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Artificial. Figuracions contemporànies.
A cura de José Lebrero Stals.
MACBA, 1998 |
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ART AND ITS DOUBLE.
A NEW YORK PERSPECTIVE
27 NOV/ 1986 – 11 JAN/ 1987
Fundació Caixa de Pensions Cultural Centre, Barcelona
Artists: Ashley Bickerton, Sarah Charlesworth, Robert Gober, Peter Halley, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Matt Mullican, Tim Rollins & KOS, Peter Schuyff, Cindy Sherman, Haim Steinbach, Philip Taaffe
Curator: Dan Cameron |
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ARTIFICIAL. CONTEMPORARY FIGURATIONS
21 JAN – 13 MAR / 1998
MACBA
Artists: Richard Artschwagel, John Baldessari, Marie José Burki, Maurizio Cattelan, Jordi Colomer, Thomas Demand, Katharina Fritsch, Féliz González Torres, Stefan Hablützel, Duane Hanson, Damien Hirts, Bertrand Lavier, Mark Lewis, Allan McCollum, Malcom Morley, Pino Pascali, Charles Ray, Gerard Richter, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Slomiski
Curator: José Lebrero Stals |
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Art and its Double. A New York Perspective was a landmark exhibition in the history of art in this country. Curated by Dan Cameron in 1986 and presented first in Barcelona and then in Madrid, the show featured various artists who were working in NYC in the mid eighties who, beyond of exploring the diverse domains of postmodern art on the basis of a critique of representation and the subjective appropriation of reality and in this way mark a point of inflection in Spanish art, talked about attitudes. These, and their critical engagement, were among their principal virtues.
Eight years later the selfsame Dan Cameron brought to the exhibition rooms of the Centro de Arte Museo Reina Sofia Cocido y crudo, continuing the line formerly marked out by Magiciens de la terre ( J.-H. Martin), Documenta IX (Jean Hoet) and the Venice Biennale and opting strongly for a curator-driven exhibition in the form of an encounter between artists from different geographical, cultural and sociological backgrounds, the result being a thematic show whose starting point was Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous essay ‘Le Cru el le cuit’. Cocido y crudo brought together different typologies of foods that corresponded to the conceptual trope of associating the cooked with the civilized and the raw with the primitive. Though the show was criticised at the time for its budget, for the quality of the works and for the intention of the curator, it is now regarded as one of the best exhibitions to have been put on in this country in recent years.
Following on in the same direction, Artificial. Contemporary Figurations, curated by José Lebrero in the MACBA in 1998, once again exposed Barcelona to front-line artistic positions on the international scene, setting out to connect two clearly distinct historical moments and in this way make visible to the spectator certain underlying ideas and overlapping premises that provide a theoretical linkage between the two. With its plural vision of history, the exhibition also set out to provoke an analysis of the museum as institution. In itself, an example of an exhibition of individual works rather than of names.
Harald Szeemann, self-proclaimed ‘exhibition producer’, put forward a more individualistic vision of the condition of the curator in his show The Beauty of Failure / The Failure of Beauty at the Fundació Joan Miró in 2004. Szeemann was one of the emblematic exponents of that new professional category, the independent curator with no ties to the institution, and this comes out clearly in one of his paradigm projects, When Attitudes Become Forms, in 1969. A model of exhibition, like the one he put on in Barcelona as his contribution to the city’s Universal Forum of Cultures, that consisted in the selecting not of works but of artists. In itself, a way of constructing the exhibition that has the effect of bringing the curator into the creative sphere. This position, that of the curator as auteur, or even as artist, is one that Szeemann in particular pioneered and has since been taken up by many other curators and artists. |
