D5 and  the Gesture of Withdrawal

Jay Chung

Harald Szeemann’s documenta 5 (1972) did not only excite controversy among audiences; it was also subject to scathing public criticism by many of its invited artists. It was not that the curator had been too exclusive or conservative—the show favored no single theme, medium, or practice, and was described in its bohemian energy as a “campsite for the far-out.”1 Instead of contenting itself with presenting a cross-section of the art most relevant to the present, this documenta was made up of an indiscriminate simultaneity of all imaginable forms of visual imagery, both art and non-art, including commercial advertising, propaganda, religious art, and comic books. It was as if its ambition was to dissolve art into the greater whole of the visual in general. Szeemann even contended that the massive array of pictures, objects and events represented the totality of all of the images in the world, being presented in such a way that it might both encompass and transform the viewer’s reality.2 To these objectives, the exhibition featured banners and posters that read, “Art is Superfluous,” and “Why Art?”

Given such questions, the only fitting way to express one’s skepticism towards d5 was to completely refuse to participate. Robert Morris sent a letter that withdrew his work from the exhibition, stating, “I do not wish to have my work used to illustrate misguided sociological principles.”3 Daniel Buren attacked Szeemann (albeit without naming him) in his essay “Exhibitions of an Exhibition,” and Robert Smithson submitted, as an ersatz contribution to the exhibition, nothing more than a disparaging catalog text entitled “Cultural Confinement.” Other artists, such as Carl Andre, Donald Judd, and Fred Sandback co-signed a published statement, and also dropped out of the exhibition.4 In the documents of this refusal, one immediately senses the artists’ disapproval for the authorial role that Szeemann had assumed, as well as the interpretive structure that he had proposed as the basis for the exhibition. Reviewer Barbara Rose, somewhat tongue in cheek, wrote:

Harald Szeemann, the brilliant Swiss curator who organized the show, chose to ignore painting and sculpture almost entirely to produce a documentary survey of the current status of art as social activity. By so doing, Szeemann has become the greatest conceptual artist in the world, assimilating the activities of what purports to be today’s avant-garde to his own ends.5

In this sensational description, Rose characterizes Szeemann’s budding cult of personality that, if not already established by exhibitions such as “Happening and Fluxus” and “When Attitudes Become Form,” would be made apparent
through d5. Yet it is only when she begins to describe the “assimilation” that Rose begins to approach the objections of the withdrawing artists. What exactly Szeemann’s “own ends” were has much to do with the disagreement—it was not entirely a question of personal conflict. Buren, Morris and Smithson’s written criticisms are based on interpreting the curator’s designs, not in the context of the art exhibition, but as phenomena indicative of broader social tendencies. Smithson’s apocalyptically-toned “Cultural Confinement,” for example, equates curators with wardens at psychiatric hospitals, and artists with invalids. He speaks of the neutralization of artworks in the gallery and institutional spaces as lobotomy. He calls art exhibitions “junkyards,” where curators “depend on the wreckage of metaphysical principles and structures because they don’t know any better.” Though Smithson’s attacks do at times specifically pinpoint terminology that Szeemann was developing, his essay as a whole tries to situate the problems of d5 and the practice of contemporary art as part of a general social malaise. He writes:

The artist acting like a B. F. Skinner rat doing his “tough” little tricks is something to be avoided. Confined process is no process at all. It would be better to disclose the confinement rather than make illusions of freedom.6

D5 did, in fact, include artwork by a patient from a Swiss mental hospital. The exhibition halls of d5 were also divided into categories, and then further subdivided into allotted spaces for each of the individual artist’s work. In a section directly curated by Szeemann entitled Artists’ Museums, for example, a large hall of the Neue Galerie presented the museums of no less than five artists: Broodthaers, Distel, Duchamp, Oldenburg and Vautier. This classificatory, encyclopedic, style of display had been employed by Szeemann before, most notably in the cell-like sections in the exhibition “Happening and Fluxus,” whose plan recalls the booths of an art fair, only with each cell containing a single artist’s work. It was an arrangement well-suited to the philosophy behind Szeemann’s exhibition practice: he saw the origin of the value of art only in the unfettered, unique practice of each artist, which he termed “intense intention.” Szeemann believed that he was not only not “lobotomizing” the individual artists, but insulating their intensity by allowing them a limited, but guaranteed, autonomy. Where the artists (Smithson, Morris, Buren, etc.) felt that their agency was being undermined by their confinement, Szeemann saw his schema as a means to enable the viewer to experience the emancipating potential of the artist’s endeavors.

