A conversation between Ute Meta Bauer and Sooyoung Leam

SYL: Sooyoung Leam
UMB: Ute Meta Bauer

SYL:
I would like to begin with the project Spring of Democracy (2020), the fortieth anniversary exhibition for the May 18 Democratization Movement organized by the Gwangju Biennale Foundation. While working on the exhibition with you, I was particularly fascinated by your decision to solely exhibit artworks or commissions produced in previous editions of the Gwangju Biennale. Why was it important for you to address the biennial’s legacy in such a way that would invite artists to intervene and activate archive materials and re-present some of the older works?

UMB:
Gwangju Biennale has a particular history because it started out of an attempt to connect the country that was shifting towards democracy. And there has always been this tension in the city between what is the local and what is the international. I was very curious how the artistic approaches to dealing with the dramatic event of May 18 changed over the years. Gwangju Biennale also had to do with artists being in conversation with politicians, as it initially got started through a strong encouragement from Nam June Paik. As a Korean artist living in the US, he taught for a long time in Germany and had been very familiar with Documenta in Kassel, which was born in the aftermath of World War II to introduce Germany again as a place for humanity. I’m not sure if it always succeeded [in that regard], and even Documenta has a troubled history, but it was this attempt made by artists like Nam June Paik to convince politicians and to make international links [that were pivotal to the formation of the Biennale].

If you look back to the storm on the Bastille and Delocroix’s depiction of it, for instance, it’s a history painting of a historical moment, which is a genre in itself. Then, of course, in Germany, we have the tradition of the woodcuts and prints by Kathe Kollwitz, who dealt with the trauma of fascism and war. The wood prints in Gwangju and across Asia were more of a means to communicate what you see in visual language. They depicted the reality, I would say, in poetry, in songs, and in something that is accessible. I am interested in how artists negotiate with history while artistic languages and vocabularies change over the period of time. For example, we had the helicopter landing on the base of the Biennale, reconstructing a moment in history in a performative, dramatic way, while others might use sculpture or, prints or photography.[1] This also leads to other questions, such as how people from different geographies might relate to such a history of repression, violence, and uprisings. For me, Spring of Democracy was a way to recognize the unique history of the Gwangju Biennale.

SYL:
Perhaps because of my art historical training, I enjoy working with archives and making exhibitions around them. I believe Spring of Democracy is just one example that illustrates your curatorial interest in engaging with archives, whether as a concept, a structure of thinking, or a site of intervention. What aspects do you consider the most when you either build an exhibition from an archive or incorporate archival narratives, imaginations or materials into your exhibition?

UMB:
We all know archives write histories. There was, of course, the ‘archivar’ in the past, who was the keeper of the official narrative. What we call today ‘archives’ are very often ‘special collections’; they’re not archives in the traditional sense of the word. But I’m still very interested in official archives, counter archives, and even repressed items in the archives. I find unconventional approaches to archives fascinating, especially how artists, filmmakers, and novelists draw from an archive and create a narrative that becomes more tangible and socially robust to the public. So, I’m equally invested in translation and contextualization.

There is also the question of whether an archive can be evidence. Often, it’s said art is truth-finding. People know artistic practice can be fictive, but they also trust artists to be truthful or find truths through artistic interpretations. When Documenta 9 (1992) invited a number of independent spaces in Kassel, I was working at a small artist-run space in Stuttgart. When we were asked to represent our institutions, we decided to work on the history of women’s participation in Documenta rather than present our institution. It was shocking how little female participation there was, and we said let’s create files of women artists who had been very important at that moment, shaping different readings of art history, yet had not taken part in Documenta.[2] We asked the artists if they could send us their dossiers, which are theoretically what the curators could have had in their offices. We had figures like Nancy Spero, Martha Rosler, and Katarina Fritsch taking part, and by the end of the first edition, we had around 35 or 36 artists. We exhibited the files, and they formed an archive, a special collection, in academic terms. It traveled for more than two years and expanded to more than 80 artists, and we even doubled the archive for North America and one in Europe, and it went to many important institutions, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC.

Then we stopped the project because it had almost become a full-time job. I worked on it together with two former students of mine at the art academy, and we eventually donated the version that was in Europe to Bildwechsel in Hamburg, a women’s archive for female artists and performers.[3] The other version was donated to the National Museum of Women in the Arts so it could be available for study. The condition was that it stay together as a project. The collection was later exhibited in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (2007) in Spain for an exhibition on feminism in the arts and institutions.

Coming back to the exhibition Spring of Democracy, I thought it was very important to refer to artists’ work with archives and their unpacking of the archives. There are a lot of archives in Gwangju about May 18, and I think it would be important for the Gwangju Biennale to make the visitors understand more of this history when they come all the way to Gwangju.

SYL:
Yet I’m concerned about the increasing neutralization of the narrative surrounding May 18. As much as these archives officiate historical narratives, they also seem to sanitize them.

UMB:
I feel like narratives are being depoliticized and become nostalgic. Because nostalgia has the power to depoliticize, it is actually dangerous to put something in the past; to be nostalgic. This is why the archive is always something of the present.

