In & out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art 1960-1967

Beginning of article

In & out of Amsterdam: travels in Conceptual Art 1960-1967

MoMA New York 19 July to 5 October

Unfortunately no T-shirts were printed to commemorate Lawrence Weiner's European Tour of 1969 (or thereabouts) but, according to the artist, showing in galleries around Europe during that period did feel something like a tour. 'It was a tour,' he insists in an interview in the catalogue of MoMA's neatly conceived new Conceptual Art show. 'It was like playing football--it went from stadium to stadium. And the interesting thing was that there was a whole system built into it. If you didn't show with Konrad Fischer, you showed with Paul Maenz.'

One of the essential stops on that tour was Amsterdam. Museums in the Netherlands were ambitious for their time, and Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum was in its heyday; in 1969 it organised a show called 'Op Losse Schroeven' (after an idiomatic Dutch expression, 'on loose screws'), which ran contemporaneously with Harald Szeemann's more famous survey 'When Attitudes Become Form' at Kunsthalle Bern, and at …