Since its inauguration in 1895, the idea of ​​national representation at the Venice Biennale has gained increasing prominence. The architecture of the pavilions in the Giardini was built on the basis of national characteristics. But what role does “the national” play in contemporary art today? Can we speak of national art in the 21st century? Although the idea of ​​national pavilions may seem anachronistic, in Venice, a city outside of time and space, everything can be negotiated and rethought.

At the 2013 Venice Biennale, some pavilions touch on this theme both in substance and form. The French and German Pavilions have decided to exchange spaces. In an attempt to reflect that the dialogue between cultures goes beyond national borders, Anri Sala, the artist representing France, is shown in the German Pavilion and the artists Ai Weiwei, Romuald Karmakar, Santu Mofokeng and Dayanita Singh, curated by Susanne Gaensheimer, are exhibiting in the French Pavilion.

The Cyprus and Lithuanian Pavilions are also collaborating on a common project, curated by Raimundas Malašauskas. The project is called Oo and is not based on any pre-established concept. The curator held a competition open to Cypriot, Lithuanian and international artists and proposes a sequence-based exhibition to be presented in a modernist building close to the official spaces of the Biennale.

The transnational theme is also evident in the choice of prestigious curators from a different country than the pavilions they represent. This is the case of Jonathan Watkins in the Iraq Pavilion where he presents a collective exhibition or Udo Kittelmann in the Russian Pavilion, where he has worked with Vadim Zakharov. The Estonian Pavilion, curated by Adam Budak, shows Dénes Farkas’ project Evident in Advance, which reflects on the elusiveness of language and the impossibility of translation. Another example: Kathrin Rhomberg, the Austrian curator who in 2010 curated a magnificent Berlin Biennale based on the theme of “reality”, is responsible for the Kosovo pavilion where she has worked with Petrit Halilaj, an artist who explores the notions of reality and memory.

Continuing with this tour of Venice 2013, we highlight a pavilion that always creates expectation, the British pavilion, which features the presence of Jeremy Deller. Deller works with “the real”, often through the confrontation of different facts or situations. The Spanish Pavilion presents a project curated by Octavio Zaya with Lara Almarcegui, which is based on the investigation of the contemporary city and its modern “ruins” (wastelands, unoccupied spaces, etc.).

In the Austrian Pavilion, Mathias Poledna presents his usual interconnections between art and entertainment and the mechanisms of image creation. The micronarratives of Mladen Miljanovic are also noteworthy in the Pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Danish Pavilion proposes an experimental collaboration between an artist, Jesper Just, and an architecture and communication team, Project Projects.

Sarah Sze is the protagonist of the United States Pavilion. Sze modifies the architecture of the pavilion and connects the interior and exterior, by creating a sequence of installations specifically designed for the space in which she incorporates continuous jumps in scale and size.

Another interesting project is Kata Mijatovic’s Between the Sky and the Earth / Tra il cielo e la terra, at the Croatian Pavilion. It is based on a Facebook profile The Dreams Archive, in which anyone can participate by archiving their dreams, and which takes the form of an installation in the Tiziano Room of the Don Orione Artigianelli cultural centre.

The Finnish Pavilion is based on an event that occurred last year, the fall of a tree that destroyed part of the pavilion and forced its renovation. Antti Laitinen presents Falling Trees, which speaks of art and nature, exploring the unpredictability and destructive force of the event, but also its transformative impulse.

At the Argentine Pavilion, Nicola Constantino proposes four installations on the figure of Eva Perón, a woman who was many women and who also functions as a metaphor for her country.

And we end the tour with the logical expectation created by the countries that are participating for the first time in this biennial, such as the Maldives, the Bahamas, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Bahrain and, curiously, the Vatican.

[Article published in Bonart, 2013]

Link to the article in A*DESK

This is a phrase uttered by the character of Morpheus in a scene from the film Matrix (1999). Slavoj Žižek also quoted it in the title of one of his books, in which he recalled Jorge Luis Borges’ fable about cartographers who, wanting to be extremely faithful to reality, ended up creating a 1:1 scale map that ended up covering the real geography they wanted to represent.

