An aesthetic of comprehension: the distribution of American land art and conceptual art in Germany, 1968-1975

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AN AESTHETIC OF COMPREHENSION:
THE DISTRIBUTION OF AMERICAN LAND ART AND CONCEPTUAL
ART IN GERMANY, 1968-1975

by

MEGAN MASTROIANNI

A DISSERTATION Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
ART HISTORY

May 2016

“An Aesthetic of Comprehension: Mastroianni
The Distribution of American Land Art and Conceptual Art in Germany, 1968-1975”

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ………………….………………………………………………….…. 3

Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………….… 5

Introduction
An Aesthetic of Comprehension…………………………………………………………… 6
Images……………………………………………………………………………………… 35

Chapter 1
The Material Idea: Conceptual Art and the Compendium…….…………………………… 37
Images……………………………………………………………………………………… 82

Chapter 2
Sensation in Body and Mind: The Documentation of Land Art in Interfunktionen…..…… 98
Images……………………………………………………………………………………… 139

Chapter 3
“A Kind of Feedback Mechanism:” Gerry Schum’s Fernsehgalerie and the
Presentation of Land Art on Television…………………………………………………… 149
Images………………………………………………………………………………………206

Chapter 4
Attitudes on Display: Harald Szeemann and the Exhibition of the Gesture……………… 225
Images…………………………………………………………………………………….. 266

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………..…………277

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Acknowledgements
The seeds of this project were planted in 2008 during my work on the exhibition Art of
Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It was there that I
first became interested in Germany during the Cold War, and I am thankful to Stephanie Barron
for opening my eyes to artistic endeavors and post-war realities in East and West Germany. My
encounter with the artists’ magazine Interfunktionen through my work on the exhibition left me
eager to explore questions about the relationship between works of art and the materials used to
distribute them.
At the University of Southern California, seminars led by Karen Lang, Paul Lerner,
Richard Meyer, and Katja Zelljadt offered opportunities to think through these questions from
many different perspectives. I am grateful for the intellectual guidance offered by these great
mentors. I am indebted to Megan Luke, who joined the art history department at a pivotal
moment in the development of my ideas and generously took me under her wing, offering
countless hours of advising. Kate Flint, Suzanne Hudson, Sean Roberts, Nancy Troy and Ann
Marie Yasin also played formative roles in my intellectual and professional development.
Sam Adams was my partner-in-crime throughout the long years dedicated to this project,
and those years would have been much less enjoyable without him by my side. My friendships
with Nadya Bair, Ellen Dooley, Claire de Dobay Rifelj, Sarah Goodrum, Rika Hiro, Karen
Huang, Brendan McMahon, Bess Murphy, Sean Nelson, MacKenzie Stevens, Erin Sullivan, and
Lida Sunderland meant steadfast support and good humor in both the best of times as well as
more challenging moments.
Generous funding provided by the Russell Endowed Fellowship, the Deutscher
Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), the Ralph and Joan Hovel Memorial Scholarship for
“An Aesthetic of Comprehension: Mastroianni
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4
Research in Germany, the Rockwell Dennis Hunt Scholastic Award, and USC’s College
Doctoral Fellowship made possible both research trips and extended periods dedicated to
writing. I am grateful to Friedrich Heubach, Klaus Honnef, Wibke von Bonin, and Ursula
Wevers for their gracious attention to my inquiries and generosity with their personal
recollections of the period and works of art under review. The archives at the Museum Ludwig in
Cologne, the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, the documenta Archiv in Kassel, and the Zentralarchiv
des internationalen Kunsthandels (ZADIK) in Cologne were kindly made available to me, along
with Harald Szeemann’s papers at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. With all of my
archival digging, Dorothea Schoene helped with translations when my own German skills fell
short.
This project would never have been realized without the support of my family, and it is
dedicated to them with a thankful heart. To my mother and mother-in-law, Christie and Theresa,
for their help with my two small children, which meant extra, vital hours of reading, writing and
revising. To Randy, my stepfather and so much more, whose genuine interest in the project was
inspiring and motivating. To Ruby and Joseph, who came into the world midway through the
project, filling my days with wonder and purpose. And finally, to Nick, who believed in me most
of all and all along. I am forever yours.

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ABSTRACT

This dissertation looks at the display and distribution of land art and conceptual art in
Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Its subjects are not so much the works of art per se as
they are the tools and strategies used to bring the often ephemeral, remotely located or
immaterial works of art to viewers beyond the original site of display. In the late 1960s,
conceptual art and land art changed the terms of the art object, pressing it beyond something
physical and discrete to include the process or idea underlying it as well as the relationships it
generated among artist, viewer and work of art. Whether a massive excavation of soil in the
Mojave Desert by Michael Heizer, or a set of instructions for producing one of Sol LeWitt’s wall
drawings, land art and conceptual art traded in projects that renegotiated the relationship between
the work of art and efforts to make it visible, exhibitable and distributable to audiences.
Reproductive tools such as photographs, Xeroxes and publications were employed to new ends,
understood for their ability to make the work of art present for viewers under a variety of
circumstances.
The examples discussed here break down into four categories of distribution, through
which these documentary materials reached their viewers. These are books, artists’ magazines,
television and exhibitions. The techniques and strategies of presentation taken up in each of these
four categories are investigated, and the ways in which they worked to bridge the distance
between a work of art and its viewer are addressed. As a result, the document is reconceived,
understood not as a belated facsimile of something located beyond its borders, but as an aesthetic
object capable of bringing the viewer into contact with the work of art’s most central inquiries.

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Introduction

An Aesthetic of Comprehension

This dissertation investigates the relationship between works of art that evade object form
and efforts to record them for distribution and display, dwelling on the function of the record, the
conditions of its presentation, and the role of the viewing subject in perceiving and
comprehending the work of art via its documentation. Within this dissertation, I use the term
“document” to refer to visual and textual material produced in an effort to record and
disseminate artistic phenomena that is ephemeral, immaterial, remotely located or some
combination of the three. In defining the term as such, I am indebted to Liz Kotz, who has
theorized photography’s function with respect to art in the 1960s.
1
Kotz describes a shift in the
work of art from object to “notational system,” in which language is used to describe a general
schema that can be realized in multiple possible ways. She argues that this shift repositioned
photography, dislodging its concern with reproduction and reforming it into a mechanism for
recording works of art in a manner that facilitates multiple possible realizations of the general
schema it documents.
2
The works of art under review here were initially accessible to limited

1
Liz Kotz, “Language between Performance and Photography,” October, Vol. 111 (Winter 2005): 3-21.
See also, Liz Kotz, Words to be looked at: language in 1960s art (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007).
2
There is a long and complex literature on what Kotz’s refers to as photography’s “reproductive logic of
original and copy.” (Kotz, 2005, 15) The earliest writing on photography celebrated the fidelity with
which photographs supposedly recorded the world. For example, see W.H.F. Talbot, The Pencil of Nature
(London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1844-46); and Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The
Stereoscope and the Stereograph” (1859), in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg, 71-
82 (New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980). In the 1960s, the historical period within which the
dissertation’s case studies are set, authors including Roland Barthes and André Bazin continued to
celebrate the one-to-one relationship between the photograph and the thing photographed, while
complicating this relationship to account for the cultural systems within which photographs are
encountered. Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image” (1964), in Image-Music-Text, 15-151 (New York:
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viewers, and the documents created in connection with them functioned to expand these
circumscribed audiences, reaching greater numbers of people through their distribution. I hone in
on the presentational strategies surrounding this distribution, exploring the ways in which
documentary materials brought the work of art to the viewer, generating new and multiple
realizations of it through the visual information they communicate.
My examples fall within the frame of conceptual art and land art, art historical categories
that emerged in the late 1960s and changed the terms of the art object, pressing it beyond
something physical and discrete to include the process or idea underlying it as well as the

Hill and Wang, 1977); André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema?,
trans. Hugh Gray, 9-16 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1967).
More recently, authors including Rosalind Krauss and Joel Snyder have interrogated the claim
that photography is a “documentary” or “ontological” medium by virtue of its capacity to record elements
of the natural world. Investigating the polemics of such a claim, Krauss and Snyder have pointed out the
ways in which the photographer’s techniques of cropping, framing and selecting subject matter undermine
the photograph’s one-to-one relationship to reality, what Roland Barthes called the “quasi-tautological”
relationship between a photograph and the thing photographed. Joel Snyder, “Documentary without
Ontology,” Studies in Visual Communication (1984): 78-91; Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Part
1” (1976) and “Notes on the Index: Part 2” (1977), in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Modernist Myths, 196-209, 210-219 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985).
The term “documentary photography” is frequently used to describe photographs commissioned
by United States government agencies to record such things as the landscapes of the Western frontier in
the 19
th
century, living and working conditions in New York City tenements at the start of the 20
th

century, and social injustices and triumphs in the aftermath of the Great Depression in the 1930s. For her
critique of the inclusion of these so-called “documentary” photographs in art historical categorizations of
photography, see Rosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces,” Art Journal, Vol. 42, No. 4
(Winter, 1982): 311-319. For more on the problems of the art historical category of “documentary
photography,” including its aesthetic motivations, see Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “A Photographer in
Jerusalem, 1855” (1981), in Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and
Practices, 150-168, 298-299 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1991); Miles Orvell, “Documentary
and the Seductions of Beauty,” in After the Machine: Visual Arts and the Erasing of Cultural Boundaries,
97-112, 178-80 (Jackson, Miss: University Press of Mississippi, 1995); and Robin Kelsey, “Viewing the
Archive: Timothy O’Sullivan’s Photographs for the Wheeler Survey, 1871-1874,” The Art Bulletin, Vol.
85, No. 4 (Dec 2003), 702-723.
A burgeoning literature exits on documentation with respect to performance art, as well. See for
example, Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: the Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge,
1993); Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London and New York:
Routledge, 1999); Matthew Reason, Documentation, Disappearance and the Representation of Live
Performance (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006); and Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art
and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011).

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relationships it generated among artist, viewer and work of art. In his 1968 book, Beyond
Modern Sculpture, the American critic Jack Burnham noted “we are moving from an art centered
upon objects to one focused upon systems,” citing the recent prevalence of “exhibitions in
antiform art, large-scale environmental art, ecological art, and conceptual art” as evidence of
such a shift.
3
Whether a massive excavation of soil in the Mojave Desert by Michael Heizer, or a
set of instructions for producing one of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, land art and conceptual art
traded in projects that renegotiated the relationship between the work of art and efforts to make it
visible, exhibitable and distributable to audiences. [Images 1-2.] The term “system” appeared
with great frequency throughout Burnham’s writing on the art of the late 1960s, revealing his
efforts to shift analysis away from objects and toward relationships, seeking a way beyond
formal stylistic development and accounting for the plurality of artistic practice after
minimalism, what Rosalind Krauss would later call the “expanded field” of sculpture.
4
This
project casts a spotlight on the documents used to record works of art that relied upon such
systems and relationships in lieu of physical objects. I investigate the ways in which such
materials bridge the distance between the work of art and its viewer, and ask what happens when
that distance is so effectively bridged that these secondary materials come to function as
aesthetic phenomena on their own.
In his 1967 essay “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Sol LeWitt worked toward a
definition of conceptual art, arguing that the “idea or concept is the most important aspect of the

3
Burnham summarizes his own argument in “Art’s End,” New York Review of Books Vol. 13, No. 9
(November 20, 1969) in response to what he perceived to be a mischaracterization of his book Beyond
Modern Sculpture by James Ackerman in the article, “The Shape of Things to Come,” New York Review
of Books, August 21, 1969. Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: the effects of science and
technology on the sculpture of this century (New York: G. Braziller, 1968).
4
For an analysis of Burnham’s writing, see Melissa Ragain, “Introduction,” in Dissolve into
Comprehension (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015). Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,”
October Vol. 8 (Spring, 1979): 30-44.
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work,” and that any material documentation accompanying conceptual art be “stated with the
most economy of means.”
5
According to LeWitt, “color, surface, texture, and shape” emphasized
the physical quality of the document, appealing to the viewer’s senses and distracting him or her
from the idea by engaging with his or her emotions. “It is the objective of the artist who is
concerned with conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to the spectator, and
therefore usually he would want it to become emotionally dry,” LeWitt wrote, positioning
emotions and the intellect on opposite sides of an insurmountable boundary.
6
It was imperative
that the material document accompanying conceptual art remained mindful of this divide,
appealing exclusively to the intellect by keeping visual elements to the barest of minimums.
Others including Jack Burnham, Gregory Battcock and Ian Jeffrey shared LeWitt’s prioritization
of idea over its material effects, a trend identified by Lucy Lippard as the “dematerialization” of
art.
7

The idea that emotions and the intellect are mutually exclusive within conceptual art, and
that the material documents accompanying conceptual art operate as nothing more than tools for
conveying non-visual information to the viewer, dominated the discourse for several decades
while conceptual art coalesced into an art historical category. This assessment has more recently
come under revision by scholars interested in demonstrating a side of conceptual art more
sensitive to the subjectivity of its viewer. Eve Meltzer and Jeff Wall have shown how a visual
rhetoric inheres in even the most seemingly straightforward documents related to conceptual art,

5
Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum Vol. 5, No. 10 (Summer 1967): 79–84.
6
Ibid., 80.
7
Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International Vol. 12, No. 2
(February 20, 1968): 31-36; Jack Burnham, “Alice’s Head: Reflections on Conceptual Art,” Artforum
Vol. 8, no. 6 (February 1970): 37-8; Ian Jeffrey, “Art Theory and the Decline of the Art Object,” Studio
International Vol. 186, No. 961 (December 1973): 267; Gregory Battcock, ed., Idea Art: A Critical
Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1973); Robert C. Morgan, Conceptual Art: An American Perspective
(London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1994).
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while Tony Godfrey has explored the role of the viewer in constituting the conceptual art work,
bringing his or her subjectivity to bear on the process of viewing and realizing a conceptual
idea.
8
“Because the work does not take a traditional form it demands a more active response
from the viewer. [It] is therefore ‘reflexive’: the object refers back to the subject. It represents a
state of continual self-critique,” Godfrey wrote.
9
By bringing the viewer into the fold, relying on
him or her to help realize the conceptual idea, Godfrey argued that conceptual art could not be
separated from the emotional and psychological qualities of its viewing subject.
This debate about the visual significance of the material documents related to works of
art that evade object form, and the ways in which they appeal to the viewer’s senses and
emotions, constitutes the groundwork for this dissertation. In addition to conceptual art, I look to
examples of land art from the late 1960s and early 1970s, a term descriptive of works of art made
with natural elements including soil, rock, water and grass, and valuing transitory structures and
erosion over the fixed product of an artist’s studio. The material quality of land art is undeniable
when compared to conceptual art, in that earthworks utilize the substance of the earth as artistic
media, excavating, moving and interacting with indisputably physical things such as dirt, sand,
water and the like. However, in asserting alternative media, whether it be language or soil, both
land art and conceptual art reconfigure the relationship between materiality and art object,
creating artworks that are often ephemeral, malleable, tied to a given location or effectively
immaterial. In so doing, they reorient the relationship between the viewer and the work of art and

8
Jeff Wall, “Marks of Indifference: Aspects of Photography In, or As, Conceptual Art,” in Reconsidering
the Object of Art, 1965-1975, ed. Ann Goldstein, 246-275 (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995); Tony
Godfrey, Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon, 1998); Eve Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual
Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Liz Kotz’s
treatment of language in conceptual art belongs here as well. Kotz, 2007. See also, Lucy Soutter, “The
Visual Idea: Photography in Conceptual Art,” PhD Dissertation, Yale University, 2001.
9
Godfrey, 4-12.
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demand alternate conditions of display and distribution. Michael Heizer’s Double Negative
(1969) requires the viewer’s presence at a specific location, while Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings
invite others to participate in the construction of the work of art, and Joseph Kosuth’s One and
Three Chairs (1965) calls upon the viewer to think through an analytic proposition. [Images 1-3.]
Impossible to move, existing in multiple iterations, or ultimately philosophical, works of art such
as these lean on documentation as an essential component in bringing the work of art to
audiences and allowing it to participate in art historical discourse.
In line with my working definition of the document as that which records the work of art
for distribution, I argue that in the case of conceptual art and land art, where systems and
relationships prevail over objects, this task frequently included communicating features of the
work of art beyond its visual elements. These features might be a sense of ephemerality, the
significance of embodied viewing, or a prioritization of viewer interaction with the work of art
over passive perception of it. I identify four categories of distribution through which
documentation is made to communicate such features: the compendium, the artists’ magazine,
television, and exhibition, each discussed through one or two key examples. Klaus Honnef’s
Concept Art (Cologne, 1971) and Ursula Meyer’s Conceptual Art (New York, 1972) represent
the compendium, a model of addressing conceptual art through publication adopted by critics in
the first years of the 1970s. These editors understood their books to be curatorial projects,
exhibitions and presentations of conceptual art in book form, utilizing the printed page as both
site and conveyor of works of art. Interfunktionen, an artists’ magazine produced in Cologne
between 1968 and 1975, is the chief example in the second category. Edited by psychology
student and art aficionado Friedrich Heubach, Interfunktionen presented examples of both land
art and conceptual art to a mostly-German audience throughout its twelve issues. The particular
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format of Interfunktionen, which paired photographs with essays, diagrams and press clippings
referring to the works of art at hand, played to the experience of reading the magazine. The
viewer’s physical interaction with it, as he turned its pages, folded out large leaves and looked
closely to make sense of grainy photographs taken from oblique angles, generated a reading
experience that echoed the existential questions at the heart of the original interventions into the
landscape documented within the magazine’s pages.
While the first two categories deal with printed matter, the third moves off of the page
and onto the screen. Gerry Schum’s “Land Art” aired on German public television on April 15,
1969. An exhibition created for television, “Land Art” was part of Schum’s effort to establish a
Fernsehgalerie, or “television gallery.” Like Klaus Honnef and Friedrich Heubach, Schum was
frustrated with the circumscribed conditions of art distribution, which favored works of art that
could easily be bought and sold, and therefore reduced art to commodity form while forestalling
and obscuring the production of works of art that did not conform to this model. In public
television, Schum identified a medium capable of democratizing the distribution of works of art.
Insisting that the projects included in his Fernsehgalerie were actual works of art conceived
expressly for distribution on television rather than filmic records of works of art located
elsewhere, Schum manipulated an outlet typically associated with mediated content, expanding it
to include the presentation of so-called “original” works of art.
10
Other examples of works of art

10
One example of a documentary about art made for television is Black Gate Cologne, which was
organized by Otto Piene and Aldo Tambellini in New York and aired in Germany on WDR in 1968. It
was similar to Schum’s earlier made-for-television endeavors (one on the 6
th
Annual Art Biennale of San
Marino, Italy, 1967 and Konsumkunst-Kunstkonsum, 1968) in that these were all documentaries
descriptive of works of art, Happenings or exhibitions, rather than works of art conceived of for
presentation on television. See Dieter Daniels, “Art and Television – Adversaries or Partners?” in Medien
Kunst Aktion – Die 60er und 70er Jahre in Deutschland, ed. Rudolf Frieling, 69-75 (New York: Springer,
1998); and Sarah Hollenberg, “Art on Television: 1967-1976,” PhD Dissertation, University of Southern
California, 2012.
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made for transmission via television at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the ‘70s, such as
the experimental projects commissioned by KQED and WGBH in the United States along with
Happenings organized by Wolf Vostell and Nam June Paik in the U.S. and in Europe, were most
often electronic manipulations of the television set’s technological apparatus.
11
Schum’s project
departed from these in its commitment to the presentation of land art on television, rather than
the presentation of the documentation of land art or the exploitation of the televisual medium to
produce new genres of art making.
Honnef, Heubach and Schum were equally dismayed by what they referred to as the
“eternal triangle of studio, gallery and museum,” frustrated by the limitations imposed by a
system that required that works of art be easily displayed in galleries or museums, capable of
being bought and sold. This model was not equipped to deal with the changes afoot in the
making and viewing of art, these men argued. Works of art that were not objects per se, but
rather the culmination or unfolding of a process, time-based events employing chance or the
participation of the viewer, or installations oriented around embodied viewing and an awareness
of comprehension on an individual level did not lend themselves to presentation and distribution
in the gallery system. Rather, they required new methods of display capable of addressing the
esoteric, experiential or ephemeral qualities central to the work of art. Heubach lamented the
“curtailing effects of the art market,” which prohibited the development of new forms of art

11
At Wolf Vostell’s TV Burial in New Jersey in 1963, cake was thrown at a television set before it was
wrapped in barbed wire and raw meat and buried in the ground. Several of Vostell’s reconfigured
television sets, called TV-Dé-collages, were installed together in his Elektronsicher Dé-coll/age
Happening Raum at the Venice Biennale in 1968. Nam June Paik manipulated the internal technology of
television sets, producing works such as Zen for TV and Kuba TV, both of which were included at his first
major exhibition, “Exposition of Music – Electronic Television,” held at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal
in 1963. These works and others are addressed in Chapter 3.
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14
making that did not easily conform to the rules of existing institutions.
12
He created
Interfunktionen in an effort to correct this problem, conceiving of the magazine as an alternative
site of display, where works of art not suitable for exhibition in galleries or museums could be
presented directly to viewers through the pages of the magazine. Similarly, Schum advocated for
“communication instead of art ownership” and offered the Fernsehgalerie as a method for
facilitating a shift away from art that could be bought and sold and toward art that could be
distributed directly to viewers outside of the museum, gallery, and studio system.
13

Harald Szeemann, this dissertation’s fourth key figure, was equally concerned with the
“eternal triangle” and committed to formulating new methods of distribution for “a kind of art
that depended entirely on the moment of the experience.”
14
Two exhibitions organized by
Szeemann, Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (Works – Concepts – Processes –
Situations – Information) (Bern, 1969) and documenta 5: Questioning Reality – Image Worlds
Today (Kassel, 1972), are under review in the fourth category, exhibitions. These examples
reveal essential components of Szeemann’s curatorial methodology, including an emphasis on
the process of making and the individual viewer’s experience of looking at the works of art on
display. Working to dismantle the “notion of art as an object or an end result,” these exhibitions
demonstrated Szeemann’s attempt to reimagine the exhibition format, reworking it so that it

12
Friedrich Heubach, “Die Documenta oder kommt Kunst von konsumieren,” Interfunktionen 1 (1968):
3-7.
13
“Introductory Speech to Mark the Opening of the Television Exhibition LAND ART,” Jean Leering,
Stedelijk van Abbemsueum, Eindhoven, March 28, 1969. Printed in “Land Art” exhibition catalogue
(1970). See also, Ready to Shoot: Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum, Videogalerie Gerry Schum, eds. Ulrike
Groos, Barbara Hess, Ursula Wevers, 71-73. (Cologne: Snoeck Verlagsgesellschaft, 2004).
14
Yann Pavie, “Entretien avec H. Szeemann,” Opus International, no. 36, June 1972, p. 39. Cited in
Harald Szeemann: Individual Methodology, ed. Florence Derieux, 65 (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2007).

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could better accommodate works of art oriented around process and ephemerality.
15
Rather than
presenting fixed or finalized objects meant to be contemplated as complete entities, Szeemann’s
exhibitions encouraged embodied viewing and subjective reflection on the part of the viewer.
The problematic nature of this curatorial strategy, in which the curator’s role was diminished in
the service of open-ended events that could result in a myriad of conclusions, revealed itself to
Szeemann in his 1970 exhibition Happening & Fluxus, which was marred by disruptive
infighting among participating artists.
16
The problems at Happening & Fluxus prompted
Szeemann to seek more control in his curatorial role, asserting his creative voice with greater
authority at documenta 5 than he had previously done at Attitudes. At documenta 5, he tested a
curatorial strategy with which he would come to be associated, conceiving of the exhibition as
artistic medium, “as a way for its creator to express subjective ideas.”
17

This shift away from the “laboratory” feel at Attitudes and toward a more author-driven
exhibition is indicative of an arc that is traced throughout the examples discussed in this
dissertation. It begins with an urgent call for art to be understood as the communication of
information, existing outside the limits of art world institutions and freely accessible to viewers.
The protagonists of this dissertation sought to make this happen by utilizing techniques of
distribution that would erase the distance between a work of art and its viewer, prioritizing the
individual encounter with the work of art and exploring the ways in which the viewer’s
relationship to it in both body and mind constituted its meaning. However, the role played by
these men in facilitating distribution was far from transparent, as their framing strategies
combined with their choices of selection and exclusion could not avoid imposing a narrative on

15
Ibid.
16
Derieux, Florence, ed., Harald Szeemann: Individual Methodology (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2007).
17
Interview with Tobia Bezzola, François Aubart and Fabien Pinaroli (April 14, 2007, Maggia)
in Harald Szeemann: Individual Methodology, 28.
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16
the works of art they sought to distribute. This is evident in each of the examples discussed
above, but documenta 5 and the turn it illustrates in Szeemann’s curatorial methodology makes
this shift exceedingly clear. Criticized for using the works of art in the service of his own ideas,
Szeemann’s methodology at documenta 5 introduced the concept of the curator as artist. In
response to documenta 5, Daniel Buren recognized somewhat critically the emergence of the
“exhibition as a work of art” in which works of art present “carefully chosen touches of color in
a tableau” directed by the curator.
18
Since then, documenta has operated on the frontlines of
debates about the potential for exhibitions to function as works of art and what happens when the
line between artists and curators is dissolved.
19
Attempts to move beyond the “eternal triangle”
of studio, gallery and museum by Honnef, Heubach, Schum and Szeemann initially included
diversifying audiences and closing the gap between a work of art and the viewer. Szeemann’s
curatorial methodology at documenta 5, however, reveals the ways in which the organizer’s role
could never be transparent. This is a concept that would come to be interrogated in the years that
followed, as artists including Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser, Adrian Piper and Fred Wilson
worked to uncover the ways in which the presentation of works of art was directed by the
political leanings of both institutions of collection and display and individuals alike.
20

18
Daniel Buren, “Exhibition of an Exhibition,” in documenta 5. Questioning Reality – Image Worlds
Today, 29 (Kassel: Verlag Documenta, 1972).
19
In their 2003 project, The Next Documenta Should Be Curated by an Artist, art historian Jens Hoffmann
and German artist Carsten Höller asked a group of 30 artists to respond with a written concept for the next
iteration of documenta, scheduled for 2007. The Next Documenta demonstrates continued concern over
the authorial overtone generated by a single curator and an attempt to displace it by returning the many
different voices of a group of artists to the center. The Next Documenta Should be Curated by an Artist,
ed. Jens Hoffmann (Frankfurt a.M.: Revolver, Archiv für aktuelle Kunst, 2004).
20
The literature on institutional critique is vast. For examples, see Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White
Cube: the ideology of the gallery space (Santa Monica: Lapis Press, 1986); Craig Owens, “From Work to
Frame, or, Is There Life after ‘The Death of the Author,’” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power,
and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson, 122-139 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Douglas Crimp,
On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993); Rosalyn Deutsche, “Lawler’s Rude Museum,” in
Twice Untitled and Other Pictures (Looking Back), 123-133 (Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts;
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Through a German Lens
At its core, this is a project concerned with materials used to bridge distances, between
works of art and their viewers, across space and time, and between an idea and its physical
manifestation. I have found it provocative to amplify these questions about distance by looking
at the presentation and distribution of American art abroad, specifically in West Germany, where
a striking pervasiveness of American art during the 1960s and ‘70s can be traced. The financial
success generated by American pop art gave German galleries the bankroll to delve into less
commercially viable projects, and thus played a significant role in the development of a German
gallery scene dedicated to emerging art trends.
21
German gallerists including Heiner Friedrich
(Munich) along with Alfred Schmela and Konrad Fischer (Düsseldorf) gave several American
artists their first European shows, which won wide acclaim. Art critics including Phyllis
Tuchman and Anthony Thwaites dedicated their careers to chronicling the importation of
American art into Germany.
22

There was, of course, a political element to the popularity of American art in West
Germany as well. On the frontline of the Cold War, exchange between the United States and

Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006); Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, ed. Alexander
Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009).
21
Sophie Richard, Unconcealed, The International Network of Conceptual Artists 1967-1977: Dealers
Exhibitions and Public Collections, ed. Lynda Morris, 26ff. (London: Ridinghouse, 2009). Wibke von
Bonin, “Germany: The American Presence,” Arts Magazine Vol. 44, No. 5 (March 1970): 52-55. Wibke
von Bonin was the developer of programming at Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) and collaborated with
Gerry Schum on his Fernsehgalerie, which is the subject of Chapter 3.
22
Phyllis Tuchman, “American Art in Germany,” Artforum Vol. 5, No. 5 (Nov 1970): 58-69. John
Anthony Thwaites, an American art critic covering German art for British and American publications
such as Studio International and October, wrote frequently on German-American exchange in the postwar
art world. See John Anthony Thwaites, “Germany: The New Generation,” Studio International Vol. 172,
No. 882 (October 1966): 186-193; “Cologne,” Art and Artists Vol. 8 (December 1973): 52-53; “West
Germany Living on the Energy of the ‘60s,” ARTnews Vol. 75, No. 8 (October 1976): 38-39.
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18
West Germany was happening on multiple levels. The infiltration of American goods and
services combined with the adaptation of American economic and political models prompted
feelings of distrust around the Americanization of West German markets and culture.
23
This was
a phenomenon not lost on German youth disillusioned with postwar reconstruction. Members of
rebellious factions including the German student movement, the Außerparlamentarische
Opposition (APO), as well as the much more violent domestic terrorist group, the Rote Armee
Fraktion (RAF), argued that the booming consumer society in West Germany was guilty of
masking injustices committed in the name of pursuing a capitalist economy.
24
To correct this
problem, these groups demanded a more self-conscious populace cognizant of their role in
society. Gudrun Ensslin, a founding member of the RAF, made the following televised statement
following her conviction for firebombing two department stores in 1968,
The people in our country and in America and in every West European country, they
have to eat like animals, in order not to think about what we have to do for example with
Vietnam… Wonderful, I too like the cars; I too like all the things one can buy in
department stores. But when one is compelled to buy them, in order to remain
unconscious, then the price is too high.
25

Sentiments such as Ensslin’s regarding capitalism and its ability to lure the populace into
complacency were formed on the back of a critique of the failure of Enlightenment theory

23
Consuming Germany in the Cold War, ed. David F. Crew (Oxford: Berg at Oxford International
Publishers, Ltd., 2003); Americanization and Anti-Americanism: the German Encounter with American
Culture after 1945, ed. Alexander Stephan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005).
24
1968: The World Transformed, eds. Carol Fink, Philipp Gassert, Detlef Junker (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998); Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture
in a Divided Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Between Marx and Coca-Cola:
Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, 1960-80, eds. Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried (New
York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006).

25
Uta G. Poiger, “Imperialism and Consumption: Two Tropes in West German Radicalism,” in Between
Marx and Coca-Cola: Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, 1960-80, eds. Axel Schildt and
Detlef Siegfried, 161 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006).
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19
associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt.
26
Drawing from
the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/47), by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, authors
including Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas criticized mass culture, consumerism and
capitalism as new forms of social control, placating individuals by producing “false needs” and
obscuring their ability to make conscious decisions in their interaction with the world.
27

This international exchange along with the complicated attitudes toward the influx of
American culture and capitalism into West Germany is demonstrated in the examples included in
this dissertation. Interfunktionen published works of art by American artists including Walter de
Maria, Bruce Nauman, Richard Smithson, Michael Heizer, and John Baldessari alongside
European artists such as Joseph Beuys, Jan Dibbets, Wolf Vostell and Lothar Baumgarten.
Essays on matters from education to politics to aesthetics by German and American authors
accompanied the art works within the magazine’s pages. Interfunktionen’s editor, Friedrich
Heubach, traveled frequently to the United States, and American colleagues including Dan
Graham and the gallerist John Gibson proved formative in both the development of the
magazine’s concept and in facilitating its U.S. distribution.
28
Heubach was friendly with Gerry
Schum, whose Fernsehgalerie featured many of the same artists that populated the pages of

26
A line should certainly be drawn between the philosophical and theoretical debates of the student
movement and the much more violent tactics employed by extremists including Ensslin. While they
shared similar concerns, the two groups frequently disagreed when it came to the execution of their ideas.
Jürgen Habermas voiced his criticism of the violent tactics employed by West German groups such as the
Rote Armee Fraktion while sharing in their distrust of the commercialization of the “public sphere,” a
development that he believed inhibited the public’s ability to be critical and turned individuals into
passive receivers of information. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere:
an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (1962), trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).
27
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/47), trans. Edmond
Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Habermas, 1962; Herbert Marcuse, One
Dimensional Man: studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).
28
Interview with F.W. Heubach, May 13, 2012.
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20
Interfunktionen, including Michael Hezier, Robert Smithson, Jan Dibbets and Dennis
Oppenheim.
29
In turn, Gerry Schum’s made-for-television projects were referenced in
Interfunktionen. Harald Szeemann’s exhibitions included a similar roster of artists, and American
influences for his curatorial strategy can be cited, including both Robert Morris’s 1968 exhibition
Nine at Leo Castelli as well as Morris’s writing on process and the disintegration of sculpture
into something with interchangeable and contingent parts. His essay “Notes on Sculpture” was
published in several parts in Artforum throughout the second half of the 1960s and was read by
Szeemann with great interest.
30
Szeemann collaborated with Klaus Honnef on several projects,
including the conceptual art section at documenta 5, where Schum’s Fernsehgalerie was shown.
31

The interconnectedness of these examples demonstrates an international avant-garde
concerned with the relationship between documentation and the original at stake in conceptual
art and land art as well as an earnest attempt locate new channels of distribution while reforming
existing ones. Framed as it is here, through examples that pay as much attention to the conditions
under which documentary materials are viewed and the viewing experience they afford as they
do to the methods of their production, it is a relationship that requires a theorization of what it
means to look at works of art, to experience and to comprehend them. By looking at the
distribution of conceptual art and land art in Germany, it becomes possible to view them
alongside a renewed attention to the individual subject and the acts of looking, interpreting and
understanding that coincided with the so-called “dematerialization” of art in the late 1960s. The

29
Email conversation with Barbara Hess, January 31, 2015.
30
Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part I,” Artforum Vol. 4, No. 6 (February 1966): 42-44; “Notes on
Sculpture, Part II,” Artforum Vol. 5, No. 2 (October 1966): 20-23; “Notes on Sculpture, Part III: Notes
and Nonsequiturs,” Artforum Vol. 5, No. 10 (June 1967): 24-29; “Notes on Sculpture, Part IV: Beyond
Objects,” Artforum Vol. 7, No. 8 (April 1969): 50-54. Other notable essays by Robert Morris include
“Anti-Form,” Artforum Vol. 6. No. 8 (April 1968): 33-35; and “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of
Making: The Search for the Motivated,” Artforum Vol. 8, No. 8 (April 1970): 62-66.
31
Email conversation with Klaus Honnef, November 3, 2015.
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Frankfurt School’s critique of the failure of Enlightenment theory and the pervasiveness of these
sentiments in the popular culture discussed above is one example of this renewed attention to
individual consciousness. The development of Rezeptionsästhetik by Hans Robert Jauss and
Wolfgang Iser at the University of Konstanz in the late 1960s offers another.
32
Similarly
concerned with the legacy of Enlightenment theory, Jauss and Iser tapped into the Kantian
“meaning-making subject” through Hans Georg Gadamer’s concept of an intersubjective
“horizon of expectations [Erwartungshorizont],” introduced with the publication of Truth and
Method in 1960.
33
While Kant had called for a shift away from the “nature of things,” and
toward “the way we talk and think about the world,” Gadamer insisted upon the historical
specificity of our experience of the world, arguing that meaning is formed within a system of
historically specific shared or agreed-upon codes, a system he called the “horizon of
expectations.”
34
Drawing from Gadamer’s theory of comprehension, Jauss and Iser argued that
the sentient reader determines meaning in a text according to the terms of his or her historical

32
Wolfgang Iser, “Indeterminacy and the Reader’s Response in Prose Fiction,” in Aspects of Narrative:
selected papers from the English Institute, ed. J. Hillis Miller, 1-45 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1971); Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” New Literary
History Vol. 3, No. 2 “On Interpretation: I” (Winter, 1972): 279-299, Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an
Aesthetic of Reception, trans. by Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).
Renewed attention to the writings by Walter Benjamin are yet another example of theoretical and
critical attention to the formation of meaning. Klaus Honnef and Friedrich Heubach cite Benjamin as an
important influence in their work. Interview with Friedrich Heubach, May 13, 2012. Email conversation
with Klaus Honnef, November 3, 2015. Outside of Germany, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and
Umberto Eco represent additional efforts to theorize the act of reading, looking and interpreting. Roland
Barthes, “Death of the Author” (1967) in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath, 142-8 (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1977); Umberto Eco, The Open Work (1962), trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1989); Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” (1964) in Against Interpretation and
Other Essays, 3-14. (New York: Picador, 2001).
33
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781), trans. Marcus Weigelt and Max Müller (London:
Penguin Classics, 2008). Translation from Robert Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian
Aftermath (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 2. Kant would call the world as it exists prior
to our experience with it the “thing in itself [Ding an sich].” Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method
(1960), trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming, 150 (New York: Seabury, 1975).
34
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 1781. Translation by Pippin, 32.
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22
reality, and in so doing, contributes to the formation of the work of art as it is understood on an
individual level governed by historically specific conditions.
The development of Rezeptionsästhetik, together with work by Habermas and Marcuse,
exemplifies a revision of Enlightenment theory and its subjective turn coinciding with a political
moment concerned with the dire consequences of a complacent populace and urgently
demanding greater individual consciousness of the subject’s role in society. As I will show, this
philosophical and popular attention to the individual and his or her capacity for critical thought
shared significant points of contact with the presentation and distribution of conceptual art and
land art in West Germany. This focus on the “intelligibility of experience itself” functions as the
theoretical backbone of the dissertation, which investigates how we process our experience of the
world on an intellectual level.
35
Approaching the distribution of conceptual art and land art in
West Germany against the backdrop of an urgent attention to the individual’s ability to think
critically helps to elucidate the relationship between the work of art and strategies taken up
around its documentation and distribution. Through the particular ways in which the protagonists
of this dissertation arranged and presented documentation of works of art in their media of
choice, these men embraced the impossibility of an a priori reality and honed in on the subject’s
act of interpretation, dwelling on the formation of meaning on an individual level through the act
of comprehension. This endeavor was especially prescient in 1960s West Germany, where the
individual’s ability to engage in critical thought was the topic of debate in light of postwar
political and economic realties.

35
Pippin traces multiple responses to Kant’s philosophy of subjecthood and judgment. On the reworking
of Kantian theories of judgment in the wake of conceptual art, see Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).
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In each of the examples that follow, the role of the viewer as the one who creates
meaning for the work of art inheres as a central theme. While American authors such as Sol
LeWitt and Lucy Lippard were focused on the so-called “dematerialization” of conceptual art,
German critics and scholars including Honnef, Heubach, Szeemann and Schum brought this
work into contact with theories of comprehension and subjective judgment.
36
The point is not to
establish a binary, as this would be all too cursory, failing to account for examples of American
authors committed to investigating the subjective process of comprehension, including Susan
Sontag and Jack Burnham, and masking international channels of communication that were
formative in the approaches discussed here.
37
(Honnef, for one, looked to American criticism,
blending Lippard’s notion of “dematerialization” with Burnham’s insistence on the mind as the
place where works of art come to fruition to argue that the mind of the viewer played a
significant role in the realization of conceptual works of art.
38
) Rather, paying attention to these
differences on either side of the Atlantic allows us to flesh out the ways in which discourse
shared between American and European authors helped to further critical understanding of
conceptual art during in its earliest days, re-defining “dematerialization” when the term proved
problematic and attending to the relationship between a subjective viewer and an art predicated
on the distribution of pure information.

36
Harald Szeemann was Swiss, but the curatorial work discussed in this dissertation was encountered by
German audiences.
37
Susan Sontag is one example of an American author seeking to understand the act of comprehension by
the viewing subject. In her 1964 essay, “Against Interpretation,” she argued that seeking to understand
the process of interpretation falsely assumes that a work of art is created in terms of its content, and that
any appeals it makes to the viewer’s senses occlude the quest to unpack its essential content. Arguing that
such sensory aspects are indeed important, Sontag calls for a reconfiguration of our understanding of the
task of interpretation, one that attends to both form and content. Sontag, 1964. See also Burnham, 2015.
38
Lippard and Chandler, 1968. Burnham, 1970. Email conversation with Klaus Honnef, January 19,
2015.
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Chapter Summaries
Chapter 1, “The Material Idea: Conceptual Art and the Compendium,” lays out the
discourse surrounding conceptual art and introduces two themes central to each of the
dissertation’s four chapters. First, the compendium model makes very clear how so-called
“dematerialized” works of art continue to employ material things, including scores, photographs,
diagrams and the like, as its physical pages consist of just such things. Furthermore, it is not
simply the materiality of these components that is important, but also the ways in which the
visual rhetoric they employ functions to shape the viewer’s perception of the work of art. Two
compendia serve as this chapter’s chief examples: Klaus Honnef’s Concept Art (1971) and
Ursula Meyer’s Conceptual Art (1972). Honnef and Meyer expressed anxiety about the need to
redefine their relationship to conceptual art as critics, as works of art that utilized language,
scores, maps, explanatory drawings and deadpan photography appeared to present information
transparently to the viewer, negating the need for the critic’s explicative discourse. Though they
acknowledged the apparent banality of the documents within their books, Meyer and Honnef
highlighted the visual and material qualities of such things through their strategies of
presentation, utilizing the printed page and book format to make critical claims about conceptual
art.
The second theme presented by this chapter centers around the particular viewing
experience generated by the document and its presentation, arguing that the reader’s engagement
with the material in terms of both body and mind brings the work of art to fruition. To this end,
the ways in which the viewer encounters and comprehends the works of art featured in the
book’s pages is identified as a motivating factor in the construction of the compendia under
review. Tapping into conceptual art’s distilment of the work of art to language, diagrams and
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25
other easily reproducible materials that lend themselves to presentation via publication, Honnef
and Meyer explored the function of the printed page as a site of display, making use of the
potential for juxtaposition, comparison and compilation offered by the compendium’s multiple
pages and capitalizing on the physical and mental experience of reading in the construction of
their books.
Chapter 2, “Sensation in Body and Mind: The Documentation of Land Art in
Interfunktionen,” builds on the previous chapter’s focus on materiality, honing in on the
photograph. I argue that photographs of land art are not belated facsimiles of something existing
somewhere else, insufficient in relaying much more than shapes, lines or colors to the viewer.
Instead, through their strategic presentation in the artists’ magazine Interfunktionen, it becomes
clear that photographs are capable of translating to the viewer what Dennis Oppenheim called the
more “esoteric” aspects of land art, such as embodied viewing, ephemerality and a self-conscious
awareness for the process of comprehension through looking and reflecting.
39
Interfunktionen
makes this possible in the reading experience it facilitates, which calls the reader’s attention to
the difference between viewing land art in situ versus through the document. Reading the
magazine thus creates a shift between looking and reflecting on the process of looking,
highlighting for the reader the instability of meaning and his or her role in constructing it. This
chapter draws on several voices to help establish the reading mind as something that creates
meaning rather than simply absorbs it, including Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss and their
development of Rezeptionsästhetik, along with Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco and Susan Sontag.
The first two chapters dwell on the function of material documents to generate
phenomena central to the original work of art. Chapter 3, “‘A Kind of Feedback Mechanism:’

39
Dennis Oppenheim, “Interview, March 29, 1969,” in Recording Conceptual Art, eds. Alexander
Alberro and Patricia Norvell, 23 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
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26
Gerry Schum’s Fernsehgalerie and the Presentation of Land Art on Television,” continues this
trajectory while shifting attention from the page to the television screen. Like the books and
artists’ magazine discussed above, Schum’s television gallery maintained that the media of
distribution could operate as the work of art, rather than simply as a recording device. The land
art projects included in his Fernsehgalerie were conceived of expressly for presentation on
television, rather than filmed for televised distribution. To make this point, the materiality of the
media of distribution remains as crucial to the discussion as it was in the first two categories, as
Schum’s examples are shown to exploit the physical features of the cathode ray tube screen on
which they appeared. These features include the shape of its surface and its dimensions, as well
as its less material qualities, such as the temporal sequencing and temporariness of shots which
appear on the screen at one moment and are gone the next. Despite the innovativeness of
Schum’s ideas, they were rife with contradictions in practice. His refusal to give contextual
information and his insistence on a single screening of “Land Art” meant that his use of
television, an outlet he lauded for its democratic appeal, did not reach as large of an audience as
it might have had multiple screenings been allowed and didactic explanations included. These
paradoxical problems prompt reconsiderations of some of land art’s central inquiries, including
site-specificity and ephemerality.
Chapter 4, “Attitudes on Display: Harald Szeemann and the Exhibition of the Gesture,”
continues the dissertation’s analysis of the ways in which works of art are made present to
viewers. Szeemann’s curatorial methodology in the late 1960s and early ‘70s demonstrated an
effort to display works of art according to terms other than their physicality, and this chapter
explores two ways in which he did this. At the 1969 exhibition Live in Your Head: When
Attitudes Become Form (Works – Concepts – Processes – Situations – Information), Szeemann
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27
endeavored to display the artistic gesture rather than the object resulting from it. Three years
later, at documenta 5 (1972), Szeemann brought the thinking, reflecting and judging viewer into
the mix, counting the act of comprehension as a collaborative component of the exhibition. This
chapter draws on Szeemann’s adaptation of Robert Morris’s work as artist, curator and writer to
develop a definition of process that is critical to this dissertation’s reading of materiality and its
relationship to the conceptual idea. Through Morris, Szeemann underscored materiality not as
contradictory to conceptual, ephemeral or remotely located works of art, but as complementary
to them. The material document can operate as a physical thing that allows the immaterial to
exist as it does and to reach its audience intact, uncompromised by a reduction to physical form.
This is a central theme throughout the dissertation, present in a discussion of Ursula Meyer’s
conceptual sculpture in Chapter 1, in the physical act of turning magazines pages at stake in
Chapter 2, and in the materiality of the cathode ray tube screen addressed in Chapter 3. Through
all of these examples, documentary material is understood not as secondary to or less principal
than the original work of art. Instead, the idiosyncrasies of a given material, whether they are the
pages of a book or magazine, the curving, static-filled surface of a television screen, or a
temporary installation in an exhibition, are tapped and exploited so as to distribute the immaterial
or conceptual features of the original. Despite these figures’ best efforts to close the gap between
a work of art and its viewer, Szeemann’s story reveals how their roles as organizers ultimately
shaped and directed the viewer’s understanding of the works of art.

An “aesthetic of comprehension”
In his 1990 essay, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to
the Critique of Institutions,” Benjamin Buchloh argued that conceptual art introduced an
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28
“aesthetic of administration” in which linguistics, directives and logistics came to stand in as the
material out of which art is made, displacing the physical art object in favor of “linguistic
definition alone (the work as analytic proposition).”
40
As an example of this paradigm shift,
Buchloh offered Mel Bochner’s 1966 exhibition, “Working Drawings and Other Visible Things
on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art,” held at New York’s School of Visual
Arts. Binders featuring photocopies of drawings, lists, diagrams and various other items were
placed atop four pedestals installed in the gallery. [Image 4.] Bochner’s installation referenced
the centuries-old method of displaying sculpture on pedestals, but replaced the more traditional
media with binders filled with information meant to be thumbed through by the visitor.
41

According to Buchloh, Bochner’s exhibition helped to transform the “format and space of
exhibitions,” as well as the definition of what constituted the art object. No longer a masterfully
chiseled stone or a carefully painted canvas, the new art object consisted of words, descriptions
and lists, cheaply printed and bound together like a book. Rather than an object crafted with
intentionality and talent, art had become sheer information.
Buchloh argued that the emergence of information as artistic media followed on the heel
of other paradigm shifts throughout art history. By introducing mass production into the realm of
art making, Pop art and minimalism had challenged modernism’s “studio aesthetic” of
authorship, originality, representation and authenticity, introducing an “aesthetic of production
and consumption.” Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans and Donald Judd’s industrially
fabricated cubes had blurred the lines between fine art and mass-produced objects and

40
Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique
of Institutions,” October 55 (October 1990): 105-143, this quote 119.
41
Buchloh points out how the height of the pedestals and the absence of chairs made this reference all the
more poignant, emphasizing the binders’ roles as “art objects” rather than things to be read at leisure.
Ibid., 109-110.
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commodities, cancelling the humanistic undertones of high modernism and Abstract
Expressionism, which understood art as representative of the sublime or as material
manifestation of its maker’s interior subjectivity.
42
Conceptual art advanced this development
even further, overturning the “aesthetic of production and consumption,” and replacing the art
object with linguistic proposition, instructions, and records of ideas or proposed events. “Just as
the modernist critique (and ultimate prohibition) of figurative representation had become the
increasingly dogmatic law for pictorial production in the first decade of the twentieth century, so
conceptual art now instated the prohibition of any and all visuality as the inescapable aesthetic
rule for the end of the twentieth century,” Buchloh asserted.
43
In other words, the advent of
conceptual art signaled the end of the visual in art, as the “aesthetic of the handcrafted original”
was ultimately replaced by the anti-aesthetic elements of language, instructions and
organization.
44

Following in the vein of Buchloh, who proposed an “aesthetic of administration” evident
in conceptual art’s adaptation of language and information as artistic material, I propose an

42
Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, “Letter to The New York Times, quoted in
Edward Alden Jewell, “‘Globalism’ Pops into View,” The New York Times, Sunday, June 13, 1943.
Barnett Newman, “The Sublime is Now,” Tiger’s Eye Vol. 1, No. 6 (December 1948): 51-3.
43
Ibid., 119.
44
In a lecture delivered to the Department of Art Education at the Pennsylvania State University on
January 27, 1969, Jack Burnham explored the Marxian ramifications of such a shift, away from art as
object and toward art as a set of relationships. Through references to Marshall McLuhan and Herbert
Marcuse, Burnham argued that previous conceptions of art as a rarefied object existed as such thanks to
the compartmentalization of different forms of labor in society determined by the “rarity of the finished
object.” This differentiation of labor had driven a wedge between technology and art, but recent art
oriented around systems and relationships revealed the divide between the two to be false. Jack Burnham,
“Art in the Marcusean Analysis.” Lecture delivered to the Department of Art Education, Pennsylvania
State University, 1969. Reprinted in Dissolve into Comprehension, 179-183. I cite this lecture here in an
effort to historicize the paradigm shift identified by Buchloh, by gesturing to the ways in which this shift
was noticed and theorized by others, including McLuhan, Marcuse and Burnham. See also, Herbert
Marcuse, “Art in the One-Dimensional Society,” Arts Vol. 41, No. 7 (May 1967); Herbert Marcuse, An
Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1969); Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage: An
Inventory of Effects (New York: Randomhouse, 1967). See also, Gregory Battcock, “Marcuse and Anti-
Art,” Arts Magazine Vol. 43, No. 7 (Summer 1969): 17-19.
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“aesthetic of comprehension” at stake in the documentary materials used to distribute conceptual
art and land art. In using the term “comprehension,” I mean to signify the acts of looking,
thinking and interpreting. I understand these acts to be specific to the individual, who brings
frames of reference unique to his or her experience of the world to bear on the act of
interpretation. Furthermore, “comprehension” refers to a process, as the acts of looking, thinking
and interpreting happen over a period of time, developing and changing as the individual
interacts with the work of art. In the context of the works of art under review here, which invoke
process, systems and relationships as aesthetic material, the individual act of comprehension
happens in concert with works of art that also occur over time.
This dissertation is as oriented around people—including the film-makers, editors, critics,
curators and viewers that interacted with the works of art under review—as it is around the
works of art themselves and efforts to document and distribute them. An “aesthetic of
comprehension” signals a dialectical relationship between these two sides of the coin. Rather
than underscoring the artist’s role as primary author and creator of meaning, an “aesthetic of
comprehension” counts the viewer’s cognitive participation as a significant factor constituting
the work of art. In the various strategies of presentation accompanying the document explored
here, documentation of the work of art joins the viewer’s process of comprehension, and the two
share equally foundational roles in the formation of meaning around the work of art. This push
and pull between artist and viewer, one making the work of art and the other experiencing and
understanding it, is as present in the original intervention as it is in the distribution of its
documentation. By paying close attention to the aesthetic function of the document and its
distributive channels, this dissertation reveals the ways in which conceptual art and land art not
only confused the boundary between the work of art and the materials used to record and
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distribute it, but effectively erased it, constructing a symbiotic relationship between the work of
art and efforts to record it.
My definition of “comprehension” has been formed with reference to Jack Burnham’s
use of the term in a 1970 interview with Willoughby Sharp, which occurred immediately
following the opening of his exhibition, Software – Information Technology: Its New Meaning
for Art, held at the Jewish Museum in Brooklyn in the Fall of 1970.
45
Burnham’s exhibition
displayed computers alongside examples of conceptual art, exploring the ways in which each
operated on an informational level, administering or executing a set of instructions. With
information now the provenance of art, Burnham predicted that art would eventually “dissolve
into comprehension.”
46
By suggesting that an “aesthetic of comprehension” motivates the works
of art under review here, and is at stake in the materials used to record and disseminate them, I
am exploring the veracity of Burnham’s prediction, bringing the act of comprehending front and
center and exploring the ways in which it becomes the phenomena from which works of art are
realized.

