calendario eventi  :: 

X

4/10/2012

Five exhibitions

Artium, Vitoria-Gasteiz

Pull the Thread. ARTIUM Collection
North, South and Lower East galleries, from 05/10/2012 to 03/03/2013

Pull the Thread is a many-sided project from the ARTIUM Collection with which the museum is commemorating the 10th anniversary of its opening. With an almost 40-year history, the collection has established an overview of art from our immediate cultural context, from the avant-garde that developed in the years preceding the Spanish Civil War until today. The artistic proposals developed in Spain, and in particular the Basque Country and Alava, have throughout these years been the main aim of this contemporary art collection, which was begun by the Provincial Council of Alava in the 1970s. Together with the acquisition and incorporation of many international art deposits over the last decade, this heritage today provides us with a coherent reading of complex contemporary artistic reality, from modernity to the present day. But what is it that these over 3,000 pieces have in common, each so different from the other, so complex, sometimes poignant, ironic, while others are seemingly mute, others strident? Theories drawn from aesthetics, the social sciences or philosophy, but mainly from the field of art itself, have attempted to provide an answer to this question. Through three interconnected exhibitions, Pull the Thread presents a multi-sided approach to that which constitutes the subject of the artistic work process, of art.

The exhibition’s premise is based on the conviction that art discourses are aimed at three directions when it comes to their main objectives and these ultimately encompass the complexity of artistic practices.

First, those that are aimed at treating the world, external fields in which the political and social act within a setting that definitively determines where art is critically expressed or at least confirms this. The exhibition Montage of Attractions attempts to address these issues.

Second, the direction of these practices is becoming inward, on an introspective path that is trying to respond in multiple ways to the constant questions we ask about ourselves, from our anguish and the search for any explanation or in transcendent expression. Visceral Soul is the exhibition arising from these issues.

Finally, the third approach to be analysed is art that refers to art. This self-referentiality, so widely displayed throughout the history of art, leads to the desire for self-justification, the approach of the premises that construct and articulate the complexity of the very existence of art through theory and philosophy. Mirror Image attempts to investigate such reasons.

As noted earlier, the first approach is presented in the North Gallery under the title Montage of Attractions. This project has adopted cinema as a reference, establishing a parallel between exhibition montage and film montage in order to present a story resembling the cinematographic from which it will seek to address a – partial and deliberately subjective – review of the ARTIUM collection in terms of its socio-political aspect, with all the contradictions and complexities that this may entail. The basis at all times is a focus from the realm of micropolitics in an attempt to create an aesthetic research environment.

In addition, Visceral Soul is a journey towards the interior of a person, the dark, transgressive side of our nature, as a way of accessing greater knowledge of oneself and after the need to visualise the restlessness of human beings, our desires, anxieties and possibilities. The exhibition in the Lower East Gallery of the museum has introspection as one of its main generative principles, with works that delve beyond social conventions and agreements into that which has been excluded from our shared space because it is grotesque, immoral or non-normative.

And finally, Mirror Image, currently showing in the South Gallery of the museum, looks at the need for art to analyse itself in an attempt at self-regulation, knowledge and reference. The concept of the autonomy of art, art for art’s sake, that originated from idealist aesthetics has become one of the foundations of art throughout modernity and is in full force today. The exhibition deals with the practice of art dissecting its own history, the role of the artist, its context and functions.

In all three cases, each exhibition begins with a single work by the artist Jorge Oteiza: Tribute to Velázquez, a conclusive work in the aesthetic development of this artist from Orio and the culmination of his “experimental purpose”, a study on the relationship between void and matter, the space of the sacred and of the human. The work acts as a turning point between artistic praxis and the development of an increasingly conceptual process, aesthetic and linguistic research and his humanist commitment, with social and political implications in his immediate environment. The Jorge Oteiza Foundation in Alzuza, Navarra, has participated in the project with a loan of two studies of this piece, which together with the one acquired by the museum from the artist in 1984, paradoxically allows us to present the same work in the three galleries. The same source for three different exhibitions that provide a comprehensive overview of contemporary art through the ARTIUM Collection.

------

Montage of Attractions (Pull the Thread. ARTIUM Collection)
North Gallery, from 05/10/2012 to 06/01/2013

This project has adopted cinema as a reference, establishing a parallel between exhibition montage and film montage in order to present a story resembling the cinematographic. From this starting point, it will seek to address a —partial and deliberately subjective— review of the ARTIUM collection in terms of its socio-political aspect, with all the contradictions and complexities that this may entail.

The title is an appropriation of the type of Soviet montage developed by Sergei Eisenstein, one of the key names associated with the Soviet school of the 1920s and 30s, who viewed cinema as an intellectual and dialectical construct. At the same time, it aims to ironically refer to the inclusion of art in the realm of performance and the entertainment industry.

