Jo Spence at Space, London

Grupo de texto poético

Work submited by Grupo de texto poético, Spain, to the exhibition Arte Postal, Bienal de Sao Paulo, 1981, organized by Walter Zanini and Julio Plaza

Claes, what is a happening?

Robert Pincus-Witten: Claes, what is a happening?

Claes Oldenburg: A happening is a breaking down of the barriers between the arts, and something close to an actual experience. It should be a very free form, a very ambiguous and suggestive form. I think it's filled with unexplored and primitive possibilities. I like it to be that way - like it to be as unpredictable as possible.

…  I think the happening is a potential work of art. I talk of it all the time as a composition or work of art. But maybe that’s not so important. Maybe it’s more important that it’s a certain experience: simply sitting and watching in an isolated way something that’s very familiar. I’d like to get away from the notion of a work of art as something outside of experience, something that is located in museums, something that is terribly precious. I’d like to think of a normal, natural experience in terms of a work of art. I don’t think the notion of the detached work of art – this aristocratic work of art – is a very useful notion anymore. People don’t want that. They suffer with that notion and they would prefer to have a redefinition of art in something closer to themselves.

… a Western audience has to have explanations. They really can’t watch anything for its own sake. They have to have an explanation first or a reason for watching it. They really don’t watch a thing. They follow an idea as it unravels, and everything represents the unravelling of an idea. The happening, as I practice it, creates a lot of discomfort for the audience. It’s an attempt to rattle them out of the notion that they are going to watch a play or an idea unfold. I try to make them uncomfortable to a certain degree, to make them bored to a certain degree, and to make them receptive to a new way of looking at things.

The Transformation of Daddy Warbucks: An interview with Claes Oldenburg by Robert Pincus-Witten 1963.

on subversive practices: C.A.D.A.

Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (C.A.D.A.) No + 1983

Reading Ulises Carrión

Ulises Carrión performing To be or not to be 1976

During the years that Ulises Carrión spent in Amsterdam from 1972 to 1989, he produced a wide variety of works that employed almost all the late 1960s and early 1970s forms of distribution: books, films, radio shows, print editions, mail art, conferences, talks, and festivals, calling into question the status of the artwork as a unique object and defusing single authorship by offering collaborative projects. A selection of Carrión’s work was recently on view at the Showroom offering a rare occasion to have a peek into his personal worlds and cultural strategies. Arranged in a modular display system inspired by the cardboard vitrines designed by Martha Hellion for the Fluxushoe exhibition that toured the UK in the early 1970s, there was a selection of Carrión books and videos, from Looking for poetry to some of his most celebrated video works, such as The Death of the Art Dealer and Card Song. Following the same spirit of collaboration and spontaneous gathering that characterised most of his work, the exhibition culminated with a re-enactment of The Lilia Prado Festival, a reassessment of one country’s cultural values and stereotypes, and the possibility of translating them to another cultural context.

A former poet, Carrión was interested in the structural, spatial and visual potential of language. His early works such as La muerte de Miss O 1966 or De Alemania 1970 connect with a tradition of artistic and poetic practices that extends from the Cubo-Futurist and Dadaist legacies, to the Concrete and Fluxus poets of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In this tradition, language rids of its semantic burden increasing its material perception and acquiring a formal autonomy that intensifies its plasticity and objecthood. The destruction of meaning in language had a great impact in the structure of the book, which remained being a container of texts but now these could or could not be literary; they were open to the articulation of new systems of signs.

Carrión’s work soon distanced itself from the literary practice to formulate the definition of ‘what a book is’ which is best developed in his notion of bookworks, ‘books in which the book form, a coherent sequence of pages, determines conditions for reading that are intrinsic to the work.’ His essays, The New Art of Making Books 1975 and Bookworks Revisited 1979, are eloquent articulations of new systems by which to present language under different forms. In his writings, he appeals to the ability that everyone has to understand and create signs and systems, setting up notions of what a book is by opposing radically to the traditional genres of novel, theatre or poetry. For Carrión, every book allowed for a different type of communication, and it was the conviction that each book produced and conveyed a different effect or message that led him to experiment with other media, applying the same logic throughout his work.

