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Antirrealismos:
Spanish Photomedia
Now
17
October - 23 November,
2003
Tue - Sun: 11.00am - 6.00pm
Galleries One, Two and Foyer
Antirrealismos: Spanish Photomedia Now is a
politically incorrect exhibition. Collective
exhibitions under a given national flag can often
serve as a strategy for cultural marketing and
political promotion, although this in itself
guarantees nothing. In the case of this exhibition
however, the facts are simply that there is a group
of young Spanish artists currently working in a
coherent fashion that is worthy of the same kind of
attention received by recent Finnish or Dutch art.
They work both inside and outside the country - New
York, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam and so on. So why
have these young Spanish artists received little
international attention? While the answer is
complex, factors include the absence of a powerful
gallery structure in Spain, the fact that art
collecting is rare and has provincial tastes, and
that there is a lack of interest by the larger
institutions in promoting and supporting the work
of young artists. So, the exhibition is
'politically incorrect' in that it does not come
with the capital P Politics of nationalistic
cultural export.
But why photomedia? After 40 years of dictatorship,
Spain's 'cultural catch-up' with the other
countries in Europe has come about precisely at the
moment when photography and video have come of age,
becoming the media of the moment across the
international stage.
Escaping the Everyday
Well, you won't find here the hackneyed
clichés: fiestas, bullfights, quaint
religious festivals and baroque excess. What you
will find is a reflection upon the confusion
between reality and fiction - a confusion both
initiated and addressed by means of digital
manipulation, by re-reading traditional genres such
as still life, (self)portraiture and landscape.
These artists explore the boundless possibilities
of staged photography and its performative nature,
its relationship to painting and sculpture, the
celebration of fashion and subculture, and the rise
of narrative and the shift from 'objectivity' to
the self-referential. Indeed, one might venture to
say that this group of artists uses photography and
video in a specifically anti-documentary
way.
Within the field of photography it is
multidisciplinary artists who have slowly marked a
shift away from the established vocabularies and
poetics of documentary, photojournalism, reportage,
travel photography and classic
portraiture1
- although these traditional forms certainly
remain. Interestingly, video, on the contrary, had
already acquired a certain acceptability a decade
ago, perhaps precisely because it did not come with
any great historic ballast. And some genres
resurface in a new form, for example in the new
kind of documentary in which reality is presented
in a diffuse, fragmented, manipulated or narrative
way.2
I - Consumer Society
The culture of consumerism is the area of
investigation for a range of artists including
Joan Morey, Miguel Angel
Gaüeca, Mira Bernabeu and Chus
García Fraile.
Joan Morey sees himself as a kind of 'conceptual
designer' delving into the clichés
associated with the behaviour and lifestyles
growing out of a diversity of contemporary
subcultures that revolve around sexuality, club
culture, design, fashion and advertising.
Surmenage, a term referring to a kind of
bodily and mental fatigue, speaks of emptiness,
existential world-weariness, submissiveness and
boredom. Miguel Ángel Gaüeca analyses
the controversial position of the artist in
contemporary society when, very often, a good
promotional strategy is more important than the
work itself. Me, Myself and I deals with
the construction of the identity of a young,
brilliant, successful and fictional artist,
exemplified by the 'brand' GAÜECA, and through
it Gaüeca denounces the omnipresent narcissism
of our society. In another perspective, Mira
Bernabeu analyses the culture of spectacle based
upon texts by Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord and
Umberto Eco. Through ironic mise en scene, the
artist questions the contrived nature of spectacle
before which the spectator feels, quite literally,
naked. Only critical activism, she suggests, is
capable of remedying this state of passivity,
apathy and disenchantment.
Finally, Chus García-Fraile exploits and
perverts the legacy of Art History through an
investigation of the consumer society and its
fallacies. Her colourist photographs of plastic
packaging emphasises the false sensation that we
have freedom of choice. But though polished and
richly coloured these are objects destined to be
discarded without a second thought and so also
become contemporary alagories.
II - Urban Landscape
Consumer society is also present in the work of
Sergio Belinchón, although for
Aitor Ortiz, César
Alvaréz, Jesús Segura and
Lara Almárcegui the concern is more
for the wider urban landscape.
With his pallid and phantasmagorical housing
developments, Sergio Belinchón meditates on
the brutal colonization of nature in his endeavour
to leave a record of the urban landscapes that have
sprung up over the last forty years along the
Spanish coastline. These developments are a true
aberration resulting from the demands of tourism
and the country's irrational hunger for progress.
Aitor Ortiz, on the other hand, creates unsettling
yet highly pictorial urban visions - computer
manipulated 'de-structures' standing in as blunt
metaphors for the fate of human relationships in
the city at the beginning of this new century. They
bring to mind the visionary architecture of
Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko while
boasting a fresh and original post-minimalist
appearance. Meanwhile, César Álvarez
takes this concern for the urban landscape to an
extreme, locating it within a quasi science fiction
setting. The faux cities are created in his studio
using a grid-like system placed against a black
backdrop to which he adds nylon to produce a kind
of urban layout. They suggest enigmatic flows of
information and new forms of behaviour.