Eisenstein argued for a dialectical cinema, for film that is less a representation than articulated discourse. It essentially involves taking two seemingly unrelated ideas and bringing them together, thereby giving them an ideological connotation and symbolism.

The exhibition opens with Homenaje a Velázquez by Jorge Oteiza, after which the next milestone is Oteiza’s own archive, which contains material from his film entitled Acteón, which was never completed. Oteiza viewed cinema as an essential aspect of people’s aesthetic education and embarked on his cinematographic project to pursue the viewer. There is also a connection with Brecht and Eisenstein’s ideas about the medium in his quest to “rouse the audience from it’s self-absorption, forcing it to abandon its passiveness as a mere recipient of stories and turning it into a participant in a work that cannot exist without its active presence.”

Following on from this, a series of works reflects on the socio-political and the impossibility of representing this. The basis at all times is the need to focus on this subject from the realm of micropolitics in an attempt to create an environment of aesthetical research.

In formal terms, the proposal is full of references to the world of cinema, not only because of what may be contained in the pieces themselves (frames,“artistic flou”, split-screens, etc), but also in the use of devices such as ellipses, elements outside the field of vision—including works outside the exhibition room— and flashbacks—by introducing works by artists who occupied this selfsame gallery space in the previous exhibition—as well as flash forwards, motifs and jump cuts.

The rhythm gradually alters as the exhibition moves on from the opening sequences, in which a much more literal allusion to film is sought, and begins to deal with issues such as the construction of identities, situations that reveal Eurocentric postcolonial attitudes to violence(s) in the realm of the domestic and social, as well as the problems of exploitation, terrorism, armed violence and military conflicts. The music for some pieces has also been established as a means to channel these issues and functions as a metaphor, a soundtrack to a tale with clear dystopian features and suffocating pessimistic cynicism. In short, the exhibition, like Oteiza’s film, attempts to overcome the distinction between what happens and what is explained, and its narrative outline, as in Acteón, is a snare that ensures that that which might occur actually happens to the viewer.

------

Mirror Image (Pull the Thread. ARTIUM Collection)
South Gallery, from 05/10/2012 to 01/09/2013

This exhibition, entitled Mirror Image, considers works in the ARTIUM collection from the point of view of experimentation, the development of artistic languages and self-referential approaches over the course of the history of art. The notion of art for art’s sake grew out of the aesthetics of idealism, which championed the autonomy of the world of ideas as a form of knowledge. Throughout the 20th century, from the early avant-garde movements to the present day, many artistic practices engaged in a direct dialogue with art by interacting with its history and language, underscoring its divorce from other educational, moral or utilitarian functions.

Jorge Oteiza’s piece Homenaje a Velázquez (Tribute to Velázquez; 1957) opens this fascinating look at a complex interweaving of quotations, references, tributes and manifestos which, as you pull on one of the threads, reveal the continuing breaks and evolutions that art has undergone in the last hundred years. The seams in this fabric that give us a new appreciation of the striving for renewal in Spanish art during the Franco dictatorship stitch together experiments in material and gesture from which abstraction emerged as the principal tool of renovation. This path was regarded by many as a process in which art split away from the real world and became defined from a political standpoint but lacking in ideology. Though it was never entirely thus, strictly speaking, art for art’s sake built a space of creative freedom at a time of tight social and cultural restraints. The artists featured in this exhibition put all their effort into their artistic language and the relevance of their medium, but at the same time they openly criticised and analysed the phenomenon of art and its impact on people’s lives.

In this early period, the mechanisms of representation looked inwards, but from the 1970s onwards the perception and interpenetration of art and its context were the main field of inquiry. This project spotlights the work of artists who preserved the value of their language but who used it to point to the cracks in modern objectivity, adding layers of subjectivity and skin to their analysis. The crisis in discourses and values in the closing decades of the century resulted in a biting, critical consideration of the object, prompting all kinds of questions. What is it that makes something a work of art? What makes the person who produced it an artist? Above all, what is it that makes this effort meaningful? These and other reflections were explored, not without melancholy, through criticism but also parody and irony. Similarly, there were many artists who turned to art history. Killing one’s father, in the Freudian sense, became a common attitude that combined adoration with head-on opposition to earlier approaches. The search for a solution to the crisis in postmodernity is in many instances reflected in eclecticism, in the quotation or appropriation and in the analysis of the codes employed up until this time. The dilemma of originality and authorship have become a central concern, pointing to the sociological aspects of the practice of art.

