Hans Ulrich Obrist Records LA Art Week

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Hans Ulrich Obrist knows how to listen. When it comes to working with artists, the Swiss curator, writer, and artistic director of Serpentine Galleries knows how to ask the right questions, too. The answers  reverberate across his various projects, as told by an awe-inspiring array of luminaries; Obrist’s 362 books and counting include an autobiography, collections of interviews, and artist books, including Remember to Dream!, a new collection of 100 hand-written Post-It notes by creative minds such as Björk, Etel Adnan, Virgil Abloh, Frank Gehry, Yoko Ono, and Zadie Smith in a who’s who of the last century. As Obrist prepares to leave Los Angeles for Zurich, he reflects on his art-filled week—from a studio visit with 95-year-old ceramicist Magdalena Suarez Frimkess to a buzzy, new artist run theater to waxing poetic with Lana Del Rey—and, as the sky pours down in LA, he recalls a fateful previous rainy vacation with legendary artists Adnan, Simone Fattal, and Koo Jeong-A that led to the making of his new book. “It's very much about serendipity,” says Obrist of his free-flowing creative approach to art—and life. “There isn't a master plan at the beginning. It's like a promenade where one thing leads to the next.”

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Meka Boyle: I want to start off by saying that I love your artist questionnaires and am honored to share a Q&A with you. What have you seen this past week in Los Angeles that stood out?

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Hans Ulrich Obrist: Whenever I'm in a city, I always make studio visits. I visit younger, emerging artists as well, but I think it's really important to visit pioneering artists whose work continues to inspire. I just got back from a studio visit with the Venezuelan artist Magdalena Suarez Frimkess. She works mostly in ceramics—she actually grew up in Caracas in an orphanage, and then moved to Chile as an adolescent—when she was 7, she started to make art and draw flowers. She became a sculptor in Chile and moved to New York, where she met her husband Michael Frimkess, a ceramicist and artist. They have lived in Venice Beach for more than 62 years, and they create amazing works together. Suarez Frimkess creates sculptures; there are often vases or mugs, but also other forms. She almost copies the world: It can be Mickey Mouse. It can be Popeye. It can be very old art. It can be her neighbors, her friends, her family. It's an incredibly special way of working. She only had her first show at the age of 84, and now she is preparing a big retrospective at LACMA. When I asked Suarez Frimkess—who works all the time and is now 95 years old—what was going to be her next project, she said a vacation. 

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MB: Do you have any advice for studio visits?

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HUO: Always follow curiosity. Everything starts with curiosity, and, in many ways, it is the engine. Also, listen. We have to learn to listen again. Visiting Suarez Frimkess' studio was very much about listening. For two hours, I completely focused on her world. When I visit a studio, I basically disconnect from the outside. I always ask artists about their unrealized projects. Sometimes there are projects which are too big to be realized, or dream projects, projects that are too time intensive or too expensive to be realized. Sometimes there are forgotten projects. Censorship can be another reason for an unrealized project. And as my friend, the late novelist Doris Lessing always said: there are also the projects we would like to do and don't dare to do. So listen, but also prompt artists to talk about unrealized projects. To then try to help to make these projects happen. This is very much part of my work.

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MB: When you arrive in a city, what is your approach to seeing art?

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HUO: I think it's always a chain reaction of conversations. To give you an example, the Serpentine America friends and I visited the studio of two amazing artists here in Los Angeles: Shio Kusaka, who works mostly with ceramics, and painter Jonas Wood. Both talked about Suarez Frimkess, which then led to this studio visit. Of course in Los Angeles, there are the amazing museums, which I will always visit; there are also the amazing commercial galleries—many new ones have joined this year and keep opening. Then the artist-run spaces, in addition to that, are always very important in cities. In New York, it is Jamian Juliano-Villani's O'Flaherty's. And in Los Angeles, all the artists I met during studio visits are fascinated by New Theater Hollywood, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff's new artist-run space in Los Angeles. It's a takeover of a little theater with 49 seats, by these two artists from Berlin who moved to LA. I went to visit and looked at their program; they are really making a great contribution to the art scene by bringing together people from the world of art, the world of theater, and the world of performance. This very magical program in a small theater is not to be missed.

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MB: Serpentine just had its annual Frieze LA reception, what was the environment like at the party? Do you have a favorite memory?

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HUO:  This year Serpentine's CEO Bettina Korek, myself, and our team are celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Serpentine Americas Foundation, a very important donor group who supports the Serpentine program. Sybil Robson Orr hosted our party in Los Angeles, and I had a particularly memorable new encounter with Lana Del Rey. We had a long conversation about art and poetry. It's always been very important for us at Serpentine—and in my work in general—to bring art, literature, poetry together, and very few artists do this in such an amazing way as Lana Del Rey, who along with all her contributions to music has also written amazing poetry.

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MB: How do you keep track of your thoughts during Art Week?

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HUO: I take notes and make doodles, sketches, and drawings in notebooks. And I always record my conversations with artists. So far I have recorded about 4,000 hours of conversations, dialogues, and interviews. It’s a way of remembering conversations, so I can go back to them. Then there are also the hundreds of thousands of photos we all have in our phones; I think it's a form of diary. Very often, after an intense week of visiting art shows and exhibitions and studios, I will go back to look at all my photos and then take more notes. So it's very analog and very digital at the same time.

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MB: Speaking of notes, you had a book launching during Frieze for Remember to Dream!, a collection of Post-It notes from an incredible array of artists. How did this come to be?

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HUO: It began 13 years ago with a conversation with Umberto Eco, the late philosopher and thinker and writer, when he was in his late '70s. He said:” We should all do something to save handwriting before it gets lost or disappears in the digital age; we need to celebrate it.” And I didn't really know how to do that. Then the artist Ryan Trecartin downloaded Instagram on my phone. It was brand new then, and he had already started posting his photos. So I joined, and I felt that I needed to do something with it. That was the second conundrum. And then, I was on vacation with Etel Adnan, Simone Fattal, and Koo Jeong A, three great artists of our time. We went on a walk where it started raining, so we found shelter in a cafe. The rain did not stop for hours. After a very wonderful, long conversation, Koo and I went on our phones for a few minutes. But Etel—who was already in her '80s, didn't have a smart phone—took out her notebook and started to write a very beautiful poem. 

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When I saw Etel's poem, it all came together: Umberto Eco wanting to do something to celebrate handwriting; me trying to find something for Instagram, knowing that I wanted it to have a mission. I suddenly thought, I'm meeting artists and poets and architects and designers every day, so I could just ask them to hand-write a sentence. That's what I've done ever since. There are a couple thousand now, and we chose a hundred for the first volume of Remember to Dream with HENI [Publishing]. In a way, it shows a bit of how I work: It's very much about serendipity. There isn't a master plan at the beginning. It's kind of like a promenade where one thing leads to the next.