MY MUSEOLOGY

Stopping is surely fundamental to art. That one should pause to consider, however briefly, is central to art, whether it be to admire, to despise, to question, to contextualise, to recognise, or to appraise. That art should carry the potential to make one think seems therefore logically to follow, for if art can arrest one's progress in space, then its effects on the conscious mind are indubitable, however apparently brief. So, with stopping and thinking we might conjecture that the capacity for action is augmented by the presence of art thus defined; that, indeed, art is the stimulus for directed action in the world towards a goal motivated by artist, curator-editor, and the subject who stops and thinks because of the artistic product. To what extent is photography a peculiarly political and sad genre in art production? This question and the introductory paragraph have been motivated by recent exhibitions, Richard Mosse The Enclave at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art at Humlebæ...

I visited the Matisse at Tate Modern for a second time last night, which I'm glad about. Last week I ran in before closing one weeknight because I was prejudiciously convinced that it wasn't an exhibition for me, but I'd felt since opening that it was something of an obligation at least to nod to it, given the name (Matisse!) and the creeping realisation that some things in life are singular and may in fact be seen or missed, not recouped. Why glad? Glad because it made me happy, and I was happy appreciating it alone with the audio guide and the relatively few anonymous participants - some alone, some in groupings - towards the later part of a late-summer evening when the humidity has passed in London but the weather hasn't approached anything like cold. There undoubtedly is a magic to the contrast of colour against a white ground, and this enlivened me, too, along with the irreality of the colour combinations, the shapes, the adjacencies of motifs, the scale and r...

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 ...

Writing without a brief is liberating, but I wonder if it's not also indulgent.  By 'Auto-Impression' I meant a sketch of my reactions to the Ladder of Escape , seeing it a second time round.  But the value of that is questionable: if I want readers to derive something other than my opinions from this blog, it has to be my opinions framed within intentions .  To this end, I shall write about the growing sense of liberation one can discern in the Miró exhibition's paintings. The precision of the architectural depiction in Mont-roig, the Church and the Village and The Farm became startlingly apparent to me today.  Having woken up to this, I think I started to find Miró's attention to detail and meticulousness more prominent, especially with regard to the Constellations series, but the pastel drawings and 'neons' on copper are also treated with an artistic exactitude of some force.  If one considers The Ladder of Escape (1940), the way the figures' eye...

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...