This exhibition leads us through familiar areas of art, giving us a feeling of déjà vu pervaded by a sense of both recognition and suspicion. Art looks inwards in order to theorise on its nature and to speculate on its mysteries, creating an archive of mechanisms and elements of creation. The display concludes with a number of pieces that examine the limits of this process, its institutions, agents and servants—bringing us to a halt in our immediate cultural context—which, because of their proximity to us, imbue this analysis with special signification.

------

Visceral soul (Pull the Thread. ARTIUM Collection)
Lower East Gallery, from 05/10/2012 to 03/02/2013

The exhibition Visceral Soul is part of the Pull the Thread project, in which the ARTIUM Collection is being displayed around the museum. The main thesis of the project, which is organised into three exhibitions curated by staff at the museum, is that all the shows are based on a single key work in the collection, Jorge Oteiza’s Homenaje a Velázquez (Tribute to Velázquez). The fact that this piece is capable of forming the starting point of these three exhibitions that each pull the thread and take different directions demonstrates its far-reaching impact.

One of the three exhibitions, Montage of Attractions, deals with the relationship between art and the world, the realms beyond, the social context. Another, Mirror Image, explores art’s relationship with itself, the self-references in works to other works, to trends in art or discourses. The third, Visceral Soul, considers introspection, the eye turned inwards.

With these three shows, the circle of essential concerns that art speculates on is closed.

Visceral Soul, as its title indicates, is a metaphor for our own ability to muster arguments for survival in the whirlwind of life, our determination to carry on until the end.

There is nothing more natural for the human being than confirming his own objectuality and, above all, establishing an intense and ongoing dialogue between his present life and certain death, something that in other terms is called the philosophy of transcendence.

For this reason, Visceral Soul is based on the conviction that art is also a medium that enables creators and artists to express themselves in every possible way, their interest in themselves, fears, questions, introspective gazes, doubts, the desire for transcendence, the meaning of their simple presence in the world. All of this occupies a central place in what we term the discourses of art.

This show is, then, a consideration of this creative tendency. It springs from Oteiza’s Homenaje a Velázquez (1958), in which the artist’s own metaphysics is starkly evident in his demonstration of the three dimensions and a fourth inside the interior void. This is what we here term The Womb, the beginning of everything, from which emerges, by pulling the thread, a series of works that are interpreted in terms of birth and humans’ acquisition of understanding and inner consciousness.

The exhibition, abounding in works of every kind, technique, style and generation, seeks to spin a thread by interpreting an account and re-examining with the public the various allusions to concepts directly related to the reflective poetics of the inner universe.

Consequently, after the opening, with the abovementioned reference to The Womb, it continues with The Leap, the acquisition of awareness, The Double, in which the other and difference appear, The Liquid, understood as the flow of life, Inside, which deals with sense and guts, The Relationship, in which the family and socialisation are given voice, The Head and Confusion, as the intimate links between mediatised gazes, and lastly The Question, which brings us to abstraction, the sign and transcendence.

------

ARTIUM 2002-2012: graphic and documentel memories
Seminar Room, from 05/10/2012 to 31/03/2013

Using the catalogues, brochures, invitations and posters published by the museum, the exhibition documents the history of the museum since its inauguration 10 years ago, as well as the graphical information and newspaper articles that have been written about the Centre.

Taking as its starting point all the graphical documentation relating to the origins of ARTIUM, it exhibition proposes a chronological review of the exhibitions and activities of the Museum, offering the information that has been used to organise, manage and disseminate these activities. This documentation may be consulted through a virtual content manager.

------

And you, what do you collect? Education exhibition
Ante-room, from 05/10/2012 to 30/06/2013

This year, ARTIUM not only invites you to explore its collection of in depth, but also to take part by sharing your personal collections with us, whatever the type. And you, what do you collect? will take photographs of your collections and exhibit these in the museum's anteroom.
How to take part? By sending a photograph of your collection to educacion@artium.org with a two-line description of what motivated you to start it.

Press contact:
Anton Bilbao 945 209023 abilbao@artium.org - bgodino@artium.org

Artium
Calle Francia 24 - 01002 Vitoria-Gasteiz
Exhibition Galleries:
From Tuesday to Friday: 11.00 - 14.00 and 17.00 - 20.00
Saturdays and Sundays: 11.00 - 21.00
Mondays: closed (unless this coincides with a public holiday)
The ticket office will remain open until half an hour before closing time.
Admission:
General ticket: 6 €
You decide rate*:
Every wednesday of the year
The weekend following the inauguration of an exhibition
Students, unemployed, pensioners an under-14s, every day of the year
Annual ticket: 10 €
It allows you to visit the exhibitions for a year beginning the day of purchase
Group rates:
Guided visits (group): 73,00 €, individual ticket included. Max. 25 people by group

stampa

permanent link