tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post5327158679393714202..comments2024-03-18T19:05:39.072-07:00Comments on Morphosis: CollectionsAdam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-72631116163489897842019-02-13T11:53:34.733-08:002019-02-13T11:53:34.733-08:00"‘Museum and mausoleum are connected by more ..."‘Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association,’ Adorno wrote in 1953 in ‘Valéry Proust Museum’. ‘Museums are like the family sepulchres of works of art. They testify to the neutralisation of culture.’ Adorno ascribes this view to Valéry: it is the view of the artist in the studio, who can only regard the museum as a place of ‘reification’ and ‘chaos’. Adorno assigns the alternative position to Proust, who begins where Valéry stops, with ‘the afterlife of the work’, which Proust sees from the vantage point of the spectator in the museum. For the idealist viewer à la Proust, the museum perfects the studio: it is a spiritual realm where the material messiness of artistic production is distilled away, where, in his words, ‘the rooms, in their sober abstinence from all decorative detail, symbolise the inner spaces into which the artist withdraws to create the work.’ Rather than a site of reification, the museum for Proust is a medium of animation."<br /><br />https://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n06/hal-foster/after-the-white-cube<br />Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-3834937636765567452019-02-10T10:46:23.200-08:002019-02-10T10:46:23.200-08:00I'm more than willing to accept that people de...I'm more than willing to accept that people derive genuine pleasure from collections, other people's or their own, even if I don't, especially. The real question I suppose is whether it's a bit morbid collecting, grasping things into a big bundle and not letting them go. Or maybe me putting it that way is so tendentiously phrased it loses any merit. I don't know.<br /><br />I hadn't seen your blog post about your parents' graveyard stone before. That's a brilliantly moving piece of writing, my friend.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-21561162056214783662019-02-10T07:55:48.380-08:002019-02-10T07:55:48.380-08:00I did my degree in the early 80s (which may be why...I did my degree in the early 80s (which may be why I have no recollection of "Moving Pictures"), and I remember Praz being spoken of; the name was already being handled with tongs, though, bracketed as "interesting but wouldn't necessarily recommend actually reading".<br /><br />The collector mentality, and the difference between a collection and a gallery, are fresh in my mind at the moment, having recently visited Sir John Soane's house. Apart from the (tiny) Picture Room - which gives you the handrails of Hogarth, Canaletto and Piranesi to grab onto - it's an enveloping and disorienting experience: you're constantly confronted by... well, what? Stuff, really. But stuff that used to be something else, somewhere else; stuff that's important now <b>because</b> it used to be something else.<br /><br />The reference to finding St Francis de Sales hugger-mugger with opera singers forcibly reminded me of the patch where my parents' ashes are interred, and of the difficulty I had finding their stone <a href="https://gapingsilence.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/rise-again/" rel="nofollow">on one occasion</a>, while stones commemorating a former rector and the blessed Dame Flora Robson were in plain view. (I didn't begrudge the rector his monument, but I was a bit fed up about Dame Flora, who's actually buried somewhere else entirely.) Anyway, that is very much the experience of the churchyard, which I suppose underscores the parallel between a collection and a mausoleum.<br /><br />I disagree with you slightly, though:<br /><br /><i>Art should be a door through which we are invited to step, not the stone rolled across the mouth of the tomb.</i><br /><br />The point about the (celebrated) stone is that it was, miraculously, rolled away. Something similar, I think, goes on in a collection of ancient artifacts - you look at the stone lion or bacchant or severed acanthus leaf, willing it to give up its secrets and knowing that it won't... or <b>will</b> it? This is (perhaps) the deeper reason why the Soane Museum doesn't label anything or permit photography - the truth of the exhibit isn't where it's from or how old it is; it's the whole life it comes from, which it can - perhaps - communicate to you, if you look at it long enough and in the right way. (Cf Rilke's "Torso".)<br /><br />I suppose I'd say that this is the appeal of collections: the appeal of a rare, ecstatic vision of archaic otherness, coupled with the melancholy of the mundanely real experience of being shut out, not getting a glimpse of the mystery however long you look at the stone. (Compare the obsession with ruins from around the same period.)Philhttp://gapingsilence.wordpress.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-12097547516517804732019-02-09T06:51:33.911-08:002019-02-09T06:51:33.911-08:00Nicely put, Dr. Roberts. For many collectors condi...Nicely put, Dr. Roberts. For many collectors condition is a god. They strictly prefer copies in pristine, untouched condition. Some collectors, like me and my prof, prefer books with the previous history: marginalia, library stamps, inscriptions, any dates. Ray Garratyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00771800826581349483noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-66817040236310642312019-02-09T03:29:22.423-08:002019-02-09T03:29:22.423-08:00One postscript on that fantasy of escaping into pi...One postscript on that fantasy of escaping into pictures, even of disappearing into them. Writing this post brought to memory watching a strange, rather delightful BBC drama from 1980 (so, when I was 15) called ‘Moving Pictures’ in which a cast of characters, via special effects that would surely strike us today as ludicrously crude, ramble around famous old master paintings. The story starts when Mr Arnolfini (John Wells) and Mrs Arnolfini (Alison Steadman) escape from their Van Eyck home and explore the art of many periods. Mr Arnolfini is running after a character played by Angharad Rees, I think, though my memory is hazy: IMDB records <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1003285/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_12" rel="nofollow">that such a show was broadcast but includes no other details</a>. But I do remember finding it strangely wonderful when I watched it as a teenager, and I daresay the pulchritude of Angharad Rees was only part of the reason for that.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.com