when attitudes become form barry barker

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WHEN ATTITUDES BECOME FORM

Barry Barker

Flash Art n. 275 – November – December 2010

AMARCORD

LIVE IN YOUR HEAD

TO REFLECT UPON an exhibition that took place over 40 years ago

is a strange and salutary experience, and I am grateful that I

still have the faculties to recall “Live in your Head: When Attitudes

Become Form,” the exhibition I visited at

the Institute ofContemporary Arts in London in September 1969.

During the late ’60s through the mid-’70s, it was often

considered inappropriate or irrelevant to critically refer to an

artwork’s context or its authorship. It was the time of the “death of

the author,” when any understanding of the work of art was to come

solely from its own presence, withoutreference to metaphor,

biography or any other outside circumstances. It now seems

commonplace to consider the context of a work of art, which could

be said to carry at least fifty percent of its meaning, whether it is

relating to its materiality, physicality in terms of place, or social and

cultural position. Looking back on this exhibition, context seems

especially relevant.

From top left: (1, 7, 8, 9, 11) Live in your Head: When Attitudes Become Form. Installation views duringthe opening event at Kunsthalle Bern, 1969. © Kunsthalle Bern, Bern. (2, 3, 4, 5, 10) Live in your Head:

When Attitudes Become Form. Installation views of the exhibition during the opening event at Haus

Lange, Krefeld, Germany, 1969. (6) Live in your Head: When Attitudes Become Form. Harald Szeemann

during the opening event at Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany, 1969; sitting in the audience: Paul Wember,

Director of Kunstmuseen Krefeld in 1969. (12) Live in your Head: When Attitudes Become Form. Paul



Wember and artist Sarkis with two of the artist’s works during the opening event at Haus

Lange, Krefeld, Germany, 1969; on the wall,

Robert Morris, Batteries with Ripples, 1964; Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany, 1969

In 1968, the I.C.A. had moved from a small space in Dover Street to larger premises in the Carlton House

Terrace, which backed on to the Mall, the road that leads to Buckingham Palace. This juxtaposition — the

home of the British monarch close by what was meant to house the UK’s cultural avant-garde — was itself

a paradox. This was the first time I’d visited this new I.C.A., but I had read and to some extent seen much

of the work in “Attitudes” while traveling, and therefore was familiar with many of the artists in the exhibition.

I walked down a few steps into an open, modestly largespace; it was obviously not an industrial space and

bore the signs of being the ex-stables and coach house for the above apartments’ grand occupants of 18th-

century aristocracy. The exhibition was curated and selected by the late Harald Szeemann, at the time

director of Kunsthalle Bern, where the exhibition was first shown. The title was interesting in itself, as it

implied the bringing together of ideas and thoughts, and their ability to inspire the formation of a material

presence. Though in some instances they did the opposite, staying in the realms of language, or existing

as works that — to quote the front of the catalogue — “live in your head,” which was the original title of

Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman (1949). The exhibition was conceived and curated not as a means

of defining or fixing the art of its time, but the absolute opposite: to open up the concept of art and to

change human perception of contemporary art as it was then understood. To quote Szeemann in his

introduction to the catalogue, “In order to entertain certain ideas we may be obliged to abandon

others upon which we have come to depend.” This exhibition was and still is a prime example of a curator

responding to the work of contemporary artists, letting the artists provide the initiative rather than the

curator imposing their personal theories or worldview, as often happens today. The subtitle to the

exhibition, “Works-Concepts-Processes-Situations-Information,” in many ways describes its

contents. These works asked spectators to join the artist in stepping outside their comfort zone — to allowtheir consciousness to be realigned with a new order of things.

This was a time when many artists, writers and gallery directors, whether working within an institutional or

private context, found themselves in a world in which their vocation and even their aspirations no longer fit

happily within a traditional definition of art or culture. There appeared to be a chasm between

language, ideas and the world. Protests against the Vietnam War were at their height both

in America and Europe. Lacking a fixed cultural order in equilibrium with the past, artists found themselves

in a place of disenchantment. In a positive sense, however, it was also a time of discussion, idea exchange

and information. The world was becoming a smaller place; every artist and thinker felt that there were

many ideas and places to explore, yet they in turn had something to contribute to the cultural life of a global

environment. It was in this spirit that Szeemann researched and brought to light artistic developments of a

younger generation. “When Attitudes Become Form” traveled from Kunsthalle Bern to the Museum

