The Hall of Lost Steps
The policies pursued since 1977 by Spain's new democratic governments, the joining of the European Common Market in 1986 and the Spanish presidency of the European Cormunity in 2002, just when the euphoria for the Euro has started, have brought our country into step with political and economical developments in the western world. In the artistic sphere, on the discontinuity and relative weakness of the historical avant-garde, magnificent individual artists-like Picasso, Miro or Dali appeared. In any case, they had to leave their own country as it was not offering the adequate context to develop their careers. The qualitative cultural leap that has been made over the last twenty years has been huge: the 1980's and 90's saw a great many new infrastructures being created: contemporary art museums, private foundations, international art fairs and a lot of festivals and young biennials to promote emerging artists took place. In the 90's, as in the rest of the western world, the art market cooled and settled down, except for the outshone of a new media phenomena: the building of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (opened in 1997) which, though financed entirely from Basque public funds, is dependent of New York for its programme and has become a clear sign of the new imperialistic globalization.
From the isolation of the past to the era of megacirculation of products and ideas, Spanish artists are still lacking a solid and horizontal contemporary tradition to normalize the institutional support to their creativity. It is mainly their individual strength what drives them to follow their path without fearing risks to go beyond the preexisting models. Five of the most obstinate and prominent contemporary creators are presented in this exhibition: Cristina Garcia Rodero, Nestor Torrens, Eulalia Valldosera, Santiago Sierra, and Pilar Albarracin. They belong to different generations, come from different regions, and work in different disciplines. Photography, installations, light displays, or social sculpture are amongst the lines of research they are prosecuting. What they have in comnon is their restlessness and their tenacity to keep on going.
For Cristina Garcia Rodero (born in Puertollano, Ciudad Real, in 1949), documentary photography has always been a privileged way of communicating with life. She has spent over thirty years touring numerous corners of the planet (Haiti, India, Cuba, Georgia, Greece, the United States...) and she has recorded scenes of human experience: the dramas and the sordid side, as well as the beauty that dwells in the most abandoned of places. Her existential independence and creativity have conferred extraordinary force on her work. Fundamental examples of this are her pictures of popular festivities and religious ceremonies in her own country, produced during a period of over fifteen years (1975-1989) and collected together under the generic title of Espana Oculta (Hidden Spain). They show aspects of an out-of-the-way Spain, where even in the twentieth century ancestral rituals endure alongside the demands of daily survival, combining the richness of the symbolic with the precariousness of the material, the force of magic and the hard facts of reality. Through their intensity and beauty, these pictures are anthropological testimonies that go beyond just transposing visual information: they blow away the frontiers separating documentary work from Art.
Nestor Torrens is an artist from the Canary Islands. He was born in Tenerife in 1954 and he saw since his childhood how tourism and bananas shaped the economy and the landscape of those islands, especially after the economic boom of the 60's. His work explores North-South inequalities, and the economic despoilment that the poorest countries are subjected to by large corporations and tourist ventures. Torrens questions the image of the Third World, which is seen sometimes as a virgin paradise for cheap holidays and sometimes as representing famine, earthquakes and squalor. He uses living elements in his installations and shows the horrendous transformation wrought by property speculation on what were once natural paradises. He criticizes the cultivation in vitro of certain species to develop more spectacular and competi-tive-but less tasty-fruits. For the show in Istanbul he will create a site specific piece. In Zona Restringidd (Restricted Area), 2002, he uses Christmas lights and wire to create an environment where is difficult to enter. Through the strong contrast between the idea of happiness associated to consumerism and the impossibility for the majority of the world s population (80%) to accede to those goods, he proposes a reflection about the inequality in the social distribution of wealth.
Eulalia Valldosera (born in Vilafranca del Penedes in the province of Barcelona in 1963) has shaped a highly personal aesthetic language to reflect on situations of emotional dependence. Household objects, performances, photography, video and light-show equipment are pressed into service to recreate phantasmagoric emotional situations and to analyze the connections between personal obsessions and social structures. In her installations, the body, its relations with the objects around it, and the light projections shifting around the space create energy circuits in which the viewer becomes integrated in a disturbing way. Presences and absences, and contrasts of light and darkness, place Valldoseras work in a zone of disorientation and anguish, despair and melancholy. Technically, Valldosera exposes the mechanisms that create the light projections, revealing the relations between the phantasm and the devices producing it. Her work Hdimock (1991) is a piece hanging between two walls. The cotton surface of the hamnock is full of small holes made out from cigarette burns. A strong light coming from the ceiling traverses that surface and creates hundred of small light spots that shine like stars, giving shape to a feminine body that looks like a cosmic landscape, where calm and tension, light and darkness live together.
