Making up a point, at the MACBA

Arte, dos puntos. Barcelona vive el arte contemporáneo. Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), July 2013 – January 2014.

L’art és una pregunta sense resposta (Àlex)
L’art és una cosa que fa qualsevol i ningú entén (Pablo)
L’art és poc democratitzador i eternament adolescent (Agustí)
El arte es excelente (Sergio)
El arte es basura (Marev)

– Answers provided by visitors to the question “Art is …"¹

The exhibition Arte, dos puntos. Barcelona vive el arte contemporáneo [Art, two points. Barcelona lives contemporary art] was held at the MACBA and CaixaForum between July 2013 and January 2014. The two institutions brought their collections together in 2010, and this was their first joint exhibition, an ambitious event showing a “new” collection which was displayed in both venues (one of the reasons for the “two points” in the title). With the general aim of exploring the concept of modernity and its relationship with the contemporary avant-garde, based on the Barcelona context, MACBA was assigned a more historical view, departing from contemporary creation to inquire into aspects of modernity, while CaixaForum set out to reveal the “concerns of the post-modernity generation.”

In fact, the announcement of this new direction, reinforced by an intensive marketing campaign which claimed a link between Barcelona, art and the “new narratives” that the shared museum funds would have enabled, did not come to that. On the contrary, two very different exhibitions resulted from this project, giving clear continuity to the strategies and identities of each institution: on the one hand, a bank collection focusing on the institutionalised vanguards of the last decades of the 20th century; on the other, a museum dedicated to historiographical review explicitly linked to its geographical place.²

Besides, a substantial part of the exhibition at the MACBA – a floor and a half of the three that Dos puntos occupied – was transferred virtually unchanged to the current display of the museum’s collection (on show until 28 April). Therefore, we shall restrict this text to the exhibition at MACBA, which could somehow be viewed as a kind of retrospective of the conceptual narrative itself.

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The theme announced for this institution – the relationships and tensions between avant-garde and modernity, taking Barcelona as a key case in point, through an inquiry into the past from contemporary artistic production – was one of various possible narratives and not always the most obvious one. The exhibition opened with a reference to the city’s transformations between the 1888 International Exhibition and the onset of the Civil War (1936–1939). This conflict was evoked by the video Aidez l’Espagne which Pere Portabella made for the Barcelona College of Architects on the occasion of a retrospective of Joan Miró in 1969. Details of Miró’s drawings, which play a decisive role in conveying the violence and suffering of that period, were combined with the editing and the sound – less explicit means than words to render a non-Francoist version of the conflict.

From this period, legacies and re-appropriations of key moments in the formulation and reformulation of a notion of modern should be highlighted, within a wide thematic range and sustained by an extensive documentary support (magazines, books), reproductions of which could be consulted. The 1888 and 1929 international exhibitions, the urban modernisation they gave rise to, the campaigns by modernist architects of the Grup d’Arquitectes i Tècnics Catalans per al Progrés de l’Arquitectura Contemporània (GATCPAC), the avant-garde artistic and literary movements and the ways in which they dealt with the impact of new living patterns, as well as the radical renewal of the educational system proposed by Ferrer i Guàrdia, built together a constellation of micro-narratives set against more recent works.

It is hard to find a thread linking all these references. Perhaps the point of connection has generally lain in the construction and materialisation processes of an image of the modern city. However, the specificity of the works and documents on display often pointed in other directions. As an example, see the juxtaposition between the documents related to the promotion of a small, modernist dismountable house by the avant-garde Catalan architects in the 1930s, the dismountable house by architect Santiago Cirugeda (Chicken Antimediatico, 2005-2008) and the 1987 photographs by Jean-Louis Schoellkopf which illustrate the various forms of appropriation of Le Corbusier’s standardised homes (Firminy, l’Unité d’Habitation Le Corbusier, 1987). Another example would be the collection of works that appropriate city monuments, today part of Barcelona’s imagery, depriving them of their aura value by concealing them (Christo, Wrapped Monument to Cristobal Colón (Project for Barcelona), 1984), by accumulating reproductions that level them (Oriol Vilanova, Còpies, a collection in progress of hundreds of postcards of Triumphal Arches) or by smudging and blurring the architectural values that substantiate them (Thomas Ruff, d.p.b. series on Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion).

This montage of diverse elements around a common generic theme – the avant-garde notion of the minimalist home or the (in)visibility of the monument – did not propose a closed discourse, but rather posits the issue of the common and distinct traits between works, times and ideas. In other words, the relationships that were woven were not of the order of the historical causes and influences but rather based on confrontation and affinities born out of the specificity of the works.

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The ground floor rooms, chronologically situated beyond the war, were somewhat less eclectic. Through sculpture and especially painting, the argument was that only in the post-war period had Catalan art fully assimilated an “aesthetic modernity.” A modernity which, implying an art of a formalistic basis, was also a statement of freedom, therefore political, supported by galleries, unofficial groups and exhibitions. From this landscape, the figure of Antoni Tapiès stands out, on whom there is a small retrospective on the 1^st^ floor, as if to keep pace with [which accompanied ?] the great 2013 retrospectives at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya and the Tapiès Foundation.

This idea of an “aesthetic modernity” which emerged in the post-war period was brought into dialogue with a set of works by artists who defined the 1980s (Miquel Barceló, José Manuel Broto, José María Sicilia), suggesting the continuity of a notion of “pure visuality” which contrasted with the (avant-garde) art on the next floor.

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Thus, the 1^st^ floor opened with a reading of Pop works as the result of a desire for reality. However, the main approach fell on the impact of both language and action and the object on artistic production in the second half of the 20th century.

