Surprising find

A new one for me, The Cinema Museum in London.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Photography for sadness, photography for politics

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...
Read more

Agnes Martin retrospective @ Tate Modern, 2015 - Introduction to a response

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 ...
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