Research Methodology
This is a dissertation that moves documentary materials to the center of inquiry. My focus
on the presentation of works of art in the pages of books and artists magazines, on the television
screen, and in exhibitions reveals my commitment to understanding moments when
documentation functions as aesthetic phenomena. To this end, I have found it imperative to

45
“Willoughby Sharp interviews Jack Burnham,” Arts Magazine Vol. 45, No. 2 (November 1970): 21-23.
Reprinted in Ragain (ed.), 253-262. Jack Burnham, Software – Information Technology: Its New Meaning
for Art (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1970). Exhibition held at the Jewish Museum, Brooklyn, New
York City, September 16 – November 8, 1970.
46
Ragain, 262.
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dedicate significant sections of each chapter to close readings of the materials under review.
Additionally, in an effort to present my case in a historically accurate and responsible manner, I
have relied upon archival research and interviews with key figures to flesh out the historical
conditions upon which my argument is built.
Cologne and Düsseldorf are cities located at the heart of the story I am telling. I
conducted archival research at the Museum Ludwig and the Zentralarchiv des internationalen
Kunsthandels (ZADIK) in Cologne, as well as the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
47
My research in
these archives helped me to understand the historical conditions of the art market and art
education during the period under review, as well as oppositions to these institutions. In an effort
to understand documenta and its complex history, I attended documenta 13 and conducted
research on documenta 1, 4 and 5 at the documenta Archiv in Kassel, Germany.
48

While in Cologne, I interviewed Friedrich Heubach, the editor of Interfunktionen, and
viewed his archive. Heubach generously answered my questions regarding the publication of
Interfunktionen, and provided a first-person recollection of the period, which aided in my
understanding of it. Interviews conducted with Klaus Honnef were equally as informative, and
through Honnef, I was able to connect with others, including Wibke von Bonin, developer of
programming at Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) and collaborator with Gerry Schum on his
Fernsehgalerie.
49

When it came to Schum’s Fernsehgalerie, I ran into difficulty in accessing archival
material. Gerry Schum’s archive is held privately by his widow, Ursula Wevers, in Cologne. She
has only opened the archive three times, twice for exhibitions and their accompanying catalogues

47
My research trips to Cologne and Düsseldorf took place in the summers of 2011 and 2012.
48
My research at the documenta Archiv took place in the summer of 2012.
49
I corresponded with Klaus Honnef several times, in January, February and November of 2015. My
correspondence with Wibke von Bonin took place in February and March of 2015.
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(for which she served as co-curator and co-editor) and once for research by Christiane Fricke, a
German art historian whose dissertation focused on Gerry Schum.
50
Just prior to the publication
of Fricke’s book, Wevers pulled all rights to the archival material.
51
As a result, Fricke’s book
contains no images and demonstrates the extreme care with which the archive is guarded. In
conducting my research on Gerry Schum and the Fernsehgalerie, I have made every effort to
access the archive, but it is unfortunately not available. In lieu of visiting the archive in person, I
have been in contact with Ursula Wevers directly and interviewed her.
52
This was no small feat,
as she is notoriously difficult to reach and reluctant to discuss the Fernsehgalerie beyond the
published record that already exists.
Gerry Schum’s work is not well known in the United States, likely because of this
inability to access archival material in addition to the absence of copies of his film in American
collections. It is, however, fairly well known in Germany and the Netherlands, where copies of
his films are more readily available, held in the collections of the Krefeld Kunstmuseen, the
Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Zentrum für Kunst and Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe,
and the Groninger Museum. I remain convinced that “Land Art” is an example central to the
investigations of this dissertation, and I decided to pursue my research and writing on the subject
despite these roadblocks in research. I obtained copies of the films from the Groninger Museum
and studied them closely. I have filled in missing information wherever possible through
conversations with scholars of Schum’s work and art on television, including Klaus Honnef,

50
These exhibitions and their accompanying catalogues are Ulrike Groos, Barbara Hess, Ursula Wevers,
eds. Ready to Shoot: Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum, Videogalerie Gerry Schum, exhibition catalogue,
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf Dec 14, 2003 – Mar 14, 2004 (Cologne: Snoeck Verlagsgesellschaft, 2004), and
Dorine Mignot and Ursula Wevers, eds. Gerry Schum, exhibition catalogue, Stedelijk Museum, Dec 21,
1979 – Feb 10, 1980 (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1979).
51
Christiane Fricke, “Dies alles Herzchen wird einmal Dir gehören,” Die Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum
1969-1970 und die Produktionen der videogalerie schum 1970-1973 (Frankfurt a.M.: P. Lang, 1996).
52
The interview took place over email in April and May 2014.
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Barbara Hess, Rudolf Frieling and Robyn Farrell. I attended screenings and lectures on Schum at
the Deutsches Haus and Electronic Arts Intermix in New York.
53
I have utilized the archival
material that is publically available in the two exhibition catalogues, while keeping in mind that
the material was chosen for publication by Ursula Wevers herself and likely tells a very one-
sided story. In an effort to counteract the one-sidedness of the published account, I have
approached the material from other perspectives whenever possible, including reaching out to the
estate of Barry Flanagan for information on his contribution to the Fernsehgalerie.
My research into Harald Szeemann’s curatorial methodology has been more
straightforward, as I was able to make use of his extensive archives held at the Getty Research
Institute.

53
These screenings took place in October 2014.
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Introduction Images

Image 1. Michael Heizer, Double Negative, Nevada, 1969

Image 2. Sol LeWitt, Proposal for Wall Drawing, Information Show, MoMA 1970

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Image 3. Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965

Image 4. Mel Bochner, Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily
Meant to Be Viewed as Art. Installation, School of Visual Arts Gallery, December 1966.

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Chapter 1

The Material Idea: Conceptual Art and the Compendium

The compendium appears with great frequency throughout the early history of conceptual
art. Three examples include Klaus Honnef’s Concept Art (Cologne, 1971), Ursula Meyer’s
Conceptual Art (New York, 1972), and Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: the Dematerialization of the
Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York, 1973).
54
Understood by their authors as curatorial
projects, exhibitions, or presentations of actual works of art, these books begin with an
introductory essay, followed by a selection of artists’ writings and works that exploit the affinity
between conceptual art and the printed page. The compendium is distinct from the anthology,
which features a collection of essays, interviews with artists and articles dedicated to defining
and historicizing its subject.
55
By contrast, the compendia under review here present primary
sources in a manner motivated by an investigation of the book and its function in relation to
works of art. Conceptual art’s departure in the late 1960s and early 1970s from objects in favor
of media particularly well suited to presentation in book form lead critics to imagine the
compendium as a container for housing original art. This was not new terrain, as the book had
been tested as an artistic medium by artists in many ways that predate conceptual art, from
luxuriously produced livres d’art to books that opposed such a model, aiming instead to

54
Lucy R Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972; a Cross-
Reference Book of Information on Some Esthetic Boundaries ... (New York: Praeger, 1973); Ursula
Meyer, Conceptual Art, 1st ed. (New York: Dutton, 1972); Klaus Honnef, Concept Art (Köln: Phaidon
Verlag, 1971).
55
Examples of the anthology model include Gregory Battcock, The New Art: a Critical Anthology (New
York: Dutton, 1966); Gregory Battcock, Minimal Art: a Critical Anthology (New York: E.P. Dutton,
1968); Gregory Battcock, Idea Art: a Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1973).
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democratize the distribution of information or to present an alternative to the singular art
object.
56
What sets the examples discussed here apart from others, however, lies in the
professional identity of their compilers as critics. Works of art that utilized language, scores,
maps, explanatory drawings and photography to communicate an idea were not only well suited
to presentation on a printed page, but the artists making them claimed that they presented
information plainly to the viewer, negating the need for the critic’s explicative discourse.
57
Faced
with the task of responding to this new art, critics including Honnef, Meyer and Lippard adapted
the format of the book to distribute works of art of this kind. These three authors knew of each
other’s work and were often in conversation with one another as they attempted to work through
the critic’s changing role vis-à-vis conceptual art.
58
The nearly simultaneous publication of these

56
The literature on the artists’ book, the book conceived as art object, and the book as exhibition is vast.
Notable examples include Riva Castleman, A Century of Artists Books. (New York: The Museum of
Modern Art, 1994); Margit Rowell, The Russian Avant-Garde Book, 1910-1934 (New York The Museum
of Modern Art, 2002); Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (New York: Granary Books,
1995); Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook (Rochester, NY: The Visual Studies
Workshop Press, 1985).
57
Authors including Germano Celant and Clive Phillpot have identified the emergence of conceptual art
as a turning point in the conception of the artists’ book, in which the book comes to be exploited as an
exhibition space that is an alternative to the gallery or museum, due in no small part to the fluidity
between printed page and conceptual art work. Germano Celant, Book as Artwork 1960/1972 (Brooklyn:
6 Decades Books, 2010); Clive Phillpot, Booktrek: Selected Essays on Artists’ Books since 1972 (Zürich:
JRP Ringier, 2013). See also, Martha Wilson, “Artists’ Books as Alternative Space,” in The New
Artspace (Los Angeles: LA Institute of Contemporary Art, 1978); Kate Linker, “The Artists’ Book as an
Alternative Space,” Studio International (Jan 1980): 75-79; Barbara Moore and Jon Hendricks, “The Page
as Alternative Space 1950 to 1969,” in Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, 87-95
(Rochester, NY: The Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985).
58
Published conversations between Meyer and Lippard exist, and Meyer’s work, both critical and
sculptural, appeared in Battcock’s publications. Lippard, Six Years; Ursula Meyer, “The Eruption of Anti-
Art,” in Idea Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1973); Battcock, Minimal Art: A Critical
Anthology. Klaus Honnef recalls knowing of both Meyer and Lippard, though he admits to knowing
Lippard’s work more closely. The two met in New York in February 1972. Email conversation with
Klaus Honnef, January 19, 2015.
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books, all between 1970 and 1973, demonstrates the vitality of this question about the role of the
critic in relation to conceptual art in the early 1970s.
59

Each of these authors (along with a host of others, including Sol Lewitt, Benjamin
Buchloh, Joseph Kosuth, Charles Harrison and Gregory Battcock) have argued that conceptual
art is one of ideas, employing a pared down use of the visual to produce something intangible,
cerebral, and open-ended.
60
Above all, its early makers and critics understood conceptual art as
an art of communication that disseminated ideas rather than produced objects. Seth Siegelaub, a
curator and gallerist who reimagined new definitions for the exhibition and display of conceptual
art in New York in the 1960s and 1970s, spent much of his career exploring the affinity between
conceptual art and books. In 1969, he described the goal of communication as paramount to
conceptual art and identified the book as the ideal medium for the collection and dissemination
of art made in the name of transferring information,
“Communication relates to art three ways: (1) Artists knowing what other artists are
doing. (2) The art community knowing what artists are doing. (3) The world knowing
what artists are doing… It’s my concern to make it known to multitudes. [The most
suitable means are] books and catalogues.”
61

59
More than twenty years after the initial tide, authors such as Alexander Alberro, Blake Stimson and
Patricia Norvell returned again to the format of the compendium, publishing tomes dedicated to
conceptual art that perpetuate the oft-repeated model of introductory essay followed by the publication of
primary sources. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999). Patricia Norvell, Recording Conceptual Art: Early Interviews with
Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, and Weiner (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001). Yet another recent example of the compendium format, Recording
Conceptual Art presents a series of interviews with conceptual artists, rather than works of art per se.
60
Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967), 79–84; Battcock,
Idea Art: A Critical Anthology; Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetics of
Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (October 1990), 105-143; Charles Harrison,
“Conceptual Art and the Suppression of the Beholder,” in Essays on Art and Language, 29-62 (Oxford,
Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991); Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy I,” Studio International 178, no. 915
(October, 1969): 134-137.
61
Lucy Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to
1972, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), xvii.
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Siegelaub, who organized exhibitions in book form including the Xerox Book of 1968 and
January 5-31, 1969, insisted that the page could operate like an exhibition space, displaying
original works of art, rather than as a receptacle for the documentation or representation of works
of art located beyond its pages. His books primed the environment into which compendia such as
those of Honnef, Lippard and Meyer would enter.
Given the role of printed matter in circulating the ideas fundamental to conceptual works
of art, the compendium serves as a useful point of entry into an investigation of the relationship
between the supposedly immaterial work of art and the physical documentation that allowed it to
do the work of transmitting information. Close readings of two compendia in particular, Klaus
Honnef’s Concept Art (1971) and Ursula Meyer’s Conceptual Art (1972), open out onto a series
of questions central to both the development of conceptual art as well as early efforts to
historicize and contextualize its departures from art that had preceded it. In what follows, the
supposed immateriality of conceptual art emerges as problematic, and a visual rhetoric is shown
to inhere in even the most seemingly banal and straightforward efforts to document an event or
idea. Furthermore, the book format and the experience of reading it offers its viewer are brought
to bear on conceptual art’s use of the material and visual. What is revealed is a symbiotic
relationship between materiality and mental action in conceptual art, as each is shown to
contribute to and amplify the work of the other rather than negate or contradict it.

The Visual Rhetoric of the “Immaterial”
In his “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” which appeared in the summer 1967 issue of
Artforum, Sol LeWitt denied the role of the visual in conceptual art. Through a series of brief
paragraphs, LeWitt defined conceptual art as a category of art making in which the “idea or
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concept” is “the most important aspect,” seeking to “engage the mind of the viewer rather than
the eye or emotions.”
62
In his final paragraphs, he established the idea in conceptual art in direct
opposition to expressive or emotive aspects that dominated other forms of art, cautioning against
the use of things like color, texture and shape, which risked distracting the viewer from the all-
important idea by appealing to the senses. “The physicality of a three-dimensional object...
becomes a contradiction to its non-emotive intent,” LeWitt stated. “Anything that calls attention
to and interests the viewer in this physicality is a deterrent to our understanding of the idea and is
used as an expressive device.”
63
LeWitt’s comment speaks to a basic tenet of conceptual art, the
claim that form, color, surface and texture are tempered, and that the conceptual idea is
transferred to the viewer as information articulated in the simplest terms possible. Appeals to the
senses run the risk of distracting the viewer from the idea, transforming the work of art into an
“expressive device” that draws on a viewer’s emotions, making the idea less comprehensible.
According to LeWitt, in an effort to preserve the primacy of the idea itself, any employment of
material must be undertaken with the “most economy of means,” so as to buoy the primary idea
and avoid aesthetic distractions. In LeWitt’s own work, this economy of means translated to
simply drawn lines, instructions for compositions yet to be executed, and stripped down cubic
structures. [Images 1 and 2.] Attitudes such as this aligned conceptual art with the printed page,
where sketches, diagrams, and lists presented the conceptual idea seemingly without pretense,
plainly and supposedly free of visual rhetoric.
Throughout “Paragraphs,” LeWitt’s ideas about conceptual art were illustrated by
examples of minimalist sculpture, including a series of rectangular boxes made of galvanized
iron and hung in vertical ascension on a gallery wall (Donald Judd, Untitled, 1965), along with

62
LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” 80 and 83.
63
Ibid., 83.
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two fiberglass forms by Robert Morris, one an inverted conical shape, the other a rounded,
bulging rectangle (both Untitled, 1967). [Images 3 and 4.] For the German art historian Klaus
Honnef, LeWitt’s choice to illustrate his paragraphs with photographs of minimalist sculpture
demonstrated the artist’s pivotal role in the development of conceptual art, enacting the transition
between minimal sculpture and conceptual art. According to Honnef, LeWitt’s paragraphs and
accompanying illustrations “signaled an artistic way out of the stalled investigations of plastic,
elementary structures which occupied Minimal Art.”
64
Honnef’s placement of minimalism at the
threshold of conceptual art signals a repeated refrain in art historical accounts of the period,
which situates minimalism as formalism’s apotheosis and the beginning of art that makes visible
the physical and psychological processes that underpin its production and reception. For authors
including Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster and Alex Potts, minimalism marks a moment after which
point it became impossible to experience a work of art without being aware of one’s physical and
mental relationship to it.
65
For Honnef, however, the break enacted by minimalism had more to

64
Honnef (1971), 7. “Damit hat Sol LeWitt, zumindest unbewußt, einen artistischen Ausweg aus den
festgefahrenen Untersuchungen plastischer Elementarstrukturen signalisiert, wie sie in der Minimal Art
betreiben worden waren.”
65
Rosalind Krauss, “Sense and Sensibility: Reflections on Post ‘60s Sculpture,” Artforum vol. 12, no. 3
(November 1973): 43-53; Rosalind Krauss, “The Double Negative: A new syntax for sculpture,” in
Passages in Modern Sculpture, 243-288 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977); Hal Foster, “The Crux of
Minimalism,” in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, 35-69 (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1996); Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
The literature dealing with minimalism as the end of an autonomous art concerned primarily with
the limits of its media, and the beginning of art that counts the viewer’s experience with it as a component
of the work of art, is vast. See also, Robert Pincus-Witten, Postminimalism (New York: Out of London
Press, 1978); Ann Goldstein, ed. A Minimal Future: Art as Object 1958-1968 (Cambridge, Mass: MIT
Press, 2004). The dragon to be slayed in each of these accounts is Clement Greenberg’s formalism. See
Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” Partisan Review 7, no. 4 (July-August 1940): 296-
310; Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” (1960), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and
Criticism Vol. 4, 85-94, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). See also,
Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum, vol. 5, no. 10 (June 1967): 12-23, reprinted in Art and
Objecthood, 148-172 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Michael Fried, “Three American
Painters” (1965), in Art and Objecthood, 213-268 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). For
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do with its negation of what he called “expressionist” tendencies. The industrially produced
object, with its hard lines and geometric shapes, presented an alternative to painting and
sculpture concerned primarily with the limits of its media.
66
Conceptual art took this one step
further, removing the object altogether, and in so doing, cleaving art from any and all concerns
with the “expressive potential” Honnef maintained was inherent in material objects. Honnef
wrote, “Waiving the object-bound artistic formulation… leads inevitably to the loss of sensory
properties,” which might distract from or miscommunicate the primary idea.
67
Employing the
pared-down, basic visual language adopted by conceptual art allows, “the eyes [to] act only as
recording tools. They transmit the received artistic impulse directly to the organizing mind.”
68

Honnef’s writing warns against the threat of an idea miscommunicated, or even worse, obscured
by an emotional response to visual elements. This threat decreases as the aesthetic becomes
increasingly simplified, supposedly objective in its straightforward communication of the idea,
and therefore more transferable to the mind, which he understood as the site where conceptual art
comes to fruition.
LeWitt and Honnef insisted that the visual presentation of conceptual ideas must be pared
down, conveying information in the simplest terms possible, so as to risk distracting the viewer
from the idea at stake. This is a problematic assertion, however, in that it understands emotions
and ideas to be mutually exclusive, and aesthetic elements to preclude the transfer of information
from work of art to viewer. Scholars including Eve Meltzer and Jeff Wall have worked to

conceptual art’s continuation of this attack on the “official history gestalt” of Greenberg and Fried, see
Blake Stimson, “The Promise of Conceptual Art,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, eds.
Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999).
66
The legacy of Greenberg’s formalism is evident in Honnef’s language here. See previous note.
67
Honnef (1971), 8. “Ein Verzicht auf objektgebundene künstlerische Formulierung führt allerdings
zwangsläufig zum Verlust sinnlicher Eigenschaften.”
68
Ibid. “Die Augen fungieren nur als Aufnahmesonden. Sie leiten die empfangenen künstelrischen
Impulse direkt an den sortierenden Verstand weiter.”
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counter this idea, honing in on the visual language that articulates the work of art.
69
Meltzer
examines how the so-called non-aesthetic of conceptual art in fact asserts a visual rhetoric that
must be explored. While LeWitt may have insisted upon an “economy of means” in conceptual
art’s visual material, Meltzer contends that a non-aesthetic is nonetheless a visual style. “Even a
total negation of visibility still counts for the visible world,” Meltzer tells us, meditating on the
conceptual artists’ efforts to stimulate “sense perception” in the transmission of data.
70
Simply
typed lists, graphite sketches on white paper, and basic diagrams – the simple visual tools meant
to convey data efficiently and without expressive emotion – continue to manifest a visual style
that remains a component of the work of art.
71

Jeff Wall has illustrated the importance of the visual rhetoric of what might at first glance
appear plain or empty of visual significance in his reading of Douglas Huebler’s Duration Piece
#6 from 1968. [Image 5.] Included in a 1969 exhibition organized by Seth Siegelaub, Huebler’s
work consisted of a 3 ½ by 4-inch rectangle of sawdust installed in front of the gallery entrance.
As visitors passed through the doorway, the pile of sawdust slowly diminished, tracked by
visitor’s footsteps throughout the interior space. The receptionist was instructed to document the
slow dissolution of the rectangle by taking photographs of it every half hour for the first six
hours of the exhibition, at which point Huebler removed the sawdust from the floor.
72
Huebler
then paired the resulting thirteen photographs with a typed description of the event, producing an
object that offers a record of an event that has passed, giving what is no longer present a sense of

69
Another example is Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon, 1998).
70
Eve Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2013), 35 and 48.
71
My use of the word “style” is meant to demonstrate my commitment to unpacking the ways in which
conceptual art uses the visual to make its argument.
72
Instructions for January 5-31, 1969 receptionist. Seth Siegelaub Papers, Museum of Modern Art,
I.A.40. Accessed electronically http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/siegelaub/ March 24,
2015.
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materiality and enabling its illustration and distribution. The piece was referenced by title only in
the catalogue to Siegelaub’s exhibition, January 5-31, 1969, alongside works by Robert Barry,
Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner. In addition to eight distinct artworks by Huebler listed in
the catalogue, the artist also published the following statement:
The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.
I prefer, simply, to state the existence of things in terms of time and/or place.
More specifically, the work concerns itself with things whose inter-relationship is beyond
direct perceptual experience.
Because the work is beyond direct perceptual experience, awareness of the work depends
on a system of documentation.
This documentation takes the form of photographs, maps, drawings and descriptive
language.
D.H.

While Huebler acknowledged that documentation enables knowledge about the work of art, his
statement assumed that such documentation refers to the work of art without any visual signifiers
that might shape the way viewers comprehend it. Accordingly, Klaus Honnef understood
Huebler’s photographs as subordinate to the process that constitutes the actual work of art.
73
For
Honnef, the photographs are intentionally banal and boring in order to lessen the viewer’s
attention to the visual material at hand, and to direct them instead to the more primary processes
of erosion and dispersal. For Jeff Wall, however, Huebler’s photographs are not the de-
aestheticized documentation of a process that supersedes them in importance. By contrast, both
the process and its documentation work together to encourage the viewer to contemplate what
Wall calls, “the condition of ‘depictivity,’” by which he means the problems at stake in the
making of images, a question he understands to be the central conceptual investigation of

73
Klaus Honnef, “Concept Art,” Magazin Kunst 10, no. 38 (1970), 1759-1768.
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Duration Piece #6.
74
According to Wall, the simplicity of Huebler’s images is an aesthetic
strategy, one that works in concert with a similar plainness in the event documented. By
photographing a seemingly trivial event – the slow depletion of a pile of sawdust as it is traipsed
over the gallery floor by visitors – Huebler brings front and center the process of documentation
itself. Wall argues, “the more the assignment is emptied of what could normatively be considered
to be compelling social subject matter, the more visible it is simply as an instance of a structure,
an order, and the more clearly it can be experienced as a model of relationships.”
75
Huebler’s
duration piece, conceived as symbiotic event and photograph, calls attention to the process of
making images. By Jeff Wall’s account, it is the interdependence of the photographs and the
process pictured that allow the work to function as it does, to highlight the inherently connected
processes of making art and documenting it. In this way, the photographs are understood not as
secondary material, documentation of a more important—if less visible, less exhibitable, and less
transferable—event. Rather, they are integral components in the investigation of a series of
relationships existing around the making of images, between the viewing subject and the work of
art, a process and its resulting object, and the work of art and efforts to represent it.
Jeff Wall’s reading of Huebler’s photography presents an alternative to LeWitt’s
insistence that all visual effects are to be empty of significance. Rather, materials related to an
event or idea employ a visual rhetoric that shapes and directs the communication of ideas at
stake. In examining the compendium and its efforts to disseminate information, Wall’s
sensitivity to the visual offers a useful model. Conceiving of the book as a material object filled
with a variety of visual spaces, the particular ways in which it operates as a tangible thing

74
Jeff Wall, “Marks of Indifference: aspects of photography in, or as, conceptual art,” in Reconsidering
the Object of Art, 1965-1975, ed. Ann Goldstein, 246-275 (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995), this
quote 258. (Accompanying exhibition held at MOCA, Los Angeles, 1995-1996.)
75
Ibid.
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emerges not as a distraction from the concept being communicated but rather as essential to its
communication. Bringing together a selection of artists and projects, facilitating connections that
unfold through the process of reading, the book distributes information in a way that is quite
distinct from a single work of art. Instead, the compendium presents an argument built across a
number of art works and artists’ writings, utilizing the visual to facilitate productive connections
and juxtapositions among various works of art, made by the reader in the act of reading and
comprehending. The viewer’s physical encounter with the material at hand cannot be separated
from his or her perception of it, and both emerge as components of the actualization of the work
of art.
Before delving into the specific compendia on which this chapter focuses, it is necessary
to briefly define my understanding of conceptual art and the art historical departure it signals.
76

On this matter, I follow Rosalind Krauss, who has argued that conceptual art sought an
“illustration of the powers of human reason.”
77
This is in contrast to art that had come before
conceptual art, which had been tasked with illustrating the surrounding world.
78
In other words,

76
The literature on conceptual art and the departure it signals within art history is vast. For artists seeking
to define conceptual art, see LeWitt, 1967 and Kosuth, 1969. Criticism around the coalescence of
conceptual art into an art historical category is, in many ways, the subject of this chapter. Significant
examples include Jack Burnham, “System Esthetics,” Artforum 7, no. 1 (September 1968), 30-35 and
Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International XII, no. 2 (February
20, 1968), 31-36. Foundational secondary texts include Buchloh, 1990; Godfrey, 1998; Alberro and
Stimson, 1999; and Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 2003).
77
Rosalind Krauss, “LeWitt in Progress,” October Vol. 6 (Autumn, 1978): 53.
78
Krauss does not go into detail in this article about what she means by the pre-conceptual commitment
to illustrating the surrounding world. I take her to mean various different things, including both
naturalistic illustration of the surrounding world as well as attempts to picture the world in terms less
concerned with a one-to-one correspondence with nature, including Impressionist efforts to paint the
conditions of fin-de-siècle life in light, atmosphere and speed, as well as Cubist renderings of multiple
and simultaneous vantage points. If conceptual art is defined as that which illustrates human thought,
Cubist collages, which explore semiotic systems through metaphors and similes, might be understood as
proto-conceptual, as they investigate communication and the equivalency of language, which has much to
do with human thought.
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the functions of the mind became the subject of conceptual art, which separated art from its
relationship to “visual reality,” bonding instead to logic, rationality and thought.
Statements made by Douglas Huebler and Sol LeWitt discussed above position the mind
as the province of conceptual art. When material documents are invoked to present works of
conceptual art to the viewer, Huebler and LeWitt insist that they be kept intentionally simple and
plain, so as to transfer information to the viewer directly rather than metaphorically, and thereby
maintain focus on the idea rather than on the object that conveys it.
79
Like others before me, I am
suspect of this proposition and identify a visual rhetoric at stake in the material documents
accompanying conceptual art.
80
By looking at the distribution of these materials in compendia,
where the makers of the books capitalized on the physical and mental act of reading, it becomes
possible to see how the visual strategies present in these materials do not compromise conceptual
art’s elevation of the idea over the object. Following Krauss, who defines conceptual art as that
which makes the function of the human mind its subject matter, I argue that the material
components of conceptual art generate or set into motion the processes of thought, reason and
comprehension that are the subjects of conceptual art. In this manner, the photographs, diagrams,
scores and lists presented in the pages of the compendia under review are not to be understood as
illustrations of the conceptual idea they document, but instead as tools through which the
conceptual art work manifests itself.

79
Joseph Kosuth presents a similar argument, and his work and writings are addressed in greater detail
below.
80
Wall, 1995; Godfrey, 1998; Meltzer, 2013.
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Ursula Meyer’s Conceptual Art: artist and critic conflate
Born in Hannover, Germany in 1915, Ursula Meyer studied sculpture under former
Bauhaus instructors Otto Lindig, Gerhard Marcks and Jan Bontjes Van Beek between 1934 and
1937.
81
In 1938, she moved to Faenza, Italy, where she continued her studies at the Scuola
Reggia before finally immigrating to New York, where she completed her bachelor of arts at the
New School for Social Research in 1960. In 1962, she earned a master’s degree at Teachers
College at Columbia University, and in 1964, she was appointed Assistant Professor of Art at
H.H. Lehman College, where she would teach sculpture until her retirement in 1980.
Throughout the 1960s, Meyer had built a career as both artist and critic in the United
States. She participated frequently in group shows in New York, Washington, D.C., Connecticut,
New Jersey and New Orleans, and by 1972, had shown her work in four solo shows in New
York.
82
In 1968 alone, her work was included in three exhibitions, one of which was a solo show
at New York’s A.M. Sachs Gallery. The exhibition consisted of three sculptures, Homage to Ad
Reinhardt, Xerxes and Dedalus. All three sculptures were modular, including multiple
components of identical dimensions that could be rearranged at the will of the viewer. [Image 6.]
The title piece, Dedalus, was produced in three different sizes and materials, the most diminutive

81
Ursula Meyer is no longer living, so interviewing her was not possible. I learned these and other
biographical details from the biography and CV supplied on her website,
http://www.ursulameyer.com/biography.htm. Accessed 24 February 2015. All three of her teachers were
professors and practitioners of sculpture and ceramics and had spent a portion of their career at the
Bauhaus. Gerhard Marcks served as director from 1928 until his dismissal at the hands of the Nazis in
1933. The years Meyer spent studying with these masters were of course tumultuous in Germany, with
the Nazis seizing power in 1933. Meyer’s studentship with these instructors is described as having been
conducted in “secret” in her official biography, though further details are unavailable.
82
These exhibitions include Cool Art of 1967 at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield,
CT, the traveling show Projected Art/Artist at Work, which was installed at several university museums
including Cornell and Finch College, as well as a number of smaller exhibitions at galleries and
universities associated with the CUNY system. The solo shows were held at Amel Gallery in 1964, A.M.
Sachs Gallery and the Hunter College Art Gallery in 1968 and at the Lehman College Art Gallery in
1971. This information has been gleaned from her official CV, accessed 24 February 2015 from her
website.
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the size of a tiny tabletop sculpture and the largest filling the room. While the smallest could be
manipulated like a “neat toy,” the largest required much more physical strength to reconfigure.
83

In this way, Meyer’s sculptures dealt with the space in which they were installed, calling
attention to the limits of the gallery’s dimensions and interacting with the furniture in the room.
Furthermore, they required the viewer to confront his or her own physical strength, moving the
body to interact with the sculptures on view. In a photograph from The Sunday Star, a woman
kneels on the floor next to the sculpture, pushing and pulling its components into place. [Image
7.] A poster hangs on the wall behind her, displaying the various possible iterations of the
object. The photographs depict the sculpture occupying multiple shapes, fixing the various
formulations of the object, producing a catalogue of possibilities and recording them for
posterity. Where a single photograph will not suffice, only a compilation can approximate the
nature of the sculpture. Describing her modular approach in a 1968 interview, Meyer explained,
“Rather than being part of a fixed whole, the module becomes ‘liberated’ relating to other
modules as form and value in its own right.”
84
Meyer’s description of her work creates tension
between individual and whole, as each piece articulates meaning through its relationship to the
pieces around it. The concept of a whole ceases to exist as a fixed entity, transformed now into a
set of relationships that is constantly evolving as pieces are added, removed and rearranged.
85

This constant evolution signals the work’s temporality, which critics quickly picked up
on. A reviewer in Art News noted how the modular, movable structure of the work meant it, “is

83
Christopher Andreae, “Review of Ursula Meyer at A.M. Sachs Gallery,” The Christian Science
Monitor, February 26, 1968.
84
Battcock, Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, 371.
85
In this respect, Meyer’s sculptural work operates in a manner similar to the compendium, as unique
pieces come together, alluding to a whole that is forever morphing, depending on the contingent
relationship among its parts and the viewer’s particular encounter with them.
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never final. There is no ‘is’ to it, but there is always a ‘now’ to it.”
86
Dedalus and the others
encouraged manipulation by the viewer, who was invited to reshape and rearrange its
components, producing ever-new iterations of the sculpture. These temporary formations of the
various sections might exist for only an instant, until the viewer, or another viewer, rearranged
them yet again. Meyer’s modular sculptures thus took up the notions of multiple possible
outcomes central to conceptual projects such as Lewitt’s wall drawings, which could be made
and remade by different people who might interpret the artist’s instructions differently. But they
investigated these possibilities while retaining a physicality that was undeniable. The size and
weight of the sculptures asserted their materiality, while the invitation to viewers to touch and
rearrange the pieces joined the viewer’s corporeality with the sculptural object.
Instability, temporality, and the physical relationship between viewing subject and art
object facilitate a connection between Meyer’s sculptural work and her art criticism of the
period. In her article “The De-Objectification of the Object,” which appeared in the Summer
1969 issue of Arts Magazine, Meyer tracked the relationship between subject and object,
describing not just a change in the relationship between the two, but a complete dismantling of
it.
87
With minimalism’s introduction of the manufactured object, the artist-crafted and signifying
object had been supplanted by a literal materiality, a “flawless perfection” which allowed the
object to “become a universal, the idea of object,” Meyer wrote.
88
Now existing as “abstraction
per se” rather than an abstraction of form, the object underwent a de-objectification, wherein its
material form ceased to be important, replaced by the idea it set forward.
89

86
A. B., “Review of Ursula Meyer at A.M. Sachs Gallery,” Art News 66, no. 10 (February 1968).
87
Ursula Meyer, “The De-Objectification of the Object,” Art News (Summer 1969), 20–22.
88
Ibid., 20.
89
Meyer’s placement of minimalism as the harbinger of the new, post-object conceptualism is echoed by
many authors writing at the same time, including Klaus Honnef and Lucy Lippard. In the preface to Six
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As the importance of the material art object dissolved, the relationship between art and its
viewer would inevitably change, Meyer argued. She demonstrated, through allusions to Kant and
Nietzsche, how the relationship between subject and object had long been one of control. While
Kant had claimed that a subject could never truly know an object in itself, Nietzsche insisted that
the knowability of the object was in fact irrelevant; all that mattered was the ability to control it.
“The de-objectification cuts through the difficulty of knowing the object,” Meyer wrote. “In the
wake of the disappearing object, the subject-object dichotomy disappears.”
90
Replaced by the
idea it sets forth, the object loses its power over the viewing subject, who emerges now as
capable of manipulating or reforming it, and eliciting from it new ideas dependent on the
viewer’s engagement with it. The object-turned-idea now exists in the service of the viewing
subject. It becomes something created by the viewing subject, rather than something he or she
strives, futilely, to know.
Meyer outlined a new relationship between subject and object, in which the object no
longer prevails over the subject but exists as an idea according to the viewer’s will, introducing
temporality as an important factor in works of art that refuse or avoid a fixed, singular form. The
form of works of art such as Dedalus, including those with considerably less material heft, was
contingent upon the viewer’s interaction with the work of art, existing only in the moment of its
reception. Reconceiving the object as a shifting entity such as this meant that there was nothing
that moved consistently through time, offering a similar experience for viewer after viewer.

Years, Lippard positioned “dematerialization” against the “industrialized geometry and sheer bulk” of
minimalist work, emphasizing instead “variety, fragmentation, and interrelationships.” See Lippard, Six
Years along with Honnef, “Concept Art,” 1970. Nearly 30 years later, Hal Foster would write on
minimalism and the break it enacted between modernism and a paradigm shift toward postmodernist
practices. Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End
of the Century, 34-69 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).
90
Meyer, “The De-Objectification of the Object,” 21.
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Rather, the work of art as idea, dependent upon the individual viewer to bring it into being, is
always reconfigured anew, shaped by the context in which it is encountered and the individual
viewer’s interpretive faculties. Both object and idea are temporary.
In her 1973 essay, “The Eruption of Anti-Art,” Meyer dwelled on temporality as the
defining factor of “rebellious,” or anti-establishment art.
91
Taking as her starting point the notion
of “Anti-Art,” which she adapts from Herbert Marcuse and defined as that which resists
established modes of making, viewing, collecting and owning art, Meyer mourned the various
moments throughout the twentieth century in which efforts toward anti-art had been made but
have failed. The problem, she argued, is that attempts to make art that would be liberated from
the dogmatic forces of the art market have always been contained within the art object, which
has been time and again absorbed by the capitalist system. Despite endeavors to produce radical
art that would be unattractive to the economic powers of capitalism, all new forms of art have
continually been absorbed “by a voracious art market,” which, in its undying will to collect,
continues to legitimate even the most insubordinate art by transforming it into a commodity.
92

The only way to produce art that is truly refractory, that effectively reforms the structures of the
art market, is to produce work which exists far outside of the realm of collectability. To succeed
at this, Meyer posits, artists must engage temporality by producing works of art that exist only in
the instant of reception and therefore cannot be collected. “If Anti-Art exists at all,” Meyer
writes, “it has to be defined on the basis of its temporariness. The disruptive function of Anti-Art
manifests itself only at the crucial moment when it spends itself in an eruption of furious
energy.”
93

91
Meyer (1973). Marcuse’s notion of anti-art appears in An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1969).
92
Meyer, "The Eruption of Anti-art," 130.
93
Ibid., 134.
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Meyer’s modular sculptures along with her description of Anti-Art help to define the
stakes of conceptual art as she understood them at the end of the 1960s. The insurmountable
materiality of Dedalus, with its imposing blocks demanding manipulation by the viewer, give the
sculpture an indisputable sense of physicality. It is, however, a physicality in which material
takes a back seat to the idea it sets forth. In the case of Meyer’s work, the idea is one that is
temporary and conditional, always dependent on the viewer’s interaction with the work of art,
which is constantly changing. In this sense, objecthood and idea are not oppositional, but instead
work together to yield multiple possible outcomes that refuse to take a fixed form and unfold
over time as the viewer engages with the work of art.
Ursula Meyer’s compendium, Conceptual Art, appeared in 1972.
94
In addition to an
introduction written by Meyer, the book presented a compilation of artists’ writings, interviews,
and works of art, including over 100 contributions from nearly 50 artists. In the book’s
introductory text, Meyer addressed the difference between conceptual art and other art. She
argued that conceptual art presents the intention of the work of art in the art itself, through
instructions, propositions or descriptions of the project. She makes the somewhat dubious claim
that such self-referentiality is in contrast with non-conceptual art, which is primarily concerned
with appearance and thus obscures the idea behind the work of art, hiding it behind things like
color and form. This unique aspect of conceptual art, she posits, makes the job of the critic
irrelevant, as the intention or idea at stake is meant to be easily accessible for the viewer. For this
reason, conceptual art is best presented on its own without accompanying critical writing. “In
this sense,” Meyer clarifies, “this book is not a ‘critical anthology’ but a documentation of

94
Meyer, Conceptual Art.
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Conceptual Art and Statements.”
95
Understanding the book as documentary, Meyer presents the
works of art in the form of photographs, summaries or descriptions, or as copies of work that has
been published elsewhere. While these presentation strategies appear at first to be simple and
straightforward, closer readings reveal the editorial decisions behind the presentation,
demonstrating how various pairings or sequences by the editor enable a deeper understanding of
the work of art for the reader, without overtly imposing Meyer’s own critical voice.
Taken together, the presentation of Dan Graham’s Schema and Robert Barry’s Inert Gas
Series in Conceptual Art offer a representative example. Conceived in March 1966, Schema first
appeared in the American artists’ magazine, Aspen in 1967.
96
Schema includes a list of twenty-
eight aspects of a given publication, from adjectives, adverbs and pronouns, to paper stock,
typeface, and the number of capitalized words. The editor of the publication in which Schema
appears is meant to fill in the number of each of the specifics listed as they appear in that
particular publication of Schema. The result, Graham tells his readers in a brief preface usually
printed with each Schema, is a “large, finite permutation of specific, discrete poems” comprised
of “exact data” that corresponds to “its published appearance.”
97
Schema is entirely embedded
into the fabric of the publication in which it appears, its visual form dependent on that
publication and its editor. The editor can elect to use or delete any of Graham’s proposed
specifics, shortening or supplementing as needed given the space constraints that may be an
issue, thereby shaping the visual appearance of a given Schema. Furthermore, as its specifics

95
Ibid., back cover.
96
Dan Graham, “Schema,” Aspen, no. 5/6 (Fall-Winter 1967), Section 16, n.p. Graham’s preface (or a
version of it) is frequently published with Schema, including the initial publication in Aspen, in Art-
Language, vol. 1 no. 1 (May 1969), 14, Interfunktionen, no. 8 (1972), 29-32, Studio International Vol.
944, no. 183 (May 1972), 212-213; Dan Graham, For Publication (Los Angeles: Otis Art Institute of Los
Angeles County, 1975); and also in Six Years, 32-33. (The initial publication in Aspen featured a longer
preface, which Graham appears to have streamlined for subsequent publication.)
97
Meyer, Conceptual Art, 128–9.
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name the various components comprising printed matter, from the elements of language to the
materiality of the printed page, Schema references printed matter both linguistically and visually,
by naming its parts and by building its visual form out of the specifics of the publication in
which it appears. Presenting to the viewer all of the vital information of the piece, Schema quite
literally spells out the information it seeks to impart. Printed alongside Graham’s brief preface,
Schema includes an explicit list of the information it documents, coupled with an explanation of
the larger project into which a particular Schema fits, all without supplementary critical writing.
[Image 8.] In this way, Schema complies perfectly with Meyer’s insistence that works of
conceptual art should require no explanation on the part of the critic, laying bare its most
pertinent information to the viewer in clear, comprehensible terms. True to form, Meyer includes
no explanatory text to accompany Schema, allowing the poem and artists’ statement to furnish
the information to the reader on their own.
Contrast this with the presentation of Robert Barry’s Inert Gas Series. In March of 1969,
Barry released a series of five noble gases into the atmosphere in Los Angeles and surrounding
areas. A few small photographs document the release of the gases, which are invisible and elude
capture by the camera’s lens. The photographs appear only as images of a landscape. Without
explanatory information, they impart none of the information central to the work of art, about the
release and expansion of the gases into the atmosphere over time or about the tension between
what is visible and what is not.
98
Unlike Schema, which includes its pertinent information within
the very composition of its visual presentation, the photograph of Barry’s Inert Gas Series
published in Meyer’s compendium requires supplemental information in order to impart the idea
behind the work of art to the book’s reader. Without it, the photograph appears only as an image

98
Ursula Meyer and Robert Barry, “Robert Barry, October 12, 1969,” in Conceptual Art, 35–41. Barry
describes temporality and invisibility as investigations central to his various works of art in this interview.
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of an empty landscape. [Image 9.] A simple caption references the series of which the
photograph is part and notifies the reader that there is helium in the atmosphere above the
Mojave Desert. Unlike Schema, integrated as it is into the publication in which it appears,
Barry’s photograph floats freely on the page, without supplemental information to tether it to the
book by contextualizing what it is doing.
Rather than inserting her own critical voice to provide this missing context, Meyer opted
to publish the photograph accompanied by an interview she conducted with Barry in October
1969. [Image 10.] Utilizing the artist’s words, Meyer provided the contextual information needed
to flesh out Barry’s photograph without imposing her own voice onto the work. Her questions
directed the conversation, encouraging Barry to meditate on certain things, such as “Anti-art,”
the ability to measure and collect “de-objectified” objects, and the aesthetics of the invisible, but
it was his words that had the final say. For example, eager to attend to the presentation of
materiality in conceptual art, Meyer asked Barry to elaborate on the “coherence of the object”
within conceptual art. Her use of the term “cohere” suggests the existence of multiple parts,
which hold together despite their distinctness and their capacity to fall apart or disintegrate. The
idea of an object “cohering” sets it in opposition to an autonomous art object, which suggests
wholeness and separateness from the surrounding world.
99
Barry responded by insisting that the
“coherence of the object” always remains intact, even in conceptual art. “The material always
seems to cohere somehow whether the artist wants it or not,” Barry replies. “No matter how the
dust [Meyer’s example of a material utilized in conceptual art] is spread around, it all fits
together into some kind of grand design.”
100
In contrast to a painting hanging on the wall in one

99
The reference to an “autonomous” art object is another example of the legacy of Greenberg’s formalism
in this chapter. See note 65.
100
Ibid., 36.
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solid and complete piece, the “object” of conceptual art holds together in a “grand design” that is
always either changing or laying bare the potential for change. Barry concludes that despite the
persistence of the coherence of the object, it is a coherence based around the potential for
dissipation rather than ontological stability. Along with the Inert Gas Series, which he mentions
only briefly, Barry describes other projects in which invisibility or the disintegration of material
into nothingness is a motivating question, such as his work with radiation and sound waves, both
of which cannot exist apart from their function to dissipate. By giving him the space to describe
his work, asking questions that propel certain lines of discourse, Meyer incorporated Barry’s
own explanation into the presentation of his work in her compendium, accomplishing the
contextualization required by the photograph and work of art without resorting to critical
explanations of the two.
The examples of Barry and Graham are representative of Meyer’s editorial strategy.
While interviews with artists and manifestos are included throughout the book, she never adds
supplemental critical explanation or historical contextualization. Aside from the introductory
text, her role as editor is compiler of material rather than explicator of ideas. The conceptual
artist is tasked with producing works of art that convey meaning to the reader without critical
exegesis. The conflation of the artist and critic this implies emerged as a pillar of conceptual art
for Ursula Meyer, who drew from Joseph Kosuth to make her point, citing statements such as
this one, “Because of the implied duality of perception and conception in earlier art, a
middleman (critic) appeared useful. [Conceptual art] both annexes the functions of the critic and
makes the middleman unnecessary.”
101
The newfound irrelevance of the critic was equally felt
by contemporary writers such as Lucy Lippard and Gregory Battcock, who also turned to the

101
Meyer, Conceptual Art, viii.
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collected volume as a means for contributing to discourse without relying on the trope of the
critic as explicator of artistic intentionality. Battcock’s 1973 anthology Idea Art, collected recent
criticism along with examples of conceptual artist’s interventions in print media, including
Meyer’s essay “The Eruption of Anti-Art” and a reprint of Documentation in Conceptual Art, a
series of artists’ writings by Lawrence Weiner, Daniel Buren, Mel Bochner and Sol Lewitt
solicited and published by Arts Magazine in its April 1970 issue.
102
Concerned with the
diminishing difference between critic and artist, and what that might mean for the emerging role
of the reader, Lippard wrote in the preface to Six Years, “I enjoy the prospect of forcing the
reader to make up his or her own mind when confronted with such a curious mass of
information.”
103
Lippard’s faith in the reader to make sense of the information provided shifted
her role as critic toward one of curator, assembling various things and compiling them in order to
present an argument through juxtaposition.
104
Rather than charging each individual object with
the task of imparting meaning on its own, or offering the explicative powers of her own,
“singular critical voice,” Lippard assembled and arranged, allowing the primary sources to
“elucidate by building upon each other.”
105
In this way, her process of “curatorial
concatenation,” did not simply respond to the dissolution of the border between curating,
criticism and art making, but in fact helped to bring it about.
106

102
Battcock, Idea Art: A Critical Anthology; Lawrence Weiner et al., “Documentation in Conceptual
Art,” ed. Gregory Battcock, Arts Magazine 44, no. 6 (1973), 42–45.
103
Lippard, Six Years (1996), 6.
104
Roland Barthes had identified the “death of the author” and subsequent birth of the reader in 1967.
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Aspen, no. 5/6 (Fall-Winter, 1967), Section 3, n.p.
105
Catherine Morris and Victor Bonin, “Introduction,” in Materializing Six Years: Lucy Lippard and the
Emergence of Conceptual Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012), xviii; Catherine Morris, “Six Years
as a Curatorial Project,” in Materializing Six Years: Lucy Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012), 1–28.
106
Morris, “Six Years as a Curatorial Project.”
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As evidenced by the editorial choices made in the compilation of works of art included in
Conceptual Art, the role of the critic was refigured as editorial or curatorial, interpreting through
collection and compilation. By strategically juxtaposing certain works of art with artists’
writings, or choosing to present them on their own, Meyer utilized her role as editor to present a
perspective on conceptual art. But her critical voice remained between the lines, so to speak,
rather than directing discourse on the works of art included more explicitly. Furthermore, it was
the materiality of the book that allowed it to exist as an organ of distribution and facilitator of
subjective interpretation. The visual rhetoric of its pages along with the order of compilation
provide the reader with tools for understanding its content even while refusing expository,
critical writing on the various works of art included.

