whatever: art

Lately I have been so tired. so tired of art, of magazines, of stupid films. I find everything empty, unimaginative. just, stuff. I am sure this is because iIam getting old, and when you're old, you lose your sense of discovery. You settle down. You stop discovering new filmmakers and only seek entertainment that you can never find. You only listen to the same bands you used to, in a loop.

Every time I walk into a gallery in Mayfair, I feel sad and disheartened. Art is something on the walls, it does not mean anything any more. And it's not a problem with the setting. The same happens when the gallery is in Hackney. Art is just, there, ignored by people that are just networking while sipping wine.

I get angry at the stupid articles on magazines. I get angry at how cool people are afraid they are losing their edge, about them being afraid the mainstream is creeping into every corner of their 2.0 world, where you can never be sure if what you like is acceptable or not. Established artists are so condescendingly patronising.

I run into Timju on Instagram. He is an illustrator from Lausanne who has recently relocated to Paris, and I fell in love with the simplicity of his drawings. I started a conversation with him, via old-fashioned email and I am sure it will help me understand his work. «I started to draw because I entered a room five years ago that I immediately loved. and I wanted to express what I felt, what I saw at that moment, to tell its story.»

I shared with him the story of the first time I wanted to live inside a work of art. I must have been around eight, and it was a dictionary someone gave my sister for her birthday, that had lovely drawings of this French family living in a flat in a Haussmann boulevard in Paris

«I draw with my heart. And whatever I do, I always put some part of me (sometimes in the details) in my drawings. With their flaws, their broken wings, their hope, or naivety.»

I love his drawings because they have life. they are not empty vessels, there's a beyond to them. And this is what I miss from what is around nowadays. I am tired of people trying to make it, trying to achieve, rather than focusing on creating something that has a heart and a soul. Whether it is art, photography, or fashion.

Please, give art its soul back.

a few weeks ago, while visiting the tate modern in london, i witnessed something stupidly remarkable. there is a sand blasted glass window at the members’ lounge on the top floor of the tate modern that sheds light on to the lobby where the stairs and the lifts are. while waiting for the lift with a friend this american middle-aged tourist found himself fascinated by the shadows projected on to the glass panel by the stools and tables on the other side. he was so fascinated, that he even took some pictures of them, and kept talking about it while descending on the lift. when my friend and i were walking around the south bank, i joked about how many other people have found those same shadows fascinating on instagram. it did not take much more than a couple of taps to find the same shot a dozen times on the tate memeber’s lounge geo-tag.

at home, i went down the whole chain of pictures, that started almost six years ago, just when instagram first was released on the apple app store. so, why are we photographing the same things, almost the same way?

obviously, instagram is not the most reliable tool for this kind of survey, but considering that five and a half million people visit the tate every year, and the total figures for instagram (200 million users, whom upload 60 million pictures every day) please allow me to consider it a sufficiently widespread tool and make some assumptions.

not everyone on instagram visits london, not every instagrammer that visits london goes to the tate. even if they do, they might have not used the correct tag for the picture. also. i am sure that there is more people out there who took the picture with a regular camera and did not upload it to the instagram. if one goes through the geo-tag, one can find numerous images of the shadowy stools, not enough to be something completely persistent, just popular enough to rise questions about the nature of its recurrence.

drawing from pierre bourdieu’s essay on taste, one can assume that those who took the picture belong to a certain social class that share certain aesthetic values and codes. first of all, because they are visiting the tate, which implies already an interest for the arts. but, why that particular view and not the staircase, or the lifts?

one could argue that there are finite ways of photographing a subject, and that at some point the images would have to be similar. but, this is not about the fact that we aim for symmetry, or the fact that we aim for breaking the symmetry in favour of perspective when we take a picture. what i am trying to focus on here is the theme of the picture. why do we take a picture of one thing and not another. is it a matter of hierarchy of photographic subjects, linked to a cultural tradition? are we really free individuals when we click the button on our cameras?

shadows as a theme is at the very core of photography, for what is photography if not the game between shadow and light? just remember the impact of william henry fox talbot’s book of 1844-46 the pencil of nature, with its iconic photographs the open door, the ladder or the haystack, all of which included dropped shadows. even mr talbot is quoted to have said “i have captured a shadow!” as his personal eureka moment. at the top of my head i can also think of claude monet’s study of the shadowy façade of the cathedral of rouen under different lights. with photography and its immediacy, art started to pay attention to the shifting nature of light.

