calendario eventi  :: 

X

19/5/2010

Two readings on the collection

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

History becomes effective to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being, wrote Michel Foucault. For most of its existence, the museum has done the exact opposite. Far from recognising the tension between the inscrutability of meaning and the opening to another language in the modern art work, the museum has watered it down to a contemplation that has become an auratic ritual frozen in a distant past.

Dos lecturas sobre la colección (Two readings on the collection), along with La Colección Reescrita (Rewriting The Collection) represents an attempt to reintroduce the staging of diverse timeframes and heterogeneous periods involving the historical narrative and its own materiality within the museum. In so far as it is an institution that orders objects, artefacts, documents and the relationships between these things and the public in a series of narrations, the museum must consider not only which stories it is to tell, but also what devices to employ for their narration. In its curatory role, the museum is aware that in order to reintegrate art as an anomaly or symptom, in the style of Didi-Huberman, it must not only explore the histories that it includes, but also the forms in which this historicity is presented.

Two readings on the collection are two ways of looking at this temporary discontinuity by making a theme of the very same devices that they are constructed from. On the one hand, Juan Luis Moraza uncovers a history buried in various chronological layers, presented as a pure accumulation of images, objects and documents. El retorno de lo imaginario. Realismos entre XIX y XXI (Return of the imaginary. Realism between XIX and XXI) alludes to anachronism as the staging of time and to the history of art as the anthropology of image through a homage to Juan Antonio Ramírez, staunch defender of art history as an iconic-verbal discourse. On the other hand, Rosa Barba avoids interpreting the past with the categories of that very same past, presenting in Una conferencia comisariada (A curated conference) a choreographed collection of multiple artistic declarations relating to how memory transforms the past.

The return of the imaginary. REALISM BETWEEN XIX AND XXI
(A tribute to Juan Antonio Ramírez)
by Juan Luis Moraza

Despite the enormous technical and stylistic differences, the art of the 21st century can be seen as unexpectedly similar to that of the end of the 19th century. In the era of simulation, of augmented reality, of the omnipresence of photography, of the hyper-real transparency of the culture of advanced capitalism, our glimpses of art at the start of the 21st century do not indicate a return to “the real” (which would have been crushed by the avant-garde anti-naturalism and its abstract, conceptual developments of adaptation and revelation, by the intense crisis of all systems and conventions of representation or by aestheticism, etc.), but rather the persistence of the imaginary, in new forms of realism that retroactively allow the reinterpretation of 20th century art as the institutional unfolding of new modes of confidence in its representation.

Taking as an exhibition model the long tradition of the polyptych (from the altarpiece –arranged using geometric principles-, to the multi-coloured modern cabinets -surrealists, constructivists, minimalists, etc., through the first large public collections, the “collection pieces”, and the salons of the 19th century), we have a chromatic mosaic in which it is the relationships between the works which evoke the contents of the exhibition. It is not about producing what would nowadays be considered an unusual exhibiting style, but rather, deliberately sacrificing the isolation that would allow the clean contemplation of each work separately. This would increase the relationships between the works and in this way, offer the image of a constellation, of a system that is ordered yet open, constructed from the links between the pieces. It does not claim to be exhaustive, but rather to transmit in a sensitive manner the systemic condition of art. The exhibition breaks down the notion of a history of art made up of clear stylistic differences to recognise that each style is nothing other than a prevention of simplification, given that each work of art combines, in a proportional manner, the entire spectrum of its constituent factors: perception, emotion, information, organisation, materiality and context.

In this way the exhibition is a diagram organised both temporally and representationally. In chronological terms, the walls are organised in three time bands: : (1) the upper band corresponds to works from the 19th century, between 1881 and 1907; (2) the central band to works from the 20th century, between 1900 and 1980; and (3), the lower band to works from the 21st century, from 1980 to the present day. In representational terms, the exhibition is organised into three zones, based on three main types of realism and corresponding to three semiotic modalities.