Klaus Honnef’s Concept Art: the book as exhibition
Klaus Honnef was the preeminent citric of conceptual art writing in Germany in the early
1970s. His comprehensive article, “Concept Art,” appeared in the German art magazine,
Magazin Kunst in 1970 and was followed shortly by his book-length study of the same title,
published in Cologne in 1971.
107
Based in Cologne, where there was little critical work on
conceptual art available prior to the 1970s, Honnef gleaned most of his knowledge through
conversations with the artists and exhibitions at Konrad Fischer Gallery in nearby Düsseldorf
(where American artists including Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt held their first European shows),
along with Harald Szeemann’s 1969 exhibition When Attitudes Become Form.
108
In his writing,

107
Honnef, “Concept Art,” 1970; Honnef, Concept Art, 1971.
108
Email conversation with Klaus Honnef, January 19 and 22, 2015. Carl Andre’s work was the inaugural
show at Konrad Fischer Gallery, in 1967. Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings were shown two years later in
1969. Szeemann, Fischer and Honnef would collaborate in 1972 on the “Idea” section at documenta 5.
See Chapter 4 for more on documenta 5.
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Honnef identified a genealogical progression of dematerialization dating back to Marcel
Duchamp’s ready-mades, in which the art object becomes less important while the questions it
asks and the challenges it poses gain in significance.
109
This approach demonstrates a similarity
with American theories of conceptual art, such as those developed by Jack Burnham, Lucy
Lippard, and Ursula Meyer, all of who insisted on the dematerialization of the art object and
ensuing elevation of the concept or idea motivating it.
110
Honnef described the physical
manifestation of conceptual art (the “plans, sketches, photos, maps, verbal appeals and
descriptions”) to be nothing more than “the superficial features of Conceptual Art.”
111
For
Honnef, these “tools of transportation” merely gesture to the conceptual interventions they
document, facilitating the movement of ideas between artist and viewer. While his disregard for
the material aspects of conceptual art is clearly problematic, his prioritization of the idea led him
to focus on the reader’s mind as the space where works of art come to fruition. In so doing, he
underscored the subjective process of reading and comprehending as a critical component in the
production of conceptual works of art.
Honnef’s book, Concept Art, appeared one year prior to Ursula Meyer’s and two years
before Six Years. However, it remains more obscure due to the realities of publication and
distribution. Shortly after its 1971 publication by Phaidon Germany, the company closed their
doors. As a result, only 1000 copies of the book were sold.
112
Despite the book’s limited run, it
nonetheless reveals the pervasiveness of a certain critical approach to conceptual art in its earliest
years, both with respect to the prioritization of idea over object and the role of the viewer’s mind

109
Honnef, “Concept Art,” 1970; Honnef, Concept Art, 1971.
110
Bunrham, 1968; Lippard and Chandler, 1968); Meyer, Conceptual Art; Battcock, Idea Art: A Critical
Anthology. Honnef knew of all of these authors, and was especially familiar with Jack Burnham’s writing.
Email conversation with Klaus Honnef, January 19, 2015.
111
Honnef, “Concept Art,” 1970, 1759–60. “…die oberflächlichen Merkmale der Concept Art…”
112
Email conversation with Klaus Honnef, January 19, 2015.
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and faculties of comprehension in conceptual art. Honnef identified the mind as a fertile field
across which conceptual art plays out its meaning, understanding the viewer as a “central
component of conceptual art strategies” and insisting that conceptual art remains, “arrested in the
intangible realm of the human imagination.”
113
On this matter, the American critic Jack Burnham
served as influence for Honnef, who was familiar with Burnham’s work and enamored with his
treatment of the mind in conceptual art.
114
Burnham argued that conceptual art not only
questioned the nature, transmission and significance of ideas, but also the relationship of those
ideas to physical reality. The mind was the site where these connections between idea and thing
were made.
115
Conceptual art, Burnham summarized, “characterizes a decided shift in sensory
ratios.”
116
No longer arranged primarily around the visual, conceptual art encouraged its viewer
to contend with interrelated systems, such as the passage of time and the transmission of ideas.
This mode of art making required different kinds of comprehension than had previous aesthetic
criteria, such as color, form and size. To flesh out these changes, Burnham drew from Marshall
McLuhan’s model of a shift from the perspectival visual space of the printed page to “the
synaestheisa of ‘tactile space.’”
117
He argued that conceptual art coincides with a new mental
experience of the world, one in which viewers are called upon to process an array of sensory and
mental interactions with the world around them.

113
Honnef, Concept Art, 1971, 8, “Concept art ist buchstäblich eine Angelegenheit des Begreifens.
Begriffsvermögen ist stärker gefragt als sensuelle Sensibilität. Sie verwandelt den Betrachter traditioneller
Kunst in einen Rezipienten, dessen geistige Mitarbeit zentraler Bestandteil conceptueller Kunst-Strategien
ist.” Honnef, “Concept Art,” 1970, 1759–60, “Sie sind vollkommen immateriell und bleiben trotz
dokumentarischer Aufzeichnung letztlich in der immateriellen Sphäre des menschlichen
Vorstellungsfeldes verhaftet.”
114
Email conversation with Klaus Honnef, January 19, 2015.
115
Burnham, “System Esthetics.”
116
Ibid., 37.
117
Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point; Space in Poetry and Painting
(New York: Harper & Row, 1968); Burnham, “System Esthetics,” 37–38.
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For both Burnham and Honnef, then, conceptual art shifted the viewer’s focus away from
visual matters and toward mental processing, assimilating an array of informational data to make
sense of the idea behind a work of art. Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs from 1965 is
emblematic of such assertions. [Image 11.] A wooden folding chair is placed against the gallery
wall, flanked on either side by a photograph of the chair and a photographic enlargement of the
dictionary definition of a chair. The chair is thus represented in three ways: as a physical object,
as an image, and as a series of words. One and Three Chairs makes visible the various ways in
which meaning is imparted to a viewer, whether it be through objects, linguistic formations or
images. It is in the viewer’s comprehension of the relationship among object, word and image
that One and Three Chairs becomes meaningful, as the viewer comprehends the similarities and
differences of the three methods of imparting meaning juxtaposed in the work of art. For Honnef,
conceptual art—One and Three Chairs included—entrusted the viewer with a greater
competence for making sense of the work of art on an individual level, handing over to the
viewer the ultimate task of finding meaning in the work of art.
118
The art therefore exists not in
the chair itself, in the image or words on the wall, or even in the relationship among the three,
but in the process of comprehension galvanized by the trio, a process that transpires in the
viewer’s mind. Kosuth’s own assertion that art is nothing more than an analytic proposition
further buoys Honnef’s reading. Art exists to pose questions about art, and beyond this tautology,
art is meaningless, Kosuth insists.
119
In other words, the photograph, chair and textual
description are simply vehicles for demonstrating and facilitating the receiving and processing of
information by a viewer, which is the idea at the core of the work of art.

118
Email conversation with Klaus Honnef, January 22, 2015.
119
Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy I.”
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Honnef’s compendium, Concept Art, puts these theoretical conceptions to work in the
form of a book. The first two sections offer attempts to historicize conceptual art and to
document its chief examples, which Honnef does by charting a path from Marcel Duchamp and
the readymade, through minimalism and onto conceptual art. While these first two sections do
not fit with the working definition of the compendia defined here, the final section of the book
stands apart from the rest. Honnef intended this last section function as an exhibition in book
form, including actual works of art that the viewer was meant to encounter for the first time
within its pages.
120
Honnef’s understanding of the book as a site of display fits in with other
similar examples from the period, including projects by Seth Siegelaub.
121
Each of these
examples taps the reader’s comprehension, identifying the subjective processing of ideas as a
characteristic of conceptual art.
Curator of several conceptual art exhibitions, including Das Konzept ist die Form at the
Westfälischer Kunstverein in 1971 and the Idee-Kunst section at Documenta 5 in 1972 (together
with the German gallerist, Konrad Fischer), Honnef had a great deal of curatorial experience
presenting an argument through visual examples. Concept Art married his curatorial career with
his critical writing, while tapping into conceptual art’s impulse to rework existing conventions
around the distribution of art, which he has identified as an important political implication of
such art.
122
Like others working alongside him, including Lucy Lippard, Honnef understood the
politics of conceptual art to be staked on a disentanglement of art from its commodity status.
123

120
Email conversation with Klaus Honnef, January 22, 2015. This same description of the book is echoed
in an archival letter published in Concept Art, 146-7.
121
For example, Xerox Book, 1968 and January 5-31, 1969.
122
Email conversation with Klaus Honnef, January 22, 2015.
123
This was a sentiment shared by many at the time, including Interfunktionen editor Friedrich Heubach
and Fernsehgalerie producer Gerry Schum. These men and their projects are the subjects of Chapters 2
and 3 of this dissertation.
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This meant wresting art from the stronghold exerted upon it by galleries and museums, which
until now had provided its primary means of distribution. The book as exhibition offered an
alternative to the gallery and museum setting, one in which the work of art could exist as
information to be communicated rather than as an object subject to ownership.
124

The exhibition section of Honnef’s book included works of art commissioned expressly
for the book.
125
These projects investigated the potential for the book to function as a work of
art, blurring the boundary between the two utilizing the printed page as artistic medium.
126
Take
for example Douglas Huebler’s Variable Piece No. 11, which occupied the pages between 114
and 120. [Image 12.] To make Huebler’s work, a group of students were instructed to conduct
simple surveys with the inhabitants of 36 homes in a Massachusetts suburb. Only six interviews
were completed successfully. The piece is presented in Concept Art over seven pages, which
include an artist’s statement, summaries of the interviews written by two students, photographs
of the 36 houses visited and three photographs of the interviewees. According to Huebler’s
statement, which describes the process undertaken by the participating students and the resulting
documents, it is the documentary materials that constitute the work of art, and not the process of

124
Neither Honnef nor Seigelaub was the first to experiment with the book as a vehicle for presenting
exhibitions or works of art directly to readers. László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, André Malraux, and
Edward Steichen all professed a belief in the book as something capable of mediating the distance
between works of art and viewers. El Lissitzky, “Our Book,” (1926) in El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Text, ed.
Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, 356-369 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968); László Moholy-Nagy,
Painting, Photography Film (1925) (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969); André Malraux, Museum without
Walls (1952-54) (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967); Edward Steichen, The Family of Man (New York:
Museum of Modern Art and Maco Magazine Corp, 1955). Each of these men identified the photograph as
an essential component in the book’s potential to bring the world to the viewer. The veracity and
objectivity of the photograph suggested by such a claim came under criticism, most vehemently around
Steichen’s Family of Man. See Roland Barthes, “The Great Family of Man,” in Mythologies, trans.
Annette Lavers, 100-102 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972).
125
An archival letter included in Concept Art illuminates the process by which works of art were
commissioned for the book. Honnef, Concept Art, 146–7.
126
Other artists interested in investigating the book as work of art include, Lawrence Alloway, “The
Artist as Bookmaker [1],” Arts Magazine 41, no. 8 (Summer 1967), 22–23; Dan Graham, “The Artist as
Bookmaker [II],” Arts Magazine 41, no. 8 (n.d.), 23.
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traveling door-to-door seeking out interviews.
127
Therefore, the photographs and typed
descriptions are understood not merely as the remnants of a process existing beyond the pages of
Concept Art, but rather it is the book’s pages themselves that present the work of art in its
totality.
Sol LeWitt’s contribution to Concept Art is similarly concerned with the book and its
pages as the site of exhibition. In “Plan for a Conceptual Art Book,” LeWitt provided eight
different sets of instructions describing ways for the viewer to interact with the pages of the
book. They include, “Take a pen or pencil and connect all of the letters ‘a’ on this page with
straight lines,” and “Take a pen or pencil and draw a straight line of any length on this page.”
128

[Image 13.] Presented one per page, LeWitt’s instructions activate each page as a field for
potential artworks to be realized, pending participation by the reader. Lawrence Weiner’s project
also deals with the page as the site of the work of art. In “Overturned,” eight pages are printed
with a phrase referring to the turning over of each page.
129
[Image 14.] The phrases build from
the English “overturned” and the German, “umgedreht,” moving to various iterations of each,
including “turned over” (“drehte um”) and “and overturned” (“und umgedreht”), indicating the
sequential nature of turning each page in a book. While LeWitt’s project presents the space of
the page as the site of the work of art, Weiner’s “Overturned” renders an act fundamental to the
process of reading a book – that of turning the page – into a work of art. Together, the various
projects comprising the book’s “Exhibition” section demonstrate the potential for the book,
including its various spaces and the actions it facilitates, to be simultaneously subject and site of
conceptual art.

127
Douglas Huebler, “Variable Piece Nr. 11,” in Concept Art, 114.
128
Sol LeWitt, “Plan Für Ein Konzept Kunst Buch,” in Concept Art, 132–40.
129
Lawrence Weiner, “Overturned,” in Concept Art, 152–60.
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Honnef was not alone in his interest in the book as a site of exhibition. The New York-
based gallerist Seth Siegelaub produced many projects committed to investigating the printed
page as a site of display. Siegelaub’s understanding of the page in relation to conceptual art
hinged on his definition of “primary” and “secondary” information in regards to art, along with
conceptual art’s disruption of the distinction between the two. While “primary” referred to the
“intrinsic ideas of the art,” which Siegelaub defined as those aspects meant to be communicated
to a viewer through the work of art, “secondary” information included details about or
representations of works of art. In a 1969 interview with the art historian Charles Harrison,
published in Studio International, Siegelaub identified 1967 as a turning point, after which artists
began to remove the “intrinsic ideas of the art” from its long held entanglement with the visual.

130
In painting and sculpture prior to 1967, visual aspects such as color, size, location, and scale
communicated information about the world to the viewer in metaphorical, sometimes obscured
ways. Conceptual art, on the other hand, worked to make these ideas transparent. Exhibition
strategies that prioritized the visual were no longer preferable, as conceptual art now sought out
new methods of display that would impart the idea behind the work of art to the viewer with
greater efficiency. “The catalogue can now act as primary information for the exhibition,”
Siegelaub proposed, “as opposed to secondary information about art in magazines, catalogues,
etc., and in some cases the ‘exhibition’ can be the ‘catalogue.’”
131
The use of easily printable
language, instructions and descriptions made conceptual art particularly well suited for
presentation on the page. While printed media distorted the visual aspects of painting and
sculpture, it did not alter the presentation of conceptual art.

130
Charles Harrison and Seth Siegelaub, “On Exhibitions and the World at Large,” Studio International
178, no. 917 (December 1969), 202–3.
131
Ibid.
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Siegelaub put to practice his conviction that the printed page could operate as exhibition
space, producing exhibitions in book form such as Xerox Book, 1968 and January 5-31, 1969.
Published in an edition of 1000 in December 1968, the Xerox Book included work by Carl
Andre, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, and
Lawrence Weiner. [Image 15.] Each artist was asked to submit a work of art on 25 pages, each
8½ by 11 inches. These were to be copied and printed in the book, existing as the work of art
itself rather than documentation or description of a work of art located beyond the book’s pages.
Carl Andre’s submission presented a growing colony of squares; the first page featured a single
square, a second square appeared on the second page and so on until the twenty-fifth page, which
featured an array of 25 squares scattered across the page. [Image 16.] Andre’s project
underscored the copying function of the Xerox machine, as the multiplying squares mimicked
the reproduction of pages made possible by the technology at hand. Robert Morris, too,
responded to the technology of reproduction, submitting 25 copies of an image of planet Earth,
surrounded by its atmosphere and space beyond. [Image 17.] The repetition of a single image 25
times reinforced the unlimited potential for mechanically reproduced copies.
While Andre and Morris dealt with the Xerox machine’s capacity for multiplication and
reproduction, Douglas Huebler investigated the limits of representation and the relationship
between text and image.
132
His pages included a series of dots, lines and “points,” accompanied
by brief descriptions. [Image 18.] The third page, for example, included 2 dots, labeled points A
and B, along with a description that each point is located 1,000,000,000 miles behind the picture
plane. Turning the page, the reader encountered the same 2 dots, this time explained to be

132
Despite Siegelaub’s original intentions, Xerox Book was not produced using a Xerox machine because
it proved to be too expensive. The first edition was offset printed instead.
http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/siegelaub/. Accessed March 24, 2015.
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located just 1 inch behind the picture plane. On the fifth page, points A and B, still identical as
they appear on the page, no longer exist on the same plane. One is located 1,000,000,000 miles
behind the picture plane, while the other rests a mere inch behind it. Despite visual similarity,
even identicality, the introduction of text alters the viewer’s perception of the image.
Like the Xerox Book, January 5-31, 1969 declared the printed page to be the site of
exhibition. The actual exhibition consisted of both catalogue and installation, located in a
temporary gallery space in midtown Manhattan, but Siegelaub stressed that the catalogue – not
the brick and mortar space – was the primary site of exhibition. Such factors were emphasized in
the design of the installation, related press materials and the works of art on display. Located in
an office building, the two-room installation featured a front room that was mostly bare,
including only a desk and receptionist, couch, table and exhibition catalogue. Works of art were
installed in the second room, beyond a small doorway, which could only be accessed by passing
through the first room and past the exhibition catalogue. The comfortable couch, receptionist and
floor plan beckoned the viewer to peruse the catalogue before entering the second room and
encountering the works of art installed on its walls. A sketch depicting the floor plan identifies
the location of works by Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, and Lawrence Weiner,
installed in the second room, beyond the narrow doorway connecting the two spaces [Images 19
and 20.]
Siegelaub insisted that the catalogue was the principal site of display; it not only provided
the viewer’s initial point of access to the artists and works included in the exhibition as they
entered and moved through the physical space, but it also contained more works of art than were
on display in the building in midtown Manhattan. Furthermore, Siegelaub drove home the
concept of exhibition as catalogue by stressing the temporary and partial nature of the on-site
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exhibition.
133
For example, Douglas Huebler’s Duration Piece #6, with its diminishing pile of
sawdust, spoke to both the temporary nature of the physical installation as well as the capability
of printed space to serve as primary exhibition site. Once the sawdust had been removed, the
photographs over the course of the event paired with a typed description were hung in its place,
offering the photograph as the lasting document in the absence of the temporary installation.
134

The Materiality of the “Dematerialized”
In his critical writing, Honnef prioritized the idea over the material things that help to
convey idea to viewer, but Concept Art’s exhibition in book form reveals another side of the
coin, demonstrating the interconnectedness of the book’s material aspects and the ideas
presented within it. This challenged the notion of a “dematerialized” conceptual art, dwelling on
the materiality of the book and exploring the exhibition space it afforded. Siegelaub’s book
projects operated similarly. In these examples, the physical conveyor of conceptual idea, be it
deadpan photograph or typewritten proposal, became an object requiring close looking and
visual analysis.
Introduced in 1968 by Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, the term “dematerialization”
was invoked to identify a progression away from art objects and toward ideas or concepts in the
last years of the 1960s. Lippard and Chandler argued that art made in the wake of minimalism
moved away from the physical and “emotional/intuitive” process that had previously
characterized art making toward “an ultra-conceptual art that emphasizes the thinking process

133
Press release for January 5-31, 1969. Seth Siegelaub Papers, Museum of Modern Art, I.A.40.
Accessed electronically http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/siegelaub/. March 24, 2015.
134
Floor plan for January 5-31, 1969, c. 1968-1969. Seth Siegelaub Papers, Museum of Modern Art,
I.A.44. Accessed electronically http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/siegelaub/. April 15,
2015. See also, Alberro, 2003.

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almost exclusively.”
135
For Lippard and Chandler, conceptual art was “non-visual” and “post-
[a]esthetic,” focusing entirely on the expression or communication of the idea behind the work in
the most transparent terms possible. Lippard later revised her theory of dematerialization, in the
preface to her 1973 compendium, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966
to 1972, acknowledging that conceptual art is quite often accompanied by very material things,
such as photographs, sketches, lists and the like. “Since I first wrote on the subject in 1967,” she
reflected, “it has often been pointed out to me that dematerialization is an inaccurate term, that a
piece of paper or photograph is as much an object, or as ‘material,’ as a ton of lead. Granted.”
136

She continues, however, to use the term “dematerialization,” insisting that the material residue of
conceptual interventions is a necessary byproduct of the need to disseminate conceptual ideas,
rather than aesthetic material worthy of art historical attention in its own right.
For Lippard, “dematerialization” was tied closely to conceptual art’s rebellion against the
notion of art as commodity. She aligned the politics of conceptual art with the “anti-
establishment fervor” of the 1960s, which perceived a commodity-driven culture guilty of
exploiting the Third World, minorities and women, and promoting the war in Vietnam all for the
sake of maintaining rapid growth in postwar economic markets. Working to dismantle the myths
of originality and authenticity that enabled the commodification of art, conceptual artists
produced art that complicated the idea of a single, genius author. Projects came in the form of
LeWitt’s wall drawings, which could be executed by anyone who had access to the artist’s
instructions, or Lawrence Weiner’s “Declaration of Intent” from 1968,
1. The artist may construct the piece.
2. The piece may be fabricated.
3. The piece need not be built.

135
Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art” (1968), 31.
136
Lippard, Six Years (1996), 5.
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Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition
rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.
137

Statements and projects such as these removed the artist from the center of production, clearing
space for the viewer to create, or choose not to create, as they saw fit. The result, at least in
theory, were not works of art that could be bought and sold for large sums, but the distribution of
the concept at the core of the work of art, unleashed by the artist’s statement or description and
shepherded through production by individual viewers, curators, and anyone else willing to
participate.
Lippard noted conceptual art’s need to connect art with “respectable work... [and] the
working class,” citing examples such as Fredrick Barthelme’s refusal to use the word “art,”
identifying “production” instead as the motivating factor of his practice, and Dennis
Oppenheim’s Directed Seeding – Canceled Crop from 1969.
138
To produce this piece,
Oppenheim cooperated with a Dutch farmer, seeding a wheat field along a line that mimicked the
scaled down route between the field and the nearest storage silo, a pathway that would have been
taken many times by those working the field. In September, the field was harvested in the form
of an X, and the resultant crop was stored rather than processed for food. [Image 21.] Describing
the project in the third issue of the German artists’ magazine Interfunktionen (1969), Oppenheim
made connections between labor, production, aesthetics and communication.
139
The project was,
he wrote, “directed towards a core network involving every permutation (from planting to

137
Published in January 5-31, 1969 catalogue.
138
Barthelme wrote, “I do not agree that by putting something in an context one admits to making
… I do not like the word . I do not like the body of work defined by the word . What I do like is the
notion production. I produce in order to pass the time.” Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” Six Years, xix-xx.
139
This description appears alongside a photograph of Directed Seeding-Canceled Crop in the third issue
of the Cologne-based artists’ magazine, Interfunktionen (1969), which is the subject of Chapter 2. Dennis
Oppenheim, “Untitled,” Interfunktionen, no. 3 (1969), 32. Directed Seeding-Canceled Crop appears for a
second time in the fourth issue of Interfunktionen (1970) as well. Interfunktionen, no. 4 (1970), 2.
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distributing the product). The aesthetic effect of the interaction will permeate the range in which
it deals: communication outside the system will come in the form of photographic
documentation, excursion, and an annual report.”
140
Oppenheim’s Directed Seeding – Canceled
Crop thus makes labor the focus of the work of art, while also negating the production of a
viable commodity. Furthermore, it establishes avenues of communication, including
photographs, discursive writing and the assembling of facts and figures, as framing devices for
the display of the work’s aesthetic aspects. When the project appeared again in the subsequent
issue of Interfunktionen (1970), Oppenheim’s accompanying description amplified the alignment
between the labor of production and aesthetics he had previously made. He now presented modes
of production that refused to result in a saleable commodity as a metaphor for unrealized visual
potential. Describing the process of cultivating the land as one of “mining” for paint, Oppenheim
claims the following, “In this case the material is planting and cultivating for the sole purpose of
withholding it from a product-oriented system. Isolating this grain from further processing
(production of food stuffs) becomes like stopping raw pigment from becoming an illusionistic
force on canvas.”
141
His later statement performs the work Lippard charged conceptual art with
doing, disconnecting artistic labor from the production of commodities and toppling aesthetic
aspects from their position at the apex discourse around works of art.
Despite these aspirations, Lippard lamented a failure of conceptual art’s rebellion against
the commodity. She shared this sentiment with Ursula Meyer, a colleague and interlocutor of
hers in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Both found the task at hand, the dissolution of art’s
commodity status, to be too tall an order in an environment driven all too vehemently by the
circulation of goods. In a December 1969 conversation between Lippard and Meyer, Lippard

140
Ibid.
141
“Dennis Oppenheim,” Interfunktionen, no. 4 (1970), 2–4.
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predicted that the art world, which “depends so greatly on objects that can be bought and sold,”
would, in no time, “absorb conceptual art as another ‘movement’.”
142
Just four years later, in
1973, Lippard noted the art market’s swift acceptance of conceptual art and corresponding
willingness to pay money for the seemingly banal residue of conceptual projects, such as “a
Xerox sheet referring to an event past or never directly perceived, a group of photographs
documenting an ephemeral situation or condition, a project for work never to be completed,
words spoken but not recorded.”
143
Meyer, too, noted the swiftness with which collectors were
willing to dole out cash for works of art that had been expressly intended to exist outside the
economic exchange of goods. A “voracious art market,” Meyer wrote, “will not leave any form
of art alone, even those that rebel against the very establishment that is eagerly snapping them
up.”
144
Material documents that had seemed so innocuous in their cheap ephemerality and plain
visual language just a few years prior were now coveted art objects like so many paintings and
sculptures before them.
Lippard and Meyer bemoaned the supposed “failure” of conceptual art to enact the shift
from objects that could be bought and sold to the dissemination of information, noting the quick
coopting by economic forces of conceptual art’s attempts at cheapness and transparency to the
idea. Looking to the visual aspects of the material presentation of such ideas, however, reveals
that these objects were not in contradiction with the communicatory goals of conceptual art,
despite the increasing vigor with which collectors began to purchase them. Instead, as the
photographs, scores, and the like solidified into objects that could be bought and sold, they more
often than not enabled the distribution of ideas to larger audiences. Particularly within the space

142
Lippard, Six Years (1996), 7–8.
143
Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” xxi.
144
Meyer, “The Eruption of Anti-Art,” 130–131.
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of a compendium, where they joined other works of art assembled by an editor, material
documents facilitated a dialogue among various works of art, furthering discourse around
conceptual art’s departures from previous methods of art making and exhibition. Perceived in
this way, the materiality of documentation is understood as neither secondary to the idea nor
detrimental to conceptual art’s ability to investigate the idea in art, but rather as a critical
component of the work of art, one that allowed it to function and participate in a world built for
material objects.
Returning to Oppenheim’s Directed Seeding-Canceled Crop, this time through its
photographic representation on page 62 of Honnef’s Concept Art, the function of material
documentation to facilitate both distribution and discourse through visual and editorial tactics
employed around its presentation becomes clear. The photograph reduces the dynamic work of
art to a static image, boiling down the labor of several people, the natural maturation of the
wheat crop, weather patterns, and the specifics of location, into a single, aestheticized
photograph that traces the gentle S-curve of the directed seeding from an aerial perspective.
[Image 22.] The image appears in Concept Art without any explanatory information describing
the entirety of the project it represents. In this way, the presentation of Directed Seeding-
Canceled Crop occludes a host of information pertinent to Oppenheim’s project, and therefore
might easily be understood as a substandard depiction of Oppenheim’s original project.
However, within the pages of Concept Art, the single photograph of Directed Seeding-Canceled
Crop does more than simply represent an event occurring outside the book’s covers. It brings
Oppenheim’s project into conversation with other works of art, capitalizing on the photograph’s
ability to function as a stand-in for the 1969 event and utilizing its materiality by quite literally
inserting it into a context established through the relationship among various works of art
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represented across multiple pages. The photograph not only allows Directed Seeding-Canceled
Crop to reach a wider audience, but also encourages connections between Oppenheim’s projects
and those of others. These connections highlight some of the central questions of conceptual art,
including the relationship between live event and material documentation.
Appearing opposite the Oppenheim photograph, on page 63, is a reproduction of the
cover of Art & Project’s Bulletin 14, produced by Joseph Kosuth in November 1969. Founded
by the Dutch gallerists Geert van Beijeren and Adriaan van Ravesteijn in 1968, Art & Project
referred to both a gallery and its accompanying publications, published between 1968 and 1989.
From the start, van Beijeren and van Ravesteijn were committed to the collection and
distribution of ideas in printed matter.
145
Fittingly then, Art & Project the journal emerged as the
duo’s primary endeavor, eclipsing the gallery both the size of its audience and the amount of
artwork presented. This became the case for a variety of reasons. Art & Project the gallery
occupied several out-of-the-way locales, including its initial exhibitions in a private home in
Amsterdam’s residential Zuid district and a temporary postal address in Tokyo.
146
The gallery’s
refusal to send official announcements or hold openings for exhibitions made it even more
difficult to find its remote locations. In lieu of invitations, Art & Project’s Bulletins were sent to
an international mailing list of 400, with an additional 400 copies available for pick up at the
gallery. The Bulletins thus reached a much larger audience than the exhibitions held in the
gallery’s various buildings. Originally meant to distribute information about the exhibition, the
Bulletins soon developed into works of art themselves, produced by artists invited by the gallery
in conjunction with exhibitions that were exceedingly brief, small and sometimes did not exist at

145
Art and Project, Bulletin 001, 1968.
146
Rini Dippel, “Art & Project: The Early Years,” in In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art,
1960-1976, 23-34 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009).
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all in the physical gallery.
147
In this way, Art & Project blurred the boundary between printed
material and works of art, suggesting not only the interchangeability of the two, but also the
primacy of the former over the later.
Facing the photograph of Oppenheim’s Directed Seeding-Canceled Crop is a
reproduction of the cover of Art & Project Bulletin 14, produced by Joseph Kosuth and titled
“Art as Idea as Idea.” This Bulletin and corresponding exhibition, which took place in a private
home between November 22 and November 30, 1969, featured examples of Kosuth’s dictionary
definitions by the same title. [Image 23.] With these definitions, exhibited as Photostats mounted
on board, Kosuth explored linguistic tautologies, suggesting that art was about the idea behind it
rather than any physical object that might serve as the material manifestation of that idea.
148

Honnef’s presentation of Art & Project’s Bulletin 14, along with an example of Kosuth’s Art as
Idea as Idea, which appears on the following page, exemplify conceptual projects that, while
prioritizing the idea behind the work of art, utilize printed material to establish and distribute that
idea.
Art & Project Bulletin 14 and the photograph of Dennis Oppenheim’s Directed Seeding –
Canceled Crop appear back to back in the “Documentation” section of the compendium, a
section dedicated to the publication of notable conceptual projects through whatever material
means possible, whether that be photographs, reproductions from journals or typed artists’
statements. In contrast with the third section of the book, Honnef’s exhibition of original works
of art made for presentation on the page in book form, the “Documentation” section was
intended as a space for the collection and display of works of art that were either referenced

147
Ibid.
148
Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy.”
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directly by, or supplemental to, Honnef’s introductory essay.
149
The photograph of Directed
Seeding-Canceled Crop published in Concept Art allows the project to participate in the
discursive work done by Honnef’s book, which attempts to categorize, historicize and
contextualize conceptual art. Through its photograph, Directed Seeding-Canceled Crop joins a
chorus of other works of art assembled by Honnef, including Art & Project Bulletin 14. In this
way, the photograph does not detract from the conceptual aspirations of the original intervention,
including statements on labor and the commodity, but instead allows it to participate in a
discourse larger than itself, connecting with other works of art across the book’s various pages
and contributing to the formation of broader claims about the upheavals enacted by conceptual
art.
The presentation of conceptual artworks such as Directed Seeding-Canceled Crop and
Art & Project’s Bulletin 14 in the compendium enabled their juxtaposition with other works of
art and distribution to a larger audience, but it also required that the idea take residence on the
printed page. Within the pages of a book, documentary materials solidified into objects. Tables
of contents, pages to be turned and thick bindings exacerbated the materiality of the pages, and
comparisons across works of art revealed a shared aesthetic of seemingly deadpan photography,
simple type writing, sequences and geometric forms. Producing books, which corralled and
collected various examples of conceptual art, these authors had to contend with the apparent
discrepancy between conceptual idea and the physicality of the printed page. Invoking Kosuth’s
Information Room as an example in the introduction to Conceptual Art, Ursula Meyer argued
that the presentation of conceptual ideas through material forms facilitated rather than detracted
from the pure idea. Information Room, first installed in 1970, consisted of two large tables placed

149
Email conversation with Klaus Honnef, January 22, 2015.
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in a room, surrounded by chairs. The tables are covered with books, mostly linguistic
philosophy, along with copies of Kosuth’s own Investigations. [Image 24.] All of these things
were material indeed, but, according to Meyer, the art was located not in their physical
placement, their proximity to one another or the appearance of the room, but in the intellectual
mingling of the ideas included in the various books, suggestive of Kosuth’s own thinking
process. “Information Room allows us to partake in the artist’s cogito ergo sum,” Meyer
claimed.
150
The viewer is invited into the mind of the artist, revealed in the juxtaposition of the
various texts. This characterization of the artist’s mind as the place where a work of art resides,
coupled with a faith in the mind of the viewer to digest and comprehend the information on view,
recalls Klaus Honnef’s characterization of conceptual art discussed above, wherein the mind is
understood as both an organ of organization and the primary site across which conceptual art
plays out.
Meyer’s description of the Information Room offers a useful model for making sense of
the compendium format, as the collection of materials within the compendium operate in a
manner similar to Kosuth’s gathered books and essays. The reader is invited to meander through
the content, making intellectual connections of his or her own while contemplating the artistic
motivations behind in each piece and the editorial decisions about what to include and how to
organize it all. Equally important in both Information Room and the compendium is the notion of
a collection. While each contribution brings to the table or book its own questions and
conclusions, it is when the individual pieces are perceived together that they are best capable of
elucidating a larger set of themes pertaining to the umbrella topic, which is conceptual art in the
case of Meyer’s book and linguistic philosophy in Kosuth’s project. Stressing the collection as

150
Meyer, Conceptual Art, xi.
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the vehicle through which meaning is assembled and perceived allowed editors of compendia to
curate chosen material, marshaling it toward an argument without overtly imposing their own
critical voice. This allowed the compendium to coexist with the conceptual mandate that artistic
idea be presented directly and clearly to the viewer, all while carving out space for the critic to
continue to participate in discourse around conceptual art.
The book is certainly a material object, one steeped in economic value as a thing to be
bought and sold, but it is also a tool for communication and the dissemination of ideas. The
idiosyncratic ways in which authors such as Klaus Honnef, Ursula Meyer and Lucy Lippard
compiled and regarded their compendia illuminate the changing terrain around objects, ideas and
communication in this period. All three understood the conceptual artworks included therein to
be actual works of art rather than simple documentation. Honnef described Concept Art as an
exhibition of sorts, while Lippard understood Six Years as a mode of criticism. Ursula Meyer’s
work, both as sculptor and critic, investigated the relationship between materiality and the idea,
revealing that the two are not at odds. In fact, her work shows that it is often through the
materiality of the object, dramatically pronounced and unavoidable as it is in her modular
sculpture, that the conceptual idea becomes most comprehensible to the viewer. The visual
rhetoric of conceptual art’s materiality emerges as relevant to the distribution of the idea at stake,
rather than detrimental to it.
The exploration of the book as exhibition site through compendia such as those of
Honnef and Meyer are just one component of efforts to reconfigure the distribution and display
of art in the late 1960s. Conceptual art, due to its very nature, caused critics, curators, and
gallerists to turn to new methods for the presentation of conceptual ideas and non-objects. In
their efforts to facilitate the transfer of information from work of art to viewer, Honnef and
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Meyer (along with Siegelaub, Lippard and a host of others) investigated the book as distributory
channel, reimagining the ways in which this might be done. They moved away from didactic,
explanatory texts, turning to strategic juxtapositions and a sensitivity to visual rhetoric to activate
the space of the page, turning it into a dynamic space of exhibition. The following chapter turns
to the artists’ magazine, investigating the ways in which it was utilized similarly, as a space for
the documentation and dissemination of works of art that evaded material form in a manner that
aimed to uphold and transfer to the viewer those aspects central to the original work of art.

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Chapter 1 Images

Image 1. Sol LeWitt, [no title], 1973

Image 2. Sol LeWitt, Incomplete Open Cube, 1974

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Image 3. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (1967), p. 80

Image 4. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (1967), p. 81

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Image 5. Douglas Huebler, Duration Piece #6, 1968

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Image 6. Ursula Meyer, Xerxes, photographed appearing in the Christian Science Monitor,
Monday, February 26, 1968, p. 8.
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Image 7. Ursula Meyer, Dedalus, photograph appearing in The Sunday Star, Washington D.C.,
October 20, 1968, p. G-4.

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Image 8. Dan Graham, Schema, in Ursula Meyer, Conceptual Art, 1971, pp. 129-130.

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Image 9. Robert Barry, Inert Gas Series, 1969, in Ursula Meyer, Conceptual Art, 1971, p. 34.

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Image 10. Robert Barry page spread, in Ursula Meyer, Conceptual Art, 1971, pp. 34-35.

Image 11. Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965
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Image 12. Douglas Huebler, Variable Piece Nr. 11, in Klaus Honnef, Concept Art, 1971, pp.
114-120.

Image 13. Sol LeWitt, Plan Für Ein Konzept Kunst Buch, in Klaus Honnef, Concept Art, 1971,
pp. 132-140.
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Image 14. Lawrence Weiner, Overturned, in Klaus Honnef, Concept Art, 1971, pp. 152-160.

Image 15. Seth Siegelaub, Xerox Book, 1968
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Image 16. Carl Andre in Xerox Book, 1968

Image 17. Robert Morris in Xerox Book, 1968

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Image 18. Douglas Huebler in Xerox Book, 1968

Image 19. The first of two galleries at January 5-31, 1969, showing the receptionist, couch and
table on which the catalogue was available for viewing.
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Image 20. Floor plan for January 5-31, 1969 installation.

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Image 21. Dennis Oppenheim, Directed Seeding – Canceled Crop, 1969

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Image 22. Dennis Oppenheim, Directed Seeding – Canceled Crop, 1969

Image 23. Joseph Kosuth, Untitled (Art as Idea as Idea), 1967
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Image 24. Joseph Kosuth, Information Room, 1970-

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Chapter 2

Sensation in Body and Mind: The Documentation of Land Art in Interfunktionen

Ten miles northeast of Overton, Nevada, Michael Heizer’s Double Negative cuts into the
eastern rim of the Mormon Mesa. Consisting of two hollowed out trenches facing one another
across the eroding edge of the mesa, it is 1500 feet long from end to end, each trench 50 feet
deep and 30 feet wide. [Image 1.] Notoriously difficult to find and ever changing, subject to
wind, sun and rain, Double Negative exemplifies the organic ephemerality at the heart of land
art, an art historical category descriptive of works of art made with natural elements including
soil, rock, water and grass, and valuing the transitory, eroding event over the fixed product of an
artist’s studio. Furthermore, it demands an embodied, present viewer, invited to meander through
its trenches, tracing with fingertips the striations that mark the trench walls and kicking along the
pebbles that settle on its earthen floor.
For those who have sought to make sense of Double Negative, the insufficiencies of its
photographic documentation pose a central problem. Take, for example, Hank Hine, whose 1990
Artforum article on Heizer’s work begins as follows,
“Those who have ‘seen’ Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, 1969-70, have likely seen
the grainy aerial view reproduced on the cover of the 1984 catalogue from the Los
Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Here the perspective delivers the long stroke of
excavation in a glance, fixing its inscription across the Nevada desert landscape. But to
stand by the actual sculpture, to view it from the ground it is made of, to walk around it
and to walk through it, offers another perspective entirely, one informed by the distances
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you must cross to experience this now 20-year-old earthwork face-to-face. For
earthworks are, by definition, manipulations of land, not of film emulsion.”
151

Lamenting the frequency with which viewers undoubtedly “see” Double Negative by way of its
photographic documentation, Hine decidedly situates earthworks in the earth, insisting that the
marks they instill upon its surface are emphatically not replicated in the photographs registering
their contours. As such, viewing an earthwork like Double Negative through a photograph leaves
a great deal of important information out. Despite his dissatisfaction with the medium, however,
Hine’s article appears alongside photographs he took of the trenches himself, during a visit to the
site one year prior. [Image 2.] His images, seven in total, capture Double Negative from various
angles. Two are taken from above, the other five snapped from within the trenches. Of these five,
one offers an extreme close-up, and is printed as a full bleed, black-and-white photo over which
three other, thumbnail-sized pictures are overlaid. Even while reflecting on the insufficiencies of
photography’s ability to transmit the most essential information about Double Negative, Hine
favors the semblance of information photographs provide over the complete absence of any
pictorial representation, turning reluctantly to the photograph as the best option for recording and
disseminating the earthwork beyond the limits of its remote location.
Hine’s conflicted attitude toward the photography of land art, his choice to include
images while calling attention to the areas in which they inevitably fall short, is but one example
of the complex relationship between earthworks and efforts to record them photographically.
152

151
Hank Hine, “Desert Song,” Artforum Vol. 28, No. 6 (Feb 1990): 119.
152
For others, see, Mark C. Taylor, “Rend(er)ing,” in Michael Heizer: Double Negative, eds. Richard
Koshalek and Kerry Brougher, 12-22 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1991) and Michael
Kimmelman, “Art’s Last, Lonely Cowboy,” The New York Times, February 6, 2005, E33. See also,
Robert Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatan,” Artforum Vol. 8, No. 1 (September 1969):
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While earthworks benefit from – even rely on – the transmittable and tangible photographs that
record them, those photographs compromise many of the defining aspects of the original,
cancelling its remoteness, fixing its changing surfaces, and selecting an ideal viewing angle.
Artists and critics alike were concerned with questions about the limits and possibilities of
documentation during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and recent scholarship continues to
problematize the relationship between land art and efforts to record it.
153
Furthermore, Hine’s
strategic use of the photographs – the layering of one over the other, the pairing of details with
wide-angle shots, and the movement between small photographs and enlargements – is
emblematic of a common editorial attempt to manipulate the limits of photography in relation to
earthworks, suggesting that whatever essential component is missing in each photograph can
perhaps be alluded to through creative play with coupling, cropping and collaging.
154
[Image 3.]
The photographic documentation of earthworks is the subject of this chapter, which
presents a complex, double-sided relationship between earthworks and the photographs that
document them. On the one hand, photographs are understood as inherently at a loss, incapable
of registering embodied, phenomenological experiences onto a two-dimensional, fixed surface.
On the other, photography presents an ideal medium for the documentation of earthworks, its
aerial capabilities, supposedly indexical relationship to reality and ease of distribution appear

28-33. Nine color photographs depicting mirrors placed throughout the landscape accompany Smithson’s
essay. Together, the essay and photographs contend with the framing and cropping of a landscape through
photography. Smithson’s project is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3 of this dissertation.
153
Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp, “Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson,” Avalanche I (Fall
1970): 48-71. Roy Bongartz, “It’s Called Earth Art – and Boulderdash,” The New York Times Magazine,
February 1, 1970, 16-17, 22-26. Dave Hickey, “Earthscapes, Landworks, and Oz,” Art in America Vol.
59, No. 5 (September-October 1971): 40-49. Tom Holert, “Land Art’s Multiple Sites,” in Ends of the
Earth: Land Art to 1974, eds. Miwon Kwon and Phillip Kaiser (New York: Prestel Publishing, 2012), 96-
117.
154
For an elaborate version of this strategy, see Richard Koshalek and Kerry Brougher, eds. Michael
Heizer: Double Negative (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1991), discussed below.
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perfectly suited for bringing remote and ephemeral works of art to a wider audience. This chapter
insists on a middle ground, attending to the aesthetic function of these documents themselves. By
dwelling on strategies of presentation, namely the editorial decisions, inclusions and omissions
that structure the appearance of these photographs in printed form, the potential for photographic
documentation of earthworks to enable a reconstitution of the embodied viewing made possible
by the original becomes apparent. To this end, documentary materials are understood not as
secondary to the original, nor as less effective at transmitting the affective aspects of the original,
but instead as tools for generating anew for the viewer components central to the work of art,
such as an awareness of the relationship between one’s body and the landscape along with the
ephemerality of natural things. This chapter begins by establishing the subject’s role in surmising
meaning from works of art as a paradigmatic component of earthworks, and then looks to how
this is attended to in efforts to document earthworks, before exploring theories of the cognitive
process being discussed in Germany in the late 1960s and ultimately addressing the
documentation of land art alongside such discussions. The West German artists’ magazine,
Interfunktionen, serves as case study, chosen for the interconnections it facilitates among media,
reception theory, and international exchange.

