The idea of "When Attitude becomes Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013" opens a very welcome debate on the meaning of Art Exhibitions there and then, now and yesterday. Germano Celant, Rem Koolhaas and Thomas Demand reinstall a 1969 seminal exhibition curated by Harald Szemann. This has been by far the best gift for art lovers such as me, born in 1971.
First of all I could breath the mood generated the revolutionary experiments in "1969 contemporary art". That would have been fair enough. A great retrospective. The amazing fact though is that I could see not only the artworks produced by artists such as Boetti, Beuys, Nauman, Mertz, Morris, Long, Lewitt, Anselmo in that very exciting time but that I could finally see by myself how the curator disposed it all: the materials, the conceptual issues, the identity, the thought on display. A time machine experience where all was re-created to give us an organic sensation of what it has been and what it might have been. How many other exhibition of the past deserve to be re-enacted? Possibly many. Surely few. Anything can happen now and maybe it would be fantastic if in 12 years time somebody will decide to re-propose 1997's Sensation where I could bring my son Edgar and explain how I felt then. It's about adventurous curatorial choices and the meaning of their complexities. It's like a never ending story where the past can be experienced in a timeloop sequence bringing it to a fast forward cycle of thought. Once again Fondazione Prada has proved to be essential to the art world dialectic.
