Postcard from Madrid

By Jill Glessing

Punishing unemployment and government austerity still plague Spain, yet its capital continues to display a staggering amount of diverse art. Contributing to the surfeit is the annual photography festival, PHotoEspaña, offering 74 exhibitions across Madrid alone (it is reviewed in the September issue of frieze).

Wealth acquired by this first European colonizer of the ‘new world’ was invested in intensely religious art. At Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is ‘Zurbarán: A New Perspective’ showing paintings by 17th-century Francisco de Zurbarán (it runs until 13 September). In deep Carravagesque chiaroscuro, Zurbarán’s ecstatic martyrs and bound lambs submit to sacrifice; the edge of a platter made from Latin American gold glimmers beneath a delicate pile of glassine grapes.

No such displays of submission are hosted by the Museo Reina Sofia. Lining up in the tradition of resistance, as expressed in its collection’s cornerstone – Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) – was its PHotoEspana exhibition ‘Not Yet. On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernism’ (it closed 13 July). Photography, film, video and textual materials curated by Jorges Ribalta cover a period during the 1970s and ’80s when artists revived a critical documentary approach used in the early-20th century by such activists as Lewis Hine and John Heartfield (but were then depoliticized and institutionalized through such humanist documentary projects as Edward Steichen’s ‘The Family of Man’ exhibition).

Cover of Staffrider, vol. 1, No.4, 1978. Courtesy: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; photogragh: Joaquin Cortes and Roman Lores

Each of the 16 rooms featured a different regional iteration. Common presentation forms, chosen by these artists for their low cost and easy display, were poster boards and slide projection; shared issues were community access to public space, housing, poverty and workers’ conditions. Two introductory rooms featured work from Hamburg, Germany, from 1973, where the new worker photography movement, and the group instrumental in spreading it – ‘Arbeiterfotografie’ – began. Original display boards with photographs and text charted, for example, the community’s struggle for greater control of public spaces.

Artist/worker collaboration was also revived. Leading up to May ’68, striking workers occupying a French textile factory in Besançon formed ‘The Medvedkin Group’ with Chris Marker, who provided cameras and instruction enabling their self-representation. Alongside workers’ photographs, Marker’s film, Le train en marche (The Bandwagon, 1971) was screened. This homage to the Bolshevik inventor of the Cine Train, Alexander Medvedkin, whose agitprop engaged with newly socialized Russians, acknowledges the tradition and links between periods.

The San Diego Group engaged in workers’ health and housing issues. Featured at Reina Sofia were works by the late photographer and filmmaker Allan Sekula, to whom the exhibition was dedicated; also included were Fred Lonidier’s photo/text installation, The Health and Safety Game (1976) and Martha Rosler’s seminal, and semiotic, photo textual series, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974-5).

British founders of the Photography Workshop, Jo Spence and Terry Dennett, explicitly evoked the worker photography tradition of the 1930s, and groups such as the Film and Photo League. Their instructive photo-text posters outlined the value of photomontage for activism. Peter Dunn and Lorraine Leeson’s wall-size murals, designed for public display, addressed poverty and health care cuts. Big Money Is Moving In. Don’t Let It Push Out Local People (1981), with its warnings of community displacement by the Dockland’s corporate development, made clear links to Heartfield’s hard and humourous critiques.

Santiago Sierra, NO Global Tour (NY Miami), 2010, photograph,1 × 1.8 m. Courtesy: the artist and Helga de Alvear, Madrid

Other moments of art activism traversed the explosive politics of the period: documentary photographs of Amsterdam squatters and their violent 1975 eviction; Agnès Varda’s sympathetic film Black Panthers (1968), alongside photographs by Pirkle Jones and displays of the Panthers’ publications that insisted on the party’s self-defense role in inner-city America; and Afrapix photojournalism images of violent oppression published in the South African magazine Staffrider, that helped discredit Apartheid.

Exploring a different cultural strain that developed around the same time is ‘PUNK. Its Traces in Contemporary Art’ at Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (it runs until 4 October). The centre’s director, Ferran Barenblit, has just been selected as new Director for Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). The unemployment and disenfranchisement that accompanied the emergence of the new right and corporate militancy in the 1980s manifested itself in the primal rage of punk music. The 74 works by 60 artists here are meant to express punk’s infiltration into the visual arts. Although drained of the progressive impulse seen in ‘Not Yet’ the works here – as if answering Sid Vicious’ lyric, ‘When there’s no future, how can there be sin’ – revel in nihilism and opposition. Exemplary are two photographs showing Santiago Serra’s monumental negation. His enormous sculpture of the letters declaring ‘NO’, were internationally toured through such urban centres as Miami and New York (Global Tour, 2010). Similarly, Jordi Colomer’s simple, even stupid, but compelling performance video, No Future (2006), follows the artist walking Barcelona’s empty streets at night, banging out the Sex Pistol’s tune on a drum while ringing random doorbells.

Itziar Okariz’s photographs and video seem to tell gender norms and decorum alike to piss off. In ‘Peeing in Public or Private Spaces’ (2001–06) the artist is shown pissing in different locations – a bridge at night, a New York hotel room.

Itziar Okariz, Mear en espacios públicos o privados (To Pee in Public or Private Spaces), 2001 – 2004, video still. Courtesy: the artist

Irreverent disruptions of American iconic symbols is a favoured genre in this show: Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco’s video, The Eternal Frame (1975) shows their reenactment of John F. Kennedy’s assassination; Paul McCarthy’s installation upends Disney dreams with his phallic nose and abject antics (Pinocchio House/Crooked Leg, 1994); and Martin Arnold’s use of optical printing technology violently intervenes in the Hollywood family drama (Passage à l’Acte, Passage to the Act, 1993). The jarring repetition of minute gestures during the 33 seconds of the film, To Kill a Mockingbird, seems to be attempting to reveal the supposed psychosis that lurks beneath patriarchal and gender norms.