In addition to “intense intention,” Szeemann proposed terms such as “Wild Thinking,” “Subjectivity Without Compromise,” “Individual Mythologies,” and “The Mountain of Truth.” Adding to these idiosyncratic terms, he repurposed Duchamp’s title “The Bachelor Machine,” spinning it to fit his needs as “Exhibition-Maker.” He continuously employed catchphrases such as “From the Vision to the Nail.” Although one can see their relation to pre-war European avant-garde ideas, these terms were used by Szeemann in such a way that they seemed wholly his own, and their continual repetition eventually helped to define the aura of personality associated with him. Perhaps the best comparison would be to artist’s terminology like that of Joseph Beuys’. Terms were a strength of Szeemann’s, and since this kind of language had until then been associated with the activities of artists, one can easily see why such quasi-mystical categories—especially when paired with the authority implied by d5—would lead to the accusation that Szeemann was taking on the role of the artist, becoming, “the greatest conceptual artist in the world.”

For the leading practitioners of minimal and conceptual art, however, it is unlikely that the authorship of the curator—the persona as meta-conceptual artist that Szeemann only begrudgingly came to accept—posed much of a threat. It was rather the exhibition’s concepts and categories themselves that posed problems. Smithson took exception to “occult notions of ‘concept’” and the reduction of art to “hermeticism and fatuous meta-physics”7—an allusion to Szeemann’s rhetorical appropriation of the neo-romantic and early 20th century utopias. Furthermore, whereas Szeemann claimed that artists would offer d5’s audience the potential to transform reality, Smithson protested that the conditions under which the artists were expected to do this were inherently flawed: to be given freedom only within calculated, predefined limits amounted to a complete loss of freedom.

Daniel Buren’s essay “Exhibitions of an Exhibition” almost exactly reiterates Smithson’s views. It accuses Szeemann of rendering the artist powerless and obsolete, “castrated.”8 Instead of casting the avant-garde artist as a unique individual with the freedom to oppose bourgeois norms, Buren proposes that the artists have completely lost their agency, trapped in old habits and institutional structures. Instead of criticizing the exhibition’s denial of artworks, its being overly exclusive—as does the founding modernist critique of the Salons—Buren attacks the mode of Documenta’s inclusiveness. He claims that because Szeemann simply put everything side by side, categorizing the artworks according to his own caprice, the potential of art was being neutralized, sterilized by the implication that any work was incommensurable to, yet equivalent with, every other work on display in the exhibition. In Buren’s words, when the artworks in d5 are treated as mere “touches of color” that compose “each section (room) as a whole,” the consequence can be described as follows:

the limits art has created for itself, as shelter, turn against it by imitating it, and the refuge that the limits of art had constituted are revealed as its justification, reality and tomb.9

The concern is that where the propriety of arts institutions had once induced the avant-garde to surpass them through transgression, d5 now demanded this transgression so that it might give the avant-garde its proper place within an institutional framework (even the radical response by Smithson, Morris and company-the refusal to participate—was eventually co-opted into the mythology of d5). Szeemann, the “wild thinker,” always ready to promote his own brand of chaos, was the personification of this allotted freedom, the predefined permissiveness that Buren refers to as the imitation of the artist. This becomes especially clear when examining Szeemann’s collected writings: the main body of the curator’s techniques and terminology were dedicated to addressing this very contradiction. In addition to providing a theoretical framework for his pioneering innovations in developing exhibitions—his synthesizing of corporate public relations with the so-called provocations of the art of the sixties and seventies, his finding sponsorship from cigarette brands and insurance companies for his exhibitions, his achievement of a then unknown degree of autonomy from museum institutions in his self-financing of “turn-key exhibitions”—the language he developed can be seen as an attempt to either resolve or repress the doubts raised in the dissent of the artists who saw d5 as an anathema to their political and artistic aims.

