A Different
Setting
Ghanges
Everything
Gharles Esche
'When Attitudes Become Form"
exhibition vew' Bern, 1969.
Cor Blok, "Letter from Holland,",Art
lnternatonal, vol. 13, no. 5, May 20,
1969, pp. 51-53.
Richard Serra, interviewed Lucy
Steeds, n Christian Rattemeyer et al.,
Exhbtng the New Art, "Op Losse
Schroeven" and "When Atttudes
Become Form" 1969, (London: Afterall
Books, 2010), pp. 260-265, p. 265.
The span between these two cities is
what Rud Fuchs defined as his
nternational reach n the catalogue
to Documenta 7 in 1982.
I COME TO BURY "WHEN ATTITUDES BECOME FORM," NOT TO PRAISE IT.
Let me start with a proposition. The act of reproducing the defining
exhibition "When Attitudes Become Form" marks the moment that the
zombie life of Modernism can be terminated. More than that, it might allow
us finally to distance ourselves from Modernity itself that state of human
affairs that has its origins in the Renaissance and the colonial drives of
an expansive, rational, science and technology-driven Europe. This is a
grand claim, I know, and one that will not be easy to prove given the number
of times that Modernism has been declared dead in the last zo years. There is
even a nice quote from Michelangelo Pistoletto opening a review of "When
Attitudes Become Form" in Art International:"lt's pointless to keep on
predicting the end of art," says Pistoletto. "It came to an end 50 years ago."'
That would take us back to r9r9, perhaps an appropriate date to mark the
beginning of the end of the modern age.
Now, we are at the end of the end. Near a century later, I want to
claim that the repeat version of a crucial internationalist exhibition is logical
precisely at the moment when the elements that are required to imagine
Modernism's end are falling into place. "When Attitudes Become Form,"
along with its sister exhibition "Op Losse Schroeven" at the Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam, established an intimate relationship between artists
on both sides of the Atlantic. In an art world still largely divided into
national movements and certainly convinced of the continental difference
between North America and Europe, these exhibitions spoke about
commonality and shared experiences. As Richard Serra puts it in the
Afterall bookExhibiting the New Art on both exhibitions: "Most of the artists
in those 1969 shows were in some sense involved with-I'm not saying it's
political but-the potential for a new way of thinking about what art can
be."'In the interview, Serra hints at a slightly nostalgic feeling for a lost
ambition, and thus quietly suggests what might have changed between
then (rg6g) and now.
It is obvious that art's geographic reach has since expanded far beyond
the old Los Angeles to Vienna cartography of that ry69 artworld.'The
reliance on formal innovation to determine the quality of the Avant-garde
has also faded, while the emphasis laid on process rather than product at
the time of "When Attitudes Become Form," or its gentle critique of the
market, have largely become niche tendencies in a commercially successful
art world and these ear
,I
.t
challenges are now safely
accommodated into a wider,
relatively static frame of
"what art can be." Despite
this, the essentialist division
between visual, narrative
and theatrical languages
that characterized
high Modernism and were
directly challenged by the
generation of "When
469
 Richard Sena, Shovel Plate Prop,
Close Pin Prop and Sign Board Prop,
1969,'When Attitudes Become Form,"
Bern, 1969.
4 Melanchola seems to be the abding
emotion for much of the old New York
radicals that remain in control of much
of the US academic world, f their
contributions to October magazine
and to large tomes of recent art
history are to be read at face value.
5 The new collecton display at the
Stedelijk Museum or the continuing
emphasis of the collection exhbtons
at the Centre Pompidou, Pars, or
Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, are three
cases among many examples in
Western European and American
museums.
6 I am thinking here of the growng
publications and academic studies
of Lucy Lippard, Jean Leering, Seth
Siegelaub and other curators from the
period.
7 Ths would be rather closer to the
argument of Bruno Latour n We Have
Never Been Modern, (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard Universty Press, 1993).
A DIFFERENT SETTNG CHANGES EVERYTHING
Attitudes Become Form"
have clung on in many
outposts of the academic
and museum art world.
Perhaps their old Modernist
analysis now comes across
as melancholic or sweetly
nostalgic today, but it still
extends a long arm over
the United States in
particular and continues to
shape art history in its own
image.o I also see in many
recent museum displays
a continued hankering after
these older certainties and
an uncertaint if not outright rejection, regarding the hybridity, super-
diversit intense subjective individualization and a host of other
miscegenies that have come with the contemporary challenge to Western
hegemony.u What is fascinating therefore about the wide interest in the