In 1975, he opened Other Books and So a bookshop specialised in the production and distribution of artist’s books, that was also an archive and an exhibition space, where artists gathered and exchanged ideas, and where performances, lectures and other events would take form spontaneously. Carrion’s interest in the production of artist’s books wasn’t so much in tune with recent claims about the democratisation of the artwork, or about making it accessible to a wider public (as it has been the goal of earlier artist’s books), rather he was experimenting with ways of devising a work of art that could incorporate its own distribution as a formal quality. Central to his work was the relationship between communication and distribution, and when he opened Other Books and So it was clear that he was trying to have some control over the production and distribution of his own work. ‘Where does the border lie between an artist’s work and the actual organisation and distribution of the work?’  he would ask himself, reaching the conclusion that distribution should be an intrinsic part of the work, not because this would make it more democratic or accessible, but because only when the art work includes its own distribution it becomes something else, its form serves its own purpose. Accordingly, he organised a series of Mail Art exhibitions, such as Definitions of Art 1977 and Erratic Art Mail International System 1977, which offered an alternative to the official mail system, and where he drove the attention from the aesthetic value of the object to the fact that Mail Art was a unique way of controlling the production and distribution of art. Distribution becomes a formal element of the final work, determining its physical appearance, while at the same time emphasising the relationship between form and function.

Mail Art was also a strategy to integrate and incorporate other artists’ works to his own, bringing together different views and opinions, and renouncing to just one way of representing things. Similarly, he started to experiment with different media, such as video and film, performances and festivals, devising what he referred to as cultural strategies in which the artist’s ‘personal world’ would gain a social reality by being exhibited and thus becoming a cultural event. Carrión was using culture as a broader concept than art, including non-aesthetic elements, as he explained, culture was ‘the coordination of a complex system of activities occurring in a social reality and including as well non-artistic factors: people, places, objects, time, etc.’[1]

He became more interested in mass media and in how communication operates at different levels and through different channels. The video Aristotle’s Mistake 1985, a documentary in which reality and illusion are blurred, was conceived to be broadcasted in television, ‘a frame that makes everything equally real. If it’s on TV it’s not art, it’s real’. Once again, the distribution of the work would have an impact in the nature and formal qualities of the very same work. In an earlier video, Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners 1981 Carrión experimented with marginal communication, in this case, gossip. The work consisted in launching a piece of gossip with the help of a group of friends. The project lasted more than three months, and it also consisted of a lecture on gossip in the University of Amsterdam, and a video-work as a conclusion. This work contrasts with the informality with which gossip is originated and transmitted and it gives an insight into Carrion’s ideas about language and communication, his fascination with identity, his interest in everyday life, and the importance of his friends in his works.

In 1984, Carrión produced The Lilia Prado Festival one of his most successful works, which makes us reassess more contemporary art practices that engage in originating social events and gatherings, and that facilitate a dialogue among diverse communities outside the confines of the institution or gallery. The Festival was a tribute to the Mexican actress Lilia Prado, an idol in the Mexico of Carrión’s youth, and it included the screening of Prado’s films together with parties, cocktails and music. The Festival generated extensive press coverage and attracted great number of people. By organising this Festival, Carrión intended to raise questions on identity and cultural values, and more specifically on how one can translate a cultural stereotype; how does a star from a given culture translate to another culture with different values. With this work, Carrión activated a social situation that connected with the historical avant-garde ideal of blurring art and life, while at the same time it brought about many questions on the dematerialisation of the artwork and its anti-market nature, and more importantly, about single authorship and collaboration. He considered the Festival to be a ready-made, a work from which he could withdraw, a work that offered him the possibility of disappear: ‘My ideal as an artist’ he said, ‘is to become invisible.’[2]


Text by Carmen Juliá

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[1] Ulises Carrión, ‘Personal Worlds or Cultural Strategies’, Second Thoughts, Amsterdam 1980, p.51.

[2] We Have Won! Haven’t We?, exhibition catalogue, Museum Fodor, Amsterdam 1992, p.79.

Tracing the steps of Julio Plaza

El trabajo de Julio Plaza (Madrid 1938 – Sao Paulo 2003) se sitúa en la intersección entre el arte, el diseño gráfico, la poesía concreta y la organización de exposiciones. Una obra multidisciplinaria que elude cualquier tipo de clasificación, siempre abierta a la colaboración y donde se dan cita distintos modelos de producción y distribución. La trayectoria artística de Plaza se remonta a los primeros años de la década de los sesenta cuando, todavía en Madrid, funda el Grupo 63 junto a seis pintores de origen castellano entre los que se encontraba Elena Asins. El grupo aglutinaba un variado número de tendencias, desde pintura informal a corrientes con un marcado sesgo neoconstructivista o neoconcretista, siendo el color el único rasgo común a todos ellos, un color que como describió Carlos Antonio Arean en el catálogo de la exposición que les dio a conocer como grupo artístico en la Sala Amadis de Madrid en 1963, ‘es más típico de Alemania y Escandinavia que de nuestra patria, tan ascéticamente contenida o reprimida’ (Arean, p.3), un comentario que no deja de sorprender tras los experimentos cromáticos del Equipo 57.

