Harald Szeemann and the Road Back to the Museum
2019; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 11; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/702750
ISSN2329-1249
Autores Tópico(s)Museums and Cultural Heritage
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeHarald Szeemann and the Road Back to the MuseumMax RosenbergMax RosenbergPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe Event FormEarly indications of what the public could expect at documenta 5 were revealed on the cover of the May/June 1970 issue of Informationen (fig. 1), a seasonal brochure on local culture in and around the city of Kassel, Germany, where the famed quinquennial contemporary art exhibition was established in 1955. In a brief schematic outline, Harald Szeemann (fig. 2), the newly appointed general secretary of documenta 5, along with a few collaborators whom he had selected to help with the organization of the show, gave a brief explanation of the approach to the next Kassel mega-exhibition. Their documenta, as the brochure makes abundantly clear, would distinguish itself from its predecessors by embracing an “event structure” (Ereignisstruktur). More than the proposal itself, a graphic featured above the text illustrated this ambition. In a large black field, “documenta IV” appeared in big white letters, but the “IV” was struck through and a “V” was printed above it. Beneath this, “Museum der 100 Tage” (100-day museum), the traditional length of the exhibition and its de facto tagline, was printed, but only “100 Tage” remained; “Museum der” was struck through and “Ereignis” (event) was added next to and slightly above the previous motto. From “Museum der 100 Tage,” the “100 Tage Ereignis” (100-day event) was born.Fig. 1. “Documenta V: 100 Tage Ereignis.” Cover of Informationen 1, no. 9 (May/June 1970). Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2011.M.30.Fig. 2. Harald Szeemann standing outside the Kunsthalle Bern during the exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form; Works–Concepts–Processes–Situations–Information, 1969. Photo by Harry Shunk. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, Harald Szeemann papers, 2011.M.30, series IV.A.By depicting the first conceptual proposal for the exhibition in this way, Szeemann and his coorganizers signaled that documenta 5 would constitute an assertive departure from the format and structure of the past exhibitions. Specifically, Szeemann wished to break down the traditional media distinctions and the privileging of painting and sculpture that the previous documentas had maintained. This intention also stemmed from a desire to move away from abstract painting, metonymy for modern art itself in much of the capitalist West (especially West Germany). Documenta had been a primary conduit through which abstraction had achieved broad cultural supremacy. At the first several documentas, the art historian and coorganizer of the shows Werner Haftmann had popularized the idea of abstraction as a “world language” (Weltsprache), a concept that the exhibition’s founder, the local Kassel artist and curator Arnold Bode, had also embraced.1 At the same time, as aggressive as the striking through of the motto of the past documentas appeared, Szeemann did not outright discard it; rather, he reformatted it into a new type of concept, one that emphasized the temporality of the affair. Though always a part of documenta’s structure, temporality, in Szeemann’s mind, had remained an underdeveloped part of the exhibition. Through this change to its motto, Szeemann shifted documenta’s conceptual emphasis from the static and authoritative conditions of the museum—embodied in the Fridericianum (fig. 3), the eighteenth-century museum building that had housed the first four exhibitions—to the dynamic potentiality of the event.Fig. 3. The Fridericianum at the first documenta (1955). The newly rebuilt center of Kassel can be seen in the background. Photo by Günther Becker. © documenta archiv / Günther Becker.Szeemann’s appointment and this decisive shift in the approach to documenta had transpired due to the poor reception of documenta 4 in 1968. While that show attracted 207,000 visitors and concluded with the first budget surplus in documenta’s history, the public and critical discontent over the exhibition put documenta’s future in question. This prompted Bode, who was displeased with documenta’s bloated and bureaucratically run organizing committee, to push for a new organizational structure for the next exhibition: a single curatorial head would be selected as a general secretary to craft the entire concept and program of the show.2 Recognizing that his own time as the face of documenta was coming to a close, Bode advocated the appointment of the young Szeemann, who had gained wide international acclaim for his work as the director of the Kunsthalle Bern.Szeemann had been appointed director of the Kunsthalle in 1961 at the age of twenty-eight, a year after finishing his doctorate in art history and