Nodes + Networks

The Public- ations and Public- ation Projects of Hans- Ulrich Obrist. Director- Joseph Grigely The HUO Archive is located at- Room 705 112 S. Michigan, Chicago, IL. 60603 Research Fellows and Contributors Nodes + Networks Home

[huobrist]

Ever Archive

The Covid pandemic has slowed down activity in the archive; for over a year we had limited access to the building in which the archive is housed, and publications we received from London during this time remained in their Fed Ex boxes, unsorted and uncatalogued. Meanwhile, we were busy organizing our first public museum exhibition of the archive, and it is finally happening after two decades of work: "Ever Archive: The Publications and Publication Projects of Hans Ulrich Obrist" at the Serralves Foundation, Porto, from 11 November until 10 July 2022.

The overarching theme of the exhibition involves exploring how the documents in an archive constitute nodes within a network of human relations. An archive in this respect is not merely a collection of documents or an enumeration of their publication history, but a diverse array of information that underscores the people, ideas, and cultural projects that contributed to their materialization.  Ever Archive evolved as a way of showing how the materials of the archive reflect upon Obrist’s practice of creating links between people, disciplines, venues, and continents — a sustained practice of cultural hyphenation.

Ever Archive was organized with the support of Rachel Wang and Tess Davey in Chicago, Philippe Vergne and Sónia Oliveira in Porto, and Hans Ulrich Obrist and Max Shackleton in London.  Recently, we've been packing the material we are sending over--a uniquely complicated undertaking in the age of Covid and "supply chain problems"--meaning, difficult, convoluted, expensive, shipping.

[huobrist]

Archive Maintenance

Since Covid closed down the Art Institute in March, we've been to the archive only twice. Once in the spring to complete a dummy publication, and again in September, when Karl Hudson of Hudson Grafik in Germany came to service our Linotype-Hell Topaz scanner.   The scanner had not been maintained for decades, and needed attention. There's another post in the blog further down about our acquisition of the scanner in 2017, and how we had it trucked from Ohio to Chicago, and installed in the archive.

The Topaz scanner was built in 1994, when the world of analog was moving to digital.   It's brilliant piece of engineering, and for various reasons--the software and the lens--makes wonderful scans.  Of course, there are great new scanners made today, but the beauty of the Topaz is that it has a great depth of field--so it captures both the image and the field on which the image is inscribed--so it shows the folds and drop shadows of paper exceptionally well.  The scans appear more three-dimensional than two-dimensional.  A couple of days ago the NY Times had an article about retrocomputing than can be found here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/style/retrocomputing.html   The Times titled the piece "The Impractical but Indisputable Rise of Retrocomputing," but we beg to differ: when it comes to scanners, some retro scanners are very practical, useful, and irreplaceable.

Karl originally worked for Heidelberg company where he focused on Pre-press operations, before starting Hudson Grafik in 2003.  He is the only technician in the world specializing in Heidelberg/Linotype-Hell scanners, which he both services and restores.  When we learned he was in the USA this past fall, we had him come to Chicago to attend to our Topaz, which needed both cleaning and lubrication, as well as a new support computer.

Karl basically took it all apart and put it back together, and installed a new Mac, as well as a new chip for the scanner.  Our old data transfer process depended on using a 100MB Iomega disk drive, lol--but with the new computer we can transfer data via USB flash drives.  We could have upgraded the entire scanner to a Topaz X--ours is one of the earliest versions made--but we decided to keep our old beast, which we love.

 Karl at work:

  Dirty mirror  :(

Clean mirror  :)

Thank you, Karl!

Photos by Tess Davey, Joseph Grigely, and Karl Hudson.

[huobrist]

The Covid months

In late May, as the Covid-19 lockdown settled over Chicago and turned the Loop into a ghost town, our access to the archive was restricted.  For a couple of months, we worked online to complete a new version of the catalogue of the Vitrine exhibitions from 2014-2020.  Rachel Wang, Tess Davey and I just returned yesterday to print out a dummy copy of the catalogue, and next week we will send it off for publication review.