Jesús Segura on the other hand returns to
everyday landscape to come up with something of an
anti-documentary. Speed Cinema presents
images of a railway carriage door in motion, all
framed in a consistent manner. There is no artifice
or manipulation. The spectator sees a blurred
landscape pass in front of her/his eyes while
waiting for a climax that never comes. Finally,
Lara Álmárcegui not only observes
urban change and mutation, but also acts upon them
through interventions undertaken in vacant lots,
urban garden plots, demolition sites, disused
buildings and other non-spaces. These self-made
constructions are individual gestures rejecting an
increasingly speculative form of urban
planning.
III - Socio-Political Visions
The social world is at the heart of the works
of Fernando Sánchez Castillo and the
group El Perro. Both reflect upon the social
and political context of Spanish society, though
from very different space-time continuums.
Fernando Sánchez Castillo returns to the
recent past - the final years of Franco's
dictatorship in the late sixties and early
seventies - with a video entitled Canicas.
It subtly denounces the still-perverse architecture
of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid a
building conceived to provide riot police with
ready access, even on horseback, to quickly bring
any potential student protest under control. The
students responded by throwing marbles
[canicas] under the horses to make them
lose their footing. In contrast, El Perro situate
their work in the present to reflect on immigration
and the hypocritical attitudes of western
societies, and particularly those of Spain, which
has traditionally been a country of emigrants.
Wayaway shows us the workings of a
'travelbox' designed to transport an
illegal immigrant. The 3D treatment accentuates the
irony of what looks like some kind of advertising
site.
IV - Construction of Personal Identity
While Fernando Sánchez Castillo and El
Perro explore mechanisms of surveillance and
control, Enrique Marty, Ixone
Sádaba, Olga Adelantado and
Cristina Lucas shift this concern with the
collective towards more personal ground.
Enrique Marty's practice revolves around the
familiar and the close at hand. The idealized
concepts of 'family', 'childhood' and 'friendship'
are here reflected back to reveal a perversion
dwelling in their heart. Through the use of
theatrical make-up, these staged portraits of
apparently bloody and bruised family members and
friends speak openly of violence and abuse in a
chauvinist society whose 'achievements' are
reproduced daily in the Media. Ixone Sádaba
also relies on the theatricalisation of everyday
life in a play of split identities that have an
underlying suggestion of Greek tragedy. Inhabiting
dreamlike settings her twin characters perform
dramatic duels that speak of suffering, anxiety,
tension and despair. The compositions are carefully
staged and surrounded by a halo of disquiet and
frustration. Olga Adelantado offers us a more
personal vision of identity. While she used to
employ materials like latex or gelatine for her
sculptures, in the video Moulding Me she
takes her own body as sculptural material. A
masseur explores the body of the artist over and
over until the contrast between the black hands and
the white skin becomes a metaphor for the limits
and fallacies of identity in an increasingly
globalised world. Finally, using a comic book
aesthetic tinged with irony and humour, Cristina
Lucas tackles the construction of the masculine
identity. Young teenagers happily fly around with
penises transformed into propellers, exuding a
selfish, narcissist and solitary attitude. They
touch as much on issues of gender identity as they
do on the strategies of authority and power in a
highly phallocentric society.
Post-Photographic and Post-Videographic
Focus
In Spain photomedia did not achieve artistic
legitimacy until well into the nineties. When they
did their development was largely due to younger
artists, such as those included here, who, in their
reflections on the crisis of representation, have
unselfconsciously adopted a multidisciplinary
practice. They would as soon mix painting with
video as sculpture with installation or maybe
photography with performance. This brand of
antirrealismo is clear in the words of
Alicia Murría when she claimed that
"something similar has been occurring in the field
of video, which not so long ago was [in
Spain] the restricted province of video
artists, just as photography once belonged to the
photographers. In both fields analogies with the
real have served a growing need to return to story
telling." 3
Finally, we should finish up with the
words of Gael Newton when she contended that
nonetheless "art presented under nationalist
banners can be illusory. Artists today are world
citizens and an international style of postmodern
and post-photographic [and
post-videographic] approach is apparent when
looking across contemporary photo-media practice
from many countries." 4
Paco Barragán
1
This is reflected, for example, in the history of
the PhotoEspaña festival over the past
decade.
2 For more on this issue see J.A.
Álvarez Reyes 'Not everything is
documentary' in Single Channel Video
1996-2002 catalogue to exhibition by Berta Sichel,
Neus Miró and Juan Antonio Álvarez
Reyes, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina
Sofía, Madrid, 2003 pp200-204
3 Insubordinations catalogue to
exhibition by Alicia Murría,
Fundación Marcelino Botín, Santander,
2000 p19
4 Gael Newton 'Generations: Australian
Photography since the 1970s' in Photographica
Australis catalogue to exhibition by Alasdair
Foster, Sala de Exposiciones del Canal de Isabel
II, Madrid, 2002 p69
Image
Credits:
• Joan Morey, Surmenage B(l)ack
side, 2002
• Miguel Angel Gaüeca,
Gaüeca Petronio, 2002
• Sergio Belinchón, Ciudades
Efímeras 1 (Ephemeral Cities), 2000
• Fernando Sánchez, Castillo
Canicas, (Marbles) (video still), 2002
• Olga Adelantado, Molding Me
(video still), 1998
• Enrique Marty, Hurt: Pedro,
2002
• Ixone Sádaba, Citeron I,
2002
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