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30/10/2013

Garmendia, Maneros Zabala, Salaberria

Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao

Curated by: Lucía Agirre and Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Garmendia, Maneros Zabala, Salaberria. Process and Method, an exhibition that examines the careers of three Basque creators who were born in the late 1960s and the 1970s whose practice shares a common interest in history as fodder for inquiry and revision. The show surveys the careers of these artists via their most important works, showing the mutual feedback among them, and it also displays three new works created especially for the Museum, which will become part of the Bilbao collection.

The analysis of history as a way to evidence its contradictions and ambiguities is a shared strategy in the artistic practice of Iñaki Garmendia, Erlea Maneros Zabala, and Xabier Salaberria. Beyond deconstructing the history itself, these artists more subtly and imperceptibly express a “shared sensibility,” such that the processes of re-creation, appropriation, and reinterpretation are part of their approaches to the concept of art.

We can also discern in these artists a phenomenological view of the state of matters, which is coupled with a vision that encompasses the experience of the everyday. Their avenues of inquiry, both shared and relevant, do not take shape in a uniform aesthetic expression but in vectors that make up a pluralistic web. This mesh has a substrate which sometimes has to do with territory and other times with the history of the ideas and artistic movements of the 20th century.

Throughout the third floor of the Museum, the exhibition brings together photographs, videos, engravings, drawings, watercolors, and installations created between 2001 and today, reflecting the diversity of mediums and techniques used by these contemporary artists. The works in the show come from a variety of museums, galleries, and private collectors, as well as from the artists’ own collections. The exhibition analyzes the careers of these three artists from the Basque Country who represent three very different ways of approaching the process of revising, decontextualizing, and creating new realities based on different reference-histories that therefore prompt personal and highly unique interpretations by viewers.

Iñaki Garmendia
The section devoted to Iñaki Garmendia (Ordizia, Guipúzcoa, 1972), a prominent figure in contemporary Basque art who has been exhibiting in Spanish and international galleries and museums for almost two decades, shows a number of works which were created in a context marked by paradoxical tendencies, developing an esthetic which bears heterogenic meanings.

Garmendia records highly specific processes, actions, and elements from the local intra-history, the history of art, and youth music and subcultures, disassociating them from their most meaningful aspects and placing them instead in a global context. It is difficult for viewers to identify these images—either in videos, performances, photographs, or drawings—as they search for the clue to decipher them based on their own experiences. Thus, their interpretation has a strong personal yet simultaneously universal component. At this point, Garmendia’s work is based on an exclusion regimen, which sometimes affects the medium of representation and other times becomes more metaphoric.

Iñaki Garmendia’s artistic oeuvre is represented in this show by such important works as the series Txitxarro (2000), Blow After Blow (Kolpez kolpe, 2003), Red Light/ Straight Edge (2006), Untitled Orbea (Orduña) (S/T Orbea [Orduña], 2007), No R.S. (99 Red Love Balloons) (2008), Untitled (Six Peaks) (Sin título [seis picos], 2011), and finally Ikaraundi – EQDALOS (Head Kneeling Against the Wall) (Ikaraundi - EQDALOS [burua paretan kontra belaunikatuta], 2013), created specifically for the exhibition. These works reveal the two avenues of inquiry pursued by the artist which are often interrelated: first, the decontextualization and fragmentation of cultural objects and icons, and secondly the study and reinterpretation of experimental audiovisual recording and editing processes.

Txitxarro is the name of a famous disco in Guipúzcoa (Basque Country) which the terrorist group ETA destroyed with a bomb in 2000; this event inspired Iñaki Garmendia to develop a series of works that stretched over the course of more than a decade. In these works, created in a variety of mediums and techniques, Garmendia reveals one of the venues near highway N-634 where young Basques had fun and hung out during the 1980s, while it also presents the harsh image of ETA’s persistent extortion of industrialists, using the image of the disco’s fence as a symbol of survival. These works are laden with political and social content to the local audience but become mere images of destruction to outsiders. The same holds true of his works on Basque villas, a kind of typological catalogue of the Basque homes (Villas Basques) which popped up along the southern coast of France, imitating the style of the traditional country house. Likewise, this disconnect between the local and the foreign can clearly be seen in such significant audiovisual pieces as Blow After Blow (2003) and CCC-MT* (All the Measures Are Taken) (2011).