composicion en blanco circa 1967

  

En 1967 Plaza viaja a Brasil como parte de la delegación artística que representó a España en la IX Bienal de Sao Paulo. Será en Brasil donde Plaza lleve a cabo la mayor parte de su obra, allí abandona la pintura y comienza sus incursiones en el mundo del diseño gráfico, así como sus primeras colaboraciones con los poetas concretos, cuya obra había conocido en Madrid gracias, en parte, a la Revista de Cultura Brasileña fundada en 1962 por el poeta y crítico de arte Ángel Crespo. En ella se daba a conocer a los lectores españoles la bullente cultura brasileña, con especial énfasis en los numerosos movimientos vanguardistas que proliferaron en el país durante las décadas de los cincuenta y sesenta, entre los que se incluía la poesía concreta. En Brasil, Plaza crea sus primeros ‘objetos’, láminas de cartón superpuestas de manera que al abrirlas despliegan formas tridimensionales gracias al juego de cortes y dobleces. En 1969 reúne un grupo de trece ‘objetos’ en su libro Objetos publicado por el argentino Julio Pacello, y en él incluye el ‘poemóbil’ abre, su primera colaboración con el poeta Augusto de Campos. Los ‘poemóbiles’ son poemas-objeto con palabras inscritas en varios planos modulares que se mueven cuando se abren las páginas, permitiendo así una multiplicidad de lecturas. La colaboración con Campos se extiende hasta mediados de la década de los setenta y juntos publican Poemóbiles en 1974 y Caixa Preta (Caja negra) en 1975, ambos libros presentan juegos formales con el lenguaje a través de una serie de construcciones en papel en las que las palabras van surgiendo según se manipulen. ‘Lo que teníamos en mente’, recuerda Augusto de Campos, ‘no era un libro de artista ni una publicación decorativa, como en la mayoría de los libros de poetas ilustrados por artistas, o de artistas comentados por poetas, sino un diálogo interdisciplinario, creativo pero funcional, entre dos lenguajes, el verbal y el no-verbal, con la intención de promover una fusión imaginativa entre lo sensible y lo inteligible a través de la conjunción íntima de dos artistas’.

alcolea de calatrava, acero pintado, 1969 Mayaguez, Puerto Rico

El libro como forma artística se convierte así en una de las preocupaciones fundamentales en la obra de Plaza, como queda plasmado en su texto O Livro Como Forma De Arte 1982, que analiza las posibilidades que ofrece el libro cuando se desprende de su significado más tradicional, aquel que lo presenta como depositario de formas de narración que se inscriben dentro de los géneros literarios tradicionales como la novela, el cuento, el teatro o la poesía. Como ya anticipase Ulises Carrión, el libro  ofrece una serie de posibilidades de producción y distribución artística que, durante las décadas de los sesenta y setenta, van a ocupar un lugar prominente en la renovación de la naturaleza del objeto artístico y sus formas de producción y distribución. 

Desde la perspectiva contemporánea es imprescindible echar la mirada atrás y hacer un repaso de lo que supuso el cuestionamiento de los canales de distribución y de las formas de producción artística, volver a recuperar el espíritu radical de muchas de estas propuestas que hoy se ha perdido, porque como dice Martha Hellion, hoy contemplamos estas obras en las vitrinas de los museos y es difícil hacerse una idea de su naturaleza experimental y transgresora en lo que se refiere al cuestionamiento de un sistema económico que se perfilaba como el primer estado de esta asfixia que hoy cancela cualquier intento creativo que no se acoja a las subvenciones, los circuitos institucionales, las galerías comerciales y de más entresijos del mercado. Hoy, que buscamos alternativas a un sistema capitalista que destruye cualquier iniciativa que intente sortearlo es imprescindible recuperar una serie de figuras radicales que han quedado olvidadas, como también parece haber quedado olvidada la posibilidad de un sistema económico en el que haya lugar para el desarrollo de una dimensión ética y política en lugar de puramente tecnócrata. 

Text by Carmen Juliá

evolucao revolucao 1971

information 1972

Equipo 57 in London

Equipo 57 arrives in London, here is the stand that they designed for Pinta Art Fair, June 2012