MY MUSEOLOGY

Duchamp, Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns, these five artists embraced, revelled in, loved chance, yet the show devoted to their work, interrelationships and mutual influences is an explicitly scripted experience. Rather than curated, however, it is a mise-en-scène by Philippe Parreno, a noteworthy distinction. Curating is an indefinable business in today's theoretical universe, so it is hardly surprising, and, given the five artists' penchant for the aleatory, it is fitting that the guide should point out in this indirect way the instability of the term. This mise-en-scène is scripted, however, from the entrance-level beginning to first-floor development, where the sections of the gallery space are numbered 1 to 8 beginning with the area immediately to the left of the top of the stairs. That the artists were so committed to chance, however, does not preclude an ordered exhibition from being a worthwhile and appropriate forum for their work. Order enables participants ...

I'd like to write this before it becomes such a long time since I was there (February 2013, the same day I first saw the Tate's Painting after performance ) that I can't remember anything useful. From a participant's perspective I remember most being disgusted by a large sculptural piece made of a packing crate for air freight, relatively small in size, displaying a grotesque mutilated corpse laid bare. It was such a realistic sight that the disgust was genuine to the point that it induced feelings of queasiness. My companion on the day thought something similar, and his nervous laughter has to have been a way of coming to terms with it. The display reminded me of something I learnt when I was last in Egypt in 2010, where I met an international teacher who was looking for work in Cairo. She had visited Thailand while she had worked as a teacher in South Korea, and the memory she related pertained to death. A living person's relationship with death, she believed, i...

I decided to approach my second viewing of the Tate's Painting after performance  exhibition with the following questions in mind: How is it curated; what is the sensation of this? What is it full of? What is the timeframe; is this an important feature of the show? Formally, it is a show divided into two parts. The first looks at the "agitated" relationship shared by painting and performance (exhibition guide) for the period from the 1950s to the early 1980s and the second considers the late 1970s to the present day to show how contemporary art has been influenced by practitioners of the first period. Since the 1950s artists have discovered a new range of possibilities in light of advances in performance; there is an indissoluble link between performance and theatricality, but we are not talking only of the theatre, but of action too. What I ultimately emerged with was the impression that 20th-century art has been inspired and sustained by action, by performance. T...

[Digital media consistently use images from Twombly's Untitled/ Bacchus series as illustrative content to accompany stories about the money dispute with the Twombly Foundation. They put me in mind of the violent sea (an unsurprising association if one considers the artist's Hero and Leandro inter alia), turned red like that horrific scene in Lord of the Flies following the fall of Piggy, or photographs I think I remember of unreal-red, carmine seas, dyed with the blood of whale-hunting. Additions to the dispute story have been in the press today, and so I think the world's emphasising value .] Courtauld's Picasso exhibition is tiny, comprised of two rooms or a vestibule and a room in which are hung 19 or so paintings. The arrangement is systematic and logical, although I must confess to having been influenced by the large-print booklet of the painting labels, which I always pick up because I feel awkward standing too long trying to read and consider what they say wh...