Harald Szeemann With By Through Because Towards Despite

Here for the first time is a complete presentation and comprehensive appraisal of the work of Harald Szeemann, who has an international reputation as one of the most creative of today's exhibition-makers. Numerous documents, notes, sketches, photos, commentaries, reactions, explanations and recollections convey a lively picture of how Szeemann's ideas and concepts are put into practice, as well as his philosophy and understanding of art.

Here for the first time is a complete presentation and comprehensive appraisal of the work of Harald Szeemann, who has an international reputation as one of the most creative of today's exhibition-makers. Numerous documents, notes, sketches, photos, commentaries, reactions, explanations and recollections convey a lively picture of how Szeemann's ideas and concepts are put into practice, as well as his philosophy and understanding of art.

Widely regarded as the most influential curator of the second half of the twentieth century, Harald Szeemann (1933–2005) is associated with some of the most important artistic developments of the postwar era. A passionate advocate for avant-garde movements like Conceptualism and Postminimalism, he collaborated with artists such as Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, and Cy Twombly, developing new ways of presenting art that reflected his sweeping vision of contemporary culture. Szeemann once stated that his goal as an exhibition maker was to create a “Museum of Obsessions.” This richly illustrated volume is a virtual collection catalogue for that imaginary institution, tracing the evolution of his curatorial method through letters, drawings, personal datebooks, installation plans, artists’ books, posters, photographs, and handwritten notes. This book documents all phases of Szeemann’s career, from his early stint as director of the Kunsthalle Bern, where he organized the seminal Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969); to documenta 5 (1972) and the intensely personal exhibition he staged in his own apart-ment using the belongings of his hairdresser grandfather (1974); to his reinvention as a freelance curator who realized projects on wide-ranging themes until his death in 2005. The book contains essays exploring Szeemann’s curatorial approach as well as interviews with collaborators. Its more than 350 illustrations include previously unpublished installation photographs and documents as well as archival materials. This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center February 6 to May 6, 2018 (a satellite show will be at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles February 4 to April 22, 2018); at the Kunsthalle Bern in Bern, Switzerland, June to September 2018; at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in Düsseldorf, Germany October 2018 to January 2019; and at the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Rivoli in Turin, Italy, February to May 2019.

Through an international range of case studies from the 1870s to the present, this volume analyzes strategies of display in department stores and modern retail spaces. Established scholars and emerging researchers working within a range of disciplinary contexts and historiographical traditions shed light on what constitutes modern retail and the ways in which interior designers, architects, and artists have built or transformed their practice in response to the commercial context.

The Getty Research Journal features the work of art historians, museum curators, and conservators from around the world as part of the Getty’s mission to promote the presentation, conservation, and interpretation of the world’s artistic legacy. Articles present original scholarship related to the Getty’s collections, initiatives, and research. This issue features essays on the culture of display in eighteenth-century Venetian palaces, the influence of prehistoric cave paintings on American abstract artists, the life and writings of Pauline Gibling Schindler, an unrealized project by Sam Francis and Walter Hopps for a contemporary art venue in 1960s Los Angeles, Harald Szeemann’s early plans for the documenta 5 exhibition, and the notebooks and manuscripts that led to Aldo Rossi’s Scientific Autobiography. Shorter texts include notices on Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s illustrations accompanying a tale in Martín de Murúa’s Historia general del Piru, copperplate prints depicting the Qing army’s invasion of Nepal in 1792, the Nazi-era business records of the Gustav Cramer gallery in The Hague, Netherlands, and a proposal for the integration of provenance research into all aspects of museum activities, including a call for cross-institutional databases and international collaborations.

The rise of the exhibition as critical form and artistic medium, from Robert Smithson's antimodernist non-sites in 1968 to today's institutional gravitation toward the participatory. In 1968, Robert Smithson reacted to Michael Fried's influential essay “Art and Objecthood” with a series of works called non-sites. While Fried described the spectator's connection with a work of art as a momentary visual engagement, Smithson's non-sites asked spectators to do something more: to take time looking, walking, seeing, reading, and thinking about the combination of objects, images, and texts installed in a gallery. In Beyond Objecthood, James Voorhies traces a genealogy of spectatorship through the rise of the exhibition as a critical form—and artistic medium. Artists like Smithson, Group Material, and Michael Asher sought to reconfigure and expand the exhibition and the museum into something more active, open, and democratic, by inviting spectators into new and unexpected encounters with works of art and institutions. This practice was sharply critical of the ingrained characteristics long associated with art institutions and conventional exhibition-making; and yet, Voorhies finds, over time the critique has been diluted by efforts of the very institutions that now gravitate to the “participatory.” Beyond Objecthood focuses on innovative figures, artworks, and institutions that pioneered the exhibition as a critical form, tracing its evolution through the activities of curator Harald Szeemann, relational art, and New Institutionalism. Voorhies examines recent artistic and curatorial work by Liam Gillick, Thomas Hirschhorn, Carsten Höller, Maria Lind, Apolonija Šušteršič, and others, at such institutions as Documenta, e-flux, Manifesta, and Office for Contemporary Art Norway, and he considers the continued potential of the exhibition as a critical form in a time when the differences between art and entertainment increasingly blur.

Participatory art practices allow members of an audience to actively contribute to the creation of art. Annemarie Kok provides a detailed analysis and explanation of the use of participatory strategies in art in the so-called ›long sixties‹ (starting around 1958 and ending around 1974) in Western Europe. Drawing on extensive archival materials and with the help of the toolbox of the actor-network theory, she maps out the various actors of three case studies of participatory projects by John Dugger and David Medalla, Piotr Kowalski, and telewissen, all of which were part of documenta 5 (Kassel, 1972).

How curating has changed art and how art has changed curating: an examination of the emergence contemporary curatorship. Once considered a mere caretaker for collections, the curator is now widely viewed as a globally connected auteur. Over the last twenty-five years, as international group exhibitions and biennials have become the dominant mode of presenting contemporary art to the public, curatorship has begun to be perceived as a constellation of creative activities not unlike artistic praxis. The curator has gone from being a behind-the-scenes organizer and selector to a visible, centrally important cultural producer. In The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), Paul O'Neill examines the emergence of independent curatorship and the discourse that helped to establish it. O'Neill describes how, by the 1980s, curated group exhibitions—large-scale, temporary projects with artworks cast as illustrative fragments—came to be understood as the creative work of curator-auteurs. The proliferation of new biennials and other large international exhibitions in the 1990s created a cohort of high-profile, globally mobile curators, moving from Venice to Paris to Kassel. In the 1990s, curatorial and artistic practice converged, blurring the distinction between artist and curator. O'Neill argues that this change in the understanding of curatorship was shaped by a curator-centered discourse that effectively advocated—and authorized—the new independent curatorial practice. Drawing on the extensive curatorial literature and his own interviews with leading curators, critics, art historians, and artists, O'Neill traces the development of the curator-as-artist model and the ways it has been contested. The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) documents the many ways in which our perception of art has been transformed by curating and the discourses surrounding it.