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ExhibitionCurator: Coordination: Documentation: Press: Design: Set-up:
CatalogProyectos Conceived by: Coordination: Texts by: Spanish 207 Pages ISBN: 84-89884-04-8 Price: 3.000 pesetas |
MUNTADAS: PROJECTS
An exhibition dedicated to presenting a way of creating and working. It sets out to evidence, together with some of the artist’s actual works, his commitment to the creation of models on which he has articulated - independently of trends and fashions in techniques and media - a line or trayectory over almost thirty years. It addresses two principal sets of objectives, some deriving directly from the nature of the work and others which concern the implications of the body of work as a whole and its organitation in the exhibition space and context. We are dealing, then, with a proposal for an exhibition and for reflexion on the artist’s output as such, with the desire to give the whole a markedly investigative character. From September 23 to November 22, 1998 in the Temporary Halls of the Art and Technology Foundation.
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| MUNTADAS: PROJECTS has been conceived in terms of the spirit of the English expression “A survey of...", an "analytical look", as a form of review which steers clear of the retrospective or anthology format. What we have here is an exhibition which articulates a painstakingly detailed study with a view to engaging in depth with the artist’s particular way of working. Hence the presence in the show of a limited number of works, of individualized proposals, alongside others -the majority- articulated onestablished models and thus forming part of series with a specific, clearly defined project that is reasserted in each piece. "Confrontations" (1973-74) belongs to the first of these categories, while "On Translation: La Mesa de Negociación" ["On Translation: The Negotiating Table"] (1998) belongs to the second. | ||
"On Translation: The Negotiating Table". 1998 |
MUNTADAS: PROJECT revolves around the idea of the project as the habitual formula and typology of contmporary artistic expression and creation. Muntadas has made an intensely commited contribution to this, establishing a particular methodology of the "pre-conception" or "project in continual progress", as Simón Marchán Fiz suggests in his text in the present publication, and habitually works with an idea of the articulated whole, documented and thought out with the aim of carrying out series of concrete proposals in an ongoing manner and an open form. "Standard/Específico" ["Standard/Specific"], "City Museum" and "On Translation", amongs others, are good examples of this. | |
| In line with certain programmes fixed by the artist in advance, from the seventies on he has been engaged, together with Eugeni Bonet, on a lengthy task of documentating his work, the results of which are the section published in this catalogue under the title "Projects 1998 - 1974" and the contents of the light tables. Both of these compilations effectively provide the observer/reader with an "analitical vision" of the course pursued over thirty years of activity. | ||
| The intervention in the exhibition space itself and the trajectory of the last few years in the form of the diagrammatic composition of the light tables (reinforced by the options which the visitor will encounter in surfing the InteRom) serve to provide the visitor/observer/reader with elements of participation and involvement. This is an option which Muntadas has selected as a necessary constant in a number of his most recent works, and one which requires the conjunction of conceptions remote from what is conventionally regarded as the role of the artist and, at the same time, of the art exhibition. | ||
"On Translation: The Negotiating Table". 1998 |
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| The possibility of establishing a multiplicity of connections between the different works presented, the ordering and deployment of these in the space, and the interaction between each work and the others and with selection as a whole provides an added interest, over and above the individual contribution of each of the works on show.
The artist has an interest in establishing structures of working as much as structures of presentation and distribution. Thus the choice of works and their siting and position within the circuit reflect this "pre conception" and link up with the "project" spirit we noted aboved, to which both of us, artist and curator, have sumitted and within whose paraments part of the "curatorial" task has been carried out. |
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| The virtual architecture which Muntadas constructs in the initial panorama of "Media Architecture Installations" (1995-1998) responds perfectly to the motive idea of "project" and to that of the "analytical look" at the body of works and activities produced, as well as to the idea of hybridization. In this hypermedium the artist, backed up by a team of technical assistants (Muntadas is a firm believer in team work, as he has demostrated once again here with the production of this electronic publication), has developed some of his most recent and innovative ideas in this area in the creation of "Hybridspaces". The fictive construction is utilized as the metaphorical basis for the hybrid, inmaterial architectures contained on the different levels of the InteRom, as Anne Marie Duguet observes in her presentation. | ||
"Portraits". 1995 |
All of these signals have an incidence on the considerations which formulated themselves in the text here by Paul Virilio when he suggests what may be the repercussions of contemporary telecommunications on the different conceptions of space and time.
"Appropiation" and "confrontation" are two constants which we find insistently reiterated in Muntadas’ work, and it is in "Confrontations" (1972, 1974) that these working typologies are strategically posited. As early as 1973 Muntadas was manifestating a sensitivity to all that relates to the media panorama and its landscapes, an area explored by Armand Mattelart in his contribution to this catalogue. |
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| If in the early seventies Muntadas was "portraying" audivisual and televisual communication, since then he has assidously and uninterruptedly continued to produced his "portraits" and "landscapes" of the media panorama, up to and including those projects which are the most recent developments of his lines of engagement. Hence our interest in presenting Portrait (1995), which ties in with another of Muntadas’ constants, "media criticism", the critique of the media exercised from the practice of the art and directed at the communications phenomena of the present moment. Here once again he focuses on this issue, which he posits with an instructive (not pedagogical or didactic) critical subtlety that is highly characteristic of him, at the same time as he offers us a confrontation between this attitude and an idealization of communication in "On Translation: La Mesa de Negociación" ["On Translation: the Negotiating Table"] (1998). | ||
"The Board Room". 1987 |
The selection on show here presents this way of working and systematizing in a fashion that is diaphanous enough to admit the validity of the suppositions made when it comes to intuiting changes in the signifying dimension of the current conception of the reception of the artistic.
This exhibition is also informed by the idea of offering insights into the mode of production of an artist such as Muntadas, which requires the creation of adequate structures in order to "situate" proposals with a discourse that is markedly informative-documentary, technological or scientific, thought out, materialized and produced on the fringes of the methodologies of information-documentation, technology or science. |
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| "Transterritorialization", "media landscapes", the "frontier between limits", the attitudes of "media ecology"... these constitute mechanisms which mark and direct our attention to the existence of attitudes and behaviours -such as Muntadas’- which are bound up with interrogative, questioning visions of the future in contrast to the alternatives of rapid progress or pure immobilism. This is what allows us to undestand the reasons for the impulsion and explosion of the relations between art and general communications context and culture, furthering our awareness that an inexorable concern with and commitment to sustainable growth is by no means new and is present in art as much as in any other sphere. | ||
| The linking together of the component elements of the trinomial works/project/career and their inscription in the roll of a perceptible, reflexive and involved art constitute the basis of this exhibition, which explores the different media, the different circuits and the different channels of the artist’s work.
Antoni Mercader, Exhibition curator |
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"Emisión / Recepción". 1974 |
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