“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution” are the words attributed to Emma Goldman, a well-known Lithuanian feminist and anarchist activist who was reprimanded for dancing too excitedly, questioning her seriousness and commitment to the cause. “I cannot believe that a cause that defends a beautiful ideal, such as anarchism and that advocates freedom from conventions and prejudices, calls for the denial of life and joy,” were her literal words.
As history shows us, with this and other examples, dancing and partying are not only synonymous with escape and lack of commitment. At the Factory in New York, parties were just another stage of the permanent creative process, filming movies, producing silkscreens, casting, holding meetings and exchanges that took place day and night in Andy Warhol’s studio.
It is not common for articles to have music, but if we had to put music to this one, it would undoubtedly be Lou Reed’s “All tomorrow parties.”
Meetings, parties and celebrations are not alien to certain current artistic practices in which the procedural, the performative and the ephemeral play an important role. Two recent cases with their specificities are Ex-Abrupto and El Palomar.
Ex-Abrupto, which defines itself as a festival of contemporary art in uncomfortable environments, was presented this spring in Vic, within the Parada Zero event. The members of the collective settled (with the permission of its owner) in the house (now for sale) where Antonio María Claret had lived, tidied it up, repaired the basic installations and, for a week, presented an exhibition as well as concerts, actions and presentations both in the house and in its garden. Artistic interventions, music, drinks and encounters to show a conception of art that is alive, vibrant and that has to do above all with people and relationships.
El Palomar is an initiative by R. Marcos Mota and Mariokissme that reviews the hidden history in relation to identity and gender. El Palomar participated in the Spanish Pavilion of the Venice Biennale curated by Martí Manen, in relation to the work of Francesc Ruiz, making unpublished itineraries through the Giardini and these days, within the Barcelona Production’16 program, they are presenting at the Capella in Barcelona, a project based on a script written by Alberto Cardín, the essayist, anthropologist and prominent LGBT activist of the 70s and 80s in Spain. But above all we mention El Palomar here for its work Hedonismo Crítico, hosted within the cycle of exhibitions curated by Martí Manen at the Espai 13 of the Fundació Joan Miró. Hedonismo Crítico. Reinvention and vindication proposed the party as a format from which to generate different times and ways of communication and reception, a festive marathon that escaped the weight of the institution “to share and generate new avenues of affection without exclusion.”
[Article published in Bonart, 2016]
