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‘It is interesting to compare these exhibitions in order to gain new insights into their importance and how their curators approached them at the time. The importance of When Attitudes Become Form by Harald Szeemann is generally recognized. Op Losse Schroeven is less well known outside the Netherlands, but also emerges as a very influential exhibition. Looking at both shows, one is able to say certain things about the difference between exhibition-making within a museum context, the Stedelijk Museum, and in a situation where the bureaucratic structure is much lighter, as it was at the Kunsthalle Bern, where Harald Szeemann was both the director and curator. It also makes one aware of the impact that the organization of the gallery spaces can have on the nature of an exhibition. At the Stedelijk Museum, Wim Beeren had a series of enfilade galleries in which to present the artists’ work, whereas the Kunsthalle Bern had large interlocking rooms – which meant that works by a number of different artists were shown in close proximity. The book focuses on the spatial organisation of these exhibitions, with floor plans and installation photographs that give the viewer a sense of what it felt like to be in those spaces.’

‘The enormous celebrity of When Attitudes Become Form probably relates partly to Harald Szeemann’s subsequent career. After the exhibition, he resigned from the Kunsthalle Bern and this effectively launched him as the first independent curator. It also included more artists than Op Losse Schroeven and was able more comprehensively to represent the confluence of emerging European and American artists. It was also one of the first exhibitions to attract sponsorship from a commercial company – Phillip Morris – and this gave Harald Szeemann a lot of financial freedom. And finally, When Attitudes Become Form was an elegant and catchy title, whereas Op Losse Schroeven (literally, ‘on loose screws’) proved much more difficult.
Another thing that feels incredibly important about When Attitudes Become Form is that artists made work in situ – the gallery was becoming a space of production. This was also happening at the Stedelijk Museum, but there were more constraints. For instance, Richard Serra made a lead splashing within the gallery in Bern (Splash Piece, 1968/69), whereas in Amsterdam he worked on the outside of the building. However the three Dutch artists, Jan Dibbets, Ger van Elk and Marinus Boezem, all made remarkable interventions in the Stedelijk Museum building. Dibbets dug around the corners of the museum’s foundations; Ger van Elk hung a curtain down the middle of the main staircase so that people going up or down would not be able to see each other, and he hung a brick wall over one of the museum café’s tables; Marinus Boezem hung sheets out of the upper windows of the museum to function as a makeshift weather vane. We would now refer to these interventions as site-specific, although that wasn’t a term used at the time. Wim Beeren observed in his catalogue essay that “the artists must decide what to do with the rooms made available to them – and not before they are actually present and working in the space”. This was a new approach to exhibition making.’

‘Bruce Altshuler wrote about this as the moment when the curator assumed ‘the artist’s creative mantle’. And there was certainly a shift from the curator as museum employee to the curator as exhibition orchestrator. But what I was trying to say in my introduction was that this was also the moment when curators started to work very closely with artists. In both cases, the curators conceived the exhibitions in dialogue with the artists and installed them, working as co-producers of sorts. Perhaps the fact that Harald Szeemann and Wim Beeren both left their institutions after making their respective exhibitions is another indication of the way in which these curators were putting themselves in the milieu of the artists rather than in the milieu of the institution.’

‘The next book in the series will be devoted to the third Havana Biennial, 1989, an exhibition that extended the global territory of contemporary art beyond the old centres of power in Western Europe and North America, and redefined the biennial model. Following this we are planning a book on Lucy Lippard’s ‘number shows’, the exhibitions she organised in the late sixties and early seventies, each of which took the population of the first city in which it was shown as its title. We are also preparing a book about Magiciens de la Terre, 1989, an exhibition that proposed a radically new definition of art activity, including objects whose makers had nothing to do with the practice of contemporary art.
In all of the books in the Exhibition Histories series we aim to make available original visual documentation and archive material, as well as commissioning commentaries and readings by contemporary curators, critics and art historians. We are looking at exhibitions that break new ground in some way, not only because of the works of art they include, but also because of innovation in their curatorial approach – ways of thinking about relationships between works of art and gallery or public space, relationships with audience, new exhibition formats and changing conceptions of the artist’s role, as well as radical shifts in the geo-politics of contemporary art institutions and networks. We are thinking not only about exhibitions that have won historical recognition but also those that have dropped from view.’