Documentaries have long been appreciated, not so much for their objective approach to reality, but for being formats that can play (in the broadest sense of the word) with truthfulness and, at the same time, approach the making of or reveal the mechanisms of systems.
The documentary genre (although it would be more accurate to speak of format rather than genre) can become an extraordinary approach to the work of artists. Whether through interviews, records of the creative processes, showing the story behind the works or from more speculative perspectives, documentaries become exceptional mediators that contribute to dissolving the damned “gap” that continues to exist between society and contemporary art.
At the end of 2020, the fourth edition of dart Festival Barcelona was held, “the first documentary film festival dedicated to contemporary art, the main objective of which is to intertwine culture and knowledge with the general public.” In this edition in the midst of the pandemic, dart has managed to find the best ally to make this year’s edition possible: Filmin, the digital distribution platform for audiovisual content that takes the greatest care to offer a catalogue carefully selected to avoid mainstreams and carry out impeccable curatorial work in the selection and presentation of its content.
From this year’s edition we would like a gem (literally) to not go unnoticed: The Proposal (2018) by the North American artist Jill Magid, a complex and ambiguous work, because it is a documentary but also an artistic project in itself. The story begins with Jill Magid’s fascination with the Mexican architect/artist Luis Barragán and the discovery, when going to his House Museum in Mexico, that only the architect’s personal archive is accessible, since the professional archive was acquired by Swiss collectors who keep it in a bunker and with extremely restricted access. After further investigation, Jill discovered that the Barragán archive was offered as an engagement gift by Rolf Fehlbaum, director of the Vitra Museum, to his future wife, Federica Zanco. With a narrative thread based on her correspondence with Federica, Jill traces a path towards making her a proposal: to offer her a ring with a diamond, made from the ashes of the architect Barragán (with the approval of the Barragán family) in exchange for returning the archive to Mexico and making it accessible.
In this way, issues such as the legacy of artists, control, ownership of copyright or access to knowledge are raised through this fascinating story, explained as if it were a novel using cinematic and epistolary resources.
[Article published in Bonart, 2021]
Empathy ADN Blog
…And nature recovered its lost ground: fish in Venice’s canals, deer in the middle of the roads, coyotes on the streets of San Francisco, wild plants pushing their way up through concrete, cleaner air and less noise pollution in cities… The idea was not to leave anyone behind… But it was only a parenthesis, a reminder not deep enough to really revisit the social-natural contract, to learn the animal’s ability to adapt and adopt more complex intelligence models to once and for all assimilate that growth per se cannot be the aim.
Right now it is not the time for megaprojects. The key is the scale, it is changing what we may really touch, to choose minimal gestures for a maximum effect, to apply the notion of arm’s length, equal terms. Intelligence hangs on empathy. Empathy and gratitude.
Gratitude is the title of one of the last essays by Oliver Sacks, in which he wrote the following words: “It is the fate of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death (…) My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
When viewing these days the documentary Oliver Sacks: His own life, we may rediscover a complex, contradictory, vital, passionate and highly empathic personality. Neurologist and writer, Sacks did not want to be a theoretician, but rather stay close to his patients, many of them in very serious and desperate conditions, to ask them “how they were”, to listen to their answers and write their stories. However, it was only after several of his books had reached quite a large audience that the medical establishment started to take his research, which contributed to a better understanding of how the brain works and the diversity of human experience, seriously.
Creative thinking (not only that of male or female artists -by the way, how much we need now to also recover Joseph Beuys!-) is organised along these very same assumptions, it follows individual, idiosyncratic processes, to put oneself “in another’s shoes”, it is transversal, it allows us to see things from renewed points of view… This is the type of thinking that we must put into practice and fight for, the one that will reconcile us with ourselves and with our environment.
If 2020 is teaching us anything, it is that we urgently need to review the social-natural contract, and not only that, we should also learn from the capacity of adaptation and evolution of some animals and assimilate more complex models of intelligence. We have seen it in nature and we see it in society. The dinosaurs, which dominated the earth for millions of years, became extinct, but their evolution has led to birds that are smaller, with less need for food and more capacity to adapt to the environment.
Another fascinating example is the octopus, an animal that carries out genetic self-editing that allows it to adapt to changes. Its neurons are spread throughout the body, so we could talk about nine brains, one central in the head and eight peripheral ones, distributed among the different tentacles.
The days of large monothematic structures are numbered. In a recent interview with A*DESK, Frédéric Migayrou, chief curator of architecture and design at the Mnam-CCI Centre Pompidou in Paris, reflected on the evolution of the museum sector after the pandemic and proposed making the museum more open to participation and the circulation of information, using technology to make the museum a means of communication.