Of the artists who withdrew from the exhibition, many (including Andre, Morris, and Smithson) were members of the Art Workers Coalition, a protest group founded in 1969 to agitate not least for peace in Southeast Asia, the establishment of economic rights for artists, equal rights for women artists, and the acknowledgement of the political responsibilities of art institutions and their boards of directors.10 In response to the growing number of workers’ strikes throughout the US, the AWC also incited and carried out a series of “art strikes,” aiming to halt and withhold artistic production and participation. The melding of artistic and political aims in the years leading up to d5 made artistic process almost indistinguishable from public protest. Robert Morris, the author of that excoriating letter of withdrawal from d5, had two years earlier demanded that his show at the Whitney Museum be shut down:

This act of closing [. . .] a cultural institution is intended to underscore the need I and others feel to shift priorities at this time from art making and viewing to unified action within the art community against the intensifying conditions of repression, war and racism in this country.11

The AWC strategy of withholding productivity also had a theoretical basis—the writings of Herbert Marcuse. Here the art-world’s and in particular the AWC’s indebtedness is indisputable. Art critic and AWC member Gregory Battcock wrote specifically about the application of Marcuse to art in essays such as “Art in the Service of the Left?” and “Marcuse and Anti-Art.” “Art in the One-Dimensional Society,”12 a lecture given by Marcuse at the School of Visual Arts, appeared in the Battcock edited Arts Magazine, where it was illustrated with the reduced, geometric vocabulary of the paintings of Jo Baer.13 Artists such as Robert Morris and Robert Smithson quoted Marcuse directly in their texts. Overall, the impact of the theories of Marcuse on the American avant-garde of the sixties cannot be overstated—the artists were interpreting and even implementing the theory literally.

Even the collective withdrawal from d5 can be read as literal interpretation of Marcuse’s “Great Refusal,” an influential idea that could practically be said to define the counterculture of the New Left. The Great Refusal was a comprehensive concept that encapsulated a diagnosis of the ill-effects of a repressive society, a total rejection of the status quo, and at the same time, the cure: a call for the creative action necessary to overcome capitalist domination. Amidst all of this, art was essential to the Great Refusal; so strong was the connection that Marcuse explicitly traced the idea’s roots to André Breton. In Eros and Civilization, he quotes Breton: “Imagination is perhaps about to reclaim its rights,” and then goes on to explain that for the Surrealists:

Art allied itself with the revolution. Uncompromising adherence to the strict truth value of the imagination comprehends reality more fully. That the propositions of the artistic imagination are untrue in terms of the actual organization of facts belongs to the essence of their truth.14

The Great Refusal, with this lineage, gave artists an unambiguous role to play in political protest. The concept provided a clear-cut ethos for the art strikes of the AWC. Following Marcuse, artists were called for not only as protesters, but specifically for their capacities as artists; they could rally with equal vigor against the war profiteering of companies such as General Electric, the policies of the Museum of Modern Art, and of course, d5.

Ironically, Szeemann’s personality as an independent and creative free-thinker—itself based on Surrealist and avant-garde values—did not excuse him from the harsh criticism of the dissenting artists. It was as if the conflict between the two positions was the result of clashing outgrowths of similar, if not the same, antecedent history of ideas. Like Szeemann, the artists identified themselves with liberation. Unlike Szeemann, they did so in a way that was filtered through Marcuse’s dialectical approach. “I am speaking of a dialectics that seeks a world outside of Cultural Confinement,” Smithson wrote,15 and in both his and Buren’s essays, it is clear that the simple connection between art and liberation was not to be taken as self-explanatory. In their texts, Szeemann stands accused of misappropriating artworks only to represent instances or cases of unrestrained behavior—of not truly opposing reality, but offering only an illusory liberation.

Once again, the influence of Marcuse, whose theories place art at the intersection of reality, illusion and liberation, is clearly evident. For Marcuse, just as art could be a challenge to repression, it could also be an instrument of control. The tension between these tendencies was central to its essence. In “Art as a Form of Reality,” he succinctly summarizes the duality:

As part of the established culture, Art is affirmative, sustaining this culture; as alienation from the established reality, Art is a negating force. The history of Art can be understood as the harmonization of this antagonism. ( italics in the original)16

According to Marcuse, the aspect of culture that is established, predominant, and instrumental in preserving exploitative social relations is opposed by an insurgent, negating sensibility that seeks to articulate a new reality. 

