Andy Warhol said that “an artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he, for some reason, thinks it would be a good idea to give them.” This conviction is what drives artists to expose themselves, to take risks, to face the possibility of failure and also to accept the eventuality of ridicule.

This idea is made very clear when watching the magnificent video “Untitled (Original orchestrated ersatz light version)” (2011) made by the Portuguese artist João Onofre for the Espai 13 of the Fundació Miró in Barcelona. In it, Onofre gathers a symphony orchestra and dares to take the microphone to sing a song by the popular Portuguese singer Adelaide Ferreira. She does it with more courage than musical qualities until she appears, Ferreira herself, displaying talent and stage presence, while Onofre is silenced and relegated to the background.

Peter Land also filmed himself in obsessively repetitive and doomed processes: dressed as an old-fashioned TV showman who tries in vain to sit on a stool while falling over and over again (“Pink Space,” 1995); trying to paint the ceiling of a room perched on a stepladder, unable to avoid falling over and over again (“Step Ladder Blues,” 1995); rushing down an endless staircase (The Staircase, 1998) or sinking with his boat into a lake (“The Lake,” 1999). As the artist himself once stated: “I suppose in my work, through the recording of acts and their repetition, I try to reflect some of the basic conditions of my own existence and perhaps to confer a kind of apparent meaning on that which is meaningless. (…) Much of my work focuses on disillusionment; the impression that meaning slips away from you when you need it most; When you think you have understood the world as it is and put things in the right perspective, suddenly something happens that ruins that feeling. Your world falls apart and you have to start over.”

In his work “Commission” (2011), the Dutch artist Erik van Lieshout also exposes himself and does not come off too well either. His “exposing himself” translates into carrying out an art project in a rather run-down shopping centre in the south of Rotterdam. The artist immerses himself in the real world and without the protection offered by the art framework he must face curiosity, incomprehension, frustration and ridicule.

The artist exposes himself personally as an object of study, with his body, his self, his fears and his doubts. By placing himself personally in situations that show differences with respect to the norms of society, he revises the perception of himself or the social meaning of his occupation. Bruce Nauman said it a long time ago: “It is said that art is a matter of life and death. It sounds melodramatic, but it is true.”

[Article published in Bonart, 2011]

Link to the article in A*DESK

Art Basel and the Venice Biennale coincide in the calendar every second edition but also in many other ways. It seems evident that what separates art fairs from biennales is beginning to be very unclear. Venice is remarkable for its form of particular (non) financing. While Art Basel needs conceptual pieces, in order to remain at the forefront of the universe of art fairs. In the current edition of Art Basel, many of the pieces on show question the artistic context, the practice, processes… aspects that could easily be explored in the context of a biennale.

An artist receives a commission to do a video about Zuidplein, a fairly impoverished shopping centre in the south of Rotterdam. As soon as he arrives, the artist, Erik van Lieshout, begins to talk casually to the regulars: pensioners who go there to pass the time, sales assistants, clients, unemployed youths, security guards, managers…before then occupying an empty shop. His shop proposal, off the wall for the centre, displays an amalgam of diverse plastic remains, packaging or dry sheets and even giant images of a controversial politician, Pim Fortuyn, assassinated in 2002 or the Dutch architect, Rem Koolhaas. Different themes appear during 49 minutes: the distrust that art generates in environments where there are other issues, the ease with which the media ridicule any immersion of art into real life, the difference between the proximity of the personal dialogue, the reaction that the art installation provokes, art professionals expressing their concern about what is becoming the predominant profile of the artist (with a diary full of appointments, their iPhone or iPad charged with a full repertoire of the images needed to show their works) and finally, the ending, when the manager of the centre draws the artist into his office, to praise the character of this “active and enterprising young man” who can’t be taken seriously for the fact that he is an artist.

Erik van Lieshout himself stated on one occasion that “Commission”, the title of this video, is his commentary on the poverty of both the socio-political scene and the artistic one. “Commission” was shown in Art Unlimited, the section of Art Basel that presents artistic proposals without any space restrictions. It’s been strange in the last few days, having attended the opening of the Biennale of Venice and Art Basel within the same week, to note the evident lack of precision in the use of the denomination art fair for Basel and biennale for Venice, as to all extents and purposes it would seem more appropriate to call them “fairiennials”. To give an example: in the selection process to participate in Art Unlimited, galleries propose a project by an artist, with the curator of the section, Simon Lamunière (responsible for the last twelve editions and who this year steps down) then making, with a committee, the final selection. In the case of the central exhibition of the Venice Biennale, the curator, this year the Swiss Bice Curiger, defines the idea behind the biennale and selects and invites artists. In practice, the fact that there is zero budget for part of the biennale means that it is the galleries (or the official foreign affairs institutions from each country) who finance the different participations and (or this is what it seems this year) who select the work they believe to be the most suitable (not necessarily for curatorial reasons).

