JORGE RIBALTA.
My motivation for this conversation is a cross between two reasons.
From the outset, it is a reaction to your article in
Babelia
"On the decline of the public monument" (January 2, 2021), with which I found many points of identification. In particular, I liked the recovery of the term "monument" to the detriment of the apparently neutral and administrative category of "public art", which has been the dominant language since the eighties to this day. To recover the term monument is to take the bull by the horns of the inevitably political aspects of putting art in public spaces outside the museum walls and, in particular, of the relations between art and power. In other words, "public art" has been a category that has made up such relationships in the name of a debatable democratization of art. Let's think about the last great public art campaign in Barcelona in the context of the 1992 Olympics,that symbolized a citizen devolution of the coastline. Today something like this would be unfeasible. Recovering or defending the term monument in our time implies placing ourselves in a necessarily uncomfortable problem, where artists cannot be neutral or “autonomous”. The monument is inevitably a commemoration or representation of the power or government of the day.
However, the monument has another dimension, not so directly instrumental to power, that is, not simply commemorative, which is the element of memory, the historical element, to put it in the manner of Aloïs Riegl (
The modern cult of monuments
).
If the commemorative element represents the disciplinary side of the monument, the historical or mnemonic element is its liberating side or potential.
"If the commemorative element represents the disciplinary side of the monument, the historical element is its liberating side" (Jorge Ribalta)
ROGELIO LÓPEZ CUENCA.
For political power it is essential to control the archive, what is included and what is omitted, what is relegated to oblivion and what is preserved as memory, and the monuments there play a fundamental role, as indicated by their etymological origin (de
monere
, “Remember”, in the sense not of “remembering” but of “reminding”, that is, “warning”, “warning”).
In this undeniably political character lies the detachment of modern art and artists, so jealous of their idealistic autonomy.
“Either it is a monument or it is modern;
not both, ”concluded Lewis Mumford (
The death of the monument
). Who is going to want to appear as the author of monuments, that is, shaping other people's memories? If modern sculpture abandoned the capsule of the white cube, it was as a supposedly beautifying, supposedly humanizing solution to the looting of an architecture and urbanism that understood the city as merchandise, as loot. And that facelift was not considered a political act. "Political" is an adjective that is applied to art according to its content, the subject it deals with, and only when it manifests itself against or critically with respect to order and hegemonic ideology. And being this, as far as art is concerned, that what art is about is itself or its author (from its unfathomable, unfathomable subjectivity, in addition to its expertise in the trade), it is not surprising that its function politics - this is its role as a monument, that is,of admonition, of reprimand, of warning to sailors - ends up camouflaged and perceived as entertainment or decoration.
JR.
Of course, the question that arises from this point of view is to what extent the administrative / governmental framework over-determines and saturates the space of criticism and resistance. As artists who work within that framework, can we only be at the service of power? Can't there be a space of difference? Autonomy is certainly a modern myth, but it is also a horizon of otherness necessary to think that art has a social utility not only "from above", but also "from below", to put it according to a certain schematism or populist Manichaeism. Modernity also gives art that space of counter-discourse or otherness through the idea of autonomy. Returning to Riegl, what about the “unintentional” monument? In other words,There is a public life of its own in the monument that escapes the logic, let's say, of the government, which Riegl associates with that process in which certain ruins take on a different meaning and use over time. This is what I mean by historical value as opposed to commemorative value. I do not intend to idealize the space of autonomy (a category that, nevertheless, seems necessary to me), but to expose a question that I constantly ask myself, about who exactly we artists work for and for which I do not have a completely reassuring answer. .I do not intend to idealize the space of autonomy (a category that, nevertheless, seems necessary to me), but to expose a question that I constantly ask myself, about who exactly we artists work for and for which I do not have a completely reassuring answer. .I do not intend to idealize the space of autonomy (a category that, nevertheless, seems necessary to me), but to expose a question that I constantly ask myself, about who exactly we artists work for and for which I do not have a completely reassuring answer. .
The monument against fascism in Hamburg when it was 12 meters high, before its gradual sinking began.WIKIPEDIA / WIKIPEDIA
RLC.
