Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form was a landmark 1969 exhibition curated by Harold Szeeman at the Kunsthalle Bern.
Szeemann was an advocate for the new art that emerged in the 1960s, work grounded in an “inner attitude” elevating artistic process over final product and a desire to be free of a system supplying aesthetic objects for the wealthy. He displayed this attitude and this aspiration by turning the Kunstahlle Bern into a giant artist’s studio, accommodating the practical demands of process-based art through Piero Gilardi’s idea of the exhibition as workshop and locus of discussion.
Szeemann’s exhibition was revolutionary in that it brought together a set of then-disparate emergent American and European movements — Arte Povera, Postminimalism, Conceptualism, and Land Art — and mixed all the work together, rather than arrange it according to the artists’ nationalities.
Richard Serra splashed lead inside the Kunsthalle foyer, Jan Dibbets excavated a corner of the building to expose their foundations. Michael Heizer smashed the sidewalk outside the museum while Daniel Buren pasted his signature stripes around the town and was promptly arrested for it. Illegality was compounded with the burning of military uniforms outside the museum, which wasn’t part of the show but was associated by the public with it.
The conservative Swiss public did not react well to the show. There was mockery in cartoons and manure, was indeed dumped at the entrace to the Kunsthalle. Despite positive reviews the museum cancelled Szeemann’s planned Joseph Beuys show. He resigned as director