In Art Basel this was also discussed. One of the “Basel conversations” revolved around the idea of Private/Public or “How museums will be able to collect?” Where are the limits of interventionism when museums see their budgets reduced and private collectors offer them their collections, albeit not without conditions? Another example: a month ago SFMoMA made public their plans to amplify their building to house a thousand pieces from the Fisher collection, generously deposited in the museum, although under the condition that at least 75% of the pieces shown in this part of the building come from this collection. Another point: increasingly it is the galleries themselves who finance important catalogues of artists who are in the process of becoming established, which aside from the expense require a huge investment of time and research.

Art Basel is not simply an art fair that lasts five days, but, sharing the calendar with Venice, periodically with Documenta and even with the Skulptur Projekte Münster, is a barometer of where the compass is pointing in art, as much commercially as in terms of discourse. Art Basel has sections such as Art Statements, where there is space for young galleries to present one artist or Art Feature the coming-out space for young galleries who gain admittance to the official section. There are even other parallel fairs with which it establishes relationships, such as Liste. So the city of Basel dresses itself up in contemporaneity (it is quite different for the rest of the year) filling its museums and art centres with the most daring proposals, such as Henrik Olesen in the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, or the presentation by Francis Alÿs in collaboration with Schaulager of his project “Fabiola” in the Haus zum Kirschgarten, to cite just two examples.

Apart from the historic pieces (without even mentioning the modern art section) by James Turrell, Dan Flavin, John Baldessari and Daniel Buren, always with their annual appointment in Basel, what stands out in this 42nd edition of the fair is a whole line of more analytical work, that reflects on the actual practice of art. We could mention Erik van Lieshout, and even Mario García Torres, with his letter of application for the role of director of the Kunsthalle in Bern that takes the form of a slide-show, in which he manifests his interest thanks to Harald Szeemann, in joining such an emblematic institution, as his work revolves around questioning the structures that make art possible. Matthew Buckingham establishes complex relations between artist, work and spectator employing a portrait from the 15th century by the artist Caterina von Hemessen and Mark Leckey presents a talk in the form of a video-installation, in which images and narration generate a sort of automatism not so distant from the way the art system functions.

In any event, what underlies these discourses is the fragility or even precariousness that accompanies artistic practices. And, in this sense, one can’t help but notice the multiple presence of Hans-Peter Feldmann, not just in Art Unlimited but also in various galleries. Feldmann, who abandoned the art circuit for ten years to open a shop with memorabilia, curiosities, second hand objects and antiques in Düsseldorf, decided on returning to define his own rules of play; collaborating with numerous galleries, without any form of exclusive representation, placing no limits on the number of copies or editions of his work a priori, but leaving them totally open. Master of all he surveys, Feldmann’s attitude evidences the contradictions of a system, the art system, that at times opts for exclusivity or opacity to conceal its own insecurities.

The impressions are contradictory. It seems that the Catalan art scene is moving between euphoria and precariousness. This spring in Barcelona has been a clear example: two fairs (Loop and Swab) accompanied by their respective parallel programs, Off section and round tables; to which other events of great attendance have been added such as Primavera Sound. It seems that many things happen, but it is not so clear that much content, context or artistic fabric is generated.

A few weeks ago, and in response to a pre-electoral debate held at the A*DESK headquarters and which brought together cultural representatives of the different political parties, the GIC (Associació de Galeries Independents de Catalunya) sent a letter to all the media in which they prepared the following diagnosis: “the politicians are not aware of the precariousness of the artistic sector, at “casa nostra” and they live in a construction of the reality that exists in the light of the abandoned situation in which all the levels of contemporary creation are found in such a cutting-edge and modern city that pretends to be Barcelona.
We are assisting in the dismantling of the basic structures for the functioning of the sector and the worst of this situation is, which has arisen due to the lack of interest of institutions, local and national. In fact, Barcelona had exhibition spaces that were benchmarks at the European level. The loss of the Sala Montcada of the Fundació “la Caixa” is about to begin a trial that does not pay off. The insurmountable darrer seems to be the Canòdrom, both director and program approved but without building finish and without consensus between Generalitat and Ajuntament to put it in Marx. Between me, all museums and foundations have seen their activities reduced and programming has not been respected. And the one who sees a limiting situation is seen to be exacerbated by the flight of talent, also at all levels.”