Photography and Land Art
The question of photography in relation to earthworks came up as a topic of conversation
in a group interview conducted by Willoughby Sharp and Liza Bear and published in the New
York based artists’ magazine, Avalanche, in the fall of 1970. Interviewed alongside Robert
Smithson and Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Heizer claimed that photographs could potentially
offer “a precise way of seeing works,” maintaining that under certain circumstances, the
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photograph might allow the viewer to “experience to a greater depth whatever view you have
been presented with.”
155
In the context of Hank Hine’s layering of details and panoramic shots,
thumbnails and full-bleed images, Heizer’s proposal appears promising. [Image 3.] Photography
allows for views of the earthwork not possible in situ, such as the comparison of different
fragments viewed side by side, expansive aerial shots, and play with color and scale.
Dennis Oppenheim was less optimistic, stating in the same Avalanche interview, “I’m not
particularly an advocate of the photograph.”
156
Earlier that year, Oppenheim had parsed the
difference between what he termed the “main work” and “pictures,” for Ray Bongartz of The
New York Times Magazine. Associating the earthwork with an experience of looking marked by
the passage of time and a physical relationship with natural surroundings, Oppenheim
understood “pictures” to be mere reductions of this experience, simplified for maximum
communicability in the media. They flattened and halted the in process, ephemeral nature of land
art, always only crude derivatives of works of art dependent upon embodied viewing at a
particular moment in time. No amount of editorial creativity could intimate these intangible,

155
Bear and Sharp, 70. Heizer contradicts himself elsewhere, stating, “All you have to do [in order to
understand his work] is just be there,” privileging site-specificity and embodied viewing over and above
any optimal point of view or fine detail a photograph can make visible. John Gruen, “Michael Heizer:
‘You might say I’m in the construction business’,” ARTnews Vol. 76 (Dec 1977): 99.
Michael Heizer made photographs of his own work, experimenting with the medium and its relationship
to his interventions into the earth. Cobbling together a series of snapshots taken the length of Double
Negative, Heizer’s Double Negative Planar Interior (1970) brings the vastness of the sculpture down to
an exhibitable size, while at the same time calling out the myriad vantage points made possible by such a
large expanse of space. This followed a similar project in Munich, Germany, Munich Rotary Interior
(1969), in which Heizer stood in the center of an excavated pit, turning 360 degrees while snapping
photographs of the wall of dirt surrounding him on all sides. See Sam Wagstaff, “Michael Heizer’s use of
photography,” in Sculpture in Reverse, ed. Julia Brown (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art,
1984), 72-75 and Gilles A. Tiberghien, Land Art (Paris: Carré, 1993), 241ff..
156
Bear and Sharp, 70.
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unfixable components integral to the earthwork, what Oppenheim called its “esoteric”
elements.
157

To the same question of the relationship between photography and earthworks, Robert
Smithson replied only, “Photographs steal away the spirit of the work…” trailing off into an
ellipsis.
158
“Spirit,” Smithson’s analog for Oppenheim’s “esoteric,” suggests the presence of
something that escapes the lens of the camera, something Smithson insists cannot be registered
onto a photographic surface the way the contours, lights and shadows of the earthwork can be.
The spirit of the work demands an embodied and reflective viewer. On this aspect of Smithson’s
work, Robert Hobbs has written, “aesthetic apprehension takes precedence over mere looking in
an object; it becomes a dialectical experience that takes into consideration thinking as well as
looking, and context as well as isolated object.”
159
In other words, the experience of viewing
Smithson’s work is one that oscillates between seeing and thinking about what is seen. For this
reason, mapping the visual elements of the earthwork onto the surface of a photograph
insufficiently captures it, in that it relies too heavily on the object of the work of art and fails to
facilitate the dialectic between observing and comprehending that the earthwork initiates.
Tom Holert notes the absence of this “dialectical experience” in the aerial photographs of
land art so frequently employed to illustrate the remote works of art, such as those found in Life
magazine’s 1969 article on land art, “What on Earth!,” by David Bourdon, or Artforum’s 1969,

157
Bongartz, 27. See also, Dennis Oppenheim, “Interview, March 29, 1969” in Recording Conceptual
Art, edited by Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001),
23.
158
Bear and Sharp, 70.
159
Robert Hobbs, “The Works,” in Robert Smithson: Sculpture, 108 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1981).
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“The art of Michael Heizer.”
160
[Image 4.] The aerial photograph finalizes the form of the
earthwork by artificially halting erosion, changes in weather or time. Furthermore, it sets forth an
ideal perspective on the earthwork, suggesting the existence of a whole that can be glimpsed
from the omnipotent aerial eye of the camera lens, rather than allowing for the countless angles
from which an individual subject might take in its vistas. In these ways, the ubiquitous aerial
photograph functions in ways that directly oppose the dialectical push and pull between
observation and reflection.
Insisting that photographs are nothing more than a disappointing and incomplete stand-in
for something much more dynamic is unsatisfying, however, especially given the abundance of
articles on land art within the press and the simple fact that photography is the means by which
most people encounter this work. As Tom Holert has shown, the popular media was captivated
by land art, which emerged alongside a “fascination with the panoramic view from above” in the
shared imagination, evidenced by the 1969 publications of Beaumont Newhall’s Airborne
Camera and William Garnett’s aerial photographs in The American Aesthetic.
161
Furthermore,
satellite images and air travel, both increasingly accessible throughout the 1950s and 60s,
changed the way the world was viewed. No longer a conceptual idea outside the scope of human
perception, it was now understood, as Marshall McLuhan noted, as an “object contained in a
man-made environment.”
162
[Image 5.] This fascination with aerial imagery was joined by a

160
Tom Holert, “Land Art’s Multiple Sites,” in Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, eds. Miwon Kown
and Phillip Kaiser, 96-117 (New York: Prestel Publishing, 2012). David Bourdon, “What on Earth!,” Life,
April 25, 1969, 80-86. “The Art of Michael Heizer,” Artforum Vol. 8, No. 4 (December 1969): 32-39.
161
Holert, 102.
162
Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Jacques Barzun, “Exploration of the Ways, Means, and Values
of Museum Communication with the Viewing Public: A Seminar Held on October 9 and 10, 1967,”
sponsored by the Museum of the City of New York and the New York State Council on the Arts (New
York, 1967), 9, as quoted in Holert, 103, who uses covers of The Whole Earth Catalogue to illustrate this
concept. This had ramifications for sculpture according to Lucy Lippard, who identified a shift form
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widespread conviction that photography offered the capacity to make images of things and views
that were otherwise invisible, either because they were too remote or because the view required a
super-human eye, hovering above the site, beyond the limits of human physicality.
163
Despite
protests by the artists (such as those published in Avalanche), art historians and critics celebrated
what photography had to offer. “Now there is an art form ideally suited to presentation via
magazine,” wrote Dave Hickey in a lavishly illustrated article on earthworks appearing in Art in
America in 1971.
164
Nancy Foote praised “photography’s flawless credibility record in swearing
to the truth” of the existence of works of art located beyond the physical presence of its
viewers.
165
This unconditional trust in the veracity of photography and celebration of the
otherwise impossible vistas it enabled allowed magazines such as Artforum, Art in America, and
Life to function, in Tom Holert’s words, not only as “media of reactive reception,” but to act “as
(not always welcome) coproducers of the phenomenon.”
166
In other words, by publishing
countless, abundantly illustrated articles documenting and discussing land art, the popular media
and art press alike not only shaped popular consciousness about the appearance of earthworks,
but reinforced belief in an ideal viewing angle and the trustworthiness of the camera’s eye. This
prioritization of visual appearance over the intangibility of an embodied, sensory engagement
with a constantly transforming site appeared to dramatically curtail earthworks, halting the

verticality to horizontality currently occurring in sculpture as a “logical result of the jet age” in the
introduction to her exhibition catalogue, 557,087 (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 1969). Satellite imagery
was referenced by Gerry Schum, as well, in Land Art, a made-for-television exhibition that is the subject
of Chapter 3.
163
Arguing that the camera supplied a view of land art beyond the limits of human physicality, the
German art critic Klaus Honnef wrote that the camera inserted an “until then unusual vehicle of
information” between the work of art and the viewer. Honnef’s ideas and writing are the subject Chapter
1. Holert, 106.
164
Hickey, 48.
165
Nancy Foote, “The Anti-Photographers,” Artforum Vol. 15, No. 1 (September 1976): 50.
166
Holert, 100.
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dialectical relationship between seeing and thinking about what is seen, between vision and
reflection, and between perceiving and comprehending.
167

In 1991, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles published Michael Heizer:
Double Negative, a book dedicated expressly to Heizer’s desert sculpture, including more than
fifty pages of full bleed, color photographs. The plethora of photographs and the multiple
viewpoints and abundant details the offer, suggest a strategy for disseminating the remote and
ephemeral trenches to readers by including as much visible information as possible.
168
In his
review of the catalogue, Marc Trieb explored the effectiveness of such a strategy.
169
Drawing on
the work of Jonathan Crary, Trieb figured the book’s reader as an active participant in the
making of meaning from the photographs published within its pages.
170
This is to say there are
no a priori, essential aspects of Double Negative located only at the site of the trenches
themselves. Rather, the earthwork’s meaning emerges from an active process of perception,
reflection and interpretation on the part of the viewer, a process that can analogously transpire
through the act of perusing the photographs published in the catalogue. Treib’s approach values
not only the photographs themselves (which he believes constitute the artwork itself, “certainly
as cerebral stimuli”), but the book’s design and layout too, insisting that the development of a

167
For the artists, it was not always necessary that their earthworks existed in any way beyond the remote
location where they had constructed them. On his decision not to photograph a recent piece, Heizer
commented in Life magazine, “I wanted the work to exist only for itself. I saw it, and three or four others
saw it, so it satisfied the demands of being visible.” Bourdon, 86.
168
Koshalek and Brougher, Michael Heizer: Double Negative, 1991. Despite the editor’s best efforts to
capture as many visual aspects of the trenches as possible, Michael C. Taylor claims in the catalogue’s
only text that Double Negative can only truly be seen from within. Taylor, “Rend(er)ing,” 13.
169
Marc Treib, “Frame, moment and sequence: the photographic book and the designed landscape,”
Journal of Garden History Vol. 15, No. 2 (Summer 1995): 126-134.
170
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19
th
Century
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). Crary identifies a pivotal moment in the early 19
th
century, when
conceptions of meaning shift away from something that exists external to the viewer and toward
something that is rendered meaningful through active observation by the viewer, observation which
entails both perception and interpretation.
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visual narrative through the succession of photographs plays a significant role in the meaning a
reader can construct.
171
For Treib, the graphic designer is the creator of a mise-en-page, not
unlike the cinematic mise-en-scène constructed by a film director, which shapes and gives
meaning to the filmic narrative.
172
Within the space of a photographic book, Treib asserts, the
work of art is not only represented visually, but also produced by the reader through the process
of reading and comprehending.
The publication of Double Negative in the seventh issue of the Cologne-based artists’
magazine Interfunktionen (1971) provides the opportunity to work through the function of
photography to enable an viewing experience that highlights the difference between viewing the
work of art in situ and through the photograph, prompting the viewer to oscillate between
looking and thinking about looking. Double Negative is presented by a single photograph,
looking at the abutting trenches from above, at a roughly 45-degree angle with the earth.
173

[Images 6 and 7.] The inexpensive copy provides a greyscale version of the trenches, muddling
the desert shrubbery, pebbles and dust to the point that making sense of the photograph requires
close looking and careful parsing.
174
A man stands at the edge of one of the trench walls,
providing some scale for the vastness contained in an image measuring roughly seven by nine
inches. The presence of his tiny body calls out the distance between the trenches and the
magazine’s reader by dramatizing the difference between his view of Double Negative and the

171
Treib, 130.
172
Ibid, 131.
173
Friedrich Wolfram Heubach, ed., Interfunktionen 7 (September 1971): 49.
174
Interfunktionen was cheaply printed for both aesthetic and practical reasons. The magazine was part of
an effort to challenge the pristine and expensive art object, and therefore took on the aesthetic of the
cheaply printed ephemera frequently accompanying non-object based art. In practical terms, Heubach
funded much of the printing himself, aided by donations from friends and colleagues and use of the
facilities at the University of Cologne, where he was first a student and later a professor. Interview with
F.W. Heubach, May 13, 2012.
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perspective offered by the photograph. The reader sees Double Negative from above, as if
hovering in a helicopter, while the body in the photograph stands at the edge of one of the
trenches, viewing the massive abyss between the two with the dramatic drop crumbling just
beneath his feet. Miniscule atop the trenches, his slight body is difficult to make out at first; the
flash of sun against his back contrasts with the shadows of his lower body and creates a pattern
that mimics the shrubbery in the background. He blends in with the environment, engulfed by the
vastness of the trenches, which are framed as the central subject of the composition.
The view from above the trenches granted to the reader of Interfunktionen contrasts with
the embodied view the reader imagines for the figure in the photograph, one marked by gusts of
wind, fear of falling, the smell of earth, and a blazing desert sun. This contrast asserts a distance
between the experience of viewing the trenches first hand and that of viewing the image,
distinguishing this photograph from other aerial photographs of land art, which feature no such
figure, such as Heizer’s Dissipate #8 and #1/3, published two years prior in the December 1969
issue of Artforum. [Images 8 and 9.] The Artforum photographs adopt the aerial view so
common in the popular press, championed for its ability to offer a view impossible in embodied
form, the only way to see the earthwork in its supposed completeness. To do this, they must
perpetuate the myth of an omnipotent eye and ideal viewing angle, turning the aerial image into a
“display object… fostering a nondialectical, decontextualized mode of looking.”
175
Implying an
ideal viewing angle and fixing the earthwork at a certain moment, aerial images such as these
foreshorten the ephemerality of the natural landscape and suggest that transmitting the visual
contours of the earthwork through the medium of photography is an effective way to disseminate

175
Holert, 104.
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information about the earthwork, collapsing the subjective, embodied experience a viewer would
have at the site into the appearance of the earthwork from the sky.
This is not the case with the Interfunktionen image. Here, the photograph establishes a
discrepancy between an embodied encounter with Double Negative and the experience of
viewing the earthwork through the camera’s lens. The blurry, indistinct forms in the photograph,
the particular angle from which the viewer is granted access to the trenches, and the inclusion of
the viewing body within the frame all work to establish this distance. This imposed space
between the original earthwork and the limits of the photograph enables a dialectic between
looking and reflecting on the conditions of looking, one that reconstitutes the contingency of the
original earthwork (in the words of Smithson and Oppenheim, its “spirit,” or “esoteric” aspects)
for the viewer, by alerting him or her to the relativity and subjectivity of meaning itself. The
photograph becomes a tool for contemplation, rather than a mere record of something located
elsewhere.
This photo is not unique to Interfunktionen, but as I will argue through discussions of the
history of the magazine and the ambitions professed by its makers, the particular conditions of its
inclusion call attention to the embodied act of looking and the individual reader’s understanding
of meaning. Interfunktionen offers the opportunity to read the documentation of conceptual and
land art against the backdrop of its German reception, where postwar concerns about the
individual’s capacity for critical thought as well as efforts to theorize the acts of reading and
comprehending shaped a discursive framework around the dissemination of works of art that
called attention to individual cognition and encouraged viewers to become aware of their role in
creating meaning. Awareness of the instability of meaning was at the heart of Interfunktionen’s
project, central to the goals of its makers who were dedicated to the distribution of art that
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counted viewer participation among its moving parts. Interfunktionen pressed documentation
beyond the limits of its materiality, tapping into and capitalizing on its affective potential.

The history of Interfunktionen
Interfunktionen was created in response to the fourth documenta (1968), the fourth
iteration of a recurring exhibition series set in Kassel, West Germany. By 1968, the progressive
democratic and pedagogic goals documenta had espoused in its early days appeared to be
waning, overcome by the impulses of a booming art market, which favored American examples
of Pop art and post-painterly abstraction.
176
For the makers of Interfunktionen, this was evidence
of problems stirring in the systems of distribution through which art reached its public, systems
that promoted certain forms of art making over others and, in so doing, actually hampered the
production of forms of art less favorable to established distributary channels, namely the
museum, gallery and exhibition. Interfunktionen was created as a venue for the display and
distribution of art that existed outside of the demands of such structures of display.
177
Enabling
the presentation and communication of works of art that existed in forms other than painting and
sculpture, the magazine participated in the establishment of new forms of art making that
prioritized discourse, ideas and the individual viewer. In so doing, the magazine developed the
role of the document, pressing it beyond the scope of its visual accord with an event or thing and

176
The term “post-painterly abstraction” comes from an exhibition organized by the American critic
Clement Greenberg for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964. It refers to painting in the wake
of abstract expressionism (or “painterly abstraction” as Greenberg calls it), namely a fluid handling of
paint that allowed for “openness and clarity” on the canvas. Artists working in this style include Ellsworth
Kelly, Morris Louis, and Frank Stella, each of whom enjoyed prominent representation at the fourth
documenta. See Clement Greenberg, “Post-Painterly Abstraction” in The Collected Essays and Criticism,
Vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-69, ed. John O’Brian, 192-197 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993).
177
Heubach cites these three systems of distribution in the opening essay for Interfunktionen 1, “Die
Documenta oder kommt Kunst von konsumierien,” Interfunktionen 1 (1968), 3.
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emphasizing the ways in which it generated opportunities for critical thought and an awareness
for the relationship between body and mind in the act of viewing.
The first documenta, organized by Arnold Bode and Werner Haftmann in 1955, had
sought to restore international modernism to the public after its violent removal from view and
defamation under National Socialism.
178
Paintings and sculptures by artists including Wassily
Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso (many of which
had been expressly denigrated in Hitler’s Entartete Kunst exhibition of 1937) were displayed in
an effort to demonstrate genealogies connecting postwar abstraction with an international
modernism that had been castigated under Nazi rule.
179
While the installation at Entartete Kunst
had been frenetic, with works of art jumbled together and defamatory language scrawled on the
walls behind them, Bode’s presentation at documenta was decidedly more serene, inviting
reflection rather than motivating shock and distaste. [Images 10 and 11.] As Bode explained in
the press materials, the aim of the exhibition was to demonstrate “which works and which artistic
positions formed the point of departure for what we now call contemporary art.”
180
As such,
documenta demonstrated an effort not only to sever postwar artistic production from Nazi-era
cultural policies, but also to establish contemporary art in direct opposition to fascist aesthetic
ideals.
181

The artistic genealogies put forth by the curatorial team were articulated through Bode’s
idiosyncratic method of display, described as Inszenierung, or the creation of a mise-en-scène.

178
Roger M. Buergel, “The Origins” in 50 Jahre Documenta, 1955-2005, ed. Michael Glasmeier, 173-
180. (Göttingen, Steidl, 2005). documenta was not founded as a periodic exhibition. The original title of
what has since come to be known as documenta was “European Art of the Twentieth Century.” See
Buergel, “The Origins,” 174.
179
Buergel, “The Origins,” 176.
180
Ibid, 175.
181
Letter written by Arnold Bode, addressed to the mayor of Kassel pitching his idea for the exhibition.
Documenta Archiv, Kassel, Germany. Documenta 1, Folder 16.
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These strategies included the use of everyday materials such as plastic sheeting, hung to divide
gallery spaces and filter light, and the display of paintings atop metal pedestals set in front of
walls. [Image 12.] This last tactic infused the paintings with corporeality and pressed them into
the viewer’s space. The goal of Bode’s Inszenierung, according to Roger M. Buergel, was to
“[abolish] the separation of subject and object,” encouraging viewers to acknowledge the
“relation between individual existence and its surroundings.”
182
In this way, Bode’s first
documenta participated in the more far-reaching efforts to rebuild and redefine cultural and
social terms in the aftermath of the Third Reich, establishing post-war art historical narratives
while also encouraging Germans to be cognizant of their role within society and in relation to
others.
183
President of the Federal Republic, Theodor Heuss expressed his hope that the
exhibition would provide the means through which “a damaged or endangered community can
make a recovery.”
184
Documenta’s efforts to facilitate this recovery included the communication
of an “ethical and aesthetic lesson” concerned with a renewed attention to the relationship
between an individual and his or her surroundings.
185
The exhibition’s founding principles thus
promised a postwar break in both cultural production and consumption alike, marked by a new
prioritization of a subjectively aware method of viewing, one that would encourage the viewer to
be conscious of his or her physical and cognitive relationship with the work of art and the
context – spatial, political, historical – within which it was being viewed.
186

182
Buergel, “The Origins,” 178.
183
For more on the formation of new social and cultural identities for postwar West Germans, see Erica
Carter, How German is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman (Ann
Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997) and Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a
Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
184
Theodor Heuss quoted in Buergel, “The Origins,” 173.
185
Ibid, 175.
186
It should be noted how distinct the exhibition strategies and works of art I am focusing on here are
from Nazi art, which stressed monumentality and permanence. Efforts by documenta’s organizers to
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The exhibition was popular far beyond expectations (130,000 visitors saw the exhibition
during its two-month run), and Bode received a great deal of congratulatory affirmations of the
exhibitions success in achieving its professed goals.
187
Bode and Haftmann organized a second
documenta in 1959, continuing their efforts to restore to view art that had been defamed under
National Socialism and to imbue the act of viewing with an awareness of subjectivity, while
expressly connecting abstraction to freedom. In his opening speech, Haftmann proclaimed,
“Modern art is motivated… by the basic impulse of freedom.”
188
Following on the heels of the
first documenta, which Bode and Haftmann had positioned as an educational opportunity “for the
young generation, for its still unknown painters, poets, thinkers, so that they can see what ground
has been prepared for them and what there is to manage and what there is to overcome,” this new
impulse toward abstraction emerged as the single way of the future.
189
These promises began to
teeter in the third and fourth documentas, however, as Bode and Haftmann struggled to maintain
this monolithic celebration of abstraction at the exclusion of other forms of art making. While the

emphasize embodied viewing and subjectivity, together with the temporariness that I am stressing with
respect to land art and works of art that require documentation to enable their circulation and distribution,
stand in striking opposition to Nazi art, which favored the monumentality and permanence offered by
neo-classicism. See, for example, sculpture by Arno Brecker as discussed in Jonathan Petropolous, The
Faustian Bargain: the Art World in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), and of
course the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition), held in Munich in 1937. See
also, “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, ed. Stephanie Barron (Los
Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New York: Abrams, 1991). In the aftermath of the Third
Reich, critiques of the Nazi aesthetic were put forward by several artists, including Bernd and Hilla
Becher’s typological photography and Lutz Dammbeck’s appropriation of Arno Brecker’s sculpture in his
films and paintings. See Andreas Huyssen, “Figures of Memory in the Course of Time,” in Art of Two
Germanys: Cold War Cultures, ed. Stephanie Barron, Sabine Eckmann and Eckhart Gillen, 224-239,
(Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2009; New York: Abrams, 2009). In the same
volume, see also, Peter Weibel, “Repression and Representation: The RAF in German Postwar Art,” 256-
259 and Svea Bräunert, “The RAF and the Phantom of Terrorism in West Germany,” 260-272.
187
“Museum Fridericianum als Ausstellungsbau. Eine zerstörte Stadt sucht Dauerzweck: bestimmung für
ein einmaliges Gebäude,” Hessische Nachrichtung, Nr. 31, Saturday, 6 February 1954. Letters from Dr.
Ulrich Gertz, a German art historian, and Ilse Sellner, intendent of the Landestheater Darmstadt.
Documenat Archiv, Kassel, Germany. Documenta 1, Folder 7B.
188
50 Jahre Documenta, 190.
189
Ibid, 172.
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slogan of the 1959 documenta had been “Art has become abstract,” in 1964 it was the more
proscriptive “Art is what important artists do.”
190
By the fourth documenta in 1968, the
exhibition organizers’ myopic vision for abstraction as the way of the future was untenable.
Aware of this, Bode and Haftmann sought to correct their shortsightedness by turning away from
genealogies and toward the most up-to-date trends in contemporary art, calling the fourth
documenta, “the youngest documenta ever” in reference to the age of its included artists.
191

For many young artists, however, the curatorial program of the fourth documenta
appeared overly market-driven, bypassing trends in contemporary art in favor of art that
commanded high prices on the market, such as the Pop art paintings of Roy Lichtenstein, Andy
Warhol and Claes Oldenburg, which dominated the main exhibition hall.
192
American artists
represented one third of the total roster, positioning New York as an important art center, but
representing the American avant-garde only in terms of Pop art, minimalism and post-abstract
expressionist painting, including the hard-edge paintings of Larry Bell and Ellsworth Kelly, and
the color field canvases of Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella.
193
Conceptual art, performance art,
and Fluxus were nowhere to be found, a sign to discontents that art less suited for the
commercial sphere was not on the radar of the documenta committee.
194
Completely absent too
were contributions by the German Zero Group, German land and performance artists, and
evidence of a renewed interest in the figure in German painting, such as the canvases of Sigmar
Polke, A.R. Penck, and Georg Baselitz, artists who had met considerably less commercial

190
Ibid, 190 and 210.
191
Ibid, 233.
192
Martin Engler, “Twilight of the Gods: Documenta in Times of Change,” in 50 Jahre Documenta, 234-
237.
193
Engler, “Twilight of the Gods,” 235.
194
The artists group “Operation,” discussed below, along with the makers of Interfunktionen, were among
these discontents.
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success at this time than had their American counterparts.
195
Documenta 4 appeared not only to
ignore changing attitudes toward the object of art, but, in the words of Martin Engler, “credited
contemporary German art with no very innovative qualities” when compared with their
American peers.
196
In light of the ethics of intersubjective relationships and more inclusive art
historical genealogies insisted upon at the first documenta, the fourth seemed to subvert the
exhibition’s critical ambitions, succumbing to booming art market trends while overlooking art
that existed outside of the market’s grasp, less capable of being distributed through galleries and
museums.
Younger German artists perceived these inclusions and omissions as indications of the
unchecked growth of capitalism and the complacency and dearth of criticality it enabled.
197

Documenta, which had in its earliest days promised to make art available to the populace and, in
its most recent iteration, claimed to include the most cutting-edge art within that promise,
seemed to be failing at its mission, omitting significant groups of artists and forms of art making
when they fit less easily into the systems of display and distribution relied upon by galleries and
museums. Seeking to account for these omissions, the artist group “Operation” organized a
program to be held at the Museum Fridericianum in the aftermath of documenta 4. They invited
“all young artists working in the fields of space, environments, objects, all those who work with

195
Engler, “Twilight of the Gods,” 237.
196
Ibid.
197
Uta G. Poiger, “Imperialism and Consumption: Two Tropes in West German Radicalism,” in Between
Marx and Coca-Cola: Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, 1960-80, eds. Axel Schildt and
Detlef Siegfried, 161-172 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006). S. Jonathan Wiesen, West
German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past, 1945-1955 (Chapel Hill: The University of North
Carolina Press, 2001). On the spread of American capitalism and consumer goods into West Germany in
the aftermath of the so-called Wirtschaftswunder, or “economic miracle,” see David F. Crew, ed.
Consuming Germany in the Cold War (Oxford: Berg at Oxford International Publishers, Ltd., 2003) and
Selling Modernity: Advertising in Twentieth-Century Germany, eds. Pamela E. Swett, S. Jonathan
Wiesen, and Jonathan R. Zatlin (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
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images, sound, light, film and kinetics” to participate.
198
The event was covered extensively and
favorably in the press, demonstrating the presence of an audience for such art.
199
Wolf Vostell
was another artist particularly upset by the last minute removal of his multi-media performance,
long slated for inclusion.
200
Together with several other artists, including Jörg Immendorff and
Chris Reinecke, Vostell organized a Happening to be staged at the documenta 4 press
conference. The artists stormed the press conference, dumping a bag of loose change in front of
the documenta council, calling it a “symbolic donation,” while Immendorff smeared honey over
the microphones and Reinecke hugged and kissed surprised members of the curatorial committee
and press. Wearing yellow armbands customarily worn by the blind, the group hoisted a banner
that read “Prof. Bode, we, the blind, thank you for this pretty show,” mocking documenta’s
ambitions to survey the current state of art making, and the uncritical (or “blind”) visitors to
whom such ambitions appeared to appeal.
201

Included within this group of artists was twenty-four-year-old Friedrich Heubach, a
psychology student with a deep fascination with art, particularly works of art that challenged the
viewer’s perception of reality. Heubach, who had turned to psychology because he wanted to see
the world from a different perspective (he “wasn’t convinced of the rational world”), saw a
similar potential in art.
202
Interested in the psychology of perception, Heubach understood art to

198
Press release written by Ursula Warnke, member of “Operation,” announcing the program, July 7,
1969. Documenta Archiv, Kassel, Germany. Documenta 4, Folder 55.
199
“Wer macht mit? “Operationen” in Kassel,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, no. 123 (May 30, 1969):
14; “Teilnahme erwünscht,” Die Zeit no. 22 (May 30, 1969): 20; “Operationen im Fridericianum,”
Süddeutsche Zeitung, no. 130 (May/June 1969) 21; “Eine Art Interims-documenta: ‘Operationen’ jünger
Kunstler im Museum Fridericianum,” Hessische Allgemeine, no. 124 (May 31, 1969). Documenta Archiv,
Kassel, Germany. Documenta 4, Folder 55.
200
Christine Mehring, “Continental Schrift: The Story of Interfunktionen,” ArtForum Vol. 42, No. 9 (May
2004): 179.
201
Mehring, “Continental Schrift,” 179-180.
202
Interview with F.W. Heubach. May 13, 2012.
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be a vehicle for questioning reality and a subject’s perception of it.
203
A student in Cologne,
Heubach spent a great deal of time in nearby Düsseldorf, where avant-garde investigations were
taking place at the Art Academy, including the formation of the LIDL Akademie, a university-
like collective that facilitated alternative artist and political activities. Heubach was an early
member of the LIDL Akademie, and a co-founder of LABOR, an organization of artists,
musicians and filmmakers dedicated to investigating new possibilities for visual and acoustic
presentations.
204
It was out of these relationships, and the turbulence around the fourth
documenta, that Interfunktionen was born, intending to document the problems that had emerged
at the fourth documenta, and to provide a venue for the display and distribution of the kind of art
that had been so blatantly absent at the exhibition.
205

The Happening staged at the press conference, later called the “Honey-Blind Action,”
was documented in the first issue of Interfunktionen through photographs, typed and handwritten
plans, and a humorous exchange between the city of Kassel and Reinecke, after the city imposed
a fine of 27 DM for the removal of honey stains left behind. This format of documentation was
repeated throughout the magazine’s twelve issues. Heubach included one-time events, musical
experiments, conceptual projects and performances, all under the title “scenic forms” (szenische
Formen), a term that suggested the displacement of formal concerns with scenes or events. These
works of art were translated from ephemeral event or object-less idea into the format of a
magazine through the publications of notes, scores, drawings, photographs, and

203
Interview with F.W. Heubach. May 13, 2012.
204
Mehring, “Continental Schrift,” 180.
205
“We didn’t sit down to create a magazine. It developed out of the quarrels over documenta. We
thought, we’ll make a document,” recalled Heubach, quoted in Mehring, “Continental Schrift,” 179.
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correspondence.
206
The particular ways in which these documents were deployed within the
pages of Interfunktionen pressed them beyond mere records of information, allowing them to
function as conduits that recreated, or generated anew, viewing experiences analogous to those
possible at the original event, encouraging the viewer to be mindful of his or her role in forming
an understanding of the work of art distributed by the magazine.
For Heubach and his collaborators, Documenta’s blind spots were more than
disappointing lapses at the hands of an aging curatorial team. They were systemic indications of
problems afoot in the display and distribution of art. Interfunktionen’s first issue opened with an
essay written by Heubach, titled “Documenta, or art arises out of consumption,” in which he
argued that the definition and contours of art have always been shaped by the limits imposed
upon it by its means of distribution and methods of consumption. In art’s current condition, these
structures were largely the gallery, museum and exhibition, systems Heubach called art’s
“corporate forms of communication.”
207
He wrote, “If the museum, gallery and exhibition are
the only possibilities for art to be distributed, the art necessarily becomes oriented around and
based on the structures of these intermediaries, expressing their volition.”
208
The result of this,
Heubach asserts, is that art naturally conforms to the structures through which it is most
effectively distributed. Because museums, galleries and exhibitions are set up to best
accommodate paintings and sculptures, artists make mostly paintings and sculptures and the
viewing public encounters mostly paintings and sculptures. As a result, art that does not conform
to these norms of distribution, or refuses the “curtailing effects of the market,” not only risks
reaching a smaller audience, but often is never made in the first place. “It stands to reason,”

206
Heubach, “Die Documenta oder kommt Kunst von konsumieren,” Interfunktionen 1 (1968), 3-7.
Translations are my own.
207
Ibid, 3.
208
Ibid.
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Heubach continues, “that an art that is not bound by the constraints and pressures of the
established forum of communication (for example, a Happening) has no access to the market…
[and] staying out of the market limits communication and distribution.”
209
The absences and
omissions at the fourth documenta were thus evidence of “fundamental problems” in the
structural systems that dictate the making of art and its distribution to an audience. In an effort to
correct these systemic shortcomings, Interfunktionen’s contributors worked to create the
discursive space where experimental projects and burgeoning ideas for social and political
reform could be collected and disseminated. Understanding the photograph as a field through
which the instability of meaning could be transferred to the viewer rather than as a direct
reflection of an event, Interfunktionen pushed documentation beyond its materiality, allowing it
to function both as witness to the indeterminacy of meaning and as an organ for the viewing
subject’s role in constituting that meaning.
Heubach and his collaborators believed that broadening the existing structures of
distribution to include avenues for the display and communication of works of art that did not
lend themselves easily to display in a gallery or museum setting would enable nothing short of
the opening up of new possibilities for art making. “It can be argued that, today, the established
communications forms for art (museum, gallery, exhibition) inhibit rather than promote its
development,” Heubach wrote.
210
It was within Interfunktionen’s pages that this would be
corrected, where ephemeral, performative and conceptual art projects could be disseminated
through their documentation. Contributions by mostly American and German artists appeared
alongside argumentative essays dealing with such topics as economic markets, art education, and

209
Ibid.
210
Ibid, 4.

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politics. The first issue circulated in an edition of 120, and circulation numbers grew to around
1,000 over the course of its life. Artists working on both sides of the Atlantic, including Joseph
Beuys, Dan Graham, Jörg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer, and Robert Smithson, appeared in the
pages of the magazine.
What makes Interfunktionen so relevant within the frame of this project is the particular
ways in which documentation was put to work throughout its pages. While documentation was
indeed crucial for the distribution of these “scenic forms” (Heubach’s term for works of art
articulated in media other than the traditional objects of painting and sculpture), its role in
Interfunktionen was not simply to represent an original event or intervention. Interfunktionen
capitalized on a liminal space of exchange created between document, original, and reader,
problematizing the acts of looking and comprehending, and drawing the reader’s attention to the
role of his or her own critical thought in the construction of meaning. The word chosen for the
title – roughly translating to “Inter-functions,” and described by Heubach as referencing a
relationship of in-between-ness (“zwischen Bezeihung”) – suggests the importance of the space
between ideas, events, and perspectives.
211
Furthermore, the historical moment out of which the
magazine emerged was one marked by an insistence that art is not only an object, but the
“intentions, possibilities, relations” existing among objects and subjects alike, between objects
and their conditions of production, and between objects and their viewers.
212
Within the pages of
Interfunktionen, documentation of art that refused or subverted the status of objecthood
highlighted a gulf between the document and original event, capitalizing on the space between to
usher the reader toward an awareness of the imaginative work he or she must do to make sense
of what is pictured in the magazine. This is the case with examples throughout the magazine’s

211
Interview with F.W. Heubach, May 13, 2012.
212
Ibid.
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twelve issues, in the documentation of performances, festivals, musical scores, conceptual
projects and more.
Given the problematic relationship between photograph and earthwork outlined above,
the magazine’s strategy is particularly evident in the case of land art. The documentation of land
art established in the pages of Interfunktionen utilized this “space between” by insisting on the
distance between viewing the earthwork in situ and via a photograph, and developing the
reader’s awareness of this distance into an awareness of his or her individual capacity to form
meaning. In this way, Interfunktionen and the documents that comprise its pages help to move
our understanding of documentation beyond the scope of its visual or informational
correspondence with reality. Documentation becomes a vehicle through which the subjectively
experienced themes underscored by the original intervention – which might include embodied
viewing in an expansive space, an awareness of the passage of time, or the limitations of
photographic documentations – are reconstituted for the viewer through the act of looking, rather
than merely represented on a page. Given the concerns out of which Interfunktionen was born,
infusing documentation with the potential to transmit these themes within land art, transforms
our understanding of the document from simplified and belated record into something alive with
the components central to the original event.

Interfunktionen 3
Michael Heizer appears earlier in Interfunktionen, striding across the cover of the
magazine’s third issue, photographed against the backdrop of the Coyote Dry Lake in
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California’s Mojave Desert.
213
[Image 13.] Referred to by Heubach as the magazine’s “Land Art
issue,” Interfunktionen 3 features photographs of earthworks by Jan Dibbets, Michael Heizer,
Richard Long, Walter De Maria, Dennis Oppenheim, and Robert Smithson, interspersed with
articles and excerpts clipped from periodicals such as Artforum, Die Zeit and the Saturday
Evening Post.
214
Accompanying this collage of text and image are longer essays, brief
paragraphs and ambiguous poems that theorize land art, attending to its art historical, historical
and political points of contact.
The poems provide an obscure textual counter to the photographic images, while a text
by German publisher Lutz Schirmer takes a more essayistic approach to the characterization of
land art.
215
Schirmer meditates on the proliferation of technology throughout the lived experience
of the modern world, noting an irony in the artistic return to the earth coterminous with such
technical advancements as the moon landing and the development of the personal computer.
Schirmer makes a case for the fierce interrelatedness of technology and the use of the earth as
artistic material. Like Marshall McLuhan, Schirmer identifies the moon landing as pivotal, for
only in travelling beyond the earth’s atmosphere had it become possible to look back on the

213
Friedrich Wolfram Heubach, ed., Interfunktionen 3 (1969). Several of Heizer’s works from 1968 to
1969 were situated within the Coyote Dry Lake. Interfunktionen titles this one simply “Coyote,” and
repeats the cover image within the same issue of the magazine. While they document the same work of
art, the two images appear in Interfunktionen as the mirror image of one another. In an interview with
Heubach, he explained to me that he flipped one of the images to make for a better cover. This is one
example of many in which Heubach made artistic choices in the construction of the magazine, pointing to
the importance of its aesthetic value above and beyond its documentary role. Interview with F.W.
Heubach, May 13, 2012.
214
Interview with F.W. Heubach May 13, 2012.
215
Lutz Schirmer, “Zur Land Art,” Interfunktionen 7 (1969): 2, 6, 7, 9. Schirmer was a German publisher
and friend of Friedrich Heubach’s. He contributed a great deal to the early issues of Interfunktionen and
served as an important connector between Heubach and American artists and gallerists, including John
Gibson, Dan Graham, Dennis Oppenheim and Andy Warhol. It was through Schirmer and Gibson that
Heubach learned of land art in the first place, and many of the photos included in Interfunktionen are
courtesy of John Gibson’s New York gallery. Schirmer was especially helpful with this third issue
(specifically the section on land art) and the section on the Lidl Academy in the second issue, and his
name appears in the masthead to credit his involvement. Interview with F.W. Heubach, May 13, 2012.
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planet as a distinct object.
216
This newly possible conception of the Earth as a discrete object
alerted artists to the potential for sections of land or earthen formations to be conceived of
similarly as autonomous things. Schirmer refers to the “Duchampian aesthetic of the object,”
noting Duchamp’s identification of the found object as a work of art, supplanting the act of
making art with that of naming something already extant, “art.” Schirmer extends this new
perspective of the Earth as an object to landscapes or sites, which also come to be understood as
discrete things capable of being named art objects.
217

For Schirmer, it is a problem that these interventions into the land do not endure in
material reality and can only be attested to through photographs. Object and concept thus
become confused, as the earth, newly understood as a discrete object itself, becomes the site for
object-less works of art. Schirmer locates earthworks within a history of German landscape
painting, in which the emotions or impulses of the mind have long been connected to nature.
218

In so doing, he argues that land artists, through the marks they have dug into the landscape, have
changed the landscape itself so that it takes on a more conditional meaning, charging the
beholder with the task of bridging the distance between his mind and the matter of the earthwork,
resulting in the transubstantiation of nature into aesthetic object.
219
Finally, but crucially,

216
McLuhan, Parker, and Barzun “Exploration of the Ways, Means, and Values of Museum
Communication with the Viewing Public: A Seminar Held on October 9 and 10, 1967,” 9.
217
Schirmer, “Zur Land Art,” 6-7. Schirmer offers no clarification of what he means by the “Duchampian
aesthetic of the object,” but it can be inferred that he is referring to Marcel Duchamp’s work with found
objects, identified as art simply on the basis of the artists’ statement, “this is art.” See Thierry De Duve,
Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). De Duve argues that Duchamp and his legacy enacts
a shift away from a Kantian system of judgment that identifies art as such on the basis of aesthetic value,
and toward a new process of judgment that asks simply, “is this art?” This fundamental change in
aesthetic understanding engenders, for De Duve, entirely new terms for the reception and theorization of
modernist art.
218
On German Romanticism, emotions and nature, see, for example, Helmut Börsch-Supan, Caspar
David Friedrich (1973), trans. Sarah Twohig (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1990).
219
Schirmer, “Zur Land Art,” 7.
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Schirmer addresses the fleeting nature of these works. Rather than making claims to
timelessness, these works are designed to be transient, to demonstrate impermanence.
220

Schirmer closes his essay by warning against the dangerous pressure to fix these works in some
manner so that they might reach an audience, a warning especially apropos in the context of
Interfunktionen, which appears to document what for Schirmer is the utterly un-documentable.
Schirmer’s essay appears on pages two, six, seven and nine, interspersed with
photographs of works by Walter de Maria. Spliced among the pages of Schirmer’s essay is a
three page spread featuring de Maria’s project, titled Two Lines on the Desert, from April 1968.
Known elsewhere as Mile-Long Drawing, the work depicted in the photograph was originally
executed by Walter de Maria in the Mojave Desert in California, a prototype for an earthwork
planned but never completed. Walls in the Desert would have consisted of two mile-long walls
erected in the path laid out by the chalk lines in the photograph.
221
The uncompleted project
along with the short-lived chalk marks that sketch out its plans now exist only through their
photographic documentation. On the first page, a man is pictured crouching down on a dry and
cracking desert floor, his body large against a mountain range, the latter dwarfed by its distance
from the camera lens. [Image 14.] A white string extends forward from his shadowy body,
jutting out across the picture plane and extending beyond its fame. Turning the page, the reader
encounters and unfolds a two-page spread to find two white lines stretched across the desert
floor, receding into the mountainous background like perspectival lines in a drawing. [Image 15.]
The lines function to map the recession of space into the distance while simultaneously
abstracting it, dividing and flattening the desert floor into three triangular fields. The reader’s eye

220
Ibid., 9.
221
Josef Helfenstein, ed., Walter de Maria: Trilogies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 11.
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is invited to flip back and forth between the illusion of spatial recession and flattened geometric
shapes.
This play between the illusion of perspective and the flatness of the page calls attention to
the distinction between place and photograph. Just as the photographs of Michael Heizer’s work
in Interfunktionen 7 had alerted the reader to the dissimilarity between viewing the earthwork in
situ and via a photograph, these photographs of Walter De Maria’s unrealized project invite the
reader to meditate on the role played by the camera lens in circumscribing and altering the
appearance of the earthwork, as it translates the original into two-dimensions and imposes an
arbitrary border, determined by the limits of the camera’s lens and the edge of the page.
Importantly, and like the Heizer photographs, these photos do so while also enabling an
experience of viewing akin to an embodied encounter with the place photographed. While clearly
different than trekking across the desert floor, the act of turning the page, of folding out the
double leaf, of the optical sensation of a shift between flattened geometric shapes and
perspectival illusion, all enable a viewing experience that echoes the embodied one at the site,
making the reader aware of the relationship between his or her body and the page, between the
work of art and his or her comprehension of it
This experience continues beyond the frame of the foldout image, as the reader turns the
page between first and second photograph. In the first image, the reader encounters the crouching
figure, holding one end of a string that extends down, exiting the frame of the picture in the
bottom center and thus addressing the body of a reader whose presumed reading position would
place her right there. [Image 14.] Turning to the second image, this one spread across two pages
that need to be folded out in order to be viewed, the reader now finds a body-less image that also
addresses the reader’s position vis-à-vis the photograph. [Image 15.] Pointing to a vanishing
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point in the center of the photograph, the white lines stretch out to accommodate the reader’s
position, as if she were standing behind the camera lens. Flipping between the first image and the
foldout one that follows it, the reader is invited to imagine the process of stretching strings across
the desert landscape. Initially positioned as if holding the string, and then, through the flip and
fold out of a page, gazing into the distance covered by two white lines. The viewer is thus
encouraged to reflect on the process of mapping central to this project, along with the expanse of
space covered and the physical movement required in its production.
These two photographs beckon for the viewer’s interaction, both on a physical level,
through the turning of the page and folding out of the double-page spread, as well as on an
intellectual one, through the imagining of the process of charting the dry desert floor with the
string. Spliced between the pages of Schirmer’s essay, which focused on the productive
confusion of object and subject in earthworks, the invocation of the viewer’s intellectual and
physical involvement in the documentation of de Maria’s work pushes the document beyond
mere record of visual information. Instead, process, physical movement, and changes in
perception across time and space become themes underscored by both the original and its
documentation. While Schirmer understood the dualism of mind and matter as central to the
motivation of earthworks, and warned that their documentation would not capture this crucial
aspect, Interfunktionen’s presentation of these photographs suggests an attempt to challenge
these perceived limits of documentation, pressing it beyond visual record to enable a dialectical
oscillation between looking and thinking about looking.

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Land Art in Germany and Rezeptionsästhetik
Recent scholarship on land art has challenged previously held assumptions of the
movement as a primarily North American entity, calling attention to noteworthy examples of the
practice on the European, Asian, and African continents. Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon’s
2012-2013 exhibition, Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, accounted for the variety of
geographic and international problems with which land artists wrestled, identifying complex
goals that reached far beyond a critical rejection of art world institutions. Emerging from this
scholarship is the international exchange fostered by land art projects that existed simultaneously
on (and within) the soil and exhibition spaces of more than one place. Examples include Michael
Heizer’s “Isolated Mass/Circumflex” 1 and 2, executed four years apart, first in the Nevada
desert and then on the grounds of the Menil Collection in Texas, or Walter de Maria’s “Earth
Room,” which consisted of 1600 cubic feet of dirt covering the floor at the Galerie Heiner
Friedrich in Munich in 1968 and was displayed simultaneously at the Dwan Gallery’s
Earthworks show in New York City, this time in the form of a photograph.
222
[Images 16, 17,
18.] These examples point to the ways in which earthworks, at once so rooted in the specifics of
their locational identities, were reiterated across geographic and national boundaries and
articulated through a variety of media.
223

The German art historian and critic Laszlo Glozer identified De Maria’s 1968 exhibition
at Galerie Heiner Friedrich as the event that established land art’s ability to move trans-

222
On the Dwan Gallery show, see Grace Glueck, “Moving Mother Earth,” New York Times, October 6,
1968, D3. On the discrepancy between site-specificity and international potential in his work, Heizer
states, “The point of the Munich Depression at the time was that it could be built anywhere in the natural
world… By exposing its materials, this sculpture became an analysis of its place.” Michael Heizer,
“Interview with Julia Brown,” in Michael Heizer: Sculpture in Reverse, exh. cat, 32 (Los Angeles,
Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984).
223
On the myths and problems of so-called site-specificity, see Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another:
Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).
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Atlantically. Having covered the exhibition for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 1968,
Glozer recently revisited his initial impressions, noting the “radically new aesthetic statement”
made by De Maria’s work, and the ensuing reconfiguration of sculpture around the inclusion of
natural materials such as “a sand heap, an open fire, stripped plaster, felt and fat.”
224
The
reverberations of de Maria’s exhibition helped shape subsequent landmark shows, including
Harald Szeemann’s “Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form” which would open in
March 1969, as well as Szeemann’s documenta 5 three years later, in 1972. For Glozer, gallerists
such as Heiner Friedrich in Munich and Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf were instrumental in
bringing American artists to German audiences, effectively “establishing a platform for emerging
American art long before it was recognized in its own country.”
225
This is borne out in the pages
of Interfunktionen, where heavy hitters of American land art, including Walter De Maria,
Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim, and Robert Smithson, are frequently featured, and also in
the exhibition histories of Heiner Friedrich’s and Konrad Fischer’s galleries, where American
artists such as Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly made their
European debuts.
226

Kaiser’s and Kwon’s exhibition, and the scholarship accompanying it, goes a long way
toward establishing a more international context for land art, and in so doing complicates

224
Laszlo Glozer, “Land in Sicht? Minimal Art von Walter de Maria – Ausbruch in die Wüste”
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung October 17, 1968, 8. Laszlo Glozer, “On pure dirt, pure earth, pure land:
a European perspective on the beginnings of land art,” in Ends of the Earth: Art of the Land to 1974, eds.
Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon, 172-177 (New York: Prestel Publishing, 2012). These exhibitions, and
their bearing on the documentation and distribution of land and conceptual art, are the subject of Chapter
4.
225
Laszlo Glozer, “On pure dirt, pure earth, pure land,” 175.
226
For a list of exhibitions at Galerie Heiner Friedrich, see Stephan Urbäschek, “Anhang V:
Ausstellungsverzeichnis Galerien Freidrich,” in Dia Art Foundation, Institution und Sammlung 1974-
1985 (Marburg: Edition Wissenschaft/Kunstgeschichte, 2003). See also Julienne Lorz, “The Case of
Munich, 1968-1972” in Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, 163.
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earthworks to account for the various locational, political and social contexts with which they
engaged.
227
Interfunktionen is one avenue through which this international dialogue was fostered.
The magazine brought American land art to German audiences, and, in its distribution in the
United States, brought German discourse such as Lutz Schirmer’s to American audiences.
228

Artists’ magazines like Interfunktionen proved to be a generative place for the distribution of
works of art and writing on art in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with numerous examples
cropping up in countries around the world.
229
At the same time, theoretical texts dedicated to an
interpretation of the relationship between works of art and their viewers surfaced within the
pages of these magazines. Notable examples include Umberto Eco’s Opera Aperta (1962), Susan
Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” (1964), and Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author”
(1967). These essays proposed theories of cognition in the act of reading or looking which
rethought the relationship between viewing art (or reading literature) and perceiving its
meaning.
230
Eco argued that texts are open, dynamic fields of meaning, engaged psychologically
with the reader, and that the meaning of language depends on the context in which it was
presented. He described the open text as one that enables an exchange between the reading mind
and language, establishing its meaning from this dynamic interplay rather than from strictly

227
On the political and social conditions of the display of land art in Munich, see Julienne Lorz, “The
Case of Munich,” in Ends of the Earth: Art of the Land to 1974, 160-171.
228
Interfunktionen was distributed to an American readership through Heubach’s contacts in New York,
including the gallerist John Gibson. Distribution numbers varied for each issue, and exact numbers are
unknown, but Heubach’s contacts in the United States ensure that there was an American readership,
however small or circumscribed it may have been. Interview with F.W. Heubach, May 13, 2012.
229
Notable examples include Dé-Coll/age (1962-1969), Aspen (1965-1971), 0-9 (1967-1969), Art &
Project Bulletin (1968-1989), Art-Language (1969-1989), Avalanche (1970-1976), and The Fox (1975-
1976). For a much more thorough list of artists magazines produced around the world between 1945-
1989, see Gwen Allen, “Appendix: A Compendium of Artists’ Magazines from 1945-1989,” in Artists’
Magazines, 227-313.
230
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image Music Text, ed. Stephen Heath, 142-8 (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1977). Umberto Eco, The Open Work (1962), trans. Anna Cancogni. (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1989). Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and
Other Essays, 3-14. (New York: Picador, 2001).
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within the text. Barthes famously asserted that the reader must ignore the identity and
convictions of the author when he or she reads a given text. The result is the liberation of the text
from a narrow interpretation based on the principles of the author, and its opening up to multiple
possible meanings which arise out of the reader’s interaction with it.
231
Like Eco and Barthes,
Sontag took issue with the process of interpretation, arguing that an obsession with interpretation
is predicated on the assumption that form and content are distinct, with content being essential
and form mere accessory. Interpretation falsely assumes that a work of art is created in terms of
its content, and takes for granted aspects such as form, structure and the ways in which it appeals
to the reader’s senses. The pervasiveness of these works is demonstrative of a certain milieu,
one concerned with the contingency of meaning and the subjective processes through which it
was made. Interfunktionen certainly operated within this realm. Barthes’ essay first appeared in
the 5
th
/6
th
issue of Aspen, an experimental American artists’ magazine published coterminously
with Interfunktionen (1965-1971), and the makers of Interfunktionen have named Sontag’s essay
as an influential source for their conceptualization of the magazine.
232
Interfunktionen’s
distribution of land art beyond its geographic boundaries therefore coincided with a multi-

231
Jacques Derrida is yet another voice in this conversation. See Jacques Derrida, Speech and
Phenomena, and other essays on Husserl’s theory of signs (1967), trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978); Derrida, Writing and Difference (1967), trans. by David B. Allison
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973); Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967), trans. by Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
232
Benjamin Buchloh, editor of the final two issues of Interfuntkionen, cites Sontag’s essay as formative
in the development of Interfunktionen in “Experimental Magazines and the International Avant-Gardes,
1945-75,” Roundtable held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 11, 2006, accessed
November 26, 2013, http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/17/123. Gwen Allen groups Aspen
and Interfunktionen together as two examples of a genre of artists’ magazines emerging in the 1960s,
defined by the experimental strategies they employed to discuss and disseminate artwork, utilizing the
magazine format and the space of the page as alternative sites of display. See Gwen Allen, Artists’
Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2011).
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disciplinary investigation into the subjective process of reading, perceiving and comprehending
that took place in large part within the pages of artists’ magazines.
While figures such as Sontag, Barthes, and Eco were challenging the fixity of textual
meaning and pointing out the limitations of interpretation, Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser
were developing the concept of Rezeptionsästhetik, or an “aesthetic of reception” at the
University of Konstanz in West Germany.
233
Rezeptionsästhetik was developed, in part, through
a series of colloquia hosted by the University of Konstanz based Research Group on Poetics and
Theories of Interpretation (Forschungsgruppe zur Poetik und Hermeneutik). The biennial
colloquia were hosted in cities throughout the country (including Cologne, the home of
Interfunktionen) and included presentations by several well-known German and American
scholars, including Siegfried Kracauer and Theodor Adorno.
234
The group’s frequent meetings
combined with their high-profile participants suggest its theoretical influence among German
scholars of linguistics, literature, and art history.
Jauss’s contribution to Rezeptionsästhetik developed Hans-Georg Gadamer’s concept of
the Horizont. Insisting that our experience of the world is limited by the parameters of our
individual perspective, Gadamer argued for the existence of an intersubjective horizon of
expectations (Erwartungshorizont). Maintaining that entirely objective meaning is unachievable,

233
The University of Konstanz was founded in 1966 as part of the reform of the German university
system. It sought a more cooperative relationship among faculty and students and celebrated
interdisciplinarity while striving for increased interconnectivity between teaching and researching. For
more on the history of Konstanz, see Rien T. Segers, Hans Robert Jauss, and Timothy Bahti, “An
Interview with Hans Robert Jauss,” New Literary History Vol. 11, No. 1 (Autumn, 1979), 91-95.
234
The publication of the proceedings from two such colloquia are Immanent Ästhetik-Ästhetische
Reflexion: Lyrik als Paradigma der Moderne, ed. Wolfgang Iser (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlang, 1966)
and Die nicht mehr schönen Künste: Grenzphänomene des Ästhetischen, ed. Hans Robert Jauss (Munich:
Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1968). The latter includes a forward dedicating the volume to the late Siegfried
Kracauer, written by Theodor Adorno. See the review of both volumes written by Richard Palmer in
Criticism Vol. 13, No. 1 (Winter, 1971): 95-102.
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Gadamer held that meaning is in fact constructed through a system of mutually agreed-upon
codes, information embedded in the particular historical and social conditions of which it is
part.
235
Meaning in a literary text, therefore, is dependent on a system of references shared
among a group of subjects. The reader brings to bear his or her subjectivity on a given text,
which is itself a participant in the communal system of readers, texts and shared expectations.
Developing Rezeptionsästhetik, Jauss understood the meaning of literary texts as something
rising up between the individual perspective of the reading subject and the shared set of
references existing within the intersubjective group of which both the reader and text are part.
236

While Jauss’s contribution to Rezeptionsästhetik established meaning as something
existing within a shared community of subjects, it was his colleague Wolfgang Iser who insisted
on the importance of the individual subject’s cognitive process in the making of meaning. From
the curatorial strategies at the first documenta to Heubach’s writing in Interfunktionen, the
individual cognitive process became the focus of much attention in the display and
historicization of art in Germany during the 1950s and 60s. Part of a wider circle of theorists
working to revise Enlightenment theory in the wake of post-war concerns about the failure of
individual critical thought. Understanding Iser’s conceptualization of the relationship between
meaning and the cognitive faculties of the reader alongside the publication of land art in
Interfunktionen allows for a rethinking of the problems posed by land art for the role of the
beholder and the possibilities of its documentation, within the context of German theory, politics
and culture. Taking seriously the publication of land art within a German context, these questions

235
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode) (1960), trans. Joel Weinsheimer
and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989).
236
Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1982). This is a collection of essays and articles originally published between 1969
and 1980.
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are underpinned by the pervasiveness of both the practice and exhibition of land art in Germany
as well as a theoretical interest in the contingent nature of meaning and the subject’s role in
producing it.
Important for Iser is Roman Ingarden’s concept of the flow of Satzdenken (or sentence-
thought) during the process of reading, which consists of the reader anticipating what is to come
in the sentences ahead while also reflecting on the meaning of previous sentences. For Ingarden,
the retrospection and anticipation of Satzdenken – the simultaneous absorption of previously read
sentences and thinking forward in anticipation of the sentences soon to be read – constitutes a
virtual dimension in which the reader’s experience of the text unfolds. When a sentence fails to
accord with what the reader anticipates and that flow between retrospection and anticipation is
broken, the result for Ingarden is an interruption of the process of Satzdenken, something to be
avoided because it distracts the reader from the text, disorienting him or her. Reconsidering
Satzdenken, Iser understands this hiatus not as a fault of the text, but instead as the locale of its
“dynamism,” or that which enables the reader to become aware of her subjective capacity for
meaning making.
237
“Thus, whenever the flow is interrupted and we are led off in unexpected
directions,” Iser writes, “the opportunity is given to us to bring into play our own faculty for
establishing connections – for filling in the gaps left by the text itself.”
238
In other words, it is out
of the inevitable hiatus in the midst of Satzdenken that the potential for awareness of the
individual cognitive process arises.

