New Macba: for now, only good intentions

Collection, like canon, has become an almost religious word.

It generates restlessness, anxiety, towards the past and towards the future.

Not so much for the viewer, who in principle is content to see a set of works placed in shared brotherhood, intense as a Chris Burden action, joyful as a slide by Carsten Höller.

In reality, it is the museum director, and no one else, who in making his elegy—an essay in social observation in a social condenser—"exposes himself" as he tries to fill in the gaps in the public's knowledge of cultural patterns.

But life is short.

We have little time and resources are scarce.

People who survive our day-to-day beautifully and fervently decide to enter a museum don't want to attend only a witty exhibition, when it's not provocative or anti-authoritarian.

This is heavy stuff, even for the most passionate neo-Marxist student.

They want to be able to see a story that transforms them and not a collection of roughly educational or entertaining pieces, combined like a child's game, something that once they leave the museum they will have to leave behind, like everything that is childish.

A collection is a switch for different audiences, be they young or adults, tourists or locals, and its notoriety will come from the fact that it can be identified with a certain context and time,

that the curators have been able to articulate something unique and unrepeatable.

In other words, that the selection of works, simply modern or with their emancipatory discourses, alter this preconceived plan for the salvation of art.

Some museums have achieved it, few have been able to maintain it.

Volatility in management offices is no longer a rarity, but a condition, one more muse within these pantheons.

The experience of visiting a museum's collection is becoming more and more like that of walking through a biennial.

Triumphant conversion?

but a condition, one more muse within these pantheons.

The experience of visiting a museum's collection is becoming more and more like that of walking through a biennial.

Triumphant conversion?

but a condition, one more muse within these pantheons.

The experience of visiting a museum's collection is becoming more and more like that of walking through a biennial.

Triumphant conversion?

The new director, Elvira Dyangani Ose, promised to excite and get us out of mediocrity.

For now, she hasn't made it

It takes place at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, ​​where for more than a year what was offered as a bold project by its director, Elvira Dyangani Ose, had been expected.

He entered Richard Meier's white building like a hurricane, he promised to excite us, "make us fly" (like this!), tear us out of the hells of mediocrity - the expression is not his, but that's how the last eight long years of Macba seemed to us. — towards other lands of poetic survival.

So far, he has not succeeded.

The most coherent aspect of this new collection proposal is its title,

, because everything in it is intention, and yes, of course, there is poetry.

Taken from the readings of the Antillean author Édouard Glissant, the epigraph refers to the “poetics of relationship” in the mestizo, Creole city, where psychotherapy, ethnography and political emancipation are intertwined.

Diversity versus universality.

Totalization against totalitarianism.

Poetics of fractures, of broken pitchers that ask for relief to return to earth.

Work lent by Elena del Rivero to the Macba in another of the rooms of the new exhibition.MIquel Coll

In practice, what there are are 127 pieces and 88 artist books, divided into three sections, “multiple dwellings” (Glissant) that hint at new languages ​​(sound-silence), times (micro-stories) and spaces (participatory places).

It should be clarified that not all works are part of the permanent collection.

Although most are recent acquisitions (many of them by young artists), others are loans from individuals, galleries or institutional deposits (Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona City Council) and the Macba Foundation.

Another image, this time rude, that the institution finds to represent the “miscegenation” from within.

The anti-heroic is the "medium" chosen to affirm the honesty of this selection, so there is little that rams our gaze but a cloak of formal/conceptual associations (the pieces by Mar Arza, Tres and Valcárcel Medina) and a cult of the tasteless that occupies too many square meters of rooms.

The rhythm of the tour forces us to accept that we are in one of those exhibitions that have the discipline of biennials, little breath, grace at times and lucidity in a few works chosen for an annotation.

Most of the works on display are recent purchases, but there are also institutional deposits and gallery loans.

Josep Maria Mestres Quadreny, with his “audible sound circles”, scores and theatrical actions (1960s and 1970s), is a Mallarmean author capable of altering any possible collection syntax.

Without apparent political criticism, his situationist concerts in the streets and museums are total, operatic, the ammunition with which the best poetry is loaded.

More pleasant chills in the film by the English Otolith Group about Etel Adnan, a Franco-Lebanese painter and poet recognized very late (died, like Quadreny, in 2021).

In it we see the artist with her back to her, in her Parisian apartment, while she reads excerpts from her epic poem

(2012), where she notes the movement of the ocean and the unstoppable mutation of matter, perfectly transmutable in her paintings of landscapes of enormous chromatic power that hang in the rooms (on loan from the Lelong gallery), which she herself summarized as follows: “I could It may be thought that the love of nature is harmless, but no love is.

It can compromise the whole of existence, and indeed it does."

Resonant is also the video of the Brazilian Jonathas de Andrade directed Jogos (2019 (on loan from Galleria Continua) and the film

(1968), by the Danish Palle Nielsen, to which is added the documentary material of that experiment that turned the Moderna Museet in Sweden into a children's playground.

Its director, Pontus Hultén, had agreed on the condition that Nielsen assume responsibility for the cost of the organization.

The project's press release read: "The game is the exhibition and will become the type of society that children want, they will explain so much of their world that they will become a model for us."

We return to jump in parks and museums, but those modellen are today very different monuments against their will.

'Poetic intention'.

Macba.

Barcelona.

Until mid 2024.

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