I don’t know if the big institutions are aware of this degree zero we are in right now. Judith Butler just said it in a virtual talk organised by Whitechapel: “The pandemic is a crisis in itself but it also exacerbates the pre-existing crises of capital, care, race and climate.” I don’t know if society or institutions have the capacity to rethink themselves at this level. But perhaps the only possibility of survival is to resize themselves in order to evolve, to lose centrality in order to adapt to the new environment. To share structures and square metres, to stop thinking about economic profitability and more about cultural profitability. It is time for museums to stop thinking of themselves as luxurious Prada stores and become accessible and usable spaces (physical and virtual), places of encounter and use. If schools do not have enough space right now to operate safely, why not take advantage of the generosity of museum spaces? It is the time when culture and education must be communicating vessels. It is the time of small structures, of self-management, of minimal gestures with maximum impact, of networks of neurons, of rhizomes. We return to Deleuze and Guattari: “In the rhizome there is at stake a relationship with sexuality, with the animal, with the plant, with the world, with the book, with everything natural and artificial, as opposed to the arboreal relationship.”
Joan Jonas. Moving Off the Land II, 2019. Ocean Space, Iglesia de San Lorenzo, Venecia. Performance with Ikue Mori and Francesco Migliaccio. Comissioned by TBA21-Academy Photo: Moira Ricci. © Joan Jonas
[Article published in Bonart, 2020]
Media Landscapes and presidential elections
Our horizon is defined by media landscapes. Natural landscapes (landscapes) were followed by urban landscapes (urbanscapes) and for decades it has been the media landscapes (mediascapes) that define and determine our present. Muntadas is one of the artists who has exhaustively analyzed the media landscape in his works. In a work from 1978, Two landscapes, he already made reference to the real and to the media landscape, that is to say, to its influence on the creation (or mediatization) of contemporary consciousness.
This impact of the media reaches one of its highlights in North American politics. Antoni Muntadas (resident in New York since the 1970s), together with Marshall Reese, have been focusing their long-term exploration of media landscapes on the periods of the electoral campaigns in the United States. Since 1984, they have created an anthology of television campaign ads for the presidency of the United States, which began with the Eisenhower-Stevenson campaign in 1952 and which they update every four years and accompany with presentations and talks. We are in 2020, in the midst of the Trump-Biden presidential campaign and Muntadas and Reese present the most recent installment of their work, a 97-minute video that collects and critically analyzes, through an edition that contrasts, superimposes or presents in parallel different campaigns, which evidence, different situations, values, priorities, needs or tendencies.
“In 68, artists were making political performances, now politics is a performance”, wrote the essayist and curator Iván de la Nuez a few months ago in his twitter account. And certainly, Political Advertisement X: 1952-2020 evidences this comparison between the 1960s and the present moment, the political struggle, the protests and social mobilization of 60s and the actual inaction of the left, probably paralyzed by the reality show that Trump has turned into his stay in the White House.
But not only Trump, this political taste for performance has to do with the need to tell a story, the famous storytelling, thought out in mercantile terms. As the political essayist Christian Salmon analyzed in an interview with the Argentine newspaper La Nación, politicians are actors in a performance theater, regardless of the ideology they express, they build stories developed strictly for popular consumption. The space of the political is pulverized and liquefied. Their representative spaces, such as the Parliament, the seats of the governments or the public institutions, slide on the Internet in such a way that the social networks transform the politician into a media star.
In his book La Cérémonie cannibale, de la performance politique (The Cannibal Ceremony) Salmon explains: “We live in a bewitched democracy that has substituted action for storytelling, deliberation for distraction, the art of governing for the art of staging. Politics has moved from debate, discussion and dissensus, to the interactive, the performative and the spectral (…) The hashtag reproduces its history and its story. Storytelling and communication are condensed. And they form a product. The ancient arts of storytelling and the laws of rhetoric are combined with the new technologies of information and communication, as well as with the possibilities of direct action on the brains offered by the neurosciences”.
This is also what the tandem Muntadas-Reese feels, “Democracy is under threat on multiple levels today – from dark money donations that push for interests favoring the wealthy and corporations; from technologies of persuasion, Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube that have overtaken and reshaped the media landscape; to the even more mortal danger in 2020 that is the Coronavirus.”
Detecting, analyzing and understanding these mechanisms are the antidotes that allows resistance to manipulation and a capacity to react. This is precisely what Muntadas-Reese has been doing since the 80’s, with the ritual projections of this work-in-progress Political Advertisement X, 1952-2020, which will be shown in several locations specially in the US and also on the 3rd of November in an online session introduced by Albert Alcoz and with a subsequent colloquium by Marcelo Expósito.
