轉載德國南方報：
HARALD SZEEMANN DIES AT SEVENTY-ONE
Legendary
curator Harald Szeemann died last Friday night at age seventy-one. As the Neue
Zürcher Zeitung reports, Szeemann, who suffered from a pulmonary illness, died
in the southern Swiss canton Ticino. The announcement was made by Davide Croff,
president of the Venice Biennale, which Szeemann curated in 1999 and 2001. "It's
a great loss for the art world, which will miss Harald Szeemann's
forward-looking organizational and critical skills," said Croff.
The
Süddeutsche Zeitung offers a portrait of Szeemann, who was born on June 11, 1933
in Bern, where he ran the Kunsthalle from 1961 to 1969. In addition to curating
the exhibitions "Kinetic Art," 1965, and "Science-Fiction," 1967, Szeemann
invited Christo to wrap the Kunsthalle in 1968. After heavy criticism of his
influential 1969 exhibition "When Attitudes Become Form," Szeemann quit the
Kunsthalle to become a freelance curator.
As the director of Documenta 5
in 1972, Szeemann "guaranteed a place for himself in the Olympia of art
historians in the eyes of art critics," according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
"Documenta 5 lifted the barriers between high culture and low culture and opened
the museum gates to advertisements, kitsch, toys. Happenings or experimental
films appeared in place of neatly hung paintings." The paper singles out three
exceptional exhibitions that Szeemann curated after Documenta:
"Junggesellenmaschinen" (Machines for Singles), 1975, which considered
sadomasochistic currents in the writings and works of Deleuze, Kafka, Freud, and
Duchamp; "Monte Verità," 1979, about the artists' colony in Ticino's Lago
Maggiore; and "Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk" (The Inclination towards the Total
Work of Art), 1983. The ‘80s and ‘90s saw solo exhibitions dedicated to artists
including Delacroix, Immendorff, Polke, Merz, Baselitz, Serra, and Beuys. The
city of Kassel, which hosts Documenta, recently honored Szeemann for his life's
work with a prize that the curator was due to accept this fall.
The Neue
Zürcher Zeitung also reports on Szeemann's last major project, at the 2002 Swiss
national exhibition "Expo.02." "He designed a pavilion covered with a thin layer
of gold leaf, which had to be protected by security guards to stop visitors from
walking off with the precious metal," notes the newspaper. "Inside the pavilion
. . . the main attraction was a machine that destroyed two (old)
one-hundred-franc banknotes every minute during the 159 days of the
exhibition."