At the same time, the exhibition also features several examples of this artist’s work on the body, including Down (Bozo, 1998/2013), a dramatic audiovisual piece which uses sexually explicit images to convey to viewers the constant sense that something is about to happen. Rendered in 2013 using audiovisual material from 1998, this allusion of the proto-queer and proto-feminist Barbara Rubin film Christmas on Earth (1963) reveals Garmendia’s fascination with the human body, through either its absence or its presence, while it also refers to the his early work, since the video it is based on was recorded in 1998 as he was participating in a creative workshop taught by Ángel Bados and Txomin Badiola at the Guipúzcoa-based art center Arteleku, a “foundational moment” for the artist.

One example of the different interpretations of Iñaki Garmendia’s work whose significance and meaning can differ or converge depending on the viewer’s own history and personal baggage is Red Light/Straight Edge (2006). This is a double screening that shows two people singing two songs from 1980s subculture bands a cappella. The absence of instruments and the atmosphere created forces viewers to focus on the words and expressions of the performers’ faces and bodies.

The work created specifically for this exhibition, Ikaraundi – EQDALOS (Head Kneeling Against the Wall) (2013), is a synthesis of Garmendia’s previous work. Based on the remaining images of the now-vanished bust that Jorge Oteiza made of the head of painter José Sarriegui, this work has numerous artistic-cultural connotations. To tackle this project, Garmendia studied the meager photographs still surviving of Sarriegui’s bust in order to reconstruct the past using a variety of techniques and processes, from industrial engineering computer programs to direct modeling. What is left to us from this entire process is traces of different mediums, such as the video in which he treats the head as a formal and self-referential device, emphasizing its iconic objectuality in a way reminiscent of his works Bomber and Untitled Orbea (Orduña), which are also on display in this show: However, in this work he includes his own voice, which tells a disjointed story that skips through time. In this way, Garmendia devises a personal puzzle for both himself and the viewer.

Erlea Maneros Zabala
The exhibition also runs through the classical galleries on the third floor, which feature the creations of Erlea Maneros Zabala (Bilbao, 1977), an artist who lives in Los Angeles. From there, she has launched a promising international career, with exhibitions in galleries and art centers all over the world. The nature of representation, the treatment of the image, and the interpretation of history by the mass media as elements comprising contemporary narratives is at the core of this Bilbao-born creator’s artistic inquiry.

In the work Ilustración Española y Americana, 1894 (2007/13) Maneros Zabala appropriates, inverts, transforms, and serializes a representation with vast historical meaning in the local context: an 80 meters tall iron tower in the guise of a modern “tree of Gernika,” which would have served as the point of convergence between modernism and tradition and was designed to be located in the center of the city of Bilbao. To contrast with this work, which brings an unrealized historical, political, and social project into the present, the artist created Basque Graphics; Typography and Ornament: 1961–1967) (Grafía Vasca; tipografía y ornamentación: 1961–1967, 2013) specifically for the Museum, a work that consist of 39 copper plate engravings that reproduce some pages of the periodical publication Sine Nomine, which was published, printed in cyclostyle, and distributed underground by the Basque clergy after its fellow underground religious magazine, Egiz (1950–1952), was banned. Both the history and social significance of Sine Nomine have been revisited by the artist from the Benedictine archive in the town of Lazkao, Guipúzcoa. Basque Graphics reinterprets her previous series, yet whereas before she focused on the image and its conceptual complexity which was dampened by decontextualization, now her analysis revolves around typography, thus shifting her focus from the formal aspects of the image to the formal aspects of the text.

The artist forges a similar dialectic in Untitled (Los Angeles Times Archive on Microfilm, May 2007) (2008), although this time Maneros Zabala stresses the notion of archaeology by starting with an obsolete printing technology. Large black-and-white images archived on microfilm and excerpted from the Los Angeles Times are displayed on a large wall that serves as a matrix where the text accompanying the images has been eliminated. In this work, the medium itself plays a role, not only a technical or mechanical one but also a conceptual one in that it invites the viewers to survey the initial images and interpret them in a new context.

In turn, in her series Untitled, Thursday, November 1st, 2001, Los Angeles Times and New York Times, 2005–13and partly decontextualizes them by disassociating them from the newspapers pages where they were originally published, although she does retain this relationship in the title. These snapshots of the bombings in Afghanistan, now turned into poetically beautiful watercolors, question viewers about the role of the mass media in the construction of public opinion, and especially about the beliefs generated in the images we have of the East.

