This presentation will highlight the continuity in Siegelaub’s various endeavors, more specifically the way in which he harnessed a series of writing and archiving methods to ensure the posterity of art and ideas.
Curator Seth Siegelaub (1941, New York–2013, Basel) is best known for his decisive role in the emergence and establishment of conceptual art in the United States and in Europe in the late 1960s. With revolutionary projects such as the Xerox Book (1968) and Douglas Huebler (1968), he set the blueprint for the presentation and dissemination of conceptual practices through catalogues, posters, and announcements. His withdrawal from the art world in 1972 allowed him to explore new subjects—most notably Marxist critiques of mass media and the social history of textiles—while continuing to investigate key issues of conceptual art by different means. Bibliographica Textilia Historiæ, Siegelaub’s extensively annotated bibliography on the history of textiles published in 1997, is his magnum opus.