archaeology at the Universität Bern. His graduate research focused on theater, cabaret, and a diverse range of artists and groups from the French Nabis to Dada.3 His early exhibitions at the Kunst halle tended toward the monographic and focused on contemporary movements, like kinetic art, or on individuals, like his inaugural exhibition on the work of the local Bern artist Otto Tschumi. In the late 1960s, Szeemann began pushing broader formal or thematic shows such as the traveling exhibition Shapes of Color (1967), which featured numerous postwar color-field painters (Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, and Frank Stella), and 12 Environments (1968), a show composed of large-scale installations by a range of contemporary artists such as Andy Warhol and Christo and Jeanne-Claude (who, famously, conducted one of their signature wrappings of the Kunsthalle). The show that gained Szeemann broad critical attention was his landmark 1969 exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form; Works–Concepts–Processes–Situations–Information, a watershed in the exhibition of postminimalist and poststudio art. Occurring less than a year after documenta 4, Attitudes caught Bode’s attention.4 Even more than with the exhibition itself, however, Bode was impressed with how Szeemann had handled the response to the show from the conservative Bern public and the Kunsthalle’s own board, made up of local Swiss artists.5 Szeemann had ardently fought the criticism leveled against the artistic practices displayed in Attitudes and further defended his plans for a large Joseph Beuys exhibition that he had been preparing but which the Kunsthalle’s board eventually canceled due to the controversial nature of Beuys’s practice.6 As a result, Szeemann came to find the situation untenable in Bern, and shortly after Attitudes he resigned from the Kunsthalle.7As an exhibition, Attitudes appeared to be everything that documenta 4 was not.8 While documenta 4 primarily featured a great deal of American postpainterly abstraction and pop and retained traditional media distinctions between painting and sculpture, Attitudes presented art that stressed the process of its making or that lacked a discrete object form or easily classifiable medium. This included Richard Serra’s Splash, in which the artist slung molten lead against the threshold where the floor met the wall in the Kunsthalle’s foyer; Michael Heizer’s Bern Depression, where the artist used a demolition ball to create a crater in the sidewalk outside the Kunsthalle; and Walter De Maria’s Art by Telephone, in which a solitary rotary telephone was placed with a placard inviting viewers to pick up the phone and speak with the artist whenever it rang. Szeemann also saw works like these as a means of manifesting the artists’ presence at the exhibition without them being physically at the Kunsthalle. The arrangement of the artworks—as interventions into the spaces of the museum and beyond it rather than linked relics in a deterministic, historical chain—shed the pretense of traditional generational progression or nationalistic association in favor of synchronic, experiential encounters between the spectator and the artwork.To Szeemann, the first four documentas had simply been a “war of attrition without a correct concept,” a static display of objects that appeared purposeless and dead, a “Christmas exhibition of huge proportions with an all-star cast.”9 For his documenta, Szeemann believed in a different organizing metric based around events: “Documenta 5 should no longer simply want to be the biggest and most comprehensive exhibition, but rather documenta can exemplify, like no other event—for which the outsider position of the city of Kassel is thus the best prerequisite—that an exhibition can be a place of programmed events, a true space of interaction.”10While Attitudes is the clear precedent for Szeemann’s plans for documenta 5, the roots of Szeemann’s focus on process art and performativity and his interest in reformatting documenta around events and interactions—around temporality and action instead of objects—go back to his early years as a student in Bern. During this period in his life, Szeemann became personally and academically interested in the theater, and he proceeded to perform in several group productions of Shakespeare, Goethe, and other classic plays at the Bern student theater. Quickly, however, he came to find the “backstage rivalries”11 of ensemble theater displeasing, which led him to establish his own one-man cabaret in 1956. Descriptions of these performances are difficult to find, but when Szeemann later makes reference to them, he describes them as a spiritual progression: “It was a strange blend,” he writes, “that became a journey of initiation, a purification. From coarse beginnings to a spiritual finale.”12 Reiterating this point, Szeemann also links these performances to his later curatorial practices: “The whole thing was conceived as an imaginary journey from the banal to the highly