I can't help but notice a resistance to the idea of a curator in the shows held by independent spaces or galleries. I've come across artists who think that the only things a curator does are write texts and select artworks to organize in a space, a task that the artist is capable of doing. It's true that I see this more in the case of personal shows than in group ones; there seems to be a certain softening about the person handling all these minutiae, which artists could easily delegate. Then, I feel as though this reluctance also stems from a certain level of pride: If I know better than anyone how I want the final product to look, why should they tell me how to arrange the works and which to expose? However, it is intriguing to be open to the work done by these artistic workers when a curator with a solid track record visits your workshop and announces that he wants to check out what you are working on, documents what you're doing, and then creates an exhibition that break the trade's silence.
When he opened the exhibition "Live In Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form" in Bern Kunsthalle, in 1969, Harald Szeemann—for I am talking about him—conceived a show that would alter how the art world viewed the curator's profession. Szeemann pioneered then the “invitation exhibition” where instead of picking some artworks and displaying them in a space, he chose the artists (as a whole) for an acknowledged institution of the visual art world. In a five-day production and set-up phase, the Kunsthalle Bern was transformed into a production hall in which artists themselves were responsible for the quality of their work. The exhibition featured 69 daring young artists, some of whom have afterwards obtained worldly prestige, whose creation might very well appear whether in physical, material form or alternatively in envisioned, conceptual, or in any other immaterial manifestations. Richard Serra arrived to spray the museum's corner with molten lead. Another corner was covered with fat by Joseph Beuys. One square meter of the gallery wall was removed by Lawrence Weiner. Michael Heizer broke up the sidewalk with a boulder.
Anyways, after the big fuss made by the press and media, a group of local artists was formed to supervise Szeemann's activity. After a while they rejected his request to work with Joseph Beuys on a solo exhibition. It was the moment when he resigned from Kunsthalle Bern and established the "Agency for Intellectual Guest Labour", launched a highly lucrative career as an independent curator of contemporary art, and became what we call today a freelance curator.
He was a major figure in contemporary art, he pulled a few strings and changed the curator's framework.
Oh and he also received an important sponsorisation from Philip Morris Europe to make an exhibition as he wants after establishing himself as a freelance curator, and got the invitation to curate the fifth edition of documenta.
Harald Szeemann (seated) on the last night of Documenta 5: Questioning Reality–Image Worlds Today at Museum Fridericianum, 1972, Photo: Balthasar Burkhard, The Getty Research Institute