Haus Lange, Krefeld (Germany) to the I.C.A. London like a caravan traveling through a cultural desert from

one oasis to another, picking up more local goods as it went along. It was brought to London on the

initiative of the late Charles Harrison, who was a writer, freelance curator and assistant editor of the

magazine Studio International . Harrison was approached by the sponsor of the exhibition, cigarette

manufacturer Philip Morris, who offered to finance this ‘caravan.’ At the time, Harrison was planning an

exhibition of his own, but he lacked funding. So instead he agreed to bring “Attitudes” to the I.C.A. if he

could add his own selection of British artists, such as Victor Burgin (though he did not include the Art &

Language group, which he was associated with). At that time, the I.C.A.’s director had little experience

with visual art, let alone contemporary visual art (his discipline was in the theater), and so the institution

accepted the show mainly for financial reasons — in other words because it was more-or-less free.



Still, Harrison resented not being able to curate his own show, so much sothat when Harald Szeemann

came to London for the opening, Harrison is quoted as saying that he “hardly talked to him.”

As soon as I saw the exhibition laid out before me I felt the mixed emotions of being captivated and

disappointed at the same time. As I came down the steps, on my left was a series of sacks that contained

different kinds of grains [Jannis Kounellis, untitled , 1969]. Some visitors took handfuls and chewed them

while viewing the exhibition and others threw them on the gallery floor. Some artists were invited by the

sponsor to come to London and install their work; one of them was Reiner Ruthenbeck, from Germany, and

it was his piece that drew my attention next, which consisted of tangled wire amid a pile of ashes

[ Aschenhaufen III , 1968] and was said to be about German war guilt. Ger Van Elk was invited to London to

shave a cactus, which was filmed and then placed forlornly on a low brick wall in the gallery [The Well

Shaven Cactus, 1969]. Joseph Kosuth put statements in several of London’s local newspapers.

As for the disappointments, there were many. The installation of Eva Hesse’s works somehow did not look

convincing; it was some years later that Harrison admitted he hadn’t installed them correctly through lack of

instructions. Another disappointment was that Lawrence Weiner’s ‘wall removal’ [ A 36 x 36 Removal to the

Lathing or Support Wallof Plaster , 1968] was not ‘installed.’ However, the one major omission was of awork by an artist who we all wished to know more about at the time: Joseph Beuys. Beuys had been

invited to the exhibition, and he offered a new work comprised of a Volkswagen Microbus and twenty-two

sleds with fat and felt [Das Rudel (The Pack), 1969]. The I.C.A. could not afford the transport cost, so the

British Public lost out on seeing this major 20th-century work for the first time. In his introduction to the

exhibition, Szeemann stated: “The exhibition appears to lack unity.” “[It]…gathers a number of

artists whose work has very little in common yet also a great deal in common.” In hindsight, his remarks are

understandable because the exhibition reflected so many different directions that were subsequently

categorized as conceptual art, minimal art, arte povera, land art and installation art. One unifying

aspect was the radical economy and simplicity of the artworks’ means and materials. Artists used common

materials such as rope, wood, canvas, photocopy and language, often to greater effect than today’s artists

who spend huge sums of money on fabrication.

In Bern, the exhibition so outraged the Swiss public that a few days after the opening protesters placed a

pile of dung in front of the Kunsthalle’s entrance. Yet in London the attitude to the show was one of

indifference; as long as there was no public funding it could be happily ignored. I have come to believe that

the Swiss public resented the fact that the exhibition had an English title together with the fact that it was

sponsored by an American company (Szeemann had already been accused by the Kunsthalle’s board of

trustees of not showing enough Swiss artists). A month after the closing of the exhibition, Harald

Szeemann resigned, going on to develop a more nomadic mode of working that has come to define much

of today’s curatorial practice.

Barry Barker is a curator and writer based in London. He is Fellow of the University ofBrighton, UK. “ Amarcord ” is a new series of feature articles where Flash Art Internationalinvites writersand curators to discuss landmark exhibitions from the past.Special thanks to Karin Minger of Kunsthalle Bern, and to Dr. Sabine Röder and Volker Döhne,respectively Curator and Photographer, of Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Germany.

when attitudes become form barry barker

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