LACA is pleased to host a mini symposium on legendary curator Harald Szeemann. Curators and scholars from the Getty Research Institute will share their research, insights, and upcoming projects. Q&A to follow.
Sunday April 24th, 3:00 - 4:30 pm
Glenn Phillips: A discussion on Harald Szeemann and his 1974 exhibit, Grandfather, A Pioneer Like Us
Pietro Rigolo: What about the Father?
The trilogy of exhibitions Szeemann worked on for about a decade following Grandfather (The Bachelor Machines, 1975; Monte Verità, 1978; Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk, 1983) will be read as a phantasmagorical re-consideration of modernity and power relations, ultimately dealing with the role of the artist within his/her own community and the world at large.
Doris Chon: Harald Szeemann’s Museum of Obsessions
Despite its profound methodological and archival significance, the Museum of Obsessions founded by Harald Szeemann in 1973 remains obscure among his achievements as a curator. He described it as both a think tank and a repository containing all of his exhibitions, a fictional “museum in the head” devoted to his conception of artistic practice as the product of visionary obsession.
Bios
Glenn Phillips is Curator and Head of Modern & Contemporary Collections at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. His exhibition California Video won the International Association of Art Critics award for best exhibition of digital media, video, or film in 2008. His other curatorial projects include Yvonne Rainer: Dances and Films; Hirokazu Kosaka: On the Veranda; Evidence of Movement; Reckless Behavior; Radical Communication: Japanese Video Art 1968-88; andPioneers of Brazilian Video Art 1973-1983. Prior to working at the Getty he was Assistant Curator for Special Projects at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he worked on the 1997, 2000, and 2002 Whitney Biennial exhibitions, as well as The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-2000. Most recently, he was a member of the core organizational team for Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A.1945-1980, a series of more than sixty concurrent exhibitions that were held across Southern California between Fall 2011 and Spring 2012. His curatorial projects for Pacific Standard Time included co-directing the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival, and co-curating the three-part exhibition It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-73, which won the Association of Art Museum Curators award for Best University Exhibition of 2011. He is currently working with Philipp Kaiser, Doris Chon, and Pietro Rigolo onThe Kingdom of Obsessions, an exhibition about the Swiss curator Harald Szeemann.
Pietro Rigolo is working as an archivist on the Szeemann papers and other contemporary art collections at the Getty Research Institute.
Prior to the move to LA, he taught at IUAV University in Venice and got a PhD from Università degli Studi di Siena / Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane. His dissertation was carried out through research at the Fabbrica Rosa in Maggia.
He has collaborated and written for various projects and institutions, most recently Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in Milan and the 14th Istanbul Biennale.
Doris Chon is a writer and art historian based in Los Angeles. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute, where she is at work on a book addressing the autonomous artist’s museum in contemporary art and the role of Swiss curator Harald Szeemann within that legacy. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles and is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study program. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), and the UCLA/Mellon Program on the Holocaust in American and World Culture.
The symposium is held as part of The Beautician by Melissa Huddleston at Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA).
