Massimiliano Gioni is a man of contradictions. The artistic director of the New Museum—a space primarily devoted to living artists and new commissions—is, paradoxically, obsessed with the past. He cherishes privacy and solitude, yet is driven by the desire for public spectacle. He is both profoundly confident and fascinated by his limitations, and is as preoccupied with mortality and absence as he is with living and abundance. Perhaps most unusually, despite being one of the most prominent contemporary art curators of our time, Gioni isn’t interested in collecting art—he prefers to collect books.
How much does Massimiliano Gioni love books? In his office at the museum, Gioni is always working but rarely at his desk. Instead, any physical surface he occupies inevitably transforms into a coveted patch of potential real estate—a new repository for books. One of his famous curatorial maxims is: “Always leave them wanting less.” A phrase that also applies to his collecting habit, which currently comprises around 20,000 volumes (and counting) spread across storage units, museums, apartments, family homes and his desk.
This bibliophilic obsession makes sense for a man whose curatorial approach has often been described in literary and bibliographic ways, such as proto-encyclopedic and Wunderkammer-like. He enjoys weaving the contemporary with historical works and ephemera, challenging his audiences to question the very nature of artworks by including objects like Carl Gustav Jung’s Red Book, which he presented in the Central Pavilion of the 55th Venice Biennial.
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For his latest exhibition, “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” the largest in the museum’s history and the first to open the New Museum’s major expansion, Gioni explores the relationship between art and technology and foundational myths of the artist as a life-giving creator. The exhibition reimagines the library not just as a repository of paper volumes but as a lively, experiential landscape where stories unfold through artworks, texts and the spaces between them. Observer recently connected with the artistic director to learn more about both his passion for books and how the show came together.
How would you describe your library?
Well, it’s debatable whether it’s a library or not. It’s a repository of books that grew organically from the fact that I love books. Mainly, it’s a set of tools for research. My habit also developed from a sense of lack. Every desire is connected with things you don’t or didn’t have. I think that became something to both use as a tool and as a project—more of a long-term accumulation of things that will maybe become more interesting in their entirety.
In an interview with Jacob Fabricius, you told him that sometimes, as you are falling asleep, you run through your exhibitions in your head like a movie as a way to ensure you remember everything. Is your collecting habit also a tool for memory?
I don’t know. It’s an interesting question. Maybe it’s a little maniacal. In a sense, my mind is all I have. It’s the only true tool, and I’m afraid of losing it, and that is something you prevent by exercising.
I’m always concerned about the fact that I don’t know very much, and that also might play with my fascination for outsider artists, for the autodidact. I am trained. I went to school and so on, but a lot of what I do is stuff that I learned on my own. I had to create my own systems of knowing, memorizing and learning. I also thought at one point that I got interested in art because it was a field where there were no rules. Maybe that’s a myth. Maybe it’s not. But growing up as a kid, it was certainly a space of freedom, a space of reinvention, a space of liberation. Then gradually I realized that it was a place where cultures, as a sense of multiple people coming together, express themselves and exist.
The origin of art is absence and the desire to hold on to what we are bound to lose. That made me think of memory and of art as a field, as a practice of preservation. When I started working in museums, I started thinking more about the intimate connection between preservation, the passing of time, loss and what we do as professionals involved in art.
If art is a space for collective expression, and exhibitions amplify that by bringing together many artists, how do you retain legibility and clarity in what the audience experiences?
It’s funny you mentioned legibility. I don’t know if I’m exactly a fan of it. It’s interesting that we’re talking about books, which are legible by definition, because I dislike it when shows are too clear. I’m not a fan of shows where you detect a clear thesis. When they’re too explanatory, they take away any magic. I try to make shows that still entail a process of discovery. When staging shows, they must be somewhat physically and visually memorable. If I think of a room in an exhibition, I need to be able to read it at once as a whole and then go into the details. But it doesn’t mean it should be clear to the point that it’s so transparent you don’t want to engage with it.
How do you maintain that balance between clarity and complexity on a textual level? For example, I read that for your first major exhibition at the New Museum, “After Nature,” you deliberately used fiction in your interpretive materials.
“After Nature” was instructive in the sense that it was my first institutional show in America. I became very aware of the notion of institutional voices in museums, which are very different today from what they were in 2008. Many museums were in a very different place intellectually and culturally than where they are today, and the institutional voice of most American museums was kind of a self-tautological description of the so-called masterpiece. I started getting a little suspicious of that voice and was curious about how institutions express themselves.
Because the New Museum is a more unusual space, more experimental and without a collection, with “After Nature,” I tried to use the authority of the institutional voice to both subvert it and play with it. There were some labels that were more straightforward, extended labels, others were not factually correct, they were actually deliberate fictions presented as truth that would make you wonder, is this real? Others were quotes from literature presented as such. Others were quotes from literature unattributed. So you had these different voices running through the show.