Experiences in the field of what we could call alter-monumentality are very minority ― whatever the aspect of that alterity, of that difference: whether it is a merely formal divergence (if that existed) or protocol (that “from above / from below ”of which we speak) -. The usual thing is the inertia that marks the city here and there like a pathetic manger. And if at some point the Monument against fascism by Esther-Shavel Gerz and Jochen Gerz (Hamburg, 1986-1993) seemed to constitute a watershed, you yourself have just remembered what was being done in the meantime in Barcelona ... Of course, yes, almost It is better to leave the subject in the hands of the “unintentional” monument, spontaneous, of the place of memory or, better, of multiple, simultaneous and changing memories: as when the monolith to the unknown soldier, without ceasing to be so,becomes at the same time a place of
gay
cruising
.
To the question of who we artists work for, of course there is no reassuring answer.
We do not work in a different system from that of bricklayers, journalists, museum directors or kellys ... The same, the correct question would be who pays you?
JR.
Regarding the decoration issue you mentioned, let me just make a point. Although it sounds
freaky
, I am in favor of decoration, which is a historical and noble function of art that modernity has made a crime (Adolf Loos). I believe that this condemnation is, in reality, a form of hypocrisy because decoration has persisted in modern art to the extent that there can be neither pure functionalism nor a total repression of aesthetic “excess”. Personally, it has been through a decorative scheme that I have approached the intervention in the Plaza de la Garduña that I wanted to talk about here with you.
RLC.
Well, the defense of decoration will sound
freaky
in our own micro-context, already
freaky
in itself
, but the vast majority of art that is produced and consumed as such has no other purpose than ornamental: environmental-art, Muzak -Art. Maybe, yes, the opposition being decorative or not is too simple, since we are talking about a border area subjected to the changing conventions of fashion. In any case, I do not believe that functionalism consummated the expulsion of ornament but rather assumed it, incorporated it, cannibalized it, making it unnecessary.
"Better to leave the subject in the hands of the monument" unintentional ", spontaneous, changing: as when the monolith to the unknown soldier, without ceasing to be, becomes at the same time a place of 'cruising' gay."
(Rogelio López Cuenca)
JR.
The second of my reasons for this conversation is that a permanent photographic installation, a “photographic frieze”, has recently been presented in the Plaza de la Garduña, behind the Boquería market, which arises from my exhibition
Ángeles Nuevos
de la Virreina in 2019. All this stems from the interest that the exhibition aroused in a part of the residents of the new social housing in the square, who approached me to propose the possibility of putting photographs in the common spaces of their buildings . This is where a conversation starts that, two years later, has led to this intervention. My work interested the neighbors because it offered elements to understand the history of the place, it was a kind of archeology that, through the documentation of the reform of the square in the last long decade, also made previous historical strata appear. In this way, for the new inhabitants, the place where they had just arrived, and which was inhabited for the first time in more than a century, became understandable, recognizable, even within their own hostility.
This project is an attempt towards that other monumentality.
RLC.
Here we find ourselves again with an unusual situation within the modern paradigm, according to which the artist and the work of art - which have, as we have already said, no other theme or objective than themselves - is addressed to an audience understood as a abstract mass of consumers / spectators. However, the author of a monument obeys a commission, usually from the Administration, of the political power, which in art hopes to be ennobled by an exaltation that contributes to compensate on the symbolic plane for its errors and excesses, since it is common for monuments to be commissioned in homage to what they themselves have destroyed, in an exercise even at times of previous nostalgia, pretending beforehand to regret the disappearance of what they have already decided to sacrifice on the altar of progress: I kill you but, hey, I make you a monument.
You speak of the possibility of a monument that does not obey the owners of the city and the official history.
Notice to what extent monument and power are perceived as indissolubly linked that the memorialistic denunciation interventions that in Mexico have been carried out lately by social movements, that is, "from below", have chosen to call them "anti-monuments" ... when it is purity, it is about full-blown monuments, with the only exception - which is not a small thing, it is true - that they have not been erected by order of the authority or with its permission.
