Antoni Muntadas

32 Pages·2014·1.94 MB·English

Antoni Muntadas: Media, Milestones & Memories
Antoni Muntadas: Media, Milestones & Memories
Introduction to Critical Reflections 4:
Robert Atkins on the Media Landscape
This text was originally scheduled to be delivered by Robert Atkins as a lec-
ture on the occasion of the exhibition Muntadas: Entre/Between. While the
event was unexpectedly cancelled, this digital publication presents a slightly
altered version of the talk Atkins prepared addressing the exhibition.
A welcome post-script to the exhibition, this text underscores the intent of
the Vancouver Art Gallery’s programs, which pair exhibitions such as this
one with critical perspectives that offer lively insights into the work. This
online release, while an artifact of unfortunate circumstances, is nonethe-
less befitting as an extension of Muntadas’ ongoing inquiry into the nature
of communication and dissemination.
Regardless of how comprehensive an exhibition, no single museum could
ever completely contain a practice such as Muntadas’ within the boundary
of its walls. It is a testament to the dedication of the artist, curator and critic
that this text has been made freely available to accompany the exhibition’s
archival traces.
Muntadas: Entre/Between was curated by Daina Augaitis for the Museo Na-
cional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid in 2011/12 and was remounted at
the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2013/14.
—Allison Collins, Adult Public Programs, Vancouver Art Gallery
2
Antoni Muntadas: Media, Milestones & Memories
Antoni Muntadas:
Media, Milestones & Memories
Let me tell you about my connection with Antoni Muntadas.
The week that the exhibition Muntadas: Entre/Between opened in Madrid in
2012, there were so many Americans in town for the occasion that the art-
ist’s New York gallerist, Douglas Walla, co-hosted a Thanksgiving dinner at
the home of Muntadas’ architect friend, Juan Herreros. Early in the evening,
it struck me that I’d met the artist exactly twenty-nine years earlier, nearly
to the day. After a few glasses of cava, I counted many of my blessings and
among them was the realization of the importance Muntadas, and many of
the people in that room, hold for me. That I’ve been closely involved with
this artist for nearly three decades doesn’t seem like an anomaly—it was
commonplace for those in attendance that night. It seems fitting that some
of the best essays in the catalogue of Entre/Between are by Muntadas’s as-
sociates and friends of forty-five years such as Eugeni Bonet.
I met Muntadas in 1983. I’d recently moved to New York from San Francisco
and I was quite young and inexperienced. The first exhibition I curated in
New York was called About TV. It was inexplicably presented at a lively
alternative space called Just Above Midtown that was known for showing
African American artists in the heart of the commercial art world on 57th
St. It had moved to Tribeca—then very non-commercial—and morphed into
JAM/Downtown.
A mutual friend, the video artist Peter D’Agostino, brought Muntadas to the
3
Antoni Muntadas: Media, Milestones & Memories
opening of the exhibition. My intention was to create a video show that tran-
scended screen-centred video exhibitions by broadly considering television,
pop culture and media. In addition to video, both on-screen and in instal-
lation, it featured a sixty-foot-long historical timeline, a thirty-inch wall of
quotes about television (which intellectuals still considered déclassé then)
and a huge sculpture crafted entirely from TV tables and dinner trays.
That day Muntadas invited me to his loft on nearby Harrison St. The main
thing I remember about that first visit—and subsequent ones—was that the
television was always on. But never with sound. And never tuned to sitcoms
or dramas, as opposed to news. (Since my visit preceded the advent of
CNN, I wonder if this is possible or a trick of memory.) I soon learned that
Muntadas had recently completed a work called Watching the Press/Read-
ing Television (1981), into which this soundless watching must have fit. Of
course, without sound a TV newscaster reading the news doesn’t communi-
cate much information about his or her ostensible subject. It is instead an il-
lustration of the similarity of radio and TV news, as well as a McLuhanesque
reminder that every new medium incorporates its predecessors.
On that first visit to his loft, Muntadas also asked me to do an interview
for ‘the critics’ chapter of Between the Frames (1983–93), his sociological
inquiry into the distribution of power and division of labour within the art
world ecology. I was flattered and flustered. It was the first time I’d ever
been interviewed on camera and I was so intimidated that I wasn’t surprised
that the footage of a sometimes tongue-tied me ended up on the cutting
room floor.
So we met cute—do you have this phrase in Canadian English?—and I fig-
ured I’d segue from this story into the subject I agreed to talk about tonight,
the central role of mass media in Muntadas’ work. The more I pondered this,
however, the more it began to seem a pointless task. I’m not sure that doing
it could shed new or interesting light on this aspect of his work, which has
been written about ad infinitum.
