James Lee Byars wrote in 1968: “I founded a fictitious museum in New York in ’68 and collected 1,000,000 minutes of attention to show”. That same year, Andy Warhol made a declaration of principles in the catalogue of an exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”. Bruce Nauman is another example of an artist who has continually demanded the attention of the spectator, sometimes through explicit orders (Please/Pay/Attention/Please, 1973 and Pay attention, 1973). Although the intentions in all these cases were very different, all three pointed towards something that has become a scarce commodity in the 21st century: attention.

It is curious that while contemporary ways of life force us to multitask (whether we are capable of it or not), there are more and more cases of childhood diagnoses of “attention deficit syndrome”. It cannot be otherwise. We have We are used to talking on the phone while we do a search on Google, while we have several tabs open in the browser to check the different social networks we are part of (and which we have to “feed” in some way if we don’t want to disappear from the social-virtual map). Exhausting! And basically, not very efficient. Our concentration is constantly fragmented.

One of the first people to introduce the concept of “attention economy” was the economist and social science specialist Herbert A. Simon, in his article “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World” written in 1971, referring to the fact that the wealth of information implies the death of something else, that is, the attention of the recipients, so that the overabundance of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to locate it effectively.

Advertisers discovered this a long time ago and that is why in their strategies they consider it essential to capture the attention of a potential client who ends up purchasing a certain product or service. But we have reached a point where the final act of purchase is no longer the goal sought, but attracting attention has become an end in itself and some economic strategists not only speak of the “attention economy” but also of “attention transactions”.

In art, the need for attention has always been there, in the desire to be exposed and to be heard and appreciated. Now this urgency to be present translates into a multiplication of events and activities, of many things happening. The risk is going unnoticed or that the 2 seconds of visibility (which is surely what Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame have become) pass too quickly.

[Article published in Bonart, 2014]

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July 28, 2014. Although the official discourse insists that there is an economic recovery, the crisis that began in 2008 is here to stay. Economic deregulation and its consequences (global inflation, food and energy crises, threat of recession, etc.) and that maxim that terrifies and paralyzes in equal measure, called “crisis of confidence in the markets,” have become good arguments to re-regulate the entire system and, of course, not in favor of fundamental rights and just causes.

It seems that the time has come to reread Marx. From philosophy, art, theater and political activism, we return to the ideas of the philosopher and to his critical and detailed analysis of capitalism and its practices, to find out if it is true that we are experiencing the last gasps of capitalism, or if it is a collapse prior to a stronger resurgence. But don’t panic, because what is at stake is also rereading it from a contemporary perspective, desacralizing it, commenting on it and also ironizing it.

In 2010, Jason Barker directed the film Marx Reloaded, with a “cast” that includes Norbert Bolz, Micha Brumlik, John Gray, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Nina Power, Jacques Rancière, Peter Sloterdijk, Alberto Toscano and Slavoj Zizek. This agile documentary features interviews with supporters of Marx’s analysis and also with skeptics, as well as Marx himself in an animated version trying to delve into a sort of “matrix” of his own ideas. “Take the blue pill and you will wake up in Cologne as the director of a provincial newspaper. Take the red pill and I will show you how the permanent revolution goes,” Stalin tells Marx, while offering him first a blue pill and then a red pill.

Jason Barker has not been the only one who has dared to tackle Marx. The American theorist Howard Zinn has also done so with a play, Marx in Soho, in which Marx comes back to life, but due to a bureaucratic confusion, he does not appear in Soho in London, where he lived in exile, but in Soho in New York, where, still in a state of shock, he wants to clarify misunderstandings and the way in which his ideas have been interpreted, in relation to communism, capitalism, Marxism and the Paris Commune. We are therefore moving in the realm of “what if…?” and with the need to return to the original sources, to correct suspicious readings and interpretations.

Returning to the sources is what Sylvain Creuzevault has done, and in what way, taking Karl Marx’s Capital literally to transform it into Capital and its monkey of repetition, a show that for two and a half hours does not give you a break and demands great mental agility to digest all the references and twists. The work, which has been seen these days in the context of the GREC Festival, is set in 1848, the year of the revolution within another revolution, which would lead to the constitution for a few days of the Paris Commune. Creuzevault brings together Raspail, Blanqui, Engels and others at the Club des Amici du Poupé in Paris to discuss whether it makes sense to attack the Paris Assembly. The author takes advantage of the moment to expose the different Marxist concepts in a context of economic, political and social uncertainties that, if you look closely, is not so different from the current one. In fact, there are also similarities with the questions raised by citizen platforms and new political parties here and now such as Podemos or Guanyem.

