Nicolas Bourriaud: “When I have a question, I curate an exhibition, and when I have some answers, I write a book, and then the book generates more questions”
April 2024
Mahsan: From working as a Parisian correspondent for Flash Art and the founder of the contemporary art magazine Documents sur l’art to one of the most important curators and art critics of our times. How did this career shift happen and how did working in publishing industry help you in your curatorial journey?
NB: At the very beginning, there was the will to write, since I was very young. I think the logic of my career was to connect all lines: text and image, action and reflection. Staying always in between two things which I really like, which are art and literature, art and philosophy, art and writing. So obviously the first concrete way of getting into this universe, was to try to be published. That’s the beginning for many people.
I had a very classical start in this path, publishing some texts in Opus International, and then New Art International, Flash Art and Art Press. So, I was writing a lot at that time, especially reviews, that’s what you give to young people, because at that time I was twenty-one, twenty-two. Then I was twenty-three when Flash Art asked me to be the Parisian correspondent for the magazine which gave me more credibility. And then very quickly, those articles attracted the attention: there was a Swiss gallerist, Guillaume Daeppen, who opened his gallery in Frankfurt and asked me to curate my first exhibition, with young French artists.
Another exhibition followed, then a third, but the real start was the Venice Biennial in 1990, that was a big responsibility because I was only twenty-five. That year, Jean-Louis Froment, who was the director of CAPC in Bordeaux, intended to destroy the French pavilion in Venice and have it rebuilt by either Jean Nouvel, Philippe Starck or Christian de Portzamparc, so the pavilion of the Giardini was occupied by these three architects and their projects. There were a lot of protests from the art world, and Jean-Louis Froment was looking for someone who could manage to show young artists. I went to Venice and looked for a place, and I found the prisons next to Le Ponte Dei Sospiri. The show was titled unmoving short movies and included Philippe Parreno, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Fabrice Hyber, Pierre Joseph and some others. We were all the same age, between twenty-five, twenty-six, and that was the start for many of them.
Mahsan: So that’s how the ideas of Relational Aesthetics were formed in your mind?
NB: Not yet. I published a novel first in 1997 called L’ère Tertiaire that was published by Flammarion and then in 1998 I published Relational Aesthetics. The two first texts about Relational Aesthetics were published by Documents sur l’Art in 1993 and 1994. In 1993 I was called as a curator for the Venice Biennale, the Aperto this time, the international exhibition. There were other curators, like Jeffrey Deitch or Francesco Bonami, and I wrote a text for the catalogue, producing relations with the world, which was really the basis for Relational Aesthetics, although not expressed in a very fluid way yet. So, the interest was already here in 1993 and a little after I tried to come back to this subject matter, trying to find out what was the common point between all the artists that I was working with. And that’s how Relational Aesthetics was born.
Mahsan: Among those artists, I really admire Félix González-Torres. I find him very interesting because, at a time when homosexuality wasn’t as accepted as it is today, Félix, as a homosexual, was able to transform this taboo and other sociopolitical issues of that era into beautiful, poetic art that is deeply moving.
NB: Félix González-Torres was certainly a leader, and he was a bit older than us. I met him in 1991, and he was very inspiring for me. He was literally a genius, someone who really invented a new form of commitment in art, a new way of doing political art by mixing intimacy and history, reloading existing forms, mainly minimal art, with new contents. Many artists started from his core intuition: the personal is political. I would also add that the history of art can be used as a toolbox.
Mahsan: In one of my questions, I was going to ask you about the notion of “genius.” Do you think it can be innate, and that some people are born geniuses?
NB: People are born with the ability to become a “genius” but it’s their life construction, education, the encounters they have and other social factors that can make them “geniuses”. Genius is just a potential, an easy way to describe it is the extreme capacity of catching the new problematics around us, it’s about developing antennas, and those antennas grow from many factors, it’s not just one thing, and it is very largely contingent. And for me, it is not necessarily individual; groups and even local scenes can also approach it.
Mahsan: You often mention that “it’s difference that brings energy.” Since you don’t focus on just one role in the art world, how are your curatorial projects, theoretical essays and books, and institutional work related to each other?
NB: All the elements you mentioned are occasional possibilities to release the spirit behind which is behind everything I do, sometimes it’s a book, sometimes an exhibition but they all come from a constant reflection, which is going on, and a constant interrogation of our relationship to the world. So, sometimes you can apply your ideas by inventing an institution, by writing a book, making an exhibition or by teaching. I need all those points of entry because they also bring me something different every time. Sometimes they make me step aside from my usual preoccupations, which makes things move forward. Transforming an idea and applying it to teaching can bring a lot. I always say: when I have a question, I curate an exhibition, and when I have some answers, I write a book, and then the book generates more questions. So, all these elements and different mediums are necessary for what I do. It’s like a spiral.
