MY MUSEOLOGY

Nathaniel Stern's Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance operates like a museum in a book. So numerous and carefully juxtaposed are artworks within a network of subtly argued ideas, the reader cannot help but feel stimulated to imagine and temporarily live with the works he describes. This presence of the works that I'm highlighting is hardly surprising. Stern wishes to show how 'matter matters, however mediated' [1], and this aspiration manifests in the palpability to which his analyses give rise. The centrality of matter in interactive art, Stern argues, stems partially but importantly from the need he perceives to elaborate upon poststructuralist and later critical attitudes concerning the body's irreducibly linguistic constitution.[2] Some body art is explicit, unfolding and explicating social and economic inscriptions, but there is an equally important type of implicit body art, which aims to 'unpattern habitual actions'.[3]...

[Originally written on 13 February 2011] http://blog.tate.org.uk/?p=3145 I knew nothing of Orozco’s oeuvre. I did not know his name. Perhaps that’s why I was so touched and impressed by it, but that is just a theory. As for certainty, I was impressed, touched and inspired by the exhibition, from the vivid simplicity and immediacy of My Hand is My Heart (clay artifact + wall-mounted double photograph), through the chilling and nihilistic rows of discarded lint in Lintels, to the charm and humour of tins of catfood atop melons. Orozco’s work in the Tate’s current exhibition demonstrates diversity and attends to our mortality, but I would rather discuss its capacity to invite participation. For instance, the relative vastness of Lintels and Chicotes includes one as a spectator in the sculptures, making it impossible not to take part in the work.