The seeds for this dualism are to be found in Marcuse’s essay from 1936, “The Affirmative Character of Culture.”17 The paper begins with the ancient world, where the truth and goodness of art were reserved for the privileged few that could appreciate it free from the harshness and contingencies of reality. With the development of bourgeois society, this privilege became a moral obligation; culture and beauty were asserted to be invaluable and universal, i.e. applicable to all. What was once a privilege was now an imperative. This, according to Marcuse, makes bourgeois culture fundamentally conflicted: it cannot reconcile the reality of material circumstances, i.e. the exploitative nature of labor conditions, with the obligation to realize the ideal freedoms celebrated by art and culture.

Rather than expressing a demand for a better and more humane world, culture becomes an instrument used to resolve the contradictions of bourgeois domination. Degraded to a “self-justifying exaltation,” bourgeois culture is a rhetoric that only serves to validate and establish—affirm—the status quo. It does so not by blatantly praising the current state of affairs-to do this would be self-contradictory-but by presuming that the role of culture is to provide a temporary or even altogether unattainable ideal world where the material and contingent demands of reality do not apply. And while this unstable world may provide a fleeting relief from the physical and psychic vitiation of the individual, it is by definition, Marcuse claims, illusory.

Marcuse’s critique continues with the idea that affirmative culture falsely associates art with the unique and free individual. The ego of the individual, he says, “is the only dimension of reality to evade the materialistic rationality of the rising bourgeoisie.”18 As such, it is only to the ego that affirmative culture is addressed. When affirmative culture articulates, for example, the capacity to transcend the material given, it might do so by evoking the ideals of friendship or love. Or perhaps an individual’s soul is the redeeming quality that allows one to overcome one’s inadequate social status. Likewise, the art of affirmative culture is presumed to appeal to the purity of the soul. Beauty operates by setting things apart, by delineating a fleeting haven from material reality. Marcuse speaks of art as a medium, both in the sense of a cultural milieu and in the sense of a process which:

may be enjoyed in good conscience only in well delimited areas, with the awareness that it is only for a short period of relaxation or dissipation [. . .] Bourgeois society has liberated individuals but as persons who are to keep themselves in check.19

Art, like the soul, can engage such immaterial ideals by providing an opening or interlude that is exempt from reification. The contradiction inherent in affirmative culture’s “idea of a pure humanity”—its art, beauty and soul—is that the well-being extolled by affirmative culture is never made external; it is only experienced in the depths and privacy of each individual’s inner-world as a brief consolation for the shortcomings of the material order of life. Even Surrealism, as the basis for the Great Refusal, is subject to this dialectic. Marcuse writes:

Surrealists proclaim the submission of the social revolution to the truth of the poetic imagination. However, this Surrealistic thesis is undialectical inasmuch as it minimizes the extent to which the poetic language itself is infested and infected with the general falsity and deception; it does not remain pure. And Surrealism has long since become a saleable commodity.20

Returning to the controversy over d5, one sees more than just a dispute over jurisdiction, methodology or scope. The written or signed statements posed by the artists were an attempt to articulate a political philosophy. As with prior strikes and statements of withdrawal, the artists’ gestures were a symbolic act, an indirect allusion to a total refusal. By not participating in documenta, the artists inferred that they, by proxy, did not participate in corporate interests, war, and the unjust administration of all institutions, not only cultural institutions. Their reaction to d5 in particular shows a refusal to support any dominant ideology, no matter if it contained an anarchic enthusiasm for self-criticality or self-negation. The act of withdrawal was evidence of the realization that the Great Refusal was only meaningful if it was absolute, if it itself was not compromised by affirmative culture. By the same token, even as the extremes of d5 may have signaled affirmative culture to the artists, there was also a paradox in reacting by refusing to take part in it. The Great Refusal was to be a total anomaly, a radical discontinuity with both society and the status quo of art. By way of the philosophy of Marcuse, however, the artists had found an affiliation to art-historical precedents for the gesture of refusal. To enact the Great Refusal was not only to renounce tradition; it was also to obliquely reinforce and partake in it.

