The Conversation
Series · 17
books · 2007-2013
Books in series
#1
Hans Ulrich Obrist & Robert Crumb
The Conversation Series
2007
This out-of-sequence first volume in Hans Ulrich Obrist's Conversation Series is devoted to the influential cult comics artist, Robert Crumb-creator of Fritz the Cat, Zap Comics and Mr. Natural, among many other iconic underground mainstays. Both Obrist and Crumb are great conversationalists, and here they make a great match:
Obrist: Could you tell me a little bit about how you feel about America and world politics right now?
Crumb: Well, when I was young I really believed in the revolution. I don't really believe in revolution any more; I'm too old now. I think that any violent over-turning of a government or society causes a reaction that is bad or worse than the thing that they were revolting against to begin with... In the early 1970s I believed in that whole thing. I had basically left-wing sympathies but, I don't know, as someone said about communism: great idea, wrong species!
#2
Hans Ulrich Obrist & John Chamberlain
The Conversation Series: Vol. 2
2007
The American sculptor John Chamberlain, known for using parts of wrecked automobiles in his volumetric, abstract work, is widely considered one of the most important artists of the 60s generation. Here, he speaks with curator, museum director, writer and cultural catalyst Hans Ulrich Obrist, editor of "The Conversation Series," about everything from the need for a redesigned hospital gown, to his relationship to Donald Judd and Marfa, Texas, to "recipes" for making art, his years spent in the Navy, becoming a hairdresser in order to meet women, being cast as a drunken womanizer by Black Mountain College scholars, Andy Warhol's Factory, John Waters, Robert Creeley and even Chamberlains, the restaurant he owned with his son in the mid-1990s.
#4
Hans Ulrich Obrist & Rem Koolhaas
2007
In this traditional paperback, renowned critic and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist teams up with Dutch avant-garde architect and paradigm-shifting intellectual, Rem Koolhaas, for a discussion of Koolhaas' work in China, his designs for Prada, architecture as metaphor, and the development of urbanism in the slipstream of globalization.
#5
Hans Ulrich Obrist & Rosemarie Trockel
The Conversation Series: Vol. 5
2008
Originally known for her large-format knitted paintings, over the last 30 years, Trockel, one of Germany’s most revered contemporary artists, has branched out into video, drawing, sculpture and installation. Called “bold in matter, mild in manner,” by Skulptur Projekte Münster 2007, she is deeply articulate about feminist issues. Witness this conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist.
#8
Hans Ulrich Obrist & Zaha Hadid
The Conversation Series: Vol. 8
2008
The celebrated architect and Pritzker Prize-winner speaks with series editor Hans Ulrich Obrist about the projects that established her distinctive, deconstructivist style, and shares her thoughts about contemporary architecture. Conceptual and structural questions are discussed with great precision, providing insight into one of the world’s most influential architectural firms.
#9
Hans Ulrich Obrist & Gilbert & George
The Conversation Series: Vol. 9
2008
Series editor Hans Ulrich Obrist here collects seven years worth of interviews with the hugely influential British artistic collaborators Gilbert & George, providing an intimate vision of what they consider the most important landmarks in their four-decade-long career together. Many of the conversations are delightfully performative.
#11
Hans Ulrich Obrist & Nancy Spero
The Conversation Series: Vol.11
2008
For more than half a century, the influential American artist and activist Nancy Spero has been known for her relentless honesty and her unshakable commitment to political, social and cultural causes—from women’s issues to war and other power conflicts. In this volume, she shares strong thoughts and light moments with series editor Hans Ulrist Obrist.
#12
Hans Ulrich Obrist & Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
The Conversation Series: Vol. 12 (Conversation
2008
The challenging French conceptualist Gonzalez-Foerster is prominent on the international scene. For Skulptur Projekte Münster 2007, she showed small-scale replicas of other Münster fair works, past and present; for her recent ARC Paris museum show, she collaborated with designer Nicolas Ghesquière. Here she speaks with fellow relational aesthetician, Hans Ulrich Obrist.
#13
Hans Ulrich Obrist & Olafur Eliasson
The Conversation Series: Vol. 13
2008
Hans Ulrich Obrist and Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson have known each other for many years, and have worked together intimately—on exhibitions, book projects, performances and more. Their legendary conversations, gathered here, are revealing, challenging, philosophical—and essential to both oeuvres.