spiritual,” adding that, “In a way [the one-man show] already had the underlying structure of documenta 5.”13 As Szeemann here recounts, this trajectory—from the banal to the higher order of the spiritual, or geistig in German, which also denotes the intellectual—would be evident at documenta 5 as well. More broadly, these qualities of the spiritual and banal appear to have been central to Szeemann’s curatorial self-identity as he progressed in his career.Shortly after leaving the Kunsthalle Bern, Szeemann started a new independent organization, the Agentur für geistige Gastarbeit (Agency for Spiritual/Intellectual Guest/Migrant Labor), a freelance curatorial agency that he established in response to the restrictions and bureaucratic limitations of traditional art institutions. The name of his agency evokes the banal and spiritual through contrasting associations. The agency’s work is spiritual and intellectual, geistig, but it is also migrant labor, Gastarbeit. This term would be immediately recognized in the German-speaking world as an unambiguous reference to the foreign-worker programs of many Western European nations, especially Germany, from the late fifties and sixties, for which workers—primarily from Mediterranean nations (Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey)—were brought in to do industrial and manual labor jobs within the host nation on an ostensibly temporary basis.14 But the banal and spiritual, as a conceptual leitmotif for Szeemann’s curatorial endeavors, was evident even earlier, in Szeemann’s first foray into exhibition making: a three-day homage to Hugo Ball.Szeemann organized the exhibition in 1957, the thirty-year anniversary of Hugo Ball’s death, in the Kleintheater Kramgasse 6, the same theater as Szeemann’s own oneman show from the previous year. The impulse for the exhibition came from his experiences performing and from his growing fascination with cabaret, which had initially led him to Ball. The exhibition included display cases filled with books, letters, and photographs documenting the Dada figure’s life and work. It also featured Szeemann and others performing readings of Ball’s poems and his literary and intellectual work.15 As is evident in the selection of Ball, the exhibition’s short duration, its location in a theater, and the recitation of Ball’s work, Szeemann had already, from the outset of his curatorial career, sought an alternative exhibition model based around performance and event structures.Later describing himself as a “bewildered admirer”16 of Ball’s, Szeemann was deeply fascinated by the artist and identified with him. Later in his life, Szeemann explained that Ball was a “model” for him “in the way he achieved a balance between activism and meditation.”17 Ball, one of the founders of Zurich Dada and the Cabaret Voltaire, had also lived in Bern immediately after his time in Zurich, where he wrote for the biweekly newspaper Die Freie Zeitung, a publication committed to political emancipation and democratic politics. Szeemann had researched Ball in great depth at university and wrote papers on topics related to the famed Dadaist.18 Szeemann also likely identified with Ball as a Catholic who, like him, lived in predominantly Protestant regions of Switzerland.19Ball is best known for his sound poems and performances, most notably Karawane (1916) (fig. 4). For this performance, Ball appeared at the Cabaret Voltaire in the guise of a “magical bishop,” wearing an outfit of immobilizing, rigid cardboard that made him appear both mechanomorphic and ecclesiastical. At the start of the performance, Ball was carried onto the stage, where he then proceeded to recite, sing, and utter a sequence of nonsensical words that he had composed. The performance concluded in a swelling crescendo that left Ball trembling and covered in sweat.20 The poem and the performance attack and collapse hierarchies and binaries: Ball’s costume reads as playful and mundane (made of cardboard and emulating the mechanical forms of the industrial everyday) but also reverential (with a cape resembling a mozzetta), all of which is topped off by a headdress that evokes both a Catholic miter and a dunce cap.21 His recitation conflates childlike ramblings with spiritual possession, infantilizing immobility with obelisk-like iconicity, and mechanical impotence with phallic reverence.Fig. 4. Hugo Ball as the “magical bishop” performing his Lautgedicht (sound poem) Karawane at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, 1916. Photo: PVDE / Bridgeman.This performance perhaps illuminates one of the many reasons that Ball appealed to Szeemann: it operated within the registers of the banal and the spiritual that Szeemann would identify as guiding principles in his own performances and curatorial practices. At the same time, there is a notable difference in how the banal and the geistig function in Karawane and in Szeemann’s performances and curatorial pursuits. Ball dissolves the distinctions that separate the banal and the spiritual, resulting