Today, almost forty years later, the act of withdrawal from d5 seems at best idealistic and at worst quixotic. The perceived distinction between Szeemann’s uninhibited, rampant abandon via the idiosyncratic and irrational, and the Marcuse-inspired practice of creative disobedience has been all but dissolved. The two positions’ common heritage—their mutual debt to Breton, to choose one example—has made it easy to confuse them. The difference in ideologies at the time of d5, however, was anything but trivial. While the Surrealist position has come to mean a denial of reality, a preference for a world of individuality or caprice, for those who were attempting “art in the service of the left,” this was not enough. The protesting artists effaced their individual oeuvres for the sake of political expediency. That the critique of d5 was directed at Szeemann gave the confrontation its urgency and meaning-those involved in the AWC, in the art strikes, as well as the withdrawal from d5 would have known that the Great Refusal was antithetical to individual caprice, that to differentiate their actions from those of the Surrealists they would have to succeed in ushering in not only the end of art, but also a new political reality. In “Art in the One Dimensional Society,” Marcuse had encouraged one to believe that, “now has perhaps come the time to free art from its confinement to mere art, to an illusion” and that art, “for the first time in history, [was] confronted with the possibility of entirely new modes of realization,” and that:

art today [was] becoming a potential factor in the construction of a new reality, a prospect which would mean the cancellation and the transcendence of art in the fulfillment of its own end.21

Of course, the “cancellation and transcendence of art” never really occurred in that particular way. If d5’s proclamation, “Art is superfluous,” never really stuck, neither did Marcuse’s grandiose claims. The Great Refusal lost its direct appeal to artists, and the widespread tendency towards civil disobedience was, by all accounts, short lived.

Many of the dissenting artists would work with Szeemann after documenta; some made statements to the press that hedged on their earlier opposition to the curator. The urge to withhold one’s participation would survive as well, finding its way to other situations, but surprisingly, d5 was to be one of the last exhibitions to face such unified opposition. In 1979, Yugoslavian artist Goran Dordevi called for an international art strike, but received answers from fewer artists than he had hoped for.22 Some of the answers came from former members of the AWC (not least Andre, Buren, Lucy Lippard and Hans Haacke), who, despite their support for his call, gently explained that their dissent now occurred on a personal, individual level. Apparently by this time, a mere seven years after d5, something had made plain that the Great Refusal was not viable. Perhaps d5 itself played a role in the change of outlook. In 1979, as it is today obviously, striking would still be a prevalent form of social protest. Art strikes, however, could only ever be indirect protests-unless artistic freedom is put immediately at risk, such strikes always remain metaphorical. For any refusal to participate, there would also always have to be a capable audience willing to interpret the greater meaning of the withdrawal. The tenor of resignation in Carl Andre’s reply to Dordevi reiterates this fact: he sent a postcard that read, “From whom would artists be withholding their art if they did go on strike? Alas, from no one but themselves.”

1. Harold Rosenberg, “The Art World: Inquiry ‘72: On the Edge,” The New Yorker, September 9, 1972, 72 – 82.

2. Harald Szeemann, Arnold Bode, Karlheinz Braun et al., Documenta 5 (Kassel: Documenta GmbH, 1972), preface.

3. François Aubart, Julia Cistiakova, and Haeju Kim, Harald Szeemann: Individual Methodology (Zurich: JRP Ringer, 2007), 142.

4. Ibid., 144 – 5.

5. Barbara Rose, “Document of an Age,” New York Magazine, 14 August, 1972, 66 – 67.

6. Robert Smithson, “Cultural Confinement,” Robert Smithson Estate, May 16, 2010, www.robertsmithson.com.

7. Ibid.

8. Daniel Buren, “Where are the artists,” e-flux, May 16, 2010, http://www.e-flux.com/projects/next_doc/d_buren_printable.html. See also Aubart, 92 – 93.

9. Ibid.

10. See Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

11. Julia Bryan-Wilson, ibid., 113.

12. Herbert Marcuse, “Art in the One Dimensional Society,” Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse Vol. 4, Art and Liberation, ed. Douglas Kellner, (New York: Routledge, 2007).

13. Bryan-Wilson, op. cit., 63.

14. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Oxon: Routledge, 1956), 150.

