Notes & Links by Casey A. Gollan on
art, design, creativity and technology on
museums

 
The alchemy of good curating amounts to this: sometimes placing one work of art near another makes one and one equal three. Two artworks arranged alchemically leave each intact, transform both and create a third thing. This third thing and the two original things then trigger cascades of thought and reaction; you know things you didn’t know you needed to know until you know them; then you can’t imagine ever not knowing them again. Then these things transform all the other things and thoughts you’ve had. This chain-reaction is thrilling and uncanny.

Jerry Saltz, The Alchemy of Curating

Found in Between the Click and the Curator, an epic stringing-things-together style post by Erin Kissane (that is but part two of five in a series).

Erin writes:

Alchemy is such a great figure for this process: it walks and quacks like a science, but at the core, it’s all correspondences and symbolic resonance and story.

That’s a piece of what one sort of curatorial work aspires to achieve. And if you ask me, it’s what we should hang over our desks as well, whether we call ourselves curators or bloggers or editors or tropical penguins. Whether the frisson is emotional or intellectual, if we’re not making the hair stand up on their arms in a flash of recognition, we have work to do.

Also not to be missed are the post’s extra paths, references, and footnotes, which have taken care of my Instapaper reading for the next week.
To be a teacher is my greatest work of art. The rest is the waste product, a demonstration. If you want to explain yourself you must present something tangible. But after a while this has only the function of a historic document.

Joseph Beuys, quoted from Explaining Pictures to a Dead Bull by the Bruce High Quality Foundation

(Thanks Aaron)

David Hart, Associate Media Producer, Digital Media at the MoMA:

You can imagine how excited I was when we received the photos of sitters from Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present performance and discovered that installation photographer Marco Anelli had been keeping an unofficial minutes-per-participant tally. On a long car ride I decided to compile these and chart out some of the basic information.

Above: Sitters by Duration and Date

For each date, individual sitters are represented by a colored vertical bar, and that bar’s length represents their sitting time. The first sitter of each day is at the bottom of the chart, and the last is at the top.

Worth viewing full-size, along with a few more awesome graphs on MoMA’s Blog.

Noted without comment: The Art Museum Toilet Museum of Art (via @philaek)

Every Person In New York

Jason Polan reports (in drawing form, of course) that there is already a line queueing up outside the MoMA to catch the last day of Marina Abramovic’s exhibition tomorrow. Sitters will be limited to 15 minutes each. I was going to try to make it over there, but now I’m not so sure that I can handle the madness.

(via jenbekmanprojects)

A historical look at potted plants being used to decorate exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, a common practice up until the 1970s.

In these images they seem to act as the stand-ins for the patrons, sometimes aloof and in the background or congregating around the radiator as if in discussion. And then there are those that are really into the work, standing in front of a sculpture’s light, their shadows enveloping the work.

Nowadays, for “a multitude of reasons, plants only reappear in the galleries if they are part of the artwork.”

Ha! This is all I have to say about that.

* Little known nerdy fact shared with me the other day by @jenbee: SFMOMA should always be spelled with a capital “O” and regular old MoMA should always be spelled with a lowercase “o”. No, it doesn’t make sense to me either.

(via Art Fag City)

…there remains a sizeable part of the art world that simply does not get photography. They get artists who use photography to illustrate their ideas, installations, performances and concepts, who deploy the medium as one of a range of artistic strategies to complete their work. But photography for and of itself -photographs taken from the world as it is– are misunderstood as a collection of random observations and lucky moments, or muddled up with photojournalism, or tarred with a semi-derogatory ‘documentary’ tag.

Paul Graham — The Unreasonable Apple

I have had a few good discussions about this recently. Photography “for and of itself” is one of the hardest things to get.

(via jenbee)

An interview with the Marina Abramovic doppelganger, Anya Liftig.

We totally called that she was a performance artist.

(via @HeartAsArena)

Theresa posted a Facebook update from the MoMA that there is a girl sitting across from Marina Abramovic wearing the exact same outfit. I promptly clicked over to the MarinaCam to snap this golden screenshot.

Yes!! I have been waiting for this moment.