when people photograph the stools at the tate modern, are they subconsciously referencing all this artistic achievements? is there a photographic collective subconscious that we access when we are presented with a subject? is this what tradition means? one could think so. but i will argue that, if history has taught us anything, is that tradition can be faked, misunderstood, or can be reinterpreted the wrong way. because the meaning of tradition works the same way as aesthetic styles work towards form, because tradition is a style.

it is very interesting what i have called the “singapore paradox”. a few months ago i read and article on the singaporean interior design blog/magazine renotalk about this couple who had renovated their apartment in the “european tradition”. mrs charmaine low spent two months studying in germany and that left such an indelible impression that she fashioned her living quarters after the charm and elegance of a traditional european home . they even have the nerve of calling the result a renovation that resembles a european museum. of course, the result is far from european or traditional, it is grotesque, almost. lots of golden mouldings, crystal chandeliers, baroque-ish furniture, accompanied by completely off-colour oil landscapes and still lives in the worst barbizon-school rip off ever, everything framed in golden carved wood. they even have a fireplace (for decoration purposes) in tropical singapore. a fireplace to nothing, in the flat’s foyer. a fireplace whose only purpose is to hold the christmas stockings and be the background for the christmas tree.

this is an extreme case, but, at the same time, this happens all the time when we appropriate other traditions, when we use japanese-themed items, or buddhist-themed items, or african-themed items, to decorate our homes. but, when our “tradition” is exposed as a “style”, then we see the flaws of the solid cultural base we thought it was.

in today's world, when we experience an event, most of the time we do so in a very public way. we are quick on sharing our pictures, the songs that we like, the videos we have discovered on youtube. we visit a coffee shop and we "check in". the 2.0 ritual. art is starting to do the same.

there is an obvious exhibitionist power in art, because art is made for display. a painting is only realised when it is viewed. a novel is only realised when it is read. and so on. but, when conceptual art seeks the public space, it sometimes gets lost. when an idea is the main commodity art has to deliver, and this idea is the personal point of view of the artist on a subject, then, i believe, the message can get lost by the public display.

art has become referential. the art industry works by creating meaningful objects that people can relate to. we use contemporary art as a mirror. to contemplate in ourselves the struggles of the gender war, or the social and economic differences, or a quest for love. so that we can say: "i do too feel like that sometimes". "that does look like a reflection of what i once felt".

we have created a chain of effects, of transferred ideas, a way of internalising ideas based upon interpretations of someone else's discourses, or, even worse, interpretations of someone else's interpretations of someone else's discourses. we think of pop songs that way. we appropriate their meaning, even when they are only aesthetic artefacts that actually do not mean anything, since they have been created using generic formulas to appeal to a vast majority.

we share everything everywhere, in a referential game, a game that includes a bottom section full of hastags that link us to one another, and we have stopped feeling in isolation, experiencing art, life, in a way that is just personal.

art, in its quest for meaning and relevance, has completely corrupted the meaning of meaning. meaning is now a commodity, something that can be measured, and we judge things by the amount of meaning they provide. high brow is just a referential game based upon the fallacy of culture, a compilation of the highest number of references to back up the actual emptiness of the idea.

we interact with each other the way we are taught by films and books. we fall in love with fiction as our background. we analyse reality with fiction, looking for reality within fiction, and fiction within reality. when experiencing something, we say "this feels like a movie". when we see a film, we say "this feels like my life". we look for an ideal that does not exist, and we go back an forth between what we feel and the way we are taught we are supposed to feel. the listeners of a pop song will use it as a vehicle to redirect their lives, they will adopt the meaning of the song as personal, moulding reality with fiction.

the 20th century saw the end of the classical interpretation of art just as an aesthetic vehicle, and meaning became the major focus of art, as i have already discussed. andré malraux called this process the intellectualisation of art.

when the emphasis is put on meaning, and it is experimented as form was earlier, as something that has a particular ethos, something that carries information about the time and the people in which that particular piece was created, we risk losing the context of art as a whole, in two ways. the first is the obvious loss of the original meaning, when a piece is not experimented the same way it was intended to be. the second has to do with the democratisation of images, that has maybe diluted art itself.

but, what walter benjamin saw as the loss of the aura, andré malraux saw as the true spirit of art, the unique way in which art can reinvent itself and add new meanings, new contexts. because when we can see all the elements in the historical series lined up, we become aware of the fiction of the concept of style.

style has no room in our museum without walls. we are the curators of our own fictions, with our unlimited sources of information. google. tumblr. i wrote about this when i first started this blog.

