Summer 2005 - Harald Szeeman - obituary
CIRCA 112 Harald Szeemann - If you've been enriched by seeing challenging art exhibitions over the last few decades, you owe Harald Szeemann a great deal - whether you've heard his name before or not. He was the person for whom the label 'artist curator' was invented and who was almost single-handedly responsible for raising to by now near-gigantic proportions the profile but also the obligations of the curator. His first claim to fame was to show, as the director of the Berne Museum, American Minimalists with some now-canonical European (e.g., the Vienna Actionists) in the legendary exhibition When Attitudes Become Form , 1969. However, he had already moved a few goalposts, for example, by mounting the first museum show of Art Brut / self-taught art (what is now referred to as 'Outsider Art'). One could conclude that, in Ireland especially, his legacy is alive. Artists' and nonartists' attitudes kept inspiring Szeemann over the next three and a half decades of exhibition-making. He considered himself a servant of artists. He facilitated and did decidedly more: the intensity that he searched for in others, he himself delivered. What was once was a diet of one-man shows, national and period surveys of art exploded at documenta 5 in 1972. Now freelance by conviction, Szeemann developed what was the first large-scale thematic exhibition. It had a utopian undertone and included self-taught pieces, science-fiction comics and individual mythologies with the inclusion of Joseph Beuys. That documenta made history - and since then, Beuys became the documenta artist. Szeemann's choices soon became canonical, but he didn't turn to safe bets. While his circle of friends from the early days kept being included when it suited, he chose his grandfather as the topic of an intimate show; he travelled, for example to China as much as ten years ago - and found intensity aplenty. He gave people a chance, including the present author. As merely an MA student I could contribute to three high-profile publications, his Beuys retrospective catalogues, Zurich (where he was an affiliated freelance curator), Madrid and Paris (Centre Pompidou), 1993/4. When I spent some months in Zurich two years later, I visited an exhibition of work by his wife, the artist Ingeborg Lüscher. Among her characteristic sulphur and black works, she showed some photographs. Initially quite abstract, they emerged as close-ups of ejaculations. Intensity, indeed. Today, Szeemann's thinking may strike one as too much of a master narrative, a total work of art, following his own show on the Inclination towards a Gesamtkunstwerk , 1983, which proposed the tendency as a crucial characteristic of European art production. The Bachelor Machines project, departing from Duchamp's Large glass , pursued that intensity into the erotic, more especially male auto-eroticism. However, the female is also present, linked with the wisdom of Monte Verità (subtitled "Le mammelle della verità"). That mountain was an artist colony in the early twentieth century, where inhabitants and visitors practised vegetarianism, life reform, eurythmics, anarchism and the like. Apart from a 1980 exhibition on that mountain near his residence in Tessin, Szeemann planned a museum that might have come close to his ever-illusive but possibly accumulative Museum of Obsessions . Szeemann's obsessions were not dogmatic but sought freedom; they were total, rather than totalitarian. The fact that he curated the second and third-last Venice Biennales , however, may look as though an independent spirit was going safe or established. But he had a vested interest: Szeemann had established and directed for almost a decade and a half the 'young' counter-exhibition in Venice, Aperto . Now Appertutto entered the establishment - for a short and suitably subversive time. That openness is and always was for Szeemann about the viewers, making things possible for us - at great personal expense. He had to conserve energies by not answering mail over the last few years, but he kept his archive open for researchers into all possible aspects of contemporary art practice. That is where he himself had begun: Szeemann did not just gain entrance to his profession by knowing artists or being one, he had done an art-historical Ph.D. involving the French writer Alfred Jarry. One of his legacies is, therefore, to prove that academics can be creative - 'artist curators'. Harald Szeemann had agreed in principle to curate ev+a in Limerick. But he also said that the Museum of Obsessions project would keep him curating until the year 3000. Unfortunately, his plans were cut short by some 995 years. We're all the much poorer for his sad departure to a more intense, obsessive place. Mia Lerm-Hayes
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