MY MUSEOLOGY

This is a note on the curatorial impulse and the relevance of curated exhibitions, but first a digression serving to contextualise the educative mission of cultural institutions vis-à-vis the broader learning landscape. Higher education in the UK is receiving more widespread attention at the moment due to last week’s publication of a Government green paper on the proposed Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). A theme emerging from the discourse surrounding this paper and the implications of implementing the framework and the perceived need for it is talk of consumers and producers. Now this transactional vocabulary is not new – I remember in 2007 hearing a university director and principal talk of the tendency of some students to behave like the customers of universities, and he protested that the relationship between institution, staff and students was not so clear cut – but the use of such vocabulary has become more nuanced. For we also read in these current discussions sur

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

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 wit