MY MUSEOLOGY

Rodney Graham – That’s Not Me, recently held at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle in the UK, posed the central question ‘What does it mean to consider yourself an artist today?’ Through combining various media in which the Canadian artist Rodney Graham (b. 1949) works, his ‘genre-defying’ (exhib. guide) practice variously answered this question. While this was not without some fair effort on the part of the spectator, in return for this, the curators had afforded plenty of space in which to explore ideas and reach divergent conclusions. Most prominent among the exhibits for their manner of display, size and preponderance were the large-format photographs, mounted in lightboxes, which appeared to document quite unremarkable scenes, such as a lighthouse keeper warming his feet as he snoozes in his kitchen (‘Lighthouse Keeper with Lighthouse Model, 1955’, 2010). Alone after a day’s work, we imagine that the model of the lighthouse (presumably a replica of its custodian...

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 ...