Reality and its representation, reality and its mediatization are some of the great themes that keep us busy. But today we are not proposing great philosophical reflections (or perhaps not explicitly), but we want to point out two works that explore these themes.

The first is The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) by John Smit, in which a scene that takes place in a bustling London street is “directed” by a voice-over… Until in the last few minutes we see that perhaps it is not exactly like that.

The second is the film Synecdoche New York (2009), directed by Charlie Kaufman, which tells the story of a theatre director who is increasingly alienated from his own existence. Unexpectedly, he receives an extraordinary grant that allows him to create a total work of art, which he sees as the pinnacle of realism and honesty. In some abandoned warehouses, the author creates a mammoth work, which never stops growing and ends up mimicking the city of New York and all its inhabitants… until the director’s voice-over says “Cut!” And no, this is not a spoiler…

Link to the article in A*DESK

The theme of the summer exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Krakow (MOCAK) is not exactly light. Curated by Monika Koziol, Delfina Piekarska and Maria Anna Potocka, Economics in Art aims to analyse aspects like the possible dialogues between art and economics, art’s dependence on the market or how the value of art is defined. The result is an exhibition that brings together pieces by thirty-five artists, amongst whom we find a carefully considered balance of referential figures, such as Joseph Beuys, Antoni Muntadas, Alfredo Jaar, Andreas Gursky, Santiago Sierra or Rirkrit Tiravanija; a good representation of the Polish art scene (Rafal Bujnowski, Oskar Dawicki, Pola Dwurnik) and other artists very active on the international scene, such as Dan Perjovschi, Christoph Büchel, Leopold Kessler, Michael Landy or Jota Castro, amongst others.

If ten years ago the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in the project Economics of Time proposed a similar but much more specific and succinct theme: the ambiguity surrounding notions of production and efficacy in art, Economics in Art places in evidence how the exhibition continues to be a problem in thesis projects, becoming, as happens all too often, a mere sample of the possibilities that the catalogue ends up exploring in more depth. In this case, the exhibition indicates a variety of subjects and approaches, of which I’ll only mention a few: the annotation “Künst-Kapital” written on a 10 Deutschmark note by Joseph Beuys (and reinterpreted years later by Alfredo Jaar), the time it takes for 1000 $ to disappear after successive money exchanges (Antoni Muntadas), the proposal of the destruction of all the artist’s belongings in the form of a production line (Michael Landy), the auction on ebay of the artistic participation in the biennale Manifesta (Christoph Büchel), a home-shopping programme selling art works (Christian Jankowski) or current affairs commented on in drawings that are as direct as they are precise (Dan Perjovschi).

The exhibition is conventional with regard to what it shows and how it shows it. It includes diverse proposals related to paper money but not, for example, the Time Bank initiated by Anton Vidokle that is a real proposal for another type of economy, one as alternative as it is ancient based on exchange. And if one thinks of idiosyncratic proposals that really question the economy of art, at less than 100 km from the Museum of Contemporary Art of Krakow, one finds find Bury Mis, the studio of an artist-designer-inventor, independent of galleries and markets, that recoups the legacy of Schwitters and his Merzbau as much as the ideas of Monte Veritá so much appreciated by Harald Szeemann.

But returning to the catalogue of the exhibition, it’s the text by the journalist and writer Edwin Bendyk “The fable of the bees: art dividends and the economics of Warhol” that hones in on the subject and amplifies the area of reflection beyond the visual arts. According to Bendyk, the traditional theory of value isn’t in harmony with artists, unless they are directly related to the production of pieces, that is, creating value in the market. But that, based on the notion of the economy of singularity (that goes beyond the value of the objective value because it bears in mind other factors and contributions) art and culture ought to be treated according to the example of the bees that the French economist, Yann Moulier Boutang narrates in his book L’abeille et l’économiste. Where the value of the bees labours isn’t determined by the production of honey, so much as by the consequences of their prior labours with the flowers. “Unfortunately”, concludes Bendyk, “lthe logic of capitalism has impeded the fields of art and culture from becoming a space for investment that expands the field where bees can work creatively”.

