MY MUSEOLOGY

[A response to Niklas Maak, Charlotte Klonk, Thomas Demand, 'The White Cube and Beyond' in Tate Etc. , 21 (Spring 2011), 78-91.] As I said in 15 April's short post concerning the difficulty of defining the museum, the article in this season's Tate Etc. cited above, on the development of the use of museum space, is a great starting-point for someone like me, coming from an informal and more, say, empirical museological background.  Perhaps in the end this will read more like a review than a response, or a mixture of the two, so forgive me the terminological inconsistency if this turns out to be the case. Museums are clearly not inert buildings but spaces of experience.  Their role as repositories for objects may be an essential one in their broader definition, but it's feasible that an impermanent, even open-air space could be described as a museum, albeit probably be limited in use to temporary and weather-resistant exhibitions. However, their received role...

There are only two days until Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape opens at Tate Modern, so I thought that I should put together an entry to help me understand how I'm going to approach the exhibition and write about it.  Miró first came to my attention in my teens, when I remember buying a print of Blue II (1961) that I subsequently had framed and hung in my room along with Matisse's Creole Dancer (1950).  His oeuvre was certainly formative in my 'awakening to art', as it were, which makes the Tate's "first major retrospective of [his] work in London in nearly 50 years" an exciting destination.  Now that I've started this blog, however, the importance of visiting has redoubled: I'd like to use the experience to learn how the curators staged the exhibition and then to speculate on the use of museum space as a learning environment for art. The roughly 150 art works on display will include drawing, prints and sculptures alongside paintings, which from ...

In my eagerness to start this blog I realise that the first posts (of images taken at Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle) might seem just to hang aimlessly in the blogosphere.  Admittedly, this is part of my project: to allow the images and posts to form whatever story anyone choosing to view them makes.  However, as I'd like not to exclude anyone from the museums, galleries, archives, museology, and curatorship debate, I hope that this entry makes sense of what I've done so far, and of how at this early stage I see the blog developing. There is a folder of images that I'm working with at the moment to include in a post about curatorial space.  This will also refer to earlier posts to start a discussion about the various methods used to display the Bowes' collections from which I'll be able to speculate about how space affects visitor reception and interaction with the museum.  Of course this isn't a new debate, but it is one of the most important that the curator f...