140 Artists' Ideas for Planet Earth

Through 140 drawings, thought experiments, recipes, activist instructions, gardening ideas, insurgences and personal revolutions, artists who spend their lives thinking outside the box guide you to a new worldview; where you and the planet are one. 
 
Everything here is new. We invite you to rip out pages, to hang them up at home, to draw and scribble, to cook, to meditate, to take the book to your nearest green space. 
 
Featuring Olafur Eliasson, Etel Adnan, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Jane Fonda &amp; Swoon, Judy Chicago, Black Quantum Futurism Collective, Vivienne Westwood, Cauleen Smith, Marina Abramovic, Karrabing Film Collective, and many more.

Hans Ulrich Obrist (Author) Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show "World Soup" (The Kitchen Show) in 1991, he has curated more than 300 shows. 
 
Obrist's recent publications include Ways of Curating (2015), The Age of Earthquakes (2015), Lives of the Artists, Lives of Architects (2015), Mondialité (2017), Somewhere Totally Else (2018) and The Athens Dialogues (2018). Kostas Stasinopoulos (Author) Kostas Stasinopoulos is a curator and art historian. He is Assistant Curator, Live Programmes at Serpentine Galleries, London, working across the institution's interdisciplinary programme, Back to Earth and the General Ecology project.

Artists are uniquely situated to present new ideas about how we are living, the materials that make up our lives and how we can begin to work together to tackle the most urgent crisis of our time. 
 
Featuring Ed Ruscha's memorial plaques to trees that didn't make it, Judy Chicago's urge to make a mark and express a feeling, Jacob V Joyce and Rudy Loewe's activism flowchart, James Bridle's instructions to help plants along with their global velocity, Vivienne Westwood's plea for lockdown not to be lost, Olafur Eliasson's poetic wisdom to 'look up, look down', Marina Abramovic's performance art for the climate, and Rose Wylie's recipe for cooking for the environment, alongside many more.

Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects

From world-renowned curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects offers a unique opportunity to learn about the lives and creativity of the world's leading artists 
 
Hans Ulrich Obrist has been conducting ongoing conversations with the world's greatest living artists since he began in Switzerland, aged 19, with Fischli and Weiss. Here he chooses nineteen of the greatest figures and presents their conversations, offering the reader intimacy with the artists and insight into their creative processes. Inspired by the great Vasari, Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects explores the meaning of art and artists today, their varying approaches to creating, and a sense of how their thinking evolves over time. Including David Hockney, Gilbert and George, Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois, Rem Koolhaas, and Oscar Niemeyer, this is a wonderful and unique book for those interested in modern art.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is a curator and writer. Since 2006 he has been co-director of the Serpentine Gallery, London. He is the author of Ways of Curating and, with Ai Weiwei, of Ai Weiwei Speaks.

Ways of Curating

One of the most colourful figures in the artworld today . . . Hans Ulrich Obrist [is] not so much a curator as a human whirlwind

An engaging and erudite work that argues persuasively for the continued relevance of curating for the arts and wider society. His book is about the curator's role as a maker of exhibitions, a task that involves tracing hidden connections between artworks and forging untrammelled routes across culture in search of new ways of experiencing art; new ways of looking at the world around us. If that sounds like an impossibly romantic definition it's because this is an unapologetically personal account of the profession's development

The sheer energy [Obrist] has brought to working with artists themselves is the abiding impression of Ways of Curating

This is a highly intelligent, thoughtful and thought-provoking book. Obrist emerges as both scholarly and energetically engaged with the proliferation of ideas in modern culture today

Drawing on his own experiences and inspirations - from staging his first exhibition in his tiny Zurich kitchen in 1986 to encounters with artists, exhibition makers and thinkers - Hans Ulrich Obrist looks to inspire all those engaged in the creation of culture. 
 
Moving from meetings with artists to the creation of the first public museums in the 18th century, recounting the practice of inspirational figures such as Diaghilev, skipping between exhibitions, continents and centuries, Ways of Curating argues that curation is far from a static practice. Driven by curiosity, at its best it allows us to create the future.

A Guide to the Extreme Present

The Age of Earthquakes

Planet Earth needs a self-help book, and this is it 
 
The future is happening to us far faster than we thought it would and this book explains why 
 
Fifty years after Marshall McLuhan's ground breaking book on the influence of technology on culture The Medium is the Massage, Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist extend the analysis to today, touring the world that's redefined by the Internet, decoding and explaining what they call the 'extreme present'. 
 
The Age of Earthquakes is a quick-fire paperback, harnessing the images, language and perceptions of our unfurling digital lives. The authors invent a glossary of new words to describe how we are truly feeling today; and 'mindsource' images and illustrations from over 30 contemporary artists. Wayne Daly's striking graphic design imports the surreal, juxtaposed, mashed mannerisms of screen to page. It's like a culturally prescient, all-knowing email to the reader: possibly the best email they will ever read. 
 
Welcome to The Age of Earthquakes, a paper portrait of Now, where the Internet hasn't just changed the structure of our brains these past few years, it's also changing the structure of the planet. This is a new history of the world that fits perfectly in your back pocket.