After moving from Spain to Mexico and pursuing his work far removed from the mainstream, Santiago Sierra (Madrid, 1966) has emerged as one of the most radical artists on the international scene. His analyses of the hidden protocols of capitalism and the relationships of submission, power and hatred that underlie social exchanges place him in the political-art tradition. Through his actions, Santiago Sierra shows up the perverse character of contractual policies in capitalist societies. His first paid action came in 1998 when he tattooed a straight line on a man's back. His hiring of 465 people to stay standing up for. four hours in the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico City in 1999, or his recent intervention at the Venice Biennial 2001 where he dyed the hair of 200 immigrants blond in exchange for monetary remuneration, have made his work a sharp testimony of human subjection to economic destiny. His works make an impact and irritate people, because they are painful mirrors held up to contemporary forms of exploitation. The work of Sierra entails the pessimism of a defeat in that it shows no confidence in any fulfillment for the working class other than selling their time for a paltry salary. The video of the action 250 cm Line Tattooed on 6 Remunerdted Persons that the artist realized in 1999 in Espacio Aglutinador, La Habana, Cuba, is one of the most radical critiques to the fake pretensions of purity of Minimal Art.
Pilar Albarracin is the youngest of the group. She was born in Seville in 1968, and her Andalusian origins have influenced her work, which can take the form of videos, photographs or sculptures. Flamenco, bullfighting and Spanish craft work populate her imaginative arena, though they are always seen from a critical, ironic and sometimes sarcastic stance. Typical Spanish mantillas embroidered with Chinese-style designs, and strings of chorizo sausages stuffed with silk are among her more amusing object-based works. However, where this artist peaks in her critique of cultural stereotypes is in her videos of her performances, in which she herself appears dressed in flamenco-dancer costume. In the video Prohibido el Cante (It is Forbidden to Sing), (2000) she shows herself dressed as a cantaora (a flamenco singer). She is accompanied by a guitar player and shouts with tragic passion. At the end of the performance, she cuts her dress with a knife and roots out her heart while the blood gushes forth. This work refers to the tabernas and bars where, in the Franco time, a sign was hanging from the wall saying Prohibido el cante (Flamenco Singing is forbidden). It refers to the prohibition to express the deepest grieves of the oppressed and to the political censorship of any expression that was not the official one.
These five artists are extraordinary examples of how critical consciousness, unconformity and courage are good skills to move on through the hall of lost steps of contemporary art. They are aware of the rich tradition of classical painting, they etibrace with passion photography and the new media, they analyze the trends itiposed by the mainstream... All this helps them to find their own voice and their own rhythm, to produce a work deeply personal and socially relevant, and to inscribe meaningful marks in the aesthetic irraginary of our turbulent world.
Rosa Martinez
From the isolation of the past to the era of megacirculation of products and ideas, Spanish artists are still lacking a solid and horizontal contemporary tradition to normalize the institutional support to their creativity. It is mainly their individual strength what drives them to follow their path without fearing risks to go beyond the preexisting models. Five of the most obstinate and prominent contemporary creators are presented in this exhibition: Cristina Garcia Rodero, Nestor Torrens, Eulalia Valldosera, Santiago Sierra, and Pilar Albarracin. They belong to different generations, come from different regions, and work in different disciplines. Photography, installations, light displays, or social sculpture are amongst the lines of research they are prosecuting. What they have in comnon is their restlessness and their tenacity to keep on going.
For Cristina Garcia Rodero (born in Puertollano, Ciudad Real, in 1949), documentary photography has always been a privileged way of communicating with life. She has spent over thirty years touring numerous corners of the planet (Haiti, India, Cuba, Georgia, Greece, the United States...) and she has recorded scenes of human experience: the dramas and the sordid side, as well as the beauty that dwells in the most abandoned of places. Her existential independence and creativity have conferred extraordinary force on her work. Fundamental examples of this are her pictures of popular festivities and religious ceremonies in her own country, produced during a period of over fifteen years (1975-1989) and collected together under the generic title of Espana Oculta (Hidden Spain). They show aspects of an out-of-the-way Spain, where even in the twentieth century ancestral rituals endure alongside the demands of daily survival, combining the richness of the symbolic with the precariousness of the material, the force of magic and the hard facts of reality. Through their intensity and beauty, these pictures are anthropological testimonies that go beyond just transposing visual information: they blow away the frontiers separating documentary work from Art.
