Karmelo Bermejo
dal 22/9/2011 al 26/11/2011
Segnalato da
22/9/2011
Karmelo Bermejo
MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporanea, Vigo
The Karmelo Bermejo exhibition is the fourth project in a series entitled 'Entering the work', on display in the first floor galleries of the museum. The exhibition is conceived as a 'work in layers', layers which are superposed, erased or complemented through their invisibility. A genuine piece painted over to look (falsely) ancient - a bogus falsification - speaks of how museums can re-set the value of objects, but it also alludes to the decontextualisation characteristic of ready-made retrospectives.
Curated by Agar Ledo Arias and Iñaki Martínez Antelo
The Karmelo Bermejo exhibition is the fourth project in a series entitled ENTERING THE WORK, on
display in the first floor galleries of the museum. The title of the series is taken from the famous
work by Giovanni Anselmo, Entrare nell’opera (1971). The paradox that surrounds the concept of
spectator and which situates the latter somewhere between passivity and action is the departure
point of this series of projects, which analyses the public, the visitor, the viewer, the audience, as an
integral part of the work.
This performance piece shows the same duality that is present in all of the artist’s works: on the one
hand it annuls the exhibition because access to the gallery is blocked, and on the other it represents
the artist’s entire oeuvre, by physically and conceptually encompassing all the other works in a built
institutional context that modifies the public’s perception of them.
Since its beginnings in the 18th century, the modern museum has rested on the concepts of
conservation, acquisition and education. Already since the Renaissance, the museum was conceived
as a utopia that encompassed the entire world, like a microcosm of the macrocosm2, or like an
accumulation of time, a place inside another place, or like a ‘heterotopy’ as Michel Foucault would
later describe it 3. Between the first and second waves of Institutional Critique the object of analysis
expanded out from the institution to other spaces, and it is this relationship between the subjects
cohabiting within the institution that particularly interests Karmelo Bermejo. Working from the
inside, he analyses this orthodoxy that characterised the mission of the museum since its origins
and critiques, not without irony, the functions of ideology and representation attributed to it.
By accepting as true all that we see in a museum, the spectator becomes part of the conventional
mechanisms of reception of the artistic work, thereby assuming a role that changed with the avant-
guards when the artist moved away from the centre of the artistic process and allowed the spectator
to step forward. The piece <. Pepita de oro macizo pintada de oro falso (2011) condenses this
antagonism between true and false. It addresses the idea of value in an art that ‘always turns the
real into a façade, into representation, and into a construction4’. Unpolished gold, as extracted from
nature, is confronted with its own representation in a strategy we encounter again in Postcolonial
Layer. Pieza arqueológica precolombina proveniente de un expolio, adquirida con dinero público en
una subasta europea y cubierta posteriormente con una pátina de falsa antigüedad (2011), where
the artist denounces the increase in value that happens to certain archaeological finds with the
passing of time.
The exhibition is conceived as a ‘work in layers’; layers which are superposed, erased or
complemented through their invisibility. A genuine piece painted over to look (falsely) ancient — a
bogus falsification — speaks of how museums can re-set the value of objects; but it also alludes to
the decontextualisation characteristic of ‘ready-made retrospectives. Bermejo’s pieces have a
transversal quality that suggests multiple meanings as well as a political dimension. In Attachment.
Cabeza de toro disecada girada 180o y empotrada en la pared (2008-2011) and - 0. Mástil de
bandera girado 180o y clavado en el suelo (2011), two sculptural pieces, the symbols of patriotism
in each (the bull’s head and the flagpole) are used in conjunction with a technique of occultation and
inversion of symbols, which is also the case of the earlier pieces Escarpias de oro macizo para
sujetar obras de arte. Las escarpias quedan ocultas por las obras de arte que sujetan (2009), o
Componente interno de la aspiradora del director de un Centro de Arte reemplazado por una réplica
de oro macizo con los fondos del Centro que él dirige (2010). Regarding the technique of inversion,
Bermejo seeks ‘to break the natural order of automatic understanding and to force the viewer to
participate in an event’6, as Joseph Kosuth said about his inverted images known as Cathexis.
