MY MUSEOLOGY

Awesome tranquillity pervaded my experience of the sculpture park at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, set on the coast of the Øresund in northern Zealand with views of Sweden just over the narrow stretch of water and the comfort of the museum's modernist embrace behind. Pieces by Moore, Arp, Miró and a host of others snatched my attention and breath as I trod soft thick grass and asked myself unconsciously which ways to turn and explore. This tranquillity was a singular experience, musing on which I have been inspired to think some more about curating and the purpose of an art museum. With the rise of the modern museology over recent decades refracting the view of our historical and artistic expository institutions, I am struck particularly by how much the contemporary museum is supposed to serve as a multimodal space to fit a host of purposes and reflect the diverse interests and motivations of current and potential audiences. What Louisiana showed me, however, is that--properl...

Duchamp, Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns, these five artists embraced, revelled in, loved chance, yet the show devoted to their work, interrelationships and mutual influences is an explicitly scripted experience. Rather than curated, however, it is a mise-en-scène by Philippe Parreno, a noteworthy distinction. Curating is an indefinable business in today's theoretical universe, so it is hardly surprising, and, given the five artists' penchant for the aleatory, it is fitting that the guide should point out in this indirect way the instability of the term. This mise-en-scène is scripted, however, from the entrance-level beginning to first-floor development, where the sections of the gallery space are numbered 1 to 8 beginning with the area immediately to the left of the top of the stairs. That the artists were so committed to chance, however, does not preclude an ordered exhibition from being a worthwhile and appropriate forum for their work. Order enables participants ...

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...

[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.