The anti-monument to remember the 43 disappeared students of Ayotzinapa on Paseo de la Reforma avenue.Hector Guerrero
JR.
Well, that's why I liked your way of raising a reconciliation with the monument.
At least, in the sense of accepting the problems it raises today.
You end your article by mentioning the case of the monument to Antonio López, withdrawn in 2018, as a missed opportunity to experience other processes of monumentality.
Again, I fully identify myself.
When the controversy of that monument jumped in 2017 (because of López's slave activity in Cuba), already in the mandate of Mayor Ada Colau (started in 2015), and the monument was finally withdrawn (in March 2018), I I was against. My argument was that the removal of the monument represented a breakdown of the historical complex of the port front that goes from the Columbus monument to the Ciudadela Park, the best urban document of colonial capitalism in Barcelona. The Paseo de Isabel II is and represents the consolidation of the political and economic center of 19th century Barcelona around the Pla del Palau and the Llotja (the Lonja de Mar), and testifies to the economic strength (of colonial basis) of Barcelona contemporary in the Cerdá era. Appointments to Spanish maritime colonialism are recurrent in the decoration of the buildings on the promenade,they are not limited to the monument to Columbus, which is, obviously, its highest expression. We must not forget that both the industrialization of Barcelona and its area of influence, as well as the Ensanche de Barcelona itself, are paid for with the capital generated by the exploitation of Cuba, capital based on slave labor.
In my opinion, a rigorous and democratic cultural policy today must know how to respect the historical heritage as a whole and not a mere sum of isolated parts. And preserve historical facts against their various ideological interpretations. History has been what it has been. The "post-colonial" critique of the slave-owning past of the 19th century "Indiano" businessmen of Barcelona is today instrumental to the populist rhetoric of the current municipal government, it expresses the challenge to the historical elites. Thus, the removal of the monument reproduces the same repressive and authoritarian logic that it criticizes, by understanding monuments as representations or instruments of power: it is an expression of the new dominant power (and of what Chantal Mouffe has called the “populist moment”, EL PAÍS, June 10, 2016).Aren't the recent attacks on monuments part of this logic?
And this goes to the detriment of the democratic principle of a de-ideologized conception of the patrimonial and educational value that would require the integral conservation of such surroundings of the port front. Without this monument, a main interpretive key is lost and a void is literally generated, this is both physical and conceptual. Even from a logic of criticism of colonial capitalism, the intervention in the monument is a gesture of violence and barbarism. Monuments are historical documents and the city itself is the great document that makes history legible. The empty pedestal of the monument is perhaps a symptom of the time, and of an impotence, that of producing another monumentality.
"Iconoclastic rage is perfectly understandable and even a way of building, of writing another story, but the physical demolition of a monument is as authoritative as its erection was in its day" (Rogelio López Cuenca)
RLC.
A few years ago (in 2014, in Barcelona, in an exhibition entitled
Nonuments
, at MACBA, which invited reflection on the relevance of the monumental genre in these times) we presented, in collaboration with Elo Vega, a proposal precisely on the monument to Antonio López.
We call it
Quilombo # 1
, because it aspired to be the first of a series of works on monuments, of temporary interventions that made different monuments dedicated to heroes and exploits of the history of Spanish imperialism speak, show what their own presence hides or conceals, specifically, brutality of colonial exploitation and slavery. Hence the name, quilombo, that of the camps created by the slaves who managed to escape. The idea was to turn those racist exaltations of colonialism and white supremacism into just the opposite.
These interventions are not considered definitive because we understand that the claim to "say the last word" in a plural and democratic society makes no sense, understanding the political as a process always under construction, in permanent discussion ... We advocate not to destroy these monuments in their physical dimension but to demolish them symbolically, that is, "awakening" them as places of conflict, of reflection, of debate. The iconoclastic rage is perfectly understandable and even a way of building, of writing another story, but the physical demolition of a monument seems as authoritative to us as its erection was in its day - a term, by the way, that directly evidences the patriarchal character of this "cock fight" around the symbolic castration of the defeated enemy.
'Memory of a nightmare' (1989), sculpture by Joan Brossa with the head of Franco's mayor Porcioles.
JR.
