The Art Newspaper

Mad, bad and impossible to make

A secretive exhibition in Basel celebrates artists’ projects that never got past the planning stages

By Cristina Ruiz. From Art Basel daily edition
Published online: 14 June 2011

Best laid plans: Momoyo Torimitsu’s "Disposable Mine Detector", left, and Armajani’s space tower

london. As Neil Armstrong took his first small steps on the moon, Siah Armajani was planning his very own giant leap for mankind. The Iranian-born, US-based artist designed a tower in 1969, to be suspended in outer space but anchored to earth by a cable, and to remain in synchronous orbit with our planet. An opposing cable of equal length and weight would attach to the other end of the structure and balance the pull of gravity with centrifugal force.

The project, entitled A Fairly Tall Tower, 48,000 Miles High, exists today only on a single sheet of paper. It was always an “unlikely” project to be realised, said curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, “but not impossible”.

Armajani’s space tower is one of around 500 unrealised artistic proposals documented and collected by Obrist over the past 25 years, a selection of which are going on display in Basel this week.

“We know much more about unrealised architectural projects than artistic ones,” said Obrist. Buildings that exist only in the imagination of architects are often published, said the curator, whereas “the unrealised projects of even the most famous artists are unknown”.

For instance, the late French sculptor Louise Bourgeois designed a wooden amphitheatre in 1978 in the shape of an “upside down dome”, which she wanted painted sky blue and white. She called it The World is a Theater and We Each have a Role and she envisioned a small figure standing in the building’s centre as a metaphor. When asked why it was never made, she said: “complicated and too expensive, but never discarded”.

While some projects were too expensive, others, like Cildo Meireles’s Southern Cross, 1969-70, were too impractical. Meireles’s sculpture is a cube with each side measuring 9mm. It consists of two transverse sections—one made from pine and one of oak, trees that, according to the artist “represented mythical beings in the cosmology of the Tupi Indians”. The minuscule cube is intended to be displayed on its own in a space measuring at least 200 sq. m.

Curatorial obsession

Obrist has spent his entire professional life documenting artists’ unfulfilled ambitions. It started when he was 18 at the very beginnings of his career as a curator, triggered by a conversation with the late Italian conceptualist Alighiero Boetti. “He remarked that artists are always asked to do the same thing; they’re asked to do museum shows or gallery shows or sometimes commissions but very often the projects they would really like to do don’t fall into any of these categories,” recalled Obrist. “He suggested it could be interesting for a young curator to focus on this.” So Obrist did.

Over the past 25 years, as he has interviewed some 1,000 artists, he has asked all of them about their unrealised plans. Working alongside him in the 1990s was the French curator Guy Tortosa who worked for the French ministry of culture when Obrist first met him. “He made the observation that in public art, the most interesting projects are systematically unrealised,” said Obrist. “He had an archive of them.” Together the duo published a book in 1997, Unbuilt Roads: 107 Unrealised Projects (Hatje Cantz).

More recently Obrist has teamed up with Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda, the artists who co-founded e-flux. Together they made an open call in May for artists all over the world to submit unrealised projects to the e-flux website. “We thought it would be interesting to combine the curated archive with an open submission, to make the process participatory,” explained Obrist. “We were inundated,” said Vidokle. “Around 1,500 proposals came in and they’re still coming.”

These include the description of a work by the architect Céline Condorelli, which she describes as “one of my favourite projects of all time, that didn’t get made, didn’t happen in this way, and was a total failure in the shape that it did happen.” Condorelli was invited to design a space for the Tate Triennial in 2006 that would host performances throughout the duration of the show. “I came with a proposal for a theatre as a performance… They asked for further possibilities… until what I feared the most happened, that is step by step, little by little, it became unrecognisable as to both form and intention of the project. It was a horrible experience… The original proposal stayed filed in a drawer.”

As well as projects that are ruined in their execution, there are entries in competitions that are won by other designs. In 1996, artist Richard Wentworth was invited to propose a pedestrian bridge across the Thames in London connecting St Paul’s Cathedral with Tate Modern. “This seemed to be an opportunity to take the longest route, explore the river up and downstream, take in the view, enjoy the sky, and decelerate the hasty citizen. Collaborating with architects Thomas, du Toit and Makstutis, our proposal developed into a lazy ‘S’ across the river, a route which took its time to depart and arrive.” The bridge was not chosen. Norman Foster’s Millennium Bridge was selected instead and now crosses the river in a straight line.

Other projects range from the whimsical and impossible (such as Joe Scanlan’s Eight Days a Week proposal to change our calendar; in order to have an eight-day week, he notes that we “need to have another planet made visible in the heavens, to correspond to the extra day”) to those that are censored for a variety of reasons. For example, Nancy Spero, invited to design a work to be flashed on advertising screens on Times Square in New York in 1986, came up with two feminist, pro-choice messages. They were never shown.

All of these projects and hundreds more will eventually be made available to the public online, said Vidokle. Another ambition is “one day to build a palace of unrealised projects in homage to [the late English architect] Cedric Price” whose design Fun Palace, 1961, was never built but went on to influence many other architects, notably Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano who collaborated together on the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. “I would like to do a very big exhibition [of these projects],” said Obrist. “It is my very own unrealised project.”

The exhibition on unrealised projects is part of a wider e-flux initiative. To find it, “look for a large clock at Messeplatz, make a left and walk to the end of the fountain, look for a currency exchange sign, enter door on the right.”