We already knew that reality surpasses fiction, but the script for this year 2020 is difficult to assimilate: pandemics, global economic crisis, inequalities, racism, fascism, psychopaths presiding over some of the most powerful countries in the world…
Between disbelief, gravity and helplessness, the need for a routine that structures our daily life often wins. We are not the first nor will we be the last. On August 2, 1914, Franz Kafka wrote in his diary: “Today Germany has declared war. In the afternoon I went swimming.”
During these months of confinement we have been more connected than ever, with the aim of sharing a situation that overwhelmed us. This compulsive need to be present digitally has found many institutions in a process of profound rethinking. What role do art and culture play in all this? How can it contribute to thinking about ourselves in relation to the world? How can we be more horizontal and participatory? And also, to definitively incorporate the digital aspect into the programs of the institutions?
While they remained closed, museums, galleries, cultural institutions and independent initiatives have opted, with more or less success, to offer access to their audiovisual archives, schedule talks to think and rethink about the situation and its consequences or commission works from confinement to artists. We look, listen, give our opinions and share the good intentions and the will to be better, when, before the end of the state of alarm, we already see that things have not changed too much, with a rush to open the terraces of the bars before the museums and theaters and that, even with the massive consumption of culture during confinement, when it comes down to it, the path towards precariousness continues unchecked.
How easy it is to talk about rethinking, redefining and reinventing everything! How quick we are to post the slogan of the moment on our social media profiles! And how brilliant some comments on Twitter! We are human and throughout the day our feelings move between meme and drama, between the occurrence and the gravity of the weight of the tragedy.
As has happened at other times in history, there are situations in which reality is so harsh, so disconcerting and unfair, that only through exaggerated representation (Honoré Daumier’s caricatures, to show what he did not like about the society in which he lived), satire (John Heartfield’s photomontages from the 30s and 40s with, for example, “Hitler swallowing gold and talking junk”, literally) or sharp comments made with a very schematic drawing (“ephemeral but drawn with a permanent marker”, as Dan Perjovsch says) can one be as precise as a dissecting scalpel.
Dan Perjovschi, Virus Diary (Rich-Poor), 2020
Courtesy of the artist and https://www.internationaleonline.org/
Almost everything is a question of time. How important time is and how little we respect it! Always running, without distinguishing between what is urgent and what is important. In art, time is essential so that artists can develop their lines of research, can make tests, make mistakes and find solutions. How gratifying and exciting it is to visit an exhibition of an artist whose work you have followed practically since its beginnings and with whom you occasionally have the opportunity to share projects and talks, and see how, suddenly, everything fits together, how early and current works are related and show coherence, how their discourse achieves a point of solidity.
This is the experience I had these days at CA2M, the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid when visiting the exhibition Panal, by Francesc Ruiz, which includes works made by the artist between 1997 and the present. Francesc Ruiz began in the 90s with expanded comics, detailed drawings in which a multitude of urban scenes took place in which groups appeared who lived the city with different levels of codification (a thousand and one different situations in El Corte Inglés, cruising in Montjuic or hospital, educational and leisure uses with architectures made of bodies and not buildings in the Zona Alta of Barcelona). From expanded comics attached to the walls of exhibition halls to putting emphasis on distribution there was a step, with kiosks in Barcelona, but also wherever exhibitions and residencies took him: Venice, Cairo, and comic shops linked to very specific consumption modalities or communities (Yaoi, gays).
Personal, social, sexual, urban and dissident identities are the leitmotiv of Francesc Ruiz’s work. The Panal exhibition culminates (literally) with a large installation (large in size and large in significance): Three Streets, Three Colours, which becomes a point of arrival and a step further in the artist’s work. The most direct antecedent is BCN Eye Trip (2008), a video installation in which the city was reduced to its logos. Now, in the great atrium of CA2M, Ruiz creates a vertical, global, chaotic city, full of colour and excess, which confronts us with the three levels of use and distribution in our global and digitalised world: the blue of Lycamobile, that is, of telecommunications and the incorporation of migrants into new cities; the yellow of Uber and the post office, that is, of logistics and messaging; and finally, at the highest level, the red of online adult entertainment. And so, in 20 years, the universe of Francesc Ruiz has taken us from drawings of multiple and simultaneous kaleidoscopic micro-scenes to immerse us in this great virtual city, delocalized, standardized and deregulated.