Mahsan: How do you come up with ideas when you’re asked to create a place and implement a model somewhere? For instance, how did you develop the idea for MoCo, your most recent institutional model, and how did it start?
NB: There’s nothing I like more than building up an institution. It’s a very rare privilege unfortunately, but here it started with the examination of the context, and I noticed very soon that Montpellier didn’t need a kind of signature building with a “logo architecture.” It was not the spirit of the city, so I started to think about a line that would cross the city with different buildings, having different functions. I saw very quickly that the art school was very isolated, so we discussed with the director of the time, the teachers and the students, about including them in the project. They were all enthusiastic about it, it worked, and it still works today.
The idea was to benefit from their energy, to feed the art center created at the same time, and connect them both to the other building, opened in 2019, devoted to the presentation of private or public collections. The idea was to curate, to enhance the gesture of curating by considering every time a constituted ensemble of works, reread by the curatorial team or guest curators. That’s why it was interesting in terms of carbon print, we made huge exhibitions with only one shipping. It’s the most economical in terms of carbon prints when we think about it. Still, you can make fantastic exhibitions because the collections are already constituted.
What I really like is considering the specific context of the period of time you’re living in, because when I created Palais de Tokyo with Jérôme Sans in early 2000s the times were different, there were different needs for Paris, Paris is not Montpellier; every time it’s the situation that creates the institution.
Mahsan: You have extensive experience in curating large-scale exhibitions. I’ll only mention a few recent ones, as the full list is extensive: The Tate Triennial 2009, Taipei Biennial 2014, Kaunas Biennial 2015, Istanbul Biennial 2019, and Planet B, the first exhibition of Radicants (the international curatorial cooperative) during the 59th Venice Biennale. In your opinion, what makes a good exhibition, and what elements are necessary to make a festival, biennial, or triennial an important event in art history?
NB: There’s a specific need for big exhibitions but not only biennials. For example, the exhibition I did in Murcia in south of Spain, an exhibition all over the city like 100 Artists in the City in Montpellier in 2019. One has to consider the context and the moment.
For a biennial, it’s important to understand that it is a photography of the moment: you are expected to develop a specific point of view on what’s going on, that’s the kind of implicit demand provided by every biennial organization. Every biennial is different, their structure and the way they function, you wouldn’t believe how different and diverse this universe is. But a biennial doesn’t have a different nature for me than exhibitions in general. To create a good exhibition, it’s important to bear in mind that it would be a total mistake to consider the biennials as only a kind of momentary gathering of people coming from all over the world and have nothing to say to each other. Unfortunately, that’s what is happening in many of them.
The question is always the question of orchestration, we will come back on this as I’m developing my new project as a kind of operatic exhibition. I see it as a kind of opera, you have a libretto that is the story, the narrative that you have to follow and keep in mind at every moment of the opera, whatever instrument is playing, whatever voice you hear… but when you visit a good exhibition, you always have a kind of a voice subtitled behind it as a dialectic relationship with the art works and that’s what I try to do. Otherwise, it’s just a gathering of objects, and this is not what interests me.
I’m interested in the way one artwork can be read differently being given the one which is next, for example if you put Gerhard Richter’s monochrome next to Barnett Newman and you put the same Gerhard Richter’s monochrome next to Claude Monet, you will have two different readings. It’s the “Kuleshov” effect that has been experienced by the Soviet in 1930s and it’s one of the bases of curating.
There are also some other elements which are relevant, I remember in the late 1990s I had few conversations with Harald Szeemann and he gave me a great piece of advice, that I’ve always kept in mind, and it was not only a joke. For him, the secret for a good exhibition was the rule of the three parts: “one third are established and historical artists, one third emerging artists, one third friends.” I’ve always kept it in mind because it’s not as stupid as it sounds. By friends he meant people who are constant correspondents with your work, and each will constitute a kind of back bone of your exhibition.
Mahsan: Now, let’s shift to your books and theories. From Relational Aesthetics, The Radicant and Postproduction to The Exform, Planet B and Inclusions. What have changed and affected your perception, analysis and concepts while writing The Exform that can be considered as a turning point?
