Mario García Torres works with very specific elements (hidden stories, rumours or un-clarified details) from the history of art, film, other artists, events from the past, etc. These investigations transform into stories that can take the form of diaporamas, videos, books, curated exhibitions or postcards, to mention just a few of the possibilities. Underlining a stance between critical and poetic that vindicates the element of the subjective, in the following interview, Mario García Torres talks about the reasons for choosing his formats for production and presentation, his relation with the Internet and the structures of art, and his negotiated comfort with the art system.

Montse Badia: In your projects there is a diversity regarding forms of production/presentation/distribution. I’m thinking of two examples: “Alguna vez has visto la nieve caer” (Have you ever seen snow) (2010), a piece in which, on the one hand, all the research into Hotel One and Kabul has been carried out from your home computer, via the Internet, without the need to travel to Afghanistan, and on the other, the interesting feature that it is a diaporama, that could also function as a narrative. Another case: is your exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, where you intervened in the bookshop, inserting postcards into some of the books. I would like to know how you decide the form or channel for presentation that you use for each one of your pieces.

Mario García Torres: My practice is not defined by my commitment or development of a medium. Each project has a distinct nature and the medium in which each aesthetic transaction is distributed is governed, in my point of view, by being the most efficient depending on its nature. My work in general explores the structures of art and the way in which these structures make possible this thing that we call art. My approach ranges from historical investigations into the practice of other artists to personal and intimate reflections about the negotiation of my practice in the art system. As you mentioned, “Alguna vez…” and the intervention in the bookshop at the Jeu de Paume are very different in nature. The first is the result of a long investigation –it is worth noting one not done exclusively on the computer– into the history of Boetti in Afghanistan, and specifically the hotel that he managed in Kabul during the seventies. The intervention in the Jeu de Paume was the extension of another project – the ones that I call more personal, intimate and immediate, the majority of which take place in the studio – one that I have now been doing for several years. It consists of each time I go on a work trip and find myself in a hotel where there are sheets of headed notepaper, I sit down for a moment and reflect about what I have done as an artist, as well as the future of my work, and I write a promise on the paper. It is more or less always the same phrase, a version of: “ I promise to give the best of myself in the years to come”. There must be forty or fifty of these sheets in existence and the project that continues today, consists of a collection of these promises. This project exists as I’ve described it, but also in a musical form – the explanation of the project became the words for a song that I commissioned from a musician friend, Mario López Landa – and a number of postcards, illustrating the modes of transport (airplanes, boats, buses) that had taken me to work, on which I had written the same phrase were distributed in the bookshop of the Jeu de Paume. I aimed for the discovery of these postcards to be a surprise, and not on the wall as is customary, in the way that the headed sheets are exhibited.

MB: To investigate the structures of art sometimes you develop projects, books or curate exhibitions. In the case of the show “Objetos para un rato de inercia” (Objects for a moment of inertia), that took place in the Elba Benítez gallery in Madrid and which brought together works by David Askevold, Alighiero e Boetti, Luis Camnitzer, Barry Le Va and Francesc Torres. The declaration of principles was clear: “History, despite its insistence on the contrary, pertains to the present. History is always being made. It is a process not a result. History, and the writing of History, are one and the same thing.” Is it a way of activating propositions that took place in the past, of which only the record or narrations are left? Do the historic investigations serve to understand the present better?

MGT: Definitely. If it wasn´t for the fact that I believe that each historic narrative, that I use as an excuse to generate another narrative, didn´t have an impact on our contemporaneity their wouldn´t be any reason to use them. In this sense, my initiatives are a conversation between my personal interests, with the understanding that I do them through a subjectivity that is situated in the present, as well as an interest in the more complex range of art that makes it possible for my work to exist. In this sense, it’s not just me as a person that activates these narratives, but a more complex system that supports the need for this revision.

MB: Your works function perfectly as stories, you meticulously investigate events, details about other artists’ projects, rumours and from there elaborate a history, a story in which the objective data and your interpretation coexist, sometimes endowed with a certain poetics. What is your stance in relation to more recent art history, to what is told, what is omitted and what is very superficially explained?

MGT: My pieces are very personal narratives that have to do with sharing my own experiences, desire or interest in a specific history. In this sense I see it as a way of making history, though very different from the one that pretends to tell the truth. Perhaps my narratives function as complements to those more official ones, as it is these details that are omitted that, most of the time, catch my attention.

MB: What is your working methodology?

