becoming a loving, accidentally busy paean to inactivity, thwarting traditional American values of industry. Incidentally, Giorno, according to legend, was the only one Warhol knew at the time who slept at length, given the prevalence of then-trendy ‘uppers’ among Warhol’s circle.
Obrist, while Swiss, is more American. Ironically for a Swiss, he has an antagonistic relationship with the clock, and time (because there is never enough of it) – and thus with sleep. ‘Sleep to me is like an accident,’ he says to Ingo Niermann in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Curating But Were Afraid to Ask, ‘because I really don’t want to sleep, and yet sleep outwits me again and again.’ In several interviews, Obrist has reiterated his life’s struggle with the body’s need for rest. This again can be dated to the early 1990s, when his career takes off. An ongoing commitment to travel is one method Obrist uses to defeat the clock. As W editor-in-chief Stefano Tonchi notes, he is always in a different time zone, and so is ‘in his own time zone somehow. There is no way to say where he is, because he doesn’t have a time zone.’
In his war with sleep, Obrist looked at cultural precedent. French novelist Honoré de Balzac legendarily drank cup upon cup of coffee every day to sustain his productivity, and so the young Obrist tried to emulate him. ‘I was having fifty coffees a day,’ he tells Niermann. ‘[But] at some point it simply abated.’ (Niermann notes that Balzac may have died from his coffee addiction, and Obrist laments that the novelist was ‘[r]elatively young’ and it was a ‘sad way to go.’) After Balzac, Obrist adopted a variation of ‘the da Vinci rhythm,’ modelled after the Renaissance artist: he slept fifty minutes every three hours. This was successful (he claims his first books were written this way), but in 2006, after getting his job at the Serpentine, which requires regular office hours, he stopped it. Presently, as he relates in a video on the website Nowness in January 2014, he always gets up very early and never goes to bed after midnight. On starting his Serpentine position, Obrist co-founded the Brutally Early Club, a crack-of-dawn salon that counts as one of its members another art-world workaholic, performance artist Marina Abramović.
Like Abramović, Obrist’s commitment to non-stop work and as little sleep as possible not only has its puritanical aspect but also an association with American celebrity. Obrist’s Nowness video, Morning Ritual, shows the curator in a blue windbreaker taking his morning run through a sun-dappled, gauzily shot Hyde Park, where the Serpentine Galleries are located, while his voice-over relates the oft-told story of his lifelong attempt to conquer sleep. The accompanying blurb extols his industry, quoting him as saying the park is his ‘extended office’ and claiming he still finds time to read at least a book a day (in the video, he says, ‘I cannot live without buying a book every day’). The video is unmistakable lifestyle porn: a stylized and sanitized fantasy version of what we could do or be, couched in consumerist compulsions and giving us pleasure precisely because we know such ideals are out of reach. Ex-model Martha Stewart is the reigning queen of lifestyle porn, but it has a rich tradition in American celebrity, from Old Hollywood how-to memoirs, such as Joan Crawford’s My Way of Life (1971), full of sadomasochistic advice like ‘Never let your husband see you exercise,’ to blogs like Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP, now frequently mocked for its ridiculous accounts of the star’s virtuous domestic and professional lives. A typical goop sign-off: ‘11:29 pm now, exhausted and ready to do it all again tomorrow!’
