Harald Szeemann: Theater, Methodology, Gesamtkunstwerk

The slide talk will highlight some of Harald Szeemann’s most provoking exhibitions and his curatorial development from small documentary-like shows at the Kleintheater Bern (The Small Theater) to Happening & Fluxus (Cologne, 1970), his section “Individual Mythologies” at documenta 5, Bachelor Machine (1975) and finally Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk (“The Inclination Towards a Synthesis of the Arts” or “The Search for a Total Artwork”) (1983). Discussing Paul Thek’s contribution Ark, Pyramid at documenta 5 as an exemplary model of Szeemann’s “Individual Mythologies” the focus of the lecture panel is also to illuminate so-called European concepts which were received controversially by the US-American audience. Another aspect will be Thek’s and Szeemann’s collaboration which started at the set of Robert Wilson’s Deafman Glance in Paris in June 1971 where both first met.

Susanne Neubauer

Susanne Neubauer is a curator and art historian. She wrote her PhD dissertation on Paul Thek’s realized and unrealized publication projects between 1969 and 1977. Before that she was a curator at the Museum of Art Lucerne in Switzerland and is preparing a traveling show on Thek’s lost ephemeral works of the 1970s for Moderna Museet Stockholm, LehmbruckMuseum Duisburg and Museum of Art Lucerne.

Supported by Pro Helvetia