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[huobrist]

New in the archive:  note and scribble pads!

[huobrist]

The Archive in Black + White

Newly arrived and long awaited: "An Exhibition Always Hides Another Exhibition: Texts on Hans Ulrich Obrist" (Sternberg, 2019)

The third book of a series of books of work by and about Obrist, "An Exhibition Always Hides Another Exhibition" constructs a visual and verbal portrait of Obrist as both a curator and cultural interlocutor.  The texts include character sketches, scholarly notes, drawings, and personal anecdotes-- all of which attempt to give shape and form to two the questions--"who is HUO" and "What does HUO do?" Contributors include Etel Adnan, Daniel Birnbaum, Michael Diers, Jimmie Durham, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Giorgo Grigffa, Boris Groys, Koo Jeong A, Bruno Latour, Gerhard Richter, Agnès Varda, and others.  

 Our contribution is an essay entitled "The Obrist Factor," which traces the history of, and rationale behind, the Hans Ulrich Obrist archive of publications and publication projects we have been working on for the past 22 years.

 Like the first two volumes in the series, this one was also designed by the Zak Group in London, under the leadership of Zak Kyes.  The cover art is by Alex Katz.

[huobrist]

Risomania....

Among our fall projects is a small saddle-stitched publication of selected notes that HUO used during the Creative Chicago Interview Marathon last year--images, texts, and texts taking the form of images.  It’s an onerous process trying to get the risograph machine to....behave?  Each time we feed in sheets of French Paper Company’s 70# pink paper, we’re never quite sure how things will come out at the other end of the machine.   The color layer registration can be up to an eight an inch off (or more!) on an 11 x 17 sheet of paper--so it creates a slightly surreal, handmade result.  We intend to have the final project done in December.

The same image, showing the effect of misregistration:

[huobrist]

Design Work in the Archive...

 Interview Marathon Poster In-Progress

 We are working on a new poster for our follow-up projects related to The Creative Chicago Interview Marathon: Obrist’s interview with Stanley Tigerman, our vitrine exhibition of Obrist’s interviews and conversations, and a publication of his interview notes.  The poster, designed by Christina Xu, has gone through a number of design iterations: we are not quite there yet, but getting closer.  

[huobrist]

HUO Interviews Stanley Tigerman

The 2018 Chicago Interview Marathon includes a memorable exchange between Obrist and Tigerman--one of Tigerman’s last public appearances before he died.

As part of the process of bringing the interview into the archive, as both a text and a performance, we worked to subtitle the video.  Initially the process involved transcribing the interview, then overlaying the captions with the video in Premiere Pro. Matching audio and video, adding a black field to the beginning, and then getting captions to appear on that black field, the different layers of video, audio, and captions appearing as movable colored bars, even getting the captions to appear in the right size font, was a challenge. Every small accomplishment was exhilarating and every small setback was equally stomach dropping.  

ST

[huobrist]

Yawnnnnnn....

On October 8th,2019, 7:45 AM (CDT), Reasonably Early Club met with HUO, with the exception being this time that we tried to Skype between two different spaces: MacLean 705, in Chicago, and the Maritime Hotel, in New York.  It was a good plan, except that we got disconnected a few times, which I suppose is emblematic of communication ruptures that occur on a daily basis.  It generally helps to be in the same room, but sometimes the carbon footprint of doing so reminds us there are other ways to communicate in the 21st century.

There have been a number of variations of the Early Clubs over the years (Hyper Early, Brutally Early, and Reasonably Early) and the archive holds a number of these cards, designed by Zak Kyes:

[huobrist]

Conversations and Interviews, 1991-present

  The conversations and interviews of Hans Ulrich Obrist encompass a broad practice that is dialogic in relation to both words and disciplines. In Ways of Curating (2014), Obrist observed that art should function as a lifelong conversation. His first book-based interview, with Walter Obholzer, was published in 1991, and has been followed by almost one thousand interviews with artists, scientists, and writers, in a global array of languages.  Obrist is co-founder of the Brutally Early Club, the Hyper Early Club, and the Reasonably Early Club, all of which are based on conversational exchanges. This installation collects together narrative elements from interviews, conversations, and correspondence, as well as Obrist's prized interview tools, Olympus VN-8600PC digital voice recorders, which have since been replaced by Olympus WS-853 recorders.