15. Robert Smithson, “Cultural Confinement”, op. cit.

16. Herbert Marcuse, “Art as a Form of Reality,” Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse Vol. 4, Art and Liberation, op. cit.

17. Herbert Marcuse, “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” ibid.

18. Herbert Marcuse, “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” op. cit., 93.

19. Ibid., 101.

20. Herbert Marcuse, “Art in the One Dimensional Society,” op. cit., 115.

21. Herbert Marcuse, “Art in the One Dimensional Society,” op. cit.,116.

22. Julia Bryan-Wilson, op. cit., 217. See also Stuart Home, “Stuart Home: Art Strike,” Stuart Home Society, May 16, 2010, http://www.stewarthomesociety.org.

In his interviews, texts and press materials, Harald Szeemann employed a specific, idiosyncratic vocabulary of concepts, both of his own devising and borrowed: In their interrelation, they formed a quasi-theoretical cosmos, serving both as the logic and banner for his exhibitions and as the touchstones by which to order the sprawling and inclusive nature of his practice. In fact, despite the variety of his interests, the system underpinning his activities was remarkably consistent. At the center, one finds both the central concept and rationale for the larger whole, that is, his understanding of the individual. The individual, in Szeemann’s view, was embroiled in a panoply of relations with the norms of society, with notions of repression and fantasy, and with historical attempts at utopia and the collective aspirations of humanity, to name but a few. It also defined for Szeemann the definition of art and the role of the artist. From this center, one can see through the association of his ideas his views regarding society and art as well as the way in which he framed his own practice.

Perhaps the most concrete and explicit approach to Szeemann’s theory of the individual can be found in the concept of the “Individual Mythologies.” Szeemann first coined the term in describing sculptor Etienne Martin in 1963, but continued to reference it, naming a section of d5 after the notion, and again in writing throughout his body of work. Etienne Martin, according to Szeemann, defined his own sculptural practice through personal symbolic systems, associations, and memories; Martin redefined general sculptural principles, such as space, against the background of his own personal experiences and cosmos. “Individual Mythologies” was intended by Szeemann as a counter category to broader definitions within the field of contemporary art. Although Szeemann did not overlook artists who fit squarely into defined “movements” such as Minimalism or Conceptual art, he felt that in proposing the category of “Individual Mythologies” he could engage artists who worked in a more hermetic fashion. He praised the quality of “inner-necessity,” i.e. the authenticity of a self-determined practice.

Szeemann’s preferred term for the bearer of individual mythologies, the artist and, most broadly, the creative individual was “Schöpfer” (creator), a term he regularly employed for its religious and mythical connotations, relating the creative act to becoming in general, or something like the universe’s creative spirit. In one instance, Szeemann characterizes the creative activity of the “Schöpfer” as liberated, when contrasted with ordinary, uncreative labor. In this sense the creative power of the individual is linked to freedom. Szeemann used the term “Intense Intention” to describe the effect or potential energy displayed by the
processes and products of the individual or “Schöpfer.” “Intense Intention” speaks both to the singularity of inner-necessity; it also draws a connection between the efforts of the individual and a macrocosmic whole that encompasses the totality of the efforts of all individuals. Szeemann sometimes represents this as a metaphysical idea, sometimes as a political idea.

Szeemann’s conception of “Utopia” is inherently bound up with the individual. It is particular to Szeemann in that it reflects his understanding that previous attempts at mass-mobilization founded on utopian ideals ended in despotism. It also takes into consideration the more recent inward turn that Szeemann identified in the countercultural movements after the late sixties. He, among others, identified a retreat from organized protest to a more personal engagement with politics. He relates this inward turn to utopia in two ways. First, he states repeatedly that he believes that the conception of utopias must originate in the individual mind; the inconsistency and internal disagreement within a political group, for example, is a hindrance to the intensity of a utopia as conceived of by a single individual. Compromise runs counter to intensity. Second, being a product of the individual, Szeemann’s utopia is always in tension with its own claim to universality. This definition of utopia is inherently paradoxical. Szeemann believes that the possibility of the application of utopian ideas should always be held in check by the threat of an imposed absolutism; the intensity and power should never exceed the scope of its creator’s individuality. If externalized, it can never be universally realized.

