Prospero | Curation reinvented

Harald Szeemann and the art of exhibition-making

A new exhibition explores the auteur-curator’s profound influence on modern art

By J.U-S. | BERN

ON THE floor is a black, 1960s-style telephone. “If this telephone rings, you may answer it,” a note reads. “Walter De Maria is on the line and would like to talk to you.” This appealingly quirky piece of art, selected for exhibition in 1969 by Harald Szeemann, does not seem especially odd by today’s standards. That is because current contemporary art shows owe so much to the Swiss curator, who died in 2005.

The landmark exhibitions of the previous 100 years—the first Impressionists collection in 1874 or the Armory Show in 1913, where Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” shocked America—are remembered primarily for their content. Szeemann’s revolution was to make form significant, and to introduce a theatrical element to exhibition-making. Viewers became participants in a spectacle where artworks played off one another and the space around them. He was “like a movie director,” said Christo, whom Szeemann invited to wrap the Kunsthalle museum in Bern, Switzerland, in reinforced polyethylene in 1968 (pictured, above).

A self-described anarchist, with a sizeable ego and a formidable grasp of art history, Szeemann was appointed director of the Kunsthalle in 1961, at the tender age of 28. Ideas were what mattered. He travelled widely to seek out new artists, embracing land art, performance art, video art and the ideas of Fluxus, an anti-art collective. He developed his shows in close collaboration with artists.

It wasn’t until the end of the decade—amid the anti-Vietnam war protests and waves of unrest sweeping Europe and America—that he really hit his stride. In 1969 he curated “Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form”, the exhibition for which he is best known (and which soon led to his parting company with the Kunsthalle). A show that, as its title suggests, set out to give artistic form to the heady, insurrectionary mood of the time, it brought together American conceptual artists with Italian Arte Povera masters, De Maria and Joseph Beuys, a German maverick. With plaster chipped off walls and pavements destroyed with wrecking balls (Michael Heizer is pictured during the creation of “Bern Depression” below), it was an avant-garde exhibition unlike anything that had been shown in a museum before.

The curator’s legacy is not just one of radical exhibition-making: he left behind a vast archive of 24,000 files on artists as well as a huge library of books and photographs in a former watch factory in Ticino, Switzerland. For the past seven years, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles has been imposing order on this “structured chaos” (Szeemann’s own term for his approach to curation). “The shock is still with me,” recalled Glenn Phillips, who led the project. “In every cranny, there was more.”

The work of Mr Phillips and his colleagues has spawned “Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions”, an enthralling exhibition about the curator’s life and ideas, hosted at his old stomping ground. The title refers to another of Szeemann’s phrases: he used “Museum of Obsessions” to describe not simply his archive and library, but exhibitions both realised and unrealised. Above all, he was fascinated by the compulsion that drove people—artists who pioneered new forms as well as those who didn’t see themselves as artists at all—to create.

Two displays focus on Szeemann’s involvement with radical artists in the 1960s and 1970s. Screens present archive footage from “When Attitudes Become Form” and “Documenta 5”, the quinquennial show that Szeemann curated in 1972. He organised a 100-day event that mixed pop and conceptual art with performance, outsider art and “non-art”. It aimed to “question reality”—and it proved highly controversial. “The prevailing assumption is that culture is an outworn fiction,” wrote Hilton Kramer, a critic at the New York Times; the show was an effort “to demonstrate that art was obsolete”.

Film of the exhibitions is offset by artists’ proposals, photos and correspondence. De Maria writes about his telephone, stating that he sometimes calls it late at night, liking the idea of the phone “ringing in the palace at 4am”. What emerges is the close relationship Szeemann forged with artists, even when they disagreed. He was thrilled, for example, when Daniel Buren complained that he had been reduced to a “brushstroke” in the curator’s “painting”: he responded by publishing Buren’s comments in a catalogue.

It could have been dry and overwhelming but “Museum of Obsessions” captivates, moving between Szeemann as the archetype of the global curator and Szeemann the individual attuned to creativity in many different forms. Following in the footsteps of one of his heroes, Marcel Duchamp, the auteur-curator opened up the definition of what art could be. In a suitably masterful piece of exhibition-making, the Getty team have highlighted the delight that Szeemann took in “the strangest and most brilliant creations that artists have devised”. Visitors will share that delight.

“Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions” is showing at Kunsthalle Bern until September 2nd. It will then travel to Düsseldorf, Turin and New York

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