II. Iconic Realism. Refers to evidence of what is felt, what is perceived, according to similarity: represent the object as perceived in relation to its similarity to other objects, independent of its essential qualities:

II.a. SENSORY REALISM. The naturalism of the 19th century, based on the sensory immediacy developed in the 20th century in the form of figurative art and photorealism, and in the 21st century, on a documentalism based on the supposed neutrality of technical methods of audio-visual recording.

II.b. EMOTIONAL REALISM. The caricaturism of the 19th century, based on the exaggeration of experience, would develop in the 20th century into all the forms of expressionism and surrealism that are based on evidence coming from the senses. In the 21st century, this sensitivity would translate into different modes of fictionalism, parody, identifications and intensified realities.

III. Symbolic Realism. Refers to evidence of what is known, what is thought, according to a representative character of conventionality: establish a shared correspondence

III.a. . STRUCTURAL REALISM. The academic formalism of the 19th century, preoccupied with formalisation and organisation, would develop in the 20th century as a focus on revealing underlying forms, which would convert organization into theme and the form into figure. It would ultimately, in the medialism of the 21st century, convert the mediums of expression into the work of art’s fundamental and perhaps even unique content.
III.b. CONCEPTUAL REALISM. The conventionalism of the 19th century, as seen in the search for the representative and the modes of symbolic formalisation, would develop in the 20th century as emblematic naturalism, based on the adoption of diverse kinds of symbolic classifications and reaching a kind of static and diffuse form represented by simulationism in the 21st century

I. Indicative Realism. Refers to the evidence of what it is, in accordance with a corresponding representative character: it points to the confluence between two experiences.

I.a. MATERIAL REALISM. The realism of the 19th century, conceived as an effort of objectivity which minimises subjectivity and style, would develop in the 20th century as a focus on literality and adaptation to the “true” material, even attempting to surpass representation by “presenting” the objects themselves in a kind of primitive declaration. This literalism would, in the 21st century, lead to a contextualism in which reality itself is subsumed in representation and the borders between reality and representation become blurred.

I.b. CONTEXTUAL REALISM. The realism of the 19th century, conceived as a radical mode of contemporaneity by which the context is understood through the work, would in the 20th century develop into the contextual subject matter of all forms of political art, including situationism, and in the 21st century, into the treatment of representation as a social agent, as has happened in relational aesthetics.
(Juan Luis Moraza)

--------------------

A Curated Conference. On the Future of Collective Strength Within an Archive
by Rosa Barba

It is the aim of this conference to draw together a representation of artists of the 20th and 21st century, and bring their informed opinion to bear on the significant questions of art. A set of neat conclusions is neither expected nor desired. It is hoped that progress will be made in the exposure of hidden assumptions and in the uprooting of obsolete ideas, and in the framing of new questions and ageless urges.

I have invited these artists, through their works, to take part in a conference on the collective consciousness within an archive. Many of these artists are not contemporaries; some are recent arrivals at the Reina Sofia, others have spent much of their existence here, but now find themselves performing together on the same stage. I would like these pieces to play out to each other and converse.

Perhaps then this ‘gathering together’ is a conference, but even more a choreographed session, closer to the arrangement of a performance, with the works reacting to each other in a rhythm of questions and answers.

There will be difficulties. We are all trying to think aloud – and simultaneously trying to communicate with each other, trying to clarify things which have not been made clear before. The question is: what is essential in a work of art? This meeting is about realising a statement in a moment of truth without considering consequences - “What had to be said”.

Each artist speaks with their own voice in their own language, temperament and volume. Their conference is an anarchic one, yet it is orchestrated like a concert, like a band that plays together or a choir joining together for a song. The archive as dateless individual expressions, choreographed like a musical score. Yet they can all raise their voices together for a relentless timelessness in art.
(Rosa Barba)

Image: view of installation by Rosa Barba
'Two readings: A Curated Conference. On the Future of Collective Strength Within an Archive, 2010

Opening 19 May 2010, only by invitation

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia
Edificio Sabatini, Planta 3
Santa Isabel, 52 Madrid
Monday to Saturday: 10:00 – 21:00 h
Sundays: 10:00 – 14:30 h
Tuesdays: Closed

stampa

permanent link