Nathaniel Stern's Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance operates like a museum in a book. So numerous and carefully juxtaposed are artworks within a network of subtly argued ideas, the reader cannot help but feel stimulated to imagine and temporarily live with the works he describes. This presence of the works that I'm highlighting is hardly surprising. Stern wishes to show how 'matter matters, however mediated' [1], and this aspiration manifests in the palpability to which his analyses give rise. The centrality of matter in interactive art, Stern argues, stems partially but importantly from the need he perceives to elaborate upon poststructuralist and later critical attitudes concerning the body's irreducibly linguistic constitution.[2] Some body art is explicit, unfolding and explicating social and economic inscriptions, but there is an equally important type of implicit body art, which aims to 'unpattern habitual actions'.[3]...
There are only two days until Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape opens at Tate Modern, so I thought that I should put together an entry to help me understand how I'm going to approach the exhibition and write about it. Miró first came to my attention in my teens, when I remember buying a print of Blue II (1961) that I subsequently had framed and hung in my room along with Matisse's Creole Dancer (1950). His oeuvre was certainly formative in my 'awakening to art', as it were, which makes the Tate's "first major retrospective of [his] work in London in nearly 50 years" an exciting destination. Now that I've started this blog, however, the importance of visiting has redoubled: I'd like to use the experience to learn how the curators staged the exhibition and then to speculate on the use of museum space as a learning environment for art. The roughly 150 art works on display will include drawing, prints and sculptures alongside paintings, which from ...
Stopping is surely fundamental to art. That one should pause to consider, however briefly, is central to art, whether it be to admire, to despise, to question, to contextualise, to recognise, or to appraise. That art should carry the potential to make one think seems therefore logically to follow, for if art can arrest one's progress in space, then its effects on the conscious mind are indubitable, however apparently brief. So, with stopping and thinking we might conjecture that the capacity for action is augmented by the presence of art thus defined; that, indeed, art is the stimulus for directed action in the world towards a goal motivated by artist, curator-editor, and the subject who stops and thinks because of the artistic product. To what extent is photography a peculiarly political and sad genre in art production? This question and the introductory paragraph have been motivated by recent exhibitions, Richard Mosse The Enclave at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art at Humlebæ...
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