modern exhibitions that broke these rules, such as "When Attitudes
Become Form," is that they offer a rather different take on the modern
period in art because such exhibitions are not categorically incompatible
with new forms of contemporary hybridity even if subsequently most
of the participating artists were subsumed into an unrevised modern
museum canon.u
This is certainly one reason why the restaging in Venice of "When
Attitudes Become Form" might be considered to mark the end of a particu-
lar sect within Modernism and perhaps the renewal of another.'
Yet, what urges me most to identify this moment as a final end of the end of
Modernism and Modernity is rather the contrast with our own time and in
particular the loss of "forward momentum" in art's forms and structures
that Serra identifies as uniting the artists in ry69. The popular break-
through that "When Attitudes Become Form" and "Op Losse Schroeven"
represented was a challenge to the means and look of art. There was an
aggressive reaction from those wanting to defend art, visible in the physical
attack on Phillip Glass in Amsterdam and Harald Szeemann in Bern.
Something was clearly at stake for both radicals and traditionalists in a way
that is hard today to comprehend. The artists struggled with a paradoxical
wish to inscribe themselves and their new materials and new kinds of
spaces into art's canon while rejecting the idea of an authoritative history
altogether. They wanted to change art's relation to the world, not simply to
enlarge it, so that they could nd a place within the existing system. In that
sense, these exhibitions still functioned perfectly within a classical
Modernist frame. They sought to present images and objects from a world
to come, one in which new human possibilities would emerge to compre-
hend the meaning of the works that were ahead of their own times. The
whole history of Modernism required an idea of the Avant-garde of this
kind, and that Avant-garde in turn required a form of historical determin-
470
 ism in which there was an arrow pointing towards the future, and the
artists were some way ahead of the pack, disappearing offin that direction.
Under this widely held settlement, art history and its exhibitions were the
subject of arcane stud while grasping the future was where it was at.
For Modernism to define a relation to its own contemporary societ it had
to believe that the future would be not only qualitatively different but also
better than the past in all ways. We do not have to be nostalgic in the
slightest to observe that this faith in the future as art would have it has
dissipated, more noticeably in the old West, but also visible across the globe.
While we can perhaps argue about the degree of this loss of faith-and
certainly the political optimists or the melancholics amongst us might be
very reluctant to let go of a grip on Modernity's transformative possibility-
I think we could all agree that the undering assumptions that justified
Modernism's success do not hold water anymore.
Instead, the most pertinent artists, curators and writers are focused
on the present in all its complexity and on trying to absorb and find
patterns in the contemporary by which we might navigate ourselves and our
communities. The consequences are playing out in front of our eyes in the
multiplying conditions
"Op Losse Schroeven" exhibition
vieq Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, through which art is
1969.
mediated, interpreted,
nar r ativ ized and displaced
out of its canonical comfort
zone. This article is not the
place to describe
contemporary developments
more generally, so let us
focus on one aspect that is so
beautifully illustrated with
this extraordinary effort to
restage "\Mhen Attitudes Become Form." The urge to reproduce the canon
of exhibitions has already appeared across the Western art world in the last
few years, while at the same time, the disciplines of "exhibition histories"
or "exhibition studies" has emerged inside academia. It is true that I am
personally involved in this process both at the Van Abbemuseum and with
Afterall Books and |ournal at Central Saint Martins College in London, but
there are suffcient other occurrences of the phenomenon to be confident
that this goes much wider. Indeed, my own developing interest in this field
is only possible because of the support of other academics, as well as the
breadth of possibilities that replaying or re-analyzing exhibitions seems to
be providing both art historians and curators. From Bruce Altshuler's
important published overviews of exhibition histories to the decidedly odd
"updated" version of "When Attitudes Become Form" at the CCA Wattis
Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, "exhibition histories" are
becoming a motor for understanding the social interface of art, and even its
future political potential today through analyzingwhat public presentations
achieved and how they functioned in their own time and place. The fact
that "When Attitudes Become Form" is now coming home to the mother of
all contemporary art festivals in a full re-enactment of its artists and

