Surface and storage @ Bowes Museum

A selection of tables and storage furniture from the Bowes collection.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Fallen Woman @ The Foundling Gallery, London

Image
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...
Read more

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...
Read more

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...
Read more