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THINK |
FERRAN BARENBLIT
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Guy Ben Ner. Moby Dick, 2000 |
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Over the last three years the CASM has proposed a regular operational procedure: to exhibit the work of a certain number of artists at the same time (between two and five), to maintain a regular agenda of activities and to run a certain number of non-exhibitive programmes in formats that range from pure research to proposals that never achieve material form. The exhibitions have almost always been new production projects, most of them created specifically for the centre and taking on their full meaning over the duration of the exhibition. A good number of them have gone on to become what we have come to refer to as expanded events. They have challenged some of the customary expectations of what we expect to find in an art centre. They have in many cases displaced the generation of objects into that of processes, putting the accent on the play of relations and positionings that the work of the artist generates in relation to its context. Those expanded events have sought to play with the traditional notion of the exhibition. Tere Recarens proposed a project of ten years’ duration (sealing up two containers during all that time, without our knowing what there is inside them). Joan Morey proposed a large film set on which he staged seven performances; those attending had to observe a series of strict requirements. Martí Anson worked throughout the duration of his exhibition on the construction of a sailing boat, which he destroyed on the day the exhibition closed, showing all the visitors what it is an artist does when he or she works… In short, a series of projects that, among other things, also question the very experience of art.
PENSA – PIENSA – THINK momentarily interrupts the dynamics of the generation of new production projects to present a series of already existing projects in a collective exhibition. Behind it all, a principal idea: art is a discipline from which to observe reality. That reality is the state of things as they in fact exist, and from the act of seeing it, analysing it, criticizing it and, when it comes to it, acting on it and short-circuiting it, we discover where its contradictions lie and how its characteristics can be dissected. They are visions that distance themselves from the documenting of our surroundings to ground themselves in fiction and in the generation of narratives that are almost always improbable or downright impossible. It is out of that impossibility, out of that back-to-front world, that the game of art is born: a mirror that does not reflect reality but endows it with other contents, exaggerates its edges and accelerates its processes. But, just like philosophy, art does not make things easier but adds confusion. That is its great attraction. It allows us to appreciate the ambiguity of multiple situations. That ambiguity very often takes the form of irony. I have spoken about this many times before, but allow me to repeat: irony is a mechanism for multiplying meanings and generating successive readings that interfere with and oppose one another. A system for providing ourselves with a layer of sarcasm when we come to address reality, for treating power as our equal and laughing at it, while making it believe, in the best of cases, that we are laughing with it. Or even for being clearly incisive and energetic. It doesn’t so much ‘exist’ as ‘happen’ when something is said and maybe, just maybe, the opposite is meant. In one way or another irony makes itself present in nearly everything that is presented in this exhibition, by relocating the actual meaning of the work in art in the faith of the spectator.
A large part of these fictions are so because they generate processes, places and attitudes that are not in fact of any use in the real world. They are parallel to it, but extract from it all notion of effectiveness. They generate large or small devices that are absolutely dispensable, like art itself. Many of those works lead to nothing. There is nothing in the room that Dora García keeps closed all through the duration of the exhibition. Or, if there is, it scarcely matters. Only she can enter it. Reality, there, has vanished. Meanwhile, in Aneta Grzeszykowska’s photo album the artist herself has vanished and
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Guy Ben Ner. Moby Dick, 2000 |
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nothing has taken her place. What is really important is not that there is nothing there, but what it generates: the space that it leaves free and that which it needs around it. That nothing is one of the protagonists of the exhibition, reminding us as it does that what matters is why. It also has a decided emotional component. And this may be the reason why many of the works presented here have a markedly fleeting aspect. They exist, or existed, in an ephemeral way. They could disappear at any moment. Some do no more than document transient moments of the past, like the calendar annotated by Tere Recarens or the photos that, like a kind of visual diary, recall her relationship with Montserrat Soto. Photos, quotes, recollections of a time that is now past and that is always defined as changing and fleeting.
A good way of addressing the reality we want to know is to dissect its institutions. Thus, art has interrogated art itself and its organisms. The very art centre, the museum, has been made the target of the artists’ scrutiny. That analysis has taken various directions. The first, that of the economic transactions that working in art generates. Some times, as in the projects that Maria Eichhorn and Daniel Chust Peters have undertaken for the CASM, that observation has been intensely detailed. Maria Eichhorn quantified every one of the costs involved in putting on her exhibition and documented them in extremely faithful reproductions of the invoices and receipts that had been generated. The visitors could take away a facsimile of the invoices that had been paid with public money (that is to say, with their own money, if we can assume that all the visitors |
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| Ahmet Ögüt. Three Spots, 2007 |
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were taxpayers). Daniel Chust Peters used the money to cover the production costs, in five euro notes, to reproduce his own studio yet again. If Maria Eichhorn showed documentation, he opted to show the banknotes. And neither the one nor the other moved an inch from their own work and commitment as artists: the first with her detailed and methodical analysis, the second with the form that he has chosen to make omnipresent in his work during two decades, that of his own studio. If one strand of the institutional critique is the issue of how the money is used, the other strand has been the question of power. Any institution (a museum, an art centre, a university) is an administrator of power. Nedko Solakov posited a fight with the curator of the exhibition —who was also the director of the centre and the author of these lines— in order to decide who was to impose their will on whom in the choice of project for the CASM.
Luis Bisbe, too, present in PENSA – PIENSA – THINK with a piece that recalls the continuous cycle to which I referred above, presented a project a year ago that involved this critique of the institution. He invited the visitors to the centre to contribute to his piece by adding their waste fluids to the liquid contained in his fountain —possessed, it must be said, of great beauty. Again we find ourselves with a case in which the time factor is a protagonist.
Art is a space of thought. Hence the title of this proposal. It is a place that is generated by thinking, and invites the spectator to think.
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