Anot he r Introd uction
In recent years the history of exhibitions has
been explored more and more as a separate
field of critical examination within the expand-
ing area of curatorial practice. From books and
conferences dedicated to particular shows
to full remakes of important exhibitions, the
engagement with historical shows has become
a popular subject of contemporary curatorial
investigat ion. The question of an exhib it ion's
afterlife is particular ly interesting for a curator.
These days, catalogues accompanying exhi-
bitions are not records of the actual exhibitions,
but have morphed into extensions of the exhi-
bitions in which more theoretical or scholarly
aspects of a show are debated. So beyond the
common documentation - images, floor plans,
perhaps models, correspondence, checklists,
and, if one is lucky, a few reviews in the press-
what is left of an exhibition after it closes?
Unlike a writer, who produces books that
endure, or a filmmaker, who makes movies that
can be seen again and again, a curator makes
exhibitions that remain on view for a few weeks
or months, then disappear. As a cul t ure, we've
already settled on ways of preserving other types
of fleeting aesthetic experiences. In music and
theater, for instance, it's common to reperform
symphonies, plays, or operas again and again
in almost the exact same manner, based on the
original composer's or playwright's notations.
It has even been done in film : Gus Van
Sant's 1998 shot-for-shot remake of Alfred
Hitchcock's classic Psycho (1960) is a particu-
larly good example. He did it in color and with
contemporary actors because, as he observed,
Psycho is such an important film, it should be
experienced by younger audiences, who might
be put off by a black-and-white movie starring
people they'd never heard pf. p and set a new bar for exhibi t ions-about-
When it comes to exhibitions, however, we
are only beginning to entertain the question of
how they might be restaged and experienced
anew, decades and continents removed from
their original presentation. But as a concept,
it does seem logical, and called for: To restage
important exhibitions would certainly spark
new insights not only into the individual works
and art history, but also into the practice of
the curator who first brought those particular
pieces together.
Such remakes are rare, but not unheard of.
One of the first exhibitions I ever visited as a
teenager, in 1991, was an exact room -for-room
reconstruction of the infamous show Entartete
Kunst (Degenerate Art). The original was first
presented in 1937 in Munich, then toured
Germany and Austria for another four years .
It brought together art that, in the eyes of
the Nazis, violated the Fascist worldview and
Aryan aesthetics. (Ironically, of course, that
so-called "degenerate art" is some of the most
celebrated art of the twentieth century, whereas
most art of the Third Reich has sunk into obscu-
rity, and rightfully so .) To walk through the
galleries of the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art and see paintings and sculptures by Max
Beckmann, Marc Chagall, Otto Dix, Max Ernst,
Otto Freundlich, George Grosz, Vasily Kandin-
sky, Paul Klee , EI Lissitzky, Emil Nolde, Oskar
Schlemmer, and Kurt Schwitters, all brought
together, was an amazing experience for any
art en t husiast , and here they were connected
to a larger historical narrative - one that is key
to any understanding of the twentieth century.
The curator, Stephanie Barro n , went to great
lengths with the details, for instance reprinting
the original gallery guide. She included a
"mediat ion" room at the beginning of the show,
explaining the context so that the rest of the
experience would entirely replicate the orig inal,
without interruption (apart from a few missing
or destroyed pieces) .
While I was aware of t he relevance of
Barron's undertaking to art history, cultural
history, and world politics, I did not fully appre-
ciate its curatorial audacity until some years
later, when I started curating exhibitions myself.
Since then, I too have made some forays
into revisi ting iconic historical exhibitions; for
example, in 2012 I created a sequel to Harald
Szeemann's 1969 When Attitudes Become
Form, entitled When Attitudes Became Form
Become Attitudes. A complete reconstruction
of the original was produced by Germano Celant
at Ca' Corner della Regina in Venice in 2013,
exhibitions . It was a full-scale, immaculately
executed restaging of what is arguably the
most celebrated exhibition of the last fifty years .
Szeemann's exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern,
while certainly important, has been mytholo-
gized to an extreme degree by curators and art
historians, and the art world's reactions to
Celant's look back were very mixed, ranging
from high praise to repulsion. Szeemann's exhi-
bition had already been examined from all
angles; it has been the subject of countless
books, essays, and curatorial seminars . But to
me, all of that simply meant that it was high
time to do a remake, precisely because it had
been so exhaustively discussed in every other
manner. We had to go there, in other words.
