Book Review: Individual Methodology – Harald Szeemann

Book Review:
Individual Methodology
Harald Szeemann
JRP Ringier

Bret Schneider

Not only a book-monument to the recently deceased iconoclast Harald Szeeman (1933 – 2005), the timely publication of Individual Methodology conveniently enters into a new cultural ethos where the decentralized art practices of the 1960’s are being revisited. Harald Szeeman is perhaps most famous for the exhibition When Attitudes Become Form, which he curated in 1969, framing the until-then loose collective motivations for new art in the 1960’s. More appropriately he was infamous for the exhibition, as the ‘happening’ influenced paradigm of curation was received as controversial in its time. One of the things Individual Methodology articulates is how the controversially decentralized nature of his exhibitions both propelled and damaged his career. Despite almost singlehandly defining the new impulses of artists of his era through visionary curatorial strategy in When Attitudes Become Form, he was fired from the Kunsthalle where the exhibition took place. Much of the book is dedicated to investigating Szeeman’s idiosyncratic methods which both flavored such an exhibition, but also how the institutional rupture shaped his practice as an independent curator, a new category emerging ironically from an iconoclast who appeared to seriously distrust categorization as a mode of knowledge. Moreover, if the decentralized artworks he showed were controversial in their time, this parallaxes with their standardization today.

Individual Methodologies is divided into four parts: situations, concepts-processes, works, and information. ‘Situations’ opens with two complex theoretical texts, as compared to the books ensuing practical documentary representation. Hal Foster’s The Funeral is for The Wrong Corpse mentions Szeemann not at all, but rather provides insight into the conditions of postmodern, and contemporary art which Harald Szeemann inevitably shaped. Opening with Theodore Adorno’s quote, “it is evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore”, Foster ruminates on the continuing idea of ‘ends’ in art. The text interrogates the logic of ends in art, suggesting that ‘the end of art’ is just another thing which has been naturalized in art and likewise needs to be done with, ironically enough. Foster then goes on to provide some significant examples of things which have a ‘spectral’ quality, most interestingly Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog, a film about a gangster assassin who lives by the code of the Samurai. The critique is substantially Benjaminian. Walter Benjamin wrote a treatise on Kafka’s use of parables, suggesting that when such an archaic form is mobilized in the modern world, a curious mix of the obsolete sacred and the profane conditions of industrial production come to a head. Not only an inclusion, but the opening for Individual Methodology, The Funeral Is For The Wrong Corpse bolsters a rear-projected reading of history which suggests that the future is imbricated with how we read the past. There is a moment when Foster’s ‘continuing on’ idea reaches back to Surrealism and through the language and words he uses makes a completely specific critique of Szeemann’s heterogeneous methodology. “Such a weird array of things is not the stuff of a renewed medium; on the contrary it is part of the Surrealist project to “explode” conventional categories of cultural objects. In this way it presumes a reified tabulation of artistic mediums to disrupt – which, as argued elsewhere in this book, is precisely not our problem”[17]. The descriptive criticism of Surrealism extends very easily into the domain of Szeemann’s contemporary curatorial practice, almost in such a way as to suggest that little has changed from pre-war to post-war artistic production. What is interesting, and not addressed so much as implied very sketchily in this book, is that the same artistic production of Surrealism for example, transpires in the area of curatorial practice.
Jean-Marc Poinsot offers the other (adjacent) critical text in the book, and an intricately researched one it is. Poinsot begins with an anecdote about Szeemann’s implied American contemporary, Seth Siegelaub. “Like Rip Van Winkle waking from a 30-year sleep, he looked back at an unknown society, trying to compare the memory of radical and anti-institutional stances with today’s world, where the artist seems to have become just a cog in the cultural industry machine”[21]. Similar to Foster, history and the attempt to recover it from the vices of culture are at stake – “so much ground has history lost as a dynamic in terms of reading events, both in daily life and in art, since the emergence of postmodernism”[21]. Poinsot then goes on to build a taxonomy of like-minded art directors, pedagogs, and curators who were interested in blurring the distinctions between art and culture.

The second part of the book is devoted to Szeemann’s impressive personal archive and ‘The Agency’, a free-floating business model which enabled Szeemann to be purely independent from institutional support. In some ways, the ‘processes’ section portrays the true extent of Szeemann’s eccentricity. That the eccentric character and appearance of personality takes up a considerable portion of this book displays the imbrication of personality and business in the move from industrial economy to one of service. And Szeemann was above all a service agent, perhaps the iconic model of the ideal of a purely mobile, “flexible personality”, in Brian Holmes words, untethered to the purported authority of the institution. Of course, what Szeemann’s archive suggests more than anything is the irreversibility of the decreasing subjectivity in the face of production. Szeemann’s archive was an obsessive mole-hole of business which buried any idea of play or free-time. Navigated by maps, diagrams, and photo-documentation, Sadie Woods and Francois Aubaurt disentangle the extensive archive that Szeemann meticulously built for himself as reference for exhibitions. The archive was a store for any and all materials that passed through his hands – books, exhibitions documents, faxes, art gifts from various artists, and multiple rooms devoted entirely to Joseph Beuys and Marcel Duchamp (the ‘Beuys island’, and ‘Duchamp Island’) etc. Like much of Szeemann’s interests the archive functions as a cornerstone interest for todays practices which have been informed by the index of conceptual art and the archivist ideas of Deleuze. This isn’t to say that archiving was anything new, per se; David Joselit already finds an archiving and diagramming function within Dada. What marks Szeemann’s interest is a method of archiving which obsesses over indiscriminate information, categorizing, and hoarding for its own sake. Similar interests were manifest in Mel Bochner and other conceptual artists around that time as well. Insofar as Szeemann’s archive wasn’t an isolated instance of the information-hoarding mentality, it was certainly an eccentric and extreme version of it. All the more driven home, since Szeemann couldn’t type, but wrote everything in longhand for an assistant to transcribe and fax. The discrepancy between unceasing information in this newly creative world and personal incapability to keep up with new techniques is a crucial gap of material and what what one desires. The fetish of information here transpires in the mind of someone who is almost luddite and proportionally left behind the information trail, obsessing to keep up.

