Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions

Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions explores the life and career of the quintessential exhibition maker, from his groundbreaking involvement with the avant-garde movements of the 1960s and 1970s and his global contemporary exhibitions of the 1990s and 2000s to his personal reading of early 20th-century modernism. Drawn from materials in the Harald Szeemann Archive at the Getty Research Institute, the exhibition is structured as a surprising series of thematic interests: avant-gardes, utopias and visionaries, geographies, and grandfathers.

This exhibition features a satellite presentation, Grandfather: A Pioneer Like Us, on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA) from February 4 to April 22, 2018.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Whether you go or not, the exhibition catalogue, Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions , 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 Its more than 350 illustrations include previously unpublished installation photographs and documents as well as  archival materials. 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 apartment 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.

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