The example of the bees links perfectly with the book, published recently, by the artist Antonio Ortega, that Gloria Guirao commented on here, not, just for Ortega’s skill at illustrating his theories with examples, so much as because in Demagogia y propaganda en arte, economics in art is one of the central subjects, in this case looking at the determining role played by the institution.

Link to the article in A*DESK

I’ve been wanting to see the film Basquiat (1996) for a long time now and for one reason or another I’ve never had the opportunity. Last weekend, Loop and Ryan Gander gave me the excuse or perfect occasion to do so. In presenting the video by Ryan Gander Basquiat or I can’t dance to it, one day -but not now, one day I will but that will be it, but you won’t know and that will be it (2008) the Dutch gallery Annet Gellink didn’t aim to surprise with a première nor with the spectacular, so much as it ventured to show, within the always odd context of an art fair in a hotel, a work as direct as it is complex, in which, as ever with Gander, the creative process of indicating and discovering stories, of testing and learning, involves the spectator right from the very beginning.

The video of Gander consists of a scene of five minutes in which a man dressed in pyjamas and a sweater, cycles through a park while smoking a cigarette. Meanwhile a voice in off explains the piece itself. The scene is in reality a re-enactment of a moment from the film Basquiat (1996) by Julian Schnabel. “The scene occurs roughly two thirds of the way through the movie, where Basquiat cycles through a park to see Andy Warhol” the voice in off tells us. “In the previous scene a journalist questions Basquiat, politely but with an obvious hostility, about Basquiat’s and his admirers exploitation of his supposed status of outsider. By way of contrast, the friendship with Warhol is the ultimate piece of insiderism. It might then be possible to read the cycle scene as the journey through the outsider-insider pole that structures the film. Basquiat’s attire, with a cardigan thrown over pyjamas, suggests that he doesn’t care, things just happen. But of course, driven by ambition and fuelled by drugs, he does care, intensely”. Who explains the video to us, from within the actual video is Niru Ratnam, Gander’s gallerist and protagonist of the recreated scene and also the author of the press release about the piece, which is the text that he reads in off that accompanies the whole projection.

In this play on relations and the representation of exchanged roles, Gander places his gallerist in the position of the artist in a key moment of conflict of conscience between what he is, what he does and what he wants, and the power and pressures of mediating agents. And mediators are not just powerful gallerists who, in a scene from the film by Schnabel, in the middle of a supper of a successful opening remind Basquiat that any sales that he makes, wherever they might be have to be made through the gallery, but mediation is also writing press releases. And it is this type of mediation that Gander focuses on because these apparently informative texts that give the keys with which to read the exhibited works, can also be terribly vacuous, totally directive or full of prejudices.

It’s also curious that when watching the video by Gander, the film by Schnabel and as an extra the documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat. The Radiant Child (2010), directed by Tamra Davis based on the material filmed during his years of friendship with the artist, what engulfs the foreground is not so much the romantic figure of an artist with a life as intense as it was brief, so much as the entangled web of agents and mediators of art. And, in particular in Davis’ documentary, a portrait of downtown New York at the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s, the huge creative boom in which everybody was an artist, actor, filmmaker and a writer all at the same time and they simply, did things.

Link to the article in A*DESK

Was the title given, in 1993, to the film by the director Manuel Gómez Pereira, which explored in a humorous vein the world of porn shows. “Why do they call it Biennial when they mean ‘name dropping’?” could be the title or summary of the proposal that concerns us here. Announced with much pomp and circumstance as “the first of its kind, curated, exclusively online biennial exhibition of contemporary art” each one of these affirmations could be the object of discussion. But we’re not going to detain ourselves here.