in an experience that rebounds back onto the social contradictions of the everyday that were in crisis during World War I. Szeemann, as he himself claims, pursues a “journey” from the banal to the spiritual. So while both qualities are present in Szeemann’s practices, this journey serves as a defining structural component and one that implies the transcending of the banality of the everyday. In Szeemann’s conceptualization of the event format at documenta, this distinction remained defining.The Festival ApproachIn elaborating how to enhance the event structure of his documenta, Szeemann prepared a preliminary proposal on the concept for documenta 5, most likely from early 1970, in which he and his initial group of collaborators outlined some general considerations regarding their approach to organizing the exhibition.22 They immediately recognized one of the paradoxes of contemporary art exhibitions: they were required to situate and categorize artistic production of the present and then, due to the demands of planning, predict the situation of art a few years in advance. The speed with which artistic production changed at this time, evidenced by the radical diversity and evolution of practices during the sixties, made predicting the condition of contemporary art, even two years in advance, extremely difficult: “The art developments to 1972 are not foreseeable,” the group wrote. “What is visible are trends. Thus we have merely developed a preliminary draft conception in which today’s visible trends are taken into account without imposing the demand of deriving a closed system.”23 On the one hand, this reflects Szeemann’s recognition that trends in the arts changed rather quickly and selecting works, even a few years in advance, could conflict with the desire to be contemporary. On the other hand, it underscores a different historical metric, what Caroline A. Jones has highlighted in Szeemann’s exhibitions as a “shift from ‘objects’ with their ‘schools’ to the spaces of multiplied happenings.”24Whereas at documenta 4 the organizers attempted to maintain the same historical scheme that had been developed at the first documenta, by looking to respond to, rather than impose, “trends,” Szeemann was clearly wishing to accommodate and elevate the intentions of the artist. At the same time, Szeemann understood that a kind of uncontained pluralism was also not tenable: principles of selection remained key.25 In negotiating between curatorial traditions of a rigid historicism, which were associated with generational and formal evolutionary models of artistic production and evolution, and the pluralistic impulse, Szeemann proposed that the contemporary art curator had to give voice to the connective impulses of artistic practice: he had to recognize broad tendencies within the registers of often heterogeneous contemporary production.At this stage, the organizers outlined very generally some of the trends they had begun to take into consideration. “Current art endeavors to move from the isolated object into real, socially engaged contexts,” reads the report. “Related to this is the departure from the preserve of the museum to the social space of action, more exactly, to the social space of interaction.” Lastly, the report stated that “the concept of time and of currentness [Aktualität], and thus also the concept of the currentness of relevant documentation, has changed.”26 As trends, “socially engaged contexts,” “the social space of interaction,” and “currentness” reflect Szeemann’s belief in the centrality of the viewer’s engagement with the artwork over institutionally defined histories and also harken back to his foundational interest in theater and performance.Some months after this preliminary report, once Szeemann had been officially appointed the general secretary of documenta 5, he and his collaborators circulated a concept paper on the broad outlines of the exhibition in which they first declared that “the slogan of the last two Documentas,” the “100 Day Museum,” would be replaced with the “100 Day Event.”27 This was their answer to the question of how an exhibition can accommodate the artist and the viewer and radically embrace currentness. True to their initial intentions, their reformatted documenta would be a space of “programmed experiences, a space of interaction, an accessible event structure with diverse action centers.”28While Szeemann never appears to have explained his views and ideas in explicit Marxist terminology, his new event-based approach stemmed from what he understood as the basic functional drives of the static museum: ownership and property. Szeemann outlined this criticism of the museum and the traditional art exhibition explicitly in his concept papers for documenta 5: “The terms ‘museum’ and ‘art exhibition’ combine the concept of object selection, of material ownership, property transport, the affirmation of ownership, and the insurance of property.”29 Underlying this criticism is a recognition on Szeemann’s part that museums and