Nestor Torrens is an artist from the Canary Islands. He was born in Tenerife in 1954 and he saw since his childhood how tourism and bananas shaped the economy and the landscape of those islands, especially after the economic boom of the 60's. His work explores North-South inequalities, and the economic despoilment that the poorest countries are subjected to by large corporations and tourist ventures. Torrens questions the image of the Third World, which is seen sometimes as a virgin paradise for cheap holidays and sometimes as representing famine, earthquakes and squalor. He uses living elements in his installations and shows the horrendous transformation wrought by property speculation on what were once natural paradises. He criticizes the cultivation in vitro of certain species to develop more spectacular and competi-tive-but less tasty-fruits. For the show in Istanbul he will create a site specific piece. In Zona Restringidd (Restricted Area), 2002, he uses Christmas lights and wire to create an environment where is difficult to enter. Through the strong contrast between the idea of happiness associated to consumerism and the impossibility for the majority of the world s population (80%) to accede to those goods, he proposes a reflection about the inequality in the social distribution of wealth.
Eulalia Valldosera (born in Vilafranca del Penedes in the province of Barcelona in 1963) has shaped a highly personal aesthetic language to reflect on situations of emotional dependence. Household objects, performances, photography, video and light-show equipment are pressed into service to recreate phantasmagoric emotional situations and to analyze the connections between personal obsessions and social structures. In her installations, the body, its relations with the objects around it, and the light projections shifting around the space create energy circuits in which the viewer becomes integrated in a disturbing way. Presences and absences, and contrasts of light and darkness, place Valldoseras work in a zone of disorientation and anguish, despair and melancholy. Technically, Valldosera exposes the mechanisms that create the light projections, revealing the relations between the phantasm and the devices producing it. Her work Hdimock (1991) is a piece hanging between two walls. The cotton surface of the hamnock is full of small holes made out from cigarette burns. A strong light coming from the ceiling traverses that surface and creates hundred of small light spots that shine like stars, giving shape to a feminine body that looks like a cosmic landscape, where calm and tension, light and darkness live together.
After moving from Spain to Mexico and pursuing his work far removed from the mainstream, Santiago Sierra (Madrid, 1966) has emerged as one of the most radical artists on the international scene. His analyses of the hidden protocols of capitalism and the relationships of submission, power and hatred that underlie social exchanges place him in the political-art tradition. Through his actions, Santiago Sierra shows up the perverse character of contractual policies in capitalist societies. His first paid action came in 1998 when he tattooed a straight line on a man's back. His hiring of 465 people to stay standing up for. four hours in the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico City in 1999, or his recent intervention at the Venice Biennial 2001 where he dyed the hair of 200 immigrants blond in exchange for monetary remuneration, have made his work a sharp testimony of human subjection to economic destiny. His works make an impact and irritate people, because they are painful mirrors held up to contemporary forms of exploitation. The work of Sierra entails the pessimism of a defeat in that it shows no confidence in any fulfillment for the working class other than selling their time for a paltry salary. The video of the action 250 cm Line Tattooed on 6 Remunerdted Persons that the artist realized in 1999 in Espacio Aglutinador, La Habana, Cuba, is one of the most radical critiques to the fake pretensions of purity of Minimal Art.
Pilar Albarracin is the youngest of the group. She was born in Seville in 1968, and her Andalusian origins have influenced her work, which can take the form of videos, photographs or sculptures. Flamenco, bullfighting and Spanish craft work populate her imaginative arena, though they are always seen from a critical, ironic and sometimes sarcastic stance. Typical Spanish mantillas embroidered with Chinese-style designs, and strings of chorizo sausages stuffed with silk are among her more amusing object-based works. However, where this artist peaks in her critique of cultural stereotypes is in her videos of her performances, in which she herself appears dressed in flamenco-dancer costume. In the video Prohibido el Cante (It is Forbidden to Sing), (2000) she shows herself dressed as a cantaora (a flamenco singer). She is accompanied by a guitar player and shouts with tragic passion. At the end of the performance, she cuts her dress with a knife and roots out her heart while the blood gushes forth. This work refers to the tabernas and bars where, in the Franco time, a sign was hanging from the wall saying Prohibido el cante (Flamenco Singing is forbidden). It refers to the prohibition to express the deepest grieves of the oppressed and to the political censorship of any expression that was not the official one.
These five artists are extraordinary examples of how critical consciousness, unconformity and courage are good skills to move on through the hall of lost steps of contemporary art. They are aware of the rich tradition of classical painting, they etibrace with passion photography and the new media, they analyze the trends itiposed by the mainstream... All this helps them to find their own voice and their own rhythm, to produce a work deeply personal and socially relevant, and to inscribe meaningful marks in the aesthetic irraginary of our turbulent world.
Rosa Martinez
