Audiences and Counter-Audiences
TELLERVO KALLEINEN & OLIVER KOCHTA-KALLEINEN. The Complaints Choirs Project, 2005-2010. Video-instalación de 4 canales, 67'. Fotograma.
It never reached the category of genre in the strictest sense, but the representation of the “audience” has been a recurring motif in the fine arts since time immemorial. However, although this tradition (like the reflection it cultivated) is one of the sediments of this exhibition, it is not its object of study. Instead of the fine arts, its title expressly alludes to the new paradigm: visual culture. In this way, other elements find greater representation in the show than visual thinking: theatre, performance, cinema, television; and, thus, the audiences are configured as spectators or audiences.
All of this is very consistent with the current organisation of the art scene (in the words of J. A. Ramírez). So it is the canonical spaces of the stage arts and their continuing devices, their meanings, agents and counter-models that this exhibition “questions”, paying special attention to the roles played in this discursive realm, their combinations and relationships.
Públicos y contrapúblicos [Audiences and Counter-Audiences] is the central show of the session On the Spectator which articulates the exhibition activity of the CAAC this quarter. Curated by its director, who reveals the critical provenance his text, it is an opportune, ambitious and well-argued proposal, presented with an outstanding sense of arrangement (not only in space but also in the journey through the exhibition, its narrative fabric, even in a cinematographic sense), which conveys some of the most fruitful trajectories of current artistic production, and which has worked hard to rescue some “classical” references (Emisión-recepción by Muntadas or Minucodes by Minujín, the latter of which is outside the show but shares its horizon), in several cases with the added bonus of recent works which comment, reference or pay homage to them (Ernst Schmidt Jr.-Heimo Zobernig, John Cage-Manon de Boer, Abramović/Ulay+Beuys-Andrea Fraser, Dan Graham-Judith Hopf).
Naturally, one needs time to see the whole show. It is inevitable, given that it is made up of a wide range of works where audio-visual formats predominate, especially when an entire chapter is devoted to “the conference as genre”. In total, it lasts more than eight hours, which is too much for one visit. However, even if we behave like those interfering viewers who perturb the contemplation of Psycho 24 hours by the anonymous character of Punto Omega, it is worth taking a peek at the works. Because everything mentioned above, which does not go beyond the limits of the studium (to use Barthes’s term), might be left behind, and the show, unexpectedly, might make an impact on us. This is what happened to the author of these words. Suddenly, a punctum: the song of the little bird, sung by one of the inmates at the Pazarić home, in Bosnia, as seen in Isola Bella, by Danica Dakić. Unexpectedly, the entire artifice collapsed like and old piece of set machinery, in the face of the emotion with which life was affirmed in that song. The entire representation machine (beginning with the film where the song emerges and continuing with the entire exhibition) was dissolved in the face of that overwhelming presence, which overcame any defects of the performer, and his injured body and psyche. According to Jiménez Lozano: the song breaks into whomever is listening to it and, “in the snapshot of its presence, it makes him or her a contemporary of what is being sung, putting them in that situation, from where they will emerge truly injured or joyful. However, above all, one emerges in a state of lucidity regarding the fact that it is still possible to rescue the suffering, the beings of misfortune [...]; and their story situates itself [...] in the centre of the world, offering a sense of perspective on it and on the ego of the listeners themselves”.
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