237
Roman Ingarden, Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks (1936), 32 (Tübingen: Niemeyer,
1968).
238
Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” New Literary History Vol. 3,
No. 2 “On Interpretation: I” (Winter, 1972): 279-299, esp. 284. For more on the “gaps”, see also,
Wolfgang Iser, “Indeterminacy and the Reader’s Response in Prose Fiction,” in Aspects of Narrative;
selected papers from the English Institute, ed. J. Hillis Miller (New York: Columbia University Press,
1971): 1-45. Iser begins the 1971 essay with a quote from Sontag’s essay, “Against Interpretation,”
suggesting that their ideas existed together in a shared discourse.
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For Iser, the fragmentary nature of the “modern text” is in direct opposition to more
unified traditional texts, the latter of which had been the subject of Ingarden’s study. In
traditional texts, the reader is invited to be lost within the virtual dimension constituted by the
mostly seamless flow of Satzdenken. Iser writes, “[Modern texts] are often so fragmentary that
one’s attention is almost exclusively occupied with the search for connections between the
fragments; the object of this is not to complicate the ‘spectrum’ of connections [the virtual zone
of the reader’s experience of the text], so much as to make us aware of the nature of our own
capacity for providing links.”
239
Recall here the function of similar such gaps or hiatuses within
the pages of Interfunktionen. The distance asserted between Heizer’s and de Maria’s earthworks
and their photographic documentation had functioned to open up the space for a cognitive
encounter with the material, one that would draw the reader’s attention to his or her capacity to
make meaning. Similarly, Iser’s interruptions in the process of Satzdenken enable the reader to
become aware of his or her perceptual faculties.
Iser’s reworking of Ingarden’s thesis bears within it the legacy of Edmund Husserl.
Understanding the work of these three thinkers together helps to position Iser’s reimagining of
the consciousness of the reader in the 1970s within a rich history of German theories of
experience and consciousness.
240
Furthermore, the link to Husserl provides an opportunity to
map his legacy in American art history as well, demonstrating the ways in which his work
informs art historical interventions differently on either side of the Atlantic. Ingarden, a student
of Husserl, rejected his teacher’s idealism in his 1931 book Das literarische Kunstwerk through a
study of the work of art, which he postulated as a material thing owing its existence to more than

239
Iser “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” 285.
240
Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity: on the Kantian Aftermath.
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pure consciousness.
241
Expanding his work five years later, Ingarden understood the literary
work of art as a “stratified formation” (“ein schichtliches Gebilde”), whose various strata are
“realized” (“konkretisiert”) in the mind of the reader experiencing the text.
242
Iser followed
Ingarden in his materialist understanding of the world, conceiving of the text as a system of
limits set by the various sentences contained within it. This is to say that there is not an unlimited
potential for meaning in any given text, but instead the text establishes a field of possibility
within its sequential sentences (what Ingarden called “intentional sentence correlatives,” or
“intentionale Satzkorrelate”).
243
Texts are therefore not entirely open to endless interpretation,
but are shaped or structured by the material sentences that constitute their formal structure in
combination with the reader’s imagination. Sequential sentences, Iser writes, “set in motion a
process out of which emerges the actual content of the text itself… For this bringing to fruition,
the literary text needs the reader’s imagination.”
244
In other words, the reader’s imagination is an
integral component of the reader’s comprehension of meaning from the text. Taken together, and
building on each other’s work, Husserl, Ingarden, and finally Iser, demonstrate the development
of a theory of an aesthetics of reception, one which finds in the imaginative, cognitive faculties
of the reader the potential to liberate and materialize the content of a literary text.
For American art historians, Husserl’s theoretical legacy is invoked in an effort to bring
about a renewed attention to the process of cognition and its temporal duration.
245
For Rosalind

241
Roman Ingarden, Das literarische Kunstwerk. Eine Untersuchung aus dem Grenzgebiet der Ontologie,
Logik und Literaturwissenschaft (1931) (Tübingen: Max Neimeyer, 1968).
242
Ingarden, Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks, 49ff. Cited in Iser, “The Reading Process: A
Phenomenological Approach,” 279.
243
Ingarden, Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks, 29.
244
Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” 282. Edmund Husserl, Zur
Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (Haag: M. Nijhoff, 1966), 52.
245
Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). See also, Annette
Michelson, “Robert Morris: An Aesthetics of Transgression” (1969), in Robert Morris, ed. Julia Bryan-
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Krauss, Husserl’s concept of the “punctual moment” (im selben Augenblick) affords the
opportunity to think through an alternative modernism, one set in opposition to the “mainstream
modernism” developed by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried.
246
“Mainstream modernism”
is predicated, for Krauss, on the concept that art enables a “rationalized vision,” in which the
entirety of an art work is comprehensible in an indivisible temporal present, “characterized as
‘now.’”
247
Husserl’s concept of “now-apprehension” undercuts this indivisible now, in that it
insists upon a durational, temporal relationship between seeing and making sense of what is
seen.
248
Through the example of Marcel Duchamp’s spinning Rotoreliefs, Krauss demonstrates
how the temporal duration between perception and comprehension functions to “corporealize the
visual,” effectively destabilizing and making subjective the act of vision.
249
[Image 19.] For
Krauss, this attention to the durational process of cognition facilitates a reworking of
“mainstream modernism,” accounting for a more complex, corporealized and subjective
endeavor than Greenberg and Fried had suggested it to be.
While Krauss does not contend with earthworks in this discussion of Husserl’s punctual
moment, her attempt to undercut “mainstream modernism” is similar to the critique waged by
earthworks. Land art has frequently been viewed as a critique of the commoditization of art
objects through their primary means of distribution within the art world, by introducing
ephemerality, temporality and site-specificity as fundamental, and unmarketable, components of
works of art. This is echoed in German writing on the subject, including Heubach’s essay in the

Wilson, 7-49 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013). On the sculpture of Robert Morris, Annette Michelson
writes “Its comprehension not only demands time; it elicits the acknowledgment of temporality as the
cognition or medium of human cognition and aesthetic experience,” 16.
246
Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, 21.
247
Ibid, 214.
248
Ibid.
249
Ibid, 216-7.
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first issue of Interfunktionen, in which he offers the magazine as a vehicle for disseminating
works made in opposition to traditional media and set outside of distributary channels, including
the gallery and museum. By forsaking such institutionalized spaces for the ephemeral and
expansive natural world, earthworks enacted a “dematerialization” on the traditional notions of
painting and sculpture, challenging the self-criticality or immediacy insisted upon by Greenberg
and Fried.
250

Interfunktionen was self-aware of both its role in the distribution of art material as well as
the particular encounter with works of art it brought to its readers. Viewing American land art
against the backdrop of hermeneutic theories developed alongside its display in Germany throws
into relief the ways in which this theoretical discourse shaped the presentation and reception of
land art there, where attention to the subject and his or her faculties of comprehension was the
topic of renewed interest. By accounting for the intersections of American land art with German
theories of reception and aesthetics, the internationality of land art is pressed beyond the
relationship between work and site or artist and nationality, broadening the scope of the
institutional, object, and commodity critiques to include the theoretical apparatus underpinning
its documentation, distribution and display in Germany. Viewed against such theories of
reception and their bearing on the distribution of documentation related to land art in Germany,
both document and land art take on new, more multifaceted identities. The document is shown to
be more than a record of visual information pertaining to something located beyond the frame of
the page. Rather, it comes to be understood as something that registers the difference between

250
“Dematerialization” was first used by Lucy Lippard and John Chandler to describe trends in American
art during the late 1960s and 70s. See Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,”
Art International XII, no. 2 (February 20, 1968): 31-36. This understanding of land art has since become
suspect. See Chapter 1 for revisions to the concept of “dematerialization” with respect to conceptual art
and earthworks.
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looking and thinking about what is seen, and thus makes the process of comprehension both its
subject and its function. Through the document, the viewer is brought into the fold of the page
and encouraged to become aware of things like embodied viewing and ephemerality through the
act of reading, along with her or her role in formulating meaning from the fragmentary
documents. The phenomenological aspects of the original event are highlighted, identified as
components of the work of art capable of transmission beyond the original site. This reverses
rules of site-specificity often associated with land art projects while also recognizing a greater
potential in documentary material, beyond the representation of that which is pictured and
toward the presentation or reconstitution of the original itself. This halts the claim that
photographs compromise the integrity of the original intervention and points to the ways in
which they actually propel it.

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Chapter 2 Images

Image 1. Michael Heizer, Double Negative, Nevada, 1969

Image 2. Hank Hine, “Desert Song,” Artforum Vol. 28, No. 6 (Feb 1990): 119.

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Image 3. Hine, p. 121.

Image 4. “The art of Michael Heizer,” Artforum Vol. 8, No. 4 (December, 1969): 32.
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Image 5. The Whole Earth Catalogue, published by Stewart Brand (Fall 1968)

Image 6. Michael Heizer, Double Negative, 1969-70 in Interfunktionen 7 (September 1971): 49

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Image 7. Interfunktionen 7 (September 1971): 49-50

Image 8. Michael Heizer, Dissipate #8, Artforum Vol. 8, No. 4 (December 1969), p. 32.

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Image 9. Michael Heizer, #1/3, Artforum Vol. 8, No. 4 (December 1969), p. 34.

Image 10. Entartete Kunst, Munich, 1937

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Image 11. Documenta 1, Kassel, 1955

Image 12. Documenta 1, Kassel, 1955, installation of paintings by Giorgio di Chirico

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Image 13. Interfunktionen 3 (1969).

Image 14. Walter de Maria, Two Lines in the Desert, Mojave Desert, April 1968, in
Interfunktionen 3 (1969): 3

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Image 15. Walter de Maria, Two Lines in the Desert, Mojave Desert, April 1968, in
Interfunktionen 3 (1969): 5

Image 16. Michael Heizer, Isolated Mass/Circumflex 1 (no. 9 of the Nine Nevada Depressions),
Massacre Dry Lake, NV, 1968

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Image 17. Michael Heizer, Isolated Mass/Circumflex 2, Menil Collection, Houston, TX, 1968-
1972

Image 18. Walter de Maria, Earth Room, Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich 1968

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Image 19. Marcel Duchamp, Rotoreliefs, 1935

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Chapter 3

“A Kind of Feedback Mechanism:” Gerry Schum’s Fernsehgalerie and the
Presentation of Land Art on Television

On April 15, 1969, television viewers in West Berlin encountered a program quite
distinct from the news magazines, dramas and comedies that customarily occupied the airwaves.
At 10:15 in the evening, the words “LAND ART” flickered onto screens across the city.
“Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum Television Gallery” appeared at the bottom of the television
screen, while the names of eight artists were listed across the top. [Image 1.] A brief introduction
appeared next, narrated by the director and cameraman Gerry Schum, followed by eight short
films featuring land art projects made by an international group of artists: Richard Long, Barry
Flanagan, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, Marinus Boezem, Jan Dibbets, Walter de Maria
and Michael Heizer.
251
The only contextual information accompanying the screening included an
initial introduction by Schum and brief informational shots preceding each example, listing the
artist’s name, the title of the work, and the location of filming. Each short film lasted between
two and eight minutes, and the entire transmission occupied 38 minutes of airtime. “Land Art”
aired officially only this once, on the network Sender Freies Berlin (SFB).
252

The introductory screen and what followed may easily have perplexed viewers. While
efforts to theorize and exhibit works of art made with natural materials, such as rock, sand, dirt

251
Following the April 15, 1969 broadcast, Michael Heizer’s contribution was removed due to the artist’s
dissatisfaction with the presentation of his work. The reasons for this are discussed in greater detail in the
“Land Art” section of this chapter.
252
“Land Art” was later shown at Harald Szeemann’s Documenta V in 1972, which marked the first
institutionalized presentation of video art. Documenta V is discussed in detail in Chapter 4.
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and water, were indeed underway, they remained in a nascent stage. The categorizing term “land
art” had yet to be established, and the exhibition and discussion of art of this sort existed within a
fairly circumscribed group of artists, critics and gallery-goers.
253
The first official exhibitions of
land art, such as “Dirt Show,” which opened at Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Munich on
September 28, 1968, and “Earthworks,” held at the Dwan Gallery in New York beginning
October 5, 1968, had operated within a more traditional lexicon of exhibition and display. This
meant installing works of art in the gallery space whenever possible (even when that meant
filling rooms with dirt and rocks) while utilizing photographs and models to reference works of
art located elsewhere.
254
[Image 2.] Recognized for its pioneering use of outdoor space to present
examples of land art, Willoughby Sharp’s “Earth Art” exhibition opened in the spring of 1969 at
Cornell University in New York.
255
Work by Jan Dibbets, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer and
others were installed not only inside the Andrew Dickson White Museum, but also around the

253
Schum’s production was the first time “land art” had been officially invoked as a classificatory phrase
referencing works of art of this sort. Other early terms include “earthworks” (Dwan Gallery exhibition
title, New York, 1968), “earth projects” (Robert Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth
Projects,” Artforum Vol. 7, No. 1, September 1968: 44-50) and “earth art” (Willoughby Sharp, Cornell
exhibition title, New York, 1969).
254
Grace Glueck, “Moving Mother Earth,” New York Times, October 6, 1968, D3. In this review of the
Dwan Gallery exhibition, Glueck references the exhibition being held simultaneously at Heiner
Friedrich’s gallery. In a nod to Marshall McLuhan, Glueck writes, “The medium (and the message) is
Mother Earth herself – furrowed and burrowed, heaped and piled, mounded and rounded and trenched.”
She explained the installation, noting Robert Morris’s “6x6 foot pile of unsculpted terra firma,” Claes
Oldenberg’s live earthworms and Walter de Maria’s “blown-up photo of a Munich gallery, whose floor he
has carpeted wall-to-wall with dirt.”
255
The exhibition catalogue highlights the exhibition’s use of outdoor space for installation. See
Willoughby Sharp, Earth Art. Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Cornell University, Feb 11- Mar
16, 1969. (Ithaca: Office of University Publications, Cornell University, 1969). On the siting of works
outdoors, see Roy Bongartz, “It’s Called Earth Art – and Boulderdash,” The New York Times Magazine
(February 1, 1970): 16-17, 22-26. For a more recent source on the emergence of land art, see Philipp
Kaiser and Miwon Kwon, eds. Ends of the Earth: Art of the Land to 1974 (New York: Prestel Publishing,
2012).
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Cornell campus and throughout the surrounding Ithaca area.
256
[Image 3.] The works of art
included used the natural world as artistic media, challenging distinctions between art and
commodity, between a final work of art and the process behind its making and decay, and
between the interiority of the gallery space and the wide expanse of the world beyond its walls.
Accompanying these pioneering exhibitions were several articles attempting to theorize the use
of the earth as an artistic medium, the movement of works of art into the outdoors, and questions
about the limitations and possibilities of documentation.
257

The “Land Art” television gallery was part of a widespread effort to understand and
exhibit works of art made from the earth and its elements at the end of the 1960s in several
countries around the globe.
258
What sets “Land Art” apart, however, is its presentation on
television, which democratized the availability of such ephemeral and remotely located works of
art while calling into question the relationship between the work of art and media used to record
and disseminate it. Other early efforts to display earthworks, such as the exhibitions at the Dwan
Gallery and at Cornell, appeared unconcerned with the distinction between a supposed original
and efforts to document it for exhibition, displaying dirt and rocks in the gallery alongside
photographs and models representing projects located elsewhere. By contrast, the Fernsehgalerie,

256
Walter de Maria’s participation in the 1968 exhibitions provides one example of differing installation
strategies. His Earth Room, which consisted of fifty cubic meters of dirt covering the gallery floor to a
depth of two feet, was installed inside Galerie Heiner Friedrich, while a photograph of the Munich
installation represented the same work at the Dwan Gallery. In contrast to Willoughby Sharp’s “Earth
Art,” where earthworks were displayed outdoors, these earlier exhibitions brought soil, rocks and sand
into the gallery space, and utilized photographs and models to represent works of art not available for
installation. See Glueck, 1968.
257
See Robert Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” Artforum Vol. 7, No. 1
(September 1968): 44-50; Ray Bongartz, “It’s Called Earth Art – and Boulderdash,” The New York Times
Magazine, February 1, 1970; Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp, “Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim,
Smithson,” Avalanche I (Fall 1970): 48-71; Dave Hickey, “Earthscapes, landworks and Oz,” Art in
America, Vol. 59, No. 5 (Sept-Oct 1971): 40-49.
258
Originally understood as a primarily North American phenomenon, the international scale of land art
has more recently been demonstrated. See Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon, eds. Ends of the Earth: Land
Art to 1974 (New York: Prestel Publishing, 2012).
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or “TV gallery,” made this distinction central to its endeavor. Gerry Schum imagined the
Fernsehgalerie as an art gallery that would exist on television, presenting periodic exhibitions in
much the same way as would a brick and mortar institution. Importantly, the televised production
would not feature the documentation of works of art located elsewhere, but the transmission of
original art directly to viewers at home. Describing the project in June 1969, Schum wrote,
“Instead of the documentation of art events in [sic.] TV, which were created for a different
medium like for instance a gallery show, in the TV gallery everything is specially planned
according to the medium [of] film or TV. This means the art objects and art ideas come to
existence only in the moment of transmission... The work of art is the film itself.”
259
“Land Art,”
which was the first of several productions produced by Schum together with his wife Ursula
Wevers under the auspices of the Fernsehgalerie, was intended as an exhibition of original works
of art, conceived of and executed expressly for the medium of television. The images viewers
saw on their screens were designed as artworks themselves, rather than depictions of art existing
beyond the television screen.
The distinction between representing already extant art on television and conceiving of
the broadcast itself as the work of art was critical to the democratic aspirations of the project.
Schum described how the transmission of works of art directly to viewers at home would help to
break down the “eternal triangle [of] studio, gallery, collector,” allowing for a more egalitarian
and authentic interaction between the public and the work of art, the relationship between the

259
Letter from Gerry Schum to Gene Youngblood, June 29, 1969. Reprinted in Katalog zur
Fernsehausstellung Land Art: TV Germany Chanel I, April 69, 2
nd
edition, edited by Ursula Wevers, n.p.
(Hannover: Hartwig Popp, 1970). This letter was written in response to previous communication from
Youngblood, who had contacted Schum requesting a statement or project for inclusion in his forthcoming
Expanded Cinema. A small write-up on Schum and his activities was included in the section, “Television
as a Creative Medium.” See Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.,
1970), 292-293.
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viewer and art now direct rather than mediated by the priorities of the museum or gallery.
260

Schum’s words echo those of Friedrich Heubach’s in Interfunktionen, as well as those of art
critic Klaus Honnef, both of whom similarly identified efforts to break down the conventional
model of art distribution as a chief concern of art making in the last years of the 1960s and into
the 1970s.
261
In the first issue of Interfunktionen, Heubach wrote, “If the museum, gallery and
exhibition are the only possibilities for art to be distributed, the art necessarily becomes oriented
around and based on the structures of these intermediaries, expressing their volition.”
262
By
removing the museum or gallery from its totemic status as arbiter of quality, replacing it with the
artists’ magazine as a site of display and distribution, Heubach believed not only that the
appearance and motivations of art would change, but also the experience of viewing and
comprehending art, which would now take place in a more direct encounter between viewer and
art than had previously been possible. In his writing, Honnef recognized the ways in which
conceptual art enacted this very same dismantling of the traditional structures of transmission,
avoiding material entrenched in its dependence on museums and galleries for distribution, such
as large paintings or heavy sculptures, and favoring instead transcribed scores, Xeroxed pages
and seemingly banal photographs. This less expensive, less precious and less ostentatious
material could operate on the pages of a book, thereby avoiding entirely the need for museum
display.
263

260
Gerry Schum’s introduction to the broadcast, reprinted in Ready to Shoot: Fernsehgalerie Gerry
Schum, Videogalerie Gerry Schum, eds. Ulrike Groos, Barbara Hess, Ursula Wevers, 67-69 (Cologne:
Snoeck Verlagsgesellschaft, 2004).
261
Email correspondence between the author and Klaus Honnef, January 22, 2015.
262
Friedrich Heubach, “Die Documenta oder kommt Kunst von konsumieren,” Interfunktionen 1 (1968),
3. Heubach traces the evolution of this reality, from paintings and sculptures commissioned by religious
institutions, to the collection and display of art by state-run museums. See Chapter 2 of this dissertation.
263
Klaus Honnef, Concept Art (Cologne: Phaidon Verlag, 1971). Email correspondence between the
author and Klaus Honnef, January 22, 2015.
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In his writing, Schum showed a similar concern about the problems of art distribution,
addressing the situation within the political context of West Berlin. In an early proposal, Schum
lamented the difficulties of exhibiting and viewing art in the walled-off city.
264
The television
gallery, he asserted, had the potential to overcome this problem, distributing works of art made
by international artists around the world directly into the homes of viewers. This would not only
increase the quantity of art available to West Berliners, but also produce a new, more expansive
model for the distribution of art, reaching a larger audience than the comparatively smaller group
of people that visited museums and galleries.
265
Reflecting on the goals of the project, Ursula
Wevers wrote, “We simply thought that the possibility of looking at art on television should
exist, so that people who happened to live in regions where little was happening in the way of
modern art would not be at a disadvantage.”
266
Furthermore, the private place of display allowed
a means for overcoming the hierarchy of art ownership, something under critique in the late
1960s by artists and theorists alike, evident in the production of multiples, or small, inexpensive
objects meant to bring the collection of art to a broader public.
267
The television gallery allowed
for the direct transmission of actual works of art into the space of the viewer’s home, Schum
insisted, where they would be free to contemplate and interact with them as original works of art
outside of the institutions of museums and galleries.
Schum’s vision for the Fernsehgalerie was undoubtedly paradoxical, problematizing art
ownership while grafting the commercial model of an art gallery onto televised space. Schum

264
“Proposal for ‘Fernsehgalerie,’ May 1968,” in Gerry Schum, eds. Dorine Mignot and Ursula Wevers, 4
(Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1979).
265
See section below, “Art on TV,” which addresses the sizable television audience in Germany in the
1960s.
266
Ursula Wevers, “The television gallery: the idea and how it failed,” in Gerry Schum (1979), 78.
267
On the multiple in art and its potential to overcome the hierarchy of art ownership, see Barbara Hess,
“No Values for Posterity. Three Films about Art,” in Ready to Shoot, 8-21.
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appears to have understood television quite unreservedly as facilitative of an interpretive,
interactive relationship between viewer and screen. His take on the television screen runs counter
to contemporaneous notions of television as the enabler of passive, uncritical viewership, such as
those espoused by Theodor W. Adorno.
268
At the same time, Schum’s vision for the
Fernsehgalerie is indicative of an alternative approach to television, which saw within the
medium the potential for a democratized art, available to large audiences beyond the reach of the
gallery and museum systems. Gerhard Eckert and Umberto Eco represent additional voices in
this alternative perspective on television
269
. The similar ways in which these men regarded
television, as well as the realities of television viewing in Germany at the time, will be further
contextualized later in the chapter.
Gerry Schum’s “Land Art” television gallery asserted that the televised broadcast was the
actual work of art rather than the documentation or presentation of work located elsewhere. As
ideas for the project developed, Schum became less concerned with the political situation in
West Berlin, and increasingly with the topic of mediation. “More and more artists today are
exploring the possibilities of the media of film, television and photography,” Schum noted in his
introductory remarks to the broadcast. “These artists are not concerned primarily with exploiting
the possibilities of communication offered by the mass media. A more important consideration, I
think, is that a greater part of our visual experience is induced by way of reproduction, with

268
Theodor W. Adorno, “Prolog zum Fernsehen,” in Rundfunk und Fernsehen Vol. 2 (1953): 1-8 and
“Television and the Patterns of Mass Culture” (1954), in Mass Culture: the popular arts in America,
edited by Bernard Rosenberg, 474-488 (Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1957).
269
In his 1953 book Die Kunst des Fernsehens, Gerhard Eckert explored the potential for television to
operate as artistic medium. See Gerhard Eckert. Die Kunst des Fernsehens (Emsdetten: Verlag Lechte,
1953). Umberto Eco similarly sees potential for aesthetic value in television programming. Umberto Eco,
“Chance and Plot: Television and Aesthetics,” in The Open Work (1962), translated by Anna Cancogni,
105-122 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
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cinematic and photographic representations.”
270
At a time when viewers were encountering art
more often than not through photographs and films, Schum identified the television show as a
testing ground for both producing and disseminating original works of art.
271

The development of Schum’s thoughts can be traced through work he completed while
formulating the Fernsehgalerie concept. Against the backdrop of the so-called “dematerialized”
art of the late 1960s and 70s, Schum’s proposal provides an opportunity for rethinking the
relationship between a photograph or film and the event or object it records. The eight projects
included in “Land Art” were designed and made specifically for the medium of television. None
were recreated following the filming process, and in all cases except one, nothing remained after
filming was complete except for the film itself.
272
In this way, the moving images that capture
and transmit the processes being filmed are distinct from other examples of the photographic or
filmic documentation of land art.
273
They do not reference something located elsewhere,
operating as a vehicle for disseminating information about a work of art that cannot be viewed in
situ for reasons of ephemerality or remoteness. Rather, they are intended as the work of art itself.
As I argue below, Schum’s Fernsehgalerie dissolved the boundary between the work of art and
the medium of distribution through which it reached its audience. I show how the projects

270
Gerry Schum, “Introduction to the Broadcast,” in Ready to Shoot, 67-69.
271
Ways of Seeing, a four part television series aired by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1972,
opened with an analysis of the viewer’s encounter with works of art through photographs and films. John
Berger, the host of the series, argued that the reproduction of the work of art produces knowledge about it
in ways that are severed from the original historical context of the painting or sculpture. John Berger,
Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972).
272
The one exception is Michael Heizer’s contribution, Coyote. The discord between Heizer and Schum
on this matter is discussed in the “Land Art” section below.
273
I am thinking here of Robert Smithson’s 1970 film, Spiral Jetty. Smithson’s film includes aerial and
close-up images of the earthwork, Spiral Jetty, accompanied by a voice-over description by the artist,
shots filmed inside a natural history museum, and other related details combining to produce a multi-
layered image of the earthwork. This is very different from the approach taken by Schum, which
minimizes explanatory information, films the events only as they are unfolding, and leaves behind no
autonomous artwork existing beyond the borders of the program itself.
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included capitalize on the material and temporal qualities of the television screen and broadcast
and argue that they were made specifically for presentation on television. In turn, the capacity
for the medium of distribution to function as the work of art is revealed, and the relationship
between documentation and original emerges as a critical testing ground within land art, where
issues of site-specificity, art and the commodity, and embodied viewing could be investigated.
In what follows, I offer a brief overview of each of the eight projects included in “Land
Art.” Next is an account of Schum’s work and the making of the Fernsehgalerie, followed by a
closer look at two examples from “Land Art.” In an effort to represent “Land Art” completely,
while also keeping within the limits of the chapter, I have chosen to focus on two projects in
greater detail than others, primarily for the clarity with which they demonstrate Schum’s goals.
Barry Flanagan’s A Hole in the Sea and Jan Dibbets’s Twelve Hours Tide Object with Correction
of Perspective feature the transformation of a scene or landscape, while the others track a
repeating process in a cyclical manner. The narratives I identify within Flanagan’s and Dibbet’s
projects highlight the erasure of the intervention from the landscape at the end of filming,
emphasizing that what is contained in the short film is the entire work of art. Furthermore, they
make use of the materiality of the screen and the passage of time within the broadcast to
articulate these narratives, and in so doing reveal the ways in which these projects are suited
particularly for presentation on the screen. The chapter concludes with a look at art on television
during this period, making a case for how the Fernsehgalerie operated within the particular
historical conditions of television in West Germany during the period to produce a television
show that is unique from other examples of art on TV.

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“Land Art”
The public presentation of “Land Art” began two weeks before the broadcast date, with
an opening held March 28, 1969 at the Sender Freies Berlin studios. Inside Studio C, guests
encountered furniture arranged into a u-shape with a screen positioned at the front of the room,
where the film would be screened. Schum had given a great deal of thought to the opening,
planning out the location of furniture, television screens and photographs so as to recreate the
appearance of an art gallery, as seen in this sketch of the proposed opening made in 1968.
274

[Image 4.] For Schum, it was important that the broadcast be understood as a gallery existing in
televised space. Holding an opening for “Land Art,” one that mimicked similar events at art
galleries, was one way of translating the conventions of gallery exhibitions into the realm of
television. Despite the obviously paradoxical nature of Schum’s efforts to overcome the
conventional gallery structure while mimicking its institutions and events, the decision to host
such an opening appears to have been unproblematic for Schum and his collaborators.
275

Jean Leering, director of the Stedelijk van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, gave an opening
address. [Image 5.] He outlined a two-fold evolution at work in the making of art: the adoption
of distributary channels as artistic material, including newspapers, magazines and televisions,
combined with a shift away from the ownership of art and toward the communication of ideas.
According to Leering, art was reacting to television’s unprecedented role in the dissemination of
news and current events, such as the war in Vietnam, taking advantage of the medium as a means

274
Minutes from two production meetings exist as well, dated March 10 and March 17, 1969. The
minutes outline the guest list (provided by Schum and complemented by SFB’s press and public relations
departments), lighting preferences, details on which monitors were to be included, along with various
other logistical details. Minutes courtesy the Schum/Wevers Archive, Cologne. Reprinted in Ready to
Shoot, 64-65.
275
The paradoxical nature, although obvious, goes unremarked upon in the literature on Schum and the
Fernsehgalerie. This contradiction and others are addressed in detail below, in the section, “A Paradoxical
Project.”
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for transmitting information to large audiences.
276
Leering argued, “Art does not want to merely
be documented by television, no, art wishes to use this means of information as an artistic
medium. Here television is not leveraged as a possibility for providing information about art.
Instead artists use television and projection to realize art works, which could not actually be
conceived at all without television. Thus, a work of art as a piece for television.”
277
Leering was
referring to the ways in which artists made use of aspects particular to television, such as the
space and shape of the television screen and the sequencing of images in time, to construct works
of art produced uniquely for television, strategies that will be discussed in greater depth as this
chapter unfolds.
Leering identified a second important aspect of the project: the democratization of art
made possible in the shift from ownership to communication. “The artist no longer produces a
product as a private object which one can own as sole proprietor, no, the artwork only comes
about during the broadcast and then disappears as canned material... communication instead of
art ownership.”
278
This shift, away from art as something that could be bought and sold and
toward art as the communication of information, was paramount in Schum’s intentions for the
Fernsehgalerie, and stressed time and again. What neither Leering nor Schum appears to have
acknowledged, however, was the contradiction this posed to his decision to borrow from the
gallery model the concept of an exhibition and opening events, while failing to address the
gallery’s commercial function.

276
“Introductory Speech to Mark the Opening of the Television Exhibition LAND ART,” Jean Leering,
Stedelijk van Abbemsueum, Eindhoven, March 28, 1969. Printed in “Land Art” exhibition catalogue
(1970) and Ready to Shoot, 71-73.
277
Ibid., 71.
278
Ibid.
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The gallery model adopted at the March 28 opening played a role in the televised
broadcast two weeks later, on April 15, 1969. Leering’s remarks and footage from the opening
were replayed in an eight minute slot at the beginning of the official broadcast. Feeling that
Leering’s remarks were in fact too brief, and did not provide enough information about land art
and the goals of the Fernsehgalerie, Schum added his own address to the broadcast, just before
Leering’s. Schum presented land art as a legitimate and established contemporary art movement,
citing recent exhibitions at the Konrad Fischer Gallery in Düsseldorf and Galerie Friedrich in
Munich. Despite the determining role played by these galleries in introducing land art to a
German public, Schum identified television as a medium capable of reaching even larger
audiences. Coupling this conviction with new trends in art making, such as the adoption of film,
television and photography as aesthetic media, Schum described a reality in which “the greater
part of our visual experience is induced by way of reproduction, with cinematic and
photographic representations.”
279
An attention to the media of transmission, the representative
photographs or videos through which so many audiences encountered the art object, was
occurring at a time when artists were looking for new modes of expression. The land artists, for
example, sought such new “expressive possibilities” by turning to the landscape, marking it
directly rather than attempting to represent it pictorially.
280
Schum then segued to his central
argument, concluding that such new forms of art making, which existed outside of the realm of
saleable objects and engaged with media of representation in new ways, were “unclassifiable in
the traditional terms of art as they are in the art market.” In the wake of these developments,

279
Gerry Schum, “Introduction to the Broadcast,” April 15, 1969. Courtesy the Schum/Wevers Archive,
Cologne. Reprinted in Ready to Shoot, 67-69.
280
When describing these new “expressive possibilities,” Schum referenced Harald Szeemann’s recent
exhibition, “Live in your Head,” along with his notion of “consciousness art.” These ideas will be
addressed at length in Chapter 4.
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private ownership of art would no longer be possible, and had to be replaced with the
communication of art directly to viewers. The mass-market medium of television was ideally
suited to such a new order.
Following Schum’s remarks, “Land Art” moved directly to its eight short films. The first
was Richard Long’s Walking a straight 10 mile line forward and back shooting every half mile.
Lasting six minutes, the film suggested movement along an invisible line in the expansive
Dartmoor in southwest England. Rather than filming a single, unbroken shot over the course of
the walk, the camera stopped and started every couple of seconds, producing a sequence of forty
shots that fade into one another.
281
These images did not match up cohesively; rather, each shot
registered a new horizon height and balance between land and sky. Together, they implied
movement across the vast moorland, paired with the sound of Long’s labored breath as he made
the trek. His walking body remained out of view of the camera.
282
[Image 6.]
The next contribution was by Barry Flanagan. A Hole in the Sea was filmed on the beach
at Scheveningen on the Dutch Coast and featured a Plexiglas cylinder, inserted into the wet sand
at the shore at low tide. As the tide rushed in, the water surrounded the cylinder but did not fill it.
Shot from above, this process resulted in the appearance of a hole in the middle of the ocean. The

281
Christiane Fricke, descriptive text accompanying 40jahrevideoart.de, 2006. Fricke’s notes aid my own
recollection of the film throughout this section.
282
Long described this project in a letter to Harald Szeemann, the Swiss curator responsible for When
Attitudes Become Form, an exhibition of land and conceptual art that is the subject of Chapter 4. In
planning material related to “Land Art,” Schum had traced over Long’s drawing of the route taken and
emulated his signature. Long wittily wrote to Szeemann, “there is a moral in all that somewhere,”
referring to the heavy hand that Schum had in producing the works of art included in the Fernsehgalerie.
Rather than simply inviting artists to participate and granting them free reign to work as they wished, a
technique Szeemann employed in his curatorial practice, Schum carefully managed the design and
execution of the works of art included in the Fernsehgalerie. The letter between Long and Szeemann is
held in the Harald Szeemann Papers, Getty Research Institute, Box 288, Folder 11. Szeemann’s curatorial
practice with respect to art that resisted object form is the subject of Chapter 4.

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three minutes and 45 seconds of the film included twelve aerial shots of the cylinder in the sea,
bookended by two shots taken from ground level, which depicted the seashore. The passage of
time was marked not only by the waxing and waning of the tide, but by intermittent timestamps,
which preceded each of the shots, while rushing water and seagulls provided the soundtrack.
[Image 7.]
Dennis Oppenheim’s Timetrack, following the time border between Canada and USA
appears next. For the making of the film, Dennis Oppenheim drove a snowmobile along the
time-zone border between the United States and Canada, on the frozen St. John River in Maine.
The two minutes and five seconds comprising the film included two different shots. The first
followed the snowmobile as it made its race across the landscape. In this shot, the movement of
the camera and snowmobile ere one and the same, frenzied and fast paced. The second shot was
taken from above, inside of an airplane. The frenetic speed of the snowmobile was no longer as
apparent, replaced by the audible rumble of the plane’s engines. Far below, the miniscule
snowmobile was a small speck in a snowy landscape, much less visible than the path it was
forging, which stretched across the screen, mapping out the time-zone border. Oppenheim’s
project addressed time from multiple vantage points: the scientific measurement of time around
the globe, the time consumed in the act of moving across a landscape, and the marking of time
lapsed by the path of the snowmobile in the snow. [Image 8.]
Oppenheim’s film was followed by Robert Smithson’s Fossil Quarry Mirror with Four
Mirror Displacements, a three-minute and five-second film shot in a quarry in the Cayuga Salt
Mine in New York. [Image 9.] Four mirrors were arranged at the base of the quarry, reflecting
the surrounding rocks, and shot in a sequence from north, south, east and west. Marinus
Boezem’s Sand Fountain came next. The four-minute film, shot in the south of France, featured
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a pile of sand being blown to and fro by an off-screen industrial fan. The only project to include
a voice-over, Sand Fountain was accompanied by a narration that explained wind velocities but
did not relate this description to what was actually happening in the film.
Jan Dibbets’s 12 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective appeared next.
Clocking in at seven minutes and thirty seconds, Dibbets’s project was the longest of the
contributions. There were two main sequences to the film, shot on the Dutch coast: the first
depicted a view of the sea, taken from just behind a bluff of sand dunes and bushes and coupled
with the sound of screeching seagulls and rushing waves. Next, the camera shifted to a shot of a
tractor in the lower left hand corner, the rumbling of its engine audible. It slowly backed up,
dragging its dredging shovel and leaving marks in the sand. The camera cut to three more similar
scenes; the tractor backed up along the right and left sides of the screen and then along the top of
the screen, producing lines that marked out the edges of the television screen. Finally, the tractor
drove off screen and the waves slowly encroached upon the outline of the shape, eventually
erasing them entirely. [Image 10.]
Walter de Maria’s Two Lines Three Circles in the Desert was next, a four-minute, forty-
five second film shot in the Mojave Desert. De Maria walked quickly away from the location of
the camera, between two parallel white lines drawn on the desert floor. While he walked, the
camera rotated slowly to make three complete circles. After every rotation, the camera rested on
de Maria’s walking figure; each time he was further and further away until finally out of the
camera’s range. A high-pitched vibrating sound reverberated loudly at the beginning of the film,
slowly growing quieter until it concluded with the end of the film. [Image 11.]
The eighth and final contribution was by Michael Heizer. Coyote, a four-minute and 20-
second film shot at Coyote Dry Lake in California, was based on one of Heizer’s desert floor
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paintings, Primitive Dye Painting No. 2. To make these massive, outdoor paintings, Heizer
spread white lime powder and aniline dyes across the desert floor to create images that could
only be seen from above.
283
Coyote opened with a shot of a coyote howling at the moon against a
desert landscape before transitioning to several shots of the massive painting filmed from various
perspectives. Coyote was removed from “Land Art” following the initial broadcast, due to a
series of disputes between Heizer and Schum. Primitive Dye Painting No. 2, which existed both
before and after filming, asserted an identity separate from the film. This posed a fundamental
problem to the premise of the Fernsehgalerie, which insisted that the works of art included were
unique to the Fernsehgalerie and would only exist during the April 15, 1969 broadcast.
Furthermore, Heizer wanted to be included in the shot of the massive painting to provide a
human scale. Schum did not want to comply, convinced that the artists should not appear in the
film except when their actions were essential to the concept (as was the case in the contributions
from Richard Long and Dennis Oppenheim, in which their presence helped to convey the idea
behind their projects rather than to illustrate realities outside the frame of the television screen,
such as scale). Schum’s decision not to comply with Heizer’s request, coupled with the separate
and distinct identity of the painting, caused an insurmountable difference between the two men.
Heizer withdrew his contribution following the April 15 broadcast, and Schum did not object.
284

[Image 12.]

283
Michael Kimmelman, “Art/Architecture; A Sculptor’s Colossus of the Desert,” in The New York
Times, December 12, 1999.
284
See Christiane Fricke, “Dies alles Herzchen wird einmal Dir gehören,” Die Fernsehgalerie Gerry
Schum 1969-1970 und die Produktionen der videogalerie schum 1970-1973 (Frankfurt a.M.: P. Lang,
1996), 147-152.
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For several of these artists, the opportunity to experiment with film was one of the factors
that motivated them to sign on to the project.
285
The tools to make films, especially films that
could be broadcast on television, were not widely available for private use at the time.
286

Schum’s training as a filmmaker combined with his relationships with television studios afforded
him opportunities not available to the artists with whom he collaborated. Signing on with Schum
meant exposure for these artists in avenues not otherwise accessible. The projects included in
“Land Art” were in all cases related to the artists’ work beyond the Fernsehgalerie. For example,
Richard Long had already done a series of walking projects, such as A Line Made by Walking,
from 1967, in which he walked up and down several times along a single line, wearing down the
grass with his footsteps. [Image 13.] Similarly, Robert Smithson’s Fossil Quarry Mirror utilized
several elements that featured frequently in his work, such as quarries and mirrors, while
engaging with his dialectical principle of “site” and “nonsite,” referring to the often-unclear
distinction between reality and representation.
287
Without contextual information, something
Schum adamantly refused to provide, viewers would only see these connections if they
encountered “Land Art” with prior knowledge of the various oeuvres being referenced.
This proved a problem for the individual works included in the broadcast, as well, where
information not provided meant that the viewer did not have access to the entire scope of the
project. Exemplary here is Dennis Oppenheim’s project, in which the crucial fact that this event

285
I am indebted to conversations with Robyn Farrell, a scholar of Schum’s work, for this information.
See Robyn Farrell, “Network(ed) TV: Collaboration and Intervention at Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum and
Videogalerie Schum,” Afterimage Vol. 43, No. 3 (November/December 2015): 12-19.
286
Urusla Wevers, “The television gallery: the idea and how it failed,” in Gerry Schum (1979), 77-8.
287
Smithson used the term “site” to refer to a work of art made in the landscape, outside of the gallery or
museum, while “nonsite” referred to a three-dimensional sculpture made from dirt, rocks, sticks, sand,
and the like, installed in a traditional gallery setting and also called an “indoor earthwork.” See “A
provisional theory of nonsites,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam, 364
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
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was filmed on the time-zone border was referenced only indirectly on the opening, informational
screen, which noted the one hour difference on either side of the border without specifying why
these times were listed. These informational lacunae point to one of the central paradoxes of
“Land Art.” Conceived of in hopes of enacting a paradigmatic shift away from art ownership
toward communication, “Land Art” professed the transmission of information and the
distribution of art to a larger audience as its motivating factors. However, in the absence of
critical contextual information, this theoretical optimism of the project faltered in practice. In
what follows, Schum’s early work will be addressed in an effort to trace the development of his
thoughts. The consistency with which he argued for his goals will become clear, along with his
stubbornness in refusing to modify his approach. The paradoxes at the heart of the project, which
advocated for communication without taking the steps necessary to most effectively see that
communication through, will emerge time and again. While such inconsistences between plan
and actual approach are at times glaring, it is important that they not overshadow the work the
Fernsehgalerie did in fact do to blur the lines between a work of art and the media employed to
distribute it to viewers.

