Prada Foundation Remounts a 1969 Exhibition VENICE, 2013 Rope art and other works in "When Attitudes Become Form," an exhibition at the Prada Foundation in Venice that re-creates a 1969 show. VENICE - What's new in contemporary art? Old. We're in an age of remake culture, an epidemic of re-enactment fever. Young painters are working in styles that were hot half a century ago. Yesteryear's performance art is being re-performed. Exhibitions that have been done and done - on Matisse, Picasso, European abstraction - are being done again. Has the art industry, noted for its nanosecond memory, suddenly become history-conscious? Is the art market, like Hollywood, nervous about anything but proven brands? Is art just plain out of ideas? Whatever the answer, the replicants keep arriving, a recent and particularly ambitious one being an ultrafastidious reconstruction of the 1969 show "When Attitudes Become Form," at the Prada Foundation in Venice. The original version, which took place in Bern, Switzerland, has a near-mythical reputation as a late-20th-century landmark. It brought together some of the most adventurous young European and American avant-gardists of the day, exponents of post-Pop, post-Minimalist, supposedly anti-market trends like Conceptual and Process art. It presented them at a high moment of political and cultural turmoil internationally, and in what has been perceived as a radically loosened-up exhibition format, with art created communally, spontaneously, on the spot. The actual event was fairly low-key. Bern was no one's idea of an art capital. The exhibition site, a kunsthalle built in 1918, was drably undistinguished. The show opened in the gray month of March, ran for barely a month and drew only a small, bemused crowd. Puzzlement was understandable. The work, by almost 70 artists, jammed into two floors and a nearby annex, wasn't quite sculpture and certainly wasn't painting. Its mediums included ice, fire, broken glass, lead, leather, felt, fluorescent tubing, peas, charcoal and margarine. Ropes snaked through rooms; electric wires wound down a staircase. Nothing was framed or on pedestals or behind stanchions, and visitors trampled on work, though it was hard to tell where the art ended and the damage began. Some damage was art. A piece by the American "earth artist" Michael Heizer consisted of craters punched with a wrecking ball into the pavement outside the museum. While popular reaction over all ranged from grumpiness to hilarity, officialdom took a more serious view. Certain kunsthalle staff members were so outraged that they effectively forced the resignation of the institution's director, Harald Szeemann, who was also the exhibition's curator. Too late. Word had spread through the art world. The show - its full title was "Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form: Works, Concepts, Processes, Situations, Information" - was instant history, a radical moment. It is partly as a monument, an artifact, that the Prada Foundation has remade the exhibition, laboriously tracking down existing art, commissioning artists to recreate pieces and asking the estates of deceased artists to supply duplicates of lost or fragile work. This harvesting could, on its own, have been an enlightening archival exercise or merely a bore. In any event, the three people in charge of the Prada project - the curator Germano Celant, who worked with Szeemann in 1969; the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas; and the German artist Thomas Demand, who photographs miniature re-creations of real architecture - went further. They decided not only to reassemble the contents, but also to recreate the physical context, the kunsthalle galleries, inside the Prada Foundation's Venetian premises: an 18th-century palazzo, Ca" Corner Della Regina, on the Grand Canal. So they have, in "When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013," which combines wonkish verisimilitude with strategic imprecision. The Bern galleries have been reconstructed on exact one-to-one scale within the palazzo, but are spread over three floors, rather than two, as in Bern. In addition, the kunsthalle annex, the Schulwarte, which in 1969 held work that arrived too late for the main show, has been reimagined as a loftlike space on a fourth floor. And while details of the Bern galleries - door frames, floor designs, all-over white paint, even radiators - have been copied, the gallery walls are treated like stage flats, with their edges cut out as if with a jigsaw, to accommodate the palazzo's ornate columns and cornices. Also, the inserted galleries have no ceilings: Look up and you see 18th-century Italian arches and frescoes.