letter from spain 




by Kim Bradley







CHANGES AT THE TOP


Vague promises plus lots of hiring and

firing have characterized the first seven

weeks in office of Spain's conservative

Popular Party (PP). Highlights include:


- True to its campaign promises, the PP

combined the education and culture

ministries, ostensibly to bring an

educational component to cultural

activities and vice versa. But arts-in-

education advocates were disappointed with

President José Marìa Aznar's unexpected,

final-hour selection of Esperanza Aguirre

as the new education and culture minister.

The 44-year-old countess has dabbled in

cultural matters throughout her erratic,

lackluster career in civil service and

Madrilenian city politics. Most recently,

she served as deputy mayor for José Marìa

Alvarez del Manzano (as noted in our last

Letter from Spain, Alvarez is disliked in

Madrid's arts community, but it is unclear

how much Aguirre "shares his values"). At

any rate, she has already been forced to

retract half-baked policy statements

(about eliminating grants for film

projects, and other sensitive issues).

Aguirre proved disappointingly vague in

her first congressional presentation on

June 18 outlining the new ministry's

priorities.


- Former PP congressman and arts pundit

Miguel Angel Cortès, originally slated for

the top education-and-culture post, has

assumed a custom-made post second only to

Aguirre. As culture secretary, Cortés

enjoys considerable liberties in shaping

arts policies, but without the headaches

of PP's highly controversial, staunchly

conservative educational schemes (such as

reintroducing the teachings of the

Catholic church into the schools). He is

considered the man behind-the-scenes

responsible for the appointment of 44-

year-old Fernando Checa--an award-winning

scholar and curator of Renaissance and

Baroque art--as the Prado's new director.


- To stress its commitment to the Prado, PP

politicians celebrated Checa's swearing-in

ceremony on May 27 with unprecedented

official fanfare. President Aznar attended

the event (he was quoted in the Spanish

newspapers as remarking, "I've already

said enough merely by being present here

today"), as well as the vice-president,

members of both Senate and Congressional

education and culture commissions, and

other illustrious PP personages.


Checa will, in effect, act as the Prado's

artistic director, thanks to a new

administrative setup. His curatorial staff

will be beefed up, particularly in the

area of Spanish painting. These long-

overdue decisions come in the aftermath of

a scandal involving prior Prado director

Josè Marìa Luzón. Late last year, Luzón

(an archeologist by training) was summoned

to identify a painting which had been

hidden away for nearly a century in an

administrative building in Madrid. He

attributed the work to Francisco de Goya,

an assessment that was seconded by two

other Prado curators. But when the

discovery of the "Goya" was proudly

proclaimed by both Luzón and local

politician Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, other

Prado curators, including former Prado

director Alfonso Pèrez Sànchez, publicly

demonstrated that the large-scale

religious work in question was really by

Mariano Salvador Maella.



VIDEO IN VALENCIA


The exhibition this spring of work by

Francesco Torres at the Instituto

Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM's Centre

del Carme) was small but important,

highlighting the 47-year-old artist's

earliest conceptualist beginnings as well

as his most recent concerns. "Uniformed

[sic] Rain (or More Than Just a Drop of

Water)", a previously unrealized video

installation from 1969, depicts perfect

"electronic rain." Each of the 50 small

monitors placed on the floor (with the

screens facing upward) registers a real-

time recording of the same drop of water

falling onto a liquid surface. The work

recalls the poetic approach many early

video artists used to explore the

relationship of technology to nature.


Another large-scale, multi-media

installation created expressly for IVAM,

The Moon in a Basket, speaks to the end of

the utopian dream. The work's basic

concept revolves around three popular

expressions that allude to the desire for

the unobtainable: wanting the moon in a

basket (a local Catalan expression),

howling at the moon, and looking for the

chicken that laid the golden egg.


One end of a darkly-lit gallery was filled

up with an enormous moon, an amazing

papier-machè structure that was created by

a local artisan who makes giant figures

for regional festivals. At the gallery's

other end, the artist's version of Walter

Benjamin's Angelus Novus--a life-size,

realistic-looking bronze winged figure

supposedly braying at the moon--croucheed

over several golden eggs. Evenly arranged

throughout the gallery were 52 wicker

baskets, each containing a different

utopian treatise (by Plato, Saint

Augustine, Herbert Marcuse, Auguste Comte,

Marx, Engels, etc.), and each resting on a

small pile of shards, which represent (in

the artist's words) "the ruins of 20th-

century civilization." Beautifully crafted

down to the last detail,The Moon in a

Basket creates a memorable, melancholy

image--spectacular, but simple, and most

importantly, compelling rather than

shrilly dogmatic. Torres seems to have

achieved the right balance, by virtue of

20 years experience dealing with

sociopolitical issues.



HORSFIELD AND NOGUERA IN BARCELONA


In conjunction the International Union of

Architects XIX Congress in Barcelona '96

(a.k.a. UIA Barcelona ë96), July 3-6, a

dozen major architecture exhibitions have

been mounted.

As a counterpoint, the Tàpies Foundation is

presenting "Craigie Horsfield: The City of

the People" (through July 28), a selection

of nearly 50 large-format black-and-white

photographs of Barcelona made by the 47-

year-old, London-based artist.


