Harald Szeemann “About the exhibition”

제만의 서문. 영문 번역이 책에 있었네. 구글 도서에서 찾았다. 일일히 쳐서 기록.

About the Exhibition

Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form: Works, Concepts, Processes, Situations, Information appears to lack unity, looks strangely complicated, like a compendium of stories told in the first person singular. We might ask the justifiable question: Are we here concerned with a new edition of Tachisme, with a subjective art, with a reaction against geometry which has reigned supreme in recent years? Certainly, the majority of artists exhibiting here might be seen as part of an artistic development to which the preexperienced workprocess of Duchamp, the intensity of Pollock’s gesture, and the unity of material, physical exertion and time in the Happenings of the early ‘60s also belong. And yet for some of these artists the desire to create does not spring from purely visual experiences. It was inevitable that Hippie philosophy, the Rockers, and the use of drugs should eventually affect the position of a younger generation of artists. It is significant that some of the major exhibitors come from the West coast of America, an area particularly open to Eastern influences. Many anti-social ideas, on the one hand the tendency to contemplation, and on the other the celebration of the physical and creative self through action, can be seen at work in this new art. Additional parts of the pattern can be found in Europe: the lack of a real centre has persuaded increasing numbers of artists to remain in their home towns and to work against all the ideas and principles of the society in which they found themselves. Evident at the same time is the desire to break down the ‘triangle in which art operates’ – the studio, gallery, and museum.

So far no one has given this complex phenomenon a satisfactory name and category, in the same way that Pop, Op, and minimal art were quickly put into categories. Names suggested so far – Anti-form," "MicroEmotive Art," "Possible Art," "Impossible Art," "Concept Art," "Arte Povera," "Earth Art" – each describe only one aspect of the style: the obvious opposition to form: the high degree of personal and emotional engagementl the pronouncement that certain objects are art, although they have not previously been indentified as suchl the shift of interest away from the result toward the artistic process; the use of mundane materials; the interaction of work and material; Mother Earth as medioum, workplace, the desert as concept.

Noticeable is the absolute freedom in the use of materials, as well as the concern for the physical and chemical properties of the work itself. Whereas two years ago polyester and computers were the media that fascinated progressive artists and at the same time determined the area of expression, nowadays the medium no longer seems importatnt in the newest art. The belief in technology has been superseded by the belief in the artistic process. The major characteristic of today’s art is no longer the articulation of space but of human activity; the activity of the artist has become the dominant theme and content. It is in this way that the title of the present exhibition should be understood (it is a sentence rather than a slogan). Never before has the inner bearing of an artist been turned so directly into a work of art. Naturally enough it has always been the same. Mondrian and Pollock gave form to their inner bearing, but always in terms of the finished product, the autonomous object. The artists represented in this present exhibition are in no way object-makers. On the contrary, they aspire to freedom from the object, and in this way deepen the levels of meaning of the object, reveal the meaning of those levels beyond the object. They want the artistic process itself to remain visible in the end product and in the ‘exhibition’.” It is significant that the mass of their own bodies, the power of human movement plays an enormous role for these artists and creates the new "alphabet of form and material" (Trini).

A large group of artists, like the earth artists, are not represented by works, but with information; and the conceptual artists are represented by working plans, which no longer require further realization. This conceptual art readily makes use of existing systems (telephone, post, press, cartography) to create its "works," and these eventually lead to new systems, which prevent all discussion of their starting points.

Works, concepts, processes, situations, information (we consciously avoied the expressions object and experiment) are the "forms" through which these artistic positions are expressed. They are "forms" derived not from preformed pictorial opinions but from the experience of the artistic process inself. This dictates both the choice of material and the form of work as the extension of gesture. This gesture can be private, intimate, or public and expansive. But the process itself always remans vital; it is "handwriting and style" simultaneously. Thus the meaning of this art lies in the fact that an entire generation of artists has undertaken to give "form" to the "nature of art and artists" in terms of a natual process.

Harald Szeemann “About the exhibition” in Selective Writings, pp. 29-31.