The Agency also accelerates a problematic anti-institutional trajectory in art begun at least as early as Dada, if not in Impressionism’s anarchism. Though Szeemann had been a curator in the Kunstahalle, he lost the position subsequently to When Attitudes Become Form, and since then had a tenuous relationship with museums, though never entirely severed, as he was always leeching off of the museums which hosted his curated exhibitions. That The Agency, comprised of no more than a few people, was not a stable entity, but rather one always struggling to uphold an idealization of freedom from the institution, marks a rupture between what was desired in the 1960’s-1970’s political ideology, and what was actually made attainable by that ideology. The ideal of an Agency divorced from the institution never touched down practically to provide a sustainable, realistic model. Szeemann may as well have been an in house curator – in later years he was more so – and one wonders what advantages this ideal severing from the institution posited. In many ways, The Agency articulates the failure of anti-institutional 1960’s art to create a real utopic vision that had realistic resonance at a time when political conditions were supposedly being reconsidered on a massive level.

The third part of the book is a substantial portion which documents the numerous exhibitions Szeemann conceptualized and manifest, most notably documenta 5. The transparency of information and process is as revealing as it is tediously banal. In d5 for example, one gets the impression that every document leading up to the exhibition has been presented, in all their handwritten complications. The presentation begs the question, would we as viewers be as interested if the documents were mundane emails? Much of the draw comes from a historical obsession.
But there is considerable content in the documents, specifically the ambitious proposal for d5, but also supplementary interviews with participating artists Lawrence Weiner and Claes Oldenburg, specifically the latter’s Mouse Museum installation, significantly referencing the culture industry. D5 is nothing short of an all-encompassing ambition to not merely liquidate art into the culture industry, but also to fold everything popular into high art and instigate a freeflowing interchange. The proposal for d5 is not for an exhibition, but for a utopia, and is an intricately mapped blueprint for a future filled with not just paintings, but everything else post-world-war life had won. A list is broken up thematically, and includes everything from children’s face painting, pop art, readymades, conceptual art, traffic signs, pornography, and caricature, to sports, games, non-identity, surrealism, action, light shows, political propaganda and much much more, in methodical categorical order. If artists in the 1960’s sought to climb out of the trap of abstract expressionist formalism and postwar semblances of obsolete artistic freedoms, they successfully climbed out of it and fell right into the trap – the same type of determinist utopia that the 1950’s created for abstract expressionism.

Much of this heterogeneous paradigm of curation continued to thread the manifold exhibitions he put on, though Szeemann was also harbinger of a wild assortment of solo shows as well. One could suppose that the latter can fall under the former category, and that is a question which arises out of the Individual Methodology, and Szeemann’s historically consumptive curational apparatus. From Fluxus and Happening, to The Bachelor Machines, and many other exhibits extending into the 80’s, 90’s and 00’s (including the first Christo and Jean-Claude museum wrapping), Szeemann maintained a diverse platform for viewing, bringing discursive elements that were not merely related to art, following from Dada. Found objects, and even a specifically designed ‘torture machine’ from Kafka’s In the Penal Colony dotted his exhibitions far beyond what he was most infamous for. Szeemann was a man who believed that the curator was an artist, and this convergence continues to complicate categorical distinction today, for better or worse. Believing for Harald Szeemann meant working furiously; one contributor mentions that at any given moment throughout his career he had one exhibition immediately pending, another planned in the future, and one beyond in conceptualization stages. Whether or not one believes in the blurring of curator/artist distinctions today, not to mention private/public and past/present as well, Szeemann believed in such category breaking to such an extent that he mastered his own invented format, and in many ways taking belief to such a logical and illogical limit is all we can ask of an artist.

Complete with copied documents, rare photographs, interviews with personal acquaintances and Szeemann himself, maps of the archive, and much other ephemera, Individual Methodology compiles a comprehensive documentative survey of a man who contributed more to our confused contemporary situation today than perhaps anyone. Reading the book, one gains a greater understanding of the types of things artists, curators, and their audience (a primary concern for Szeeman) thought was a viable turn in the 1960’s and for the future of society. A fulcrum for such ideology, Harald Szeeman’s life project argued for a certain type of world. The editors did a good job introducing rare material and presenting selections from the paper trail he left behind in such a way that readers can glean the frenetic hope of an era.