Francesc Ruiz, Three Streets, Three Colours, 2020
CA2M, Madrid
Photo: Sue Ponce Gómez
[Article published in Bonart 2020]
No Place Like Home and other gems of confinement
How hard it is to make sense of things these days! Not to throw oneself into a compulsive digital hyperactivity, to open up broadly the access to archive material or simply not to be paralyzed by the future that awaits us. Back to normality? We have already seen that “normality” was the problem. How was that spell like? “I wish you to live in interesting times.” Well, yes, “interesting” are, for everyone.
In Magazine we are currently analysing with Martí Manen the need to rethink the institution, in what he is calling “newnewnewinstitutionalism”. And we are also seeing a multitude of institutional, independent, artistic initiatives to show that the art world is a sphere of resilient and stubborn survivors, too used to not being able to count on Ministries of Culture (and equivalents). In this tidal wave of proposals, we would like to highlight some little gems that deserve not to go unnoticed. Obviously, given the circumstances, most proposals can be found online. It is very important to emphasize here that the digital does not replace the face-to-face, but that both coexist and each one has its moments and formats, of presentation, distribution and scope.
We begin with an institutional initiative, Un metro y medio, curated by Manuel Segade and Tania Pardo, CA2M, a paid (very very important to note) call and aimed at artists living in the Community of Madrid whose work is not represented in the CA2M collection. CA2M proposes a reflection on the situation, on this underground and medium of social distance to present an artistic proposal online every day.
During these weeks of forced exhibition closures, some galleries have brought us part of their programme, such as Thomas Schulte, which temporarily allows online access to the documentary on Mapplethorpe that they had scheduled as a public activity in parallel to the exhibition on the artist. Esther Schipper has been working on online visits to her exhibitions for some time now and is taking advantage of these days to give more weight to her Continuity platform, which includes content on the gallery’s artists, conversations, screenings and presentations of the history of this gallery that has a thirty-year history.
Instagram is the platform used by many galleries to bring us closer to its contents, the exhibition that could not be inaugurated by Carlos Pazos at ADN Galería and their periodic deliveries of TakeAway, presenting individual works; Bombon Projects, with video conversations between the artist Jordi Mitjà and the curator Tiago de Abreu Pinto and also, like other galleries, displaying different aspects of the exhibitions they keep closed in their spaces. This is the case of the exhibition dedicated to Ana Mendieta and curated by Wilfredo Prieto at NoguerasBlanchard.
If we talk about (time)site-specific, No Place Like Home, a project curated by Fito Conesa, together with Ismaël Chappaz and Juanma Menero (Espai Tactel), deserves special attention. It is an exhibition curated from works of the gallery, conceived for the physical space of the gallery, where they have been installed (since Ismaël and Juanma live in the back of the gallery) and shown in a video commented tour. The works on display acquire new readings in this context: the video on the sale of a sculpture with an expiring date by Aggtelek; the touch to the artistic egos by Paco Chanivet; or the composition by Fito Conesa that relates his date of birth to a naval battle in 1905.
Because the situation we are living in, whether it’s one of comfortable confinement or risk and tragedy, moves between the meme and the drama, between everyday life and historical events, like the famous entry in Kafka’s diaries on August 2, 1914: “Today Germany has declared war on Russia. In the afternoon I went swimming”. No Place Like Home was Dorothy’s recurring phrase from The Wizard of Oz. And, as the curatorial text concludes, perhaps in addition to seeking guidance in thoughtful texts that attempt to analyse the collapse of the world as we know it, it makes a lot of sense to put ourselves back in the shoes of our adolescent selves, that stage we have all been through, so complex and uncertain and so “interesting”.
ARCO 2020 or putting back the artist at the centre of it all
“The phone rings. Felix is dead. How? Felix is dead, I saw it in the newspaper. No, it can’t be. We knew about Ross, but Felix… We thought about Ross, about the possibility of death, about his disappearance. We tried to convince ourselves that he’ll always be here, that we can keep him alive. We fought to keep Ross. But Felix, without Felix, everything falls apart, every moment, all the love for Ross. The light bulbs, the papers, the birds flying in clouds of black and white. The passports to freedom.”