In 2013, Obrist released a book entitled Think Like Clouds, a collection of his doodles that suggests that even when he’s not consciously working, he’s working. Designed by artist and publisher Paul Chan, the cover underlines Obrist’s ubiquity, with digitized versions of the curator’s head proliferated in a polka-dot pattern. Inside are more than two hundred pages of Obrist’s scribblings, amassed from about fifteen years of activity. In his introduction, Chan notes that, as is typical of doodling, Obrist will scribble during his interviews, or before and during public speaking, which makes him nervous. (Chan calls this ‘a form of public notation.’) The paper Obrist uses is telling: printed-out e-mails, conference itineraries, hotel stationery – all testaments to a frenetic, incessant, global pace. In a postscript essay, Michael Diers writes that Obrist’s ‘scribbles are attractive, and ask to be looked at as well as read,’ positioning them as potential artworks. Yet he also rightly notes that, more and more, doodling is ‘a feature of creative training programs for managers.’ The entire book is uncannily reminiscent of the output of corporate-friendly doodling authority Sunni Brown, who has written two books on the subject and has held many international seminars. On her website, she calls her followers ‘Doodle Revolutionaries’ who ‘put the DO in Doodle.’ Always professing to be an inspiration rather than an impervious paragon, Obrist has, like Brown, gotten other people to follow his example. His popular Instagram account consists of shots of Post-it notes and other scribbled scraps from various cultural figures.
In 2010, Abramović appeared in a video, produced and directed by Klaus Biesenbach, to mark the release of Obrist’s second volume of interviews. In this video portrait of Obrist, she begins by holding up a sign reading,
THE CURATOR IS PRESENT
THE ARTIST IS ABSENT.
She wears the clear-plastic-frame glasses that are Obrist’s trademark, as if to suggest that, for the duration of this video, she is he, or he has somehow possessed her. She proceeds to tell us slowly that ‘Hans Ulrich is. . .fast. . .sleepless. . .restless. . .curious. . .encyclopedic. . .adventurous. . .obsessed. . .possessed. . .art. . .Olympic. . .monotone. . .runner. . .volcanic. . .hurricanic. . .mind-blowing. . .surprising. . .limitless. . .art-loving . . .overmedicated. . .[et cetera]’ and then repeats the list faster and faster until it becomes gibberish. She may be teasing Obrist, who by all accounts is a friend, or giving direct voice to many artists’ concerns about the phenomenon of star curators like Obrist. If the curator is present, is the artist necessarily absent, i.e., disempowered and negated?
More important, however, is the alliance. It’s as if Obrist is the other half to Abramović’s binary, a Dostoyevskian double. Much can be made of this. Both Abramović and Obrist come from marginalized yet relatively new fields (performance art and conceptual curating, respectively). Both seem to have turned themselves into caricatured art-world celebrities, whose defining feature is constant activity for the sake of legitimizing their respective fields. On her part, Abramović has in recent years been dedicating herself to her own ‘Method’ of performance art, to be taught through a bricks-and-mortar Institute in Hudson, New York, but also at various temporary satellite locations around the world. There is a paranoia of professionalism here: a hyper- or accelerated desire to make ephemeral creative practice into ‘value’ and ‘work’ in order to secure its status and canonization. For both Abramović and Obrist, this dedication to permanence has a mock-totalitarian/-dystopian cast. Abramović’s Institute is clinical and bureaucratic, its employees outfitted in white lab coats; Obrist has co-founded the Agency of Unrealized Projects, an archive of unrealized ideas and arguably a play on the National Security Agency, whose aim is also data collection. (Obrist counts Julian Assange among his many interview subjects.) The danger, as writer Thomas Micchelli noted in a 2012 piece for the art blog HyperAllergic, is that impermanence, in being so aggressively combatted, may paradoxically be summoned. Either that, or a severe neutering takes place. ‘[Abramović] refuses to accept. . .finality,’ writes Micchelli, ‘and proposes to recycle a fleeting mode of experience, however ersatz, into infinity.’
As a curator, Obrist has seemed both a totalizing example of contemporary art and an anomaly, his ambition causing him always to have one foot out the door. ‘I flirted with leaving the art world as early as the mid-1990s, perhaps for architecture,’ he tells Niermann. ‘It was all too constrictive; but as [artist] Carsten Höller once said to me: it is the least bad place. And that’s how these bridges across disciplines came into being. I curate art; I curate science, architecture, urbanism.’
Obrist may be the most powerful curator in the world, but he could also represent the discipline’s end-game: après lui, le déluge. As with Abramović, his attempts at securing his own – as well as existing, complementary – legacies,