The biennial is organised by ART+, “a mobile exhibition platform that combines insight from the leading experts in the contemporary art world with the transparency of fellow members’ behaviors and preferences”. And while it’s not a face-to-face event, the online biennial has all the tics of this type of event, beginning with a weakness for numbers (and also adjectives): 180 artists (promising, emerging, with talent) and 30 (international, leading). Nothing against the artists nor the curators that are simply doing their job; some providing the names of artists when they are asked for them and others facilitating images of their works. The list is fairly varied in both cases, with the “usual suspects” and others that aren’t. Amongst the curators we highlight Iara Boubnova, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Nancy Spector, Katerina Gregos, Lorenzo Benedetti, Javier Hontoria, Cuauhtémoc Medina and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, amongst others. In the list of artists we’d highlight Rossella Biscotti, Falke Pisano, Ignacio Uriarte, Paloma Polo, Daniela Ortiz, Calle Holck and Ragnar Kjartansson, amongst loads of others.

The problem lies in the marketing. That is to say the distance between what is announced and what is offered. To illustrate this nothing better than the video in which the artistic director of this edition of the biennial, Jan Hoet (the one responsible for the most noteworthy works, such as the mythic Chambre d’amis (1986), Documenta 9 (1992) or museums such as S.M.A.K. in Gant or MARTa Herford) explains, with very little conviction, his apathetic and vague idea for this event, that he has titled Reflection & Imagination. We’re also not going to detain ourselves here.

Entering finally into the biennial is to go meandering through images of artists and works, with short biographical references as well as synopses of the pieces. The online biennial is nothing more than an archive of works by artists selected by a series of curators. In reality it’s nothing more than an online version of Cream (and the ones that followed, Fresh Cream, Cream 3, Ice Cream and Creamier) that the publishers Phaidon have led us to become accustomed.

It’s curious that a piece by Oliver Laric, An incomplete timeline of online exhibitions and biennials, commissioned by the biennial itself, in the end doesn’t form part of it. For as the proposal by Laric places in evidence, the idea of an exhibition or online biennial is not new. Equally, for a while now there have been artists who work with the Internet (and we’re not talking about what in its day was called “net art”, that incidentally has aged fairly badly). Three years ago, for example, the Vip Art Fair appeared, an online art fair that continues its activities via Vip Art. One of the aspects that stands out of the artifices of the Online Biennial as much as of VIP Art is the quantity of registered users and the possibility of making selections and tagging favourites, that the tastes and preferences of the users end up being associated with their profiles and that themed social networks can be created. And it doesn’t seem over the top to think that this leads directly to “big data” as a marketing tool.

Link to the article in A*DESK

A few days ago Paloma Checa made an assessment of the last IKT congress celebrated in Madrid. She wrote about the subjects that had been considered in the debates, but also of what was talked about in the informal gatherings: the precarious nature of working as an independent curator or, what comes to the same thing, the precariousness of working in art. And one wouldn’t say that it was an unimaginable situation five years ago because it was also unthinkable the world would be governed by the financial markets the way it is now.

In some contexts measures are beginning to be taken: in the United Kingdom they have started the campaign “What Next”, an initiative of those responsible for cultural institutions, from theatres to museums, and also dance schools, to promote public investment in the arts. The objective is that the arts become a sort of manifesto within political life. It’s about making politicians understand the importance and value of culture (and yes, culture can generate economic and political returns) though the debate is ultimately about the type of society that we are constructing and what type of society we want to live in. In Madrid they are preparing sit-ins in the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. The aim is the same, to vindicate the value of culture

Harald Szeemann said that artists were a kind of seismograph for what happened in society, because they detected or reflected (consciously or unconsciously) the changes that were talking place. The statement still remains valid on a more global level. In the globalised world we live in, the distance is increasing, between an extremely rich class and the large number of people who are increasingly close to poverty or subsistence levels. The welfare society is winding backwards at a supersonic speed. The art world also reflects this situation: there is a world of millionaire auctions, art galleries located in the suburbs of large cities to situate them closer to private airports, collectors coming from exotic countries capable of buying everything and more, as well as endless unique works of art with prices involving many zeros. And then there are art professionals (artists, critics, curators, managers, designers, etc.) who work with ideas, contexts and content, juggling numbers and budgets. It seemed that the 19th or early 20th century idea of the artist living a life that was as bohemian as it was impoverished had been overcome, but it seems to be once again more up to date than we’d thought.

