2023/03/23 at 15:30. Three photographs taken in the Pitt Rivers Museum: my carved angel positioned above the case of model boats (1990); Phyllida Barlow’s Airfix model of a Harrier Jump Jet bound in Sellotape, also near the model boats (1994); and Sutapa Biswas’s projection of the counting rhyme ‘tinker-tailor’ onto the outrigger canoe, the word ‘thief’ was omitted (1992).
2023/03/23 at 14:57. I’ve been making notes about these pieces as autonomous artworks. Set within a museum (rather than an art gallery), ‘items’ that lay claim to the autonomy of art could be said to diversify attention by expanding the ‘bandwidth’ of viewing experiences.
2023/03/23 at 10:50. First thoughts: prescriptive uses of attention are not the only cognitive resource available to curators; types of viewing that complicate the notion of a master narrative can be linked to non-instrumental values (of the kind cultivated in contemporary art).