SYL:
In an interview you did back in 2009, you mention how the biennials are being reformulated as art schools and even go as far as to suggest that we should maybe think about turning art fairs and markets more empathetically as educational tools as terrain for (counter)actions. Do you think the biennials are still acting as important, if not alternative, learning sites? How do you evaluate the current state of the biennials?

UMB:
The biennials are often a point of entry for many people. It’s about acknowledging this and then asking how we can make sure it is possible to really learn. People come to biennials to learn, and that’s usually their motivation. Even when I go to a biennale, I go to learn. Documenta 5 (1972), for example, had something called Besucherschule, meaning visitor school. This school was introduced with a concern of how to make people from all over the places who are not familiar with art or who don’t know the history of the exhibited works engage with the exhibition. I think many biennales actually deal with this issue consciously or unconsciously. The edition of Manifesta 6 (2006), directed by Anton Vidokle and Florian Waldvogel in Cyprus, would be another example. They decided to turn Manifesta into an art school, into a real art school. But then, it fell apart because of the conflicts between Turkey and Greece.

For me, the training of the guides is always very important. In Kassel we had the means and we trained our guides for half a year. And they had access to the artists, and we gave seminars, so it became a complete project. I did the same on a smaller scale in Berlin for the third Berlin Biennale (2004), and my whole approach to the second Diriyah Biennale (2024) was to create that capacity. We developed ‘Biennale Encounters’, which started a year before the Biennale, and one of the curators, Anca Rujoiu, who actually was in my curator course in Gwangju back in 2011, led this program. So we prepared this program for the audience who is very new to seeing international art or contemporary art in the first place. Even for the artists, this program was an important occasion to meet other artists. In fact, I was fascinated to find that from its first edition, the Diriyah Biennale organized almost 500 public programs. They have an entire team dedicated to it. The team would work through the entire Biennale, to make it accessible to the public. In Istanbul, for the seventeenth Istanbul Biennial (2022), which took place when the lira was devalued by 80%, we, as the curatorial team, worked together to minimize the overall costs and to make the Biennale free. For several editions already, the Istanbul Biennale has remained free. Although our edition was delayed due to COVID-19, we had almost a million visitors. Because if it’s free, people do actually go.

SYL:
Extending our conversation about biennials as platforms for learning, I would like to hear your thoughts on the academic education of curatorial and artistic practices. There seem to be more artists and curators returning to school to earn degrees or higher degrees at a time when there are fewer job opportunities for them to turn to after graduation. What are some of the major issues you see today with academia?

UMB:
It’s a big question, and I have to go back to answer it. I studied art and stage design. And in my time, we didn’t have to write much, which we were happy about. But then it was also the moment, for the first time when it was possible to get a degree in fine art. Many art schools would refuse to give out a degree at the time and say, as an artist, you cannot be certified as an artist. You can be an interesting artist, a good artist, whatever it means, but to have a degree does not say anything.

But then I looked around and saw many artists with day jobs. I was aware I might need a day job and thought it wouldn’t hurt to do a degree. Since I was part of an artist collective, we did a degree together; in fact, we were the only ones ever allowed. I studied stage design and art, but I chose the publishing degree because we could also make books. Collectively, we made two catalogs for our group. Then, when I became a professor at a relatively young age, I taught my art students at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna how to write. They need to learn to write a CV and a short statement about their work because otherwise, other people will determine who they are and what their work is about.

I also put together exhibitions in Stuttgart about artist-run magazines and artist-created books. I featured, for example, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design’s publication on Yvonne Rainer, Dan Graham’s book about himself, Joan Jonas’s book about her practice, and Donald Judd’s publication on his art. To me, these books were much more revealing about their practice than the art historical ones. I also started a curatorial class for artists. I asked them: If you want to define how your work is shown, but if you are not clear how your work is going to be shown, who do you think will do it for you? So, my curatorial impetus went toward artists, not toward curators. Historically, I always introduced them to the exhibitions of Dadaists and Surrealists. They created amazing exhibitions, which are still very inspiring.

Even when I led the Gwangju Biennale Curators Course, I first introduced the students to important exhibitions done by artists at major venues, and then carried on by innovative museum directors. I became really interested in the history of exhibitions, inspired also by artists who would deal with exhibitions. I knew an artist who was kind of a mentor in my hometown in Stuttgart, and he would draw exhibitions from photos. He was very interested in how the artworks were hung. I soon understood that it’s a power structure. It has a meaning. Rosalind Krauss said we have to focus on the artwork, while cultural studies said we must also include the context. And I think both are true. We need both. But I was particularly interested in exploring where something appears. My text, The Space of Documenta 11, was precisely about that.[4] The text also came out of Foucault, who talks about the history of disposition and how the placement of something can be a political statement. Then, of course, there is Deleuze and Guattari, who understand layers of history and power structures within that. Exhibitions can bring layers of history, and it becomes like geology. In the early days, I still saw myself as an artist interested in this practice of exhibition making.