The final room of ‘PUNK. Its Traces in Contemporary Art’ is devoted to scatological forays. Among them are Austrian collective Gelitin’s photographs from their book, Das Kakabet (2007) that show the words ‘Punk Traces’ spelled out in fecal font.

Though Paul Graham’s work would hardly fit here, he, too, began to make art under the influence of punk. His milder response was to use colour in opposition to the black and white more conventionally used for social documentary photography. Less assertive than the activist documentary movement, his images are nonetheless indictments of the power and wealth imbalances plaguing contemporary society. An intimate and dreamy collection of photographs from his series and book, ‘Does Yellow Run Forever?’ (2014) held court at Elba Benitez courtyard gallery as another PHotoEspaña offering (it closed until 30 July).

Paul Graham, Senami, Takaka, NZ, 2011, colour photograph. Courtesy, the artist, Galería Elba Benítez, Madrid, and Carlier Gebauer, Berlin; © Paul Graham

Three subjects in the photographs – of different sizes and hung at different heights – make for a quiet conversation. A wall-size image of a New York gold pawnshop – the kind that has flourished since the financial crisis – hangs close to floor level, inviting identification with the reality of the street. Golden evening light softens the scene. Directly opposite but higher on the wall is a gold-framed photograph of an Irish rainbow in an envelope of grey cloud. An interior square room is further interiorized by five large photographs of a woman lying in bed (the artist’s partner in different hotel rooms). Taken in the early morning, she is deep in sleep – dreaming perhaps of something beyond gold in pots or pawn shops. In each image, the colour of the bedding and walls, like those in a rainbow, are different, suggesting full spectrum dreams. The four facing dreamscapes create an intimate enclosure of calm.

In the aftershocks of economic turbulence, gold has the attention of pawnshops and artists alike. In ‘Glints: Two Origins’, a PHotoEspaña exhibition at Centro de Arte de Alcobendas (which closed 4 July), Magdalena Correa considered precious metal and its circulation across geographies, as both the exclusive economy on which a dirt-poor Peruvian gold-mining community depends and what the filthy rich of Kuwait line their houses with. Seventeen vivid colour photographs (‘La Rinconada’, The Corner, 2014) make amusing commentary on the contrast – the gold, silver and gems that practically ooze, like oil, from shoes, teeth braces, and furniture of the Kuwaiti oligarchs set against the canopy of tin roofs that shelter the Peruvian workers when they aren’t digging in the dirt.

Alejandro Cesarco, Allegory or The Perils of The Present Tense, 2015, 16 mm film transferred to digital. Courtesy: the artist and Parra & Romero, Madrid

In ‘Other Recent Examples’, at Parra & Romero (which closed 1 August), Alejandro Cesarco sought a more ephemeral gold, mining his own past and other artists and writers’ works. In five photographic works and one video, Cesarco worked through the nature of emotional and intellectual life – how the past infiltrates and drips through the present. Continuing his series of indexes for books he will likely never write is ‘Index (With Feeling)’, (2015). Three wall-size photographs of black text against white ground offer a section of an index that begins with ‘Derrida’ and ends with ‘Montaigne, Michel de’. Besides author and artist references (Horn, Roni; Kawaro, On), the list is a distillation of the artist’s inner life: ‘Failures’ gets six page citations; ‘Expectation’ has five; and ‘Empathy’, one.

Portrait of Robert Walser (2015) is a brilliant depiction of literary production and influence. In the photograph a sheet of paper is taped to a window patterned with security mesh; appearing behind both is a soft focus, brick and blue, urban streetscape. On the page is a typewritten a quote by the author William Gass describing the Swiss author Robert Walser’s ability to suggest fathomless anxiety beneath a simple and pleasing image, something Cesarco himself mimics through this very image. That Walser engaged in multiple and playful references to other authors pushes the already weighty Tower of Babel toward tipping point. Cesarco’s role here was more curator of a group show, alerting us to the vast and historic whispering between artists, intellectuals, authors.

Framing the exhibition, on the first and last wall, are two small black and white photographs, each showing a hand, full of presence and suggestive of touch: Studies for a Series on Love (Wendy’s Hand – Left and Wendy’s Hand – Right) (2015). As with Graham’s meditations, besides crashing currencies and our search for value, art and ethics, we are anchored by our love relations.

1. Zurbarán: A New Perspective
From 09 June to 13 September 2015
at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
http://www.museothyssen.org/en/thyssen/exposiciones_proximas/121 – ongoing

2. Not Yet: On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernism
at Museo Reina Sofia
February 11 – July 13, 2015 http://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/exhibitions/not-yet-on-the-reinvention-of-documentary – past

3. PUNK: Its Traces in Contemporary Art
at Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M).
26th MAR— 4 OCT 2015
http://www.ca2m.org/en/future/punk-traces-contemporary-art – ongoing

4. Paul Graham: Does Yellow Run Forever?
At Elba Benitez
16 June – 30 July, 2015
http://www.elbabenitez.com/exposiciones/paul-graham/ – ongoing

5. Magdalena Correa: Glints: Two Origins
at Centro de Arte de Alcobendas
07.05 – 04.07.2015
http://www.phe.es/en/phe/exposiciones/5/seccion_oficial_otras_ciudades/377/magdalena_correa_destellos_dos_origenes – past

6. Alejandro Cesarco: Other Recent Examples
at Parra & Romero,
24 JUNE– 1 AUGUST 2015
http://www.parra-romero.com/exposiciones/cesarco2015/cesarco2015.html – ongoing

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