring the idea of dialogue and rejecting disciplinary boundaries, Raza’s practice is multifaceted, comprising the roles of artist, producer, curator, and writer. He consistently conceives of exhibitions as metabolic entities in which an active scenario must be constructed.