Mind over matter

ArtForum, Nov, 1996 by Hans-Ulrich Obrist

That same day we visited the studio of a Dutch painter, Reiner Lucassen, who said, "I have an assistant. Would you be interested in looking at his work?" The assistant was Jan Dibbets, who greeted us from behind two tables - one with neon coming out of the surface, the other one with grass, which he watered. I was so impressed by this gesture that I said to Edy, "Okay. I know what I'll do, an exhibition that focuses on behaviors and gestures like the one I just saw."

That was the starting point; then everything happened very quickly. There is a published diary of "Attitudes" that details my trips, studio visits, the installation process. It was an adventure from beginning to end, and the catalogue, discussing how the works could either assume material form or remain immaterial, documents this revolution in the visual arts. It was a moment of great intensity and freedom, when you could either produce a work or just imagine it, as Lawrence Weiner put it. Sixty-nine artists, Europeans and Americans, took over the institution. Robert Barry irradiated the roof; Richard Long did a walk in the mountains; Mario Merz made one of his first igloos; Michael Heizer opened the sidewalk; Walter de Maria produced his telephone piece; Richard Serra showed lead sculptures, the belt piece, and a splash piece; Weiner took a square meter out of the wall; Beuys made a grease sculpture. The Kunsthalle became a real laboratory and a new exhibition style was born - one of structured chaos.

HUO: Speaking of new structures for exhibitions, I wanted to ask you about the Agentur fur Geistige Gastarbeit (Agency for spiritual guest work). I know that it served as a kind of base from which you mounted a number of significant shows in the early '70s, but I'm unclear how the agency was founded.

HS: "When Attitudes Become Form" and the following exhibition "Friends and their Friends" provoked a scandal in Bern. To me, what I was showing were artworks but the critics and the public did not agree. The city government and the parliament got involved. Finally they decided that I could remain the director if I didn't put human lives in danger - they thought my activities were destructive to humankind. Even worse, the exhibition committee was mainly composed of local artists and they decided that from now on they would dictate the programs. They rejected the Edward Kienholz show and the solo show of Beuys, to which he had already agreed. Suddenly it was war, and I decided to resign, to become a freelance curator. It was during that period that the hostility to foreign workers began to manifest itself; a political party was even founded to lower the number of foreigners in Switzerland. I was attacked since my name was not Swiss but Hungarian. In response, I founded the Agentur fur Geistige Gastarbeit, which was a political statement since the Italian, Turkish, and Spanish workers in Switzerland were called "guest workers." The agency was a one-man enterprise, a kind of institutionalization of myself, and its slogans were both ideological "Replace Property with Free Activity" and practical, "From Vision to Nail," which meant that I did everything from conceptualizing the project to hanging the works. It was the spirit of '68.