One of the most interesting examples for me of a “critical monument” in contemporary Barcelona is Joan Brossa's anti-monument to Mayor Porcioles, entitled
Memory of a nightmare
(1989), where the severed head of Porcioles is offered to the public on a tray, like the head of San Juan Bautista. That parodic monument of Brossa (which, by the way, remained incomprehensibly removed and hidden in a municipal warehouse until it ended up in the Sant Adrià de Besos Immigration Museum, which is still a debatable location as long as it is also “Domesticates” and “expels” it from the street) it seems to me that it is the best monument to the neighborhood and neighborhood movement, which is the ideological-intellectual and social base of the new social democratic urbanism of the Barcelona of the eighties. Brossa's is, without a doubt, a
kitsch
monument
, but it is a valuable example to think about another monumentality established on an idea of counter-memory and that does not imply the destruction of anything existing but the expression of other voices.
Your action at the Antonio López monument interests me in the sense that it departs from the dominant erection / castration framework that you rightly mention. I share the idea that it is not about destroying but about inventing other processes of monumentality, taking into account the historical-documentary dimension of what exists in the city or, even more, understanding the city as a monument / document in itself. But it raises the initial question of to what extent your project is in perfect harmony with the municipal government discourse and becomes, therefore, instrumental to that power. In addition, I believe that this monument has unfairly become a scapegoat for other guilt for the mere fact that the character was not Catalan, so that his attacks are also a perverse naturalization of a local nationalist mythology.There are various historical injustices that are converging on that monument and that serve to leave intact other responsibilities of greater significance, in addition to confusing on the historical plane. What sense does this condemnation focused on López have when slave labor has been structural to the industrial / colonial system (Spanish and international) and to the prosperity of contemporary Barcelona?
"What sense does this condemnation focused on the monument to Antonio López have when slave labor has been structural to the industrial system and the prosperity of contemporary Barcelona?"
(Jorge Ribalta)
But, from the point of view of artistic experimentation, the fundamental thing I think is not that: one thing is to intervene in the monument and quite another is to produce that “other monumentality”.
Your intervention is, in fact, a project, an idea that does not materialize, that "parasitizes" an existing monument.
It does not produce a new public space of memory or a new monument and I wonder if, on the contrary, it does not rather raise the difficulty or impossibility of doing so.
RLC.
I understand that it was about taking the character, the first Marquis of Comillas, as a representative emblem of that oligarchy born in the heat of overseas and colonial businesses, among which the slave trade stood out, which was also, in its last temporal stretch, already illegal; that is to say, the one that could produce the most benefits but that was only available to the most daring - such as the illegal drug trade today - or to the elites most intimately entangled with political power ... whose power and influence extends until now same; the same as the policies of institutionalized racism or immigration control, which is what interests us fundamentally, to work on history, not as “the past”, but as a dialectical process of which we are radically contemporary, in which we are immersed and of who we are,we want it or not, protagonists.
Our idea did not go through defending the permanence of the monument taking into account considerations of a patrimonial or conservationist nature of the artistic or cultural at all costs (that secular religion of our time) but because its presence (as opposed to its absurd transfer to a museum or similar space) is much more useful when activating the critical and political reading that we always seek, which wants to complicate the precooked ideas and the most common rhetoric, in this case, on this specific issue.
And, yes, although it is true that
Quilombo # 1 (Antonio López)
stayed in a project, the proposal proposed, among other things, to initiate a process that was intended to intervene throughout the square through devices in which the story would be told of transatlantic slave traffic and would include the physical construction of a quilombo around the monument ... Unfortunately, the removal of the statue (a gesture that seems pathetically fetishistic to me) truncates the possibility of this or other experiences that give voice and visibility to the memories of "The many against the one", that opened processes or joined others already underway around other places of memory in the city.
Removal of the statue of Antonio López y López in Barcelona.
Massimiliano Minocri
JR.
My proposal for a monument in the form of a “photographic frieze” is an experiment in several senses towards this other monumentality.