#15
Hans Ulrich Obrist & Enzo Mari
The Conversation Series: Vol. 15
2009
Volume 15 of The Conversation Series features a riveting dialogue between series editor and cultural catalyst Hans Ulrich Obrist and the renowned Italian designer Enzo Mari. More concerned with theoretical issues in design than commercial success, Mari is one of the most thoughtful and intellectually provocative designers of the late twentieth century. His work as a product and furniture designer, as well as a writer, teacher and artist, has proved influential both to his peers and to younger generations. In this volume, Mari discusses his iconic designs for cutting-edge production houses Danese, Olivetti and Castelli, his experience of the contradictory aspects of postwar Italy and his unique take on the design trends of the 1960s and 1970s.
Enzo Mari was born in 1932 in Novara, Italy. He has most recently completed a series of tubular aluminum chairs for Vienna's Gebrüder Thonet and a collection for the Japanese home store Muji.
#16
Hans Ulrich Obrist & Gustav Metzger
The Conversation Series: Vol. 16 (Conversation
2009
In volume 16 of The Conversation Series, Hans Ulrich Obrist presents an in-depth exchange with the venerable German-born artist and activist Gustav Metzger, which illuminates the artist's fascinating life and 60-year career. In 1959, Metzger penned a manifesto of Auto-destructive art, which states in part, "Auto-destructive paintings, sculptures and constructions have a lifetime varying from a few moments to 20 years. When the disintegrative process is complete, the work is to be removed from the site and scrapped." In this volume, Metzger talks to Obrist about his past and present association with Auto-destructive art, how he has come to fuse his art practice with his political commitment to human rights and ecology, how he escaped the Holocaust at the age of 13 and the many projects he has yet to realize.
#17
Hans Ulrich Obrist & Yoko Ono
The Conversation Series: Vol. 17
2010
In this volume, Hans Ulrich Obrist elicits from New York art veteran Yoko Ono a portrait of her life and career that is unprecedented in detail. Across five interview sessions, Obrist quizzes Ono about her earliest works in visual art and music in Japan, her musical development in New York, her friendship with John Cage, her Fluxus days, the founding of the new state of Nutopia with John Lennon and her ongoing campaigns for world peace and human rights. Ono also recounts here the genesis of her installations and performances, so many of which have since become classics of their genre. Throughout these discussions with Obrist, in which architects and artists such as Rem Koolhaas and Gustav Metzger also participate, this icon of twentieth-century culture shows herself to be a generous and smart personality, and a multifaceted artist of enormous influence.
#19
Christian Boltanski
2009
Hans Ulrich Obrist and Christian Boltanski are not only associated through their longstanding friendship: Boltanski was also the first artist that Obrist ever exhibited. Over the course of this friendship the two have often met for discussions, the earliest of which, from 1994, are published here. Whether on a taxi-boat in Venice, in his atelier or at an exhibition in Ljubljana, Botanski readily divulges information on his projects. His collaborations with other artists such as Ilya Kabakov, which have also led him into the field of performance arts such as opera and dance, are a particular theme of the conversations; on occasion, other interlocutors step in, such as the designer Jean Kalman or the sociologist Luc Boltanski (Christian Boltanski's brother). The result is an informal portrait of one of the most important artists of our time.
#21
Hans Ulrich Obrist & Cedric Price
The Conversation Series: Vol. 21
2010
The British architect Cedric Price (1934-2003) completed relatively few buildings, but through his drawings, proposals, teachings and conversations, he exerted an enormous influence across many disciplines. For Price, as for an increasing number of architects today, architecture was an instrument towards social and pedagogical growth, and not an aesthetic gesture in itself. His two most famous structures of the early 1960s, the Fun Palace (1961) and the Potteries Thinkbelt (1964) were both intended to foster social cohesion, and were executed as short-term structures. Hans Ulrich Obrist met the great visionary and architectural theorist several times between 1999 and his death in 2003, and spoke with him about his ideas and his most important projects. The result is a spirited and vivid portrait of Cedric Price's life and work.