CHARLES ESCHE 471

,.l*..
 The Pergamon Altar reconstructed
in Berlin according the project
by Alfred Mes-sel and Ludwig
Hoffmann, Berln, 1910-3O.
8 ln 2009, I asked Rudi Fuchs to reinstal
an exhibition he had produced with
the Van Abbemuseum collection
26 years earlier after his return
to Endhoven from Documenta 7.
"Play Van Abbe l: The Game and the
Players," Van Abbemuseum, 2009.
g T.J. Clark, Farcwell to an ldea:
Episodes from a History ot Modernism
(Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1999), p.4.
A DIFFERENT SETTING CHANGES EVERYTHING
installations is final confir- roI
mation to me that the
exhibition histories ten-
dency has arrived, securing
a place for itself at the
center of contemporary art
discourse. In the process, as
such it participates fully in 11
the urge to write a history
of exhibitions and the 't2
nostalgic quotations of
late Modernist experimen-
tation that can be observed all over the art-world and beyond. It is clear also
that textual reflection or criticality is not sufficient to cover the need to look
back at exhibitions but that also the physical, immediate experience-
the effect of walking back through time while being fully aware of the
anachronism-is becoming an essential way to postulate about Modernism
and all its variants that only such an enveloping action might achieve. By
doing so, of course, Modernism itself is no longer immanentlywith us but
removed to a respectful distance into the past.t
The manner of producing this exhibition is decidedly archaeological.
The vitalism of the curator and the performative installation done by
those young artists are totally absent, given the death of one and the static
nature of the objects in the other. What we might call "When Attitudes
Become Form Reloaded" is a phenomenon totally independent of the
original exhibition.
This exhibition's wonderfully eccentric attempt to force one location
(Kunsthalle Bern) into a completely other architecture (a Venetian palazzo)
is precisely the kind of exercise that Alfred Messel already anticipated with
his Pergamon Museum in Berlin or, more latterl that Bernard Tschumi
understood in his successful Acropolis Museum, save for the cruelly absent
Parthenon Marbles themselves. These processes of antique museumification
serve to construct a very necessary awareness ofthe gap between our
present and the original material, thereby allowing us to extract, frame and
re-order. It is just that they have been traditionally reserved for rather older
material than a 44-year-oId exhibition, which is perhaps why the show
here will only be temporary. Nevertheless, it could easily be seen as the
fulfillment of T.J. Clark's 1989 statement that "Modernism is our antiquity"e
and its reconstruction performs a compatible function to those museums
ofAncient art in that the current generation ofartists and curators can
investigate and analyze as well as respect what was done under
Modernism's dominion while no longer being subject to it. We are all
already liberated to a certain degree in the very act ofits restaging, being
able to emerge from out of Modernismb shadow by placing it into antiquity
where it can weave new spells of inspiration without becoming a tradition
that must be followed. The power of "When Attitudes Become Form"
has been not only that it opened up a new way of thinking about art, but
also that its canonization has led it to become a kind of silent reproach to
the present for its failure to realize the promises of Modernism that it
472
10 ln his PrisonNotebooks of the 1920s
and 1930s, Gramsci famously writes
that: "The crisis consists precisely
in the fact that the old is dying and
the new cannot be born; n ths
interregnum a great varety of morbd
symptoms appear." I am only partially
suggesting that "When Attitudes
Become Form" is a morbid symptom,
howeve( or its morbidity might be
precisely the point as seen today when
old ways of thinking need to expire.
11 When Attitudes Become Form, loose
bound catalogue, Kunsthalle Bern,
1969.
12 See especially Steven ten Thje, "'Op
Losse Schroeven' and'When Attitudes
Become Form': Public Reception in
the Netherlands and Switzerland," in
Christian Rattemeyer et al., op. cit.,
pp.212-219.
Bernard Tschumi, Acropolis
Museum, Athens, 2001-O9.
CHARLES ESCHE
contained. Now, by reproducing this defining exhibition of Conceptual artl
Arte Povera, the current project has the capacity to put much of the weight
of that history behind us and to allow the new to be born, as Antonio
Gramsci wished it to be back in the r9zos.'o If it is used well, this reloaded
version of "When Attitudes Become Form" can become a symbolic moment
to mark the end of an art rooted in the social rebellions of 1968, and the
adoption of one that takes its lead from both the political collapse of one-
party state communism and the slow motion wreckage of free market,
