Without Reality There Is No Utopia
CARLOS MOTTA Graffitis ideológicos, de La buena vida (2005-08). Courtesy: the artist and CAAC.
The Chinese artist Zhou Xiaohu said, in 2006, before the start of the current crisis but in reference to the frenzied developments taking place, that “problems make artists think, becoming more involved and more keen to delve into things”. This is the foundation and the requirement of this exhibition, the strong point of the quarterly programme of the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, entitled La constitución política del presente, curated by Alicia Murría, Mariano Navarro and Juan ANtonio Álvarez Reyes.
The capitalism crisis is now a global crisis in every sense of the word, and the worst thing is that is seems that things aren’t so bad for capitalism, especially when it seeks to persuade us that it is more important to save the system which has caused the crisis than to save the citizens who are enduring it. The end of communism left capitalism with no point of reference, and its ultimate development has had important consequences in the geopolitical order and the decay of democracy. Therefore, it seems necessary to hold an exhibition which helps us reflect on the current situation. We cannot quite understand, to use a recent example, the presence of Spanish troops in Libya, to favour a system of freedom, while President Zapatero is travelling to China to request financial aid.
The exhibition, based on Baudrillard’s well-known remarks on the replacement of reality by simulacrum and the subsequent ideas of Andreas Huyssen, according to whom it is that lack of reality that entails the impossibility of utopia, is divided into two sections: the first, La descripción de la mentira, attempts to reveal that reality of simulacra; whereas the second, Colapsos,aims to display the collapse of large ideological and economic systems.
Not only is the show based on solid foundations; it has also been efficiently devised through the works of important artists from Spain and abroad. The journey through the show begins at the monumental group of Cartuja, where we are received by Fede Guzmán’s steamroller, Ed Hall’s banderols and the extraordinary series of drawings Kolonial Post,on forgotten documents of colonialism, by Fernando Bryce. The video by Alfredo Jaar on Pasolini and the work by Zhou Xiaohu,where he represents a series of actions (a labour, an execution by electric chair, a police raid in a brothel, etc.), using clay figures which also serve to build video-animations, are both exemplary, and question the validity of the news on the mass media.
In the second part, with the mural on the crisis by López Cuenca and Muntadasin the background and the vignettes by El Roto, which somehow link together all the works, we come to a series of video-graphic installations, very well arranged in general, from the recital by William Burroughs about the songWhat Keeps Mankind Alive?, the Three Penny Opera, by Berthold Brecht, to the imposing piece by Oliver Ressler on democracy, as well as the survey on capitalism by Katya Sander and the exponents from East Germany by Dora García and Phil Collins. Along with all this, it is worth noting the spectacular mural on the Perestroika by the Russian collective Chto Delat? [What To Do?], the hybrid paintings by Manolo Quejido and the works on journalistic document by Pello Irazu and Rirkrit Tiravanija. The latter uses pages from the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper showing the news of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and takes the title from a film by Fassbinder: Angst essen seele auf [Fear Devours the Soul], establishing another of the many connections presented by this exhibition, with Alfredo Jaar’s video on Pasolini, a lucid witness of his time and a prophet for the times we are living now.
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