It is about experiencing an art form in public spaces that departs from the sculpture model and arises from dialogue with people, in this case people from the official protection floors, the Boquería market, the Massana School, and that tries to respond to a very specific problem of the place: accompanying the arrival of new people to a place that had not been inhabited since the demolition of the Monastery of Santa María in Jerusalem in the second half of the 19th century.
A traumatic arrival that perhaps the photographs can support through the memory and representation of the history of the place.
It is also about experimenting in the dialogue between architecture and photography, and offering a counter-model with respect to advertising, which is the dominant form in which photography appears in public space. This "anti-publicity" translates into a photograph linked to the materiality of things, which does not promise false illusions, which does not idealize, which approaches things with a certain harshness or harshness. Is this photograph a dead language? As Giorgio Agamben says (in his latest book
The Epidemic as Politics
), the language of poetry and philosophy is a dead language, but nevertheless it is precisely this dead language that brings greater vivacity to thought.
Photography as I understand it (a photograph that enacts its own memory and its historical and technological roots) can be identified with this condition of poetic language and is a means to get out of worn, hyper-encoded representations.
The harshness of this anti-advertising photography is also the representation of violence inscribed in the architecture itself and the urban form.
Let's not forget that architecture appears at the cost of the demolition of the pre-existing.
The city is a process of permanent destruction and construction.
I try to give an account of the material harshness of the city.
The harshness of the images is the harshness of the urban process.
It is also about experimenting with the idea of a document, with the documentary tradition in the history of photography, a tradition or artistic genre that emerged in the 1920s to represent the popular classes.
The problem of the document is the axis of my work for the last two decades.
In this case, the question posed was how to convert the document into a monument?
And, finally, it is an experiment with the very idea of a monument, more specifically with that “other monumentality”.
The monument is not as a representation of the dominant power or the government of the day but as a representation of a daily memory of what ordinary people have experienced.
Not the big story but the micro-story.
A memory of the forgotten, worth the contradiction.
RLC.
For this "other monumentality" the fundamental question is that there are no formulas, it is necessary to experience a specific formalization that is the result of the context itself on each occasion. They cannot be mass-produced, just as a typical sculptor can dedicate a more or less abstract form to whatever it is (I don't know, to World Peace, or to the Constitution or to the victims of the covid) in the same way as in the XIX a female nude was put to signify the Homeland, Freedom, or whatever it took. The problem is that those citizen groups that claim a monument for "their cause" have no other reference than the abstract sculpture or the allegorical figure. When associations for the recovery of historical memory or victims of the dictatorship, for example, ask to monumentalize a place, they expect that,a big thing (the adjective "monumental" has also ended up meaning that: huge) made of bronze or marble. A monolith was what we were literally asked to do when in 2007 we inaugurated in Torre del Mar (Malaga) a project in memory of the massacre that the population of Malaga was a victim of when the city fell in the Civil War. We managed to extend the process for three years, to involve the people who requested it in the design of the memorial, challenging the usual expectations regarding the monument (horizontal instead of vertical; multiple instead of single; usable instead of contemplative; using, instead of the noble materials to use, others more fragile, that require attention and maintenance, that is to say, commitment, etc). It was also accompanied by a whole series of parallel productions (exhibitions, publications,an online archive…) in order to reconstruct the conscience regarding a crime conscientiously extirpated from the collective memory. That was undoubtedly achieved. And that space immediately became a place of memory that people felt as their own. But years later, another municipal government decided to erect, in a more attractive site, another more suited to its needs: a figurative bronze sculpture, on its pedestal, a
Ideal
photocall
for the annual photo of the authorities laying flowers at the hero's feet.
Contemporary art has grown protected by the safety of the white cube.
The street, when you are not on the side of power, is not easy territory.
Artists - educated in the religion of their irreducible subjectivity - are not, we are not, generally prepared to work with social movements;
and these, in turn, are suspicious, not without foundation, of these newly landed strangers.
It is not for nothing that expressions of opposition to what the traditional, authoritarian monument represents, take the form of more or less violent attacks (from graffiti to demolition).
It is not a genre that has been characterized precisely by its propensity for dialogue.
"When the associations for the recovery of historical memory or the victims of the dictatorship ask to monumentalize a place, they expect a large thing made of bronze or marble."
