Launch of With A Bao A Qu Reading When Attitudes Become Form by Maria Fusco / Wednesday 23 October 2013, 6.30 – 8.30pm

With A Bao A Qu Reading When Attitudes Become Form
By Maria Fusco
Published by New Documents, 2013
Book launch with a reading by Maria Fusco

“An entertaining and thought provoking addition to the reexamination of one of art history’s most mythologized exhibitions that demonstrates how language is attitude and how words are form.”

Jens Hoffmann, Curator of When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, 2012

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.

With A Bao A Qu Reading When Attitudes Become Form
11.2 x 18 cm
142 Pages
ISBN: 978-1-927354-14-8
Published by New Documents
Los Angeles/Vancouver: 2013