MGT: When a piece is exhibited, a long time has passed from the moment when the episode in question excited me. The majority of times I begin an investigation, not very methodologically, about something that interests me and afterwards, at some point, I see the potential for it to convert into something that would be interesting to recount more publicly. The majority of times I rely on these things that have drawn my attention, the notes in a box on my desk and, little by little, different invitations end up also defining which ones are made and presented in specific temporal or geographic situations.

MB: What are the main points of confluence and also differences between your role as an artist and when you expand it on occasion to become curator of exhibitions?

MGT: To me there don’t seem to be that many differences. I am an artist, and my interventions as a curator have to do with looking for a different way of sharing my interests. Sometimes it can seem more to the point to make an exhibition that tells the story in a more personal manner, hence the exhibitions. But in reality I see it all as a single body of work.

MB: You often cite works or parts of work that are already made to begin your own process. Would you allow your works also to become the object of citations, appropriations, re-enactments or revisions?

MGT: It would be an honour if somebody one day saw them this way, and would continue these narratives, in whatever manner, to know that in some place in the world someone might continue to be interested. In the end, one works just for this to find people who have similar interests. I think that in the end my work comes down to this.

MB: Are you concerned about the notion of truth? Do you think that truth is possible in art?

MGT: No, I have absolutely no interest.

MB: What is your relation with the Internet, for you, is it a tool for research, communication or dissemination?

MGT: Obviously it is always my first point of contact with a subject and many times it leads me to investigate things in a less methodological way, a richer way. It situates normal people, everyday people, at the same level as books and official sources. Internet is present all the time, and I don´t blame it for often being wrong. I like it. What better way to divert an investigation towards something contradictory or further from the truth. It is there that one finds relations that potentially become something interesting, in the weaving of a new way of telling a story.

MB: Many of the works that you make at present could be disseminated perfectly via the Internet however they tend to be shown within the parameters of the institution. Have you ever thought about sometimes using the possibility of other routes to show and distribute your work?

MGT: I’ve never thought about it in depth. I believe that in the end I’m interested in the experiential part of art however contradictory that might seem. The use of films and slides, for example, has to do with having a cinematic experience, which would be lost if it was seen on a small monitor. I believe that there are pieces that can be disseminated on the Internet, but not the majority of mine. I am as concerned about the experience, as about the data within them.

MB: Do you think that the institutional framework (museums, art centres and also big events like Documenta or international biennales) is flexible and does it adapt to the new needs required by artistic practices?

MGT: Yes, it doesn’t trouble me. I believe that I have constantly tried to use this framework to talk about what I want to. Obviously there are limitations, but there is also a lot of flexibility. I believe that up until now, each time they have invited me to exhibit in a biennale or an exhibition of this type, I have ended up doing my work elsewhere. For me the work exists where it is executed and not where it is exhibited. That’s the least of it.

Software social. An interview with Antoni Abad

31 - October - 2012

Link to the article in A*DESK

Antoni Abad is a paradigmatic example of an artist who, trained in fine art, starts off as a sculptor and progressively dematerialises his work until he develops projects that call for the artistic institution, as the initiating and driving force, but that are developed in the terrain of the real. In the following interview Abad talks about the details of this evolution, the changes experienced in his role as an artist, the needs and production requirements for his current work, the channels of distribution that he uses and his independence in relation to the art market.

Montse Badia: You began working as a sculptor and now make projects where you don’t produce any specific objects. I’d like you to tell me about this evolution in your work and how you conceive it.

Antoni Abad: To respond to this question I would have to go back to the time I spent as an artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada, in 1993. I went to Banff with the measuring tape pieces and there I discover video and make my first video-projection in the space. There, I become aware of the existence of the Internet, for the first time. I arrived in Canada with the tools for relating in which I employed the tape measures and returned to Barcelona with videotapes. I also brought back my first email address. It is the moment that I modelled the last sculpture, the metal hands, and made the first video-projection in the space: my hand infinitely measuring palm by palm, the everyday.

There is another crucial moment, in 1996, when there isn’t even any projection in the space. It is when Roc Parés invites me to do a project specifically for the Internet within the now disappeared MACBA on line, a project driven by the Pompeu Fabra University and MACBA. The result was a renewed interpretation of Sisyphus, a video-projection from 1995. The new version adapts to the Web and is located between two Internet servers, one in Barcelona and the other in the Antipodes, in New Zealand. The virtual space overpowers Sisyphus and nothing takes place any more in the physical space. To enjoy this experience it is essential to connect to the Internet.

