MY MUSEOLOGY

That the architecture is reminiscent of the Natural History Museum in London is interesting, and that the vast open central gallery contains a feast of zoological specimens (including a stuffed albatross that could almost rival me in height) is wondrous, but my favourite part of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum exists beyond this - a large, dimly lit basement gallery. 'Magic, Masks, Music . . .' reads the virtual tour webpage , the ellipsis particularly useful since this gallery contains more besides, full of intriguing ethnological and anthropological artefacts ranging from sympathetic medicine to rope-making and necrology.  It isn't just the scope and diversity of the thousands of objects, but their manner of arrangement, too: hardwood and single-pane glass viewing cabinets that can be inspected from all sides--save underneath--in which the objects are arrayed according to classifications handwritten on display cards.  The room is an experience of the history of...

Writing without a brief is liberating, but I wonder if it's not also indulgent.  By 'Auto-Impression' I meant a sketch of my reactions to the Ladder of Escape , seeing it a second time round.  But the value of that is questionable: if I want readers to derive something other than my opinions from this blog, it has to be my opinions framed within intentions .  To this end, I shall write about the growing sense of liberation one can discern in the Miró exhibition's paintings. The precision of the architectural depiction in Mont-roig, the Church and the Village and The Farm became startlingly apparent to me today.  Having woken up to this, I think I started to find Miró's attention to detail and meticulousness more prominent, especially with regard to the Constellations series, but the pastel drawings and 'neons' on copper are also treated with an artistic exactitude of some force.  If one considers The Ladder of Escape (1940), the way the figures' eye...

  It's a month since I visited the V&A's ceramics study galleries to look at the maiolica and I'm still no closer to being able to publish a full survey of the marvellous, spellbinding collection.  In its stead, for the time being, here are a short photo essay and video that should provide an introduction.

My judgment of the Miró exhibition's curation was hasty.  Blogs are so much about producing something coherent and concise quickly that although I didn't publish the entry until the late afternoon after seeing The Ladder of Escape , that still hadn't been enough time for my ideas to form.  It was while I was preparing the entry for a response to 'The White Cube and Beyond' article in this season's edition of Tate Etc. that I appreciated the curators' positioning of Morning Object , Still Life with Old Shoe and the 50 lithographs of the Barcelona Series. "What we should not forget is that the main focus of today's curators is on the combination of objects in different media.  The field of interest has become so much bigger and more complex, and curators already have enough work on their hands simply showing us things we would not otherwise see" (Thomas Demand in Tate Etc. (21) , p. 85). So, for all my initial scepticism about the layout o...

The BBC recently showed a programme on The Freud Museum in its Behind the Scenes at the Museum series.  The Freud Museum in Hampstead has employed a new director to increase the number of visitors, and as part of her reimagining of the institution she would like to make some of the display notices less dense and more accessible to those who have very little or no knowledge of Freud and the history of psychoanalysis. It wasn't the approach that caught my attention as much as the response of another member of staff, who claimed that people don't want things to be simple and that in the end it is complexity that fascinates.  My difficulty here is that I would be pro-simplification if it would increase museum participation and in the process extend general access to the subjects of Freud and psychoanalysis.  Although ultimately people may seek complexity, isn't it only after a process of having gained knowledge in some form or another, usually starting off simply, that the...

Are museums always or necessarily spaces of commemoration?  Just a thought that went through my mind as I walked past the Florence Nightingale Museum today.

[A response to Niklas Maak, Charlotte Klonk, Thomas Demand, 'The White Cube and Beyond' in Tate Etc. , 21 (Spring 2011), 78-91.] As I said in 15 April's short post concerning the difficulty of defining the museum, the article in this season's Tate Etc. cited above, on the development of the use of museum space, is a great starting-point for someone like me, coming from an informal and more, say, empirical museological background.  Perhaps in the end this will read more like a review than a response, or a mixture of the two, so forgive me the terminological inconsistency if this turns out to be the case. Museums are clearly not inert buildings but spaces of experience.  Their role as repositories for objects may be an essential one in their broader definition, but it's feasible that an impermanent, even open-air space could be described as a museum, albeit probably be limited in use to temporary and weather-resistant exhibitions. However, their received role...