The (serious) game of classification: (I think I’m happy, she thought, but am I real?)

Abstract

The principle that classification may always be provisional and illusory continues to be of relevance and concern to art and curation that seeks to expose the fallacies of systematic order and taxonomy. Taking the museum as a starting point, this article explores the curation of information and objects by writers and artists who offer alternative spaces of representation and interpretation. Language is fundamental to these curatorial undertakings, for example: the keywords chosen as starting points by Daniel Spoerri and Marie-Louise Plessen for their 1981 Musée Sentimental de Prusse; Tate Liverpool’s choice of artwork for their 2014 interpretation of Raymond Williams’ 1988 book Keywords; and Rose English’s choice of words to explore during her 1983 performance Plato’s Chair, included in the Keywords exhibition. Developing into a consideration of social networking as a space of curated representation, the article examines my own use of the hashtag and its relation to classification and keywords in a recent Instagram project @cartography_for_girls. I set up the account to share the thoughts of philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch’s fictional women characters on a platform synonymous with personal articulation and connection seeking. The hashtag offered a taxonomy with which to engage with Iris Murdoch’s advocacy of the acceptance of contingency and to her assertion that ‘the task of classifying […] can perhaps never be more than a (serious) game’.