Later on I experiment with video-projects realised with made to measure software programmes, like the piece “Ego” in 1999, in which flies infinitely draw the phrase “YO y YO y YO…” (I and I and I), harking back to the egocentric miseries that we all suffer. Based on these experiences, in 2001 I began a long lasting project on the Web. It’s a programme that manifests itself in the form of a virtual fly that is alive when the screen of the computer is connected to the Internet. This was a project predating what we now call social networks, where the users installed the fly in their computer and could communicate with each other without being detected by a central server. This network had a horizontal design realised with p2p technology, so that the communications between users couldn´t be intercepted. The fly project couldn´t have existed without the users, who, by installing the programme in their computer, entered into forming part of the virtual community.

It wasn´t until 2004, with the arrival of telephones with integrated cameras, that I began to work with different groups, and communities at risk of social exclusion.

MB: When you began Megafone.net it was more difficult for people to have their own communication channels in the Internet, now it is more usual. How has this side of things affected your work?

AA: In 2004 when we began the first project with mobile phones in Mexico City, the taxi drivers didn’t know what Internet was. After this discovery, the taxi drivers had to discover what was the thread of their discourse. It was foreseen that this was a project for small groups of people, that met up weekly, to propose, debate and decide the subjects that they would deal with. These projects are not open to everybody, like Facebook or Twitter, where it is not necessary to meet in person or agree subjects. They serve more for everyday exchanges and it is only recently that they have been used to denounce and promote certain causes. On the other hand, the projects of megafone.net, enable certain groups at risk of social exclusion to self-represent themselves and they aren´t open to everybody to be able to participate, though they can be consulted on the Internet.

Normally these projects arise in order to distort the proposals that I receive from art centres. At the beginning it wasn´t like this, they asked, for example, for a project of video-projections and I tried to give it a twist, asking what collectives there were in each city who might be interested in a creative project with alternative communication channels via mobile phones.

MB: How does your role as an artist change, what is your job and what is your responsibility?

AA: I came from sculpture and had used materials like foldable chairs, sponge-rubber, meccano and iron… afterwards I used more ethereal materials like photography or video. Now the materials that I use are the data transmission networks of mobile phones and the Internet. I try to model them so that they can serve as a way for these groups to express themselves with total freedom. My work as an artist consists in giving form to these networks, as well as getting involved with the groups I work with.

I try to use the technology in a minimalist manner, keeping it to a minimum. Megafone.net is not baroque, nor complicated and endeavours to express the ideas of these groups in the barest possible way.

MB: How are your projects financed?

AA: There’s a bit of everything, from major sponsorship, both private and public, as in the first case, that of the taxi drivers in Mexico, where we had sponsorship from the Centro Nacional de las Artes in Mexico, the Centro Cultural in Spain, as well as from Telefónica, that had just arrived in Mexico. Or in the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, we had sponsorship from Nokia and Amena (later Orange). Or, in the Centre d’Art Contemporain of Geneva, where there was a long list of foundations that sponsored the project. There are also projects, such as that of Manizales in Colombia organised by the Universidad de Caldas, that have practically no budget at all, with a few mobile phones that are taken as contraband from Spain, or that of the Sahrawis, where we didn´t even have a mobile data network, so much as used the antenna of the Internet connexion supplied by an Italian NGO.

MB: In these cases the art centre is used as a meeting point.

AA: Yes, it’s about trying to make the most of the art centre’s resources. First of all, the physical space. The centre wants there to be art within that space, an installation, a representation. In Megafone.net they use it to have the weekly meetings of the participants. When it is opened to the public, the table and the computers that we use become an installation. I call them documentary installations that try to explain what is going on, that a few people have telephones and remotely feed the Web with their images, sounds, videos and reports.

On the other hand, the art centre always has a public relations section and a press department that we endeavour to take advantage of to disseminate the projects. The aim is to use any device that the museum has to try and parasite all the media with information about the project. These media disseminations have the objective of making the user choose to enter into the Internet, to see what the participants in these projects want to tell us.

There are places where the project has had a lot of visibility. In Mexico, for example, when it was made public through a press release those anonymous taxi drivers became the perfect disseminators of the project. From that moment on, they were interviewed non-stop by the radio, the television, and the newspapers. There was a time when the server received 50.000 visits daily. We managed to make what those people expressed, those who are never listened to, reverberate across the Web.

MB: What you don´t do is produce photographs of the participants, for example, to be exhibited in art galleries. What are your relations with commercial galleries?

AA: Currently none. At the beginning there were portraits of the participants that formed part of these documentary installations. But there came a time when I considered that it was no longer necessary. If I write on the wall of the art centre the phrase: “18 taxi drivers transmit from mobile phones on the Web”, the project is already explained it isn’t necessary to know what faces the participants have.

