One of the responsibilities of a museum is to activate meanings by contextualising what is presented. For example, it is not the same to look at Richard Hamilton’s emblematic collage “Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?” in isolation, than to see it alongside other works from the same period, the catalogue for the exhibition “This is Tomorrow”, magazines from the time or records and films from the same period.
In one of his first statements as director of MACBA, in April 2008, Bartomeu Marí stressed the importance of documents, printed, audiovisual and sound material, to better contextualise the works of artists and to better understand history. He also announced the active role of the Centre for Studies and Documentation, not only as a place of archives, conservation and study for specialists, but also as a place of research, presentation and debate.
When market prices are at levels where even the most conceptual works (see for example, “Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1st, 1971” by Hans Haacke) must be acquired in collaboration with other museum institutions, it does not seem a bad strategy to broaden the scope of the work to other media or formats, used by numerous and renowned artists, whose prices are, for the moment, more affordable. There is no doubt about the importance of creating a documentary collection “aimed at establishing close links of continuity with the MACBA collection to enrich it and expand its potential”, as stated on the museum’s own website.
“On the margins of art. Creation and political commitment” is a documentary exhibition curated by Guy Schraenen that can currently be seen in the exhibition hall of the MACBA Study and Documentation Centre. A British resident of Paris, Schraenen was director of the Kontakt gallery in Antwerp in the 1960s and is a collector who focuses especially on the period 1960-1980 and is interested in “printed material” which for him is as fundamental as the works of art. Schraenen was the curator of two previous exhibitions at MACBA, “Sold Out Edition” (2001) and “Vinyl. Records and Covers” (2006). In both, as in the one we are dealing with here, the curator presented material from his own collection to show how artists of the 1960s used other production and dissemination channels (posters, postcards, etc.) to escape from the museums and institutions considered as established. In the case of “Vinyl. Records and Covers” he also emphasised the fruitful relationship between visual arts and music by presenting material resulting from collaborations between musicians and artists.
“On the margins of art. Creation and political commitment” highlights the critical and active role of the artist, and to this end he takes up a whole line that runs through the 20th century, and which for him intensified between 1960 and 1980, of artistic practices understood as an element of irritation, of protest and of rejection that uses channels outside the artistic circuits to establish a more direct, effective and, why not, controversial communication. For Schraenen this period ends in the 1980s, with the prominence achieved by the art market, social changes and a more conservative and reactionary attitude that we still suffer today.
The exhibition in the foyer of the Documentation Centre offers a transversal view that, taking this critical and denouncing attitude as its articulating axis, relates elements, actions and creators from different geographical and temporal contexts based on 230 artist books, magazines, brochures, posters and postcards, among others. Thus, political commitment and the conception of art as an instrument of political action are evident in the declarations “for a revolutionary and independent art” of the surrealists in the 1930s. In the 1960s and 1970s, this same spirit is taken up again in art and political magazines such as “Konkret”, headed by Ulrike Meinhof (who later joined the RAF), in the publications of the situationists or in the material published to defend the civil rights of the Black Panthers. And in the 1980s, the combative tone is maintained, albeit with irony, in the posters and inserts to defend gender rights by the Guerrilla Girls. Immigration appears both in references to the homeless in Art in Ruins and in El Perro’s publication “Wayaway” on deportations of illegal immigrants.
Despite the relevance of the topic, its approach and even the materials presented, “On the Margins of Art” seems to be presented as an exhibition for “specialists”, without making the slightest effort to approach or explain itself. It distributes the material in a dozen display cases and on the walls of the room without considering (or perhaps it is its will) that some of the elements could be “activated”. Why not incorporate audiovisual elements that would better situate us in what is being shown to us? Why not, for example, complete the presence of Joseph Beuys’ vinyl, “Sonne Statt Reagan” with the video that shows him singing and that is even on Youtube? Why, if in the two previous exhibitions curated by Schraenen the documents were “alive”, here he decides to show them in such an austere and “deactivated” way? Why does the exhibition not reveal a hint of the vital, critical and committed attitude of its curator, which he does communicate with his words in the section Son(i)a #84 on the museum’s website: http://rwm.macba.cat/ca/sonia?
A documentary exhibition can be the place or format capable of redefining itself, of being bold and risky, of mixing, superimposing and contrasting with more freedom and fewer restrictions than the pieces in a collection, for example. For some time now, research has not only happened in silent libraries and archives and documents are not only for specialists; everything depends on the way they are presented and on the way access to them is offered. It is important to be attentive to the changes that occur and, in this regard, we recall the recent case of the report written by a teenager on the media – and its usage habits – which was taken very seriously by Morgan Stanley and published in the Financial Times because, despite the lack of scientific rigor of its author, it revealed widespread forms of behaviour that gave sufficient clues to glimpse the urgent need for adaptation of the media in order not to be left without users in the near future.