art exhibitions were failing to serve the public interest, and that they had come to merely extend private interests and the structures of the dominant socioeconomic order.This critique extended back to Szeemann’s time as the director of the Kunsthalle Bern. As Szeemann explained it, he felt that over time his primary role had become maintaining the property conditions of art: “My job was to more or less allow for the transportation of valuable objects to Bern and then to stage them according to the means available to me.” With When Attitudes Become Form, Szeemann attempted to change this dynamic by “building spaces according to artists’ demands so that artists could finally come to Bern.”30 That exhibition was intentionally cast as a workshop site for the artists, and the institution itself often served as surface and subject for experimentation and protoforms of institutional critique.31 In particular, the prevalence of process art at the show reflects Szeemann’s attempt to ground the exhibition in experience and engagement rather than traditional media and objects. Moreover, in this approach, there exists an echo of Szeemann’s banal-to-spiritual paradigm. He filled the spaces with artworks or the traces of actions that were mundane in material and execution and often grounded or attached to a defined physical site but that facilitated noncommodified encounters between the viewer and the artist. This aspirational sentiment was also reflected in the slogan that Szeemann developed for his freelance curatorial agency: “Besitz durch freie Aktionen ersetzen” (Replace property with free activity).Frustratingly, Szeemann felt that property relations persisted even at Attitudes: “Whether objects or direct actions, the result was the same: confirmation of ownership, and not what I actually sought: participation. The artist departed and I stayed with the remains of the action, already sold in Bern at great cost.”32 This fact is nowhere more apparent than in the corporate sponsor for Attitudes, Philip Morris Europe, whose president, John A. Murphy, in his sponsor’s statement for the exhibition, made an explicit link between art and business innovation: “We at Philip Morris feel that it is appropriate that we participate in bringing these works to the attention of the public, for there is a key element in this ‘new art’ which has its counterpart in the business world. That element is innovation—without which it would be impossible for progress to be made in any segment of society.”33 Art as a model of entrepreneurial innovation merely reiterates the social dynamics of property and ownership that Szeemann would later critique. By contrast, Szeemann’s intended goal of participation represents a subversive practice for the museum. It implies a specific instrumental role for the art institution that is distinct from the socioeconomic dynamics of everyday life in postwar capitalist society, that of engaging visitors in unique, egalitarian experiences. Szeemann’s interest in participation aligns with his interest in cultivating spiritual and intellectual experience and also likely stems from the broader discourses on radical forms of democratic political engagement in the sixties and in the aftermath of 1968.34Szeemann saw the potential at documenta to dispense with the property structures of the art institution, since documenta was, at its core, an event defined by its quinquennial recurrence, not the physical structures that housed it. Yet, in his mind, the persistence of the traditional museum format contradicted and limited the previous documenta and kept the exhibition from reaching its inherent potential. Szeemann believed this was one of the primary reasons for public and critical dissatisfaction with documenta 4. “The informed visitor,” wrote Szeemann and his collaborators of the experience of documenta 4, “had the feeling that [they] already knew everything, that the surprising moment [of art] was extinguished.”35 Documenta, devoid of a collection yet adhering to the format of a collecting institution, continued to deny the very element that made it special.Szeemann therefore believed that to promote participation required springing art from the confines of the “four-cornered” art world: the atelier, the gallery, the collection, and the museum.36 He viewed these settings as the structures that maintained the conditions of ownership over the artwork and therefore restricted the experience of art. While the initial proposal for documenta 5 that Szeemann published in Informationen did not give much in the way of an explanation as to how his event-based exhibition would be accomplished, it provided one concrete claim: it would use a mile-long stretch of Kassel’s Karlsaue park for the “thematic realization” of the experience. Szeemann further developed this concept into the idea of a “street” that would function as a “meeting place” and “as a zone for action and demonstrations and as an aesthetic situation.”37Feeling disappointed in his attempts to create new kinds of