most of the time it feels like a documentary, as it usually happens with the dardenne brothers' cinema. small lives on the fringe. in a boring town, in a boring country. they don't want us to relate. so-called independent cinema is full of empathy-seeking directors that tackle only everyday matters in order for every teenage girl to feel "understod" when they are alone in their rooms.

but there is not that much empathy when the character is out of our comfort zone. not all of us have alcoholic mothers, have lost a child or are albanian immigrants. jean-pierre and luc dardenne present their characters without judgement. the camera makes it obvious when it follows them from behind. we are ghosts that see everything but do not intervene. the connexion comes from a different sphere, we become witnesses of a greek tragedy-like story, whose fate is unstoppable.

lorna (arta dobroshi) is a young albanian immigrant that works at a dry cleaners and founds herself married to a druggie, claudy (jérémie renier), in order to get the visa to live in belgium, through an organisation we ignore except for fabio, a cabbie.

the idea is to let claudy od on drugs and then lorna, widowed, will marry a russian citizen that is willing to pay for an eu passport. lorna has an albanian boyfriend, sokol, who is okay with the plan. they want to open a bar. but when everything is about to happen, an uninvited guest shows up: guilt.

everything is symbolic. the west vs the developing europe. lorna, hardworking; claudy, a druggie. are not we all? asleep? drugged? narcotised? guilt shows up while climbing up the stairs. the ending.

there is an ellipsis that tears you up inside. they open doors all the time to possibilities, to other rooms that will never be visited, but that make the architecture of the film seem like an authentic labyrinth of unwritten presents and futures. when they turn the camera to one of those rooms, we see the inside but leave for the next one. we do not know when we are going to actually follow a path.

there is people that is willing to kill and be killed to be a part of what we do not even give a value. our society. because this is not a story of big houses and fast cars, of first class immigration. it is a case of the small world. it is a case of how the will to have a better life is sometime even stronger than the will to live.

we leave the story at an unpredicted end that resonates strangely with what henry david thoreau said about his transcendental book walden:

i went to the woods because i wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if i could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when i came to die, discover that i had not lived. i did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did i wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. i wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

seen from our self-proclaimed central position, the post-colonial africa seems as remote and mysterious as it ever was, and we are not aware of its complexities, I would dare say, of its mere existence, blinded by our own vision of the world. but it is usually in its margins where culture develops its most fascinating creations. africa was forged by blood and war, and even its fashion stands as living proof.

the herero people of namibia, as photographed by jim naughten for the book “conflict and costume: the herero tribe of namibia”, and presented in an exhibition at the margaret street gallery, london, are the result of a time that was. what we see are the portraits of proud men and women that stand against the desolated landscape of the namibian desert over which they seem to float. the portraits look majestic and clean, with an almost impossible mix of the 19th century british portrait tradition and an iconography very close to that of the immaculate conception of the spanish baroque.

women proudly wear fashions that went out of style in europe a hundred years ago, the victorian era-like dresses they were introduced to by german missionaries in the late 19th century. men proudly wear prussian army-inspired garments. children stand like the african version of manet's fifer in their military clothes made out of cardboard. and they do so to honour their ancestors. they stand as living proof of a time in which 65,000 of their own people were killed or died by the actions of the german soldiers of lieutenant-general lothar von trotha in a war expanding from 1904 to 1907. but this is not a documentary. these are not traditional portraits, they convey a deeper meaning. of pride, and of death.

naughten studied the early 1900s photographies of the herero rebelion, and his portraits could be understood as the stilised, contemporary version. the herero honour their ancestors not only in their costumes, the desert is also an essential part of their culture, as it was the background of their genocide. the majority of the deaths happened when they were forced to leave namibia and wander into the desert, with the german army positioned at the water wells so that they died from thirst and starvation. this is a landscape of mourning.

in this realisation there is a sense of awe, an alien feeling of timelessness, of time standing still. costumes that relate to fashion as the cargo cults in the pacific after ww2 relate to religion.

when a society tries to differentiate itself from another one more complex than it, it increases its own complexity through the proliferation of new subsystems of culture. fashion is one of them. it helps us to achieve a sense of belonging. to a certain class, to a certain nation. and there is a strong feeling of nation in their behaviour, and of appropriation. because if they dress like this, it is for wearing the enemy's uniform diminishes its power, and if there is another war, this time, they will win because they are now as advanced and civilised. but there is no more prussia and no more kaiser wilhelm.

they are dressed for a war that will never be. for they mourn the dead that should never have happened.

you probably already think london is a city open to new ideas and projects. that it is a melting pot of cultures and nationalities, and that it is probably the city with the biggest density of creative people in the world. and you would be right to think so. but, how do new artists make his or her voice heard? specially if you are a foreigner, trying to make it in london, can prove to be hard.