Fifteen actors play the different characters and question, in a comedic tone – although it may seem unbelievable – the current state of notions such as salary, democracy or power and have no qualms about creating imaginary conversations between Freud and Foucault, for example. The comedy – as its author insists – sometimes seems to be close to Shakespeare, other times to a political meeting; sometimes it seems like a play by Brecht and other times, a conversation that takes place at the bar of a bar. That is why it is so contemporary and why Creuzevault’s Capital is so exhausting. Perhaps only with a background of black humour is it possible to approach things that are so transcendent, because our lives depend on it.

Black humour and also disenchanted pragmatism, not lacking in enthusiasm, is what Slavoj Zizek’s words exude at one point in Marx Reloaded: “We are in deep shit and we know it.” Zizek’s words could not be clearer. Something must be done about it.

Enric Farrés-Duran (Palafrugell, Girona, 1983) is a storyteller in which the real and the fictional end up meeting and modifying each other. His work is articulated through research, coincidences and fortuitous encounters and the possibility of making connections between different places, objects and circumstances. Farrés-Duran creates narratives that reveal hidden and unexpected relationships, which sometimes involve different times and places. The story – narrated and written – plays an essential role in these processes, and the information it provides is essential to be able to approach the process and the connections it establishes. His projects are formalised in installations, commented tours or guided visits and books.

In the same way that the writer Enrique Vila-Matas does not write but rewrites, Farrés-Duran combines and shuffles technical and conceptual strategies while playing with all the cultural baggage he has behind him. The reference to Vila-Matas is not a coincidence, since the artist takes his book París no se acaba nunca and literally makes a fake of it, copying not only the title but also the cover design, with the well-known cream-coloured background that identifies the collection Narrativas Hispánicas by the publisher Anagrama. Formal cloning is the starting point of a series of projects in which, like Vila-Matas (who in turn takes the thread of Hemingway’s novel París era una fiesta, to ironically revisit his days of literary apprenticeship in Paris in the 1970s), the artist invites us on an autobiographical journey in which the true and the false, the plausible and the improbable end up merging. Enric Farrés-Duran’s Paris Never Ends is a project that has so far developed three stages (Paris Never Ends # Poblenou; Paris Never Ends # El Prat and Paris Never Ends # Districte Cinquè), in which the artist starts from a specific place (the Barcelona neighbourhood of Poblenou, the peripheral city of El Prat or the Fifth District, in the El Raval neighbourhood of Barcelona) to establish routes in which as many things are discovered as are hidden and are completed with a book that puts order or contradicts everything that came before.

Thus, Paris Never Ends # Poblenou traces a route based on a coincidence of initials and location, which links Can Felipa, an artistic institution focused on emerging art and a Museum of Contemporary Painting belonging to a private foundation. Enric Farrés-Duran’s proposal mixed elements from both institutions, so that some paintings from the latter were exhibited in a context of emerging art, while the works of some very young artists were shown mixed with more traditional works.

Paris never ends # El Prat, carried out together with Roger Amat-Comellas, brought to light a hilarious journey of connections in which some elements with a designation of origin appear, such as the renowned artichokes from El Prat or the blue-footed chicken, in connection with oversized monuments of the same and found in the United States (because Roger Amat-Comellas’ life circumstances led him to live in the United States), all set to the relaxed music of the 80s, with the group Decibelios and their “Vacaciones en el Prat”. The literal journey took the form of a group trip by coach that the artist titled Viaje al origen.

The third of the Paris Never Ends installments # Districte Cinquè, was produced in the context of the collective exhibition La Realidad Invocable at MACBA. During his wanderings around Barcelona’s Fifth District (which are not without misunderstandings with another fifth district, that of Paris, also a university area) the artist has carried out research whose results are reflected in an installation of inputs and findings in the form of objects, books and other miscellaneous elements. The installation is presented as the setting for a performance to which, as spectators, we have arrived too early and in which we find a shelf with various elements, together with a chair, a plant and a poster, of which we do not know and cannot figure out what role they will play in the plot of a performance that, we imagine, will take place a few moments later. The secret was revealed on June 26, 2014, when, under the title Searching for Enemies, Enric Farrés-Duran conducted a guided tour for a small number of people through some of the places in the fifth district that were important in his own biography: the Faculty of Philosophy, the Massana School, or the studio of the designer Peret, among others. There, former colleagues or collaborators of the artist had the opportunity to discuss and refute his ideas, from a philosophical point of view or in the form of a “settling of scores” that, in essence, demonstrated the intelligence of Farrés-Duran’s position as an artist and his mastery in shaking, shuffling, and handling references, situations and formats.