Working in art also involves experiencing another series of contradictions: we still talk of trading with unique pieces or limited editions (in totally reproducible formats); buying and selling objects; of limited access; of institutions that have grown too much so that it ends up being hard for them to adapt to the flexibility and dynamics that the times, artistic practices and public demand and of wanting/being able to be an industry. Working in art is not something “nice” or “interesting”, working in art is something necessary and by no means easy. It has to do with being critical, questioning things, a dissatisfaction, with looking for and creating meaning. Of course as an artist, critic or curator meaning can be created anywhere, on a webpage or in the corridor of your house. The problem lies in the value and need being recognised. As someone wrote a long time ago: “Culture in the long term is the most revolutionary political option”. It’s not by chance that it is now being targeted.

Link to the article in A*DESK

The history of Temporary Gallery in Köln is a curious one. It was established in 2008, on the initiative of the gallerists Thomas Rehbein and Christian Nagel as a space that, having previously paid the rent galleries from all across the world could use to have a presence in Köln. This need to activate the gallery scene of the city was fruit of Koln’s diminishing role in the art world during the eighties and the nineties, due amongst other reasons to the new capital status, not just political but also creative, assumed by Berlin. But Köln was not as sexy as before and the idea of the Temporary Gallery only functioned for a limited time. In 2012, the project changed direction and transformed into a non-profit space dedicated to the research and presentation of contemporary art projects. Directed by Regina Barunke, Temporary Gallery has been offering for a year now a programme that stands out for its collaboration with international curators and also for a certain inclination towards cinematographic formats and references.

This is the case of Roll Over. Reflections on documentary, after Richard Leacock, a group show curated by Bianca Visser, which stemming from the work of the British filmmaker Richard Leacock (1921-2011) investigates to what extent his ideas and contributions regarding the documentary genre have been continued or rejected by contemporary artists. In other words, at a time when contemporary artists approach, use, gobble up or dissect the documentary format, to what extent are the technical and conceptual achievements of a documentary filmmaker like Leacock still valid in the artistic field?

Bianca Visser resolves the dilemma not through grand theoretical digressions so much as by simply causing a few films by Leacock to coexist alongside works by seven contemporary artists: Yto Barrada, Duncan Campbell, Jan Dietvorst/Roy Villevoye, Luke Fowler, Anna McLauchlan, Fernando Sánchez Castillo and Hirofumi Suda. Projections and monitors alternate in a restrained staging that without deploying sophisticated technical devices offers the necessary conditions to look at (and listen to) the works in a very suitable fashion.

Richard Leacock’s maximum aspiration was to get as close to reality as possible and for this, at the end of the fifties, he dreamt up a mechanism to synchronize image and sound, or to put it another way, he invented a silent portable device that enabled him to move around unnoticed, recording everything that was occurring. His invention, that was made reality by his associates Robert Drew and Otto Koppelka, made it possible from that moment to move freely through streets and places and record them in a spontaneous manner. Hence the name “direct cinema”. The aim was that film would be able to transmit to the spectator a feeling of being there.

For Roll Over, Visser has selected three works that aren’t the most well known by Leacock, but for this it’s relevant to show them: Hickory Hill (1968), shows the annual pet show in the Kennedy’s residence, that left the president’s dog in a rather uncomfortable situation on seeing how other dogs, cats, birds or hamsters occupied his usual space; Community of Praise (1981), is a portrait of an average family from deep America. Throughout the film their religiosity gains importance, accompanied by superstitions and fanatical rituals. The third of the documentaries projected is Maidstone (1970), recorded during the filming of a film with the same title, written and directed by Norman Mailer, for which Leacock was a cameraman. Maidstone begins with a relaxed country scene that takes a strange turn, developing into a fight between Mailer and one of his actors. Suddenly, fiction and reality intermingle, the names of the characters are no longer used and the blood, flowing from flowing from one of their ears, is totally real.

Fernando Sánchez Castillo also comes across a situation and films it with his iPhone. During his visit to Documenta last summer his attention was drawn to one of the banners unfurled by the collective Occupy Kassel, “Keep shopping while bombs are dropping”, he decides to buy the banner and film the negotiations of this process. It’s a minimal scene that suddenly evidences the contradictions between good intentions and much more prosaic needs.