I could have played the world of the gallery and the market but decided to abandon it. Whoever wants to enjoy these projects only has to visit them on the Web. I don´t produce anything that could have any exchange value on the market. I try to work with institutions that can finance these projects.

Another aspect is the technological investigation behind it, that I have to improve, so that the device can be ever more fluid and easier to use. This I call “social software” as the modelling I talked about at the beginning is done according to the needs of each group of participants. This effort to minimise the use of software and to make the device as easy as possible, ties in with the idea of media minimalism that has always interested me.

MB: Sometimes you have used telephones for each one of the participants and at others communal telephones, that are passed from hand to hand between the participants, why?

AA: The idea of the communal telephone arose in the project with the motorbike messengers in São Paulo. The channel *MOTOBOY started with twelve participants where each one used a mobile phone. When the initial period of the project was over, the participants decided to make the project theirs and to continue it. But as they no longer had the support of the art centres that organised them, the funding ran out. I consider that this decision by the participants to give continuity to the projects is the maximum success that this type of project can have. What happened in São Paulo, is that the participants couldn´t maintain the accounts of 12 mobile phones, so I invented the communal phone: a mobile phone that changes hands at every weekly meeting. This ends up making the network much cheaper to maintain. São Paulo has been making uninterrupted transmissions for 4 years with 3 telephones that enable 6 motoboys to continue the project.

When the participants decide to give continuity to the projects, sustainability becomes a key factor. In the case of the project with the young Saharans, in the year 2009-2010, we adapted the device so that it could publish via WIFI, so that the publication on the Internet had a cost of zero.

MB: What human team do you need to carry out your work?

AA: As well as the teams from the art centres that I mentioned before, each project needs a local coordinator, to whom all the knowledge about how the device functions is transmitted, who is the person who coordinates and energises the weekly meetings in which the group decides democratically what subjects are going to be dealt with. The computer programmers who I have been working with these last years are, naturally, indispensable, a job that is currently fulfilled by Matteo Sisti Sette.

MB: How has technology modified your way of working? How has the type of telephone that you use changed and how has the access evolved?

AA: Things have changed a lot; we have gone from the first projects where the telephone with a camera was the latest fad in technology to the popularisation of smartphones. Recently the appearance of the operating system Android, that facilitates enormously the programming of this type of mobile device, facilitates the experimentation with and rapid execution of mobile applications.

The interface that grows most rapidly – and is now well ahead of computers – is that of mobile phones. For example, in the project that I am now doing in New York we have found that many of the participants already have a telephone with a camera and an Internet connection, something that facilitates enormously the realisation of the projects.

At the beginning of these projects, in 2004, it was often necessary to explain to the participants what the Internet was. The processes were a lot to do with digital inclusion. Currently the participants are familiar with the Internet, are users of social networks and already have mobile phones.

MB: The fact of giving a voice to different communities, has it at any time entered into contradiction with the very bases of the community and generated some type of conflict?

AA: At a certain point, the two groups of gypsies with whom I have worked ended up in the odd conflictive situation, they fell out but it didn´t go beyond that. In the gypsy world, those who have the right to express themselves in the name of the community are the patriarchs. I, on the other hand, proposed to give the young people a voice. In the first instance, this proposal wasn´t well received, but finally the patriarchs accepted that it was the young people who represented the community in the project. In the case of Lleida, it ended up being very difficult to find gypsy girls who wanted to participate. The community tried to censor some of these girls, for the images that they had published. But in all cases the conflict was resolved.

In the case of Colombia, I proposed that, instead of a single group, two potentially conflicting groups participated. One would be made up of people displaced by the conflict, who had had to abandon the rural area to take refuge in the city. The other would be made up of people who had formed part of illegal armed groups, like the FARC. When I made the proposal they told me I was mad because these people ran a huge physical, and even life threatening, risk. That no way could they meet together in the same space. I insisted and what I did was ask them to meet separately but with only one virtual space, so that the dialogue that they couldn´t have in person, could be carried out on the Internet.

It was the best possible result, because after the third meeting, seeing that the subjects were the same, I proposed that they meet in person. They accepted and from that moment they became one single group, which was later integrated into the working group at the Universidad de Caldas.

So the desire to express oneself has always been over and above internal conflicts. In São Paulo the messengers had the odd scare with the unions, who wanted to appropriate the project to convert it into the voice of the union, but the Motoboys decided to remain independent.

MB: When they invite you to present Megafone in the context of a group exhibition, how do you do it?

