Off the record: Serpentine Summer Party

By Gallery Girl

To be frank, the London summer party scene isn’t what it used to be. Cocktail parties at commercial galleries seem to be a thing of the past. Major public institutions have decided that it would somehow be inappropriate to continue hiring dwarfs to carry plates of Boutros on their heads. So what, in these party-straitened times, is a girl to do? Luckily one institution has dug in its heels and in time-honoured fashion refuses to bow to financial downturns; thank God for the Serpentine Gallery, I say!

The Serpentine Summer Party has always been legend and is extensively covered in quality press such as London Lite, Butt Magazine and Artforum.com’s Scene & Herd. At the esteemed London college just a stone’s throw away from the Serpentine, where I did my esteemed Certificate in Curating, our course tutor devoted a whole term to teaching the history of this vital art happening. He taught us how the museum’s board of trustees came up with the jolly summer party ruse a few years back, as the exhibitions were ‘all going a bit Jeffrey Deitch’. The beauty of the ruse lay in its simplicity: invite an out-of-work architect to knock up a prefab structure next to the gallery and then get Bianca Jagger and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson along to its opening. This worked for a few years, until the trustees decided that it would be good to appoint a curator, as somebody had pointed out that this was the sort of thing museums were now looking to do. After a quick search on Google, they gave the job to some bloke called Hans Ulrich Obrist, as his name appeared 117,000 times on the search engine. The trustees might not have had any idea who he was, but when he turned up, Mr Obrist demanded that a rigorous intellectual programme be implemented – this resulted in Bianca and Tara being rigorously questioned for 24 hours at a time by Rem Koolhaas inside the Bucky-build. Anyway, enough ‘history of art’!

The first problem with the Serpentine, as ever, was what to wear. With Little Boots rumoured to be choosing D&G’s black and copper metallic jacket, their autumn/winter 09 range was a nonstarter. As for the ironic high-street look, Poppy Delevigne snagged Topshop’s sequin minidress and ruffle T-bar shoes. After a quick look through my own humble gallery-viewing wardrobe, I seized upon a lilac silk and dusty-blue lace chemise dress cinched with a skinny metallic double-wrapped belt under a cropped sequined cardigan with black open-toe pumps, while under my breath thanking the RCA for all that it had taught me.

Next there was the small problem of not having an invite. While this might have been insurmountable a few years back, with Mr Obrist’s presence I felt that there might be a way in. Nipping down to Book Ends, I picked up a copy of his latest blockbuster on the ‘brief’ history of curating – the best few pounds I’ve spent in a while. Quickly rifling through it, I composed an email to the great man, renowned for answering all emails sent to him by any-old person.

Dear Mr H.U. Obrist,
I have been reading your marvellous book and was most taken with the statement posed at the start by the former director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Anne d’Harnoncourt: ‘I mean to be with art.’ I read those words and I thought: how can we indeed ever be fully with art? Is our experience of the object always mediated, and if this is so, is it actually through that always-ever-being-mediated state of experiencing art that we actually come to a state of once having been with art? Is the object of art only ever fully be-able-with through the always present, past and future of having always been curated? Can I have an invite to the Summer Party?

Did it work? Well, reader, if I told you that just a few days later I was locked in a temporary Japanese structure with Gustav Metzger preparing a homemade bomb from just three bottles of Perrier-Jouët, eight miniburgers, a copy of Art Monthly, four rough-hewn beech trees gathered from Hyde Park by two attractively sweaty technicians and a well-worn copy of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s manifesto Empire… well, that would be telling, wouldn’t it?

GG