“In the 1980s, the art system was being transformed,” Muntadas explained in an interview with Anne Bénichou. “In the art world, there is, on the one hand, the work of the artist and everything that goes into producing the work, and on the other, the system that constitutes the environment of intermediation; dissemination, sale, collecting, distribution, everything that affects the subsequent visibility of the project. The 1980s represent a very specific period in which some of these intermediaries held excessive power and had exaggerated visibility. That is why I wanted to understand how we had arrived at a situation like this.” And that is why he began to interview numerous agents involved in the art world (gallerists, collectors, critics, curators, heads of institutions, educators, journalists) and recorded them on video over more than 200 hours. The result was Between the Frames, an installation that the artist has been revising and which is currently being presented at the MACBA under the title Between the Frames: The Forum (Barcelona), 1983-1993.
Divided into several chapters-rooms in which the published work can be viewed, some statements stand out: the pragmatism of the gallery sector (arrogant in the case of Ileana Sonnabend “What I think is good must also be good for other people”, or the realism of Marian Goodman, who stresses that the romantic aspect of the gallery owner must be totally balanced with the financial role); the variety of positions to define the institution (from the museum as a place of research into art and the ideas of our time proposed by Marcia Tucker, to the museum as a point of relation with history defended by Kaspar König, passing through the place that shares the gaze with the artist from Pontus Hulten) or the role of the critic and the media (“The media do not transmit, they transform”, René Berger bluntly states).
At the antipodes of these reflections, the art history students of the Faculty of Geography and History of the University of Barcelona received a very different input at the end of the 80s. While Miquel Barceló was triumphing on the art scene, the classes of “20th century art” and “latest art trends” continued to be based on almost vanished slides by Dalí or informalism which, if I remember correctly, was the most contemporary trend that could be reached. End of parenthesis.
We return to Muntadas, who completes his work with an epilogue that includes compelling statements from artists: “Art has become a real estate asset” (Dan Graham), “There has been no organic development of art in our society” (Joseph Beuys). There is no doubt that the current art system is indebted to the one that was created in the eighties, but also to the residue of previous decades. With one difference: nobody is innocent and the patterns of productivity and efficiency that prevail in other areas have also been assimilated by art.
[Article published in Bonart, 2011]
