All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation :: An evolving anthology
Maiolica @ Bowes Museum
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These are posted in my order of personal aesthetic preference. Please forgive the rudimentary camera skills, including those times when I failed to handle the reflection of the display cases.
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...
Intended as a corrective to the view of the ‘fallen woman’, this exhibition charts the emergence and development of that idea over the course of the seventeenth to twentieth centuries through a display of museum effects - mainly archival - and supporting artistic media. As an enticement to the largely social-historical narrative the exhibition presents, several canvases ease the spectator in, showing him first of all the productive importance of renewing one’s understanding of an artwork’s subtext, for while the first painting on the left-hand wall shows an interior family scene of parents with their children, the introductory blurbs helps us to see it as an encapsulation of the ideal. In other words, we are not witness only to the fact of nineteenth-century family life, but to the attitude that such a picture of family life was the proper aspiration of any spectator: one was supposed to want to live like that. Clearly middle class, a painting several along shows a woman playing...
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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