The same idea is echoed in Untitled (Orientalist Studies) (2010), a series of glass vitrines made of flimsy materials which display a series of collages in which the artist yet again introduces references to the clichéd representation of the East in Western culture. Likewise, the show also features Exercises on Abstraction (Series I, II, III, and IV), 2007–13, in which the artist reproduces the technique of marbled paper on thin, immaculate newsprint.

Xabier Salaberria
Xabier Salaberria (San Sebastián, 1969), who was the winner of the Basque government’s Fine Arts Prize, is consolidating his almost decade-long career of taking part in major solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries in both Spain and the rest of Europe.
Salaberria’s practice is unique in his generation, as he travels through the terrain where art, design, and architecture converge. The history of modernity, which the artist calques onto his sculptural or architectural installations has proven to be fruitful ground for the artist’s intellectual inquiry throughout his career. The artist often uses collaborative strategies and relational participation, which generate unexpected connections between the audience and other art agents. Through this practice, he reflects on the concept of sculpture in the 21st century, the notion of modernism, and relational art.

When developing his projects. Salaberria often draws inspiration from modernist architects, such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe or Gerrit Rietveld. Many appear in this universe of references, both textual and otherwise, from Jorge Oteiza, alluded to in Debacle (2009), a modular structure that morphs into work of art thanks to the artist’s conceptual action, to Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass, as the formal support of his sculpture from the series Unconscious/Conscious (Inkontziente/kontziente, 2011–13). In the installation A.T.M.O.T.W. (2013), created specifically for the show, he reflects on the museum as a place of representation. The work contains references to his previous works, including Martello (2012) and Unconscious/Conscious. A.T.M.O.T.W. stands for All The Material Of The World, the cover of a publication by the same name that the artist made in 2010 for the 20th edition of Gure Artea. The title is likewise a statement of intentions which reveals an encyclopedic projection in which the Museum’s architecture serves as the subtext. This time architect Gerrit Rietveld is one of the touchstones for a work which looks like a watchtower in which numerous references to his previous works are inscribed or to which they gravitate, such as Hammer and Unconscious/Conscious. The scale of the installation is determined by a brick module which serves as a unit of measurement across which the constructed volume unfolds. This semantics of deferred accumulation is what is transformed into the substrate and method of generating this new project, which plays with the intersection between art, architecture, and design.

Xabier Salaberria, who is also a member of the group of artists and critics who participated in the Arteleku workshop in 1998, deconstructs the history of modernism, the history of the Industrial Revolution, and the serialization of mass production, interpreting their objects-artifacts or exhibition displays. His eye is tightly honed in on a period in history in which the local context serves as the substrate upon which his oeuvre lies, with the development of notions such as the Oteizian concepts of the object and space.

Catalog
The exhibition catalog explores the oeuvre of Iñaki Garmendia, Erlea Maneros Zabala, and Xabier Salaberria through an illustrated survey of some of their most representative works and through essays written by Tanja Baudoin, Peio Aguirre, Miren Jaio, and exhibition curators, who further explore the meaning and scope of their art.

Educational area
The exhibition is complemented by an educational area located in the corridor next to the classical galleries. This area features the artists’ working processes and the key subject matter appearing in the show, such as history, process, and appropriation, through texts, audiovisuals, and a select bibliography chosen by the artists themselves. These materials enable visitors to learn more about the artists’ areas of interest and sources of inspiration.

Visits with the artists
Iñaki Garmendia, Erlea Maneros Zabala, and Xabier Salaberria will explain the keys to their working methods and the works they are showing in the exhibition at three encounters with the public:
- Thursday, October 31st – Erlea Maneros Zabala
- Thursday, November 7th – Iñaki Garmendia
- Thursday, November 21st – Xabier Salaberria

Meeting point: Information desk, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. Free of charge. Participants must register in advance on the Museum’s website. Limited to 20 people /minimum 5 (Museum admission not included).

Department of Communication and Marketing
Tel: +34 944359008 media@guggenheim-bilbao.es

Guggenheim Museum
Avenida Abandoibarra, 2 48001 Bilbao
Tuesday to Sunday 10 am to 08 pm
Monday closed.
July and August open every day.
The Museum will be closed on December 25 and January 1.
On December 24 and 31 the Museum will close at 5 pm
Adults: 8 €
Senior: 5 €
Groups: 7,50 €
Students: (< 26 years) 5 €
Children and Museum Members free

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