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...

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...