What possibilities does an artist have when he completes the Sant Andreu- Can Felipa – Sala d’Art Jove emerging circuit? What happens to a curator when he has already curated the corresponding cycles of exhibitions and calls? What stability can associations and other initiatives have that develop their activities with the uncertainty of whether they will be able to carry them out next year, in addition to spending many hours justifying very limited and ineffective financial aid?

Someone commented after visiting the exhibition “The Question of the Paradigm. Genealogies of Emergency in Contemporary Art in Catalonia” at the Centre d’Art La Panera, which, while it is true that it shows the dynamism of artists, curators and other agents of the art scene in recent years, also portrays a worrying precariousness in which initiatives are always due to people rather than to solid structures. The critical perspective of the exhibition shows that we are far from the American myth of “those guys who started in a garage” and now run Apple. Unfortunately, the most common thing here is that they continue in the garage or, frustrated, dedicate themselves to something else.

[Article published in Bonart, 2011]

How is memory constructed? What role does it play in creating and understanding a story? What mechanisms determine the construction of reality? There is a whole line of recent works in contemporary art that explore these aspects: memory and its ambiguities, authenticity, experience and its recording, how history is written and how it transcends, the notions of secrecy, rumour and oral transmission. Artists such as Mario García Torres, Dora García, Francis Alÿs, Christian Jankowski and Omer Fast, among many others, work from the idea of ​​story and narration in which reality and fiction often intersect and dissolve.

An exhibition by Omer Fast can be seen these days at Caixaforum in Barcelona. Fast became internationally known with the video installation Spielberg’s List (2003), for which he interviewed people who participated as extras in Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. Spielberg’s film was shot on location in Krakow and featured numerous local extras. Using a documentary format, Omer Fast collected these testimonies, in which the extras explained their experiences in relation to the film, but also in some cases to the real events, and mixed them with images of the original concentration camps, combining them with parts of the set that recreated them, so that different narrative levels were automatically created.

In Casting (2007), one of the two video installations shown at Caixaforum, the artist continues to draw intersections between reality, memory and fiction. Casting focuses on the testimony of an American soldier in the Iraq war. A fortuitous event, the shooting of a civilian and, in parallel, an unfortunate romance in Germany are the events narrated by the soldier. While we hear his voice (and see him on one of the screens), the central part of the installation recreates this story and enhances its fictional aspect, by placing the action in a casting.

In his book Storytelling. The Story Making Machine and Formatting the Mind, Christian Salmon argues that what we understand as reality is increasingly confused with fiction. The book shows how, alongside reality, a new order of storytelling is being constructed, a fictitious order that replaces reality and points to the existence of a financial management storytelling or a marketing storytelling. He himself explained in an interview: “If we talk about politics, it’s the same. Politicians don’t argue, they don’t open a debate, but a theatre, a story. Storytelling: they tell a tale. John McCain has written a book, Faith of my fathers, and Obama titled his Dreams from my father. Regardless of whether we like Obama more, the truth is that both present a virtual theatre, a chain of positions that obey the same codes: storyline, timing, framing, networking…”.

[Article published in Bonart, 2011]

That’s what Jeff Jarvis recently titled a book about new strategies for achieving business success. The way the book was sold was brilliant: “Whatever you do, Google will end up doing it better than you and for free. Are you ready?” And he was right. Google is the company that has had the greatest growth in the shortest time in history. It is a brand whose management can serve as a case study of the changes brought about by the digital age. Although some of its proposals have met with reluctance (among them Street View or Google Analytics, banned in Germany for overstepping the boundaries of privacy), there is no doubt that we live in a Googleized world.

Google continues to make new launches and now it is the turn of GoogleArtProject, which offers a virtual tour of a selection of museums around the world. The project uses Street View technology that allows you to virtually move around the different spaces of the museums, get close and look at numerous works in detail, expand your knowledge through your own channel on YouTube and create your own collection that can be shared on social networks.

But what is really interesting are the premises and the details of the project. The objective and functions of GoogleArtProjects are not as clear as those of Google Maps, for example. It is very significant to analyze which museums are there. The list continues to grow, but as of today it has seventeen institutions: Alte Nationalgalerie (Berlin), Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian (Washington DC), The Frick Collection (New York), Gemäldegalerie (Berlin), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), MOMA (New York), Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid), Museum Kampa (Prague), National Gallery (London), Palais de Versailles, Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam), The State Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg), Tate Britain (London), Galleria degli Uffici (Florence) and Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam).

