MY MUSEOLOGY

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...

Before visiting the Agnes Martin retrospective at Tate Modern last weekend I waited for my companion in the bookshop, seduced as usual by the fascinating titles currently available in the art book market. The catalogue for an exhibition at the Viennese Albertina last year on the subject of Miró: From Earth to Sky seized my attention, so I leafed through it momentarily to take a measure of its thinking and a look at the plates; the thought of context was summoned to mind by the beginning of one essay discussing how the surrealist's personal geography played a central part in his making. In turn this gave rise to a memory of his Head of a Catalan Peasant (1925), apparently such an important motif in Miró's work which had first been brought to my knowledge at the Tate's 2011 exhibition Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, later reprised in 2012 at the Washington National Gallery of Art . Accidental reading, chance thinking, a particular context reminding me of the notion of contex...