“Art is understood as a living process.” Gerry Schum and the development of the Fernsehgalerie
Gerry Schum was trained as a filmmaker at the Deutsches Institut für Film und Fernsehen
(DIFF) in Munich and at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie in Berlin (DFFB).
288
Upon
completing his studies at DFFB in 1967, Schum made three films about art, all of which aired on
German television between 1967 and 1968. These films are important for the connections they
facilitated between Schum and the television stations that would later broadcast the

288
Schum attended the Deutsches Institut für Film und Fernsehen in Munich (DIFF) between 1961 and
1963 and the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie in Berlin (DFFB) between 1966 and 1967.
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Fernsehgalerie, as well as for the formative role they played in the development of his thoughts
on the presentation of art on television.
The first, Schaustücke-Ereignisse (Showpieces-Events), recorded a brief performance by
the German artist Bernhard Höke. Presented as part of the magazine program “Berliner Fenster”
on Sender Freies Berlin (SFB), the broadcast documented the duration of the event, lasting four
minutes and 56 seconds. It appeared on television only once, at 9:30 pm on March 30, 1967.
289

The first of Schum’s work to appear on TV, Schaustücke-Ereignisse demonstrates an early
interest in the potential for film and television to function as productive partners with time-based
artwork, such as performative actions or staged events. In the last years of the decade, artists
worked to undermine the fixity and singularity of the art object and engaged with the passage of
time.
290
This included a growing rejection of painting and sculpture, and a turn toward
collaboration, process, and events. Following his experience filming Höke’s action, Schum
became increasingly interested in applying film’s ability to record time and movement to such
new trends in art making. A few months following the broadcast of Schaustücke-Ereignisse, in
June 1967, Schum pitched a second production to Wibke von Bonin, the developer of arts

289
Hess, 10. Whether or not the one-off broadcast was critical to Höke’s project – as it would later be for
Schum – is unclear.
290
Clement Greenberg’s influential essay “Modernist Painting” (Artforum, 1960) demonstrated his
conviction that each medium must fulfill the single quality most unique to its materiality, such as flatness
for painting. Greenberg’s ideas were championed most vociferously by Michael Fried, who insisted in his
essay “Art and Objecthood” (Artforum, 1967) that works of art must be at all times wholly manifest,
existing outside the realm of time. Charles Harrison places the Fernsehgalerie at the tail end of a seven-
year period in which a particular type of modernism emerged, bookended by the publication of
Greenberg’s Modernist Painting in 1960 and Michael Fried’s Art and Objecthood in 1967. According to
Harrison, the Fernsehgalerie brings time back into the equation of the visual arts, undermining the
modernist logic that had been established by Greenberg and Fried. Harrison writes, “Conceived as a
medium of art, film had the potential at one and the same time to restore the dimension of time to the
artist’s practice and to remove the physical ‘art object’ altogether from the spectator’s grasp.” The fallout
of this is the emergence of film as a medium for the art to present itself, separating the distinction between
art and representation. Charles Harrison, “Grounds for Optimism: The Work of Gerry Schum,” in Ready
to Shoot, 46-54, quote 51.
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programming at Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), and a highly influential figure in the pairing
of art and television in Germany.
291
It would be a documentary-style report on the 6
th
Annual Art
Biennale of San Marino, Italy. Drafted together with a fellow student from DFFB, Schum’s
proposal articulated an affiliation between the medium of film and new ways of making art,
which prioritized process and ephemerality over final objects and often engaged with
technological apparatus.
292
The biennial production would, Schum wrote, “express the great
variety of new technical procedures and materials in a way consistent with film.”
293
Read as a
precursor to the topics under discussion by Leering and Schum at the Fernsehgalerie opening two
years later, these words mark the beginning of Schum’s developing thoughts on the affinities
between the time-based medium of film and the works of art he was encountering, such as the
durational events staged by the Zero group which often featured machines such as light boxes,
light curtains and motors.
294
While environments and objects created by the Zero group were not
include in the San Marino documentary, other projects demonstrating a similar concern for the
use of technology or an interactive relationship between viewer and artwork were. Examples

291
In addition to her instrumental role in the development of the arts programming format at WDR III,
Wibke von Bonin was a prolific contributor to the discourse around art on television. She contributed a
regular column to Arts Magazine, in which she reported on German gallery exhibitions. See for example,
“The American Presence,” Arts Magazine, Vol. 45, March 1970, 52-55. See also “Kunst und Fernshehen
(Art and Television)” in Kunstjahrbuch, No. 3, Hanover, 1973, 91-94; and “Video und Fernsehen – Wer
braucht wen? (Video and TV – Who needs whom?)” (1982) in Videokunst in Deutschland 1963-1982:
Videobänder, Videoinstallationen, Video-Objekte, Videoperformances, Fotografien, ed. Wulf
Herzogenrath (Stuttgart: Hatje, 1982).
292
Schum’s co-author on the proposal was Wolf Gremm, who was one of many important collaborators
for Schum during these early years. Following Schaustücke-Ereignisse, Schum continued to work with
Bernhard Höke, who offered counsel in the development of ideas and projects. Hannah Weitmeier, an art
history student, was an equally important contributor to these early projects. Höke and Weitmeier were
Schum’s closest collaborators until he began working with Ursula Wevers in October 1968. Their ideas
were formative in the early development of the Fernsehgalerie concept.
293
Hess, 13-15. See also Fricke, 20.
294
For more on the Zero group, see Renate Wiehager, ed. Zero aus Deutschland, 1957-1966 und heute
(Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2000).
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include a sequence featuring a demonstration by the sculptor Werner Shrieb in which he used a
smoldering wire to remove pieces from a polystyrene block, along with Gerhard Richter’s Fünf
Türen (Five Doors), 1967, in which visitors were filmed walking through a series of doors
installed in a gallery space. Schrieb’s sequence was accompanied by an off-screen commentator
who questioned whether or not artists were aware of the “radical change in the entire field of
traditional art” that ensued as a result of the introduction of technical processes in the making of
art objects.
295

Schum’s investment in film as an appropriate tool for the recording of new forms of art
making developed as time went on. In the proposal for the Fernsehgalerie, drafted a little less
than a year later, in the spring of 1968, Schum would describe his field of study in opposition to
“art objects,” claiming an interest instead in, “art projects whose concept, realization and
consumption are demonstrated especially for and by filmic reproduction,” and insisting that, “art
[be] understood as a living process.”
296
His approach would be an analysis of “tendencies…
which have a project-like character about them.” In a letter written that same spring to Eberhard
Roters, Secretary General of the German Association for the Visual Arts (Deutsche Gesellschaft
für Bildende Kunst), Schum mused again on the productive pairing of film and the durational
events he was interested in using the medium to record. “It is becoming particularly clear that the
conventional disciplines of fine art as they were previously understood are disintegrating,”
Schum wrote, “giving way to a new integration of disciplines which … summarize spatial and
temporal points of reference into a spatial and temporal unit which is directly dependent on the
medium of movement which can be made particularly evident by filmic and television

295
Hess, 14.
296
“Exposé on the Fernsehgalerie Berlin, Spring 1968.” Courtesy Schum/Wevers Archive, Cologne.
Reprinted in English in Ready to Shoot, 57-58. My emphasis.
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means.”
297
The Höke and San Marino projects thus honed Schum’s attention to the relationship
between moving images and the more “project-like” art of the present moment, which denied the
hypothetical autonomy of traditional painting and sculpture and attended to the passage of time
and movement. It was during the production of his third film that he would more fully formulate
the democratic appeal of the television screen as the ideal site for such art.
WDR accepted the pitch for the San Marino documentary, and it aired on August 24,
1967 at 9pm.
298
The day after the broadcast, Schum proposed Konsumkunst-Kunstkonsum to
WDR, a made-for-TV film concerned with the increasing availability of artist’s multiples on the
art market.
299
Multiples were small, inexpensive things made in editions, such as the hand-held
sculptures and found objects produced by Joseph Beuys or the games, pamphlets and trinkets
constructed by the international Fluxus group. [Image 14.] More readily available than singular
works of art, smaller and without pretense to originality, artist’s multiples widened the
parameters for the collection of art by individuals. Against the backdrop of the rapidly rising
success of commercial art galleries, artist’s multiples offered art for private consumption at a
significantly slighter price tag.
300

In West Germany, the so-called “Economic Miracle,” or Wirtschaftswunder, created a
unique environment for multiples, where a top-down insistence on the availability of goods for
all people was a political strategy for demarcating the difference between East and West
Germany. State leaders’ efforts to convince the West German populace that there were plenty of

297
Letter from Gerry Schum to Eberhard Roters, May 8, 1968. Courtesy Schum/Wevers Archive,
Cologne. Reprinted in Ready to Shoot, 59.
298
Hess, 13.
299
August 25, 1967 letter to WDR. See Hess, 15.
300
On the boom of the contemporary art gallery in Germany during this period, see Sophie Richard,
Unconcealed, The International Network of Conceptual Artists 1967-1977: Dealers Exhibitions and
Public Collections, ed. Lynda Morris (London: Ridinghouse, 2009).
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goods and services to be acquired, and that one’s ability to consume was directly connected to
freedom and democracy, are an example of one way in which Cold War ideology extended
beyond politics and reached into everyday goods and their uses.
301
Whether or not the
Wirtschaftswunder was in fact an economic reality, or simply a repeated refrain in
advertisements and political rhetoric, it encouraged increased consumption while also acting as
fodder for a critical reaction to the pervasive obsession with amassing goods.
302
The multiple,
which introduced a less-expensive object for consumption within the art world, exemplifies these
contradictory terms around consumption in West Germany at the time. The multiple blurred the
line between the work of art and commodity, creating a place for small, easily consumable
objects in the art market and encouraging a more widespread consumption of art. In this sense, it
enabled the democratic dispersal of the ability to own and collect art, while shoring up the idea
of art as a saleable object.
This was a concept under critique in Schum’s Fernsehgalerie and problematized as well
in demonstrations and Happenings organized by other artist groups. Konsumkunst-
Kunstkonsum’s airdate on WDR coincided with the second day of the second Kunstmarkt Köln,
an art fair founded in Cologne in 1967 by the Association of Progressive German Art Dealers

301
David F. Crew, “Consuming Germany in the Cold War: Consumption and National Identity in East
and West Germany, 1949-1989,” in Consuming Germany in the Cold War, ed. David F. Crew, 1-19 (New
York: Berg, 2003).
302
On the marketing of the so-called “Economic Miracle” to consumers, see S. Jonathan Wiesen,
“Miracles for Sale: Consumer Displays and Advertising in Postwar West Germany,” in Consuming
Germany in the Cold War, 151-178. On critical reactions to the Wirtschaftswunder, see Robert P.
Stephens, “Drugs, Consumption, and Internalization in Hamburg, 1960-1968,” in Consuming Germany in
the Cold War, 179-206. See also, Erica Carter, How German is She? Postwar West German
Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997); S.
Jonathan Wiesen, West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past, 1945-1955 (Chapel Hill:
The University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Hanna Schissler, ed. The Miracle Years: A Cultural
History of West Germany, 1949-1968 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). On consumerism in
Germany prior to World War II, see Paul Lerner, The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and
the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880-1940 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).
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(Verein progressiver deutscher Kunsthändler).
303
Kunstmarkt Köln achieved rapid success;
during its third year in 1969 it was the site of the first sale of a work of art by a West German
artist for more than one hundred thousand marks.
304
Such staggering prices at Kunstmarkt Köln
made it the target of leftist criticism from artists concerned with the increasing commodification
of art and the ensuing domination of the art world by elites. The artist group LABOR was among
these dissenters. Founded by composers, authors, and artists Mauricio Kagel, Alfred Feußner,
Wolf Vostell, Ursula Burghardt and Friedrich Heubach on January 11, 1968, LABOR sought the
“exploration of acoustic and visual occurrences” through the production of temporary staged
events. In an effort to show alternative projects unlike the paintings and sculptures for sale at
Kunstmarkt Köln, LABOR organized a five-day event held in the parking garage under the
Kölner Kunsthalle, the site of the art fair.
305
Labor – 5 Tage Rennen, took place between October
15-20, 1968, overlapping with both the Kunstmarkt and the airdate of Konsumkunst-
Kunstkonsum. The five-day program included contributions by artists including Kagel and Wolf
Vostell, who organized actions and events meant to undermine the commodification of art.
Kagel’s project, Ornithologica Multiplicata, included plastic tubing, sound amplifying
equipment and sixty live birds. Walking through the installation, set in the dimly lit parking
garage, viewers were confronted by the cacophonous sounds of the birds amplified over the
airwaves. [Image 15.] Other projects included Wolf Vostell’s Magnetostriktion in Milch, in
which the artist roller-skated through puddles of milk, and Ursula Burghardt’s Kumme Ebene,

303
Konsumkunst-Kunstkonsum aired on WDR on October 17, 1968. Kunstmark Köln opened on October
16, 1968.
304
It was the painting, Das Rudel, by Joseph Beuys, sold by René Block. History of Kunstmärkte Köln,
accessed October 30, 2014,
http://www.artcologne.com/en/artcologne/diemesse/geschichtederartcologne/geschichteartcologne_1.php.
305
My knowledge of the group comes largely from an interview with Friedrich Heubach, May 2012,
Cologne. LABOR is also featured in Interfunktionen 2 (1969).
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which consisted of a series of slides and ladders constructed in the parking garage. Documented
in the second issue of Interfunktionen (1969), Labor – 5 Tage Rennen provides one example
among many of artistic efforts to displace the commodity by shoring up process and
collaboration.
306
The group’s name alone, “Labor,” prioritized the process behind the production
and consumption of a work over the reified object resulting from it. Within the context of the
commercially successful Kunstmarkt Köln, the privileging of work and practice over saleable
object would have been especially salient.

With Konsumkunst-Kunstkonsum, Schum addressed the art market boom, as well as the
backlash against it by groups such as LABOR, by focusing on the emergence of artists multiples.
Schum dwelled not only on the objects and the artists making them, but even more extensively
on the processes of production and consumption. The production of multiples in the artist’s
studio commanded a great deal of airtime, along with sequences of viewers touching and
manipulating the objects, even dismantling them. Multiples were positioned as an alternative to
forms of art making that celebrated the singularity of the art object, the genius of the artist, and
the role of the viewer as passive receiver. Multiples enticed the viewer to handle and interact
with them, making the relationship between viewer and object tactile and playful. Schum
focused on the time-based nature of such methods of consumption, wherein the viewer would
spend time handling the object, turning it over, moving it about, and thereby the sense of its
existence outside of any interaction between the viewer and the object.
While the interactive viewing encouraged by multiples aligned them with events such as
Labor – 5 Tage Rennen, a conflict inherent to multiples remained staunchly in place. While

306
The event is documented in Interfunktionen 2. See Labor – 5 Tage Rennen in Interfunktionen 2, 1969,
2-57. This issue of Interfunktionen also has a section devoted to the multiples and events of the Fluxus
group. See pp. 77-84.
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making the ownership of art available to a larger audience made the private collection of art less
elite, it nonetheless solidified art’s status as commodity.
307
This compromised the democratic
objectives of the multiple, constraining such goals to fit within a consumer-driven economy,
reinforcing the ownership of art even while diffusing it across a wider group of people. This is a
problem Schum would attempt to resolve with the Fernsehgalerie, rejecting art ownership and
replacing it with “communication with a wider audience.”
308

The potential for television to serve as the facilitator of such communication is
foreshadowed in Konsumkunst-Kunstkonsum, with the presentation of work by Heinz Mack, a
founding member of the Zero group. An off screen commentator stated, “Mack is planning a
special kind of multiplication of art objects. Reproduction through the mass medium of
television.” Mack himself then explained, “I intend to do an exhibition that is no longer held in a
museum, that is no longer held in a gallery, but appears only once exclusively on television. All
objects that I will be showing in this exhibition can only be made known to the public via the
television and will then be destroyed by me.”
309
While Mack did indeed produce work that was
filmed for television, his idea of a television exhibition, presented within the space of Schum’s
film, was perhaps most fully achieved by the Fernsehgalerie.
Between the production of 6. Kunst-Biennale San Marino in 1967 and the filming of
Konsumkunst-Kunskonsum in 1968, Schum had become involved in a one-night exhibition that
took place at the Galerie Loehr in Frankfurt. Lasting from 7:45 to 9:55 on the evening of
September 7, 1967, the exhibition featured temporary installations and actions by Jan Dibbets,

307
Hess, 19.
308
Gerry Schum, “Introduction to the Broadcast, Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum,” presented April 15, 1969
at 10:15 pm on SFB. First printed as a slightly altered version in Land Art (1970), a catalogue published
to complement the broadcast by Ursula Wevers and Gerry Schum. Reprinted in Ready to Shoot, 67-69.
309
Hess, 19.
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Richard Long, Bernhard Höke and Barry Flanagan. Titled, Dies alles Herzchen, wird einmal Dir
gehören, (or, One day, my dear, this all will belong to you), the fleeting exhibition featured
collaborations and temporary actions. These events were presented as a positive, optimistic turn,
signaling the development of new approaches to the making and display of works of art that
could be passed down to the next generation. Works of art included in the event were made of
water, air and sand, constructed by the artists working together while onlookers watched
everything unfold. Schum was invited to film the event, and while the film did not find its way
onto television, it presented a viable alternative to the multiple that he was currently filming for
Konsumkunst-Kunstkonsum. His participation at the Galerie Loehr exhibition developed his
conviction that the work of art could be located entirely in the process of making rather than in
the object resulting from it.
310
This in turn informed his approach to multiples in Konsumkunst-
Kunstkonsum, which levied the actions and practices underpinning the production and reception
of objects as equally important to the final, collectable thing. This appreciation for the process of
making that went into the material object, coupled with the concept of communication rather
than ownership, fueled the development of the Fernsehgalerie.
The first proposal for the Fernsehgalerie was written in May 1968, addressed to Sender
Freies Berlin. Schum dwelled on the isolated nature of Berlin, discussing the communicatory
aspects of television as the motivating factor behind putting art on television. “Exhibitions in the
conventional sense pose immense transportation problems for Berlin owing to the island-like
status of the city,” Schum wrote. “In the ‘Fernsehgalerie’ Berlin unites at one fictitious

310
Dorine Mignot, “Gerry Schum – a pioneer,” in Gerry Schum, 67-72. Other influential exhibitions that
Schum attended include “Arte povere e azione povere” in Amalfi, Italy (October of 1968), “Nine in a
Warehouse,” at the Castelli Warehouse in New York City (December 1968), and Willoughby Sharp’s
“Earth Art” at Cornell University (Feb-Mar, 1969). The latter two exhibitions are discussed in Chapters 4
and 2, respectively.
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exhibition location information and opinions on a particular art theme collected at the most
varied of arenas. Berlin is a place for reflection, for the intellectual exploration of this theme.”
311

The difficulties of mounting an exhibition in Berlin, where the enclosed reality of the city made
it difficult to transport artworks and to attract a large number of visitors to the exhibition site,
meant that exhibitions were faced with limitations from the start. The television gallery, Schum
proposed, could overcome this problem, collecting works of art from an international group of
artists and transmitting them directly into the living rooms of viewers.
While Schum’s insistence on television as a medium capable of overcoming the
challenges faced by efforts to exhibit art in West Berlin may appear dramatic, they were in fact
echoed by several colleagues in the art world, including Eberhard Roters of the German
Association for the Visual Arts, who wrote a letter of support on Schum’s behalf.
312
“The kind
of television gallery planned by Mr. Schum also has the advantage that it is easy to transport and
handle not requiring special effort so that with minimal costs as wide as possible an audience can
be reached and addressed,” Roters wrote. “This is of not inconsiderable significance for the
situation in which Berlin finds itself as through this an interested public can be reached that is
not otherwise able to follow the cultural events in the German Federal Republic and abroad.”
313

Similarly, Peter Löffler, of the Akademie der Künste expressed his enthusiasm for the work,

311
Gerry Schum “Fernseh-Galerie Berlin,” Spring 1968. Courtesy the Schum/Wevers Archive, Cologne.
Reprinted in Ready to Shoot, 57-58. For the original German, see Gerry Schum, “Fernsehgalerie Berlin,”
Spring 1968, in Gerry Schum (1979), 4.
312
The situation was reiterated to me also by Wibke von Bonin, developer of arts programming at WDR
III at the time, in an email conversation on March 17, 2015. Dr. von Bonin recalled the population of
West Berlin as mostly elderly widows, young students and people trying to escape military service. There
was virtually no art scene at the time, so a gallery that did not transcend the borders of the enclosed city
would not reach very many people at all.
313
Letter in support of the Fernsehgalerie from Eberhard Roters, Secretary General of the Deutsche
Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin, May 8, 1968. Courtesy the Schum/Wevers Archive, Cologne.
Reprinted in Gerry Schum (1979), 4.
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celebrating it for the novelty of the approach to the exhibition and presentation of new forms of
art. So enamored with the proposed project, Löffler invited Schum to hold an opening reception
for the Fernsehgalerie at the Akademie der Kunst.
314
Sender Freies Berlin accepted Schum’s
proposal and produced a contract that August, offering the possibility of two further programs
should the first Fernsehgalerie be a success. Schum’s ability to convince Sender Freies Berlin to
air the Fernsehgalerie on their first channel, which transmitted nationally, was a major coup,
considering that arts programming at the time was almost exclusively aired on regional channels,
which were dedicated to cultural programming but reached a much smaller audience than did the
national channels. Given Schum’s aspirations for the Fernsehgalerie to operate as a vehicle for
the transmission of ideas near and far, the contract with SFB was crucial.
315

In October 1968, Schum began to work with Ursula Wevers, an art student from the
University of Cologne who would later become his wife. The initial idea for the Fernsehgalerie
had been formulated with his previous collaborators, with whom he had worked on the first three
films.
316
As the makeup of Schum’s team changed, and filming began (in October 1968), the
goals for the Fernsehgalerie shifted as well. The idea of the televisual space constituting a gallery
became increasingly important, as Wevers and Schum worked to define how the media of
presentation could be most effectively utilized by the art included in their exhibition. The goal
was not to make an art documentary but to conceive of the film itself as an analogue for
exhibition space, and the images on the screen as the art on display, rather than representations of

314
Letter in support of the Fernsehgalerie from Peter Löffler, Akademie der Kunst, Berlin, May 8, 1968.
Courtesy the Schum/Wevers Archive, Cologne. Reprinted in Ready to Shoot, 59.
315
The contract with SFB was signed August 28, 1968. See Ursula Wevers, “Love Work Television
Gallery,” in Ready to Shoot, 22-44. My knowledge on the makeup of the television channels, as well as
Schum’s success in finding cooperation with SFB, comes from conversations with Wibke von Bonin,
developer of arts programming on the third (regional and cultural) channel at WDR. Email interview with
Wibke von Bonin, March 14-17, 2015.
316
These collaborators were Hannah Weitmeier and Bernhard Höke. See note 292.
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art located beyond the screen. “Productions were to be made, which would incorporate and
reflect the specific possibilities of presentational form within the artistic concept, both
consciously and in a media-oriented manner,” Wevers wrote in retrospect.
317
In other words,
projects would be undertaken so as to exploit aspects distinctive to television, such as the shape
of the screen and the development of events over time. Rather than utilizing film to capture or
record works of art that existed over a period of time, the Fernsehgalerie projects would be
conceived of from the start with the medium of television in mind. As Charles Harrison has
more recently noted, in the case of the Fernsehgalerie, “film furnished the artwork with a
medium in which to present itself.”
318
Film, together with the television screen that would enable
its transmission, was understood not as a tool for representing or recording, but rather as a
medium of production.
While initial collaborations between Schum and fellow artists helped to flesh out these
goals and sharpen the approach, they also demonstrated the difficulty of the enterprise. Working
with the Anglo-Dutch collective Eventstructure Research Group (ERG), Schum and Wevers
encountered a formative difference of opinion. ERG understood the role of the film as
documentary, providing an evidentiary representation of the more primary event. Schum and
Wevers, on the other hand, were more concerned with finding “more compelling criteria for the
images,” or utilizing the camera and the space of the television screen to produce a series of
images that spoke specifically to the medium of television.
319
In other words, making art for
television became far more important than making a television show about art. This distinction

317
Wevers (2004), 25.
318
Harrison, 50-51.
319
Ibid., 26.
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became paramount to the Fernsehgalerie, with Schum committed to a final product that would be
art itself rather than a didactic explanation of art presented on television.
320

With the mid-December deadline quickly approaching, Land Art was far from finalized.
Schum and Wevers obtained an extension to March 1969, and in January 1969 filming for the
final project was at last underway. In a fury of film, international travel and post-production in
Berlin, the eight projects were shot between January 1969 and March 1969. Richard Long, Barry
Flanagan, Jan Dibbets, Marinus Boezem, Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Heizer and Walter de
Maria made contributions to the television gallery, shot in the Dartmoor Moorland in England,
the south of France, the Dutch Coast, New York and the Southwestern United States. In some
cases, the artists were present; in others Schum followed directions provided by the artists to
simultaneously construct and film their project.
321
Everything was shot on 16 mm film, and later
transferred to video for television broadcast.
322

While Schum was filming in the United States in February 1969, Wevers stayed behind
to continue processing the film in Berlin and to prepare publicity for the broadcast.
323
Eight
different postcards were produced to publicize the Fernsehgalerie, one for each artist, along with
a poster featuring the eight postcards and broadcast information. [Image 16.] Filming wrapped in
March 1969, and in April 15, 1969, televisions tuned to Sender Freies Berlin screened the
inaugural exhibition of the Fernsehgalerie at 10:15 pm, titled “Land Art.”
In support of Schum’s insistence that the works of art included in the Fernsehgalerie were
original works of art, the projects ceased to exist at the end of filming, leaving behind no lasting
interruptions in the landscape. In this way, they were distinct from other examples of land art,

320
Wevers (1979), 77-78.
321
Wevers (2004), 26-31.
322
Schum transitioned to video in 1971 with the use of a Sony Portapak.
323
Wevers (2004), 29.
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such as Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969) discussed in Chapter 2 as well as other notable
earthworks including Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) and James Turrell’s Roden Crater
(1972-), interventions into the earth, which, while allowing for erosion over time, have made
changes to the landscape that endure in some way. [Image 17.] The Fernsehgalerie projects, by
contrast, bring front and center the act of making. In so doing, they make a connection between
process, which takes place over a period of time, and the time-based medium of film, which is
capable of recording and disseminating the production and destruction of works of art. As the
film unfolds, the viewer is granted access to a real-time perspective on the making of the work of
art. The viewer follows, for example, the speeding snowmobile as it traverses the snowy
landscape in Dennis Oppenheim’s Timetrack. Or, in the case of Richard Long’s, Walking a
Straight 10 Mile Line, the viewer sees the landscape from the perspective of Long as he walks
through the moorland, the sound of his labored breath heavy in his or her ears. Unlike Heizer’s
Double Negative or Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, in which the earthwork exists as the mark left
behind by the process of making, the Fernsehgalerie earthworks focus on the production of that
mark while diminishing or destroying the mark itself. The trail left behind in the snow in
Timetrack disappears from the screen as the camera races to keep pace with the zooming
snowmobile. Similarly, evidence of Long’s walk having occurred is not visible, only the
movement and sounds of the walk as it is occurs are transmitted through the film. Contrast this
with Long’s, A Line Made by Walking, 1967 in which the worn down grass serves as evidence of
a process no longer visible, and the labored action of walking itself emerges as the topic at hand
in the Fernsehgalerie. [Image 13.]

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A Paradoxical Project
A number of aspects around the Fernsehgalerie are difficult to square. One is the firm
commitment Ursula Wevers and Gerry Schum shared when it came to demanding a single
broadcast.
324
Identifying television as an ideal medium for the distribution of works of art such
as those included in “Land Art,” Wevers and Schum were much less eager to adopt the
medium’s capacity for rebroadcast. Schum’s insistence that SFB not replay Land Art was one of
the main points of contention that drove a wedge between the television channel and Schum. The
single broadcast appears to have afforded uniqueness to the works of art included. If the space of
the transmission were to exist as the work of art, then limiting that transmission to a single time
would give the works of art a degree of authenticity and singularity associated with fine art. The
problem, however, is that privileging originality in this way contradicts the communicatory and
democratic aspirations espoused so fervently by Schum and Wevers. If the goal was to shift
away from art ownership and toward communication, it follows logically that numerous
broadcasts would only aid the effort.
This is a discrepancy that cannot be answered in a methodologically satisfying way
without access to the archive, but it is a question that must be raised nonetheless. The answer
may be a simple matter of finances. Barbara Hess has surmised that the choice to limit the
broadcast to a single occurrence was a pragmatic one, rooted in the Fernsehgalerie’s need and

324
Land Art was shown one more time after Schum’s death, very much against his wishes. See Wevers,
“The television gallery: the idea and how it failed,” in Gerry Schum (1979) and “Love Work Television
Gallery,” in Ready to Shoot. See also, Hess, “No Values for Posterity. Three Films about Art” in Ready
to Shoot. Hess reinforced this position in an interview I conducted with her in January 2015. In an
interview I conducted with Ursula Wevers, she elaborated on the topic, explaining that she and Schum
would very much have liked to have seen further broadcasts of the Fernsehgalerie. They would not have
been Land Art, however, but rather different iterations of the concept, such as Identifications, which
appeared on Südwestfunk, Baden Baden in 1970. Interview with Ursula Wevers, April 2015.
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desire for new commissions.
325
By allowing only a single transmission, Schum and Wevers
perhaps hoped to create demand for further productions. Following the transmission of the
second Fernsehgalerie, “Identifications,” in 1970, Schum and Wevers were unable to obtain a
contract for a third production. In order to pay the bills, they began selling video editions under
the auspices of the Videogalerie Gerry Schum, which opened its doors in Düsseldorf in October
1971. These short films by artists including Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Beuys, Mario Merz and
several others were sold in editions ranging from small (four to six) to unlimited, accompanied
by gallery shows dedicated to each edition and lasting one to two months. Producing video work
in editions and selling it, although more in line with the way in which video art came to operate
in the second half of the twentieth century, was nothing short of an about-face on the part of
Gerry Schum.
326
His platform had been built on a resistance to commodification, art as
something to be communicated rather than collected, and the video editions were entirely
collectable.
While financial needs are a powerful motivator, perhaps there is a more theoretical reason
behind Schum’s refusal to permit rebroadcasts. The association with land art raises questions of
site-specificity. Robert Smithson’s work, for one, has demonstrated the link between land art and

325
Email conversation with Barbara Hess, January 31, 2015.
326
Notable sources on the development of video art as a genre include Rosalind Krauss, “Video: the
Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October, Vol. 1 (Spring, 1976): 50-64; Douglas Davis and Allison Simmons,
eds., The New Television: A Public Private Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977); Benjamin Buchloh, “From
Gadget Video to Agit-Video: Some Notes on Four Recent Video Works,” Art Journal, Vol. 45, No. 3,
Video: The Reflexive Medium (Autumn, 1985): 217-227; Rob Perrée, Into Video Art: The Characteristics
of a Medium (Rotterdam and Amsterdam: CON Rumore, 1988); Paul Ryan, “A Genealogy of Video,”
Leonardo, Vol. 21, No. 1 (1988): 39-44; Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer, eds., Illuminating Video: An
Essential Guide to Video Art (New York: Aperture Press, 1990); Peggy Gale and Lisa Steele, eds., Video
re/View (Toronto; Art Metropole and V tape, 1996); Catherine Elwes, Video Art, A Guided Tour (New
York and London: I.B. Tauris, 2005); Chris Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art: The Development of
Form and Function (Oxford and New York, 2006); David Joselit, Feedback: Television Against
Democracy (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2007).
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notions of site-specificity quite emphatically. An example is his Yucatán Mirror Displacements
(1-9) from 1969, in which Smithson placed mirrors in various locations throughout the Yucatán
Peninsula, producing nine color photographs that reveal reflections of the surrounding landscape.
[Image 18.] Published to accompany his 1969 essay, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the
Yucatán,” in Artforum, the photographs and essay together deal with the particularities of the
chosen environment and the articulation of these characteristics in photographs taken at the
site.
327
Similarly, Smithson’s “non-sites,” fragments of the landscape including rocks, sand and
dirt installed within a gallery space, question the possibility of overriding locational identity,
isolating elements of a given environment and displaying them outside of their original home.
Smithson’s work demonstrates what Miwon Kwon has called “phenomenological site-
specificity,” or an aesthetic attempt to draw the viewers’ attention to the physical characteristics
of a given space and the experience of encountering them.
328

Within the context of the Fernsehgalerie, however, the site-specific tendencies of land art
appear under somewhat different terms. The television screen, its particular contours and borders
along with the flickering of its lights emitted through the cathode ray tube, becomes the site of
the work of art, just as the dusty deserts of the American Southwest or the frigid Dutch coast
operate as sites for other examples of land art. Here, Thomas Crow’s more temporal model of
site-specificity is useful. For Crow, site-specific art makes its intervention by “refusing
traditional forms of permanence and monumentality.”
329
In order to do this, it must be brief and
unrepeatable. As an example, Crow discusses Walter de Maria’s Earth Room, installed for the

327
Richard Smithson, “Incidences of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatán,” Artforum Vol. 8, No. 1 (September
1969): 28-33.
328
Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2002).
329
Thomas Crow, “Site-Specific Art: The Strong and the Weak,” in Modern Art in the Common Culture
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 150.
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first time at Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Munich in 1968. In 1977, the dirt-covered floor was
permanently re-installed as The New York Earth Room by the Dia Art Foundation in a SoHo loft.
[Image 19, compare to Image 2.] While Earth Room will continue to confront new audiences in
this installation, the fact that it is available indefinitely, that one can return to see it again or
postpone a visit for months or years, detracts from its ability to contradict the objecthood of art, a
contradiction fundamental to Crow’s temporal model of site-specificity.
330

This effort to achieve transience could have been the reason behind Schum’s mandate for
the one-off broadcast. In postwar West Germany, where exhibitions such as documenta had
stressed temporariness in opposition to the monumentality and permanency of Nazi art, Schum’s
efforts to emphasize art that existed only for a moment in time certainly had political
undertones.
331
As I have argued, however, the Fernsehgalerie was committed to reworking the
economic systems within which art was made and consumed. The brevity of the broadcast and a
single airdate ensured that the Fernsehgalerie could not be bought or sold, or even revisited time
and again. In this way, the Fernsehgalerie confronted the commodifiable art object and critiqued
the concept of art ownership. While Schum and Wevers were no doubt concerned with ensuring
commissions and contracts to keep the Fernsehgalerie alive, they were not interested in selling it.
Evidence of their refusal to sell exists, including their decline of an offer to buy made by the
New York taxi entrepreneur and art collector, Robert Scull on March 31, 1969.
332
Both the
creation and destruction of the works of art included in “Land Art” are visible in the film; the

330
The temporal nature of non-object based works of art has been discussed previously in this
dissertation, in relation to Ursula Meyer’s theorization of the art featured in her compendium Conceptual
Art (1972). See Chapter 1.
331
Attempts by its organizers to position documenta in opposition to Nazi art are discussed in greater
detail in Chapter 2.
332
March 31, 1969 cable to Gerry Schum from Robert Scull. Published in Ursula Wevers, ed. Katalog zur
Fernsehausstellung Land Art: TV Germany Chanel I, April 69, 2
nd
edition (Hannover: Hartwig Popp,
1970).
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marks made in the landscape are constructed and effaced while the camera is rolling, leaving
nothing behind at the end of the film. They are entirely temporary and exceedingly brief. By
refusing to allow multiple broadcasts, Schum ensured that this impermanency would not be
compromised by television’s ability to rebroadcast, separating the film from representation or
record and trumping up its critique of the art object as commodity. Taken this way, the
originality or authenticity of the broadcast reads less as an affront to Schum’s critique of the
reified art object and more as a strategy for ensuring the viability of his goal to replace
ownership with communication.
A second contradiction at the heart of Schum’s enterprise exists between the
Fernsehgalerie’s goals for communication and Schum’s unwavering conviction that minimal
contextual information should be provided during the transmissions. Wanting to mimic as
closely as possible the viewing conditions of a traditional gallery, in which “the works can be
observed for as long as the viewer wants, from any desired angle, while he can choose not to
listen to any spoken commentary that may be offered,” Schum and Wevers were adamant that
explanatory information be restricted to opening remarks and minimal information preceding
each project, in the manner of a wall label, and nothing more.
333
Voiceovers during the actual
contributions went against the goals of the Fernsehgalerie in that they would direct the viewer’s
attention too much, prohibiting individual reflection on the situations unfolding onscreen. While
viewing conditions in galleries and museums certainly do not always comply with the stringent
parameters insisted upon by Schum and Wevers, it was the goal of the Fernsehgalerie to uphold
them.

333
Wevers (1979), 79.
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It was also, however, a major source of tension in Schum’s relationships with the
television stations with which he worked. “Land Art” received a bevy of positive reactions from
the press, which appeared to have understood and accepted Schum’s premise that the works of
art included in the transmission were actual artworks rather than the documentation of more
primary events.
334
An article in the Darmstädter Echo credited the Fernsehgalerie with bringing
into focus television’s double role, as conveyor of information and as artistic medium, while the
gallerist and art critic Hans Strelow lauded the Fernsehgalerie for its utilization of television to
express “the intangible qualities of most recent art” in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
335

Sender Freies Berlin, however, was frustrated by the lack of contextual information
accompanying the broadcast. The network had wanted Schum to provide a voiceover and
explanatory statements, which he failed to deliver.
336
The result, according to SFB, was
something “incomprehensible to the public... which evoked a certain amount of aggression.”
337

While this “aggression” was not borne out in the critical reception to “Land Art,” it was reason
enough for the network to dissolve Schum’s contract. As a result, the two additional productions
of the Fernsehgalerie promised in Schum’s original contract with SFB were canceled.
The irony of Schum’s vision for the democratic appeal of art on television is made
evident in this disagreement. While the press responded favorably, the articles and positive

334
See for example, “Land-Art in der Fernsehgalerie: Ein Berliner Experiment” in Süddeutsche Zeitung,
April 2, 1969; L.S. “Spurengraben” in Die Welt, April 8, 1969; Wolf Schön, “Schums Galerie” in
Rheinischer Merkur, April 25, 1969.
335
“Gibt es fernseheigene Kunstwerke? Bildschirm-Versuch mit ‘Land Art’” in Darmstädter Echo, April
17, 1969. Hans Strelow, “Regungen einer neuen Romantik Kunst am Ende des mechanischen Zeitalters
Ausstellung in Bern,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 9, 1969. Strelow wrote, “Ein neuer Weg der
Distribution und Kommunikation von Kunstideen bahnt sich in Gestalt der Fernsehgalerie von Gerry
Schum an, in der erstmals exklusiv für das Fernsehen realisierte Projekt (u.a. von Long, De Maria,
Dibbets) gezeigt werden sollen. Der Plan ist frappierend, weil er der immateriellen Qualität der jüngsten
Kunst entspricht.”
336
Ursula Wevers (1979), 77-78.
337
Ibid., 78.
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reception came mostly from art world insiders, while the larger population may very well have
been turned off by the absence of contextual information and Schum’s refusal to provide it. Of
the circumscribed group of people that actually responded to the Fernsehgalerie, Daniel Buren
remarked, “Only those people who were already interested in the most recent manifestations of
visual art had any interest in this gallery.”
338
The rest of the viewers likely comprised a more
general population, one who voiced in audience surveys on arts programming a need for shows
that offered “a fair blend of the familiar, the recognizable and the new.”
339
The launch of the so-
called “educational and minority channels” around 1964, on which Schum’s various projects
appeared, had indeed created space for art programs. Television shows related to art captured the
least amount of popular attention, however, following programs dedicated to theater, music and
literature.
340
In an effort to facilitate a viewing experience free of interference, the Fernsehgalerie
failed to make familiar the obscure projects included in it, and thus ultimately obstructed its
communicatory goals.
341

Schum and Wevers went on to produce a second Fernsehgalerie, titled Identifications
which focused on the presentation of conceptual and performative projects. Despite the loss of a
relationship with Sender Freies Berlin, Schum and Wevers were able to secure a contract with

338
“Statements,” in Gerry Schum (1979), 75. Buren’s work was included in the second Fernsehgalerie,
Identifications (1970).
339
Wibke von Bonin, Kunst und Fernshehen (Art and Television) in Kunstjahrbuch, No. 3, Hanover,
1973, 91-94. (This quote is on p. 94.) Such viewer surveys provided only rough estimates of viewership
prior to the 1970s, when ratings began to be measured more systematically. See Geschichte des
Fernsehens in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (History of Television in the Federal Republic of
Germany), Vol. 2. Das Fernsehen und die Künste (Television and the Arts), ed. Bernhard Zimmerman
(Munich, 1994), 93-113; Wibke von Bonin, Notizen zum XIV. Loccumer Kulturpolitischen Colloquium:
Kunst, Künstler, und Massenmedien (Notes on the XIV Loccum Cultural Political Colloquium: Arts,
Artists and Mass Media). (Rehberg-Loccum, 1982), n.p.
340
Geschichte des Fernsehens in der Buindesrepublik Deutschland, 94.
341
Email conversation with Wibke von Bonin, March 14-15, 2015. Dr. von Bonin recounted how
adamant Schum was to refuse any kind of contextual information in his programming. This was
problematic, she relayed, given the television station’s duty to demonstrate their ability to produce
quality, educational, accessible programing to an audience.
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Südwestfunk, Baden-Baden, which aired Identifications on November 15, 1970. Identifications
provoked similar disagreements between Schum and the television station, which insisted on
contextual information that Schum was not willing to provide. It was in the aftermath of this last
failed relationship that the Videogalerie Gerry Schum was founded, and Schum and Wevers
began to sell the video editions discussed above. When Schum committed suicide in 1973,
Ursula Wevers closed the doors of the Videogalerie Gerry Schum.
The contradictions that run through the story of the Fernsehgalerie make the
inaccessibility of the archive all the more frustrating, but they also help to direct our attention to
the broadcast itself, the visual work it does, and its material connections to the CRT screen.
Furthermore, it offers an opportunity to think through the tensions between an event and the
evidentiary traces it leaves behind. In the case of the Fernsehgalerie, the event and evidence of it
are made to be one and the same. Given my focus here on the relationship between a work of art
and efforts to record it for distribution, the Fernsehgalerie’s confusion of these categories helps
to make clear the ways in which they each propel our understanding of the other. In the absence
of the archive, the Fernsehgalerie comes to function as its own evidentiary material. In the
section that follows, a visual analysis of two of the projects included in Land Art will reveal the
ways in which the television, both screen and broadcast, were integrated into the design and
execution of the Land Art projects. The result is a reconfiguration of the relationship between a
work of art and its medium of transmission.

Barry Flanagan and Jan Dibbets in Land Art
Gerry Schum’s effort to broadcast actual works of art, rather than the documentation of
works of art located elsewhere, is evident in the visual and temporal structure of the individual
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contributions. The eight projects demonstrate attention to both the time-based medium of
television as well as the shape and surface of the cathode ray tube (CRT) television screen on
which they would have been seen. Of the eight, Barry Flanagan’s A Hole in the Sea and Jan
Dibbets’s 12 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective provide excellent examples of
such priorities, producing televised images and sequences that had no direct correlate at the site
and time of filming, and were therefore visible only within the temporary timespan of the
broadcast and according to the dimensions of the CRT screen. By capitalizing on the sequencing
of images made possible by television, the various perspectives enabled by the camera’s lens as
well as the artificial borders imposed by the rounded, rectangular shape and sloping surface of
the CRT screen, Dibbets and Flanagan, together with Schum, produced works of art that could be
seen only within the Land Art broadcast. In this way, Flanagan’s and Dibbets’s projects
succeeded at creating a work of art that exists not for television, but on television, distributed to
its viewers through the transmission of the program. Distinct from other efforts to document and
distribute land art, which reinforce the primary status of the original site and intervention,
Flanagan’s and Dibbets’s Land Art projects quite literally efface the original site and uphold the
filmic record as the original work of art.
342

Barry Flanagan’s project, A Hole in the Sea, was the second of the “Land Art” projects to
be filmed, completed in February 1969. It was also the second to appear in the broadcast,
following Richard Long’s Walking a Straight 10 Mile Line. At the end of Long’s project, the

342
Barry Flanagan’s attention to the process of making and use of organic materials in his sculptural
practice has been noted by scholars including Claire Wallis and Jo Melvin. Even after his shift to the
much more traditional medium of bronze in the early 1970s, he continued to focus on process, including
models and plaster forms with his final, bronze compositions. A student of Anthony Caro’s, Flanagan’s
work is understood as a more playful reaction to the stoicism of Greenberg’s modernism by Wallis and
Melvin. See Claire Wallis, “The Business is in the Making” (11-34) and Jo Melvin, “No Thing to Say”
(53-65) in Barry Flanagan: early works 1965-1982 (London: Tate, 2011).
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screen switched immediately to Flanagan’s, featuring a scene filmed at Scheveningen on the
Dutch Coast. A clear Plexiglas cylinder is inserted vertically into the sand just at the shoreline.
The camera slowly moves in closer to the cylinder, and the waves splashing in the background
supply the only soundtrack. Barry Flanagan’s name flashes onto the screen, followed by the title,
A Hole in the Sea, the location and date of filming. This information, and nothing more, is
narrated by an off-screen voice.
343
The screen goes black for a moment, followed by the
appearance of a timestamp reading 13.15. When the scene from the coast returns, the angle of the
camera has shifted, and is now located directly above the cylinder, which occupies the middle of
the screen. One small wave laps up against the shore and surrounds the cylinder, which blocks
the water from entering into its center. [Image 20.] The screen goes black again, followed by a
second timestamp, this time 13.24. When the ocean scene returns, the tide has come in a bit and
the waves are visibly larger. Following the third black screen and timestamp (13.37), the camera
has moved down, closer to the cylinder, and the ocean now fills the televised shot. [Image 21.]
The bits of sand and shore present in the first two shots re no longer visible and the waves are
notably stronger and deeper. This pattern repeats through several more timestamps, covering a
total period of nearly three hours, from 13.15 to 16.20. As time passes, the waves get larger and
stronger, sometimes skipping over the top of the cylinder to flood its interior. As the waves
recede, any surplus water remaining inside the cylinder seeps back into the sand. The angle of
the camera, now located directly overhead, flattens the scene into a two-dimensional picture. The
cylinder appears as a flat circle; it neither emerges from the surface of the sea nor retreates into
the depths of the sand. Rather, its interior reads as a circular absence in the middle of the sea,
replacing the three-dimensions of the cresting and waning waves with the two-dimensions of a

343
The words on the screen appear in English, but the voiceover is in German.
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simple black hole. [Image 22.] Occasionally, the camera moves in relation to the ocean,
sometimes closer to the cylinder, and sometimes farther away, granting the viewer perspective
on the scene from a variety of heights. At 16.38, the camera returns to the position it had at the
beginning, even with the horizon. The ocean retreats into the background, and the rules of linear
perspective direct the viewer’s vision. Barry Flanagan walks out into the thigh-deep water to
retrieve the cylinder and carts it back to shore and off screen. The camera lingers on the seascape
for a couple of seconds before the screen fades to black.
The series of images that constitute A Hole in the Sea depict a black hole in the middle of
the ocean. The passage of time, marked by the periodic time stamps, the incoming tide and the
rhythmic sounds of the sea produce nearly four minutes of footage that appear seamless,
unedited and, aside from Flanagan’s appearance in the final shot, untouched by the intervention
of an artist or viewer. By distinguishing between the sequence of events presented during the
transmission of Land Art and what actually unfolded for the camera establishes the broadcast as
the primary work of art. The unbroken progression of an incoming tide, along with the persistent
ability of the Plexiglas cylinder to evade the stronger and stronger waves, are illusions enabled
by the film. So too is the aerial perspective the viewer was granted for much of the broadcast,
along with the artificially imposed boundaries of the television screen, which suggested the hole
to be located much further out to sea than it actually was, right at the shoreline. Several
production notes suggest the discrepancy between the broadcast of A Hole in the Sea and the
actual event. For one, Ursula Wevers recalled running out into the ocean with Flanagan to adjust
the cylinder, as the waves continually knocked it out of position.
344
The only human intervention
conveyed in the film was Flanagan himself trotting out to remove the cylinder, triumphantly

344
Wevers (2004), 28.
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hoisting it over his shoulder and carting it off screen at the very end. The stability of the cylinder
and its dominance over the waves were myths fabricated for the viewer in the filming and editing
process. Furthermore, a strict deadline from SFB meant that Schum and Wevers had to execute
the project as quickly as possible.
345
With only a handful of days available for filming in which
the high tide would occur during daylight hours, the production would certainly have been high-
pressure and rushed.
The aerial perspective granted by the camera’s lens provided a second important
distinction between the presentation of A Hole in the Sea in Land Art and the realities of its
making. At Flanagan’s suggestion, Schum borrowed a fire engine from the Scheveningen fire
brigade.
346
[Image 23.] By climbing out to the end of the fully extended ladder, Schum was able
to obtain a shot of the cylinder from directly overhead. This perspective obscured the long sides
of the cylinder, and captured only its interior void, which was rendered as a flat circle. A
photograph taken during filming depicts the discrepancy between the camera’s vantage and the
perspective available to people at the scene. Whether crouched on the cold sand or standing atop
the nearby retaining wall, onlookers could only see the cylinder from an oblique angle. [Image
24.] The phenomenon of a hole appearing in the middle of the sea, dependent on the aerial
vantage point, would not have been visible to viewers at the scene. Similarly, the edges of the
television screen allowed for the establishment of an artificial environment around the cylinder.
The rising tide bled off the edges of the screen, filling the surface of the screen completely with
ocean and manipulating the scale at which the viewer encountered the cylinder. The early shots
depicted sand and sea, suggesting the cylinder was located at the shoreline and thereby giving a
semblance of scale. Towards the end of the broadcast, however, the cylinder was seen adrift in a

345
The original deadline was mid-December, 1968. By this point, it had been extended to March, 1969.
346
Email conversation with Jo Melvin at the Estate of Barry Flanagan, October 15, 2014.
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borderless sea, expanding to fill the frame set first by the camera and ultimately by the television
screen. This apparently endless seascape contrasts significantly with the actual film site, which
was much smaller in scale, located on a shallow beach protected by a pier and retaining wall.
The limiting borders and separation from context imposed by the television screen itself aided in
the construction of a dramatically different visual event than the one that took place on that cold
February morning in 1969 on the Dutch Coast.
347
These differences separate the broadcast of A
Hole in the Sea from the event filmed, disrupting any pretense to correlation between event and
filmic recording, and reinforcing Schum’s concept of the broadcast as work of art.
Jan Dibbets’s contribution is the longest of the eight, clocking in at seven minutes and 32
seconds and appearing sixth in the broadcast. Filmed right after A Hole in the Sea in February
1969, and also on the Dutch Coast, Dibbets’s 12 Hours Tide Object with Correction of
Perspective similarly required a rushed shooting schedule, completed within three short days in
which the high tide occurred during daylight.
348
12 Hours begins with a shot of the sky, with Jan
Dibbets’s name superimposed across the screen. The camera slowly pans down until the ocean
fills the screen, horizon line at its top, waves at its bottom. The title, date and location of filming
appear on screen, narrated by an off-screen voice. The camera slowly moves back, across the
sand, finally settling on some seaside bushes that sway in the wind. Suddenly, the scene shifts to
a blank expanse of sand, and a tractor can be seen backing up along the left side of the screen, its
rumbling motor adding the only sound. [Image 25.] The tractor’s dredging shovel leaves behind
a series of grooves in the sand that extend up the side of the screen. Once the tractor reaches the
top of the screen, the camera cuts to a new shot; this time the tractor is backing up along the right

347
Years after the filming of A Hole in the Sea, Flanagan recalled how bitterly cold it was during filming.
Email conversation with Jo Melvin at the Estate of Barry Flanagan, October 15, 2014.
348
Wevers (2004), 28.
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side. Similarly, the tractor is filmed reversing across the bottom of the screen, and then across the
top. At the top, it drives back and forth several times until the grooves left by its shovel fill the
top of the screen. [Image 26.] A square, edged by the lines left by the tractor’s shovel, appears on
screen for several seconds, joined by the return of the sound of the ocean. [Image 27.] Slowly
encroaching waves gradually erase the grooves left behind by the tractor. As the tide comes in,
and the waves grow larger and deeper, seaside sounds become more apparent; screeching
seagulls join the soundtrack. [Image 28.] Ultimately, the screen is transformed from a dry
landscape marked by the tractor’s grooves into a fluid, ocean scene, with foaming waves and
water completely filling the surface of the screen.
Dibbets’s project is part of his larger investigation of the illusion of perspective in two-
dimensional images, whereby shapes appear distorted when they are articulated according to the
principles of linear perspective.
349
Until his work with Schum, Dibbets had performed such
“corrections of perspective” in photographs, such as Perspective Correction, My Studio I, 2:
Square with 2 Diagonals on the Wall, from 1969. [Image 29.] In this photo of the artist’s studio,
the diagonal lines of the wall receding into space are countered by the sketch of a square drawn
on the surface of the canvas. (Perspective Correction is a gelatin silver emulsion on canvas.) The
lines of the square, along with bisecting diagonals inside of it, mark out the orthogonal
dimensions of the canvas’s borders. These dimensions are obscured through the illusion of
perspective, which suggests the recession of space leading from the area of the studio where the

349
According to Erik Verhagen, Dibbets’s photographic practice is concerned with the “‘pictorializing’ of
photography,” meaning the exploitation of photography’s pictorial aspect in order to investigate its
inherent duality as something both indexical and iconic. See Erik Verhagen Jan Dibbets: The
Photographic Work (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014). For definitions of the indexical and iconic
in relation to photography, see Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Part 1” (1976) and “Notes on the
Index: Part 2” (1977), in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1985).
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photograph was taken back to the far wall and window located several yards away. Perspective
Correction, My Studio I, 2 combines the illusion of three-dimensional space in the photograph
with the two-dimensional reality of the surface of the canvas.
12 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective similarly alludes to the
displacement of reality by illusion when three-dimensions are rendered on a two-dimensional
surface. Though in this case, Dibbets accounts for the dimensions and curvature of the CRT
screen, which is rectangular with rounded corners and edges that slope down and away from the
surface of the screen. The tracks left by the tractor’s dredging shovel produced what appeared on
the television screen to be a square drawn in the sand. In reality, the shape was a trapezoid. The
edge seen at the top of the screen was 90 feet long while the edge at the bottom was only 9 feet
long, and the edges on the right and left sides of the screen sloped outward to accommodate the
difference in length between top and bottom.
350
[Image 30.] Taking the shape of the CRT screen
into consideration, Dibbets calculated the dimensions and camera angle necessary to produce
what would appear to be a square on the screen. Seen perched atop his mobile film studio, Gerry
Schum films the scene from a vantage point carefully calculated and unavailable to other onsite
on-lookers. [Image 31.] The angles between each line and the variant thickness of each edge
produce the optical illusion. Production notes recount how the lines on the left and right sides of
the screen had to be made thicker during the editing process, to make the illusion of the square
more convincing, and a production photograph taken during the filming depicts the top line to be
much thicker than the others.
351
[Image 30.] Formulated precisely for presentation on the screen
according to these terms, 12 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective is the televised
image rather than the event that unfolded on the Dutch Coast in 1969.