The “Museum of Obsessions” is, in some ways, Szeemann’s resolution of the paradox. It is at the same time a spirit of curating and, in as far as Szeemann developed it as a practice, a concrete institution. In describing the necessity for the institution, he observes that the creations and “Individual Mythologies” are by their private nature ephemeral. Since they cannot be realized for the whole of society, they will also risk not being preserved. The collection of the “Museum of Obsessions” is an attempt to enshrine these radical, yet fragile efforts. Furthermore, the “Museum of Obsessions” does not seek to differentiate or evaluate any one of the positions endorsed in its collection. It is an artificial space of plurality, where differing, even antagonistic views can be represented simultaneously. Any of the individual creator’s claims to universality are considered provisional. This thinking is also reflected in the museum’s protocol: the collection was permanently traveling, its exhibitions always hosted by other institutions.

The history of art, in Szeemann’s terms, is formed by a comprehensive view of a plurality of incommensurable individualities. It is described somewhat poetically by Szeemann as a view from a higher perspective-in a dream he saw the plurality from the heights above a valley of artistic activity. Above the fray, Szeemann imagined an emergent totality made up of discontinuity, conflict, madness and egocentrism.

Szeemann also identified specific categories or models for the production of art. He adapted for example, Duchamp’s “Bachelor Machine”, using it to metaphorically designate a procedure and theme that he believed cut across the boundaries of art-historical and disciplinary categories. The “Bachelor Machine,” as Szeemann saw it, was a radical version of the solipsism of the individual. It is embodied by the work of Duchamp, but also the machine from Kafka’s penal colony, the projection machine of Adolfo Bioy Casares, and the writing of Raymond Roussel. Metaphorically, it stood for the combination of several characteristics. Beyond its closed, solipsistic, character, it involved a self-referring eroticism that was not reproductive and had a machine-like, logical, or procedural character. Finally, Szeemann opposed the “Bachelor Machine” to the figure of the “Femme Fatale”; he locates the relevance of the second to the Symbolists, in contrast to the more recent generation of artists whom he believed operated according to the principles of the first.

Another theme that Szeemann often employed was that of the religious, the mystical, or the esoteric. Like the “Femme Fatale,” the “Mystic” is opposed to the “Bachelor Machine.” Whereas the “Bachelor Machine” is fixated and determined by the ego, the “Mystic” addresses itself to the other. Nonetheless, Szeemann’s mysticism is actually another kind of individualism, this time spiritual in terminology and approach. As with his understanding of “Utopia,” Szeemann situates his definition with respect to a decline of a totalizing systems. In the case of the “Mystic,” the decline in the prevalence of Christianity and the atheism of the modern age leaves open a spiritual function which can only be filled by eccentrics, creative and visionary individuals, and, of course, artists. Szeemann frequently made a spiritual metaphor out of Monte Verita, a Swiss utopian and mystical community; in doing so he demonstrated the intersection of his concepts of utopian political and social idealism, and spiritual free-thinking under a broad banner of liberation for the individual.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Szeemann’s themes was one that he addressed only intermittently. As is well-known, Szeemann defined himself as an exhibition-maker, and he without doubt saw his activities as creative acts. He was consequently asked on numerous occasions, both by skeptics and supporters whether or not he considered himself an artist. On different occasions, he answered both affirmatively and negatively. Yet in all cases, when answering the question, he only did so only according to his own definition of what an artist was, that is a “Schöpfer”, a creative individual. One can even say that each of the above instances of his terminology could be applied to his own practice. His Agency for Spiritual Guest Work, the “company” which he established to represent his practices, he referred to as a “Bachelor Machine”. He willingly cultivated and assumed the persona of the “Mystic”. Finally the “Museum of Obsessions” was the expression of his own relentless, obsessive pursuits. The entirety of Szeemann’s thinking about art shows a remarkable tendency for self-similarity. Just as in the case of Etienne Martin, his ideas are simultaneously the product of and legitimation of his own personal mythology.

Images:

Statement published by the Art Workers’ Coalition in the advertising pages of Artforum, June 1972.

Étienne-Martin, Passementerie II, 1949, fabric, glass, braids, 35 x 35 cm.