The Breakaway Seventies:Harald Szeemann and the Exhibition as Medium

Between 1969 and 1981 Harald Szeemann worked as one of the first independent curators in contemporary art history; designing, writing, and financing exhibitions partly or sometimes fully on his own. Two of Szeemann's most well known exhibitions are When Attitudes Become Form (1969), an exhibition that pushed Szeemann into the profession of independent curator, and Documenta 5 (1972), an exhibition where the curator supposedly acheived an "auteur" status. While these exhibitions have received substantial attention by scholars and are indeed noteworthy for their relevancy and impact on exhibition history, they fail to exemplify a philosophy that underscores Szeemann's most profound explorations of the exhibition as an artistic medium. Three exhibitions from the 1970s, Grandfather (1974), Bachelor Machines (1975), and Monte Verita display the extent to which Szeemann transforms the art exhibition into a quasi- anthropological and installation environment, removing it from considerations of historical specificity and from serving as an arena from which objects of an institutional authority speak.