(Rogelio López Cuenca)
JR.
True, artistic problems cannot be solved solely from ideology and discourse.
I believe that, indeed, criticism or dismantling of what exists is not enough to produce appropriate and meaningful symbolic forms for people.
The monument requires formalizations that resist temporality.
I think that if we understand the monument as an aesthetic and symbolic element in the production of the city's public space (that is, the monument as an affirmation of a
demos
), we have to recognize the need for propositional practices, for artistic forms that are not purely denials or contests of what exists. The question posed to us as artists is how to do it from the "negative" aesthetic traditions of contemporary art or the neo-avant-garde or whatever we want to call it.
In this sense, my specific way of giving a propositional and not purely negative solution is through a combination of two traditions that are relatively outside or go against the grain of the neo-avant-garde. On the one hand, the tradition of decorated interiors, from the bourgeois modernist ornamentation to the pop decorations of the hallways of apartment buildings of the sixties. A reference for me is the decoration that Catalá Roca made in the Casa de los Toros (1959-1962), by Antoni de Moragas, on Gran Vía, near the Monumental bullring. The lobby is lined with a
wallpaper
photographic made of details of the bullfighter's suit of lights, and the roofs of the balconies covered with photographs of bullfights, which, seen from the street, give the building a kinetic, proto-cinematographic, very original dimension.
I don't think anyone has done something like that.
RLC.
The permanence - or at least the permanence of a monument - should not be a prior premise, an objective, but rather depend on the - unpredictable - circumstance that its users, neighbors, citizens, people, feel it and do it. yours and decide it deserves to be kept.
The "official" monument already brings that aspiration out of the box, don't think about it: the police are in charge of defending its integrity.
I would insist that I believe that the strategies have to avoid the, let's say, frontal response - which accepts the tax terms of the monument and condemns you to a position in which you have already lost the game beforehand - and opt more for parasitic, camouflage modes , guerrilla, in the sense of taking advantage of the inert force of the monumental logic (and even the physical elements of the monument themselves) and working along its margins, in those interstitial spaces that, although they are unstable, insecure, uncertain, at least they are minimally breathable.
"There are not many experiences with photography in the production of monuments because photography is historically instrumental and subsidiary to the fine arts, it lacks the nobility of stone or bronze sculpture."
(Jorge Ribalta)
JR.
The other tradition is that of propaganda photographic exhibitions ranging from the Lissitzy pavilions in the late 1920s to
Family of Man
in the 1950s. In other words, the idea that large mural photographic enlargements create a "kind of public space" in which a
utopian
fusion
between the public and its image is represented, a kind of universal public space. It is a
very characteristic
demos
of a time, that of the Cold War, a very photographic fiction of the era before television.
They are, if you like, forgotten traditions, possibly anachronistic, even kitsch, very specific to photography and that today allow us to think of a counter-model to advertising. There are not many experiences with photography in the production of monuments, precisely because photography is historically instrumental and subsidiary to the fine arts, it lacks the nobility of stone or bronze sculpture. It is also ephemeral, insofar as its public life is associated with paper, the press, advertising, all those elements that appear and disappear periodically. Quite the opposite of the mineral eternity of sculpture. However, photography is an art of memory and of the archive, with which it can intervene from a different perspective and make the past appear. A memory that is not commemorative but historical.This is what I have tried to do in the Plaza de la Garduña. It is a game of images of burials and unearthing, with archaeologists as the protagonists. Archaeologists are evidently my
alter ego
, as are also the new inhabitants. In this case, archeology is a metaphorical way of restoring the place to civic life. But it is also a way of anticipating their own destruction, of understanding the intervention as a kind of ruin.
RLC.
Of course, I am in favor of the use not only of less "noble" materials and techniques than the traditional ones, too associated with the pride of the monument of more authoritarian roots.
I think that assuming the fragility and perishableness of other materials implies also recognizing the limits of memory itself, its processual, conflictive, dialogic condition.
And, in this regard, I insist that the production, the realization of the work must be the end of a process, necessarily collective: the (provisional) conclusion of a dialogue, a moment of that conversation.
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