MY MUSEOLOGY

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'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...