That’s how begins Contarlo todo sin saber cómo (To tell everything without knowing how) the novel/exhibition that Martí Manen wrote/curated in 2012. Felix was, of course, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, an artist of conceptual, political and minimalist work, of small gestures and great emotional impact. The light bulb that goes out too soon, the pile of candies that decreases as they disperse, the synchronized clocks, the unmade bed shown on a billboard in the public space … made him a key artist of the 90s. His approach to issues such as AIDS, sexual and racist violence or the role of art in contemporary society based on the poetic and metaphorical potential of everyday objects had a great impact on artists, critics and curators of his and subsequent generations. Two years after his death, in 1998, the memory of Felix González-Torres articulated the second edition of Manifesta in Luxembourg. The legacy of Felix Gonzalez-Torres has been maintained thanks to the work of his gallery Andrea Rosen who, until today, has shown and kept his work alive.
Maribel López, director of ARCO, is one of those art professionals influenced by Felix González-Torres. Always close to the artists, as a curator, gallery owner or manager, it’s not strange that this first edition of ARCO directed by her, makes a parenthesis in the formula of the invited countries (in the end, we all live in the same country, called Capitalism, Bong Joon-ho said recently… but that’s another story…) and focuses on the artists. How important to remember from time to time the reason why we are here, the origin of all this: the artists!
It’s Just a Matter of Time is the title of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ public space intervention in 1992 and it is also the title of the small but forceful section with which ARCO pays tribute to the artist from the works of other artists which allude to/ remember/ are allied with the spirit of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Memory, the ephemeral, the fragile, the personal, emotion, feelings, dispersion or absence appear in the proposals of Liam Gillick, Danh Vo, Pepe Espaliú or Jack Pierson, among others.
And to start there, suddenly conditions a visit completely different to a fair, in which everything seems to breathe more and in which there is time for talks, meetings, public presentations, exhaustive and in-depth information about the works, and let’s hope that this also translates into the quantitative aspects: sales, the start of new collections and the consolidation of others and new projects that do not forget to put the artists in the centre, since without them the ecosystem of art would not make sense.
What is iconic? We asked ourselves this February on A*DESK.
Iconic language is a system of both linguistic and visual representation. We often speak of iconic images and works to refer to those that are immediately recognizable, that become valid representations of a given moment, situation or time. A sort of temporal beacon.
The photographer Sandro Miller wanted to re-represent the images, according to him, most iconic of the 20th century: Andy Warhol’s Marilyn, Che Guevara, Alfred Hitchcock, Jack Nicholson’s Joker (it was 2013, that is, Heath Ledger and Joachim Phoenix were not yet possible options) and Diane Arbus’ girls, among others. He had the collaboration of the chameleon (and “iconic” actor) John Malkovich, who was able to represent everything, including himself.
Re-enact. Replay. Diversify. Multiplying references. Iconic is no longer only the shared but also the individual. As a referent, the iconic is the object of re-readings, revisions, reinterpretations, re-enactments, re-, re-.
Recently we made an edition of A*LIVE with La Plataforma de estudiantes de la Escuela Massana. We proposed them to work from James Lee Byars’ performance, The World Question Center (1969) and take it to their field. The first thing they did was to break it down, analyze it in detail and propose a totally different alternative: anti-hierarchical, outside the institution and much more horizontal. The pseudo TV show with James Lee Bars as moderator became, by choice of La Plataforma, a meeting in the Absenta bar (near Massana) in which they invited people of reference for them (Caterina Almirall, Paco Chanivet, Eloy Fernández Porta) to chat with them.
What is iconic for you? we asked Andrea Soto Calderón, Antonio Ortega, Chus Martínez and Joana Roda, and each of them took us to their own terrain: to the theory linked to personal experience (Andrea Soto Calderón), to concrete examples (Antonio Ortega), to the most recent talks from one end of the globe to the other (Chus Martínez) or to the responsibility of selecting a work that will remain in the memory of the visitors to a fair (Joana Roda).
