MY MUSEOLOGY

Roxanne L. Euben’s   Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge  changed how I read and taught.[1] Drawing on the etymology of ‘theory’, which relates to contemplation, speculation ( theōria ) and ultimately spectatorship ( theōros ), another semantic parallel between Arabic and Greek struck me, since the Arabic,   naẓariyya , likewise connects with notions of looking and speculation. That we often read and speak of theories as ‘lenses’ is appropriate, then, and here I’d like to reflect on the place of theory in museological practices and the ways that the metaphor of theory-as-seeing could be recast. How far do theories inform how curators stage exhibitions and what place do they have for visitors? Considering the catalogues for the National Gallery’s  Michelangelo and Sebastiano , the Tate Modern’s  Agnes Martin  and the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s  Cy Twombly:  Fifty Days at Iliam , they present and b...

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 ...

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...