MY MUSEOLOGY

I'd like to write this before it becomes such a long time since I was there (February 2013, the same day I first saw the Tate's Painting after performance ) that I can't remember anything useful. From a participant's perspective I remember most being disgusted by a large sculptural piece made of a packing crate for air freight, relatively small in size, displaying a grotesque mutilated corpse laid bare. It was such a realistic sight that the disgust was genuine to the point that it induced feelings of queasiness. My companion on the day thought something similar, and his nervous laughter has to have been a way of coming to terms with it. The display reminded me of something I learnt when I was last in Egypt in 2010, where I met an international teacher who was looking for work in Cairo. She had visited Thailand while she had worked as a teacher in South Korea, and the memory she related pertained to death. A living person's relationship with death, she believed, i...

We always perceive the infinitude of a moment, but we cannot capture it, which made this exhibition seem appetising. Naturally, to say this contradicts some important thinking on perception -- the name Merleau-Ponty looms forth -- and so what I mean exceeds the literal. Being present for a moment, part of its simultaneity, is partially to absorb it and to experience its energy or presentness: this is to be present to the moment in its infinitude, not to apprehend the impossible totality of it. Infinite is infinite. This exhibition claims to explore this complex between the presentness of a performed moment and its representation. And so, when we look at the David Hockney , the jarring of stillness and action creates the overall energy of the piece. The instant after the dive is artistically (gesturally, figuratively) captured upon the canvas. This painting of an action after the performance of it aligns perfectly with the ethos of the exhibition, and, of course,  A Bigger Splash ...