How does that compare to an exhibition like the edition of the Gwangju Biennale that you curated in South Korea in 2010? You described that exhibition less in literary terms and more like constructing an essay.
In Gwangju, the interpretive material was more like a support. Similar to Venice, the texts were more straightforward; they were more about short biographical portraits in a sense, but the care that went into those texts was very special. Even when I’m not writing myself, a lot of work goes into the editing and assembly process for these texts. Even the most direct description is always extremely carefully crafted in collaboration with various writers and researchers.
Does your latest exhibition, “New Humans,” tend more toward experimental fiction like “After Nature” or an essay-like structure like Gwangju?
I think it’s more aligned with Gwangju and Venice. But “New Humans” is so rich and complicated. There are close to 200 artists, each one with a 250-word entry. So there is this beauty in my mind of a kind of giant accumulation of words and fantasies and stories. It becomes a kind of parallel product with the exhibition. You can go through the exhibition listening to those voices or return to them later. I don’t know if we succeeded, but a lot of work goes into making sure the interpretive texts are surprising, exciting, not just kind of descriptive in the simplest sense. I like shows you go through in a state of constant rumination.
Do you remember why you started building shows through that kind of literary or archival framework?
At one point in my career, I had this idea that to make a show, you have to create a small library.
Famously, when Flaubert was writing his unfinished novel Bouvard and Pécuchet, he built an enormous library: apparently, he assembled and read thousands of books to develop his characters. Bouvard and Pécuchet are, in a way, a parody of knowledge and Enlightenment ideals, and the whole book seems to ridicule the very idea of a universal, comprehensive knowledge. That struck me—the idea of creating characters who go through life like idiot savants, weighed down by their pursuit of learning.
I thought it was interesting that to write a book, you make a library, and so I thought to make a show, I should make a library. I became more systematic at keeping a library together only in recent years, in the past 15 years or so. And I hope it’s seen in the exhibitions themselves because they become much more textured and interesting. My dream is that, when working on a show like “New Humans,” one could work on it without having to go to a public library, because you own all the books on the subject that you need and all the books on the various artists.
Is the library ever complete?
The library is always incomplete. That’s both a humbling and a depressing thought, because you put a lot of energy into it, and it amounts to nothing, because the moment it’s complete, it’s already surpassed by many other books. But that’s also the beauty of it, because the library is a memento mori. It’s a way to keep track of your time, your sources and your limits. There are also practical reasons that make the library incomplete. For some reason, other people always seem to have the books you don’t have: it’s the first axiom of bibliophilia—it’s so depressing. Whenever I go to someone else’s home, I am just staring at their bookshelves and realize I miss all the books they own.
So it’s a perennial struggle, and it puts you in touch with mortality not only because of the many dead authors that are preserved in a library but also because, in a way, collecting books is an exercise in modesty. You see, so many books are forgotten. When I did the catalogue for “After Nature,” it came out of the idea that I didn’t want to add another book to the virtual library of humanity out there. So the idea was to acquire the W.G. Sebald book of the same name (After Nature) and retrofit it to become the catalogue of the show by simply printing a new cover that contained the exhibition essay and then putting images in the book by hand. It was my first book in the States, and I thought, I’m going to make a book that doesn’t actually add or take up more space, it’s simply repurposing a book that is already out there. In that sense, it was also a very bibliophilic gesture because the gesture of affection was to preserve an existing book that I loved and avoid adding anything new.
Do you have that same anxiety regarding exhibition-making in general?
No, which is probably not the right answer to give, but maybe it’s because exhibitions, unlike books, go away.
So, because exhibitions are more temporary, you don’t feel that same kind of responsibility?
I don’t know, it’s a good question. I haven’t thought about it. I don’t think I do. Exhibitions are more expensive; they’re huge operations, with many people involved. You do think: it’d better be worth it and important enough. But I don’t get the same sense of responsibility as I do with books.
It’s funny—once curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev told me she always goes to the last day of her shows because it’s the last time all those objects are going to be together in that specific configuration. I thought it was a very nice thought. Until she told me that, I would have never really cared. In a strange way, I don’t feel so precious about shows after they have finally come together.
Do you feel like exhibitions are becoming more long-lasting and permanent, similar to books, with how much more heavily they’re documented and how their images circulate online and through different kinds of media?
It’s an interesting question. The increase in information does not necessarily prolong life, which may be true about everything, and maybe it’s also healthy. This goes back to libraries and books. There are just so many, and it doesn’t necessarily make either better or more memorable, you know? Books are a dying technology; it’s a dead technology. My liking books and libraries probably has to do with preserving something that is bound to disappear.
Does preservation have its trade-offs? To learn something new, do you also have to forget something?
I’m more curious about holding on to things than forgetting them. When it comes to books, I love them and want to hold on to them, but I’m not doing it for the fetish of owning many things. Obviously, it is a possessive desire, but it’s because they are tools of remembrance and tools of knowledge.