The tours proposed are also interesting, since they are not curated, but the museums themselves decide which works to show based on their own interests. So it is not unusual to find some works “blurred” due to copyright issues.

Google is not the first to offer virtual tours of museums. ArtBasel and Frieze have had specific iPhone applications for some time now, and recently VipArtFair was held, a virtual fair where you could take a much more organized (and concentrated) tour than at the in-person fairs, with the curiosity that gallery owners could keep track of their visitors and delve into the interest shown by the users’ clicks. But does Google do it better and also for free? In this case, surely not, but the interesting thing is to ask: what is Google’s interest in embarking on such a complex superproduction? Is it a declaration of principles to stop other similar initiatives that require payment?

[Article published in Bonart, 2011]

An art fair is not just a pure and simple market, but involves much more. In fact, there are many confluences between an art fair and an art biennial. As an example, in 2007, four major events took place in Europe: the Skulptur Projekte Münster, Documenta, the Venice Biennale and Art Basel. June began with the Basel art fair, followed by the openings of the other events within a two-week period. The successive visits to Basel and Documenta revealed the ambiguity of the attributions and functions of both events. While the Unlimited section of Art Basel exhibited risky installations, Documenta presented works that could easily have been incorporated into the stand of any fair.

Fairs play an important role in the current art scene, but not all fairs are Art Basel or Frieze. A fair is a time for professionals to meet, to gauge the market and to present galleries. The dynamics of the art world have changed radically, from artistic practices to the way of presenting, communicating, distributing, collecting and, of course, marketing. The role of fairs has become much more complex. And to this we must add their proliferation. Competition is fierce.

The fairs that work are those with a long history and a significant specific weight, such as the aforementioned Art Basel or those of more recent creation that have known how to define their specificity and positioning, such as Frieze. Others have reinvented themselves, such as Artissima. Needless to say, they correspond to contexts that have a consolidated artistic and cultural fabric.

There is no doubt that the ARCO model had become obsolete, and the huge empty corridors of a year ago portrayed it perfectly: a monumental structure (but without the museum weight of Basel), a lax selection of participating galleries, discrete curated programmes and a financial balance that was balanced by institutional purchases that were formalised during the days of the fair… Carlos Urroz, its new director, declared as soon as he was appointed that the first thing he was going to do was reduce space and the number of participants.

Dynamism, new ideas, better communication, agility, fluidity of visitors and professionals, meetings, forums. But everything in its proper measure. The large scale is no longer enough, nor are the majority audiences. A fair can be the ideal place or should contribute to creating the ideal situation for buying, for taking the pulse of current art, for discovering, for confirming, for gathering elements for reflection, for meeting, for seeing, for being seen, for debating, for going out and, last but not least, for becoming an unmissable event that takes us annually to a particular city, to revisit it and enjoy its cultural and leisure offering.

[Article published in Bonart, 2011]

Link to the article in A*DESK

Economy, politics, social relations… almost all aspects of our present are undergoing a process of redefinition. And art is not left out. Institutions, exhibitions and also curating are in crisis. Reinvent or die, that is the question.

Curating is a relatively recent activity that, in four decades, has gone through a cycle of emergence, splendor, saturation and is now experiencing moments of confusion and questioning. Emerging in parallel with the practices of the 60s and 70s (with Harald Szeemann as one of the first references), the figure of the curator experienced a moment of absolute prominence in the 80s and 90s. It was then that it became professionalized and training programs in curating emerged.

Started in 1996, Manifesta, the European biennial of contemporary art, celebrated its eighth edition this year. Since it has been self-proclaimed as an “experiment with innovative curatorial methods and models” from the very beginning, a review of its history and, especially, that of its curators can become illustrative of this evolution of curating and its current crisis.

The first edition of Manifesta took place in Rotterdam in 1996. Its curators were Katalyn Neray, Rosa Martínez, Viktor Misiano, Andrew Renton and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. In other words, a collection of international and independent profiles who have been repeated in biennials and major events. Manifesta 1998, which was held in Luxembourg, served as a platform for the international career of its curators Robert Fleck, Maria Lind and Barbara Vanderlinden.

