When attitude becomes form: Daniel Birnbaum on Harald Szeemann

ArtForum, Summer, 2005 by Daniel Birnbaum

HARALD SZEEMANN, who died in February at the age of seventy-one, was the most influential curator of his generation--and, arguably, the most influential of all time, since he practically defined the curator's role as we understand it today. For decades, he worked out of a studio he called "The Factory" in the small Swiss village of Tegna, conceiving exhibitions that were international in scope and consistently dodging the categories of traditional museum practice, often daring to place historical and contemporary artworks beside anthropological artifacts, sacred objects, technical devices, and occult instruments. Szeemann sought, he said, to create shows that were "poems in space." And in the wake of his move away from quasi-scientific museological attempts to classify and order cultural material, the figure of the curator would no longer be seen as a blend of bureaucrat and cultural impresario. Instead, he emerged as a kind of artist himself, or as some would say--with no small degree of skepticism toward Szeemann's genuine belief that art exhibitions were spiritual undertakings with the power to conjure alternative ways of organizing society--a meta-artist, utopian thinker, or even shaman.

Szeemann himself preferred the down-to-earth Ausstellungsmacher (exhibition maker) as his job title. But this modest term hardly conveys a real sense of his curatorial endeavors, whose "controlled chaos" (Szeemann's phrase) might productively be traced back to his brief career in theater during the 1950s, which included a renowned transvestite act and an homage to Dadaist Hugo Ball before ending with his egomaniacal one-man production of Urfaust in 1956 (yes, Szeemann played all the roles himself). "It gives you the same rhythm as in theater, only you don't have to be on stage constantly," he said in these pages regarding his decision in 1957 to enter the art world and direct exhibitions. Four years later, at the age of twenty-eight, he became director of the Kunsthalle Bern. It was a rather provincial institution at the time, but the bare-bones venue--precisely because it lacked any permanent collection--dictated that Szeemann take up a kind of improvisational, laboratory approach and working style that he would maintain throughout his life. At an unbelievable pace--an exhibition opened every month--Szeemann introduced a baffled local audience to the newest generation of American and European artists, many of whom received their earliest opportunities from the young director. Christo and Jeanne-Claude's first major project, for example, was wrapping the kunsthalle in 1968; and the venue also offered Andy Warhol one of his first shows in a European institution.

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But the landmark event of Szeemann's tenure in Bern was also his grand finale: "Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form," the first major survey of Conceptual art to take place in Europe. The tumultuous 1969 show, subtitled "Works, concepts, processes, situations, information," marked an important methodological shift for exhibition practice, in that artists were more or less free to contribute any work that they felt would be relevant. Since the artists, in Szeemann's words, "took over the institution," they also did their best to redefine the physical conditions for the show: Lawrence Weiner removed three square feet of wall space; Michael Heizer demolished the sidewalk with a metal ball; Richard Serra contributed one of his "Splash Pieces" involving molten lead. Richard Long, on the other hand, left the institutional framework behind and went on a three-day hike in the Swiss mountains. As the title suggested, this was not an exhibition of artworks but of "attitudes," the implication being that the artists themselves, as creative subjects and eccentric personalities, were as much on display as the often ephemeral works resulting from their activities. In fact, in the introduction to the show's catalogue, Szeemann mentions that some of the Conceptual and Earth artists who appear in the catalogue had no works in the show. Today this kind of approach is accepted practice in many international exhibitions (for better and, some would say, for worse): First the artist is invited, then comes the question of what the work will be. But in 1969 this method was entirely novel. (Though one should also note that Szeemann was not entirely alone: For example, New York artist and curator Seth Siegelaub was exploring similar ideas contemporaneously, notably creating a show in which artists could make their pieces "anywhere in the world.")

The new model had no less an impact on the public role of the curator, who was now not only an accomplice but also a key protagonist--the enterprising figure responsible for the exhibition's very staging as an event. Unfortunately, the public reaction to "When Attitudes Become Form" was over whelmingly negative ("When Platitudes Become Form," "Sabotage in the Art Temple," "Is Art Finally Dead?" "Stupidity ..." are just a few headlines found in local newspapers at the time), and scandals accompanied the opening (Daniel Buren, who hadn't actually been invited to participate in the show, was arrested for executing a poster project illegally in the streets). In addition, Szeemann, who had already come under heavy fire from the kunsthalle's board for not showing enough Swiss artists, was assailed again for the number of foreign artists he featured. Under such increasing pressures, Szeemann decided to resign, but only to become something that had never previously existed, assuming a role that would affect the most fundamental operations of the art-world community for decades to come: the independent curator.