shareholder economics that is currently taking place.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ATTITUDES BECOME HISTORY?
Scott Burton neatly summed up "When Attitudes Become Form" when he
wrote in the catalogue that what the artists all shared was "...the modern
ll
obsession with going as far as possible." As is acknowledged by this
moment in Venice, the exhibition gradually developed the aura of an
exemplary curatorial strategy. This has taken of in the last decade in
particular, when the growth of curatorial studies has created more urgency
to create an exhibition canon as we have seen above. It must be added
though that "When Attitudes Become Form" was always a valued exhibi-
tion, especially for those artists that participated. Its quality was and is
perceived in the energizing personality of the curator who insistently
brought the artists together and catered to their needs as well as to its
internationalism; a radical gesture at a time when most group shows were
constructed around national cultural essences. Szeemann's methodology
which was basically to allow the artists to do their thing while always taking
care that there was something to contemplate in the galleries, was one
that mixed the charming impresario with an eye for the press and media.
It is not for nothing that he published his diary in the exhibition catalogue,
organized to have the installation filmed andrealized the benefrts of its con-
troversial press reception. In contrast to the less-media sa\rvy Wim Beeren
of the Stedelijk Museum's "Op Losse Schroeven," Szeemann knew how
rumors worked in the art world long before any other curator." It is also
significant that "When Attitudes Become Form" was one of the first shows
to be substantially sponsored by a private company (Phillip Morris) and the
show as a whole had remarkable success in launching art careers into the
market and museum world.
"When Attitudes Become Form" has become in this way the iconic
Avant-garde curatorial
gesture. It seems to
foreshadow the most
signifi cant developments
that followed, while
being absolute of its
moment. It was
speculative yet it took
a clear position,
proclaiming this new
art to be the art ofthe
473
13 ln this regard, t is noteworthy that
even at the original moment of the
exhibition itself, in 1969, an "exhibition
copy" was included n the show-the
work by Bruce Nauman that was
rebuilt by Szeemann following the
artist's instructions. lt is ths version
or copy that will be shown in Venice,
as it was never destroyed after the
show as had been requested.
14 Piero Glardi, intervew with Francesco
Manacorda, in Christian Rattemeyer
et al., op. ct., pp. 230-238.
Stage desgn for Michel Seuphor's
L'phmre es{ ternel, 1964
(ca. 1926) by Piet Mondrian,
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.
A DIFFERENTSETTING CHANGES EVERYTHING
future aswell as a discovery in the present. Now, in the Ca' Corner della
Regina in Venice, that forward projection is being turned into something
that looks initially as though it is glancing back at that time of new energy
with some envy, at best in order to draw sustenance or conclusions for
today. It is possible to understand this gesture of repetitive exhibition-
making as a retrospective proposition, a means to say that what happened
once can inform what might happen soon, but it is essentially a
memorializing event through which a new analysis might emerge. It is, at
the least, a moment to ponder what once was. Signifrcantly for our current
condition, this process of restaging or repeating focuses our attention as
visitors on the physical manifestation of the exhibition. This new old
exhibition in Venice cannot help but reify the objects it displays by
emphasizing the materiality of the things themselves and their value as
inanimate "things" rather than tools or gestures in the hands of artists.
By focusing on the objects, it also contributes to the burgeoning forms
of sampling, copying and remaking artworks from the past, or simply
declaring new "exhibition copies" of previous works that are becoming a
core part of the art system. Alongside new copies and editions, there is
a more recent development of repeating performances using actors instead
of the original artists, or marketing the "scripts" or "scores" of happenings
or events to art consumers. All of these attempts to restage, represent
or reenact works from late Modernism serve many masters, not only
nostalgia and commerce but also memory and the potential for new
analysis and new conclusions. What they all have in common, however,
is an essential opposition to such Modernist tenets as originality and
uniqueness; tenets that have been fundamental to maintaining the value
of artworks in the market."As Piero Gilardi points out in the Afterall
book, the step from contingent process to reified object is not in any way in