AA: Normally, through an installation that recreates the documentary installation that took place during the project. That is to say, a meeting table, a random projection and a computer, where one can consult the contents published by the participants. If there is any printed documentation it is placed on the table so that it can be consulted. It is about publicising what happened. I say random projection but maybe I should call it the “breaking news” of each project. It is an application that searches in the database for the most recent publication so as to project it like a billboard. If it doesn’t find any, it looks within the latest publications.

MB: Your responsibility is to maintain the database, which is what is left after all these projects. The preservation of Megagafone is your responsibility.

AA: Yes, we maintain an Internet server that makes it possible to publish in real time and that also constitutes the repository that preserves the memory of all the projects, around 300.000 photographs, texts, videos and sounds.

MB: Can you imagine always continuing with this type of project, or do you at times have the temptation to return to the studio and produce objects? Or, on the contrary, is turning back the clock no longer possible?

AA: At the moment I plan to carry on within this field. No doubt I will take other routes, as in the project with blind people in 2010, and in other more specific areas of research. It could be that the sense of this investigation turns towards people who can take advantage of these technologies for problems with blindness or Alzheimers. This represents a new and complex shift, to try and construct a more refined and simple device that could be of use to these people.

If I evaluate it on a personal level, remembering my times as a sculptor, when I was thinking about the sublime of art, and I compare it to the situations where these projects take me, where you are often in the street with people who otherwise you would never have had the chance to meet, and I find myself sharing with them a whole series of problems that I had no idea could even exist, then I think that I wouldn’t swap any of this for my earlier practice. Though maybe a time will come when I will miss what sculpture had, that building, little by little, with physical materials. Going back the next day to the studio and continuing. You didn’t have to connect to the Internet to confirm the sculptural presence.

From Pollock to performance

31 - October - 2012

Link to the article in A*DESK

The erosion of certain curatorial practices, that has occurred over the last few years across the international stage, along with the paucity within the local arena of studies into art, that propose methodological analyses instead of merely enumerating tendencies and chronologies, means the need is greater than ever for thesis exhibitions, the fruit of rigorous research that, above all, elaborate temporally transversal trajectories.

In this sense we’re fortunate because until 24 February, the Miró Foundation in Barcelona is presenting “Explosion! The legacy of Jackson Pollock”, co-produced with the Moderna Museet and curated by Magnus af Petersens, who until a few days ago was head of Exhibitions and Collections at the Moderna Museet and, since October, is the chief curator of the Whitechapel Gallery in London. In 2006, Magnus af Petersen was preparing a solo show of Paul McCarthy and while talking about some of his first works (that can also be seen in “Explosion!”) the artist commented on the influence that Jackson Pollock had had on him and, in particular, his working process. This brief reference was the point of departure for the exhibition.

It is true that Petersens hasn´t discovered dynamite and he recognises it explicitly. The subtitle of the exhibition “The legacy of Jackson Pollock” reproduces the title of the essay written in 1956 by Allan Kaprow, the same one that coined the word “happening” and contributed to the appearance of the practices of conceptual art. Petersens follows Kaprow’s diagnosis in identifying the time after World War II, as being the detonator for a need to start from scratch, to attack painting, already perceived as an exhausted process, and to explore new routes. And in this starting from scratch a few images were key in indicating a before and after: the photographs of Hans Namuth that accompanied an article about Jackson Pollock, that appeared in “Life” magazine, which showed his works, but above all, the artist in action (and never a truer word said).

The thesis of the exhibition is more than clear: to evidence the legacy of Pollock, that is to say, the artist in action, underlining the relevance of gesture and its consequences: the change in the role of the artist, a distancing with regard to “the work”, the emphasis on process and the change in role that the spectator has had to adopt. Different options and interpretations are shown along the way: the Gutai group in Japan, throwing bottles full of paint against canvases; Niki de Saint Phalle shooting paint; Jean Tinguely’s painting machines; Yves Klein dressed in black tie giving instructions to his models to carry out “live and in situ” his Anthropometries, or the same artist realizing his paintings with fire; etc. etc.

And here one of the major achievements of this exhibition is introduced, that is situating the audio-visual documents on the same level as the works, documents that, otherwise can be accessed via youtube, however, by situating them right beside the “work” (in the way we studied Art History at the University of Barcelona), they turn into a brutal “update” of these works.

Chance, instructions, choreographies or performances are issues that artists are currently working with. And this relation to the present that formed part of the exhibition when it was presented in Stockholm has been circumvented in its journey to Barcelona or it has been done with minimal brushstrokes (read video works of Janine Antoni or Tracey Moffat and Gary Hillberg, without excess complications nor requirements for their installation). And it is a real shame, because performance is present in different exhibition programmes within the city, such as Fabra i Coats or the Fundación Tàpies, but as yet has not managed to mark out a real circuit, beyond being mentioned in the different informative leaflets of these institutions.