An email-like, culturally-perceptive exploration of our digital realities... a mix between a dystopian modern glossary, Internet memes, multiple-choice dropdowns, mindsourced images and a fair bit of wisdom, it is a self-help book for the "last generation that will die"

A philosophical Anarchist Cookbook for the online era, when we are in touch with everyone at once all the time, or like to feel that we are... Like Marshall McLuhan's iconic dictum "the medium is the message" or the staccato bursts of meaning of George W.S. Trow's essay-book In the Context of No Context, The Age of Earthquakes is an abstract representation of how we feel now about how we are now. It's a book insistently engaged with the present tense... Perhaps it is the 21st century's first book-meme

Many of us feel like technologies of the future are arriving too slowly, but a new philosophy-cum-modern-self-help book suggests that, in fact, it's dawning on us faster than we ever thought possible

A pocket-sized primer on our blossoming obsolescence

Age of Earthquakes = panic-inducingly addictive

It's a fun, visual and easy read. Verdict: In the future all books will be written this way

An abstract representation of how we feel about our digital world

I don't know about you but I would very much like a guide to this brave new world

Addictive... A fun read. But one that makes you question how you read, why you read and just how much the internet has restructured our brains... It is a book not only inspired by the internet, but seemingly written by the internet. It is as if the internet gained not only artificial self-consciousness but wisdom - and then became your pal

The Age of Earthquakes seeks to induce paradoxical visions of the contemporary, both ambivalent and critical

with Hans Ulrich Obrist

Ai Weiwei Speaks

Ai Weiwei is the kind of visionary any nation should be proud to count among its creative class. He has drawn the world's attention to the vibrancy of contemporary Chinese culture...For the world, Ai continues to represent the promise of China.

Jon Huntsman, US Ambassador to China from 2009 to 2011

Time Magazine, 100 Most Influential People in the World 2011

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist, designer, architect, curator, blogger and publisher. 
 
Hans Ulrich Obrist is a curator and critic. Since 2006 he has been Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery, London.

'If artists betray the social conscience and the basic principles of being human, where does art stand then?' 
 
Ai Weiwei - artist, architect, curator, publisher, poet and urbanist - extended the notion of art and is one of the world's most significant creative and cultural figures. In this series of interviews, conducted over several years with the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, he discusses the many dimensions of his artistic life, ranging over subjects including ceramics, blogging, nature, philosophy and the myriad influences that have fed into his work. He also talks candidly about his father, his childhood spent in exile and his criticism of the Chinese state. 
 
Together, these extraordinary discussions give a unique insight into the outstanding complexity of Ai Weiwei's thought and work, and are an essential reminder of the need for personal, political and artistic freedom.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

David Watson

Life In Progress invites us to discover the person behind the polymath … Art is the gateway to possibility, Obrist believes, and his aim, it would seem, is to chivvy the rest of us through it

The inspiring titan of the modern art world delivers an unconventional and entertaining short memoir, while offering a sustained burst of infectious enthusiasm for the life-affirming power of creative connection

In his memoir, Obrist reveals a poignant motive for all his busyness. When he was six-years old, he was hit by a car on his way to school. He spent weeks hovering between life and death in hospital. “I just remember that the feeling of urgency started there, that there is no time to lose, every day could be your last"

His words come out in an almost comical torrent, citations bobbing up and ideas colliding... ArtReview named him the most powerful figure in the field, but Obrist seems less to stand atop the art world than to race around, up, over, and through it

Hans Ulrich Obrist manages to underline the value of art, to single it out from other human endeavours as something of paramount importance; to this, he brings an instinctive and profound love, a generosity of spirit (and heart) that he extends also to other fields of human expression

He is a passionate communicator. In result, half the world is starting to live in the future now

When Hans Ulrich was a young boy, he was knocked down by a speeding car. Hospitalized for weeks, he discovered the healing powers of art. Once he was able to travel again, he began to set out alone, on night trains, to meet artists in their studios across Europe. 
 From these early youthful encounters with the art world to his first exhibition in his Zurich kitchen, and even penning 250 postcards while trapped by an avalanche in Val Bregaglia, Obrist takes us through the formative experiences that made him.Part unputdownable coming-of-age story, part tour de force of the contemporary art world, part user’s manual on how to live driven by curiosity, conversation, and not least hope, Life in Progress is an enchanting ode to what engaging with art and the people around us boundlessly affords.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Praise for Life in Progress

Life In Progress invites us to discover the person behind the polymath … Art is the gateway to possibility, Obrist believes, and his aim, it would seem, is to chivvy the rest of us through it

The inspiring titan of the modern art world delivers an unconventional and entertaining short memoir, while offering a sustained burst of infectious enthusiasm for the life-affirming power of creative connection

In his memoir, Obrist reveals a poignant motive for all his busyness. When he was six-years old, he was hit by a car on his way to school. He spent weeks hovering between life and death in hospital. “I just remember ...

Life In Progress invites us to discover the person behind the polymath … Art is the gateway to possibility, Obrist believes, and his aim, it would seem, is to chivvy the rest of us through it

The inspiring titan of the modern art world delivers an unconventional and entertaining short memoir, while offering a sustained burst of infectious enthusiasm for the life-affirming power of creative connection

In his memoir, Obrist reveals a poignant motive for all his busyness. When he was six-years old, he was hit by a car on his way to school. He spent weeks hovering between life and death in hospital. “I just remember ...

Life In Progress invites us to discover the person behind the polymath … Art is the gateway to possibility, Obrist believes, and his aim, it would seem, is to chivvy the rest of us through it

The inspiring titan of the modern art world delivers an unconventional and entertaining short memoir, while offering a sustained burst of infectious enthusiasm for the life-affirming power of creative connection

In his memoir, Obrist reveals a poignant motive for all his busyness. When he was six-years old, he was hit by a car on his way to school. He spent weeks hovering between life and death in hospital. “I just remember ...

Books by Hans Ulrich Obrist

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