The 'new art' of the late 1960s was shown in two landmark exhibitions in 1969: Op Losse Schroeven and When Attitudes Become Form. This book reveals how each brought together Arte Povera, Anti-Form, Conceptual and Land art, whilst challenging such categories and introducing innovative curatorial approaches. Christian Rattemeyer offers a rich comparative analysis of the two exhibitions, exploring the related but differing approaches of the two curators – Wim Beeren and Harald Szeemann – in two distinct institutional settings: the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Kunsthalle Bern. Numerous installation photographs enable a virtual 'walk through' of each exhibition, while meticulous chronologies detail the negotiations that shaped them. Crucial texts from the time are complemented by new research and fascinating recent interviews with participating artists. Included are interviews with Marinus Boezem, Jan Dibbets, Ger van Elk, Piero Gilardi and Richard Serra. This book is Volume 1 in the Exhibition Histories series, which investigates shows that have shaped the way contemporary art is experienced, made and discussed.

Widely regarded as the most influential curator of the second half of the twentieth century, Harald Szeemann (1933–2005) is associated with some of the most important artistic developments of the postwar era. A passionate advocate for avant-garde movements like Conceptualism and Postminimalism, he collaborated with artists such as Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, and Cy Twombly, developing new ways of presenting art that reflected his sweeping vision of contemporary culture. Szeemann once stated that his goal as an exhibition maker was to create a “Museum of Obsessions.” This richly illustrated volume is a virtual collection catalogue for that imaginary institution, tracing the evolution of his curatorial method through letters, drawings, personal datebooks, installation plans, artists’ books, posters, photographs, and handwritten notes. This book documents all phases of Szeemann’s career, from his early stint as director of the Kunsthalle Bern, where he organized the seminal Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969); to documenta 5 (1972) and the intensely personal exhibition he staged in his own apart-ment using the belongings of his hairdresser grandfather (1974); to his reinvention as a freelance curator who realized projects on wide-ranging themes until his death in 2005. The book contains essays exploring Szeemann’s curatorial approach as well as interviews with collaborators. Its more than 350 illustrations include previously unpublished installation photographs and documents as well as archival materials. This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center February 6 to May 6, 2018 (a satellite show will be at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles February 4 to April 22, 2018); at the Kunsthalle Bern in Bern, Switzerland, June to September 2018; at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in Düsseldorf, Germany October 2018 to January 2019; and at the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Rivoli in Turin, Italy, February to May 2019.

Situated at the crossroads of performance practice, museology, and cultural studies, live arts curation has grown in recent years to become a vibrant interdisciplinary project and a genuine global phenomenon. Curating Live Arts brings together bold and innovative essays from an international group of theorist-practitioners to pose vital questions, propose future visions, and survey the landscape of this rapidly evolving discipline. Reflecting the field’s characteristic eclecticism, the writings assembled here offer practical and insightful investigations into the curation of theatre, dance, sound art, music, and other performance forms—not only in museums, but in community, site-specific, and time-based contexts, placing it at the forefront of contemporary dialogue and discourse.

The first major history of the glamorous art biennial. Biennials have proliferated across the globe since the end of the Cold War and have now stabilized at about 200 a year. While this quintessentially contemporary form has significant roots in the world expositions of the 19th century, Jones argues that the biennial is also the platform for an important new aesthetic shift. Moving away from a focus on visual looking in the mid 20th century, the art world today embraces experience: art fairs give the feel of closeness and spaciousness, crowds, and they engage all our senses, even taste. Jones argues that the dominance of installation art and the simultaneous rise of biennialsor recurring art fairsneed to be examined as joint phenomenamutually reinforcing and linked to specific geo-political and aesthetic conditions. From the rise of tourism to the flows of art commerce, Jones hatches a new way to track the development of international art fairs in nearly every corner of the globe: from the early world fairs of London, Paris, Chicago, and New York to art fairs proper in Venice, Sao Paulo, Havana, Berlin, Lyon, and Beijing, as well as Kassel s Documenta, Whitney Biennial, and moreall explained through a rapidly evolving aesthetics of experience that has never, until now, been addressed in such a substantial way."

Emerging from a matrix of Old Left, black nationalist, and bohemian ideologies and institutions, African American artists and intellectuals in the 1960s coalesced to form the Black Arts Movement, the cultural wing of the Black Power Movement. In this comprehensive analysis, James Smethurst examines the formation of the Black Arts Movement and demonstrates how it deeply influenced the production and reception of literature and art in the United States through its negotiations of the ideological climate of the Cold War, decolonization, and the civil rights movement. Taking a regional approach, Smethurst examines local expressions of the nascent Black Arts Movement, a movement distinctive in its geographical reach and diversity, while always keeping the frame of the larger movement in view. The Black Arts Movement, he argues, fundamentally changed American attitudes about the relationship between popular culture and "high" art and dramatically transformed the landscape of public funding for the arts.