MY MUSEOLOGY

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...

Remembering too well engenders sadness, in which case the nearly two-year absence here ought to be lamentable. In fact I'm glad to see when, what, and how I last wrote here. For it represents a productive history, the beginning of something that can only be resumed, not undone, and it permits a brief meditation on  the feeling of seeing something of my own history unchanged in the knowledge that, while lives can be measured by the strictures of our formalisations of time (or our concessions to it), the multiplicity of my experiences and the evident continuation of my history in spite of the absence of a centralised discursive record of it frees us from over-organised perspectives on ourselves, what we've done, who we've been, and what that says about who we are. This, then, is the collapsing of a twenty-or-so-month caesura, a reconciliation of an extraneously qualified shortfall. Gently does it nudge us, too, towards thinking about history and now, and about museums as st...