Reconsidering the exhibition When Attitudes Become Form curated by Harald Szeemann: form versus “anti-form” in contemporary art

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines the problem of determination of form in contemporary art and its aesthetic evaluation. Harald Szeemann, curator of the exhibition When Attitudes Become Form (1969), presented a conception, in which “anti-form” symbolically complemented the traditional idea of a valuable artistic form. Szeemann not only tried to comprehend and interpret the metamorphoses of art form in his texts (especially in the collections of essays Individual Mythologies and Museum of Obsessions), but also consciously mastered these tendencies in his curatorial practice. His conception of aesthetic evaluation of contemporary art—theory of “art of intensive intentions” was not based on opposition to the classical criteria of aesthetics, but on absolutely another principle: as an artwork expresses some spiritual, metaphysical problems or values, and as its form, regardless of its visual qualities, serves this purpose. When Attitudes Become Form became one of the first European exhibitions illustrating metamorphoses of contemporary sense of art form.