With A Bao A Qu: Reading When Attitudes Become Form

With A Bao A Qu: Reading When Attitudes Become Form is a solo authored book. 

When Attitudes Become Form is one of art history’s most eulogized exhibitions curated by the hugely influential Harald Szeemann in 1969. Yet before this book there had been no substantial, critical examination of the research methods involved in the exhibition’s innovative curatorial strategy. My book utilises the working methods of the exhibition’s sixty-three contributing artists to embody, through experimental writing, one entry per artist creating an alternative, critical taxonomy of the exhibition. The book was recognised with the prestigious Canadian publishing Alcuin Society Award (2013). The book is produced in an edition of 2,000 copies is almost sold out and will receive a second edition. It has been translated into Swedish this year. It was launched in Arbroath, Edinburgh, London, New York and Vancouver and my performative readings of it take place in academic institutions, as a form of teaching, including Emily Carr University (Vancouver), Royal Academy, Royal College of Art, The Ruskin (Oxford) and Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Jens Hoffman, Director of The Jewish Museum in New York and a Harald Szeemann scholar, wrote of the book that it is “… a thought provoking addition to the reexamination of one of art history’s most mythologised exhibitions that demonstrates how language is attitude and how words are form.”