ArteContexto // Blog

NY and the new transience of art spaces

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0200

Until 2004, 548 West 22nd street in New York was the home of the Dia Art Foundation, one of the main institutions in the city. Founded in 1974 to support the new needs of the artists of the time, it required large-scale and technically complex or long-lasting projects, which could not be conducted in traditional institutions –as is the case of the 7000 Oak Trees by Joseph Beuys, Broken Kilometer by Walter de María, or his Field of Lightning–, it closed its doors in the city in order to install its spectacular collection upstate –with artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Michael Heizer, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra and Robert Smithson. The reason for the closure: the space no longer fulfilled the needs of the institution(1).

Primavera 2010: The Greatest

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0200

Magnetised by a simply spectacular line-up, a perfect balance between nostalgia and modernity, a hundred thousand music fans invaded, this weekend, the Parc of the Forum during the most multitudinous edition of this classic Barcelona festival. They are fans not only of music, it is true, but also of fashion and beer, as it was difficult to see a face free from the ubiquitous retro-style sunglasses or a hand not holding a cold and foaming glass, which leads me to suspect that the main sponsors of the event must be more than satisfied. If sponsorship involves the ability to organise this kind of line-up, you are welcome, you monsters of market research.

Self-Portrait on Convex Mirror. On Autoría by Julieta Valero

Tue, 18 May 2010 00:00:00 +0200

In the quotation chosen by Julieta Valero to conclude Autoría [Authorship], Miguel Casado points out that “the continuous thread of the voice has provided the subject with the only possible space for existence”. “Once concluded,” he had previously written “it all falls apart again”. Anyone who chooses to interpret Autoría in a linear way, without taking chance or omission into account, will wonder whether Valero wove the “only space for existence” for her discourse, or whether her voice can be heard, hesitantly, at ground level and ironic at times, rough and twisted at others: “at present, The Sublime is a membrane between words and the multiplicity of the bazaar”, suggests Valero in Ashberiana, a dialectic she establishes with a poetics of the writer and philosopher Alberto Santamaría, which we could perhaps see as the nucleus of Autoría, as well as, undoubtedly, a major footnote in the literary choice of Julieta Valero, not just because of the explicit reference to the North American poet (“all so Ashbery now”, she humorously, and accurately, pointed out in that text).

Cosmopoética 2010: El jardín de la inocencia

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0200

Perhaps one of the greatest virtues of Cosmopoética is its ability to create intra-stories in the streets, those corridors between high culture and citizens who intermingle like wild climbing plants until they form a thick and invisible blanket of experiences, encounters, smiles and discoveries. In addition to promoting reading and expanding knowledge to unexpected confines, the International Poetry Festival of Córdoba, one of the most important of its kind in Europe, turns the city, for ten days, into a true enclave for dialogue, a shared territory where different expressive disciplines overlap in order to soak naturally into the metropolitan epidermis and the day-to-day pulse of its inhabitants. In this sense, perhaps one of the most striking experiences in this seventh edition of the festival has been El jardín de la inocencia [The Garden of Innocence], a large joint work developed by four painters and twelve poets1, which has turned a central public space into an original oasis of synaesthesias where the literary and the pictorial coexist.

William Kentridge: Five Themes at the MoMA

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0200

“…circumscribing his own work to a world haunted by the invisible powers of the Other”1 seems to be a part of the art practice of William Kentridge. In his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, on show until the 17th of May, his five most recurrent themes lead us into a universe of frenzied gestures, which are not usually the ones chosen to convey a violent and paradoxical social-political reality.

The Modern Art Museum of Medellín and its new headquarters

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0200

It is an increasingly common practice to restore old industrial buildings and use them as cultural spaces; it tends to be part of ambitious urban renewal projects for underused or unused areas, which become more central and accessible as a result of urban sprawl. London, Bilbao, Barcelona and Buenos Aires have turned formerly semi-derelict areas once populated by factories and warehouses into luxurious neighbourhoods where magnificent buildings, formerly used as factory premises and boasting imposing architectural structures, have become excellent settings for current art practices in their many and varied expressions.

Adolfo Arrieta. From the sidelines

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0200

Always from the sidelines, indifferent to the trends and adulation which film lovers are so prone to lavish, and to the lack of interest of the uninitiated, who do not see his films as a valid option for a Sunday afternoon, Adolfo Arrieta is a filmmaker who belongs on the (in)visible map of European cinematography. However paradoxical it may seem, the father of Spanish underground cinema –and a key figure in the French scene– is always “on the verge” of being (re)discovered in our country. This “on the verge” is entirely irrelevant to Arrieta’s work, which is not suitable to play a role in the debate regarding whether film can be considered a popular art or is merely a mass entertainment industry. It is worth noting, as Víctor Erice used to say, that film and the film industry are not the same thing, however many links they share, and despite the unconcealed efforts of the market to cause their paths to converge. The work of Arrieta is outside this discussion. In fact, it is outside the two fields, and does not depend on the formula viewer-subsidy-critic.

Red Bucket Films: Joyful Abundance

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0200

There are people for whom filming is like breathing. People who can’t avoid doing it and, who, while most of us are sleeping, reading, strolling and cooking, are shooting all sorts of films. The Safdie brothers are this kind of people, and they were destined to be filmmakers from the moment their father gave them a video camera for their birthday. Their accomplices are the creatives Alex Kalman and Sam Lisenco.

Aesthetic Mimicry. On Speak of the Devil by Beto Hernandez

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0200

In a few years, I hope, a sociologist-critic will realise that the current transculturalisation between the Hispanic and Anglo-Saxon worlds, which will serve as a paradigm to understand the time we are living, has been most clearly and firmly expressed in the work by Beto Hernández, rather than in the places where critics have been insistently looking. Despite this, a few critics have had a look at Love & Rockets, the exceptional magazine with which the Hernández brothers made their name. However, very few have ventured beyond the comfortable territory of easy classifications, particularly with regard to the clear differences displayed by the work of each of the brothers in their early days. Those who felt closer to the visual arts preferred Jaime’s work, which was much more suited to its time, as well as being more experimental, despite its narrative absurdity. Those who approached comic books from the perspective of narrative were likely to prefer the work by Beto (Gilbert), which was clearly inspired by Latin American literary narrators, and was much more conservative in terms of its graphics.

PES. Hits Frame by Frame

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0200

Why do we think that everything that is new is bound to destroy the old? It seems that computer graphics will kill pencils and paper (as we know, “video killed the radio star”), when, in fact, the many technical options available (regardless of whether they are cutting edge or obsolete) can help rethink the ethical and aesthetic meaning which underlies the choices regarding the ways of doing something. Because of this, those who today embrace stop motion animation (traditional animation using objects, produced frame by frame) deserve to be seen differently from their illustrious mentors.