350
Letter from Gerry Schum to Gene Youngblood, June 29, 1969.
351
Wevers (2004), 28.
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In addition to the visual importance of the image on the physical screen, process and the
passage of time are central concerns at stake in 12 Hours. The comparatively lengthy (almost
twice as long as Flanagan’s) piece captures the slow and steady pace of the tractor, alluding to
the time it took to dredge the groves into the sand and the back and forth, repetitive course it
took. As the encroaching waves wash across the shore, erasing the tractor’s lines, the camera
records the time spent unmaking the lines in the sand. Frequent jumps from shot to shot suggest a
lapse of time cut out of the span of the film, alluding to an even longer process than the one
viewers are given access to. This underscores duration in the broadcast, producing a work of art
that dramatizes the temporal aspects of television through visual ellipses.

Art on TV
The first television broadcast in the Federal Republic of Germany appeared on Christmas
Day, 1952, pioneered by Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR), which would become Sender
Freies Berlin (SFB) in 1954.
352
One year later, 10,000 viewers tuned into the country’s only
channel for evening programs.
353
For the next decade, SFB continued to broadcast West
Germany’s one television channel, which aired in black and white for two short hours in the
evening. It was not until 1963 that a second channel appeared, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen
(ZDF). By 1965, there were 10 million television sets in Germany, with an average of 2.5

352
Dieter Daniels, “Television – Art or Anti-Art? Conflict and cooperation between the avant-garde and
the mass media in the 1960s and 1970s” (2004) Media Art Net, accessed November 6, 2014,
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/overview_of_media_art/massmedia/.
353
Ibid.
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viewers each, leading the German journalist Hans Heigert to report, “television is already
reaching the whole German nation,” despite his skepticism toward the medium.
354

While the average American family watched five hours of television in the 1960s, with
their choice of roughly 10 channels depending on location, often broadcast around the clock and
increasingly in color from 1957, West Germans enjoyed relatively modest viewing conditions.
355

Despite the small amount of available programming and on-air time, artists and critics alike
perceived the medium as a threatening thing in need of critical attention from its earliest days.
Perhaps its most vocal opponent, Theodor Adorno feared television would become the ultimate
tool for the culture industry. He wrote in 1953, “Through television one comes closer to the goal,
that dreamless dream, of having a reproduction of the entire material world in an image that
penetrates all the organs, and at the same time one can inconspicuously smuggle into this world
anything that one considers becoming to the real world.”
356
Television’s ability to create a
facsimile of the world, all encompassing in its simultaneity of visual and auditory effects,
facilitated the culture industry’s forward march toward the total undermining of individual
thought and critical reflection.
357

354
Hans Heigert, “Das Fernsehen” in Massenmedien die geheimen Führer, edited by Josef Othmar Zöller
(Augsburg: Verlag Winfried-Werk, 1965), 179. In the same breath, Heigert describes television as the
“favorite whipping boy of German cultural criticism. “Zugleich ist dieses Instrument der deutschen
Kulturkritik liebster Prügelknabe.” See also, Daniels, “Television – Art or Anti-Art?”
355
Daniels, “Television – Art or Anti-Art?”
356
Theodore W. Adorno, “Prolog zum Fernsehen,” in Rundfunk und Fernsehen Vol. 2 (1953). English
translation from Daniels, “Television – Art or Anti-Art?” and Daniels, “Art and Television – Adversaries
or Partners?” Media Art Net, accessed November 7, 2014, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/source-
text/94/. Adorno’s concern was shared by many, including Jean Baudrillard who wrote, “The mass media
are anti-mediatory and intransitive. They fabricate non-communication – this is what characterizes them,
if one agrees to define communication as an exchange, as a reciprocal space of a speech and a response,
and thus of a responsibility.” Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,” (1972) in The New Media
Reader, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, 280 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003). This essay was
originally included in Pour une critique de l’economie politique du signe. Paris: Gallimard, 1972.
357
Adorno continued his critique of television in 1954 with the essay, “Television and the Patterns of
Mass Culture.” Here, he dealt with the predictability and stereotypy of television shows. Television, he
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In Germany, artists were skeptical of the medium, too, and determined to find a way to
interrupt the passive viewing Adorno had railed against. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s,
artists had neither access to the equipment needed to produce programming for television, nor
the relationships with television networks that would allow for collaboration. The Sony Portapak,
a handheld video recorder that became available in 1965, coupled with increasingly open lines of
communication between television networks and artists beginning as early a 1968, brought about
fundamental changes in the field.
358
In the interim, artists such as Wolf Vostell and Nam June
Paik made the physical television set the center of their investigations. Their work ranged from
aggressive responses to the object itself, to interruptions of its internal technology resulting in
distorted pictures. Many of Vostell’s projects treated the TV set like a dangerous entity that
needed to be dominated by the viewer. In 1962, he called on audiences to assert control over the
TV by constantly changing channels or ingesting it as a “TV dinner.”
359
In a 1963 Happening,
titled TV Burial, Vostell assaulted a television set with cake before wrapping it in barbed wire
and raw meat and burying it in the ground.
360
Beginning in 1959 and continuing throughout the

argues, is formulaic and stereotypical both because of the technology of its production and the desire of
its audience for a medium that organizes an increasingly “opaque and complicated modern life.” As
television adopts and promulgates certain types, they are transferred over into reality. “Empirical life,”
Adorno writes, “becomes infused with a kind of meaning that virtually excludes adequate experience no
matter how obstinately the veneer of such ‘realism’ is built up.” Theodor W. Adorno, “Television and the
Patterns of Mass Culture” (1954), in Mass Culture: the popular arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg,
474-488 (Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1957). Originally published in Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television,
Vol. 8 (1954): 213-235.
358
The last years of the 1960s proved a pivotal period for collaborations between artists and television
networks in both North America and Europe. In 1969, San Francisco’s public TV station, KQED, created
a National Center for Experiments in Television, inviting artists to produce work for broadcast in the
studio. Also in 1969, WGBH in Boston began its series The Medium is the Medium, which included the
broadcast of a selection of artist’s tapes. Shortly thereafter, experimental channels would also appear in
the UK (Channel 4) and in France (Canal +). See Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 292-293, 298-
299; Catherine Elwes, Video Art, A Guided Tour, 119-121; and Sarah Hollenberg, “Art on Television:
1967-1976” (PhD Dissertation, University of Southern California, 2012).
359
Elwes, 24-25.
360
Daniels, “Television – Art or Anti-Art?”
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1960s, Vostell disassembled television sets and manipulated their internal technology, producing
jumbled images on the screen. Several of these re-worked TV sets, called TV-Dé-collages, were
installed together in his Elektronischer Dé-coll/age Happening Raum at the Venice Biennale in
1968. Here, six televisions showing mangled images on their screens were installed on a
platform that had been covered in glass shards. [Image 32.] The television sets were connected to
motors equipped with an “interactive control system,” which moved objects around the platform
according to the movements of visitors in the room.
361
Like his earlier endeavors, the Venice
installation was concerned with disrupting passive viewership and facilitating genuine viewer
interaction with both the broadcast and the television set itself. For Vostell, this required
adjustments to the physical TVs, which he adorned with various household items including skis,
rakes, fans and an assortment of detritus, framing the altered picture flickering on their screens.
[Image 33.]
Like Vostell, Nam June Paik manipulated the internal technology of the television,
producing distortions that would invite “the viewer to abandon the shallow pleasures of
television consumerism and embark on a process of transcendental meditation.”
362
For his 1963
Zen for TV, Paik affixed magnets to a television set, which disrupted its electron scanner and
caused only a single visible line of light to appear in the center of the screen.
363
[Image 34.] In
Kuba TV, the television set was connected to a tape recorder; the music playing on the recorder
determined the appearance of the picture. Both Zen for TV and Kuba TV were included in Paik’s
first major exhibition, “Exposition of Music – Electronic Television,” held March 11 – 20, 1963

361
This is according to Peter Saage, the technician who developed the system. See Media Art Net,
accessed November 6, 2014, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/elektronische-
decollage/images/3/?desc=full.
362
Elwes, 25. See also Lutz Koepnick, “Fluxus Television,” in Framing Attention: Windows on Modern
German Culture, 200-239 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
363
Ibid.
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at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal. [Image 35.] Open for only two hours each evening, from
7:30 to 9:30, the exhibition coincided with the nightly television broadcast, thus interrupting the
visitor’s ability to watch television at home while also attending the exhibition. Without the
opportunity to produce programming for television, Paik nevertheless found a way to intervene
in the structure and systems of the broadcast.
364

While Adorno was convinced that television elicited a dangerously passive viewership,
and artists such as Vostell and Paik worked to counteract such passivity, other early responses to
television were more optimistic, celebrating the potential for mass communication lodged within
such technological novelty. The German media scholar Gerhard Eckert concluded in the final
section of his 1953 book Die Kunst des Fernsehens, that television was already by 1953 an art
form in certain circumstances. More triumphantly, he insisted, “It will certainly be the art of
tomorrow.”
365
Umberto Eco, too, recognized the communicatory potential of television, devoting
a section of his 1962 treatise The Open Work to “Chance and Plot: Television and Aesthetics.”
366

Live broadcast especially, he argued, might operate as an “open work,” or one that required the
viewer’s mental cooperation to construct meaning, rather than relying on fixed meanings waiting
to be consumed by a passive audience. For Eco, live television was not an “open work” simply
because it existed in real time and was subject to chance. Rather, the director of a live broadcast
worked in a way that highlighted chance by arranging and categorizing a constellation of
possibilities. In programming planned in advance, choices related to the placement of cameras
and which shots to broadcast in a given sequence often pandered to the stereotypy Adorno

364
Daniels, “Television – Art or Anti-Art?”
365
Gerhard Eckert, Die Kunst des Fernsehens (Emsdetten: Verlag Lechte, 1953), 102. Eckert was an early
supporter of German commercial television. See also Daniels, “Television – Art or Anti-Art?”
366
Umberto Eco, “Chance and Plot: Television and Aesthetics,” in The Open Work (1962), trans. Anna
Cancogni, 105-122 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
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discussed, arranged in such a way as to efface the production of shows for television, making
transitions from scene to scene and the development of narrative as seamless as possible.
However, Eco argued, live broadcasts made directorial choices and the narratives they created
more evident. When these elements were transparent to the viewer, he or she would enjoy a
greater awareness for the workings of the medium and become a more critical viewer.
Eco’s belief that television could facilitate an active viewing experience was one shared
by Gerry Schum. In his 1969 letter to Gene Youngblood, Schum asserted, “[The] TV gallery is
more or less a mental institution, which comes only into real existence in the moment of
transmission by TV.”
367
For Schum, the Fernsehgalerie produced a viewing environment that
encouraged critical reflection, and it was this aspect of it that separated the Fernsehgalerie from
other television programs. He described the Fernsehgalerie as a “kind of feedback mechanism,”
in which viewers would be called upon to actively consume what they were watching, critiquing
what they saw while attempting to make sense of it. This was in contrast to other programs,
which enabled “the mindless absorption of the televised spectacle,” precisely what Adorno
feared.
368

In his remarks at the March 1969 opening, Jean Leering differentiated between the
Fernsehgalerie and other television shows. Unlike the others, Schum’s program aimed for
transparency in the transmission of information. “In normal TV,” Leering explained, “your
interest will be directed to the matter of which you are being informed. In the artwork, the
process of informing itself is the focus. The typical function of information thus falls away.” In
other words, the Fernsehgalerie functioned to draw the viewer’s attention to the media of

367
Gerry Schum letter to Gene Youngblood, June 29, 1969.
368
Gerry Schum, Proposal for the “Fernsehgalerie: Land Art,” May 1968. Reprinted in Gerry Schum
(1979), 4. Quoted in Eric Du Bruyn, “Mediascape,” in Ready to Shoot: Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum,
Videogalerie Gerry Schum, (Cologne: Snoeck Verlagsgesellschaft, 2004), 139.
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distribution, to the broadcast itself as aesthetic material. This was in opposition to traditional
programming, in which the media of distribution was meant to be invisible, or at least less visible
than the subject matter of the program. Crucial to this active viewership was the absence of
superfluous explanatory information. Viewers of the Fernsehgalerie were meant to encounter the
television program on their own terms, without prescriptive or confining definitions. “During all
38 minutes of the ‘Land Art” show there is no word spoken,” Schum wrote in 1969. “No
explanation. I think an art object realized in regard of the medium [of] TV does not need a
spoken explanation.”
369
Schum’s refusal to provide contextual information ultimately resulted in
the demise of the Fernsehgalerie, as television stations grew increasingly concerned with ratings
in the 1970s. His faith in the viewer’s ability to comprehend what they witnessed within the
Fernsehgalerie was fundamental, however, to his belief that television could function as a means
for the communication of information as art, rather than information about art.
The radicalism of Schum’s approach is made all the more apparent when his
Fernsehgalerie is viewed within the context of other arts programming available in Germany at
the time. In contrast to Schum’s Fernsehgalerie programs, which were shot entirely by Schum in
collaboration with the artists, other coterminous examples were made under the guidance of the
television stations, filmed or reworked within their studios and finalized according to their
standards of communicability.
370
The first direct collaboration between artists and a network
occurred in 1964, when Joseph Beuys, Bazon Brock and Wolf Vostell were invited to carry out
live actions in the studio. These actions were then filmed for a feature titled “Fluxus Group,”

369
Gerry Schum letter to Gene Youngblood, June 29, 1969.
370
For example, the 1962 “Fluxus Festspiele” in Wiesbaden received televisual coverage in the form of a
rather pedantic, condescending documentary. Dieter Daniels, “Art and Television – Adversaries or
Partners?,” in Medien Kunst Aktion – Die 60er und 70er Jahre in Deutschland, ed. Rudolf Frieling, 71
(New York: Springer, 1998).
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included in the TV magazine, Die Drehscheibe and broadcast by ZDF on December 11, 1964.
371

While the artists were allowed to design and carry out their own events, full control of the
directing and filming remained with ZDF. Black Gate Cologne, often recognized as the first “TV
art broadcast” in Germany appeared on WDR in 1968. Organized by Otto Piene and Aldo
Tambellini in New York, the Happening had been filmed but not intended for distribution on
television. The recording was reworked for television in WDR’s Studio E, where multiple
cameras and recordings were edited together to produce the televised program.
372
In contrast
with these televised events, which were carefully orchestrated by the stations that aired them,
Schum’s Fernsehgalerie was something of a rogue project. Developed by Schum and his
collaborators and filmed entirely by Schum in cooperation with the artists, Land Art was
produced without help or interference from SFB (aside from the network’s repeated and often
futile attempts to receive the program in a timely manner). While the network was ultimately
unhappy with the project, what resulted was a televised event quite distinct from other
contemporary examples in its effort to facilitate an engagement between art and viewer outside
of the gallery and museum system.
Furthermore, Schum’s faith in the viability of television as artistic media, his adoption of
the medium rather than any effort to subvert it, is all the more pointed in Germany, were the
earliest artistic responses to television proved to be the most critical. In addition to Vostell’s TV
Burial, Günther Uecker covered a television set in nails in 1963 while Joseph Beuys produced
his Felt TV action in 1966, in which he punched his own face with boxing-gloves while seated in
front of a TV screen covered with felt.
373
[Image 36.] Compare these works with other examples,

371
Ibid.
372
Ibid. See also, Daniels, “Television – Art or Anti-Art?”
373
A version of Felt TV was included in Schum’s second Fernsehgalerie, Identifications, 1970.
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such as Tom Wesselmann’s Still Life #28 (1963), and Richard Hamilton’s Just What is it that
Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956), both of which feature a television set
unassumingly situated among many modern conveniences and luxuries. [Images 37 and 38.]
These collages incorporate television in a manner that is nowhere near as violent and aggressive
as Nam June Paik’s and Wolf Vostell’s treatment of the medium. Wesselmann’s and Hamilton’s
images furnish the viewer with the opportunity to reflect on a scene, rather than demanding
audience participation and interaction with the television set itself. In contrast to those who
feared television’s ability to manipulate and pacify mass audiences, Schum believed television
had the potential to incite active viewership, producing critically contemplative viewers with an
expanded access to works of art, now available over the airwaves. The “cultural deficiencies of
the mass medium,” were not a concern to Schum, who saw television as a perfect means for
distributing “artistic process and concepts that had left the object behind them.”
374
Motivated by
the changing trends in art making, combined with the democratic impulse to make art available
to more people, television appeared to be a productive avenue for the making and distribution of
art.
Schum’s formula for producing a television show that distributed art rather than
information about art depended on his adaptation of aspects central to the medium. The works of
art included in Land Art were organized around two features fundamental to television, the shape
and surface of the screen and the time-based quality of the medium. Land Art’s projects made
these factors the very subject of their events, bringing front and center the processes of their
making while constructing their visual appearances around the parameters of the CRT television
screen. Furthermore, Land Art sped up the process of making and unmaking central to so many

374
Daniels, “Art and Television – Adversaries or Partners?” 72.
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earthworks, but often less visible at the site. Double Negative, as discussed in Chapter 2, will be
entirely transformed over time, but its complete construction and deconstruction are not visible
in a single visit. The projects included in Land Art operate like brief vignettes; they tell the tales
of erosion, transformation and natural forces so relevant to earthworks, but in compact,
perceivable, “made for television” passages. In all these ways, they assert film and television,
otherwise understood as documentary and mediated tools, as the primary site of the work of art.

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Chapter 3 Images

Image 1. Opening Screen for Land Art, April 15, 1969

Image 2. Walter de Maria standing next to his Earth Room installation at Galerie Heiner
Friedrich, Munich, 1968.
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Image 3. Dennis Oppenheim, Beebe Lake Ice Cut, executed on the Cornell Campus as part of
Earth Art exhibition, 1969.

Image 4. Gerry Schum’s sketch of proposed opening for the “Fernsehgalerie,” 1968

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Image 5. Jean Leering at the opening for Land Art, held in Studio C at Sender Freies Berlin,
March 28, 1969.

Image 6. Richard Long, Walking a straight 10 mile line forward and back shooting every half
mile, in Land Art, April 15, 1969. Detail from Land Art promotional poster.

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Image 7. Barry Flanagan, A Hole in the Sea, in Land Art, April 15, 1969. Detail from Land Art
promotional poster.

Image 8. Dennis Oppenheim, Timetrack, following the time border between Canada and USA, in
Land Art, April 15, 1969. Detail from Land Art promotional poster.

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Image 9. Robert Smithson, Fossil Quarry Mirror with Four Mirror Displacements, in Land Art,
April 15, 1969. Detail from Land Art promotional poster.

Image 10. Jan Dibbets, 12 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective, in Land Art, April
15, 1969. Detail from Land Art promotional poster.

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Image 11. Walter de Maria, Two Lines Three Circles in the Desert, in Land Art, April 15, 1969.
Detail from Land Art promotional poster.

Image 12. Michael Heizer, Coyote, in Land Art, April 15, 1969. Detail from Land Art
promotional poster.

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Image 13. Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking, 1967

Image 14. Flux Year Box 2, c. 1967

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Image 15. Photograph from Mauricio Kagel, Ornithologica Multiplicata, an event included in
Labor – 5 Tage Rennen, Cologne, October 15-20, 1968

Image 16. Poster advertising Land Art, featuring each of the 8 postcards sent to announce the
broadcast
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Image 17. James Turrell, Roden Crater, 1972- (photograph ca. 1983)

Image 18. Robert Smithson, Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1-9), 1969.
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Image 19. Walter de Maria, The New York Earth Room, 141 Wooster Street, New York, 1977-

Image 20. Barry Flanagan, A Hole in the Sea, in Land Art, April 15, 1969
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Image 21. Barry Flanagan, A Hole in the Sea, in Land Art, April 15, 1969

Image 22. Barry Flanagan, A Hole in the Sea, in Land Art, April 15, 1969

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Image 23. Filming of A Hole in the Sea, February 1969

Image 24. Filming of A Hole in the Sea, February 1969

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Image 25. Jan Dibbets, 12 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective, in Land Art, April
15, 1969

Image 26. Jan Dibbets, 12 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective, in Land Art, April
15, 1969

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Image 27. Jan Dibbets, 12 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective, in Land Art, April
15, 1969

Image 28. Jan Dibbets, 12 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective, in Land Art, April
15, 1969

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Image 29. Jan Dibbets, Perspective Correction, My Studio I, 2: Square with 2 Diagonals on the
Wall, 1969

Image 30. Filming of 12 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective, February 1969

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Image 31. Filming of 12 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective, February 1969

Image 32. Wolf Vostell, Elektronischer Dé-coll/age Happening Raum, 1968

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Image 33. Wolf Vostell, Elektronischer Dé-coll/age Happening Raum (detail), 1968

Image 34. Nam June Paik, Zen for TV, 1963

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Image 35. Nam June Paik, installation of television sets at “Exposition of Music – Electronic
Television,” March 11-20, 1963 at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal.

Image 36. Günther Uecker, TV auf Tisch (TV on Table), 1963

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Image 37. Tom Wesselmann, Still Life #28, 1963

Image 38. Richard Hamilton, Just What is it that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So
Appealing? 1956

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Chapter 4

Attitudes on Display: Harald Szeemann and the Exhibition of the Gesture

On March 18, 1969 a wrecking ball suspended from a crane smashed several times into
the ground outside the Kunsthalle Bern. Under the direction of Michael Heizer, the repeated
blows to the cement resulted in a series of pockmarks that soon accumulated into a cracked and
gaping hole in the plaza outside the Kunsthalle’s entry rotunda. The destructive force of the
event received a great deal of critical attention from the press, but photographs taken that day
reveal a less subversive narrative.
375
A somber and reflective Heizer stands watch over the
wrecking ball as it slams into the ground over and over again. Shallow craters evolve into a
collection of detritus, smashed concrete, dust and pebbles nearly twenty feet wide. He crosses his
arms, gazes at the ground, reaches down to brush aside some rocks and squats to contemplate the
scene from a lower angle. [Images 1-2.]
Heizer’s Bern Depression was part of Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form
(Works – Concepts – Processes – Situations – Information), an exhibition organized by Harald
Szeemann. It opened at the Kunsthalle Bern on March 22, 1969, featuring works of art by 69

375
Steven ten Thije has attributed the critical response in the press to two violent events that preceded the
exhibition, shrouding it in negativity before it even opened. One was Heizer’s destruction of the
pavement. The other was Peter Saam’s and Hans-Peter Jost’s public burning of their military uniforms to
protest Switzerland’s compulsive military service. Although the second event was not part of Attitudes,
many perceived it as such, leading to a connection between the exhibition and vandalism in the name of
art. Steven ten Thije, “‘Op Losse Schroeven’ and ‘When Attitudes Become Form:’ Public Reception in
the Netherlands and Switzerland” in Exhibiting the New Art, 212-219 (London: Afterall, 2010).
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European and American artists.
376
Put together with extraordinary speed over a furious three
months of international travel and studio visits, the exhibition addressed contemporary art with
an energetic sense of the new.

Significant not only for the art on display, but also for its
innovative curatorial structure, When Attitudes Become Form came at the end of a decade
defined by innovation and upheavals in the making of art. Minimalism, Pop art, Fluxus, land art
and conceptual art had all transformed the rules around what constituted a work of art, who could
make it, where it might be located and if it even had to be made in the first place.
377
Exhibiting
this art provoked questions about what exactly the art was; whether it might be the act of
creation, the documentation of the process of making, the material things generated by such a
process, or the encounter between the work of art and its viewer. With the Attitudes show, Harald
Szeemann sought a method of exhibition that could accommodate this sense of open-endedness,
staying true to the contingency at stake rather than falling back on the objects that might stand in
for the more intangible work of art. To do this, Szeemann prioritized the presence of the artist,
inviting artists to install their work on site at the Kunsthalle and accommodating whatever
gestures the artist proposed, from the overtly dramatic (Michael Heizer’s destruction of the
ground outside the Kunsthalle with a wrecking ball), to the utterly invisible (Robert Barry’s

376
The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue featuring work by several additional artists,
represented by “Information” in the catalogue but without physical works of art on view in the
Kunsthalle. Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form. Works, Concepts, Processes, Situations,
Information, ed. Harald Szeemann (Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, 1969).
377
Lawrence Weiner made the following “Declaration of Intent” regarding conceptual art in 1968, “1.
The artist may construct the piece; 2.The piece may be fabricated; 3.The piece need not be built. Each
being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver
upon the occasion of receivership.” His statement was published in the catalogue as exhibition organized
by Seth Siegelaub, January 5-31, 1969. See the discussion of this exhibition and statement in Chapter 1
of this dissertation.
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release of the odorless, colorless Uranyl Nitrate from the roof of the building).
378
These onsite
installations were meticulously documented with photographs that recorded both the process of
making as well as the atmosphere of conversation and interaction among the participants in the
exhibition space turned “laboratory” or “shared studio.”
379

The exhibition’s brevity – it lasted just four and a half weeks – is a minor detail when set
against the historical significance with which it has come to be viewed.
380
Recognized now for
the “hugely compelling description of a new moment in art, and in the curatorial presentation of
art” that it offered, the exhibition at first met with some very critical responses from both the

378
This approach was evident from early in the planning process, documented by a note in Szeemann’s
diary on December 15, 1968, following a visit with Richard Serra. Here, Szeemann noted the need to
secure airfare for Serra so that he could make his piece, Splash, in Bern. To make Splash, Serra threw 210
kilograms of molten lead against the wall where it met the floor and then left it to harden. Szeemann, How
Does an Exhibition Come into Being?, 180.
379
Szeemann often used the concept of the “laboratory” to describe the exhibition. See for example
“Mind Over Matter: Hans Ulrich Obrist talks with Harald Szeemann,” Artforum 35, No. 2 (November
1996): 74-79. Reprinted in Hans Ulrich Obrist, A Brief History of Curating, 80-101 (Zurich: JRP Ringier,
2008).
Balthasar Burkhard took a significant portion of the photographs. The Getty Research Institute holds a
near complete collection in the Harald Szeemann Papers, Series IV. Many have been published in Tobias
Bezzola and Roman Kurzmeyer, eds., Harald Szeemann: With, By, Through, Because, Towards, Despite.
Catalogue of all exhibitions, 1957-2005, 226 (New York: Springer, 2007), and Germano Celant, ed.,
When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013, ed. Germano Celant (Milan: Fondazione Prada,
2013).
380
When Attitudes Become Form closed a few days earlier than had originally been planned (April 27,
1969). Following its presentation in Bern, the exhibition traveled to Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, May
10 – June 15, 1969 and then on to the Institute of Contemporary Art, London August 28 – September 27,
1969. There is an extensive body of literature on Attitudes and Harald Szeemann. Notable examples
include Florence Derieux, ed. Harald Szeemann: Individual Methodology (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2007);
Bezzola and Kurzmeyer (2007); and Christian Rattemeyer, ed. Exhibiting the New Art (London: Afterall,
2010). See also Julian Meyers, ed., HSz: as is/as if (San Francisco: California College of the Arts, 2010).
Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in Szeemann and Attitudes. The Getty Research Institute
acquired Szeemann’s archive in 2011, and recreations of the exhibition have been organized in San
Francisco (2012) and Venice (2013). See Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Became Form Become
Attitudes: a restauration, a remake, a rejuvenation, a rebellion, ed. Jens Hoffmann (San Francisco: CCA
Wattis Institute for contemporary Art, 2012) and When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013,
ed. Germano Celant (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2013).
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press and Harald Szeemann’s colleagues at the Kunsthalle.
381
Frustrated by the response he
received, which he understood as evidence of the overly conservative perspectives shared by
Kunsthalle colleagues, Szeemann left his post as director and began work under the aegis of his
“Agency for Intellectual Guest Labor” (Agentur für geistige Gastarbeit), an independent
organization he established to facilitate his work as a freelance curator.
382
With the
establishment of the Agency, Szeemann wanted to question “the modes of presenting, selecting,
and understanding artworks,” attacking the spirit of ownership and preservation around which
institutions were built.
383
Without the backing of an institution, Szeemann’s role as “exhibition
maker” (his preferred term) turned increasingly toward the authorial. In turn, his conception of
the exhibition changed as well, into a medium or method for its creator to express subjective
ideas.
384
When Attitudes Become Form is remembered not only for the “revolt, experimentation,
and freedom” with which it summarized the art of the 1960s, but also for the changes it
generated in the genre of exhibitions, ideas about how to present works of art, and the role of the
curator.
385

381
Cor Block criticized the exhibition for incorporating “too many divergent tendencies to present a very
clear picture,” thus becoming “caught in the whirlpool of emerging possibilities.” For Tommaso Trini,
Attitudes failed to achieve a method of museum exhibition that could contend with the art on view,
revealing instead the impossibility of such an aim. “When the attitudes of a museum become formal, we
find a shop-window instead of a research centre, a warehouse instead of a school… [The exhibition] has
revealed that despite such openings there is no solution on the museographical plane for the reality-
hunger of the art of today.” Cor Block, “Letter from Holland,” Art International XIII, No. 5 (May 20,
1969): 51-53. Tommaso Trini, “Prodigal Creator’s Trilogy,” domus 478, No. 9 (September 1969): 43-53.
382
Szeemann described the conservative attitudes he perceived at the Kunsthalle Bern in a public letter of
resignation published upon his departure. Harald Szeemann, “Abschied von Form gewordenen Attitüden
in der Kunsthalle Bern,” Berner Tagblatt, 20 April 1969.
383
Derieux, 65. Quote comes from Yann Pavie, “Entretien avec H. Szeemann,” Opus International, No.
36 (June 1972): 39.
384
Interview with Tobia Bezzola, François Aubart and Fabien Pinaroli (April 14, 2007, Maggia)
in Derieux, 28.
385
Rattemeyer, 40.
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This chapter explores Szeemann’s curatorial goals for the Attitudes exhibition, along with
the further development of these ideas in his organization of documenta 5, which took place
three years after Attitudes in 1972. Looking at these exhibitions together allows us to trace a
developmental arc within Szeemann’s curatorial methodology. It begins with the “laboratory”
model at Attitudes, where artists were invited to make their work on site relatively free of
curatorial intervention in an effort to render the artistic gesture visible for the viewer, and shifts
to the much more organized and directed display at documenta 5, carefully executed by
Szeemann so as to facilitate a series of comparisons and juxtapositions that would prompt the
viewer to reflect on the concept of reality as a product of individual comprehension. Each of
these exhibitions placed the viewer’s experience at the center of investigation, exploring the
ways in which the viewer assembled meaning from the works of art on display. At Attitudes, the
artist and his or her gesture were presented as the starting point from which the viewer would
assemble meaning, while at documenta 5, that locus shifted to the curator and the exhibition
design. Identifying Szeemann’s authorial role in the construction of documenta 5, and the
visibility of his hand in shaping the conditions under which viewers encountered the art on
display, marks the final stop on this dissertation’s investigation of efforts to bridge the distance
between works of art and their viewers. Despite Szeemann’s efforts to underscore viewer
comprehension at documenta 5, the overtness of his curatorial hand led artists and critics
including Daniel Buren to argue that Szeemann’s exhibition confused the line between artist and
curator, as the exhibition came to function as a work of art, and the works of art included were
presented in the service of Szeemann’s own ideas.
386
The authorial overtones present at
documenta 5 reveal the inability of organizers such as Szeemann, along with Friedrich Huebach,

386
Daniel Buren, “Exhibition of an Exhibition,” in documenta 5. Questioning Reality – Image Worlds
Today, 29 (Kassel: Verlag Documenta, 1972).
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Gerry Schum, Klaus Honnef and Ursula Meyer, to remain entirely transparent in their
presentation of works of art to viewers, and the impossibility of bridging the distance between
the two in an entirely unmediated way.
Szeemann’s exhibitions joined several others during the late 1960s and early ‘70s, all
dedicated to seeking out methods of display capable of adequately presenting art that favored
process over the object resulting from it. He listed New Media: New Methods (1969), Op Losse
Schroeven (1969), and Nine at Leo Castelli (1968) as influential exhibitions in the General
Bibliography of the Attitudes catalogue.
387
The Dutch exhibition Op Losse Schroeven, organized
by Wim Beeren and held at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam from March 15 to April 27,
1969, coincided almost to the day with Attitudes. Beeren’s and Szeemann’s efforts to keep
expenses low for both organizing institutions prompted them to coordinate the artists’
international travel, resulting in a nearly identical roster of artists in each show.
388
Despite these
similarities, however, the two curators approached the material quite differently. Szeemann
sought an installation that would incorporate the presence of artists on site and reveal the process
behind the production of works of art as paramount to the exhibition’s display. Beeren’s
approach was more thematic, outlining art historical genealogies for recent art, categorizing it
and historicizing it. In New York, New Media: New Methods, organized by Kynaston McShine
and held at The Museum of Modern Art from March 16 to August 16, 1969, shared an approach
similar to Beeren’s. At Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, held at the Whitney Museum of Art
from May 19 to July 6, 1969, artists were invited into the galleries to make their work, and their

387
Gerry Schum’s Fernsehgalerie and the 1968 Earthworks exhibition at the Dwan Gallery, discussed in
Chapters 2 and 3, also appeared among the influential exhibitions listed in the Attitudes catalogue.
388
Rattemeyer, “Op Losse Schroeven and When Attitudes Become Form” in Exhibiting the New Art, 12-
62.
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“spontaneous movements” were identified as elements under review at the exhibition.
389
In 1970,
McShine presented Information at MoMA (July 2-September 20, 1970), employing documentary
materials and ephemera as a method for recording, preserving and presenting works of art that
did not result in object form. It was Nine at Leo Castelli, organized by Robert Morris in 1968,
that was perhaps the most influential for Szeemann, who saw the exhibition while conducting
research for Attitudes. Morris’ marriage of process and material proved deeply influential for
Szeemann, evident in his writing related to the exhibitions as well as the installation design for
Attitudes and documenta 5, and warrants further discussion below.
390
At Attitudes, Szeemann
used the material object as a “trigger to replicate the ‘experience of the artistic process.’”
391
In
this way, Szeemann’s Attitudes represents an attempt to exhibit the gesture, while demonstrating
how the exhibition of the gesture can remain very much rooted in the material object.
Together, these exhibitions reveal an international urgency to contend with the dramatic
upheavals in art making that took place throughout the 1960s. Szeemann’s curatorial
methodology stands apart from the rest, however, in his commitment to bridging the distance
between the work of art and its viewer on an intellectual level. For the extended title of the
exhibition, Szeemann adopted the artist Keith Sonnier’s imperative that art be “live in your
head,” referring at once to the viewer’s mind as the site of the work of art and also to the idea of
the work of art as an unfolding process, live and open-ended, rather than something that had
already resulted in a finished form. In this sense, Szeemann’s curatorial strategy joins other
examples of efforts to transmit works of art directly to the viewer, such as Gerry Schum’s efforts

389
Cindy Nemser, “The Art of Frustration,” in Art Education 24, No. 2 (Feb, 1971): 12-15.
390
Morris’ influence on Szeemann is discussed in greater detail below, in the section “Precedents and
Influences.”
391
Rattemeyer, 53. Quoted words Szeemann’s, from the section “How does an exhibition come into
being?”
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to broadcast art into private homes with his Fernsehgalerie, and Friedrich Heubach’s
employment of the artist magazine as conduit for the conceptual components of land art, from
original desert locale to the reader of the magazine.
Frustrated with the same “triangle” of studio, gallery and museum on which Honnef,
Heubach and Schum had ruminated, Szeemann professed the need for museums to change the
way they organized exhibitions, to better facilitate the transfer of works of art to viewers. In a
1970 interview with the art critic Petra Kipphoff featured in Die Zeit, Szeemann explained how
the presentation of art in museums is challenging, as the museum generates an impression of the
work of art as an expensive and enchanting thing, propagating the studio, gallery, museum
triangle of distribution that dominates contemporary art.
392
By transforming the museum into a
place of “encounters and events,” the experience of the audience would become more prominent,
raising the profile of the individual viewer and positioning him or her as a component in the
work of art, which required the viewer’s experience with it in order to exist.
393

As I will argue, Szeemann highlighted the experience of the visitor and his or her role in
assembling meaning from the exhibition in different ways at Attitudes and at documenta 5,
allowing for an open-ended encounter between the work of art and viewer at Attitudes, and
directing a particular method of viewing at documenta 5. The three years in between Attitudes
and documenta 5 included further efforts to develop an exhibition strategy capable of accounting
for the liveness and open-endedness he located at the heart of the art on display. A key example
was the 1970 exhibition Happening & Fluxus, held at the Kölner Kunstverein. There, he

392
“Über Kunst kann man nicht abstimmen,” Interview between Petra Kipphoff and Harald Szeemann, in
Die Zeit, May 1, 1970. Harald Szeemann Papers. Getty Research Institute. Box 301, Folder 3. “…jedoch
nur eine Erlebnisform zuläßt: das Staunen oder Verzücktsein oder Erfreutsein vor einigen teuren
ästhetischen Objekten.”
393
Ibid.
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encountered problems, including infighting among participating artists and misunderstood
narratives, which led him to impose greater curatorial structure on subsequent exhibitions. While
a reviewer of Attitudes had noted, “The human beings, the visitors to the Kunsthalle Bern, are the
only works of art to be seen at this exhibition,” referring to the ways in which the exhibition
depended upon the experience of the visitor, this had changed markedly by documenta 5, where
the art critic Irmeline Lebeer recognized a “relatively modest role allocated to viewer’s
participation.”
394
When pressed to explain the diminished role of the viewer at documenta 5,
Szeemann concluded that the open-ended art of the 1960s required a more structured model of
exhibition than he had previously attempted with Attitudes.
395
While he continued to demonstrate
an interest in the viewer’s experience with the work of art, describing the process of viewing an
exhibition as the “fermentation in the head of the art lover” of the “publically exposed idea” in
planning notes related to documenta 5, by 1972 his curatorial voice was much more overt. This
was evident in clear categories dividing the works of art on view, along with plans for a
“Visitor’s School,” which would train viewers in the particular manner of looking required by
the exhibition.
396
Perhaps more than anything else, the focus on reality at documenta 5
problematized the relationship between the viewer’s experience and the presence of a directed
narrative at work in the exhibition. Szeemann worked to present reality as something constructed
by the viewer in the act of looking, presenting multiple different ways of imaging reality within
the exhibition and inviting the viewer to reflect on these differences. While the viewer was
invited to “find his own answers,” this all took place within a carefully orchestrated exhibition

394
Reinhardt Stumm, in Basler Nachrichten, April 1, 1969. Reprinted in Bezzola and Kurzmeyer, 226.
Iremlin Lebeer Interview with Harald Szeemann, first published in Chroniques de l’Art Vivant, no. 25,
Nov. 1971, reprinted in Derieux, 130-1.
395
Irmeline Lebeer Interview, in Derieux, 131.
396
Harald Szeemann Papers, Getty Research Institute. Box 314, Folder 10.
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design meant to direct the viewer to the single conclusion that reality was a function of
cognition.
397

Attitudes
For Szeemann, the “newest tendencies in visual art” focused on the process of making
rather than on the objects that resulted from such processes, including both the artist’s physical
actions and psychological motives.
398
In the foreword for the Attitudes exhibition catalogue,
Szeemann wrote, “An entire generation of artists has undertaken to give ‘form’ to the ‘nature of
art and artists.’” He then defined this “form” as the expression of “artistic positions” that reflect
both the “inner bearing” of the artist and the physical action that generated the work of art.
399
In
both German and English, “gesture” and “attitude” refer to the “translation of interior emotion or
thought into a bearing of the body.”
400
Following these definitions, Szeemann defined “attitudes”
as a combination of the measurable, visible gesture with the more elusive emotional state of the
artist. By linking the intangible concepts of individual nature, emotions and psychology to the
more quantifiable movement of the body, “attitudes” offered Szeemann an approach that gave
form to the otherwise more nebulous concept of artistic process. With the term “attitudes,”

397
Lucia Pesapane, “Interview with Co-Curators,” in Derieux, 136-7. Szeemann’s collaborators included
Jean-Christophe Ammann (Realism), Bazon Brock (The Visitor’s School, Audiovisual Preface) François
Burkhardt (Utopia and Planning) and Johannes Cladders (Individual Mythologies).
398
Draft of catalogue forward, When Attitudes Become Form. Harald Szeemann Papers. Getty Research
Institute. Box 288, Folder 8.
399
Foreword to the catalogue, When Attitudes Become Form. English translation taken from the version of
the foreword published in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition’s presentation at the Institute of
Contemporary Arts in London, August 28 – September 27, 1969. The translator is unknown. The essay
appears in Rattemeyer, 192-193.
400
Alison Green, “When Attitudes Become Form and the contest over conceptual art’s history” in
Conceptual: Theory, Myth, and Practice, ed. Michael Corris, 132 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004).
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Szeemann identified the artistic gesture as something capable of being exhibited, without
reducing the process he found so compelling to a reified object.
An archival note reveals Szeemann’s exploration of the term “attitudes.”
401
On one side
of the page, Szeemann typed, “Attitudes are…” On the opposing side he added a long list of
possible definitions, such as “disastrous,” “romantic,” “the end of art,” “the beginning of art,”
“see-through,” “hermetic”, “mystical,” “revolutionary,” “uncommunicable.” [Image 3.]
Szeemann’s pairing of the term “attitudes” with an array of adjectives, none of which actually
define the word “attitudes” but rather construct an affective web of sensibilities around the
concept, reveal his understanding of it as an atmospheric concept that colored both the making of
art as well as the viewing of it. Terms such as “Anti-Form,” “Conceptual Art,” “Possible Art,”
“Impossible Art,” and “Arte povera,” had been used to describe art made during the 1960s that
challenged the status of the art object.
402
For Szeemann, however, these attended only to the
work’s opposition against form and failed to account for what emerged when the object was
given second billing.
403
For Szeemann, it was not enough to account for process in place of the
object. Rather, it was necessary to attend to the ways in which the negation of the art object
transformed the experience of making and viewing works of art. “The artists in this exhibition,”
Szeemann wrote in the foreword to the Attitudes catalogue, “are not object makers. On the
contrary, they seek freedom from the object, and therefore extend meaning beyond the object to
a situation. The artistic process must remain visible in the final product and in the

401
Harald Szeemann Papers. Getty Research Institute. Box 290.
402
Important influences for Szeemann include Robert Morris and Piero Gilardi. See Robert Morris, “Anti
Form,” Artforum 6, no. 8 (April 1968), 33-35; and Piero Gilardi, “Primary Energy and the ‘Microemotive
Artists,’” Arts Magazine 43, no. 1 (September/October 1968), 48. Both of these articles were listed in the
General Bibliography section of the exhibition catalogue.
403
“How does an exhibition come into being?” 178.
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‘exhibition.’”
404
With his exhibition, Szeemann looked to display the artistic process in a manner
that would not only attend to the “inner bearing” of the artist and its manifestation in the work of
art, but also to the experience of viewing the “situation” that existed in lieu of the object.
Szeemann’s primary goal at Attitudes was not to construct art historical genealogies for
the art of the 1960s, categorizing and classifying it, but to create the conditions under which art
could be made in the gallery, an end he felt was both justified and required by the work. This
display strategy would engender a particular experience of viewing, as visitors were encouraged
to meander through the space forming their own connections and drawing their own conclusions.
The goal was an exhibition alive with action and construction, one that put the act of making art
on display rather than merely accounting for it as one component of the work of art. Szeemann
understood his role as a “catalyst” rather than art historian, and the art under review as that which
“deals more with atmosphere than with images.”
405
He worked to create an installation that
would facilitate the production and reception of such “atmospheres” rather than simply leading
the viewer from one work of art to another. This was achieved not only through the art chosen
for exhibition, but also through the organization and layout of the Kunsthalle galleries, where an
open floor plan featured a large central hall and three smaller side galleries, all of which were
accessible and visible from the central hall. This meant that the direction of movement from
gallery to gallery was not linear.
406
As visitors made their way through the exhibition, they
would have to move in and out of the central hall to access the smaller side galleries. In so doing,
they viewed the same artworks repeatedly, in different sequences, which encouraged new
thematic and formal connections. Furthermore, the Kunsthalle’s relatively small rooms meant

404
Harald Szeemann, “Foreword,” Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form. Works, Concepts,
Processes, Situations, Information (Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, 1969).
405
Planning notes for exhibition. Harald Szeemann Papers. Getty Research Institute. Box 288, Folder 4.
406
See floor plans for the Kunsthalle in Celant (2013) and Rattemeyer, 130-131.
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that the exceptionally large and numerous works of art had to be installed in close proximity to
one another. Works of art were rarely perceived on their own, but instead in connection with
those things installed nearby. Finally, an additional two galleries located in the basement level
were accessible via mostly unobstructed stairways that allowed the viewer to peer over the
balustrade into the spaces below, visually connecting them to the more open floor plan on the
main level. [Image 4.] The installation of works such as Alain Jacquet’s electrical wire, which
ran from the top to the bottom floor, draped over the guardrail and strung across the ceiling of
the lower floor, connected the various spaces. One of Artschwager’s 40 Blps (1968) was installed
on the half wall leading to the staircase [Image 5.] and Lawrence Weiner’s A 36” x 36” removal
to the Lathing or Support Wall of Plaster or Wallboard from a Wall (1968) occupied one of the
walls in the stairwell. [Image 6.] The installation of works in this liminal space between floors
functioned to connect the upper and lower spaces, turning passageways and sightlines into sites
of display.
Installing works of art so that they occupied multiple galleries and transitional spaces was
a strategy used throughout the Kunsthalle. On the main floor, two smaller galleries to the right of
the entrance hall held Barry Flanagan’s Two Space Rope Sculpture (1967), a length of rope that
snaked from the north gallery to the east, connecting the two spaces and mimicking a
meandering footpath through the galleries with its haphazard placement. [Image 7.] Similarly,
artists had work installed in various areas of the exhibition, rather than being grouped together
according to maker. For example, Alighiero e Boetti’s chalk drawing, La Luna, 1969, which he
made on site during the installation, was hung on a wall in one of the lower galleries, while a
sculpture of his was included upstairs in the southwest gallery. Photographs taken during the
installation recorded the making of La Luna, depicting Boetti repeatedly marking lines on the
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chalkboard, his concentration apparently unbroken by the commotion going on around him.
[Images 8-9.] His sculpture, Me Sunbathing in Turin on 19 January 1969, was installed upstairs
in one of the smaller galleries on the south side of the Kunsthalle. [Image 10.] Made up of a
number of cement balls, formed by hand and installed in the shape of his body, the work took on
the appearance of a lumpy chalk outline. Both of Boetti’s works offer a record of his body, one
mimicking its shape, the other comprised of a trace of its methodical movements.
Installed far away from each other, each work was made to interact more with the works
surrounding it than with each other. This stretched the two pseudo self-portraits beyond
references to their maker, bringing them into conversation with other projects installed around
them, on both a formal level as well as a relational one, attending to the interaction between the
work of art, others surrounding it and the viewer. For example, the flatness of the body in
Sunbathing, its horizontal posture jutting out from the corner of the gallery, offers a counterpoint
to Flanagan’s meandering rope. While the rope marks out a possible pathway through the
galleries, one to be taken by an upright, walking visitor, Boetti’s cement balls lie gathered
together, prone against the floorboards. One installation photograph in particular highlights these
relationships with exquisite clarity. [Image 7.] As the thick rope snakes through the doorway
connecting the two small galleries, it loops past Boetti’s cement balls and winds around two
visitors, their moving feet blurred by the exposure of the camera lens. The photograph cuts off
the upper half of the visitor’s bodies, including only their legs and feet in the photograph and
drawing comparisons between the upright bodies and the works of art that lie on the floor, the
visitors’ strolling feet negotiating the space around the sculptures.
Downstairs, Boetti’s chalk drawing La Luna was hung in a gallery shared by other Arte
Povera artists, including Gilberto Zorio and Mario Merz. These lower galleries featured works
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that showed a transformation of natural materials. Merz constructed an igloo made of glass,
adorned with a giant branch and dripping in water; Zorio suspended flaming torches from a wire
strung from the ceiling. [Image 11.] Decidedly less spectacular than its gallery-mates, Boetti’s
simple, repeated lines offer a more subdued take on the indexical trace than do fire and water.
Nonetheless, it speaks to the same symbolism and metaphor illustrated by the transformation of
materials in these works of art, “never solely understood as physical manifestations of the
inherent qualities of the material.”
407
Not simply chalk lines on a board, but rather traces of
physical movement and endurance over time, the making of Boetti’s La Luna on site,
documented by the prolific amount of photographs accompanying the exhibition, renders this
process at once measurable and recordable but also temporary and malleable as the chalk dust
fades and disperses over time.
The viewer was invited to meditate upon these sorts of dialogues and juxtapositions
among the works on view. Christian Rattemeyer described these multiple mise-en-scènes with
the term “parcours,” referring to the fluid movement through the space encouraged of both eye
and body.
408
The smaller galleries on the north and south side of the main exhibition hall had just
one entry and exit point, meaning they could only be accessed from the central hall. North
galleries, to the left of the entrance hall were dedicated to spare, immaterial, decidedly
conceptual projects, including works by Carl Andre, Robert Ryman, Fred Sandback, Mel
Bochner, Sol LeWitt, Hanna Darboven, and Franz Erhard Walther. The works on display in the
central hall were mostly made by the youngest generation of post-Minimal American artists,
including Walter de Maria, Keith Sonnier, Bill Bollinger, and Richard Tuttle. Most were made
on site, and therefore reflected Szeemann’s curatorial efforts most emphatically, bringing the

