Art Metropole

#10821

With A Bao A Qu Reading When Attitudes Become Form: Maria Fusco

Date

2013

Publisher

Fillip

Format

Artists' Books

ISBN

978-1-927354-14-8

Size

11.2 × 17.8 × 1 cm

Length

42 

Experimenting with the form and register of contemporary art writing, With A Bao A Qu Reading When Attitudes Become Form re-figures the seminal artist’s book / catalogue When Attitudes Become Form (1969). Originally edited by Harald Szeemann to accompany the Kunsthalle Bern exhibition of the same name, When Attitudes Become Form brought together new tendencies in the art of its time including Arte Povera, Conceptual Art, and post-Minimalism, to conceive curatorial practice as a linguistic medium.

Working with Szeemann’s artist’s book/catalogue as case-study, With A Bao A Qu reflects on the form and structure of the artist’s book. By stylistically adopting a subjective literary voice, drawn, at least partially, from Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings (published in English in 1969), the book counter-intuitively shifts focus away from reading of art’s conceptual properties to those of its physical, material embodiment.