The show offers a sharply different vision

of the city than the sugar-coated "new

Barcelona" trumpeted since the '92 Olympic

Games, when the civic authorities seem to

have discovered the virtues of promotional

campaigns directed at local voters as well

as potential tourists abroad. The

exhibition's title, "The City of the

People," purposely mimics the slogan of

one such splashy pre-electoral exhibition

held last year.


Horsfield captures a side of Barcelona

well-known to its inhabitants, but perhaps

psychologically denied: the city's

crumbling peripheral zones, sooty roof-

tops sprouting television antennas helter-

skelter, desolate industrial wastelands

crisscrossed by power lines. There are

also portraits of people: a stout Basque

immigrant wearing a printed T-shirt from

her homeland, a fish vender in her open

stand, a large gypsy family, a worker

whose face is lined by hard living. The

huge photos, framed in black, feature

damped down contrasts with a grainy

quality that lends a cinematic effect.


Horsfield, who put off exhibiting his work

for ideological reasons until 1988, is

known for his Socialist background and

strong sense of social commitment. The

Barcelona photos are the result of a two-

year-long collaboration between the

photographer, the show's two curators

(Tàpies foundation's artistic director

Manuel J. Borja-Villa and Jean-Francáois

Chevrier, professor at the Ecole nationale

supèrieur des Beaux-Arts, Paris) and

various architects, economists,

anthropologists, and neighborhood leaders.

(Urban studies and some of the truly

remarkable personal histories of different

subjects will be published in the

catalogue due out this fall).


Although the photos purportedly offer a

collective vision, rather than a personal

one, these powerful, often beautiful

images (especially the portraits),

struggle to speak for themselves--

Horsfield's subjective gaze over-

romanticizes at times. By the same token,

they demonstrate a deep knowledge of the

city that is very moving, particularly for

those who live here. The project was

intended to encourage local debate, and it

has.


"Pere Noguera: Lakes, Islands, Stoney

Grounds, and the Lifeless," which recently

closed at the Palau de la Virreina,

featured newly commissioned work by this

55-year-old Catalan artist. Noguera's

conceptually-based installations sometimes

recall Robert Smithson, Tony Cragg and the

early work of Claes Oldenburg.


Some of Noguera's most interesting early

installations consisted of entire rooms,

the floor scattered with objects that are

then covered with a thick layer of

monotone-colored mud (from his native

Bisball, an area prized for its ceramic

ware). He has always utilized castaways,

such as old toys, furniture, plastic

bottles, tires, tools and machines, but

his interest in consumer society's refuse

seems more formal and poetic than any

else.


The most interesting--and cryptic--

installation on view,Islands and the

Lifeless, consisted of a gallery closed

off to the public, but viewed through a

plate glass wall in the palace's interior

courtyard. The gallery's floor was covered

with mustard-colored clay pigment, on

which several rows of machine parts were

placed. This installation vaguely

suggested mechanical insects on a desert

trek; as the title indicates, they were

once "living" and are now cut adrift, like

islands. In front of the window, Noguera

grouped rubber tires and differently

colored plastic jugs (such as for cleaning

products). Filled with concrete, with

rusty loops inserted (in the top of each

jug and in the center of each tire) as

though they could be connected to

something, the objects suggested an

absurd, circular logic typical to Catalan

contemporary sculpture: used objects are

rendered useless, converted to dead

weight-- rather than propose a new

function, the hooks only serve to

underscore their purposelessness.




BARCELONA CONTEMPORARY


Barcelona's contemporary art museum

(MACBA) has unveiled the second half (and

more coherent section) of its collection

in the exhibition "Fons per a una

Collecció II" (their translation: Holdings

for a Collection II), which is on view

through Jan. 6, 1997.


According to curators Antònia Mariá

Perelló, Rosa Queralt and museum director

Miquel Molins, the nearly 60 works on

display trace Dadaist or Surrealist

strains in local Catalan art, "as

internationally contemplated." But

providing an international context is

risky business; to my contemplative eye,

the jagged figures drawn by Mallorcan-

based Ferrán García Sevilla simply don't

hold up to Basquiat and A. R. Penck.

Moreover, it's confusing to place early

and recent work by 77-year-old neo-Dadaist

poet and object maker Joan Brossa

alongside neo-primitivists. Fortunately,

there are some good works by artists

little known outside of Spain, including

Catalan artists Joan Rom and Ramón

Guillen-Balmes (they craft similar

hermetic objects, often erotically

charged, of felt, raw canvas and wood),

neo-conceptualist Federico Guzmán from

Granada (he often creates participatory

works, in this case a wall that doubles as

a chalkboard), and Carlos Pazos, the king

of Catalan kitsch with his I Cried Again

that Night with Bambi, a raucous collage

of various fake-fur rugs adorned with a

neon deer head draped with pearls.


Still, so far MACBA's has failed to

provide viewers with even the sketchiest

outline of what kind art was produced here

in recent years. A modest suggestion: try

a conventional arrangement of the

collection, more-or-less chronological,

more-or-less stylistically linked, at

least for the time being.




KIM BRADLEY is an American art critic

living in Barcelona.