as a spaniard myself, i was amazed by the strong creative spanish community I found within london when i moved here nine months ago. but this is not only in the back streets of camden town. from ángela de la cruz's (b. 1965) nomination to the turner prize in 2010, tamara rojo's (b. 1974) election as the artistic director of the english national ballet, to last year's exhibition of spanish artists in london at messum's gallery (8 cork st, london w1s), the increase of the spanish presence in major london art scene is evident. and they are taking the city by storm.

the first weekend of may, the surroundings of the queen elizabeth hall at the southbank centre were invaded by the streets of spain festival, a celebration of all spanish food, wine, culture and art. but what is happening in the world of photography makes the Spanish presence in the city even more obvious.

photographer jordi ruiz cirera (b. 1984) won last year the taylor wessing photographic portrait award 2012 presented by the national portrait gallery for a portrait of a camera shy bolivian mennonite woman named margarita teichroeb. she is part of a religious minority which forbids images, hence the uneasy relationship between her and the photographer, who had to earn the trust of the community in several trips to south america. today, photographer cristina de middel (b. 1975) is exhibiting her publication the affronauts (self-published, 2011) at the photographer's gallery london (16-18 ramillies st, london w1f), a finalist for the annual deutsche börse photography prize 2013 (until 30 june 2013). she explores the myths and truths of one of africa's most delirious projects, the 1964 attempt by zambia to send the first african astronaut to the moon. and this may be a great metaphor to understand what happened in spain after the global financial crisis of 2008.

in this scene, the collective círculo creativo london (cclnd), launched in october 2012 by the spaniards belén balado, manu sáinz de los terreros, pablo amade and isabel sierra is a 2.0 answer to a 2.0 problem. if you are from spain, residing in london, and you work in fields from fashion to design, illustration, art, photography, video or advertising, this is your place. this project works as a creative platform, not only to put your name literally on the map, but also to allow you to be a part of a growing community of creative people, in which established artists help newcomers to form a network in which new projects and collaborations can be born. and this is a project that can work here and now because of the openness of the city´s art world and the real interest for talent that new galleries in hoxton and shoreditch have. cclnd aspires to be the virtual framework and the tool that shapes the spanish creative presence in the city.

with a decimated economy and the highest unemployment rates in europe, spanish creativity is migrating up north. the historical destination of the spanish artists had always been paris, and the presence of spaniards in the seine capital is still strong, but more and more small 2.0 collectives such as cclnd are uniting spanish creative minds all over the world. there are similar groups in paris, berlin, new york... and if they are all as successful as the new spanish photographers are proving to be, london's art scene should better start learning spanish.

the usual buzz when people talk about the new arts has always bothered me. on one hand, we are more and more dismissive about what is being officially considered art, but then we are keen on labelling everything as art.

nobody would doubt cinema or photography are now part of the arts, but what about fashion? what about comics and graphic novels? video games? even food and wine?

margherita loy, writing for il fatto quotidiano, penned an article last year titled «se tutto è arte, l'arte non esiste» (if everything is art, art does not exist). what happened here was a previous article in which the italian journalist echoed the infamous julian spalding article at the independent in which he called damien hirst a conman and, above all, claimed damien hirst is not an artist. loy's first article originated a coy debate in which some applauded her for finally screaming "the king is naked", while others asked her a very interesting question: what do you want from contemporary art? because, whatever we are looking for, it seems art is failing.

in her second article, loy justifies her position finishing with that not everything is art line, behaving exactly how an educated european should behave: she respects art, even contemporary art, but it is easy to see that she only has in mind a very concise spectrum, the spectrum of what has already been stamped with a seal of this is okay. she talks about henry moore, francis bacon, lucien freud, bill viola, and the italians lucio fontana, michelangelo pistoletto or pino pascali. if she were to be rich and had a big mansion, she would buy pieces by these artists.

and here is when we realise what the problem is.

when art turns conceptual, we lose the sense of possession. how can someone possess the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living? by paying $12m for damien hirst's shark, as collector steve cohen did? how does someone possess a happening by marina abramović? is that what she intended with her celebrated piece the artist is present at the moma in 2010? to give us back that feeling?

there is still a great resilience in contemporary society of this idea of art = objects = possession. and maybe that is why we have transferred the value of art to all those other forms of artistic creation. because it is easier to possess a coat by juun j or a bluray film by pedro almodóvar than to understand what tracey emin meant with her unmade bed. or if she meant anything at all in the first place.