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]...

I decided to approach my second viewing of the Tate's Painting after performance  exhibition with the following questions in mind: How is it curated; what is the sensation of this? What is it full of? What is the timeframe; is this an important feature of the show? Formally, it is a show divided into two parts. The first looks at the "agitated" relationship shared by painting and performance (exhibition guide) for the period from the 1950s to the early 1980s and the second considers the late 1970s to the present day to show how contemporary art has been influenced by practitioners of the first period. Since the 1950s artists have discovered a new range of possibilities in light of advances in performance; there is an indissoluble link between performance and theatricality, but we are not talking only of the theatre, but of action too. What I ultimately emerged with was the impression that 20th-century art has been inspired and sustained by action, by performance. T...

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 ...