opposition to Szeemann's initial motivation for doing the first exhibition
in 1969. "Szeemann's vision was not that of cancelling out the object
transforming nature-but the condensation of ideology into an aesthetic
-of
icon, and he was still interested in showing the whole supporting process
in the artwork's creation and its maintenance. That's because he, as a
museum man, needed a final object."to Yet what does this even heavier
materialization a second time do for the youthful, anti-capitalist attitudes
that imbued many of the artists in the exhibition in those ear days?
From the deliberate desire to produce "unsellable art" shared by Ger van
EIk and Marinus Boezem
to the constantly changing
and never finished
installations of many young
Arte Povera artists to be
found in Turin's Deposito
d Arte Presente, some of
the artists in "When
Attitudes Become Form"
were fighting against
the reification of art and
seeking a dynamic
474
Reconstruction of Lszl Moholy-
Nagy and Alexander Dome/s Raum
der Gegenwart,2OO7 (ca. 1925),
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.
15 Cor Blok, op. ct.
CHARLES ESCHE
interaction with people and
environment. What
remains of this "attitude"
as its form is restaged in its
original context?
In his review of both
"When Attitudes Become
Form" and "Op Losse
Schroeven," Cor Blok hints
at the problems that
museums and collectors
were going to be forced to confront once works like those in the exhibitions
became art of the Modernist canon: "A museum might adapt itself to the
exigencies of the new art, e.g.by publishing catalogues without holding an
exhibition, as Mr. Wim Beeren, who organized the "Square Tags" show, has
suggested. In some cases it remains essential because the setting in a
museum is the only thing which differentiates the work from similar
objects found in everyday life. Other works, however, require a different
setting, and still others are simply unfitted for exhibition except as
photographs: the fields ploughed by |an Dibbets or the troughs dug in the
desert by Michael Heizer."'u We know now that this difculty of preserving
the original, or even claiming an artwork's originality outside of the
museum context, was solved in a myriad of creative ways, partly by selling
the context (the installation), partly by reifying an associated object (the
certificate), partly by just ignoring the availability of the work in formats
other than the highly priced artwork (the DVD special edition with
accompanying artifacts) and by other means that were often specific
solutions to particular works of art. What is interesting here is that the
restaging of a969 exhibition from Kunsthalle Bern recaptures or reframes
the original resistance to such commodification amongst the artists
themselves and, by doing so, sets up very pertinent questions about which
aspects of "originality" the market wishes to preserve in the artworks.
Perhaps the last word can be left to the individual who more than any
other was the initial driving force behind both "When Attitudes Become
Form" and "Op Losse Schroeven," and whose anxious traveling, incessant
introductions and political commitment to a new form of art in a new
society mark him out today as an exceptional mix of activist and
entrepreneur. Piero Gilardi knew all the artists in the shows, convinced
others of the signifrcance of their innovation and connected both Szeemann
and Beeren to the artists who participated. In that recent interview with
Francesco Manacorda in Exhibiting the New Arf, he finished his comments
on Szeemann's need for a "final object" with the following observation:
"Instead for me [...] in the field of contemporary art, frnally the work has
much more radically assumed a threshold value, for which the interaction
with the very social and natural setting is its central value." Whether this
optimistic sense is true, this claim that the contemporary might be
fulfilling the promise of the past perhaps touches the core of the potential
significance of this repeated exhibition. If it shapes not only a desire to
memorialize a strand of Modernism that is more compatible with the
475
 present but also to challenge the construction of Modernism in museums
and collections, then it will be of real importance. If it further disrupts the
contemporary artworld by showing its inadequacy as a successor to the
ambitions of 'When Attitudes Become Form,'then this zor3 version will
go down in art history and some art historians yet to be born might be
restaging this Venice version somewhere else in the world in 44 years time.

a-

A DIFFERENT SETTING CHANGES EVERYTHING 476

WHEN
ATTITUDES
BEGOME
FORM
Bern l969iVenice 2013

H
[0RiltR
IILtA
Rttll'lA

Fondazione Prada
BOOK

@ 20l3 Fondazione Prada, Mlan Special thanks to the photogrcphers

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