When Attitudes Become Form – Concepts, Materials, Processes

In 1969, an exhibition was held at Kunsthalle Bern that is ranked as one of the most important in recent art history: Live in Your Head – When Attitudes Become Form. Works – Concepts – Processes – Situations – Information. Curator Harald Szeemann brought together a new generation of artists such as Hanne Darboven, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Richard Long, Richard Serra, and Franz Erhard Walther who distanced themselves from the social and mass-media focus of Pop Art and from the purist and self-referential Minimal Art of previous years. These artists concentrated on concepts, processes, and changeability, on ephemeral events or even solely on linguistic, photographic or numerical instructions or information.

This new understanding of art emphasized above all the artistic idea and artistic action. Art was viewed as a temporary process with an open-ended outcome that was largely determined by the materials used and did not necessarily result in a completed and “commodified” work. Or, as American sculptor Robert Morris put it, an “activity of change, of disorientation and shift, of violent discontinuity and mutability, of the willingness for confusion even in the service of discovering new perceptual modes.”

In hindsight, the spirit of the second half of the 1960s with its political, social, and economic upheavals seems to be condensed in this new art, which, depending on the focus, soon became known as “Conceptual Art”, “Process Art,” “Post-Minimalism,” “Anti-Form,” “Performance Art,” “Land Art” or “Arte Povera”: freedom of expression, open-ended and experience-based action, and hence, last but not least, an emphasis on individual subjectivity. The focus shifted from the primacy of the medium to personal feelings and behavior, in short, to an individual “practice”: provisional forms were rooted in a unique stance, an “attitude.” A perspective which remains valid today.

Although When Attitudes Become Form was by no means the only exhibition dedicated to this radically new art, it is considered a key event in the history of exhibition-making and the advent of the modern concept of curating; in 2013, restaged was even restaged at the Fondazione Prada in Venice. The exhibition played a pioneering role in developing process-oriented forms of production and presentation, with the exhibition space functioning as a kind of collective and open studio where many of the works came into being for the first time. However, When Attitudes Become Form entirely failed to fulfill today’s diversity standards; almost all the artists originated from the USA or Western Europe and the sixty-nine artists listed in the catalog included just three women: Hanne Darboven, Eva Hesse, and Jo Ann Kaplan.

The works from the mumok collection presented here are all by artists who were involved in When Attitudes Become Form in 1969. They are emblematic of that historic moment of radical change and the artistic approaches that emerged from it. As was also the case in 1969, the works establish sometimes surprising affinities and discursive communities that extend beyond art-historical classifications and illustrate artistic production as a relational practice that remains “in motion.”