Tag Archives: Getty Publications

ON MARCIA TUCKER

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To say time flies means that it ceases to have any specificity or urgency. Westerners tend to think of this as meditative—what happens when you’ve gone exploring in the computer, or you’re deep into a really good book, or falling madly in love. It’s unusual, something other than the ordinary temporal sensibility that gets us to work, the kids to school, the assignments done, the dinneron the table. How paradoxical, then, that the most rewarding and satisfying activities are those where it seems as if time ceases to exist. — Marcia Tucker, 1996*

Friends and colleagues of the late Marcia Tucker—art historian, curator, and New Museum founder—will gather this week for a book launch and panel on OUT OF BOUNDS—THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF MARCIA TUCKER.

OUT OF BOUNDS BOOK LAUNCH AND PANEL DISCUSSION

Thursday, October 17, at 7 pm.

New Museum Theater

235 Bowery, New York City.

*Marcia Tucker, from A Labor of Love, New Museum exhibition catalog, 1996. Reprinted in Out of Bounds, 2019.

From top: Marcia Tucker; Joan Brown, The Room, Part I (The Leg), 1975, oil enamel on canvas, courtesy and © Joan Brown Estate, Anglim Gilbert Gallery, and George Adams Gallery, “Bad” Painting exhibition, New Museum, 1978; Pat Steir, The Virgin’s Dream, 1972, oil and pencil on canvas, Lannan Art Collection; Out of Bounds—The Collected Writings of Marcia Tucker, design by Catherine Lorenz, courtesy and © the New Museum and Getty Publications; Daisy Youngblood, Romana, 1987, low-fire clay, courtesy McKee Gallery, photograph by Fred Scruton; Labor of Love exhibition, New Museum, 1996; Liza Lou, Kitchen, 1991–1996, glass beads, wood, wire, plaster, and artist’s used appliances, photograph by Tom Powell, Labor of Love exhibition, New Museum, 1996. Images courtesy and © the artists, photographers, and publishers.

HARALD SZEEMANN — SELECTED WRITINGS

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Harald Szeemann (1933–2005)—curator, artist, art historian, and “secretary general” of the legendary documenta 5—was an exhibition maker nonpareil. HARALD SZEEMANN: SELECTED WRITINGS—published in conjunction with last year’s exhibition Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions at the Getty Research Institute (home of the Harald Szeemann Papers)—brings together over seventy essays and interviews, many published in English for the first time.

Richly illustrated throughout, the book contains a 20-page section of plates, including Szeemann’s artwork, exhibition diagrams, installation views, archival photographs, and other ephemera.

“I’m an existentialist. You are thrown in the universe from somewhere and are, once here, responsible for your acts. But it’s always a privilege to fall into a well-made bed. In this case, the Kunsthalle Bern in 1961…

“The historical moment, when the image of the creator/curator became conscious and evident, happened in 1969, when I organized When Attitudes Become Form and the artists arrived and installed their works and the TV reports publicized it. Beuys put his grease on the walls, Heizer made a hole in the public sidewalk, Artschwager distributed his blps in the city, Barry put the building under radiation, Weiner removed a square meter of wall, Ruthenbeck ruined the wooden floor with his wet ashes, Serra threw melted lead against the wall, etc., etc. This was no longer perceived as an art exhibition but as an archaic provocation—not by the artists, but by the curator who allowed it.” — Harald Szeemann*

HARALD SZEEMANN: SELECTED WRITINGS. Edited by Doris Chon, Glenn Phillips, and Pietro Rigolo. Translated by Jonathan Blower and Elizabeth Tucker. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2018.

In New York, the Swiss Institute has restaged GRANDFATHER: A PIONEER LIKE US, the 1974 exhibition Szeemann organized in his Bern apartment two years after documenta 5.

HARALD SZEEMANN—GRANDFATHER: A PIONEER LIKE US

Through August 18.

Swiss Institute

38 St. Marks Place, New York City.

*”Making Things Possible: A Conversation with Harald Szeemann.” Interview by Beti Žerovc. In Harald Szeemann—Selected Writings, 383–393.

From top, left to right: Harald Szeemann, in the 1990s in the Fabbrica Rosa, his office and archive in Maggia, Switzerland, photograph Fredo Meyer-Henn, State Archive of Canton Bern; Szeemann’s address list for his 1968 research trip to New York—for the Kunsthalle Bern exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969)—includes contact info for Eva Hesse, Hans Haacke, Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, and Lucas Samaras; Szeemann (seated) on the last night of documenta 5, 1972, photograph by Balthasar Burkhard; Getty Publications book cover; Lidija Delić, poster art commissioned by the Swiss Institute for the Grandfather: A Pioneer Like Us exhibition; Oasis No. 7, Haus-Rucker-Co (Laurids Ortner, Manfred Ortner, Klaus Pinter, Günter Zamp Kelp), 1972, documenta 5: Questioning Reality—Image Worlds Today, Kassel, 1972; part of Szeemann’s rubber stamp collection; Szeemann. Images courtesy the Harald Szeeman Papers at the Getty Research Institute, © J. Paul Getty Trust.

MODERN SCULPTURE READER

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The unofficial mascot for the fifth decennial Skulptur Projekte Münster—through October 1, 2017—is a cartoon of a man holding a drink and a cigarette exclaiming, “This shit rocks!” In the year of the previous exhibition, the Henry Moore Institute and its curator Penelope Curtis initiated and published the MODERN SCULPTURE READER (2007)—which quickly sold out and fell out of print.

Five years later, the J. Paul Getty Museum sponsored a second edition of this essential volume on twentieth-century sculpture, which includes:

Essays by Eva Hesse (“Contingency”), Apollinaire (“Duchamp–Villon”), Vito Acconci (“Notes on Vienna”), and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (“Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Modern Sculpture”). Interviews with Louise Bourgeois, Robert Smithson, Rachel Whiteread, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Serra. Excerpts from longer pieces—Robert Irwin’s “Notes Toward Conditional Art,” Rilke on Rodin, Wilhelm Worringer on abstraction, Carl Einstein on African sculpture, and Allan Kaprow on assemblages and happenings.

The 70 texts—artists’ statements, newspaper and magazine articles, poems, transcribed lectures and interviews—are arranged chronologically, and edited by Jon Wood, David Hulks, and Alex Potts.

MODERN SCULPTURE READER (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute/Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2007 and 2012).

Claes Oldenburg, Giant Pool Balls—which was made for the first Skulptur Projekte Münster in 1977—covered with graffiti. Image credit: Rudolf Wakonigg/LWL, 1977/©1987 Skulptur Projekte Münster.

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