407
Rattemeyer, 39.
408
Ibid., 38.
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process of making into the gallery space. As viewers spent more time in the Kunsthalle, they
would have moved in and out of these galleries, facilitating new juxtapositions and theoretical
connections, with each new path yielding “different sensibilities and concerns.”
409
Furthermore,
the close proximity of many of the works on view combined with the massive number of visitors
occupying the space made it difficult, if not impossible, for viewers to stand back and take in a
work of art in its entirety without either physically bumping into another or catching something
else in their frame of view. Franz Meyer recalled, “Everything was physically close and the
viewer encountered it as a (highly productive) jumble, high on the wall or very low, protruding
into space from the wall or independently situated in the middle of the room.”
410
This method of
installation, in which artworks shared space and begged for metaphorical connections made
among form, materials and live events rather than chronological or biographical narratives,
required active looking. Visitors were encouraged to formulate their own discourses and
reflections on the works on display, which also involved contending with multiple time frames,
reconciling the earlier, moving gesture of the artist with the present, inert state of the form the
viewer encountered.
Franz Meyer, Szeemann’s predecessor as director of the Kunsthalle, described the
departures of the Attitudes show from previous exhibitions. “The ‘Attitudes’ exhibition,” he
wrote, “unlike the contextual thematic group shows before, overwhelmed me. It was an event
with a palpable inner necessity, an uncertainty maybe that was felt beneath the skin, but one that

409
Ibid., 37.
410
Franz Meyer, ‘Wenn Attitüden Form werden’, in Uwe. M. Schneede and Monika Wagner (ed.), Im
Blickfeld: Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunsthalle, 11 (Hamburg: Christians, 1996). Translation Rattemeyer,
36.
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was also immensely pleasurable and inspiring.”
411
Meyer’s words speak to the exhibition’s
energy as an event to be experienced, a living thing that was not a record of actions completed
but rather a collection of processes, gestures and interventions. Szeemann, describing the frenzy
of his “anarchist” exhibition, recalled, “The exhibition took the artist as its starting point. There
weren’t rooms with works hanging in them. It was fairly chaotic; it was more innovative.”
412

There were, of course, rooms with works of art hanging in them, but this quote reveals
Szeemann’s ambitions for the show to operate as something more dynamic than didactic,
facilitating an experience of viewing that would highlight for the viewer his or her role in
assembling meaning, rather than describing works of art for the viewer.
Szeemann’s effort to find a way to “exhibit the gesture” can be dated back to the summer
of 1968.
413
He had been conducting studio visits in the Netherlands in preparation for the
exhibition Recent Art from Holland, organized in cooperation with Edy de Wilde, director of the
Stedelijk Museum.
414
After a visit to the studio of the Dutch painter, Reinier Lucassen,
Szeemann and de Wilde popped next door to see work by Lucassen’s colleague, who had been
helping out as translator during his studio visit. Jan Dibbets greeted his visitors by watering grass
planted atop one side of a two-part table; small bits of neon emerged from the accompanying
tabletop. The fortuitous visit to Dibbets’ studio, which happened because Szeemann “couldn't
find the door to exit” Lucassen’s space, prompted Szeemann to think about an exhibition that

411
Franz Meyer, “When Attitüden Form warden,” in Im Blickfeld: Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunsthalle,
ed. Uwe M. Schneede and Monika Wagner, 11 (Hamburg: Christians, 1996). Translation Rattemeyer, 36.
412
Rattemeyer, 26. Quoted from Sophie Richard, “Conversation with Harald Szeemann, Maggia, 22 July
2003,” in Unconcealed: the International Network of Conceptual Artists 1967-77. Dealers, Exhibitions
and Public Collections, ed. Lynda Morris, 474 (London: Ridinghouse, 2009).
413
“How does an exhibition come into being?,” 173.
414
Szeemann’s Recent Art from Holland was held at the Kunsthalle Bern from November 2 – December
1, 1968. Edy de Wilde presented the complementary exhibition 22 Young Swiss Artists at the Stedelijk
Museum from March 28 – May 5, 1969.
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endeavored to exhibit gestures rather than objects.
415
(He writes in his diary on the day of the
studio visit, July 22, 1968, “The Gesture – The real story actually begins here.”
416
) Already at
that time, Szeemann had been granted generous funding from Philip Morris Europe, under the
directive to create an exhibition that would survey recent trends in art making.
417
The agents
from Philip Morris had proposed something examining the use of light as artistic media, but
Szeemann felt that topic had been sufficiently explored in recent exhibitions.
418
Instead, he
wanted to do something “completely new,” something that would “create a new climate” that
would generate further scholarship and change perspectives on art.
419
Szeemann’s experience
with Dibbets led him to the realization that what characterized much of the new art was an
elevation of the processes or artistic gesture that went into the production of an art object, over
and above the material thing that resulted from such endeavors.
420
Szeemann’s idea germinated
over the summer of 1968, and Philip Morris accepted his proposal in November 1968. On
November 12 he wrote, “the rush begins here,” a comment that was followed by a frenzy of
studio visits in the coming months.
421
Szeemann traveled to Germany in November and

415
“How does an exhibition come into being?,” 173.
416
Ibid.
417
Jean-Marie Theubet of Philip Morris, together with Nina Kaiden, Director of Fine Arts, Ruder & Finn,
New York (the PR firm representing Philip Morris), visited Szeemann on July 13, 1968. They proposed
that he organize an exhibition that would contend with recent developments in art. The exhibition was to
be organized under the auspices of the Kunsthalle Bern, and it would travel to other institutions. “How
does an exhibition come into being?,” 172.
418
In his diary, Szeemann sites the Kunsthalle Bern’s recent exhibition Light and Movement as an
example of this topic’s already sufficient exploration. Licht und Bewegung was held at the Kunsthalle
Bern, July 2 – Sept 5, 1965. “How does an exhibition come into being?,” 172.
419
Ibid., 173
420
Ibid., 174. Dibbets is also part of the origin story for the Dutch show, Op Losse Shroeven, organized
by Wim Beeren at the Stedelijk. Beeren recalls visiting Dibbets’ studio, expecting to see paintings, but
learning instead about his involvement in the exhibition Dies alles Herzchen wird einmal dir gehören, a
Happening-type exhibition held in Frankfurt in 1967 and discussed in Chapter 3. Bart De Baere and
Selma Klein Essink, “Op Losse Schroeven: An Interview with Wim beeren,” Kunst & Museumsjournaal
6, No. 6 (1995): 41. Quoted in Rattemeyer, 23.
421
“How does an exhibition come into being?,” 174
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throughout the United States for much of December 1968. In the first part of 1969, Szeemann
traveled to Italy, London, Munich and Cologne before returning to Bern and beginning the heady
installation process that included the installation of work by nearly 70 artists at the Kunsthalle in
less than a week. The exhibition opened on March 22, 1969, just four months after his proposal
was first accepted by Philip Morris.
422

Precedents and Influences
According to Szeemann, the art on view at Attitudes dealt “more with atmosphere than
with images,” counting among its influences such “non visual” things as “hippie-culture, the
need to leave marks, [and] interactions between work and material.”
423
These references
decoupled the exhibition of gestures from other exhibition practices, such as the presentation of
art historical genealogies tracing the development of form and composition. Instead, Szeemann’s
curatorial method constructed an environment for viewing, one that would bring the viewer into
proximity with the artist’s gesture. To devote significant space to art historical forefathers and
stylistic forerunners would have been to risk the energetic contemporaneity of the exhibition, to
turn the “laboratory” into a series of fixed points mapping out a teleological conclusion.
424

For this reason, Szeemann navigated the fraught relationship of art historical precedents
to the works of art on view strategically in his installation design. He referenced art historical
precedents just enough to give his project credibility while also reconfiguring the relationship

422
This frenzied pace is due in part to the fact that Attitudes had been pushed up to fill a space left on the
Kunsthalle’s schedule following the unforeseen postponement of a solo exhibition of work by Yaacov
Agam. Agam’s show was postponed due to the artist’s decision. “How Does an Exhibition Come into
Being?,” 174.
423
Miscellaneous note. Harald Szeemann Papers. Getty Research Institute. Box 288, Folder 4.
424
Szeemann’s impulse to exhibit the most contemporary trends was shared by others working at the
same time. For example, see William C. Seitz, “Problems of ‘New Directions’ Exhibitions,” Artforum 2,
No. 3 (September, 1963): 23-25.
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between forerunners and the contemporary into one fleshed out by the viewer, who was given the
opportunity to make stylistic connections across artworks on his or her own. This transformed
the art historical narrative told at Attitudes from that of historical survey into a subjective one
experienced and constructed on an individual level. This is particularly striking in the installation
in the first three galleries – the entrance hall and the two, smaller south galleries to its right –
where works by the exhibition’s only official “predecessors” were installed alongside works by
other artists.
In the foreword to the catalogue, Szeemann wrote about the role of gesture in the
paintings of Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock, explaining that while their “inner attitudes” had
indeed played a role in the production of their paintings, these “attitudes” had simply informed
the result of their work.
425
In the works of art on display at Attitudes, by contrast, the
idiosyncratic gesture of the artist, both physical movements and private motivations, were the
kernel of the work of art, the thing meant to be displayed. Within the Kunsthalle’s galleries,
Szeemann named only two official “predecessors,” Joseph Beuys and Claes Oldenburg. He
acknowledged their “organic, process-driven way of working” and their use of common,
everyday materials such as felt, fat, rubber and cloth as significant to the art currently under
review.
426
Rather than giving these artists pride of place in the first gallery, Szeemann installed
projects by Beuys and Oldenburg in the smaller south galleries, alongside works of art by
Richard Long, Mario Merz, Alighiero e Boetti, Barry Flanagan, Bruce Nauman, Edward

425
Harald Szeemann, “Foreword,” in Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form. Works, Concepts,
Processes, Situations, Information (Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, 1969). “Mondrian und Pollock haben die
innere Haltung Form werden lassen, aber im Hinblick auf das Resultat.”
426
“How does an exhibition come into being?” 182.
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Kienholz, Jean Tinguely and Richard Artschwager.
427
Beuys, whom Szeemann understood as
“the creator of speculative and material atmospheres,” offered a precedent that operated beyond
the “anecdotal.” Beuys’ work presented a new frontier in art making, one in which the viewer
was enveloped by environments that encouraged his active participation beyond inert
reflection.
428
By displaying works by Beuys and Oldenburg together with works by other artists
in the exhibition, Szeemann refrained from presenting the two as progenitors for the new art.
Instead, they were two players among many in a symphony of visual forms and materials
collected throughout the galleries.
Upon entering the Kunsthalle, the viewer encountered a series of massive leather straps
hung in loops along the back wall of the entrance hall. These were Richard Serra’s Belts, and
below them, 210 kilograms of molten lead laid congealed along the bottom of the wall where it
met the floor. The hardened lead was part of a work by Serra, titled Splash. He had made it the
same day that Heizer had made his Bern Depression, by tossing the liquefied metal into place.
Several fuzzy black ovals of varying lengths, Richard Artschwager’s Blps, adhered to the walls
around the room, and were joined by metal pipes and sheets comprising Serra’s Prop Pieces.
[Image 12.] These first works of art on view introduced the viewer to a few of the visual tropes
that would be taken up in different ways throughout the exhibition. For example, in the south
galleries to the right of the entrance hall, Joseph Beuys’ Fettecke and Robert Morris’ Felt
furthered several of the themes employed by artists in the entry hall. To make Fettecke, Beuys
pressed margarine into the space where the wall met the floor along the length of the gallery’s
north wall and in the northwest corner. A photograph of Beuys making the work shows how

427
A performance choreographed by James Lee Byars and performed by the gallerists Kaspar König and
Anny De Decker, titled Two in a Hat (Fictions Doctor Degree), was also performed in these two
galleries.
428
“How does an exhibition come into being?” 182.
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Serra’s Splash would have been visible just beyond the doorway. [Images 13-14.] The proximity
of the pieces facilitated connections between the two. Both were made on site, functioning as a
trace of the physical act of the artist who had worked to accumulate this mass of material in the
space, one flung hurriedly in its molten state then left to harden, the other more slowly pressed
and molded into its lumpy shape. Not only did both operate in a space not typically occupied by
works of art, near the floor, but each also gave form to a space that is otherwise a void.
Encountering Serra’s project before Beuys’, the viewer came across these two projects out of
order, so to speak, with Serra’s appearing earlier in the viewer’s journey through the Kunsthalle,
followed by the so-called “predecessor.” This jumbled order, in which visual connections existed
outside of a linear narrative, relied on the viewer’s ability to make these formal links. Similarly,
Robert Morris’ Felt, which hung in heaps against the rear wall of the southeast gallery,
mimicked the shapes made by Serra’s leather belts in the entrance hall. [Image 15.] Draped in
five distinct bunches, the felt fell together into a giant pile on the floor, with strips and folds of
material tangled haphazardly. Felt offered the viewer the chance to think back to the similar
forms encountered at the beginning of his or her walk through the Kunsthalle. It also spoke to the
use of felt by Beuys, whose Wärmeplastik was installed in the southwest gallery, just a few steps
away from Morris’s Felt. [Image 16.] Beuys’s precisely layered panels of felt, stacked one on top
of the other and heated electronically, countered the haphazardness of Morris’s hanging felt
installed just beyond the open doorway connecting the two galleries. Visual quotations and
reinforcements such as these were repeated throughout the exhibition, offering the viewer a
constellation of material, forms and processes upon which he or she was invited to reflect.
If Beuys and Oldenburg, along with Pollock and Mondrian, were to be seen within the
exhibition as early exponents of the gesture, Robert Morris and Piero Gilardi represented
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Szeemann’s theoretical influences. In 1968, Robert Morris organized Nine at Leo Castelli, an
exhibition of environmental sculpture installed at the Leo Castelli Gallery’s storage space on
New York’s Upper West Side. The show featured work that countered minimalism’s proclivity
for the object by laying bare the process of its making. Earlier renditions of Richard Serra’s
Splash and Prop pieces were included, along with installations by Eva Hesse, Rafael Ferrer, Bill
Bollinger, Alan Saret, Bruce Nauman, Keith Sonnier, Gilberto Zorio, Giovanni Anselmo and
Stephen Kaltenbach. Szeemann saw the show on December 11, 1968, during his travels
throughout the United States in preparation for Attitudes, and promptly invited the complete
roster of artists to participate in his exhibition.
429
For Szeemann, their work exemplified his
vision to display the artist’s gesture rather than objects resulting from it. Much had been made on
site or installed by the artists, and the materials were temporary in nature and composed of
unorthodox materials such as chicken wire, felt, cotton, latex, polyurethane and molten lead. For
example, Rafael Ferrer’s project, Staircase – 3 Landings – Leaves, consisted of 36 bushels of
leaves that had been installed in the stairwell of the warehouse. As time went on, the formation
and state of the leaves eroded, resulting in a work of art made of organic material that looked
significantly different across the span of three weeks.
430

Beyond the works of art on view, it was Morris’s curatorial method that proved formative
in Szeemann’s thinking. Morris had invited the artists to display the role of process in their work,
rather than selecting finished objects to be put on display. This approach required the artist to
participate in the exhibition in new ways, not simply submitting work, but rather, taking “an

429
Rattemeyer, 43.
430
Whether or not Ferrer’s work was officially part of the exhibition or not is up for debate. Morris
denied inviting Ferrer to participate and claimed his piece was not meant as part of the exhibition. But it
was there, nonetheless, and has been listed as part of the exhibition in historical accounts. See Mario
García Torres, 9 at Leo Castelli (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Instituto de cultura Puertorriqueña, 2009).
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active stance toward the placement, installation and interpretation of the artwork.”
431
Serra had
splashed molten lead on the floor and installed his giant metal Prop pieces precariously against
the gallery walls. Works such as Eva Hesse’s Aught and Keith Sonnier’s Rat-Tail Exercise
evoked supple, changing forms. Aught consisted of four panels of canvas that had been layered
with polyethylene and painted with latex. The trace left by the brushstrokes remained visible in
the final work, revealing the artist’s process and gesture, traced repeatedly over the surface of the
canvas. Rat-Tail Exercise, a sculpture made of string, conjured unnerving sensations of the
rodent’s body part to which its name referred. The effect of Morris’s curatorial methodology was
the restoration of a “newly active role for artists” in the wake of minimalism.
432
While
minimalism had introduced industrially-made objects that forced the viewer to contend with the
relationship between their viewing body and mechanically produced, finite objects, the works on
view at Nine at Leo Castelli presented art as something determined by chance and the physical
relationship between artist and artwork, an artistic labor that revealed the process of its making
within its materiality.
433

Piero Gilardi, the Swiss-Italian artist and member of the Arte Povera group, was also
instrumental in helping Szeemann define his ideas. He and Szeemann corresponded frequently in
November of 1968, and Gilardi played a major role in prompting Szeemann to bring as many

431
Rattemeyer, 44.
432
Ibid.
433
According to Hal Foster, minimalism operated as a threshold between art concerned with its
objectivity and the limits of its own media, and subsequent art which pushed these concerns beyond the
physical object to include the space surrounding it, the passage of time, and the process of making and
viewing. “Minimalism is as self-critical as any late-modernist art,” Foster wrote, “but its analysis tends
toward the epistemological more than the ontological, for it focuses on the perceptual conditions and
conventional limits of art more than on its formal essence and categorical being.” See Hal Foster, “The
Crux of Minimalism” in The Return of the Real: The Avant Garde at the End of the Century, 40
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).
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artists as possible to the Kunsthalle to install their work.
434
Szeemann recorded in his diary on
November 18, 1968, “Gilardi wanted to see the whole thing as an assembly of artists, from
which the exhibition would then naturally emerge.”
435
Shipments of finalized works, facilitated
through galleries and dealers, would be kept to a minimum, replaced by the presence of artists on
site, working side-by-side, their shared conversations and collegiality operating as the lifeblood
of the exhibition.
The emotional, subjective aspects that defined Szeemann’s use of the terms “attitude”
and “gesture” also came from Gilardi, who had coined the term “microemotive” to describe the
art of the 1960s. In his article, “Primary Energy and the ‘Microemotive Artists,’” which appeared
in the September/October 1968 issue of Arts Magazine, Gilardi identified a group of artists who
recoiled from technology in their work, seeking instead a “collective and universal ‘perceptive
ritual,’” that enabled “primary emotive freedom.”
436
Looking at the adoption of things like air,
steam and smells as artistic media, Gilardi discussed the use of such elements and their function
to “link the ‘internal’ space [of the work of art] with external, atmospheric space.” The result was
the viewer’s “awareness of the visual element and the sensations received to create an ‘open’
mental perception of imponderable energy.”
437
This “marriage between the ‘psycho-physical
time’ of the creator and the ‘sensorial perception’ of the viewer,” created an art that existed in
“fluid form” between the material object and the space surrounding it.
438

434
Correspondence with Piero Gilardi. Harald Szeemann Papers. Getty Research Institute, Box 1218,
Folder 10b.
435
“How does an exhibition come into being?” 176.
436
Piero Gilardi, “Primary Energy and the ‘Microemotive Artists,’” Arts Magazine 43, No. 1
(September/October, 1968): 48-51.
437
Ibid., 50.
438
Ibid., 51.
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Gilardi sent a copy of the article to Szeemann in November 1968, and his ideas proved
formative for Szeemann.
439
In a draft of the press release, Szeemann adopted Gilardi’s language,
claiming that the works of art included in the exhibition were motivated by “existential sources,”
and “dictated by an inner attitude of the artist.”
440
Through Gilardi, Szeemann grounded the
phenomena he hoped to put on display at Attitudes, describing the work of art as both the
manifestation of the artist’s interior motivations and vehicle for the transference of so-called
“attitude” from artist to viewer.
In his article, Gilardi differentiated between minimalism and more recent art. More recent
art, he wrote, “reaches its concrete form in sensorial, perceptive, scenic or ecological
environments.”
441
In other words, minimalism’s hardened, industrially-produced and precise
object was now countered by the fluid and the unstable. Robert Morris, too, was interested in
making sense of the 1960s departure from minimalism. In his 1968 essay, “Anti-Form,” Morris
portrayed the new art as that which rejected finished form, favoring chance and indeterminacy in
its place and highlighting the process of making rather than obscuring it. “Random piling, loose
stacking, hanging, give passing form to the material,” he wrote. “Chance is accepted and
indeterminacy is implied since replacing will result in a different configuration. Disengagement
with preconceived enduring forms and orders for things is a positive assertion.”
442
For Morris,
whose own work has become paradigmatic of process in the art of the 1960s, malleability offered

439
Correspondence with Piero Gilardi. Harald Szeemann Papers. Getty Research Institute, Box 1218,
Folder 10b.
440
Press Release Draft, February 1969. Harald Szeemann Papers, Getty Research Institute. Box 288,
Folder 4.
441
Gilardi, 51.
442
Robert Morris, “Anti-Form,” Artforum 6, No. 8 (April, 1968): 35.
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a means for challenging the finiteness of materiality.
443
Objects and materials that could be
moved and manipulated or whose shape could be determined by gravity or inertia altered the
definition of form, changing it from something molded and fixed into something amorphous and
conditional. For example, Morris’s installation of water, paper, grease, plastic and wood,
Continuous Project Altered Daily, featured the artist’s daily intervention with the materials of his
work, which he moved and rearranged during the show’s three-week installation at the Leo
Castelli Gallery in March of 1969. In his 1969 article, the fourth installment of his “Notes on
Sculpture” series, Morris further clarified the employment of process as artistic medium, in the
place of a fixed object. “Under attack is the rationalistic notion that art is a form of work that
results in a finished product,” Morris wrote, describing the situation in the late 1960s. “What art
now has in its hands is mutable stuff, which need not arrive at a point of being finalized with
respect to either time or space. The notion that work is an irreversible process ending in a static
icon-object no longer has much relevance.”
444
Szeemann took up this language in his
descriptions of Attitudes, identifying “entropy and gravity as physical terms that are central to
art.”
445

Both Gilardi’s and Morris’ essays were cited among the twelve articles listed in the
General Bibliography printed in the Attitudes catalogue.
446
Szeemann developed his ideas for the
exhibition from the two, as an arena in which the artistic gesture – defined as the process of

443
On process in Morris’s work, and the departure it signaled from minimalism, see Maurice Berger,
Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism and the 1960s (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
444
Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part IV: Beyond Objects,” Artforum 7, No. 8 (April 1969): 51.
445
Draft of Press Release, February 1969. Harald Szeemann Papers. Getty Research Institute. Box 288,
Folder 4.
446
“General Bibliography,” in Live in your head. When Attitudes Become Form. Works, Concepts,
Processes, Situations, Information, 201 (Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, 1969). Gerry Schum’s “Land Art,” which
is the subject of Chapter 3, also appeared in the General Bibliography. It was the only item listed under
the “movies” category.
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making and carrier of the artist’s interior motivations and psychology – would be made available
for the viewer. The interaction between viewer and work would yield a conversation between
maker and audience, made apparent to the viewer as she moved through the exhibition, making
visual and formal connections in the act of looking. Sensations, mutability, entropy, inertia and
psychology were terms central to the exhibition’s aims, borrowed and developed from Gilardi
and Morris.
As Christian Rattemeyer has shown, Szeemann’s appropriation of Morris’ writing shows
that he never lost sight of the materiality of the works on display, even while remaining
committed to exhibiting the gesture. “Morris provides a philosophy of process, chance, random
order, indeterminacy and impermanence that coincides [with what Szeemann endeavored to
show], but renders the origins, procedures and effects of these ‘attitudes’ in a decidedly physical
language,” Rattemeyer wrote.
447
In other words, even while prioritizing the gesture as the thing
on display at Attitudes, Szeemann utilized the material object as a conduit for said gesture,
insisting that process resided in the material form. At Attitudes, the object remained vital to the
presentation of the gesture, rather than being rebuked as an obstacle in the quest for process, or
as a necessary, but less desirable, byproduct of the artistic gesture. Its materiality was celebrated
rather than downplayed as secondary to process. This is reminiscent of Ursula Meyer’s sculptural
work discussed in Chapter 1, in which the materiality of the object was not in contradiction with
its conceptual potential, but rather complementary and conducive to it. Meyer’s modular
sculpture Dedalus invited the viewer to move and manipulate its parts, using the heft of its
weight and its integrated modules to call attention to its formal instability and multiple potential
iterations.

447
Rattemeyer, 46.
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Similarly, the objects installed within the Kunsthalle’s galleries were to be understood as
material indicators of the process of making or mnemonic devices referring to events beyond the
exhibition’s concrete boundaries, both temporal and spatial. In Szeemann’s own words, “Works,
concepts, processes, situations, information (we consciously avoided the expressions ‘object’ and
‘experiment’) are the ‘forms’ through which these artistic positions are expressed.”
448
But this
did not make them materially insignificant, and Szeemann’s loyalty to the material expression of
the gesture separates his treatment of works of art that evade object form from other coterminous
efforts, which identified the artistic idea as the primary object and its material expression as mere
collateral.
449
As Rattemeyer has noted, “Szeemann had a keen interest in and sensibility for the
centrality of the artistic gesture, but accompanying this was an appreciation of the object as the
carrier of meaning.”
450
Similarly, Alison Greene has described how the Attitudes exhibition
presented a different perspective on the art of the 1960s, “contrary to the anti-emotivist core of
Conceptual art,” focused instead on “creating an avant-garde ‘experience’” driven by the
“subjective character of the works that compromised it.”
451
Green draws on the early 1970s
writings of Jack Burnham and Ian Jeffrey to demonstrate how quickly conceptual art came to be
understood as something linguistic and informational, a form of art for which the “ideal medium

448
Szeemann, “Foreword.” This translation appeared in the catalogue accompanying the presentation of
Attitudes at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in September, 1969. It is reprinted in
Rattemeyer, 193.
449
As discussed in Chapter 1, initial readings of 1960s conceptualism stressed the priority of the idea over
the object. See for example Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer
1967): 79–84; Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International XII,
no. 2 (February 20, 1968): 31-36; Gregory Battock, ed., Idea Art: A Critical Anthology (New York:
Dutton, 1973); Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to
the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (October 1990): 105-143; Robert C. Morgan, Conceptual Art: An
American Perspective (London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1994).
450
Rattemeyer, 45.
451
Green, 123.
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is telepathy.”
452
According to Greene, this definition of conceptual art was applied retroactively
– and erroneously – to Szeemann’s understanding of the art of the 1960s and 70s, with Attitudes
signaling the beginning of conceptual art according to this now-entrenched definition of an art of
information and objective ideas rather than sensations and subjective experiences. To right this
incorrect reading of Attitudes, Green argues that Szeemann and the show must be understood for
the emotional and sensorial aspects he maintained were inherent to the art of the 1960s.
453

In considering the ways in which Szeemann utilized the material to convey to the viewer
a “felt experience” of the artistic gesture at Attitudes, his commitment to the physical stands apart
from previous efforts to subordinate it to a concept or to render it transparent to an idea.
454
In
contrast to Sol LeWitt, who insisted that “anything that calls attention to and interests the viewer
in this physicality is a deterrent to our understanding of the idea and is used as an expressive
device,” Robert Morris had insisted that the “origins, procedures and effects” of the artistic
process could be rendered in “a decidedly physical language.”
455
Following Morris, Szeemann
explicated the relationship between form (understood as material) and gesture (immaterial) in the
catalogue text. The “forms” on display at Attitudes were “derived not from preformed pictorial
opinions, but from the experience of the artistic process itself. This dictates both the choice of

452
Jack Burnham, “Alice’s Head: Reflections on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 8, no. 6 (February 1970): 37-
8. In this review of When Attitudes Become Form, Burnham frames his early attempt at a definition of
conceptual art through a discussion of Attitudes. See also, Ian Jeffrey, “Art Theory and the Decline of the
Art Object,” Studio International 186, no. 961 (December 1973): 267.
453
On Szeemann’s differing perspective on conceptual art, see also Julian Meyers-Szupinksa, “Attitudes
and Affects,” in Life in your head: When attitudes became form become attitudes. A restoration, a
remake, a rejuvenation, a rebellion, ed. Jens Hoffmann, n.p. (San Francisco: CCA Wattis Institute for
Contemporary Arts, 2012) and Hans-Joachim Müller, Harald Szeemann: exhibition maker (Ostfildern-
Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2006).
454
Meyers (2010), 24.
455
LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” 83. Rattemeyer, 46.
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material and the form of work as the extension of gesture.”
456
The installation of the exhibition
drives this home, juxtaposing works of art in such as way so as to generate the production of
environments rife with potential comparisons, similarities and quotations on which the viewer is
invited to meditate. The viewer’s act of beholding and the mental space of their comprehension
is given credence as a critical component of the exhibition, understood as a analogous to the
artist’s “inner bearing” or interiority, and the exhibition is the place where the two come into
fruitful contact with one another. For Szeemann, the materiality of the works on display was
significant, not a deterrent to the ability to convey the work of art directly to the viewer, but
essential to this process. This was evident in the care taken in juxtaposing materials and forms
that would facilitate connections on a mental level, such as the looping shapes of Serra’s Belts
and Morris’ Felt, Flanagan’s meandering rope and Jacquet’s twisting wire, and the frequent use
of organic materials, such as felt, fat, rubber, tree branches, alongside the elements, fire, water,
and soil. For Szeemann, it was within the “the silent spaces between things” that the viewer and
artist came into contact with one another, and the materiality of these things was not a factor to
be removed, but instead the very thing that enabled the distance between artist and viewer to be
bridged.
457

The Experience of Looking at documenta 5: Making Realities
Following Attitudes, Szeemann left the Kunsthalle and founded his Agentur für geistige
Gastarbeit (“Agency for Intellectual Guest Labor”) with the goal of producing exhibitions in the
manner of events, erasing the role of the curator in favor of artistic expression and audience

456
Szeemann, “Foreword.” ICA translation.
457
Julian Meyers, ed., HSz: as is/as if, 24.
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involvement.
458
Describing his objective for the Agency, Szeemann explained, “I wanted to
attack the spirit of ownership, which was tied to the notion of art as an object or an end result. I
sought to recognize and participate in a kind of art that depended entirely on the moment of the
experience.”
459
The Agency’s two mottos, embossed on rubber stamps and used on all
correspondence, revealed Szeemann’s desire to move away from ownership and toward the
experience of art. In the early years, the motto was “Besitz durch freie Aktionen ersetzen,” or
“Replace ownership with free actions.” This comment indicates Szeemann’s political leanings
with regard to labor, likening artistic activity to labor and stressing the need to maintain
transparency around both. His earlier effort to exhibit process and the gesture at Attitudes fell
within this same category. This imperative was met again at Happening & Fluxus, the first
exhibition organized under the auspices of the Agency, held at the Kölner Kunstverein in
November and December of 1970. There, the presentation of Happenings and live events created
an exhibition in which the outcome of the work of art was entirely out of the hands of both artist
and curator, located within the artwork itself or dependent upon chance and the participation of
the audience. This model proved problematic, its unpredictability too detrimental to the outcome
of the exhibition. For example, when Wolf Vostell brought a calving cow into the exhibition it
was promptly removed by animal services. Protests by artists claiming censorship ensued,
followed quickly by a second wave of protests, protesting the event itself. The second wave of
objectors included Szeemann himself, who decided that an exhibition driven by events was far
too precarious. These complications led Szeemann to conclude that it was “impossible to take

458
The Agency was officially founded October 1, 1969. See Fabien Pinaroli, “The Agency for Intellectual
Guest Labor,” in Derieux, 63-71.
459
Yann Pavie, “Entretien avec H. Szeemann,” Opus International, no. 36, June 1972, p. 39. Reprinted in
Derieux, 65.
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any but a documentary approach to the exhibition of Happenings.”
460
In other words, events
conceived of as artworks required that curatorial structure be established around them, directing
the viewing experience to some degree, preserving a degree of legibility to the event and
preventing it from devolving into chaos.
In the aftermath of Happening & Fluxus, Szeemann reformulated his curatorial approach.
He introduced a new motto for the Agency, “From vision to nail,” and rerouted his role as
“exhibition maker” toward a more authorial one. At documenta 5, Szeemann put this into
practice with a more directed model of Inszenierung, or the creation of a mise-en-scène, that
would facilitate a viewing process that encouraged the viewer to become aware of his process of
comprehending or making sense of the exhibition. This would happen in a relatively controlled
environment that directed the viewer’s attention in particular ways, rather than allowing chance
and open-endedness complete free reign.
A series of letters exchanged between Szeemann and Werner Hofmann, director of the
Kunsthalle Hamburg, in preparation for documenta 5 illustrate this arc of development in
Szeemann’s thoughts. Over the first six months of 1970, Szeemann conferred with Hofmann on
his ideas for documenta 5. The letters reveal Szeemann’s early enthusiasm for the initial “event”
approach, an enthusiasm that was met with skepticism by Hofmann who believed this model
lacked an essential historical component. He urged Szeemann to make space for the
historicization of the contemporary in documenta 5, but cautioned that this could stand in
contradiction to Szeemann’s concept of the exhibition as event. Hofmann felt so strongly on the
matter that he declined to participate if Szeemann did not include the “museum-historical

460
Mackert, 254-5.
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introduction” that he was proposing.
461
Szeemann responded the following week, June 25, 1970,
writing that he had abandoned the event concept of the exhibition entirely. documenta 5 would
be “a place where the mobility of artistic ideas can be demonstrated against the backdrop – and
as part of – a well-organized festival.”
462
No longer “clinging to the concept” of the event
structure or the “experience documenta,” Szeemann’s model for the exhibition had been
transformed into one that investigated the process of individual comprehension against an
organized, directed backdrop.
In his letters to Hofmann, Szeemann described the experience that the viewer would have
as something “lived rather than merely enacted or performed,” demonstrating a link between his
current line of thinking and previous curatorial strategies, which had sought to keep alive the
contingent, open-endedness of the event or gesture rather than the reified object resulting from
it.
463
At documenta 5, against the backdrop of a carefully organized display, Szeemann located
this contingency in a particular method of viewing and comprehending that was meant to occur
for the visitor. Documenta 5: Questioning Reality – Image Worlds Today was driven by an
investigation into the nature of reality, which Szeemann and his collaborators, including the
Swiss art historian Jean-Christophe Ammann and the German artist and art theorist Bazon Brock,
understood to be a function of cognition, something constructed rather than objective. In a
proposal for the exhibition written in March 1971, the three men identified the nature of reality
as the central topic of investigation at documenta 5, and distinguished between three different

461
Letter Werner Hoffmann to Harald Szeemann, June 15, 1970. Harald Szeemann Papers. Getty
Research Institute. Box 301, Folder 2.
462
“D 5 wäre demnach mehr der Ort, an dem die Mobilität der künstlerischen Ideen vor dem Hintergrund
und als teil eines durchorganisierten FESTIVALS.” Letter Harald Szeemann to Werner Hoffmann, June
25, 1970. Harald Szeemann Papers. Getty Research Institute. Box 301, Folder 2. Translations my own.
463
“..gelebten, nicht lediglich vorgeführten..” Letter Harald Szeemann to Werner Hoffmann, June 25,
1970. Harald Szeemann Papers. Getty Research Institute. Box 301, Folder 2. Translations my own.
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levels of reality: “1. the representation of reality, 2. the transformation of reality by its
representation, and 3. the creation of a new autonomous reality.”
464

The first category was represented in the exhibition by advertising, political propaganda
and found objects, such as covers of the magazine Der Spiegel and currency, all corralled in a
section titled Gesellschaftliche Ikonographie (or “Social Iconography”) and meant to convey the
reality of things existing in the world, or what Bazon Brock called the reality of the “picture
itself as a picture.”
465
These materials, taken from everyday life, were displayed in the Neue
Galerie’s basement alongside sections dedicated to science fiction, child’s play and “Utopia and
Planning,” which included imagined things like petrol stations in the air and proposals for more
efficient traffic systems.
466
Contrary to the everyday items on display in the “Social
Iconography” section, these more fantastic examples defined reality as something imagined and
comprised the second category, which explored the construction of new realities through the
making of images, or what the organizers referred to as “beautiful illusions,” “dream worlds,” or
the reality of “the thing shown in the picture.”
467
Upstairs, rooms dedicated to the art of the
mentally ill and religious imagery pressed the idea of reality as a fabrication or the production of
images even further. Meanwhile, photorealistic paintings by Robert Bechtle, Chuck Close and

464
Jean-Christophe Ammann, Bazon Brock, and Harald Szeemann, “Second concept for documenta 5,” in
Informationen, March 1971. Reprinted in Derieux, 95-103.
465
Bazon Brock interviewed in Documenta 5, 1972. A film by Jef Cornelis. Flemish Belgian national
radio and television, Argos, JRP Ringier, 2012. These terms are reminiscent of G.W.F. Hegel’s
differentiation between the “reality of the image” [Abbildung] and the “reality of the imaged”
[Abgebildetes]. For more on the legacy of Hegel’s dialectic in the design of documenta 5, see See Gabriel
Mackert in, “At Home in Contradictions: Harald Szeemann’s documenta,” in 50 Jahre documenta, 255
(Göttingen: Steidl, 2005).
466
Utopia and Planning was organized by François Burkhardt, Lucius Burckhardt, Burghart Schmidt and
Matthias Eberle.
467
The first two phrases come from Jean-Christophe Ammann, Bazon Brock, and Harald Szeemann,
“Second concept for documenta 5,” in Informationen, March 1971. Reprinted in Derieux, 95-103. The
third comes from Bazon Brock interviewed in Documenta 5, 1972. (Cornelis, 2012.)
467
Utopia and Planning was organized by François Burkhardt.
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Gerhard Richter could be found in a section titled Realism, which blurred the line between the
reality of the image and the reality of the imaged, offering examples of cases in which images
replicated or mimicked the reality of the surrounding world. [Images 17-18.]
Differentiating between “the reality of the image [Abbildung]” and “the reality of the
imaged [Abgebildetes],” Szeemann and his team contrasted fictional and imagined scenes made
real through their depiction, with objects and images that shared a more indexical relationship to
the world in which they operated.
468
The third and final category of reality depended upon the
viewer’s experience at the exhibition. In moving through the exhibition, encountering the various
registers of reality, the viewer was meant to think dialectically, comparing, contrasting and
reconciling the material on display. The result would be the construction of a new concept of
reality, developed through the viewer’s act of cognition.
469

The concept of “image worlds” within the exhibition presented reality as something
constructed on an individual level, while giving a name to what this process might look like. In
this way, it operated as a model for the viewer, showing him or her how artists fabricated
realities through their artistic process of accumulating, filtering and producing images. “Image
worlds” described “the origin of creation within the cosmos of the artistic imagination.”
470
It
referred to the constellation of images assembled by the subject in his or her or act of
comprehending the world, collected from the various strata of popular culture, everyday life and
high art. Under the section “Parallel Image Worlds,” which indicated the side-by-side existence
of these multiple ways of conceiving the world, the subsections “Artists Museums” and

468
“Mind over Matter,” in Obrist (1996), 91.
469
Bezzola and Kurzmeyer, 316.
470
Rattemeyer, 61
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“Individual Mythologies” examined how artists constructed art historical and personal narratives
through the creation of such “image worlds.”
“Individual Mythologies” was the more complicated of the two, impervious in its
extreme subjectivity. This section probed the ways in which artists constructed their aesthetic
identities and displayed their artistic processes, or “deploy[ed] their most personal signs, signals,
and symbols within an intellectual space.”
471
It was no surprise to Szeemann that the intensely
personal, often opaque and indecipherable nature of the works of art included in this section
proved the most problematic for viewers. Described by one critic as an “area with vague and
unclear boundaries,” the egocentricity of the projects made them all but impermeable to outside
viewers.
472
Paul Thek’s Ark Pyramid, Christian Boltanski’s eccentric architecture, and Joseph
Beuys’ Schamanism and Mysticism were installed near a reconstruction of a psychiatry cell
created by the schizophrenic artist Adolf Wölfli, described as a “spatialized psychogram.”
473

[Images 19-20.] Although he called it the “problem child” of the exhibition due to its
inaccessibility, Szeemann praised this section for the “shared conviction that art history is not
geared to formal criteria alone, but also shaped by intention and expression” that it offered to the
exhibition as a whole.
474
Szeemann’s attention to the interior, emotional and psychological
aspects of art making first addressed at Attitudes reached its apex in the “Individual
Mythologies” section at documenta 5. However, rather than allowing the interiority of the artist
to unfold within the exhibition space as had been the case at Attitudes, in the “Individual

471
Szeemann quoted in Mackert, 252.
472
François Pluchart, attitudes 8/9 (Jul-Sept 1972). Cited in draft of essay, “Individuelle Mythologien,”
Harald Szeemann Papers, Getty Research Institute. Box 303, Folder 14.
473
Mackert, 252.
474
Draft of essay, “Individuelle Mythologien,” Harald Szeemann Papers, Getty Research Institute. Box
303, Folder 14.
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Mythologies” section, the artist’s subjectivity was presented as a tableau, as an image of the
artist’s individual constructed reality, selected for display by the exhibition organizer.
The “Artist’s Museums” section presented a more accessible illustration of “image
worlds.” Consisting of a series of small exhibitions imagined by five artists on display in the
Neue Galerie’s foyer, “Artist’s Museums” featured the construction of art historical narratives by
artists through the collection and display of found material.
475
While the “Artist’s Museums”
retained a degree of subjectivity, created by an individual and therefore indicative of one
individual’s view on the world, they were less intimate than the “Individual Mythologies,”
working toward art historical rather than personal narratives. These included Claes Oldenburg’s
Mouse Museum, featuring found and designed objects created in collaboration with the gallerist
Kasper König, and Hebert Distel’s Museum of Drawers, in which he offered exhibition space in
the small drawers of a sewing cabinet to 500 artists. [Image 21.] Marcel Broodthaers supplied a
third “Artist’s Museum,” Musée des Aigles, which traced various appearances of the eagle
through multiple periods of history and across high and low culture. Ben Vautier’s Fluxus
Museum, and Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte en valise rounded out this section.

475
The “Artists’ Museums” at documenta 5 foreshadow later projects by artists including Fred Wilson,
Michael Asher and Andrea Fraser, which saw the intervention of the artist into the museum, creating
works of art that mimicked the size and scale of exhibitions and waged a critique on the museum as an
institution. Andrea Fraser posed as a tour guide in Museum Highlights, 1989, giving a performative tour
of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, mocking the language used to describe works of art and calling
attention to the post-colonial power structures that shape museum practices of collection and display. Fred
Wilson’s Mining the Museum exhibition, held from 1992-1993 at the Maryland Historical Society,
featured objects pulled from the museum’s permanent collection and arranged so as to highlight themes of
colonization, slavery and racism in the collection and display of art. Michael Asher’s projects, such as his
exhibitions at Pomona College in 1970 and at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica in 2008, rearranged the
architecture of the exhibition space to critique the insularity of spaces of display.
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Szeemann had originally planned to show the history of art from Cubism to Pop and
minimalism in the foyer, but the plan had to be scrapped when a major funder fell through.
476

His choice to fill this space with “Artist’s Museums” demonstrates the faith Szeemann placed in
the construction of meaning on an individual level. When it became impossible to include the
expected art historical narrative, five unique takes on the history of art came to stand in its place.
Furthermore, Szeemann’s observation that artists were choosing to “integrate the form of their
presentation into the works of art” blurred the lines between exhibition and work of art, artist and
curator.
477
The changing relationships between works of art, exhibitions, artists and viewers was
not lost on Daniel Buren, who noted the following in an essay included in the documenta 5
catalogue:
More and more, the subject of an exhibition tends not be the display of artworks, but the
exhibition of the exhibition as a work of art. The works presented are carefully chosen
touches of color in the tableau that composes each section (room) as a whole…. the
exhibition establishes itself as its own subject, and its own subject as a work of art.
478

Szeemann’s documenta 5 had turned the concept of the exhibition on its head, moving
away from previous documentas, which had worked thematically, selecting works of art in the
strategic construction of art historical narratives. At documenta 5, the very nature of reality was
under investigation, as narratives and histories were revealed as multiple, individually
constructed things. However, Szeemann’s curatorial voice remained overt throughout, shaping
and arranging the exhibition so as to usher the viewer toward the realization of reality as
something constructed. Despite Szeemann’ emphasis on the construction of realities as a process
unique to the individual act of comprehension, the organization of the exhibition in such a way

476
Bezzola and Kurzmeyer, 316
477
Ibid.
478
Daniel Buren, “Exhibitions of an Exhibition,” in documenta 5. Questioning Reality – Image Worlds
Today, 29 (Kassel: Verlag Documenta, 1972).
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as to facilitate this realization meant that this occurred within an organized and directed
environment, designed in such a way as to lead the viewer toward a specific realization.

Conclusion
Within the present study, which has explored various attempts to exhibit works of art
committed to ideas rather than objects, and found among them all a shared focus on the process
of comprehension as generative of meaning, Szeemann’s inclusion of the viewer’s
comprehending mind as a component of documenta 5 is a logical place to conclude. Like Klaus
Honnef, Gerry Schum and Friedrich Heubach, Szeemann was committed to toppling the old
system within which art was made and distributed, dismantling the so-called “eternal triangle” of
gallery, studio and museum. These four men recognized the potential in the late 1960s for works
of art that evaded the object to demand a reconfiguration of long-standing conventions around
the distribution and display of works of art. However, rather than reducing these artistic
interventions to the documentation that seemed the most fitting method for distributing them—
the photographs, scores and descriptions that lent these process-based projects material form—
these men sought out methods of distribution and display that would keep alive the sensorial
aspects at the core of many of these works of art. To do so, they identified viewer comprehension
as a vehicle for bridging the distance between the work of art and its viewer, and arranged and
presented documentary materials in a manner that would facilitate this process.
Like Heubach’s Interfunktionen, Schum’s Fernsehgalerie, and Honnef’s application of
the compendium, Szeemann’s Attitudes and documenta 5 were motivated by the search for a
method of exhibition suited to the display of works of art that were dependent upon subjective
realizations. Gerry Schum had hoped his Fernsehgalerie would help enact a shift away from the
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display of art as an object and toward the distribution of art as information, defining
comprehension as a process generative of original works of art. Friedrich Heubach and Klaus
Honnef launched similar investigations, using the artist’s magazine and the compendium as
distributive tools that tapped into the viewer’s cognitive process and defined individual
comprehension as the site where works of art were not simply understood, but in fact created.
Similarly, Szeemann designed exhibition strategies that promoted a new awareness for the role
of the viewer in constituting narratives and significance around the works of art on display. The
problems he encountered in his endeavor pushed him to amplify his own authorial voice,
however, revealing in turn the ways in which these efforts to bring the work of art to the viewer
could never exist outside the reach of the organizing figure, whose framing role was inescapable
despite best efforts to obscure it or render it transparent.

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Chapter 4 Images

Images 1-2. Michael Heizer, Bern Depression, 1969

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Image 3. Harald Szeemann Papers. Getty Research Institute. Box 290.

Image 4. Stairway at Kunsthalle Bern. Alain Jacquet, Les fils électriques, 1968 can be seen hanging over
the balustrade and strung across the ceiling of the lower galleries.

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Image 5. Richard Artschwager, 40 Blps (1968). Installation at Kunsthalle Bern, March-April, 1969. Alain
Jacquet, Les fils électriques, 1968 is also visible.

Image 6. Lawrence Weiner, A 36” x 36” removal to the Lathing or Support Wall of Plaster or Wallboard
from a Wall, 1968. Installation at Kunsthalle Bern, March-April, 1969.

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Image 7. Barry Flanagan, Two Space Rope Sculpture, 1967. Installation at Kunsthalle Bern, March-April,
1969.

Image 8. Alighiero e Boetti, La Luna, 1969. Artist making the piece, Kunsthalle Bern, March 1969.

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Image 9. Installation scene, featuring Boetti making La Luna and a photographer capturing his process in
a room filled with several other installation processes unfolding.

Image 10. Alighiero e Boetti standing over the installation of his sculpture, Me Sunbathing in Turin on 19
January 1969, 1969

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Image 11. Gilberto Zorio, Torce, 1969

Image 12. Installation shot showing Richard Serra, Belts, 1966-67 and Splash, 1969, together with
Richard Artschwager, Blp, 1968.
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Images 13-14. Joseph Beuys making Fettecke, 1969. Richard Serra Belts and Splash seen in the
background, just beyond the doorway.
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Image 15. Richard Morris, Felt, 1967

Image 16. Beuys making Wärmeplastik, 1969. Richard Morris, Felt, 1967 visible beyond the doorway.

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.
Image 17. Chuck Close installation at documenta 5

Image 18. Robert Bechtle painting at documenta 5

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Image 19. Paul Thek, ARK PYRAMID at documenta 5

Image 20. Adolf Wölfli cell at documenta 5

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Image 21. Herbert Distel, Museum of Drawers at documenta 5

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation looks at the display and distribution of land art and conceptual art in Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Its subjects are not so much the works of art per se as they are the tools and strategies used to bring the often ephemeral, remotely located or immaterial works of art to viewers beyond the original site of display. In the late 1960s, conceptual art and land art changed the terms of the art object, pressing it beyond something physical and discrete to include the process or idea underlying it as well as the relationships it generated among artist, viewer and work of art. Whether a massive excavation of soil in the Mojave Desert by Michael Heizer, or a set of instructions for producing one of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, land art and conceptual art traded in projects that renegotiated the relationship between the work of art and efforts to make it visible, exhibitable and distributable to audiences. Reproductive tools such as photographs, Xeroxes and publications were employed to new ends, understood for their ability to make the work of art present for viewers under a variety of circumstances. ❧ The examples discussed here break down into four categories of distribution through which these documentary materials reached their viewers. These are books, artists’ magazines, television and exhibitions. The techniques and strategies of presentation taken up in each of these four categories are investigated, and the ways in which they worked to bridge the distance between a work of art and its viewer are addressed. As a result, the document is reconceived, understood not as a belated facsimile of something located beyond its borders, but as an aesthetic object capable of bringing the viewer into contact with the work of art’s most central inquiries.

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