“Being there”, filming in a free and spontaneous manner, what is left of all this? A fair amount, in the case of Jan Dietvorst and Roy Villevoye, when in After the Battle (2012) they interview an historian focussed on the battles that took place in Verdun during the First World War, who dedicates his time to gathering, conserving and ordering each relic and clue that he finds (from bottles to helmets) to remember a series of fairly irrelevant battles that took place in that place.

Luke Fowler and Anna McLauchlan set out to film the short journey that goes from their apartment to the street. A priori neither complicated nor laborious, but it becomes almost impossible when the capturing of each one of the steps and all the details transforms it into something almost obsessive. In Hand-Me Downs (2011), Yto Barrada takes homemade material filmed with Super 8 and 16 mm, bought at flea markets and incorporates small stories about the memory of his own family in Morocco. The freedom that Leacock advocated is total in the case of Hirofumi Suda, who records everything that captures his attention, in a way that creates a selection of images unconnected by any narrative thread, but with a capacity to inspire an infinity of stories.

As a counterpoint, Duncan Campbell in Make it new John (2009) works basically with found material, although he has no qualms about adding the odd scene that he has filmed, to reconstruct a story: that of the entrepreneur John DeLorean who thought up a double plan: to create a futurist automobile which manufactured in Ireland, could –in passing- serve to resolve the political and social conflicts. A fantastic film that only uses the documentary conventions that interest him and in which he has no qualms in taking all the artistic licence he needs. Far from Leacock, but for that alone, it is highly significant in this context.

In this way, and without forcing the confrontations, Roll Over explores “the documentary trend in contemporary art”, but without any desire to generalize so much as analyse a very specific case: the impact of one of the pioneers of the genre on some artists working today. We don’t know if Leacock is a reference for the artists that Bianca Visser has selected, but what is evident is how naturally the logic of facts and the logic of fiction are constantly confused. Jacques Rancière already said a while ago: “writing history and writing stories come under the same regime of truth”.

For a few months now, Caixaforum Barcelona has been hosting Qué pensar | qué desear | qué hacer, an exhibition spread over time and presented in three parts. Qué pensar, Qué desear and Qué hacer are the titles of the three consecutive exhibitions that explore the function that art can have in a present marked by redefinition at all levels. Rosa Martínez is the curator of this project, for which she has worked with works from the “la Caixa” collection while incorporating others that function as purchase suggestions. A strategy very similar to that carried out by Kaspar König in his first exhibition as director of the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, entitled Museum unserer Wünschen (The Museum of Our Desires, 2001) and in which he exhibited all those works that in his opinion should form part of the museum’s collection. What better arguments to convince an acquisitions committee than to see the works in situ, perfectly installed?

As is usual in her work, Rosa Martínez does not make thoughtful thesis exhibitions, nor is she very fond of presenting archives of documents, but rather understands her work as that of a mediator who creates the context for artistic proposals to be presented in the best possible way. Martínez values ​​everything that art can contribute in terms of presence and experience, as something alive that allows us to reflect on our present.

Rosa Martínez’s career is long and solid. She was a star and regular curator at international biennials, starting with the first edition of Manifesta (1996) in Rotterdam, Istanbul (1997) or Moscow (2005 and 2007), among others. She was also the curator of the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2003, with Santiago Sierra, whose project left the pavilion in ruins, while preventing entry to anyone who did not have a Spanish identity card, so that a large percentage of visitors to this event based on national pavilions were excluded. Once again, the curator helped to create the best possible situation for the artistic project to be carried out.

And another fact worth remembering here is that Martínez was the director of the Mediterranean Biennial between 1988 and 1992. This was a biennial promoted from Barcelona and focused on emerging art, which worked on aspects such as multidisciplinarity and exchanges between different cities in a specific geographical area. With rather little vision for the future, it was cancelled to make way for the grand plans of Barcelona’92. But that is another story that no longer depends on the curator, although it affects him.

[Article published in Bonart, 2013]