The work of Antonio Ortega (Sant Celoni, 1968) deals with social behaviour and social dynamics. He often creates \u00abrecords\u00bb, employing a strategy similar to that of a fable, with easily recognisable reference points to exemplify or illustrate different situations. For instance, in Record of frailty (1966) he forced a plant to grow inside a long cardboard tube so that when the tube was removed the plant withered away; in Record of sponsorship (1999-2000) he spent the production budget for his exhibition in Barcelona on sponsoring an English piglet called Lucy, providing it with care and attention, food and veterinary services for a year; in Record of goodness (1999) he made himself sick, kept the vomit in a container in the garden of his house in London and let the birds feed on it. As David G. Torres has pointed out, \u00abThey are records in which the unusual is a millimetre away from the futile. It is in this millimetre that his work lies\u2026 The document, anodyne in its appearance and simply a portrait of an experiment carried out by Antonio Ortega, has the ability to develop intensely at the level of meaning.\u00bb In these three instances, the behaviour, reactions and roles of plants and animals become portraits or projections of our own behaviour in accepting, adapting or submitting to the prejudices implicit in acts of generosity.<\/p>\n
From a na\u00efve position devoid of any cynicism, Ortega observes with a permanent sense of perplexity and doubt the mechanisms that define the dynamics of artistic production and its purpose in society. In Antonio Ortega and the contestants (2002), for example, he transformed what was to have been a one-man exhibition in The Showroom in London into a group exhibition and invited five recent graduates from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Barcelona to take part in it with him. The aim was to try and demonstrate the dynamics of production in art, by imitating the promotional strategies employed in other areas of pop culture, while at the same time exploring the idea of authorship and the hierarchical and competitive nature of the art world.<\/p>\n
Faith and enthusiasm is based on an idea he has been pondering for some time: the fact that only success releases the artist from the appearance of ingenuousness. Ortega explained this at a talk he gave in March 2002 in CaixaForum, Barcelona: \u00abI think there is nothing more pathetic than a visual artist \u2013 or a singer or an actor \u2013 who has not been successful, because only a taste of success can neutralise the feeling of ingenuousness of an artist devoted to his career. If you still have doubts about this, you can join me in the following exercise. Think of a major artist and imagine that he only shows his work to his elderly parents. On Sundays he goes with his family to have lunch at his parents\u2019 home and after coffee he shows them his latest works\u2026 I don\u2019t know about you, but when I was writing this I was imagining a dignified Joseph Beuys carefully collecting on a tray the congealed lumps of fat stuck to the walls of his parents\u2019 dining room. This is why I accept my na\u00efve status.\u00bb<\/p>\n
Faith and enthusiasm takes a look the current media scene, which creates personalities who come to exemplify stereotyped values. In Spain, television has created a new genre, a cross between the reality show and the soap opera, in which the lives and doings of these personalities can be followed, dissected and criticised, for they automatically place the audience in a superior position. Those who populate the current media scene are not (famous) public figures on account of their professional accomplishments but people who have turned the details of their private lives into a profession. Achieving fame at any price and maintaining it at any price is one of their main characteristics. Faith and enthusiasm concerns one such artiste, Yola Berrocal, the epitome of the fabrication of a celebrity, described by Ortega as \u00abthe real muse of enthusiasm\u00bb convinced of her own artistic talents. Ortega shares a faith with Berrocal \u2013 in their work and their possibilities of success \u2013 that eliminates any idea of cynicism.<\/p>\n