The future of art. In a world of cuts and cultural industries

7 - October - 2012

Art does not save lives, but it improves them. This assertion can be more or less shared depending on the historical, social and economic moment. In recent years, all roadmaps have pointed in the direction of greater professionalization in this sector, which implies greater efficiency and standardization. Good proof of this has been the proliferation of professionalizing workshops: preparation of professional dossiers, English courses for artists, etc. Nothing to object to, as long as these communication tools are not the main objective, but rather the accompaniment to a previous work and artistic discourse. Because art is not a cultural industry and, if it wants to be one, the price to pay is perhaps too high. Art is more like a laboratory activity, of research, of trial and error, than the launch of already packaged products and shows ready for consumption. Art works with the unexpected and with not knowing how to react. When we go to the cinema to see a genre film, we know certain codes and certain dynamics beforehand. In art, we don’t always know what we’re going to encounter and we’re never quite sure how we should react. And this can be seen in the simplest gestures: when we attend a theatre performance (whether it’s “Life is a Dream” or experimental theatre), as spectators, we know that at the end we applaud the actors. When we attend an artistic performance, there is always a moment of doubt before deciding whether we should applaud or not. The independent and unconventional role of art could be exemplified by Pippi Longstrump, the fictional character created by Astrid Lindgren. Pippi’s spirit of contradiction, present even in her braids and her idiosyncratic way of dressing and living, is a festival of creativity, imagination and independence that often clashes with the rest of society and, at the same time, opens up new experiences for her conservative friends, Tommy and Annika. Art is a practice that is rooted in individuality, in personal obsessions and in the possibility of generating conflicts or critical relationships with its forms. In this way, it is capable of generating knowledge that goes beyond standard parameters and insists on diversity and difference. The objective: to raise questions, to raise questions that allow us to observe and question things from renewed perspectives. Although the objective perspectives do not seem very promising for the future of art: cuts, increases in VAT and personal income tax, recession. Basic issues such as health or education are beginning to be neglected, so that the need for art seems much more relative. But, for that very reason, it must continue to be the trigger for awakening consciences and pointing towards other possibilities of thought and action. More than ever, art is an absolute necessity and its practice, a mode of resistance.

Mastery is revealed in limitation. On Manifesta 9 in Genk (co-author Andreas M. Kaufmann)

2 - October - 2012

Article published in A*DESK, 2012

Conscious of how vast and vague Biennials and other international exhibitions and events can be, Manifesta 9 focuses on a very specific subject that is currently highly significant.

The curator of Manifesta 9, Cuauhtémoc Medina couldn´t be clearer and more precise in the text he wrote for the catalogue: “For years now, visitors and participants to the world’s biennials have been complaining of a feeling of despair. Artists have the feeling that the specificity of their practices gets lost beneath the grand thematic and theoretical claims of the biennials organizers. Critics have the feeling that the tyrannical egos of the curators are given free rein. Audiences suspect that the proliferation of contemporary biennials around the world is contributing to a global cultural homogenization, favouring a ’usual suspects’ list of artists while perpetuating stereotypical representations of local or regional forms of practice. At best, biennials are regarded as a ’necessary evil’, rather than as an institutional structure that is constitutive of the experience of art today. Art biennials have become increasingly industrialised. With their lack of internal segmentation, hundreds of contemporary artists, and thousands of hours of videos, films, talks and actions, they demand days of hectic and frequently incomplete absorption from professional and amateur viewer alike. (…) It is no accident that the title of Manifesta 9: The Deep of the Modern insists on calling attention to the abyss of modernism’s temporality. Although modernisation and capitalism do indeed have a threatening and overpowering appearance, we, the curators, are not convinced that the best cultural strategy today is to mimic their monstrosity”.

Awareness, a self-critical attitude, precision and focus are implied in such a statement. This, and the claimed in-depth research into modernism and its individual and collective memories, may lead to a better understanding of the world we are living in today – a theme that had already been highlighted in diverse contributions at the Coffee Break (http://www.a-desk.org/spip/spip.php?article1281) at Manifesta 9 in December 2011.

Somehow it feels as if the party is over, the huge international art presentations are something of the past, as now they are financed and politically supported more for reasons connected to urban development and tourism, than for any genuine cultural function. Even worse, they have become increasingly self-alienated, increasingly resembling, moreover, the format of theme parks, with the adverse effects mentioned by Cuauhtémoc Medina above.

