ArteContexto // Blog

Indirect Style. Fundació Foto Colectania, Barcelona

jue, 22 dic 2011 00:00:00 +0200

With Indirect Style I, an exhibition of 8 contemporary artists using photography, the forgotten, lost or failed utopias of the past scratch their way back into the present. Indirectly, as it were. If, as curator Martí Peran proposes, a direct style would have the actors of history speak in their own voices of their own experiences, an indirect style would be more roundabout. The direct style confronts us with a face, telling us its heartfelt story in the first person. Yet as Peran argues, this seductive combination comes with a limitation: as these witnesses are locked in time, they can never be repeated, denoting an authentic endpoint. They cannot guide us into the future.

The indirect style, in turn, relies on the interpretative capacity of a narrator, who here views, collates and arranges the fragmentary remains of history. The photograph, whether as a past document or present-day tool, is the vehicle. In a well-wrought metaphor, Peran recalls Ernst Bloch’s “anticipatory footsteps” (Bloch wrote of “anticipatory consciousness” in The Principle of Hope, an inspiration on ideas of utopian reconstruction). Misplaced marks from yesteryear, the broken shards of human desire, to be picked up anew.

Le quattro volte

jue, 15 dic 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Director: Michelangelo Frammartino
Year: 2010

According to a quote from the New York Times featured in the poster for Le quattro volte (2010), the film by Michelangelo Frammartino “reinvents the very act of perception”. Nowadays, the intellectual and emotional connection with the plot and characters which make up standard narrative cinema can have the same effect on a multidisciplinary erudite and an entertainment-seeking amateur. However, there is some supposedly elitist cinema left which fans of good history and of the construction of memorable human types should also watch.

This film belongs to that “other cinema”, pejoratively labelled as “museum cinema”; films which help cleanse the gaze, fine-tune our hearing (there are no dialogues or music, but a lot of sonic life) and re-educate the brain, which is tormented by over-stimulation and by the imperative need to obtain “chewed-up and prepared” information (which is constant, one-directional and obvious) through the media.

Frammartino, a multimedia artist with a solid academic background, decided, he says, “to find himself”, in a remote Calabrese village, where he took his camera to capture, with archaic fascination, an almost philosophical gaze. This unique perspective was originally centred on the human figure, the shepherd, before focusing on everything around him. The depth and ambition of the result is not without humour, it must be said. Some scenes, such as the domestic-goat invasion, would have made even Jacques Tati chuckle.

The success of the connection between the director and the viewer depends, largely, on knowing, guessing at, or, directly feeling the richness of content concealed behind the apparent bareness of the work as a whole. This determines whether or not can be achieved the “risky” perceptive experience posed by Frammartino and other “poets of time” (of slow time, some would say), from Abbas Kiarostami to the masters of neorealism, as well as fanatics of dreamlike experimentation, such as Phillipe Garrel and Tsai Ming Liang.

Along this same comparative line, between a profound depth and a lightweight form, we must highlight the fact that reducing Le quattro volte to its anecdotal plot would be the same as attaching the mere label of documentary to its filmic nature. It is not a documentary, but it does include landscapes, animal behaviour (in Cannes there was a “special mention” to the shepherd’s dog, the only “professional” actor to appear onscreen) and anthropological details (including the Fiesta de la Pita, an ancient rite first filmed by the documentary-maker Vittorio de Seta in I Dimenticati, more than 50 years ago). In other words, the film can be perceived as a mere window into this beautiful land where, as he tells us, Frammartino spent his childhood summers.

However, the true value of the work emerges when we understand the cosmology of Pythagoras (who is believed to have been born in this region), according to which human beings are a sensitive body whose four components –fire, water, earth and air– interchange and transform into one another. Through this Pythagorean prism, the true leitmotiv of the author, we shall reinterpret the poetry contained in the way in which the old shepherd, who eats ashes and dust from the church floor to cure his disease, dies on the night he loses them in the forest; the way in which, after his death, a billy goat is born; this billy goat, in turn, becomes lost in the forest, and collapses next to a tree; this tree is first the object of devotion by men, and then it is felled to make coal, which will make fire, and, therefore, life. A brilliant allegory on the harmony of “dust to dust, ashes to ashes” and the belief in the transmigration of souls.

Keith Rowe. Concentration Of The Stare

jue, 01 dic 2011 00:00:00 +0200

The history of artistic modernity could be written like the peculiar relationship between music and painting. This relationship has been linked to the move toward abstraction, where painting attempted to follow music as the most “abstract” of the arts, an ideal which should be pursued. This has been expressed in texts by Kandinsky and Klee, and in the tittles of many paintings and sculptures from modernity, such as composition, sonata, symphony, etc.

As time went on, painting liberated itself almost entirely from representation, and it was music which, trapped in sentimentalism and the description of romanticism, began looking for external examples to emulate. This gave rise to a large part of the New York school, with the inexpressive paintings by Barnett Newman and, even more so, Mark Rothko. On the other hand, contemporary American music left behind the dictates of dodecaphonism and serialism and gave rise, among others, to Morton Feldman.

GUSTAVO MARRONE. Don’t Turn Out the Light.

jue, 10 nov 2011 00:00:00 +0200

No apagar la luz is the title of a book, or a journal, or an artist’s book; it is also the title of an exhibition which, in an expanded way, widens the very concept of “exhibition” at a certain art centre. The fact that this review appears in the “Books” section should help us read it with one eye on the parameters of an exhibition review (or almost, or excessively, depending on its role), while we also pay attention to that same quantification of what is observed, in the sense of a dramatic (artistic) action is condensed in an object which, for philological convenience, we agree to describe as “book” (or almost, o excessively, depending on its role as well). To simplify things: No apagar la luz should be seen and read under both these premises, as both offer the key which gives us access to one of the most consistent, unusual, lucid, and intelligently emotional art productions made in Spain in the last two decades. Its author is Gustavo Marrone (Buenos Aires, 1962).

