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.
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...
What’s the effect of curating a show by an artist of such rarefied means? Does it simplify the exercise, because painting is all she’s got (the odd sculptural object besides)? Does it raise new challenges, because, formally speaking, most of her canvases are all of a type (the early biomorphic abstractions and pre-grid works besides)? How do you engage a broad and varied audience within such parameters, and with an artist who was so (a) abstract (‘there’s nothing to see’), (b) minimalist (‘did she do anything different?’), and (c) expressive (an absence of narrative is cause for anxiety, I might argue, in today’s rationally inclined climate, so sceptical of articulations of sensibility and emotional response). These are some of the questions that come to mind as I sit to write my first blog piece on the Agnes Martin retrospective, which I visited perhaps ten times or more over the course of this summer. I was ineluctably and automatically affected by the works on display—and perhaps ...
Visiting this made this morning utterly worthwhile and immeasurably inspiring. It's exhausting, unnervingly despondent at points and, for all that, happily provocative. I was accompanied by my best friend, some of whose commentary I'll include in this entry for its trenchant observations. Arriving early meant we were among the first crush to enter the galleries, but that was no surprise given the breadth of publicity that has been spinning around The Ladder of Escape . I took some notes, thought a lot, chattered a little, and lamented at not being able to take photographs or make a video. This aside, I was there, and here is what I have to say about it; I'll use the three questions I've mentioned in earlier posts to structure the entry. Curation + Implied narrative/s There are over 160 pieces in the 13 galleries making up The Ladder of Escape which include painting, drawing and sculpture; an array of supports across canvas, velours paper, Masonite an...
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