Early on, I once organized a conference in Stuttgart about ‘new spirit in curating’.[5] I invited Hans Ulrich Obrist, Corinne Diserens, who was one of the early participants of the Whitney Independent Study Program’s curatorial program. She was the only one I knew who was trained in a curatorial program in 1992. After that conference, I would start to invite people like Anna Harding, who started the MA in Curating program at Goldsmiths, and I would get connected to the Royal College of Art course and then later to Bard, also all in the 90s. Soon, I got very interested in the approaches and the differences [in curating].

Typically art historians in museums would carry out researches on works, but the museums wouldn’t necessarily rehang the works. Then, there came the first exhibition makers, like Harald Szeemann or Kaspar König. Initially they weren’t called curators, but exhibition makers. I always tell my students that curating is a fairly young profession, and if you don’t know why you’re doing it, don’t do it. For me, it’s very difficult to deal now with these expectations of jobs. I think it really limits the students to see their own potential. When it comes to curating courses, I believe we have to be much more transparent about the realities.

SYL:
You often emphasize that artistic practice does not exist in solitude. I would say this is all the more the case for curators. As someone who has been pursuing a transdisciplinary approach to curating for many decades, what do you value the most when forging dialogues and collaborations with people from different disciplines to form new or alternative understanding about the reality we live in?

UMB:
I had a whole seminar in Vienna about what is an intellectual with my art students. We were reading Gramsci to understand ourselves as organic intellectuals who have no mandate. According to Gramsci, an organic intellectual is an independent thinker. I think this is also what we have to cultivate, to be an independent voice interfering other voices in society to start a conversation.

My view is partly indebted to my education in stage design. If you bring a theater piece on stage, you have to study its history. If I bring a Greek drama, I need to understand why it was written, where it was written, if it’s true, if it’s historical or invented. Soon, you realize how relative it is. Looking into art history, you see how artists were referring to specific moments in time. For example, artist Dora Budor picked up Turner and tried to put his paintings, especially his depictions of light, into her vocabulary as a contemporary artist. These colorful skies in his paintings were partly the result of a volcano eruption in Indonesia and the ashes released into the atmosphere that changed the light. As a viewer, if you did not know about the volcano eruption, you’d miss out on the whole project. This example also illustrates how our world is changing according to climates, wars, and pandemics. The world is not a neutral space, and artists do not operate in a neutral space. So, it’s very important to include multivocality in the works, also for the public.

SYL:
What are your current interests, and what’s next for you?

UMB:
I’m currently working on a book for the second Diriyah Biennale I curated. It can be very minimal, but it gives a glimpse into the artists’ works and their research material. Many artists actually conducted their research in Saudi Arabia. Posing questions such as what is an arid landscape? What is actually a desert? Is it an ocean floor? I’d like to make a glossary that walks you through the exhibition. I’m curious if a book can still give an experience of the Biennale, even if you have not been there. Can the catalogue unpack and become a time capsule in itself?

I’m mainly working on research projects together with artists and scientists. We are looking into the mitigation of climate change. I work with advocacy groups, but they don’t necessarily get the message out in their peer-reviewed papers. I’m upset with how academia has become so siloed and disconnected from the needs of this world and the concerns of young people. It’s become a degree-awarding, money-making machine, which I oppose and that’s not what universities are for. We have to free them or start something new. Science has to be tangible and impactful and communicate with the people, but I feel we failed terribly.

Some projects I’m involved in test if independent educational structures are possible. One of the artists, Ursula Biemann, who was also in the Istanbul Biennale, worked with indigenous communities from Colombia on an indigenous university. Education is driven by them because there is such old and deep knowledge. I also work with artists from Southeast Asia, particularly Yee I-lann, who collaborate with others at the Borneo Institute. Collectively, they are setting up an indigenous university in Borneo. I also see people in philanthropy, who often come out of big corporations. They understand even philanthropy should engage in these initiatives. So, there is a seismic shift. Understanding climate change and our political situation has to be addressed in a different way. My heart beats for these issues and for opportunities to join forces with others my age.

[1] Here Ute Meta Bauer is referring to Minouk Lim’s opening performance, Navigation ID, commissioned by the tenth Gwangju Biennale.
[2] The project Information Service took place at Martin Schmitz Gallery in Kassel during Documenta 9. It was conceived by Ute Meta Bauer, Tine Geissler, and Sandra Hastenteufel.
[3] Founded in 1979 mainly by the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg students, Bildwechsel is one of Hamburg’s longest-running women’s projects. When it was first launched, its main aim was to strengthen the presence of women in the audiovisual media arts. It runs an archive and a reference library.
[4] Ute Meta Bauer, “The Space of Documenta11. Documenta11 as a Zone of Activity,” in Documenta 11: Platform 5, exh. cat (Kassel, Hatje Cantz, 2002).
[5] Ute Meta Bauer dedicated an entire volume of her publication project, Meta, to document the discussions made at the conference. See Meta 2: A New Spirit in Curating? edited by Ute Meta Bauer (Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, 1992).