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SPACES FOR CREATION AND CAMOUFLAGE: RADIO |
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What is the capacity of art institutions to infiltrate the social fabric? Museums and art centres try to penetrate the white walls that legitimise everything artistic and to offer new forms of production and perception. In an attempt to find means of infiltration, Jorge Luis Marzo is preparing a series of radio programmes that during 2006 will form part of the schedules of several radio stations, with the added purpose of redefining and recovering radio as a public space of public reason.
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JORGE LUIS MARZO
Imagine an actor, a performer, whatever, someone who wants to enact extreme poverty and who in order to do so decides to push the boundaries a little further out. What would he need to do? Provoke the audience by performing increasingly sensational acts on himself or on other people? Or perform his act in contexts where nobody would expect to see them? Some years ago it would seem that Joan Simó asked himself the same question. In the context of a festival that was being held in Barcelona, he dressed up as a tramp and sat in the street in the pose of someone begging for charity. With one leg bent up underneath him out of sight, he stuck a haunch of cured ham with some meat still on the bone into the empty trouser leg and put a sock and a shoe on it. As he reached the culminating point of his lament about how he was starving to death, in full view of anyone who wanted to look, the actor rolled up his trouser leg, took out a rusty knife and, with yelps of pain, sliced off the few slivers of ham that remained on the bone and put them in his mouth. The effect was |
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horrifyingly realistic, as could be seen from the faces of those passers-by who were not in on the act. Quite a few of them were actually sick.
Some time later, Simó included this number in one of his plays. And, of course, instead of disgust on the faces of the audience there was complicity and laughter. Where is the value of a performance?In art, or in the context in which the activity takes place? Might we think that a knowledge of the codes (the expectations created by a space that has been previously defined as artistic) rules out any possible subversion of the control of perceptions? Or, on the contrary, to give an example from the legal world, does ignorance of the codes free an activity of its intrinsic artistic quality?
This bald question leads us to one of the most exciting thematic serials when it comes to questioning the capacity of museums and art centres to offer new forms of production and perception. If I go to a museum, I know what I will find there. On the other hand, if I put my work outside, how will people know whether or not it is art? This is the spirit and the malevolence that dominates the programme of radio activities that we are preparing at the CASM for 2006. Radio, needless to say, provides all possible means to ensure that these questions are materialised. In other media, it would certainly be more difficult. Radio is intangible and infiltrates itself wherever it can. The history of radio is full of artistic (or other) events that, under the guise of camouflage and infiltration, have been able to create the most extraordinary short-circuits between expectation and reality. From the great Orson Welles to the infamous COPE in Bolivia.
The recovery of what is public
At the same time, the relationship between contemporary creative work and the medium of radio in recent decades has been based on principles that are often very fruitful but also often perniciously deceptive. Since John Cage began to broadcast his sound productions on radio, it seems as if the only possible relationship had to be founded on the conception of radio as a mere loudspeaker for sound art. In this diminished state, radio is no longer an autonomous public space but merely an acoustic readymade. So the exploration of radio disappears beneath the exploration of sound. Recovering the radio space as a potential public meeting place (or non-meeting place) for creators and for audiences, should be a relationship model to which more importance needs to be attached. Reinforcing sound art on the waves is very necessary, but it is even more essential to redefine its “public reason” through creative models that go beyond the formats of what is known as the tyranny of the “radio formula”, whether commercial or institutional. Fortunately, we have already seen several examples of independent radio stations that have shown the enormous variety of different paths that can be taken, particularly with the new opportunities offered by the Internet.
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These two reflections – camouflage
and the recovery of the public nature of radio – will
be the central thread of the programme. The artists
Guillermo Trujillano (Bilbao) and Taniel Morales
(Mexico City) and the groups Radio Paca (Barcelona, www.radiopaca.org)
and Experimentem amb l’Art (Barcelona, www.experimentem.org),
in association with David Armengol and José Antonio
Delgado, have been invited to develop these themes
in various radio programmes during 2006. The aim
isto enter the territory of radio in order to transmit
and relate concerns, fictions, reports and knowledge,
or to establish public relations (in the public sense
of the term rather than the marketing sense) that
are able to capture the attention of an audience
that mainly never puts a foot in museums (and perhaps
rightly so). Guillermo Trujillano plans to infiltrate
himself with and into radio programmes in order to
carry out interventions in which, using formats such
as TV series, music programmes or camouflaged fiction,
he makes people see the often ridiculous world of
the arts. Taniel Morales, who has long experience
of radio at the NAM in Mexico, will also infiltrate
himself both inside and outside radio. Radio can
also be camouflaged outside its own reality: we should
not forget that the media are in effect nothing more
than places in which things are received. Through
a residency at the Can Xalant production centre in
Mataró that has just been opened, Morales
will do research into the world of new immigrants
as the basis for giving form to the creation of certain
connections and interruptions in the radio space
both in Barcelona and in Mataró. Radio Paca
will develop a whole series of resources and radio
channels so that women from the area and from other
parts of the world can discuss technologies and share
experiences. And Experimentem amb l’Art, with
David Armengol and José Antonio Delgado, will
convert the medium of radio into a creative platform
for introducing themes connected with exhibitions.
In other words, radio as an exhibition room.
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All this, of course, will be done through various radio networks around the country. We are not radio, we use simply it as a place in which to house projects: Radio Paca, Ràdio 4, Contrabanda, Ràdio Gràcia, Catalunya Ràdio, Ràdio i TV Tele Taxi, Mataró Ràdio, Com Ràdio, etc., will probably be some of our hosts, with the collaboration of La Mosca, d’Hispahard as technology partner, or Can Xalant as production partner. And all this can be seen on a website published for the occasion. Get ready! You never know where it will hit you! |
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