Along the same line as the aforementioned piece, in which Ferrán Barenblit’s (director of the CA2M,
Madrid) vacuum cleaner was intervened upon and the funds he was responsible for were
supplemented as a result of the project, enriching him in the process, is Jacuzzi instalado en el
despacho del director con los fondos del Museo que él dirige (2011). Again we encounter the
technique of negation, since the public is denied access to the piece and is left to trust the
statement that appears on the information card, which is presented in a ‘de-materialised’ way and
projected, life-size, on a wall, in a simulacrum of fetish that introduces fiction into the exhibition as
well as the concept of physicality and presence/absence. We see the information card’s meaning
expanded, for in addition to being something that provides information, it is an intrinsic part of the
exhibition, of the construction of the work for Karmelo Bermejo opts to leave the card next to the
piece, in the director’s office, and move the projection to the exhibition space.
The irony underlying these works is also present in Transparencia 0. Réplicas en plomo macizo de
las obras de arte de la colección personal del director del Museo (2011). Here a series of lead
monochrome pieces are made in a foundry using moulds obtained from pieces in the private
collection of the institution’s director. The polychrome is eliminated, the image is faded, and with it
the work’s authorship is also hidden, as are its value and the director’s personal tastes. In the
gallery, the replicas are presented as an accumulation, as booty, without any information to help the
visitor form an idea of the individual tastes of the person responsible for choosing which artists and
works are to be shown in the museum. A conflict between public and private arises from these
strategies of occultation of content and cancels out the pieces’ true value.
Public money is the central pivot of the works 0. Devolución de una subvención del Ministerio de
Cultura por no haber realizado ninguna de las obras de arte para las que fue otorgada (2011), and +
0. Abono de los intereses por un año de demora en la devolución de la subvención (2011), both of
them consisting of two official documents and two bank documents stating that the artist gave back,
after previously accepting, a grant from the Ministry of Culture and assumed the 75.34 Euros
incurred through interest rates during the process. Had he rejected the grant he would not have
been able to secure the money, and by accepting it he prevented other artists from benefitting from
it. An artist’s private space should not be the object of public appreciation until he decides to stop
doing the work for which he is paid. Like Bartleby, the writer in the book by Herman Melville,
Karmelo Bermejo ‘preferred not to’, not to carry out the work for which the Ministry gave him 2000
Euros. Again the negation, this time as a response to bureaucracy and red tape; it is the same
negation that lingers in the air of Bartleby’s office and which permeates Bermejo’s work, in this case
because the artist chooses to defy the rules and regulations dictated by the structures of power and
remain inactive.
In 1920 Man Ray photographed Marcel Duchamp’s Le grand verre, also known as La mariée mise à
nu par ses célibataires, même, one of the most commented, disputed and interpreted works of the
20th century. The photograph was taken at a time when Duchamp’s ‘installation’ had already
gathered some dust due to a pause in the artist’s productivity when he was busy playing chess.
Entitled Élevage de poussière, the photograph can be described as an accumulation of dust
reflecting a conscious process going on in Duchamp’s mind: dust as a ready-made. Bartleby’s
negation and Duchamp’s deliberate inactivity are equivalent to Bermejo’s absenteeism from work,
which, by giving back the grant introduces in his work a reference to the mechanisms of (self-)
control in the public sphere of public money.
The public sphere and power relations is where the meaning of - 10.000. 10.000 euros de la
Fundación Botín enterrados (2011). The project consists of burying 10,000 Euros, awarded by the
Botín Grant for the Plastic Arts, in a public place. Placed inside an airtight box so that the bank notes
do not deteriorate, the money is rendered inaccessible and we know of its existence only thanks to a
bronze plaque put up at the site of the ‘treasure’. The spectator witnesses the result of an action
negated by the impossibility of seeing or verifying it. Like the aforementioned Jacuzzi instalado en el
despacho del director con los fondos del Museo que él dirige (2011), it is an Étant donnés with no
chance whatever of voyeurism”.
[Extract of the curatorial text for the exhibition catalogue]
Image: Karmelo Bermejo, Solid gold nugget painted in false gold, 2011
Courtesy of the artist
Photo: MARCO/María Urrutia
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