Looking for the Face I Had Before the World Was Made

       For those of you who don't know, I will be interning at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver. My main task will be to research previous modern dance exhibits at museums around the world and synthesize all of the research into a proposal for the museum about creating its own modern dance exhibit.
       I don't actually start my internship for another week. Instead, I'm spending all my time researching three things: the history and modern status of contemporary art, the history of modern dance and it's links with contemporary art and the current and past exhibitions of MCA Denver.
       My main text at the moment is a tiny little book called Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction by Julian Stallabrass. Now, do not be fooled by the title. It is one of the most complicated books I have ever read. Sometimes condensing information is not the best approach, though my on-site adviser swears it's the absolute best introduction. Perhaps what I find so confusing about it is that Stallabrass says nothing about what contemporary art actually is, nor does he provide any sort of introduction to the history of the movement. Instead, he talks about contemporary art in relation to consumerism and capitalism and makes an argument for the place of contemporary art in our society. While this is all very interesting, it is also somewhat confusing. I hope that more research and actually working at the museum will enlighten me further on the definition of contemporary art.
      In other research, the title of this blog post—taken from a Yeats poem—is the title of MCA Denver's current exhibit. Together, the six works making up the exhibit all try to tell different stories about humanity while avoiding making the stories about a specific person. The point is to capture what makes something human before it is individualized. After researching the works making up the exhibit, I can't wait to see it myself.