It was a necessary, inevitable, and ext remely
controversial experiment .
Celant told me he has considered doing remakes
of other important shows, but does not want
become known as "the remake curator."
I understand, and share his hope that the idea
will not become a trend. Not every influential
exhibition requires revisiting. The danger of
that is not high, however, as on ly a handful of
iconic exhibitions for which we have sufficient
documentation have mass appeal. Of these,
the one I've always wanted to see retackled
inside the gallery space is Primary Structures:
Younger American and British Sculptors, orga-
nized by Kynaston McShine in 1966 at The
Jewish Museum . While historically less vaunted
than When Attitudes Become Form, it was a
major event in postwar art. It brought together,
for the first time, artists from the United Kingdom
and the United States who were making scu lp-
ture in highly forma l, abstract, reduced ways.
Shortly after the exhibition ended, the work they
were doing was officially dubbed Minimalism.
The advent of Minimalism transformed art
history, but more important, it signaled a seis-
mic shift in aesthetics. Fifty years later, what we
now call a Minimalist aesthetic has expanded
to have meaning and deep influence in such
disparate realms as architecture, product and
graphic deSign, fashion , and even food . The
principles of Minimalism in art involve simplic-
ity as an aesthetic value, as in Ludwig Mies van
der Rohe's famous dictum that "less is more."
But they also represent an underlying value
system in which simplicity is understood as
necessary to a spiritual, essential mode of life.
Trad itional Japanese aesthetics had a great
influence on Minimalism, as they too emphasize
removing superfluous elements in order to view
art (and life) in the most unobstructed way
possible and to reveal the fundamental charac-
ter of the materials used to create an object.
Minimalist art owes much as well to earlier
forms of geometric abstraction, such as the
work of the pioneering artists Josef Albers,
Piet Mondrian, or Kazimir Malevich, and artistic
movements such Suprematism, the Bauhaus,
de Stijl, and Constructivism. The art historian
James Meyer begins his epochal study Mini-
ma/ism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (2001)
w ith the simple yet profound question, "What
is minimalism?" He never gives an unequivocal
answer, but rather offers various definitions by
a range of authors and scholars, ending up
with Sol LeWitt's claim that "no one defined"
Minimalism, and that therefore no limits exist
as to what it can be. Another proposal I found
particularly interesting is the critic Kim Levin's
suggestion that Minimalism was "the last
of the modernist styles," a transition from
Modernism to Postmodernism .
Indeed, Minimalist art was called a lot of
different th ings before the term established
itsel f. ABC Art, Cool Art, Primary Structures,
and Rejective Art are only a few of the terms
that frequently pop up in writings and criticism
from the 1960s. Meyer clearly views Minimalist
art as an American movement spearheaded by
Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Dan
Flavin, Anne Truitt, and LeWitt. That the exhi-
bition Primary Structures played a very big part
in the establishment of Minimalism is clear
through the enormous importance Meyer and
other scholars give to the exhibition. Meyer's
entire first chapter is dedicated to a step-by-
step tour of the exhibition, accompanied by
a number of rarely seen images.
Not everyone thought of the exhibition as
such a mil estone, however. Hilton Kramer, then
the most powerful critic in New York, found the
work overly intellect ual and its presentation
uneven. Writing in the New York Times on May 1,
1966, he commented:
A good many works engage one's interest as
demonstrat ions of theoretical poss ibilities,
but then fail to sustain one's attention as
expressive entities in their own field . I cannot
recall another exhibition of contemporary art
that has, to the same extent, left me feeling
so completely that I had not so much as
encountered works of art as taken a course
in them .... Nor is it easy to say whether the
fault lies entirely in the works itself or in
McShine's se lection of it. He has been
extraordinarily diligent in ferreting out more
representatives of this sculptural esthet ic
than a casual observer might have thought
possible. (Even so he has not included
everyone.) But, inevitably, what the exhibi-
tion gains in comprehensiveness, it loses in
quality and conclusion.
Indeed, many of the artists whose names are
attached to the term "Minimalism" also ques-
tioned its validity, or doubted that they were
ever part of a movement. Given the diversity of
forms and impulses that get placed under that
term, the question remains whether there ever
was such a group.