Totally in coherence with this, the international biennial Manifesta 9 is abstaining from any superficial glamour and doesn’t make any substantial compromises in either content or form: Cuauhtémoc Medina, together with the associate curators Dawn Ades and Katerina Gregos, takes the former mining site at Waterschei in Genk as a case study and point of departure for mapping the social, economic and political processes of the last century that have defined our present. And Manifesta 9 does it through quite a clear structure that occupies only one venue (the Waterschei), which is divided into different sections. These incorporate the pre-existing local museum dedicated to the history and memory of the miners in Genk. Thus Manifesta presents art works, from the 19thC up to the present day, in the same context as objects, documents and historical files all related to mining.

The exhibition and the catalogue, available online (http://catalog.manifesta9.org/en/) can be seen as an Encyclopedia (or better a Subcyclopaedia) where art works don’t just illustrate a curatorial idea but are respected in their specificity as self-contained sources of knowledge, in an interdisciplinary and penetrative analysis of modernism. Some of the issues explored by the exhibiting artists are; the extremely hard working conditions of miners, present in Henry Moore’s drawings that depict the underground as a sort of living hell, the photomontage “Mineurs au travail” by Olivier Bevierre and the film “Coal Face” by Alberto Cavalcanti, with music by Benjamin Britten, an experimental montage of industrial scenes. The repercussions of Fordism, the consequent alienation and repetitive labour are commented on by Kozakis & Vaneigem in the video “Un moment d’eternité dans le paysage du temps”, where some workers start to build a house at the foot of Mont Athos in Greece, but stop and stand still, just to look at the wonderful landscape. The organisation of mass manufacturing economies are considered by Jota Izquierdo in his research into fake brands and Edward Burtynsky with his photographic documentation of China’s industrialisation. The disempowerment of the labour force is the main subject of “The Battle of Orgreave” by Jeremy Deller and the filmmaker Mike Figgis; a documentary re-enactment of the clash between miners and police on the occasion of a mine closure in the 1980s. This disempowerment is also emphasized by Mikhail Karikis & Uriel Orlow in their film of an ex-coal miners choir reproducing the sound of a working mine, as well as by Oswaldo Maciá, who brings back the working atmosphere via a sound composition based on hammers playing flamenco rhythms. Entrepreneurship and economic restructuring are explored by Duncan Campbell in the film “Make it New John”, a kind of parody of a real case, the DMC-12, a futuristic automobile whose production was thought to be a way of also solving conflicts in Ireland. A current topic, like the fictitious money and funding of capital is presented by Goldin+ Senneby through an installation that investigates the clandestine zones of global finance, exemplified by Headless Ltd., a real offshore company registered in the Bahamas.

The bottom line of it is: our present is no brighter (and in some aspects even worse) than it was in those mining times. Thus, Katerina Gregos summarizes in the catalogue “the principle of profitability is now imposed on society as a whole. This need for growth reinforces social regression and destroys social cohesion”. This statement can be considered an implicit, but urgent call, for a change in curatorial and artistic practices that have become rhetorical.

Indeed, contemporary artistic practices in particular, understood to be individual processes, have to take responsibility for once again defending the value of “Singularity” against the all-embracing culture industries. And art curators, critics, theorists and other art professionals ought and need to take seriously, once again, their role as independent, critical communicators of – and guides to – the world of art production. In this sense, Manifesta 9 has put up a strong and convincing statement for the biennial as an art institution that creates independent and even idiosyncratic knowledge beyond any short term and speculative interests. What is more, “Manifesta 9: The Deep of the Modern” is an art exhibition, which has voluntarily limited itself to an experience that can be undertaken within a reasonable time and in so doing returns the notion of sustainability to its primal meaning. And this eventually has motivated the title of this review, “Mastery is revealed in limitation”, which is actually taken from the sonnet “Natur und Kunst” (“Nature and Art”) written in the year 1800 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – more than 100 years before Ludwig Mies van der Rohe coined the iconic phrase “less is more”. The Modern is really deep.

Metadocumenta. A constructive review on dOCUMENTA (13)

9 - July - 2012

Link to the article in A*DESK

Documenta has become the contemporary art event, par excellence. Proclaimed as the thing that marks the pace for art of the moment, it is hardly surprising that it provokes expectations and deceptions in equal measure.

If Documenta is a referent, it is logical that the artistic director of the moment feels the weight of the institution and is aware that the position constitutes the maximum point of visibility of his/her professional career and all too often (or at least this is what occurred in the last two editions) ends up getting lost in gestures, or worse, in justificatory posing behind conceptual pirouettes. In contrast to the previous ambiguity and the numerous justifications of curatorial discourse, we confront dOCUMENTA (13) with as open a mind as possible.