  1. Hans Ulrich Obrist, "Gespräch mit Walter Obholzer." Printed in German, French, and English. Wien: Galerie Metropol,1991

2. Hans Ulrich Obrist, Conversations with Joseph Grigely, 1995-present

3. Hans Ulrich Obrist, The Chicago Interview Marathon Notes, September 2018

4. A selection of editions of conversations and interviews, including Conversations in Mexico (2016), Conversaciones en Colombia (2015), Interviews, volume 1 (2003), Interviews, volume 2 (2010), Art Basel: Conversations (2006), Serpentine Gallery 24-hour Interview Marathon (2007), and The China Interviews (2009)

5. Calling cards for the Hyper Early Club (3:30am), the Brutally Early Club (6:30am) and the Reasonably Early Club (7:45am)

6. Susanna Singer, on behalf of Sol Lewitt, via Laurence Bosse, fax of instructions for "Wall Drawing #989," for the exhibition "Do It," 31 October, 2001

7. Four Olympus VN-8600PC voice recorders, retired 

The archive on September 20, 2019:

JG.

[huobrist]

By Appointment

There’s an obvious top-pick tour guide for the Hans Ulrich Obrist Archive: Obrist himself. And yet, his presence—or more precisely his absence—is the motivating force of the archive—ours and beyond. How do you organize the effects a person produces into an experience of its affects?

Our hot-off-the-presses Hans Ulrich Obrist Archive: A Visitor’s Guide introduces our HOW—our archival approach. Intended as an entry point for further exploration, the guide presents the basics of accessing the archive, its physical categories, how to navigate it, and the programming organized by the Nodes + Networks SAIC team. We also curated a sampler of entries from the ever-growing bibliography.

Interlacing text and images, the guide aims to convey a sense of the archive’s character, both represented by the people involved in this ongoing project and curriculum, and by Obrist’s own words and work. Every document within the archive represents a node within a network of human relations. The Visitor’s Guide begins to map some of those nodes.

This work is ongoing; every foray into a disciplinary experiment—like publishing A Visitor’s Guide—reveals fodder for future publications and programs. There is no closure in the archive; it continues unabated, sometimes at a slow pace, sometimes at a hectic pace, subjecting itself to continuous reassessment about the ways it can be organized and shared. Meanwhile, the boxes from London continue to arrive at MacLean 705, where they are emptied, sorted, enumerated, and added to the archive.

As Arlette Farge wrote in The Allure of the Archives: “In the end there is no such thing as a simple story, or a settled story.” Instead there is a mass of fragments, details, and incidents, each publication being a moment in time that does not, for anyone, stay still.

Amid this constant current, we are so grateful for the calm expertise of the people involved in this project: Rachel Wang, Emma Cole, Joseph Grigely, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Max Shackleton, Josh Garrett, Amy Kisner, Katy Niner, the students enrolled in three iterations of Nodes + Network, not to mention the many visitors, collaborators, and supporters of the Hans Ulrich Obrist Archive. Thank you.

K9

[huobrist]

Hans Ulrich Obrist: The Hotel Drawings

In the spring of 2014, when I was doing research in Obrist's Berlin archive, I found hundreds of drawings, most of them on hotel stationary, squeezed into a single cardboard box. This was in the kitchen, among maybe a hundred other boxes stacked on top of each other. The Berlin archive is like an archaeological excavation--every box has a surprise in it.  But this was a particularly unusual and unexpected surprise.

