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DANIEL BIRNBAUM ON HARALD SZEEMANN
HARALD SZEEMANN, who died in February at the age of seventy-one, was the most influential curator of his generation-and, arguably, the most influential of all time, since he practically defined the curator's role as we understand it today. For decades, he worked out of a studio he called "The Factory" in the small Swiss village of Tegna, conceiving exhibitions that were international in scope and consistently dodging the categories of traditional museum practice, often daring to place historical and contemporary artworks beside anthropological artifacts, sacred objects, technical devices, and occult instruments. Szeemann sought, he said, to create shows that were "poems in space." And in the wake of his move away from quasi-scientific museological attempts to classify and order cultural material, the figure of the curator would no longer be seen as a blend of bureaucrat and cultural impresario. Instead, he emerged as a kind of artist himself, or as some would say-with no small degree of skepticism toward Szeemann's genuine belief that art exhibitions were spiritual undertakings with the power to conjure alternative ways of organizing society-a meta-artist, Utopian thinker, or even shaman.
Szeemann himself preferred the down-to-earth Ausstellungsmacher (exhibition maker) as his job title. But this modest term hardly conveys a real sense of his curatorial endeavors, whose "controlled chaos" (Szeemann's phrase) might productively be traced back to his brief career in theater during the 1950s, which included a renowned transvestite act and an homage to Dadaist Hugo Ball before ending with his egomaniacal one-man production of Urfaust in 1956 (yes, Szeemann played all the roles himself). "It gives you the same rhythm as in theater, only you don't have to be on stage constantly," he said in these pages regarding his decision in 1957 to enter the art world and direct exhibitions. Four years later, at the age of twenty-eight, he became director of the Kunsthalle Bern. It was a rather provincial institution at the time, but the bare-bones venue-precisely because it lacked any permanent collection-dictated that Szeemann take up a kind of improvisational, laboratory approach and working style that he would maintain throughout his life. At an unbelievable pace-an exhibition opened every month-Szeemann introduced a baffled local audience to the newest generation of American and...