Exhibition^3: Documenta 5, Harald Szeemann, The Artists, on view at the University of Pittsburgh through March 20, 2015, was recently reviewed by Kurt Shaw for Trib Live. The article begins by describing the career of influential curator Harald Szeemann and the ongoing significance of the original Documenta 5, quoting curator Terry Smith:
‘Documenta 5' was the breakthrough mega-exhibition — that is, the first large-scale survey of contemporary art organized according to a number of subthemes within the larger idea of mapping how art was responding to current social and political change.
The article then delves into the three-fold curatorial approach of Smith and his students, and outlines the additional works procured by the class for the expanded exhibition:
“A sense that any exhibition, no matter how large and important, has a pre-history (the first room), a curatorial intelligence behind it (the Szeemann room at the back), and that the artists in the show are both part of the exhibition, but also have independent careers that are what art is really about (the artists' rooms),” Smith says.
Smith and his students asked five local collectors to loan pieces by a few of the original exhibiting artists, including Jasper Johns, Ed Kienholz, Alfred Jensen, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Joseph Kosuth, Art & Language, Lawrence Weiner, Hanne Darboven and Paul Thek.
To read the full article, visit Trib Live's website, here.