Obrist began drawing in the 1980s to mitigate the nervousness he felt while public speaking, and as a haptic expansion of conversations taking place around him. His drawings have evolved into two categories defined by context: the Notebook Drawings and the Hotel Drawings. The Notebook Drawings are primarily doodles, scrawls, and palimpsest-like inscriptions in notebooks and on scraps of paper (envelopes, faxes, and conference programs)—each tracing the visual trajectory of his thought process in that moment.  A selection of the Notebook Drawings was published in Hans Ulrich Obrist: Think Like Clouds (New York: Badlands Unlimited), 2014. The Hotel Drawings are somewhat different. Most are composed on branded hotel stationary. In an affective turn, they focus more on images, as if place produces specificity. They also engage a spectrum of media—whatever’s on hand in the confines of the hotel room—pencil, pen, highlighters, coffee.

Nearly every piece of paper Obrist encounters bears some sort of mark: a doodle, an image, a matrix—a practice so ubiquitous yet also largely inconspicuous.

A selection of the Hotel Drawings is being exhibited as part of the public programming of the Hans Ulrich Obrist Archive.

JG.

[huobrist]

Hôtel Carlton Palace

Today is the 25th anniversary of the opening of Hans Ulrich Obrist's exhibition Hôtel Carlton Palace, Chambre 763.

Like his other shows in the early 1990s, Hôtel Carlton Palace involved producing an exhibition in what was otherwise an unexceptional domestic space. Hôtel Carlton Palace was located in Montparnasse on Boulevard Raspail (though it's now called Hotel Mercure).  Chambre 763 was 12 square meters: week after week, while living in the hotel from 22 August-25 September 2013, Obrist invited artists to contribute to the exhibition: Ed Ruscha, Franz West, Gerhard Richter, Annette Messager, Isa Genzken, Maurizio Cattelan, Absalon: it was a lineup of big names and new names, and the exhibition included within it, in the room's armoire, a smaller exhibition of clothes designed by artists. 

The exhibition was accompanied by one of Obrist's unconventional catalogues (a boxed set of Post Cards); in 2014, Koenig published a mini-monograph of the exhibition, Hôtel Carlton Palace, on the occasion of the exhibition Room Service: The Hotel in the Arts and Artists in Hotels at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, 22 March-22 June 2014.

Obrist is shown wearing Maurizio Cattelan's pillow. Photograph by Pierre Leguillon.

Hans Ulrich and Joseph Grigely will be having a conversation together about archives and archiving as part of Chicago's Art Expo / Art Design Chicago, on September 29th.  We will post more information about this event as the date nears.

[huobrist]

Profiles

Hans Ulrich Obrist, during the installation of Laboratorium, Antwerp, 1999.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, during a talk at the Aspen Art Museum, 2018

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A miracle moment

For fifteen years we have been trying to get Hans Ulrich on a river for some fly fishing.  It finally happened two weeks ago on the Frying Pan River in Colorado.  Many thanks to Heidi Zuckerman (left, director of the Aspen Museum of Art) and Seth Stolbun (right, former HUO archive intern) for logistics and assistance and support.

[huobrist]

Reorganizing our GDrive

The HUO Archive has been located at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 2014. As a project-based course, Nodes + Networks has seen approximately four groups of student tackle its oeuvre. With the relentless efforts of every group’s documentation, there is a hefty amount of data recorded by the people working in the archive, such as vitrine exhibitions, bibliography entries, WIP photographs, and other forms. So when these files are uploaded to our HUO-a folders, we encounter unsurprising discrepancies in how they are named, categorized, and placed. I am currently working on the Sisyphean task of unifying our digital data from the past four years; every time it seems I am getting somewhere, I come across a new (or rather very, very old) batch of data that requires reconfiguring my current organizing pattern. With that said, it is important to get this done sooner than later, before this data and memories of this data are dispersed even further.

-Rachel

[huobrist]

HUO50

Happy 50th birthday, Hans Ulrich!

The birthday announcement design is by Zak Kyes--who is a partner working with the HUO archive.

A flashback photo to 1997, when we had one of our many conversations together--this one just after the release of Point d’ironie issue No. 1.