NB: It’s better to see the line that crosses all those books. Maybe is not that obvious. Experiencing art is not only watching one object or one image. It is important to look at the same landscape with different cameras, different angles, to displace the camera in order to see different things. For example, you can easily check that the artists commented in Relational Aesthetics and Postproduction are more or less the same. I just try to analyze their works from different angles because one thing that is obvious and should be said again: There’s not one important work which has only one thing to say. If it can be reduced to one single idea, it’s not that great. So, I tried to check that with the artists I was discussing in Relational Aesthetics in Postproduction, and I could also include some of them again in The Exform. Maybe if I try to find a common point between all the books, it would be the constitution of the figure of the artist as a protestation against the capitalist process. It’s about reification in general.
In Relational Aesthetics, it’s clear that the artwork is produced by the relationship with the other. For Postproduction, it’s clear that there is a way out of the consumption system, which is the use of historized forms. So, my books are in a way anthropological, and they try to explore the relationship between the artworks which are produced at a certain period in the history of mankind. This anthropological interest is particularly developed in my last book, Inclusions, which talks about anthropology itself, so it’s a way to go back to revisit all the previous books. It’s an anthropological approach.
Cover of Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud, Les Presses du Réel, 1998
Mahsan: Once, I read that you mentioned, “I’m not a philosopher” because you never analyze or write with preconceived ideas.
NB: Exactly, that’s why anthropology interests me. Its definition, according to the British anthropologist Tim Ingold, is: “anthropology is philosophy with people in.” it is quite close to Relational Aesthetics, in the way it includes the other, and the notion of inclusion is the theme of my last book. Here again we have the spiral.
Mahsan: But it was after The Exform that you became more concerned with climate change and the Anthropocene.
NB: It started with Taipei Biennial in 2014, which was my first exhibition about the Anthropocene, and I think the first biennial devoted to climate change. So, the beginning of my interest in climate change started back then with the great acceleration in 2014, and the purpose of this exhibition was to enlarge and expand the Relational Aesthetics to the non-human. That was the theme of the catalogue text of the exhibition.
I just realized at the time that Relational Aesthetics was not adapted to the time being because it was too anthropomorphic. From then, I tried to extend the theory to the non-humans. It was exactly the path that an artist like Pierre Huyghe was also following. I always say he’s my twin artist in a way. I know him since his very beginning, when were in our 20s, and surprisingly we developed in parallel, even if he always was more advanced than me, for a good reason: he has huge antennas. I could see that whatever direction I was moving towards; he had already started exploring them in his work. He has the ability to feel the times, and his work is developing in a very logical way. I tend to think that mine too…
Mahsan: A simplified summary of The Radicant is the notion of identity with no past. Identity is not behind us; it’s in front of us. In your words, “There is a two-fold enemy you are fighting against in The Radicant: globalization and the fetishization of the roots in nationalism, various religious fundamentalisms, etc.” We must, therefore, identify and acknowledge the internalized structures and biased schemes of perception, conception and action ingrained in us to move forward, change, grow and build our identity throughout life which I totally agree with.
From a psychoanalytical perspective, these structures are part of our personal unconscious that can be identified and controlled. However, what about Carl Jung’s concept of the “collective unconscious” that is beneath the personal unconscious and its contents have never been individually acquired and owe their existence exclusively to heredity? Jung recognized them as forms of instinct, or archetypes—collectively inherited forms, or patterns of behavior. Archetypes are autonomous living personalities within us and are not under our control. They guide us towards psychic wholeness through the individuation process, the path towards Self. Consequently, if we try to adapt to new structures, ideas, activities that are not aligned with our nature and instincts, don’t you think we’re going against the path towards the Self?
NB: I have a Darwinian approach to this. I really believe in filial genetics; you have acquired signs and characteristics which are transmitted from generation to generation and become more visible at every generation, like in any animal species. We think that peacock has been a peacock since the beginning, but no. It’s the successive choices of the female peacock who design the species, and Darwin developed this theory after The Origins of Species: but it was rejected by all its fellow scientists, because it was a scandal to believe that females could have a leading role in anything. But in reality, it is the female who designed, from generation to generation, with subtle improvements, the form and the character of the species.
If a country is isolated, the same characteristics or the same topics are always reproduced as such. The more a society is open, the more it’s diluting and expanding, for the worst or the best. So, of course, insisting on your national characteristics is also a part of self-branding. It’s a kind of permanent selfie sent to the world saying that I’m Italian, I’m French, I’m Iranian or whatever, and it’s not very creative because then you’re stuck in ready-made type of psychology or formal universe that you cannot really question.
Mahsan: Unfortunately, not only our nationality, but today’s political issues are also becoming a form of marketing and branding. Art has always been political for many artists, who have used various mediums to raise awareness and make an impact on the world beyond the art world. However, there is a thin line between creating political art for these purposes and using political art to promote and brand oneself.
