MY MUSEOLOGY

My judgment of the Miró exhibition's curation was hasty.  Blogs are so much about producing something coherent and concise quickly that although I didn't publish the entry until the late afternoon after seeing The Ladder of Escape , that still hadn't been enough time for my ideas to form.  It was while I was preparing the entry for a response to 'The White Cube and Beyond' article in this season's edition of Tate Etc. that I appreciated the curators' positioning of Morning Object , Still Life with Old Shoe and the 50 lithographs of the Barcelona Series. "What we should not forget is that the main focus of today's curators is on the combination of objects in different media.  The field of interest has become so much bigger and more complex, and curators already have enough work on their hands simply showing us things we would not otherwise see" (Thomas Demand in Tate Etc. (21) , p. 85). So, for all my initial scepticism about the layout o...

[A response to Niklas Maak, Charlotte Klonk, Thomas Demand, 'The White Cube and Beyond' in Tate Etc. , 21 (Spring 2011), 78-91.] As I said in 15 April's short post concerning the difficulty of defining the museum, the article in this season's Tate Etc. cited above, on the development of the use of museum space, is a great starting-point for someone like me, coming from an informal and more, say, empirical museological background.  Perhaps in the end this will read more like a review than a response, or a mixture of the two, so forgive me the terminological inconsistency if this turns out to be the case. Museums are clearly not inert buildings but spaces of experience.  Their role as repositories for objects may be an essential one in their broader definition, but it's feasible that an impermanent, even open-air space could be described as a museum, albeit probably be limited in use to temporary and weather-resistant exhibitions. However, their received role...

I'm formulating a response to Niklas Maak, Charlotte Klonk and Thomas Demand's 'The White Cube and Beyond' in Tate Etc. (Issue 21, Spring 2011, pages 78-91), that I'll post soon.  For the moment here's a video adaptation of some of the perspectives expressed in the article, which makes for good introductory reading to the history of the use of museum space.

There are only two days until Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape opens at Tate Modern, so I thought that I should put together an entry to help me understand how I'm going to approach the exhibition and write about it.  Miró first came to my attention in my teens, when I remember buying a print of Blue II (1961) that I subsequently had framed and hung in my room along with Matisse's Creole Dancer (1950).  His oeuvre was certainly formative in my 'awakening to art', as it were, which makes the Tate's "first major retrospective of [his] work in London in nearly 50 years" an exciting destination.  Now that I've started this blog, however, the importance of visiting has redoubled: I'd like to use the experience to learn how the curators staged the exhibition and then to speculate on the use of museum space as a learning environment for art. The roughly 150 art works on display will include drawing, prints and sculptures alongside paintings, which from ...

[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.