#22
Hans Ulrich Obrist & Jeff Koons
The Conversation Series: Vol. 22 (Conversation
2011
Reflecting on 20 years of making art, Jeff Koons talks to Hans Ulrich Obrist about his vocation and its frequently controversial highlights. Koons makes acknowledgement here of determinative influences such as Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol, and elucidates his sense of the legacy of Pop art and his own transformations of that legacy. Koons emerges from this volume as a charmingly open and very focused artist, with strong views on the purposes of art today, and advice for practitioners: "See everything as an opportunity. Stay focused, then amazing things can happen." Koons' goals are also inspiringly utopian and appropriate to all forms of art: "The journey of art begins with self-acceptance," he declares at one point, espousing his ideal of art as a tool for happiness. "Objective art is about Love."
#23
Hans Ulrich Obrist & Marina Abramovic
The Conversation Series: Volume 23
2010
Over the past three and a half decades, Marina Abramovic’s astonishing oeuvre, with pieces in which she performs feats of extreme endurance or mortification of the flesh, has laid bare—perhaps more than any other artist has done—the human body’s strengths, limitations, vulnerabilities and complex bouquet of meanings. In addition, her projects have simultaneously provoked and deflected intense curiosity about who could possibly want to publicly subject herself to such agonizing who, in short, is Marina Abramovic? In this revealing set of conversations—conducted in train stations, hotels, galleries and her own private studio—between Abramovic and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, with the occasional addition of other interlocutors including Gustav Metzger (the “Old Master of action art”), the artist talks about her work, the strict discipline of her Yugoslav childhood and the process of preparing for her epochal retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
#27
Hans Ulrich Obrist & Matthew Barney
The Conversation Series: Volume 27
2013
Over the course of about ten years, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Matthew Barney met several times to discuss Barney’s past work, current projects and his plans for the future. The resulting collection of interviews provides a rare insight into how the work and working method of one of the most prominent artists of a generation has developed over time, and uncovers the ideas, influences and collaborations that lie behind his multi-layered and multimedia creative output. The conversation covers all of his major pieces to date, from the internationally acclaimed Cremaster cycle to the somewhat less well-known Drawing Restraint series, as well as looking at particular projects in more detail, such as the recent “Khu” performance and Barney’s participation in Il Tempo del Postino, curated by Obrist at the 2007 Manchester International Festival.
Authors
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Author · 28 books
Hans Ulrich Obrist is Co-director of the Serpentine Gallery in London. Prior to this, he was Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris from 2000 to 2006, as well as curator of Museum in progress, Vienna, from 1993 to 2000. Obrist has co-curated over 250 exhibitions since his first exhibition, the Kitchen show (World Soup) in 1991: including 1st Berlin Biennale, 1998; Utopia Station, 2003; 1st & 2nd Moscow Biennale, 2005 and 2007; Lyon Biennale, 2007; and Indian Highway, 2008-2011. Obrist is the editor of a series of conversation books published by Walther Koenig. He has also edited the writings of Gerhard Richter, Gilbert and George and Louise Bourgeois. He has contributed to over 200 book projects, his recent publications include A Brief History of Curating, dontstopdontstopdontstopdontstop, The future will be…with M/M (Paris), Interview with Hans-Peter Feldmann, and Ai Wei Wei Speaks, along with two volumes of his selected interviews (Interviews: Vol. 1 & 2). The Marathon series of public events was conceived by Hans Ulrich Obrist in Stuttgart in 2005. The first in the Serpentine series, the Interview Marathon in 2006, involved interviews with leading figures in contemporary culture over 24 hours, conducted by Obrist and architect Rem Koolhaas. This was followed by the Experiment Marathon, conceived by Obrist and artist Olafur Eliasson in 2007, the Manifesto Marathon in 2008, the Poetry Marathon in 2009, Map Marathon in 2010, and the Garden Marathon in 2011. In 2009, Obrist was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). In March 2011, he was awarded the Bard College Award for Curatorial Excellence.
Enzo Mari
Author · 3 books
Born in 1932, he's an Italian architect and designer, husband of Iela Mari (illustrator).
Gilbert Proesch
Author · 1 books
Gilbert & George are two artists who work together as a collaborative duo. Gilbert Proesch (San Martin de Tor, Italy, 17 September 1943) and George Passmore (Plymouth, United Kingdom, 8 January 1942) have become famous for their distinctive, highly formal appearance and manner and their brightly coloured graphic-style photo-based artworks.
