It is a balmy spring evening in Milan. The last rays of sunlight break through the approaching pale grey clouds, flooding the courtyard of the Dominican monastery with golden light. When I introduce myself to Hans Ulrich Obrist, we are standing in the Chiostro delle Rane, the small cloister of the Dominican monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, at a cocktail reception hosted by Prada Frames. I tell him about the idea of a conversation about conversations, a kind of meta-conversation. Tomorrow morning at eight, at my hotel. We are sitting in the breakfast room of his hotel. While Hans Ulrich Obrist has breakfast, I alternate between sips of filter coffee and orange juice. Both our phones are lying on the table, the recording timer steadily advancing.
JULIUS SEBASTIAN FÜHR: Do you know Peter Handke’s play Das Spiel vom Fragen oder Die Reise zum sonoren Land? For the theatre director Claus Peymann, who premiered the play at the Burgtheater in Vienna in 1990, the play is really just saying that we have to learn to ask questions again, because questions are the movement towards the other, in a society that otherwise promotes isolation. Would you agree with this assessment? Have questions perhaps become even more important today, the more isolating our society becomes?
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: Oh yes, absolutely. Molly Nesbit always says that, basically, it’s all about question marks. So: We need a notebook and question marks. I actually begin everything with questions. Even as a child, I asked an endless number of them. My parents even had to go on holiday to recover because I asked questions day and night. Once, they sent me to stay with my aunt and uncle for two weeks. When they came to pick me up, the two of them needed a holiday themselves. Another interesting observation is that we live in a very polarized age, with social media and filter bubbles. People are isolated within their own algorithms, and questions can free us from that isolation.
JSF: What kinds of questions have that kind of power?
HUO: There are questions that are very specific and that you can ask a particular person. But there are also timeless questions that need to be asked again and again.
JSF: What are those eternal questions?
HUO: I always ask about the unrealized project, because essentially everyone has one. There are different reasons why projects remain unrealized: sometimes they are too big, too small, too expensive, or too demanding. Doris Lessing says there are also projects that we censor ourselves. For example, I always wanted to write a novel, but somehow I felt embarrassed about it. The question of the unrealized project is very fruitful because, on the one hand, you learn a great deal about the person you are talking to. At the same time, talking about it can create the conditions under which the project might eventually be realized. Another good question is to ask for advice. I have always found it interesting to ask experienced people for advice, very much in the spirit of Rainer Maria Rilke and his Letters to a Young Poet.
JSF: Which questions do you try to avoid?
HUO: I find it somewhat problematic to ask people what influenced them, because that immediately creates a genealogical narrative. It is therefore better to ask them who they work with. Alexis Pauline Gumbs put it this way in her book Dub: Finding Ceremony about Sylvia Wynter: she is not influenced by Sylvia Wynter, that would be a genealogical perspective, but rather, she works with her. A painter can work with Philip Guston even though he is no longer alive. In other words, you can work with people from the present as well as from the past. So the question is: With whom are you working with? These are two of those timeless questions that keep coming back.
JSF: How does an interview differ from a conversation, a dialogue, and how important is the continuity of these conversations?
HUO: Unlike a conversation, an interview has a clear beginning and end. A conversation is more open, less defined. My archive now comprises around 4,000 hours of recorded conversations. I have spoken repeatedly with around 60 artists over the course of several decades. In this sense, they are endless conversations. The series of conversations between David Sylvester and Francis Bacon was particularly influential for me.
JSF: That is a very good example of this kind of conversation: over the many years of Sylvester and Bacon’s dialogues, the initial interviews evolved into conversations and illustrate dialogue as a figure of thought.
HUO: Yes, exactly. But then there is also the question of redundancy: how do you avoid repetition? Although repetition can sometimes be interesting too. Often, however, you think about speaking with an artist about particular chapters. For example, I did an A–Z with Etel Adnan: I would name a word beginning with A, and she would respond, and so on all the way to Z. Or with Gerhard Richter, we talked about different chapters of his work: the small overpainted photographs, his artist’s books, or architecture. There is always the danger of constantly asking the same questions. When I did my first interview with Gerhard Richter, back when we didn’t know each other yet, I asked questions that I probably wouldn’t dare to ask today. In the end, conversation is like life: serendipity plays a major role. You cannot plan it completely. Of course, you have a list of questions, but it is never linear. And we live in a non-linear age, so you have to leave yourself the freedom to jump between subjects and respond to what has been said. That is how a lively conversation emerges, almost like a living organism. Chance plays an important role in this, much as it does for John Cage, who speaks of controlled chance, which he deliberately factors into the process.
JSF: Yes, that is a fitting comparison between music and the art of conversation. In music, it frees the composer from absolute control, from the constraints of determinism. And like John Cage, Witold Lutosławski, Pierre Boulez, and above all Karlheinz Stockhausen were proponents and co-developers of a liberating compositional method known as controlled aleatorics, in which, as you say, chance is deliberately introduced.
HUO: Exactly. When I enter a conversation, I am extremely well prepared. I read a great deal beforehand and make extensive notes. I have cards and sheets of paper arranged in a certain order. But then I let go of them and suddenly become free. That is when something unexpected can emerge – something alive.
The book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective by AI researcher Kenneth O. Stanley describes precisely this idea: that we are always dependent on serendipity. Life is not a master plan, and neither is creativity. And ultimately, that is true of everything we do. Conversation should work in the same way. It creates the possibility of talking in the present about things we might create together in the future. The future becomes connected to the present. In this sense, ideas emerge from my conversations, and these ideas change lives and, above all, lead to projects that may eventually be realized.
JSF: There is a collection of conversations between Lawrence Grobel and Truman Capote entitled Ich bin schwul, ich bin süchtig, ich bin ein Genie. In the quotation at the beginning, a central question arises that is never explicitly taken up again later in the conversation itself. Lawrence Grobel asks whether conversation can be literature. Truman Capote answers: No, but it can be art. Would you agree? Can conversation also be art?
HUO: To be honest, I have never really thought carefully about what it is that I actually do. I still think about it to this day, but I have never arrived at a definitive answer. All I know is that I have to do it. For me, it is like a mission. I also believe that it has a social relevance today, bringing people together through conversation. There is also an impulse to connect different fields with one another. But above all, it is vital to me, I cannot live without it. I started asking questions when I was three or four years old; it is a kind of incurable curiosity.
Overall, it is perhaps less a visual-artistic project than a literary one. The Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich, for example, turns conversations into literature. How did the two of you come to conduct conversations?
JSF: We were dissatisfied with the limited educational opportunities at our university, so we decided that if we could not ask our professors, we would simply ask the people we wanted to speak to directly and learn from their stories. It seemed, and still seems, more effective to us than sitting in the lecture hall, grumbling in frustration.
HUO: So you created your own school?
JSF: Indirectly, yes. What was it like for you? When did you start recording the conversations?
HUO: In my case, I had always been having the conversations, but I only started recording them later. At some point, I was in Paris with Jonas Mekas, having a drink in a café. At the time, he always carried this Bolex-Paillard camera with him, a very analogue camera that was clearly audible when filming, and he filmed me and the passers-by with it. That meeting was a real epiphany for me: Jonas Mekas told me that if I did not record my conversations, I would regret it one day. So, in a sense, he was the one who gave me this task. I don’t know whether it has anything to do with filmmaking, but by now I have thousands of hours of material. In that sense, it is a very hybrid project, which is why I find it difficult to say exactly what it is. It is a knowledge project.