These two poles were mediated by issues of the magazine Aspen, published between 1965 and 1971 in a box containing items such as prints, engravings, posters, records or videos, joined by a copy of the “green box,” the portable and reproducible edition of Marcel Duchamp’s La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même. In the rooms dedicated to language, there was an attempt to bring works by Catalan artists into dialogue with works by better known authors (Art & Language, Marcel Broodthaers). The nucleus focusing on a presentation of Suite bufa (1966), “musical action” (by artist Joan Brossa and composer Josep Maria Mestres Quadreny) was quite interesting, joined by object-poems by Brossa, works on paper by Antoni Llena and a collection of “mail-art” by the Argentinian Edgardo Antonio Vigo, a dense mesh of personal, historical, aesthetic and material relationships emerging between these artists.

On the other side, the “return of the object” was interpreted from the idea of ready-made, as suggested by the photographs of museum installations in the series Les ready-made appartiennent à tout le monde, by Philippe Thomas, whose critical inquiry was accompanied by Sherrie Levine’s (The bachelors (after Marcel Duchamp), 1990) and Haim Steinbach’s artistic discourses (Untitled, 1989). A penchant towards direct impact and visual spectacle could also be seen, well-illustrated by Tony Cragg (Untitled, 1993) and Juan Muñoz’s installation, The nature of visual illusion (1994-1997).

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The concept of document was central to the focus on the top floor. Firstly, the relationship between document and history was addressed, through works exploring the possibility of mobilising (personal, subsidiary) memories to question the authority of History. More surprising, though, was The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years without Images (2011) by Eric Baudelaire, a documentary accompanied by a photographic installation reconstructing the routes of a number of characters connected with the Japanese Red Army, a 1970s extreme left terrorist group, to address simultaneously memory, image and the possibility of representation. Other works also functioned within this fluctuation between the visible and the invisible of history, such as the inventory of memory places in Muntadas’ Media sites (1981) and Alice Creischer’s appropriation of Gustave Courbet in L’atelier de la peintrice (2000), crossing life itself, as an historicisable subject, with a political allegory, subverting the genre-specific rules and decorum.

In the last rooms, the concept of document was interconnected with that of archive, emerging here as the memory of a present marked by an ever-growing expansion of the urban, taking Barcelona as a case in point. This attempted inventory of the urban was put into perspective by the – reverse – utopias of Constant Nieuwenhuis (Construction aux plans transparents, 1954, New Babylon series, 1963, amongst others) and Gordon Matta-Clark (studies for Sky Hook, 1978, the film My summer 77 with Gordon Matta-Clark, by Cherica Convents), understood respectively as the last truly global (hence, modern) utopia and as the most coherent critique of the city, done and undone by speculative logics. Photography (series by Jean-Marc Bustamante, Manolo Laguillo, Craigie Horsfield) and sculpture (Jordi Colomer’s bricolage, partly IKEA and partly do-it-yourself) disclosed the interstices and tensions of a Barcelona that, in the context of the 1992 Olympic Games, was undergoing rapid change, looking for a new, more global identity, also evoked by the model of a public sculpture by Claes Oldenburg (Mistos, 1992). The imagery of an interstitial city was perhaps best captured by Bustamante’s images of the use of suburban, supposedly useless, waste land for leisure purposes (Domingos, 1994-1997).

These inventories were joined by other works with which they shared an attempt at imagining the boundaries of the urban and its representations – from the urban garden café of Lara Almarcegui (Un café al aire libre para los hortelanos. Asociación de huertas Van Houten, Weesp, Amsterdam, verano 2003) to the obsessive archive of Reykjavik’s residential architecture by Dieter Roth (Reykjavik slides, 1973–1975, 1990–1993), through to the overlapping of border imagery onto the suburban landscape by Jeff Wall (A hunting scene, 1994).

Here, the image suggested not only documentary value (in the main sense of the rescuing of memory), but also an idea of seriality and proliferation. As if the decentralisation of the work itself, whose meaning comes from accumulation, corresponded to the loss of the (urban) centre.

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As is apparent, it is not easy to find a general selection criterion besides an insistent, at times contrived, connection to the Catalan context and a notion of avant-garde too wide-ranging to establish a global narrative. However, urban modernisation and the avant-gardes, the concept of modernity in post-war Barcelona, the problematisation of the 1960s as a breakaway period, the inquiry into the document and the critical review of urban transformation processes of the 1990s are topics that MACBA has developed, following a critical revisitation programme of specific events. [Thus, the exhibition could be seen as an anthology of this programme – which may have been intentional or not – as if it resulted from the mounting of approaches and thematic affinities of the museum itself. ]

This notion of mounting or montage seems important, first and foremost to account for the mixture of surprise and frustration that a visit to the exhibition could provoke. On the one hand, there is a metonymical logic: the abundance of topics, more than developed or argued for, were evoked by a few works, as if each set of works only pointed to an already known argument. In this replacement of the part with the whole, it is fundamental to know the latter to understand its frame of reference, without which it remains superficial or illegible.

But it is this absence of a reading key that leads to another idea of montage as the convergence (and divergence) of disparate objects, i.e. on the basis of relationships, contrasts and affinities that are not systematised. In this sense, montage (its surrealistic definition comes into play) generates new meanings from the individual dialogue between the works and the viewer, giving rise to the possibility (or challenge) of tracing a personal itinerary. Thus, this exhibition may be perceived as a move away from both historicism and aestheticism and from didactic arguments (which seek to convey already closed narratives, even when they retain room for criticism).

Two premises are at play. One is to take seriously the notion that history is an open construction, always incomplete, non-linear but manifold, corresponding to the idea of searching for problematisation rather than legitimisation devices (i.e. devices that enhance the work by inserting it into a legitimising narrative). The other is that visitors are able to build for themselves their own stories from the objects proposed to them, and that this construction is valid.