Drawing lines in space, threading stories, making webs … the act of weaving has the quality of being able to include other arts, from drawing to architecture, through writing and music. One of the recurring images of the spinner in mythology is that of weaver of destiny: both the Greek Moiras and their Norse correlates. But the warp that we will trace in this writing defies this idea of predetermined destiny, because our plot will […]
A and B on their knees slowly approaching each other, A drooling and B wiping the drool, repeating the operation until A can’t drool anymore. This was one of the acts or chapters of Comfort zones activity that Allan Kaprow presented in the mythical Vandrés gallery in a city, Madrid, living a period of suspense (1975), expectant before the impending death of Franco. CA2M (Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo) now recuperates that event managed by Fernando Vijande, which meant the […]
The same gray spreading through highways, tunnels and level crossings, manufacturing plants and new construction blocks. Suburban landscapes that only tread on infinite number of wheels, unavailable for the passer-by. Edges of cement more and more extensive that are repeated without hardly variation all over the world. Also the boundaries, increasingly high, longer, more impassable, are a model that extends through the world with few variations: containment barriers, electrified wire fences, motion sensors… In both […]
Winckelmann revolutionized the historiography of ancient art by turning to the mystique of erotic contemplation. The artists’ school was in the gyms, he writes as he imagines Fidias going to the stadium to study the harmonious proportions of the athletes, their muscles in tension, the choreographic beauty of the struggles in the arena… Also, he figured Socrates in the arena recruiting young ephebos to whom to instruct in the art of the temperance. The contemplation […]
David Trullo travels to the past again and again. It has done so by collecting visual flashes that somehow contributed to forge his personality (Timewarp), reconstructing episodes mutilated by the heteronormative speech (A true history) … Now, in his two current expositions reviews the queer iconography confronting with pieces of the National Museum of Decorative Arts (Queer cabinet) and tracing a personal homoerotic genealogy impregnated with lyricism and irony in equal parts (Souvenirs). The truth […]
Photography is always a capture of an announced death. There is no future in it, said Roland Barthes. What you show will no longer return, if it has ever been. No wonder it is an artistic expression of those who are seduced by death most. Both the self-portraits that Pierre Molinier staged in the last years of his life locked in his apartment, like the photographs that Antoine d’Agata has been making from himself and […]
Hygiene is the religion of fascism, Paul McCarthy told to his interlocutor in an interview in which he spoke of his intention to transform Hummel porcelain figurines into grotesque characters with phallic noses. His desire to unveil the obscene side of the idyllic pastoral life represented by these kitsch statuettes, to desecrate his cloying neatness, extends to all his artistic production, dedicated to turning the patriarchal morality around. And against social hygiene McCarthy proposes the […]
Give back to the art what the power took from him could be one of the mottos that guide the projects of Mateo Maté. But since «great art» has along the history been venal, easily bribed, an instrument of propaganda…, its restitutions can not but be ironic. Just as the concept of «camouflage» had served the artist to establish correspondences between the Impressionist landscape and the mimetic tactics of military power, he now takes the […]