Farrés-Duran is capable of facing very diverse contexts and bringing them to his own terrain. This is the case of Tres cosas raras, historia de una desaparecido (2013), at the Tàpies Foundation Library, in which, once again, he starts from a biographical element, the incredible discoveries inside books (which he knows well thanks to his work in a second-hand bookshop), to reveal, in the form of a dramatised journey, some of the best kept treasures and secrets of said library.

And the last project, for the moment, that is worth mentioning here is 4 dies sense pati (Four days without a playground) (2014), an intervention at the Josep Pla Foundation in Palafrugell, in which he writes on a wall a quote from the writer Josep Pla: “De vegades pensé en Palafrugell”. Four days without a playground was the punishment that Enric Farrés-Duran had to serve at school for writing with spelling mistakes. In 4 dies sense pati, the artist writes Pla’s quote with an obvious spelling mistake (“begades” instead of “vegades”), a mistake that sparked a lively controversy in the local context and generated clever animated gifs on social media.

With his youthful and carefree air, Enric Farrés-Duran begins stories that combine real events and invented stories, and, as a good narrator, he invites us to follow them and enjoy them, but also to question them and call them into question.

[Article published in Bonart, 2014]

Link to the article in A*DESK

The ADN gallery in Barcelona is currently presenting a collective exhibition which, as the text on the exhibition leaflet explains, “starts from the idea of ​​the artist as an accomplice and witness to social dynamics that require their involvement, commitment and an active positioning that goes beyond denunciation.”

The impeccable exhibition is entitled Accomplices and Witnesses and is relevant, not only for the projects it presents, but also because it is capable of raising many questions; both about the positioning of the artists or the situations and conflicts that they show, reveal or denounce (which we will not dwell on here), and about the risks that these types of practices can fall into; or about the real impact that these can have and the way in which they can be read.

Beyond this exhibition, there are risks or tics that these practices, artistic and cinematographic – especially documentaries – can incur, sometimes, due to a question of naivety or inertia. Detecting them should not be understood as a sign of destructive criticism, but of doubts and questions generated from honesty and from the conviction of the need for this type of project.

A few months ago, the artist Tania Bruguera dedicated a workshop here to the notion of “useful art”, that is, the need to bring art into the realm of reality, and as she herself insisted, “to do something that can serve society”. There are several dangers or complex situations associated with this declaration of good intentions. Firstly, that said “useful art” is directed at an audience that is already aware, convinced and committed to the proposed cause. In this case, rather than generating new questions or revealing specific situations, the artistic proposals would be limited to creating an effect of recognition. Secondly, that the existence of said art ends up acting as a tranquilizer of consciences and, therefore, does not produce any type of action. And finally, the figure of the artist becomes a substitute for a sociologist/anthropologist/architect/ethnographer/… (and add here the specialty you want), who approaches a specific scientific discipline without an exhaustive degree of knowledge, rigor or the necessary involvement.

If one of the most important strategies of action in art can be to point out, show, evidence or propose tools that contribute to change (sometimes small changes that can have great later significance), what can happen when working with such sensitive material as humans, that is, people with all their problems, ambitions, desires, expectations and frustrations? How can an artist approach a community or a collective, sometimes with very different social and cultural patterns and guidelines, without being or appearing paternalistic? What is the point of denouncing things? Can socially involved art end up being a soothing of consciences? Is activism a form of collective recognition sometimes more important than its own real impact? What percentage of representativeness should artistic practices have in order to be able to be between these two worlds, that of the art circuit and that of action, maintaining the codes of both and without betraying either of them?

Perhaps more than finding the answers to these questions, the fact of openly posing these questions means admitting and assuming the danger of this slippery and unstable terrain in which these practices move and, above all, being aware of the importance of keeping these cynical attitudes at a distance, with the will and eagerness to assimilate and pervert them, often reducing them to simple clichés.

Link to the article in A*DESK