Sandro Miller. Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich. Homage to Photographic Masters, 2013
The artist Christian Boltanski said that we actually die twice, the first time at the moment of death and then, when someone no longer recognises us in photographs. How important it is to take care of memory, personal and historical, recent memory and living memory, to reconcile with it, accept it and learn. Unlike events further away in time, which we can recover after intense archival and newspaper research work, recovering the most recent artistic and cultural memory has the advantage that there are many testimonies that are still accessible, with which we can talk, which remember, nuance and analyse from a temporal and personal distance. An essential and very rewarding job that it is not clear which museum or institution would correspond to. Would it be the MACBA that would have the duty to encourage the task of investigating the most recent past of the city in which it is located? It is surely not the responsibility of a single museum, but it should be a very present issue.
The museum that is already doing this is the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC), through exhibitions/research of specific moments of the counterculture (such as the exhibition dedicated to El Víbora) and giving access to its archives and collections to artists so that they can make reinterpretations (La caja entropica by Francesc Torres or Neumotórax. Una perforación en l’archivo-pulmón del Museu Nacional by Jordi Ferreiro). La Virreina. Centre de la Imatge has also been doing this work for some time. The most recent case is the exhibition Sala Aixalà (1959-1975), a shop in Barcelona that carried out an intense activity of presenting experimental proposals of photography, film, music and comics. In the exhibition, curated by Laura Terré, the meticulous reconstruction of specific moments of the Sala Aixalà programme is key and, naturally, that some of its creators can explain its history.
Recovering memory, from a more personal perspective, is what Aimar Pérez Galí does in relation to the impact of AIDS on the dance scene in the 1980s in countries on the periphery (of history and power). Every time Aimar Pérez Galí travels to do a dance performance, teach a workshop or give a lecture, he tries to get in touch with someone from the dance scene at that time who can learn first-hand about the object of his study, which he then transforms into letters that he writes to those dancers and choreographers who have disappeared. All these letters make up the book Lo Tocante and The Touching Community, a dance show with five dancers of different ages and conditions. Sounds, words and movements become true words of love for all those who are no longer here but who can never again be forgotten.
Aimar Pérez Galí. The Thouching Community. Mercat de les Flors (Barcelona), 2016. foto: Siddharth Gautam Singh
[Article published in Bonart, 2020]
Most of the great references of art from the second half of the 20th century are usually read from a contemporary perspective, emphasizing those aspects that are considered most relevant at each moment. Artists as versatile as Cindy Sherman can be analyzed from a photographic, cinematographic or appropriationist point of view, among others. At the time, feminist theories saw in her an example of the stereotypes of femininity and post-structuralist theories, an example of the construction of the notion of identity as a compendium of the notion of “the death of the author.” As Hal Foster wrote on the occasion of the retrospective dedicated to her by the MoMA in New York in 2012, this shows “how right we were and, at the same time, how wrong we were.”
In the case of Francis Bacon, during the 1980s (postmodernism, let us not forget) there was talk of references to the history of art (from Velázquez to Picasso, passing through Chaim Soutine), of the gesture and expressiveness of the brushstrokes and of the solitude and violence that his paintings could transmit. After the artist’s death in 1992, his studio was donated by his partner, John Edwards, to the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin, where it was reconstructed with archaeological precision. From that moment on, his work methodology was valued, visible from the huge collection of photographs, illustrations from medical journals, press reports and reproductions of works that are in his studio. It is no coincidence that this focus of attention on his archive took place at the turn of the century.
But recovering or vindicating an artist is not interesting for what the present can tell you but for what an artist can contribute to the present. So now would be a good time to vindicate, once again and in all its complexity, the figure of Joseph Beuys, his conviction in the transformative power of art, the necessary connection with politics, the pedagogical, ritual, symbolic, mystical, humorous aspects and the consideration of the multiple and its democratic scope as valid elements to disseminate his discourse.
At a time of strong permeability between art, mediation and pedagogy and cultural industries, this approach to art becomes relevant again. Going back to Beuys right now could be as if we could talk to our past selves, the only one with the authority to make us see that we are destroying the planet (as not so much politicians and large corporations remind us every day, but Greta Thunberg and so many other teenagers and activists of what we have so much to learn) and to reconcile ourselves with a humanist discourse that believed/believes in the capacity of people to make the world a better place.
[Article published in Bonart, 2019]