social experiences and encounters within the spaces of the museum with exhibitions such as Attitudes, Szeemann now sought to abolish the museum altogether. He embraced the inherently liminal street as an anti-institutional form that could fulfill documenta’s potential by reprogramming the exhibition as a social, interactive, and participatory zone devoid of the mausoleum-like display of deadened, static property. The appeal is understandable within Szeemann’s curatorial ambitions. The street is familiar, ordinary, banal, and yet it is a shared rather than owned space; it is experiential and unpredictable, a space of genuine potentiality that can transcend the mundane everyday.As planning continued, Szeemann’s ambitions to dissolve the static traditions of documenta and the museum only intensified. Shortly after the initial proposal for documenta 5 had been published in Informationen, Szeemann became convinced that even keeping the 100-day format was a mistake. “I saw the error in our concept,” he wrote to Jürgen Claus, a collaborator. “I don’t think we need to hang on to the 100-day concept, but rather we should actually replace the exhibition-time [Ausstellungszeit] with an eventtime [Ereigniszeit] lasting no more than three weeks.”38 He put it in more comical terms to his colleague Werner Hofmann, who had apparently been critical of the 100-day format all along: “We are not Napoleon, nor are we capable of a hundred-day erection.”39 The latter analogy is perhaps a direct dig at documenta 4 and a reference to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work 5,600 Cubicmeter Package (1968), a massive pneumatic cylinder that repeatedly failed to inflate during numerous attempts to do so in the Karlsaue park during the run of the exhibition.40Further impetus for this truncated Ereigniszeit appears to have stemmed from Szeemann’s previously elaborated critique of the museum. In an interview, Szeemann had stated, “In the Kunsthalle, I was often convinced that certain exhibitions should only last three or four days, but I was required to let it run for a month so that a part of the cost would be recouped.”41 Though Szeemann was not outright declaring it as such, the 100-day model—even made over to emphasize the event-like qualities of the exhibition—maintained an institutional format that he believed fueled the ownership-affirming qualities of the traditional art institution through the normative framework of the long exhibition run and through standard museum operating hours. The three-week proposal was an attempt to turn documenta into a festival like Woodstock, an experience meant to set itself outside the dynamics of the everyday. This format offered the potential to disrupt the capitalist structures of designated times and spaces of production and consumption, work and leisure. In place of social atomization and the automatization of everyday experience, this festival format offered the possibility of engendering new forms of collective experience and participation revolving around alternative temporalities.42To make this format feasible, Szeemann suggested devoting funds to constructing “barracks” and cheap accommodations for visitors so that they could stay over multiple days at low cost and engage in activities during the daytime and at night rather than during prescribed museum hours. These barracks would be placed south of the Fridericianum in the Karlsaue park along with art sheds and other spaces meant to promote social interaction and engagement between visitors and artists. The Fridericianum itself, as Szeemann envisioned it, would function as a documentation center and a space for seminars and indoor demonstration. He declared that “if we again fill the Fridericianum with pieces, then we are no further along than D1–D4.”43 The Fridericianum would be entirely devoted to educating visitors through audiovisual presentations and slides, printed matter, seminars, and ambiguously titled “group” and “learning” machines (Gruppenautomaten; Lernmaschinen), as well as offering spaces where artists could “clarify their intentions.”44In his letters regarding the three-week format, Szeemann further hinted at how he envisioned accommodating participatory experiences: “D5 is a place where the mobility of artistic ideas can be demonstrated against the background of an elaborate festival (teach-in, film-in, dance-in, theater-in, art-in, live-in).”45 Szeemann seems to have believed that the sit-in/teach-in format, which challenged the functioning of traditional institutional structures and hierarchies through horizontal, participatory models and forms of social interaction, could be exported to serve as a model structure for the experience of contemporary art. Student movements had employed these approaches in educational institutions in an effort to subvert administrative control. In Szeemann’s plan, this dismantling occurred through eliminating the structures that made for a passive audience—including the te
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