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Sculpture, changed - Some notes

What I'm circling around right now ... is the idea of soft sculpture.  I saw the Bourgeois, Hesse and Adams exhibition at the Courtauld on Friday. It's a recasting of the 1966 exhibition curated by Lucy Lippard, focusing on the three women artists in that original show. The Courtauld's is Abstract Erotic , based on a phrase coined by Lippard; her show was called Eccentric Abstractions . I find soft sculpture exciting because it's subversive but I admit to being lost in the exhibition. I spent good time in there, revisiting the two beautifully appointed and well curated rooms several times and working through my anxiety to absorb the messages conveyed by captions and hanging in the air as the pieces dialogued. The feeling of finding some pieces a waste of time bothered me. I was delighted to see Fée Couturière  and Le Regard .  As I contemplated Fée Couturière , which I only recalled having seen numerous times in books, I was taken by its suspended state, its being cast...
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Spaces of Defamiliarisation 1: Chile’s Museo Histórico Nacional

Under the stewardship of a new director, the historian Sofía Correa Sutil, from the mid-1990s Chile’s Museo Histórico Nacional (National Historical Museum) in the capital Santiago began to revise its presentation of national history. As a result of these critical efforts, Joanna Crow appraised the museum's gallery concerning ‘Chile’s First Inhabitants’ as a more inclusive contact zone.[1] However,  Crow remarked,  the labels there continued to use the past tense, and in the museum’s own reflection  a few years later  on Correa Sutil's modernisation project, one contributor averred that ‘the tiniest room is for the indigenous world, which is not shown in all its diversity and complexity’.[2a] Yet another observed: ‘ The history [the museum] represents did not seem to me to be the history of Chile; it is rather the history of Santiago and its institutional milestones. It is not the history of a people or of its indigenous minorities, or its regions or its place in t...
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Theory and the Museum

Roxanne L. Euben’s   Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge  changed how I read and taught.[1] Drawing on the etymology of ‘theory’, which relates to contemplation, speculation ( theōria ) and ultimately spectatorship ( theōros ), another semantic parallel between Arabic and Greek struck me, since the Arabic,   naẓariyya , likewise connects with notions of looking and speculation. That we often read and speak of theories as ‘lenses’ is appropriate, then, and here I’d like to reflect on the place of theory in museological practices and the ways that the metaphor of theory-as-seeing could be recast. How far do theories inform how curators stage exhibitions and what place do they have for visitors? Considering the catalogues for the National Gallery’s  Michelangelo and Sebastiano , the Tate Modern’s  Agnes Martin  and the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s  Cy Twombly:  Fifty Days at Iliam , they present and b...
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