You know, this might be relevant for “New Humans.” Eleanor Maguire was a neurologist who did a lot of studies on memory, and she used London cab drivers for their amazing ability to remember streets and directions. Her discovery was that memory can be exercised, and that memory actually produces physical changes in our brain—the more we use it, the more the hippocampus grows.
She was also interested in people suffering from amnesia, and one of her arguments was that if you lack memory, you can’t imagine the future. An amnesiac patient had more trouble imagining situations in the future, as simple as, what will your holiday be like? Tell me, will you be at the beach? What does it look like? And so on. You form your vision of the future based on past experiences, so that’s maybe why I’m interested in memory and forgetting—it’s a way to envision the future as well.
I think that’s really beautiful. You strongly emphasize the relationship between the future and the past in “New Humans.” How did you first conceptualize the exhibition?
The show has been in gestation for a long, long time, and it’s changed many times in my head, and now we are finally making it.
The show has a lot to do with memory. The premise of the show is deeply inspired by French curator Jean Clair, specifically his 1995 Venice Biennial, which was called “Identity and Alterity.” Many of his other shows dealt specifically with the myth of the new man, which is also central for “New Humans.” Jean Clair is a curator that not many people really think about that often, particularly here in the States, but I think he’s a great writer, a great art historian and an extremely original curator, particularly when it comes to the combination of visual culture and art.
When I saw the exhibition, it was my second biennial that I ever saw, and I still remember it. I remember this room, which had the early identity portraits by Alphonse Bertillon exhibited with Cesare Lombroso’s tools to measure heads, and Marcel Duchamp’s Standard Stoppages. It was a room about phrenology and measuring identity, measuring the self, and all the misguided associations between certain ideas of positivist knowledge and racism. I remember this other room about X-rays, which was also quite beautiful. Clair included some early x-rays and an Edvard Munch self-portrait with the bones in his arm exposed. And then, in another room, there were paintings by Francis Bacon and photographs of First World War survivors. So it was a show that was extremely original in the combination of art and non-art, and found materials and art. And that stayed with me. In a way, “New Humans” is a tribute to some of Clair’s shows, or it has been very much inspired by his exhibitions. It’s been a long gestation. I’m afraid it’s not as good as his shows, though.
Which artworks have been on your list for “New Humans” since the beginning?
The Dresden Glass Man from the Hygiene Museum has always been something I wanted in “New Humans.” The homunculus, which we have, was in Jean Clair’s show. Also, El Lissitzky was on our earliest lists. Paradoxically, those artworks I listed are many things that, as a contemporary art museum, it wouldn’t be immediate what you think about for “New Humans,” but that’s why, in a sense, they become more valuable, because you can create a situation that allows them to be in the show. In many cases, I make entire shows that allow me to present artworks I have been thinking about for years.
I love that. It’s almost like when a filmmaker makes a movie around an actor or a character that they want to work with. What about books? Did you have a foundational text or story or myth that you started with?
Well, there was Karl Capek’s R.U.R., which is the book that invents and popularizes the word robot. But, more broadly, the show is about the myth and the fear of giving life, which—interestingly enough—is a very male obsession. The show is based on the idea that familiarizing ourselves with the fact that these myths have been with us for hundreds of years, and in many cases, for thousands of years, will maybe help us to overcome new fears.
In many of the galleries in “New Humans,” you will encounter plenty of men aspiring to give birth, or dreaming of that possibility for the future, which is also frightening. They fantasize that in the future, birth will not be the exclusive realm of women. It will also be the realm of men and of the machine. In a sense, the show is less about looking at technology and more about the founding myths that still inform our understanding of technology and whether artists today are contributing to creating new myths to understand the technologies we are in.
Do you feel like they are?
Probably. It seems to me also that many of them are returning to the same central question, which is also intimately tied to the question of art. This show is mainly about art and technology, but it is more deeply an exhibition about the dream of giving life, and that is ultimately also what art is about. You could say it’s a show about the myth of the artist as somebody who gives life or invents life, which obviously is also a very loaded idea. It’s a kind of primal fantasy, which, again, is also very tinted with gender-specific associations and other problematic associations that have had complex consequences on the history of the 20th Century.
Maybe the life-giving myth can apply to exhibitions and curators as well? A good exhibition can also inspire a new generation of artists, curators and writers.
Well, I don’t know if I would go so far. It’s much harder to make babies than exhibitions, let’s be clear about that, and it’s much harder to grow decent humans than to make the show. But maybe that’s also something worth thinking about—the pedagogical function of exhibitions. Or maybe that’s just a consolation prize: when you can’t make a blockbuster, you just hope you will produce at least one good future artist. I think that’s a worthwhile endeavor. It’s maybe self-centered and a bit narcissistic on my part, though, but it’s something I think about often. I do remember the impact that certain shows had on me as a kid and I think those encounters made my life better—not just in that moment, but they literally made my life better for many years to come, because I would have had a very different life if it wasn’t for those shows and for art.