Alighiero Boetti. Game Strategy

jue, 03 nov 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Since the 1990s, the criticism of the narrative of the history of art of the 20th century, in the canonical version laid out in the United States, has opened up many lines of research which have attempted to correct, complete and diversify the historiographical perspective toward a more complex and less linear interpretation. The result has led to an inclusive opening of feminist, postcolonial, gender and multicultural discourses, applied to the reconsideration of figures and movements from the Latin American and Eastern European art scenes, as well as marginal and minority personalities who have carried out their work in hegemonic centres, such as Gordon Matta-Clark and Louise Bourgeois. This reinterpretation has been carried out in a very pertinent and systematic way by the MNCARS in the last few years, and it is on this basis that we must examine the exhibition on Alighiero Boetti, curated by Lynne Cooke, Christian Rattemeyer and Mark Godfrey, in coproduction with the London Tate Modern and the New York MoMA, emphasising the consensus on the need to revise history.

SOFÍA JACK. Everything Solid Vanishes into Thin Air

jue, 29 sep 2011 00:00:00 +0200

A paradigmatic statement which runs through Marxist thought and lands in an essential treaty on the experience of modernity, in the text of the same title by Marshall Berman, lends its grandiloquence to the name of the latest exhibition by Sofía Jack. With that almost prophetic paratextuality, as a preface to the display, the artist opens imaginary windows in her works in order to invite the gaze of the voyeur. Given Jack’s warning before we enter the gallery, we cannot allow ourselves to be taken over by the despair of a modernity as expansive as it is regulated, which continues to prescribe perceptive categories, action models and the axiology of an agonizing critical anthropocentrism.

Upon entering the display space, we find, in the first room, three polyptychs made up of small charcoal drawings, where a range of domestic interior spaces are recreated, arranged in rooms, staircases and living rooms. Compositions with disturbing angles where representation conveys an uncomfortable sense of calm. In an atavistic gesture, we fall into the trap of carrying out a mental exercise in order to complete the image of the house in its entirety, connecting the disperse fragments in the drawings. We continue with the attempt of building a narrative for each space, interpreting the traces of their inhabitants in the day to day objects which populate the rooms, which, more than homes, seem stage designs set up to be the venue for the rite of existence, with its illusory reality and a time which struggles between a tour de force of transcendence and frailty.

José Manuel Ballester. The Reinvention of Space

jue, 22 sep 2011 00:00:00 +0200

José Manuel Ballester (Madrid, 1960), known for his prize-winning career as an artist, presents, at the Alcalá 31 gallery, a show devoted to his work from the last five years. Architecture continues to be the leitmotiv of a body of work which tends to play with the move of the photographic discourse toward the pictorial discourse. The artist blurs the edges of these realms as he focuses his experiments on the capacity for evocation of spaces, through the transformation of their identity and in order to benefit the construction of a new narrativity. To do this, Ballester meticulously chooses the angle of vision, the nature of the treatment of colour, the textures, shadows, and, above all, his way of approaching the notions of the void and immensity; creating a profound and unquestionable abstraction of reality, as reflected in the title of the exhibition.

Jason Kahn, The Strategies of An Attitude

jue, 15 sep 2011 00:00:00 +0200

The “desire for style” is an idea which has long been left behind, after its burst on to the architectural post-modern scene, but it refuses to die, even, in the context of new intermedia practices. This happens because most artists tend to maintain, for long periods of times, the mechanisms of creation with which they feel comfortable, which allow them to reliably formulate the issues they examine, which are also maintained for long periods of time.

However, this is not always the case. Two exceptions are the American band which emerged in post-punk Los Angeles, Destroy All Monsters, or the Californian conceptual John Baldessari & Co. It is made up of Steve Roden and Jason Kahn. The former is a visual artist by training, better known in Europe as a sound artist who has released dozens of CDs. His music is original enough to have given rise to a new concept: lower case music. But they are very different kinds of music.

Return to the Past

jue, 08 sep 2011 00:00:00 +0200

A year ago, in this magazine, José Manuel Costa questioned the relevance of the past in the current scene, following the inclusion of Roxy Music in the Sonar festival. These ideas were part of a wider trend, which, through genres such as hypnagogic pop, witch house, glo-fi and hauntology, constantly renamed the present, always looking back.

In his recently published book, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past, Simon Reynolds offers a critical and personal assessment of the present time. Although the book deals with consumer culture from the 20th century, I would like to focus on the views the English critic offers about the present, which not only deal with music but also wider social, industrial and economic aspects. His vision is that of a dystopia, where technology is taking over the memory of the present. We can all identify with many of his ideas: the loss of a shared identity, the accumulation of information, the deprivation of a wider historical sense… However, it is true that that cultural speed and saturation has also been experienced at other times: the proliferation of labels and micro-styles in electronica in the early 1990s, and the countless soul bands which emerged in the 1960s are two examples of this.

AN AESTHETICS OF THE WORST

jue, 28 jul 2011 00:00:00 +0200

The latest essay by the professor and philosopher José Luis Pardo, Estética de lo peor, is a compilation of essays previously published in the press, exhibition catalogues and specialised magazines, between 1997 and 2008. Any compilation, i.e. the presentation in a single work of a number of documents which have already been published, possesses an admirable quality, which is none other than the re-reading –in the event, of course, that one follows the author– of part of his work, under a twofold condition of randomness and possibility. Furthermore, however much we like an author it is unlikely we will have access to everything he or she has published. This is an essential factor in this case, as José Luis Pardo, fortunately, writes and publishes with happy, solvent and dynamic frequency.