Mariana Roquette Teixeira.
The Exhibition as a Means of Personal Expression: Harald Szeemann’s “Grandfather: A Pioneer Like Us” (1974)

A study of Harald Szeemann’s pioneering exhibition experiments.

In her monograph The Exhibition as a Means of Personal Expression, Mariana Roquette Teixeira uses the case study of the exhibition Grandfather: A Pioneer Like Us (1974) to explore the pioneering practices of the Swiss curator Harald Szeemann (1933–2005)). Grandfather… was the first product in the search for a “new type of exhibition” that Szeemann had begun in his projects Agency for Spiritual Migrant Work and Museum of Obsessions. Szeemann experimented with strategies and ways of exhibiting: for example, he exhibited artworks and ordinary objects in the same space, paving the way for the transformation of traditional art institutions into the lively contemporary museums familiar to us today.

Roquette Teixeira provides a profound analysis of Szeemann’s critique of bureaucratic and authoritarian approaches and uses the Grandfather exhibition to examine how Szeemann redefined the work of “creators of exhibitions” as a subjective practice of the curator/author.

Harald Szeeman has always been in favour of freedom of expression. In one of his texts, he drew the reader’s attention to the fact that the most dynamic and determined institutions are run by people who, like himself, believe that only the subjective can become objective enough. This explains how the exhibition as a means of personal expression became a trend and the curator really became the author.

The Exhibition as a Means of Personal Expression is divided into three parts: the first explores the changes that took place in art institutions in the 1960s and 1970s, the second analyses Szeemann’s concepts and new approaches to art, and the third elaborates on the structure and content of Grandfather: A Pioneer Like Us.