The press conference for Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana, where its four curators, Francesco Bonami, Ole Bouman, Maria Havajová and Kathrin Rhomberg, refused to sit at the same table to defend it, showed the failure of the experiment of forming a random curatorial team of diverse geographical origins. In its fourth edition, Manifesta landed in Frankfurt and its curators, Iara Boubnova, Nuria Enguita Mayo and Stephane Moisdon-Trembley, worked more on guidelines of consensus than intellectual debate. In the fifth edition, in San Sebastian (2004), the curatorial team was reduced to two, Massimiliano Gioni and Marta Kuzma, who seemed to develop two parallel Manifestas that crossed paths from time to time.

Manifesta moved to Nicosia in 2006 with the intention of having a real impact on the context, starting with the proposal to create an art school, that is, that Manifesta’s stay in Nicosia meant laying the foundations for starting to work in art. The political problems and division of the country forced the proposal to be cancelled and it is curious that on the Manifesta website (http://manifesta.org/manifesta-6/) it appears as “cancelled” and not even the names of the commissioners appear.

Anselm Franke/Hilla Pelleg, Adam Budak and Raqs Media Collective were the commissioners of Manifesta 2008 in Trentino, Alto Adige. And this year, which was held in Murcia, three collectives formed this tripartite commissioner, which in reality generated three independent exhibitions. Alexandria Contemporary Art Forum, Chamber of Public Secrets and tranzit.org are the names of three collectives with members spread across almost all five continents in a supreme example of delocalization.

But what is most worrying is the way in which these collectives define themselves and put forward their proposals. Transzit.org, for example, presents itself as “a collective of autonomous cultural production units.” The opacity of its language and the accumulation of clichés and commonplaces in its discourse is very well reflected in the report on Manifesta made for the television program Metrópolis http://www.rtve.es/television/20101….

The eight editions of Manifesta offer a good mapping of the evolution of curating, from the ubiquity and intensity of Obrist to the current dissolution of authorship, location and, it seems, also of ideas. Too many learned codes and little vision. Too much self-referentiality. The focus has become professional projection and not so much vision and risk. If we add to this the oversaturation of professionals and “international curators” and the containment of institutions in their programs, what is the future of independent curating? We could venture to rethink, investigate in depth, raise relevant questions, bet more on content and rigor and less on networking strategies. Approach other disciplines, explore formats and other forms of communication and, of course, forget about self-referentiality. As we said, reinvent yourself or die.

Mark Twain wrote that “rejecting awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than usual.” An award always represents recognition of a work or a career, but there may be reasons to publicly reject it: among others, one may be critical or against the organization that grants it (or its interests); one may use the moment of the award as a platform from which to claim something; one may reject it to guarantee independence; one may be outside of awards and, in a certain way, of society; one may say “no” in coherence with a way of thinking and also to be consistent with the character that we have built for ourselves and, finally, one may accept an award and at the same time specify in the speech everything that one rejects.

In 1972, Marlon Brando was awarded the Oscar for best actor for his performance in The Godfather. Instead of collecting the award, Brando sent a young actress of Indian origin who read out on the actor’s behalf her refusal to accept the prize as a protest against the treatment of the Indian people in Hollywood films.

In 1964, Jean-Paul Sartre refused the Nobel Prize for Literature and explained that if he accepted it he would compromise his integrity as a writer.

Another case is that of the Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman who, after solving a mathematical enigma that had been pending since the 1990s, showed his lack of interest in public recognition by considering the award unfair (he declared that his American colleague Richard Hamilton was the first to suggest the solution) and said no to a prize worth a million dollars.

Juan Goytisolo was as careful as he was explicit when explaining his refusal. In an article published in El País, he first explained his joy at learning the names of the members of the jury who had awarded him the International Literature Prize (all of them writers that Goytisolo admired) and then stated a “but”: the origin of the funds from the Libyan People’s Democratic Jamahiriya, created in 1969 by Gaddafi’s military coup.

In 1964, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, Martin Luther King listed everything he rejected: “I accept this award today with a deep and solid faith in America and a bold faith in the future of humanity. I refuse to accept despair as the definitive answer to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the tendency to conform to the simplicity of what “is,” proper to human nature in our days, makes the men of today morally incapable of reaching the eternal “what should be” that has always been proposed.”

A few days ago, Santiago Sierra renounced the Spanish National Prize for Fine Arts, citing common sense and considering that the prize “uses the prestige of the prize-winner to benefit the state.” Ultimately, rejecting a prize is a question of attitude and also reflects the character that Sierra has created for himself: tough, direct and uncompromising.

[Article published in Bonart, 2011]