NB: Yes, it’s again about sending those selfies… To answer your question, I believe that we are all born with some potentials, idiosyncrasies, and inabilities. So, whatever we learn and whatever we want to become, we are limited by those abilities and inabilities. We build up our identity from this field of constraints, but we have to create our identity through our actions, through our displacements, through the way we navigate the world, the ideas that we develop… And it’s an infinite game of possibilities and impossibilities, confronted to a huge number of contexts, that create the diversity of the world. If we think that we are condemned to stick to one identity that was given to us when we were born, it will also condemn us to mediocrity and that’s the biggest punishment, living a boring life. Stick to your place.
Mahsan: Do you agree with Rudolf Steiner’s views on art? According to him, freedom is the foundation of spiritual growth, both for society and for the individual. Joseph Beuys was also inspired by Steiner’s philosophy and believed that everyone is an artist following Nietzsche’s principles, who wanted every man to become a super-human through art.
NB: I agree with Joseph Beuys that everyone can be an artist, but you have to complete that with the theory of Robert Filliou, a very important artist of the Fluxus movement. He was talking about “The Genial Republic”, and he was talking specifically of what happens in Parisian cafés and Bistrots, the idea of total democratization of the possibility to be an artist which means the possibility to lead the life of an artist. It goes with a specific type of life which in Robert Filliou’s case is the exact content of his work; How to introduce poetry into your life? That’s the main thing, and it is related to a specific kind of behavior in your everyday life, a specific productivity, the productivity of the banal, which could also be seen in the Surrealist movement, the idea of “enchanter la vie” and the idea of the “merveilleux” (the marvelous) … Then, the situationists drifts in Paris, which was another way to create art with your feet by walking in streets at night.
To answer your question, when I was teaching at IUAV, the Venice art university, in 2006, 2007, I had to leave Venice for five days, so I asked all my students to do an exercise: create anything they wanted, but the duration had to be five entire days. they had to experience or live something for five days. The work had to start on Monday and end up on Friday, whatever it was, it could be a painting, or being under a bridge in Venice, or eating only red things for five days, whatever … and after this exercise, the next Monday half of the class told me they understood they would never be an artist.
Mahsan: Now, let’s continue with The Exform. What is the relation between ‘garbage’ and art in The Exform? Can you elaborate more on this topic?
NB: The Exform is an object, in the very general sense of this word, which is a subject of dispute between two different parts of society, an object taken into a mechanism of exclusion on one side, and re-inclusion on the other side. An example would be Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, especially the Urinal, or The Origins of the World by Courbet, or impressionist paintings at the time. There is a threat to be excluded from society, and at the same forces to bring it back into the center. I quote the example of the dog that goes to the garbage to get what his/her master has just thrown out and brings it back on the carpet. That’s the mechanism of The Exform. The avant-gardes of the 20th century tried to bring back to the center of the carpet some objects that society wanted to get rid of or did not want to see. An exform is a problematic object, and there are many examples of it.
Mahsan: How do you analyze private and public contemporary art collections? Do you think Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “legitimate culture” in Distinction still influences the choices of tastemakers when it comes to collecting?
NB: I’m afraid that the production of taste today is less determined than it was at Bourdieu’s time. I’m not sure if collectors are reading anything about what’s going on, are they really aware of the problematics of their time? I’m not 100% sure about this. Most of the time, especially the new collectors are only attracted by what is successful or what answers to kind of very spectacular way of envisioning art, which is not going to last. That’s why they might lose the battle of the taste, because it’s not the most spectacular, bling-bling or shiny art that lasts.
Mahsan: The exhibition Threads: A Fantasmagoria about Distance during Kaunas Biennial in 2015 was about the abolition of distance and presenting absent realities in a globalized and digitalized world and questioned the capacity of art as a system that connects itself to a different time or space. Can you elaborate more on this concept?
NB: The basis for this show was the invention of Fantasmagoria at the very end of 18th century, especially in the revolutionary context of Paris. There was a Belgian guy called Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, who created this kind of spectacles in the middle of the revolutionary Paris, calling for the ghosts, especially the ghosts linked to the revolution. It was the ancestor of the cinema in a way, as it was based on special effects that were invented at the time, like spreading smoke for example. This ability of art to confront itself to special effect, was the theme of the biennial. For example, during the exhibition, a light piece by Carsten Höller made the whole building blink every 15 minutes, through an electric system which was made to flicker light for ten seconds. And it created a kind of urban hallucination for all the people passing by.