MERY CUESTA
“An effort of imagination is needed if culture is not to appear to be the monopoly of a few, resorting, if necessary, to the well known tactic announced by Seymour Hearts of giving culture to the public in an intelligent way.’.
Sabas Martín, Coordinator of Special Programmes, Radio 3
In art, doing radio and television is in vogue right now. The technical accessibility made possible by technological advances is mainly responsible for this, combined with an acute and unshakable sense that the production of art has arrived at scandalous extremes of abstraction and non-communication. ‘Streaming’ is the magic word that today expands smiles and pupils. Or what comes to the same thing, we are now in a position to broadcast on the Internet a) at minimal cost, b) with absolute freedom in the choice of contents, c) with potential access to a global public, and d) without having to go through troublesome bureaucratic procedures to obtain a broadcasting licence — procedures that were simply impossible to complete. Tasty, isn’t it? So it is hardly surprising to find reorientations like the one at Hangar, which in addition to piling on the technology so as to throw itself headlong and happily into these things, now includes within its ranks the valiant Radio Paca. Can Xalant in Mataró has also got itself a lovely little system to do radio.
And the agendas speak volumes, because 2006 saw a huge number of initiatives in relation to radio; within the Spanish State alone we have La Casa Encendida, which has incorporated activities related to radio into its programme on a regular basis, not only in the form of workshops (‘The Experimental Radio Laboratory’), but also by way of such promising projects as the Sound Effects Library. What is more, the centre ‘archives’ the activities it puts on in reportage format on MP3, ‘described by the protagonists themselves’ (the ‘reality’ effect is highly contagious). La Casa Encendida’s sound reports are something like what the MACBA is trying to do with Son(i)a, but in a less complicated way, and better. We should note, in any case, that these and other initiatives that art undertakes in the name of radio ultimately come down to a collection of archives, compilations of sound recordings and nothing more. This is not really radio. The art institution cannot yet boast of ‘doing radio’; in other words, making radio broadcasts with a minimum of regularity. In the last analysis the experiences in radio attempted from art have always ended up in the same old obsessive objectualization and artificialization.
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| A moment in the shooting of the video Llévame al museo, papi, by Guillermo Trujillano, 2006 |
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"I really can't get over this ardent and unanimous embrace of the radio by contemporary art. At times I get the feeling that this spontaneous enthusiasm conceals a sense of the impossibility of ever getting access to TV."
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In Barcelona, during the year that has recently ended two radio initiatives were developed that have achieved a notable resonance; one of these was Hem pres la ràdio (We’ve Taken the Radio), produced by the CASM. The intentions of its
curator, Jorge Luis Marzo, are good and attractive, because it is centred on a concept: infiltration, or getting art projects inside people’s homes without the listener running away or even being aware of it; ‘in an intelligent way’, as Sabas Martín counselled in a moment of enlightenment in his stale discourse.
As regards the experiences that We’ve Taken the Radio has hosted, I would like to remark that the research carried out by Morales, microphone in hand, among the immigrant communities of Mataró, though valuable and valiant, did not gain the reception it deserved, while Guillermo Trujillano’s radio soap opera Rebeca. Pasión de becas has become popular, basically thanks to its runaway sense of humour (real humour, something of a rarity in the terrain of art initiatives), capable, as Mr Martí Manen rightly says, of interesting even those who cannot be members of the art community because they don’t even know who Nuria Enguita or Antoni Abad are. In this project, the ambitions of We’ve Taken the Radio have been realized in full.
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| Some of the creators of Hempreslaradio |
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The other radio initiative that has been circulating around these latitudes is Novembro, which although a CGAC production, is the work of Júlia Montilla, an artist born and bred in Barcelona. This, too, is a radio soap opera, but with a more character than Trujilllano’s. While it shares the ‘intelligent’ strategy of Rebeca..., it doesn’t quite manage to camouflage itself: its atmosphere and pace are not those of a ‘commercial’ programme. The handling, however, is impeccable. And the fact is that it’s hard to mix entertainment with contemporary art: it can be done, but it’s very difficult, basically due to the intransigence of both fields, and the almost irremovable prejudices that each one sourly holds against the other.
However, today I am more optimistic about the attempts at infiltration and camouflage via the airwaves, in view of the general diarrhoea occasioned by the merest mention of the formula ‘contemporary art’, than about the classic form of incursion into radio by art. I am referring to a practice that artists have been developing for some few decades now in the medium of radio — a practice often lumbered with the awkward tag ‘Radio Art’. The fact is that, in general, when artists have made use of radio, they have done so in two ways. First, for its value as an object, as a musical instrument or even as a fetish. John Cage is a paradigm exponent of this approach, in actions such as Imaginary Landscape No. 4, for example, in which he emitted sounds at very low volume by way of twelve transistor radios. They say that Cage was beside himself with joy when he saw all the transistors in a line: ‘Ah! Twelve Golden Throats!’ he exclaimed, in reference to the make of the radios . But the principal way in which artists have used radio is as a loudspeaker for their projects, and sound artists have been specialists at this, with most of them treating radio as a mere medium of dissemination. The writer and radio-artist Gregory Whitehead sums up this state of affairs very well: ‘When the radio has appeared under the name of art, it is most often under the degraded guise of industrial artefact […]. Alternately, the investigation of radio has disappeared into the investigation of sound. Amén. If dissertations on art and radio almost inevitably come down to sound art it can only be because attempts to explore the mechanisms of the radio broadcast in its own language are few and far between.
But what can I say? I really can’t get over this ardent and unanimous embrace of the radio by contemporary art. At times I get the feeling that this spontaneous enthusiasm conceals a sense of the impossibility of ever getting access to TV, which continues to be the real obsession of the modern subject, the historic model of diffusion, Matrix and Dominatrix. In all probability the Internet will topple television, but even with streamings and all the rest, it will take some time before the change takes place, especially in our minds. Meanwhile, the particularities that radio possesses are what we should be making the most of. Radio is the ideal place to investigate the nature of the language itself, but in addition it exudes a certain humanity and sensuality that neither TV nor the Internet possesses, and has, what is more, the power to stimulate the visual imagination and to generate emotional spaces in an unlimited number of anonymous individuals that abandon themselves to the particular act of listening. So we won’t bore you.
Diversos autors. Radio 3: 20 años – Una crónica de la
cultura pop en España, Ed. La Máscara, Valencia, 1998.
ARIZA, Javier / GARCIA-OCHOA, Luis (eds.). Kostelanetz:
John Cage en radio y cinta, Ed. Radio Dontana Mix, Cuenca, 1994.
KHAN, Douglas, WHITEHEAD, Gregory. Wireless
Imagination: Sound, radio and the avantgarde, The Mitt
Press, Massachusets, 1994.
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