Prejudices

Loads. The prior indicators couldn’t be worse. The artistic direction of dOCUMENTA (13) proclaimed a no-concept; a never-ending team, not of curators but of agents (secret? with a licence to kill?); another generous list of participants amongst whom figured artists, scientists, thinkers, writers, etc; a secret list of artists that wasn´t revealed until the moment of the press conference (zealously guarded in an envelope like in the Oscars ceremony?) and a proliferation of locations that harbingered the visit was going to be exhausting, very exhausting…

Critical aspects

The excuses soon started flowing: a press conference in which the artistic director insisted on her “no-concept”, to then begin reading her essay, of which she omitted pages and pages; the explicit desire to evade direct communication, that would purportedly belie the complexity of reality and the present day; a catalogue that isn’t called a catalogue, but wait for it, “The Book of Books” (“Das Buch der Bücher”) like the Bible, in fact; curators that aren’t called curators but agents; an educational programme that is called “The Maybe Education and Public Programs”; the constant repetition that it is an experiment or study; the claim that the aim is to reproduce simultaneity, proliferation and speed, and that its choreography points towards a lack of harmony and the frenetic…. In short, doubt as a leitmotiv and scepticism as the stance. Nothing to object to, quite the contrary, as long as it’s not all used as a defensive shield.

All this makes one suspect that the time and energy is lost in the meta-artistic discourses, in redefining the denominations, in hiding behind notions of “experiment” or “study”, as a way of evading making statements and defending them, of offering a vision that obviously can be erroneous, but that at least can generate discussion and debate. And also the sensation of self-irony, that maybe functions in a ‘making of’ or in petit comité but not as a declaration of principles.

dOCUMENTA (13) is an unstructured document, in which the accumulation and exaggeration (the number of artists, participants, sites, events, projections, publications, encounters, seminars) does nothing more than distract attention. Because what is dOCUMENTA (13) about? Everything. No doubt everyone in the world can find something to grasp onto. DOCUMENTA (13) is like a large department store, with a week dedicated to both Afghanistan and Cairo, where no doubt we will find something that fits.

Positive aspects

The art. The re-encounter with artistic proposals and stances: the almost empty entrance to the Fridericianum, in which the cold air of Ryan Gander marks the threshold to the stories that we are going to be told. What also stands out is the recuperation of certain artistic positions that are neither obvious nor comfortable, artists who at a certain moment in time decided (or had no other choice) to be long-distance runners, even at the risk of being left out of the game. One could think of Ida Applebroog and her exploration of the human being in all its complexity, of the musician and artist Llyn Foulkes, always resisting being pigeonholed, of Fabio Mauri and her conviction about the linguistic compression of the world, of Sanja Iveković and her investigation of certain details from more recent history or the abstraction (political and mental) of Etel Adnan.

What stands out are also the magnificent works that are nothing more than solid proof of very individual perspectives: Mark Lombardi’s obsession for gathering information related to political and financial scandals and capturing them in mental maps; the personal narrations of Mario García Torres, based on specific references in recent art history, exemplified by the case of Alligiero Boetti and his stay and experiences at the One Hotel in Kabul; the obsession and meticulous labour in the images by Geoffrey Farmer or Yan Lei; the reflection on time and modernity at the hands of William Kentridge; the exploration of narrative forms by Dora García, that on this occasion adopt the format of a programme of televised debate that will be broadcast every Friday from Kassel. The transformation of everyday or familiar elements (in this case, images extracted from a book that seems to be about perception) as in the work of Roman Ondák, through subtle observations that open up many possible perspectives or, of experience, in the fullest sense of the word; the darkness, uncertainty, emotion, discovery, awareness, diversion and pressure of the experience prepared by the always radical Tino Sehgal.

The experience of the exhibition makes it clear that the political does not come simply through the documentary, that to try to understand the world we maybe have to cast our eyes towards other scientific practices, such as quantum physics and that the production of thought can’t be understood within closed categories, so much as in the movement and constant flux of ideas and references, that can at times seem chaotic.

And after the experience of the exhibition, reflection, the reading of a curatorial essay which pinpoints ideas, a plan of action, moments of reflection and an analysis of the present and of art. So what’s with all the coquetry and prior posing? Why so much false dandyism? Why so many justifications? dOCUMENTA (13) is a vast document, but for this it offers a multitude of possible pathways and, there is no doubt, its success lies in triggering this search for meaning.