It was not only in the United States and
England where sculpture and painting wit h
severely reduced forms, lines, and angles were
flourishing . Artists in other parts of the world
were also pursuing radical reductions and
fundamental reconsiderations of sculptural
shapes and forms, but with d ifferent points
of departure.
We live in a moment in which it is common to
see artists from all over the world partic ipat ing
in the same exhibition. So it is appropriate for
Other Primary Structures to ask what might
have been inclu ded in the original Primary
Structures if the wo rld of the 1960s had been
less segregated and Western-dominated, and
as global and connected as it is today. Other
Primary Structures contains some material
from the original exhibition in the form of wall-
size reproductions of installation photographs
and an archit ectural model of The Jewish
Museum with a miniature display of Primary
Structures specially made for this exhibition.
But its focus is on art with an apparent ly
Minimalist aesthetic that was created co ntem -
poraneously with Primary Structures, between
about 1960 and 1970, in parts of the world
long considered peripheral or underdeveloped.
It includes works by well-known artists such as
Helio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Lee Utan, and Gego,
as well as lesser-known artists from Africa ,
East Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Midd le East.
The Brazilian artis ts were working in a local
context known as Neo-Concretism, which intro-
duced an almost Postminimal subjective, sym -
bolic, and organic dimension to Concrete art.
In Japan and South Korea the work was called
Mono-ha, usually trans lated as "School at
Th ings," a rad ical artistic movement that
emerged alongside Conceptual art, Fluxus, and
other more widely noticed trends. In present-
ing these works together, the new exhibition
invites both a complement to and a reassess-
ment of the original.
Other Primary Structures is presented in two
parts, one looking at work made between 1960
and 1967, before Primary Structures; t he other
co mprising wo rk made between 1967 and
1970, examin ing the infl uence of th e orig inal
show on th e thinking of subsequent artists
operating in a Minimalist sprit .
The "other" in the titlf1 has two lTIeanings.
One is literal: additional, or further works are
shown. The second 'evokes the postco lonial
"other" - the many cultural , ethnic, and political
groups that have been marginalized , sup-
pressed , or underrepresented in the hegemonic
Western art-historical canon. Aesthetically, it is
true that the artists in Primary Structures were
"others" to some degree, as a lot of their work
(at least among the Americans) was a reaction
against the th en-dominant artistic mode of
Abstract Expressio nism. But it is also true that
they were all operating directly at the cultural and
economic center of the world at that time . The
exhibition lau nched many powerful careers -
not coincidenta lly, most of the artists were
white and male.
In planning the show I was inspired by The
Other Story: Afro -Asian Artists in Post-War
Britain , organized by Ra sheed Araeen at the
I
Hayward Gallery, London, in 1999. It was a sig -
nificant exhibit ion that confronted Britain's
colon ial and postcolonial past and addressed
the racism, inequality, and ignorance of other
cultures that Araeen fe lt to be pervasive in
the Th atcher yea rs. Other Primary Structures ;
includes works by Araeen and David Medella,
who were in The Other Story. Araeen's work as
both an artist and a curator infl uenced me as
a young curator, particu larly in regard to ques-
tions of race and our postcolon ial realities.
But to fully understand the historical context
of Other Primary Structures, it is instructive to
look back further. In the 1960s, The Jewish
Museum found itself in a highly experimental
phase, thanks to a number of visionary directors,
curators, and patrons. Two key events of the I
early 1960s opened t he museum to very pro -
gressive art . In 1 ~fi2 , the enlightened art histo-
rian Alan Solomon became the new director
and confi rmed the museum's commitment to
exhibiting New York's most cutting-edge artists.
He ushered in an era of truly radical and exper-
imental exhibitions. Then, in 1963, Vera and
Albert A. List underwrote a bui lding expansion
that doubled the available exhib ition space;
the new galleries were flex ible and modern ,
and an outdoor sc ulpture court was created.
During Solomon's tenure , he personally
curated t he first solo museum exhibitions of
Robert Rauschenberg (1963) and Jasper Johns
(1964). His other shows included Towards a
New Abstraction (featuring Paul Brach, AI Held ,
Ell sworth Kelly, Morris Loui s, Kenneth Noland,
George Ortman , Ra ymond Parker, Miriam
Schapiro, and Frank Stella) in 1963, Black and
White in 1964, and Recent American Sculpture
(wi th Peter Agostini, Lee Bontecou, John
Chamberlain, Mark di 8 uvero, George 8egal,
Richard Stankiewicz, and George Sugarman),
also in 1964.
