FOR ALL AUDIENCES
Sala Rekalde. From March 2 to May 7 of 2006. Bilbao.
Txomin Badiola, Cecilia Barriga, Anat Ben David, Bene Bergado, Blami, Daniele Buetti, Minerva Cuevas, Kajsa Dahlberg, Tracey Emin, Chus García Fraile, Miguel Ángel Gaüeca, Guerrilla Girls, Immo Klink, Jakob Kolding, Chris Korda, Elke Krystufek, Matthieu Laurette, Cristina Lucas, Mateo Maté, Carmen Navarrete, Itziar Okariz, Pripublikarrak, PSJM, Jill Sharpe, Carly Stasko, Zhou Tiehai, Mark Titchner and Li Wei.
Over recent years the question of
public space has become the subject of new analysis and definition
centring on the dizzying developments seen in the social communications
media throughout the 20th
century, which have broadened and
transformed traditional concepts
of how that space is perceived.
Indeed, the so-called mass media
have become the main transmitters and producers of “information”,
effortlessly expanding the boundaries
of coverage and influence that
might previously have been considered
imaginable. And so a period
opens in which the mass media
function as arteries that are vital for
contemporary societies and where,
paradoxically, the entertainment
and advertising industries have
come to occupy centre place in the
generation and regeneration of social
policies. At the same time, public
space transformed into a showcase
for marketing commercial
interests leaves scarcely any room
for the spontaneous manifestations
of the citizen at large. This complex
panorama, submerged by a flood of
advertising messages, is structured
to fit the hypercapitalist paradigm,
and often strangles attempts to
distinguish between economic and
cultural policies.
But what role does art play in these
political processes? A significant
number of those who command the
heights of the hierarchical structure
of the domains of art continue
to champion worn romantic ideals
that, while accepting that artists
may be critical vis-à-vis society,
promoted the idea that the true
function of art resided in expressing
itself and that artists should
not be pinned down to political and
social concerns of the day-to-day
sort. Against this position, artistic
movements that developed Marxist
theories concerning social conflict,
along with other tendencies such
as the feminist movement, forged
in the struggle for civil rights, have
battled to transmit the message
that it is precisely through disassociating
the terms art and society
that the status quo of inequality is
perpetuated. This conflict has rung
the changes in the debates of the
20th century around the relationship
between art and politics and which
remain relevant today: does using
art for advertising imply subordination
of the aesthetic quality of the
message? And can criteria for judging
aesthetic quality be separated from ideological values?
In the 1960s the Situationist International
(which, of the Marxistinfluenced
artistic currents, was
probably the movement that left
the greatest mark) developed various artistic strategies in order to
combat nineteenth-century traditions
that, along with other tenets,
endorsed the supposed “innocence”
of art. Among these situationist
strategies, over the last few years
détournement occupies a place way
out front in its stretching of the conceptual
limits of the artistic community.
Guy E. Debord and Gil J.
Wolman (1956) define détournement as the improper appropriation and
decontextualisation, with accompanying
loss of meaning, of elements
that are mutually unconnected, and
their assembly within a new significant
whole. Distortion as a game
arising from the need to invert or
subvert all elements of the cultural
past, as a negation of the value of
the old organisation of expression
that must be surpassed.
In For all audiences, 28 artists from
within and from beyond our borders
redefine the concept of traditional
public space. The exhibition reflects
various critical discourses
from the art world and other fronts
that, over recent years, have called
into question the uses and abuses to
which the general public has been
subjected by market strategies,
with an emphasis on revolutionary
feminist theorising around the
division between the public and the
private. Likewise, the show constitutes
a critique of sexist content and
of other interests, both economic
and ideological, that frequently define
the shape of these hegemonic
spaces. The pieces on display in
the exhibition may be considered
to be contemporary examples of
détournement. In them there occurs
a distortion of the world of advertising,
of mapmaking, town planning,
cinema, writing itself and of all
kinds of images and means of communication. And, most important
of all, there is a desire to give a
twist to the principles of spectacle
itself and even to call into question
artistic creation and the art market.
These works are often composed
of prefabricated elements: quotations,
passages from literary works,
fragments of film, comics, maps,
and so on, all decontextualised and
endowed with new meaning in an
exercise that subjects language as
ideology to criticism: language,
that is, as an instrument of domination
and power.
The title of the exhibition, For all
audiences, also expresses a desire
to bring together the work of artists
concerned by these questions,
with the aim of defying the depraved
machinery of what has been
termed the “dictatorship of the
audience”, according to which the
interest of the general public is not
aroused by critical content.
Xabier Arakistain. Exhibition curator.