Solomon left the museum soon thereafter,
and Sam Hunter became the new director. And
then, in spring 1966, came Primary Structures.
It featured more than forty artists , many of
them not yet well known to the larger pub lic
but soon to become synonymous with a rad ical
new approach to sculpture. Primary Structures
is conside red the pinnac le of this pioneering
peri od at The Jewish Museum , but the institu -
t ion cont inued to stage major shows, such as
Ad Reinhardt: Paintings, curated by Hunter
in 1967, and Software, a revolu tionary 1970
exhibition about information technology and
interactive art.
Two shows particularly influenced Kynaston
McSh ine as he was planning Primary
Structures: 7 Sculptors, presented in 1965 at
the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and The New
Generation: 1965 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery
in London. 7 Sculptors was a tribute to the
sculptor Davi d Smith, who had died earlier that
year. It included works by Anthony Caro,
Chamberlain, Donald Judd , Alexander Lieber-
man , Tina Matkovic, Anne Truitt, and Smith.
Four of these artists went on to participate in
Primary Structures, including Truitt, whose Sea
Garden (1965) appeared in both shows. The
New Generation, curated by Ian Dunlop, Herbert
Read, and David Thompson, presented works
by nine artists influenced by Caro . David
Annesley, Philip King, Tim Scott, William Tucker,
Isaac Witkin, and others installed large pieces
without pedestals, emphasizing truth to mate-
rials. All of the artists in that show except
Roland Piche and Christopher Sanderson were
in Primary Structures.
Further, an im portant exhibition directly
resulted from Primary Structures. Estructuras
Primarias /I (Primary Structures II) took place
in Buenos Aire s at the Sociedad Hebraica
Argentina in 1967. It was organized by Jorge
Glusberg , who had seen the Jewish Museum
exhibition the previous year. He brought
together a large number of artists from Buenos
Aires and Rosario, including Cesar Ambrosini,
Rodolfo Ramon Azaro, Miguel Angel Bengo-
chea, Fernandez Bonina, Oscar Bony, Aldo
Bortolotti, Jorge Lui s Carballa, Graciela
Carnevale, Noemi Escandell, Maria Mercedes
Estevez, Eduardo Favario, Carlos Gatti, David
Lamelas, Lia Maisonnave, Gabriel Messil ,
Margarita Paksa , Oscar Palacio, Noberto
Puzzolo, Juan Pablo Renzi, Osvaldo Romberg ,
and Antonio Trotta. Several of them are here
in Other Primary Structures.
Other exhibitions that followed in McShine's
footsteps included 10 at the Dwan Gallery,
New York (1966), which presented the work of
ten artists, including Andre , Flavin, Judd, LeWitt,
Morris, and Robert Smithson from Primary
Structures. Then there was Eccentric Abstrac -
tion, the first show curated by Lucy Lippard , in
1966 at the Fischbach Gallery in New York .
Lippard's intent was to show work that bl urred
the harder sensibi lity of Minimalist work with
the sensuality of earlier process art. Though
Eccentric Abstraction was influenced by Primary
Structures, there was no overlap among the
featured artists. Another legendary exhibition
of this period was 9 at Leo Castelli in 1968,
curated by Robert Morris, featuring Giovanni
Anselmo, Bill Bollinger, Hesse, Stephen Kalten-
bach, Naumen, Alan Saret, Richard Serra,
Sonnier, and Gilberta Zorio . (A remake was
mounted in 2009 at the CCA Wattis Institute for
Contemporary Arts in San Francisco by the
Mexican artist Mario Garcia Torres in collab-
oration with me.) Very few people saw the
fifteen-day-Iong exhibition. There was hardl y
any documentation of its content, and no one
seems to agree on what was and was
not included.
During the course of my research for the exhi-
bition, a reality of current curatorial practice
came forward vividly; that we today have
the means to do tru ly global research, to find
and invite artists from every corner of the world.
These ideas had not yet been articulated
in 1966. Other Primary Structures signals a
dedication by The Jewish Museum to exploring
and presenting the work of artists from all over
the world.
J en s Hoffm ann
Deputy Director
Exhibitions and Pub lic Programs