4
Antoni Muntadas: Media, Milestones & Memories
Why did this topic come to seem not merely familiar, but so difficult to lec-
ture about? I came to the conclusion (yet again) that his work is so associa-
tive, its diverse elements so interwoven, that to analyze it by any theme is to
unravel it, to dismember it, to do it a disservice. I found a visual metaphor
for this in a pair of photographs that will be on view in an upcoming show
at the Morgan Library this spring. The show is to be installed in horizontal
rows of photos of varying lengths. Imagine a space hung with four photo-
graphs. The works are sequentially linked in three pairings based on visual
or thematic echoes. To remove the third picture then, is to cut the second
and fourth adrift.
Stills from Between the Frames: The Forum, 1983-1993
The curator of a show like Entre/Between faces a similar challenge—figura-
tively speaking—vis-à-vis the complexity of Muntadas’ work. How to present
its many affinities while not boxing them in too tightly? Daina Augaitis has
done a remarkable job. She’s made evocative associations between nearly
seventy projects divided into nine sections she calls “constellations.” She’s
managed to both clarify the connections linking the projects within each of
them, while maintaining their individual characters.
5
Antoni Muntadas: Media, Milestones & Memories
Political Advertisement, 1984-2008
6
Antoni Muntadas: Media, Milestones & Memories
But the show can’t transcend the fact that it is a retrospective exhibition.
Unlike Muntadas’ usual exhibitions of a single or a few projects, this show
features seventy and obviates the site specificity so central to his projects.
Ironically, Vancouver is a city with which he’s as connected as any outside of
Spain or New York. In some cases, the viewer experiences the work in the
show only second hand, as with his artful poster for Political Advertisement
(1984–), the continually re-edited anthology of US presidential election ads
he and Marshall Reese have been compiling every four years since 1984.
But as with live theatre, there are always energies and circumstances that
are invisible in documentation. The exhibition Muntadas created for the
2005 Venice Biennale, On Translation: I Giardini, was intriguing secondarily
as a social sculpture, a phenomenon invisible to the camera. Virtually the
only place on the Biennale grounds with mobile phone reception, the Span-
ish Pavilion where it was shown was transformed from a gallery housing a
nuanced and rather sombre looking presentation of the history of the Bien-
nale grounds, into a popular hotspot that seemed to lack only cocktails to
realize its party potential.
The problem with discussing the work in written or verbal language paral-
lels the problem of curating the retrospective exhibition. (I’m awaiting On
Translation: The Catalogue, which might acknowledge this and other inter-
pretation-related issues.) When people complain about translating images
into words they are usually referring to the inadequacy of verbal or written
language vis-à-vis visual production, to pay fealty to the cliché that there are
images worth 1,000 words.
Those they point to usually traffic in spectacle, both the spectacular subject
and a spectacular view of it, all condensed into a single image. Consider a
truly remarkable, Pulitzer Prize–winning picture of a little girl running down
the road. It’s out of place in this context because it is the rare photo that is
actually “worth” 1,000 words—or more. But even this infamous image from
7
Antoni Muntadas: Media, Milestones & Memories
the Vietnam War era derives much of its meaning from the context of its his-
torical moment and the circumstances of its making. It would require 1,000
words of explanation if it had been produced in the twenty-first century.
Modernist photography and its sibling, photojournalism, are all about the
single “perfect” image shot at the “perfect moment.”
Muntadas, of course, is not interested in spectacle. He is Brechtian in tem-
perament and rejects exploiting emotion at the expense of thought. How
then to present multiple possibilities for the viewer to simultaneously con-
sider? To provide more information to enable more complex and thoughtful
responses to his projects, to push viewers into areas they hadn’t previously
considered?
Transmitting such complexity is certainly easier in art than in language, since
art is the most complex form of knowledge. By that I mean it involves both
psyche and soma, all of our ways of apprehending and understanding the
world. Written or verbal prose, on the other hand, is more linear, making it
much less ambiguous than images and better suited to proving a hypothesis
or engaging in argument. But like Muntadas, I have no argument to make.
I actually considered bypassing the matter of sequencing the ideas in this
lecture by cutting up the text into a dozen pieces, pulling them out of a hat
and presenting them in random order.
The audience too experiences this problem of overload. Because Munta-
das’ work is so dense, the interested viewer’s thinking may randomly move
in multiple directions, spurring multiple associations. Those who are not
fans tend to be uneasy or put off by the density of the work and by Munta-
das’ low-key use of words and images. Looking at his work is different than
experiencing almost any other artist’s. Most conceptualists of his genera-
tion—consider Daniel Buren or Richard Long—still work within “traditional”
visual parameters (that is, their work always looks pretty much the same).
They produce art in a signature style no less recognizable than Jackson
8
Antoni Muntadas: Media, Milestones & Memories
Pollock’s, despite conceptual-art rhetoric that encourages the production of
work whose form emerges from the artist’s thinking and processes.
The tactile and intellectual pleasures of Muntadas’ work can be an acquired
taste in a culture like ours, which is so dedicated to immediacy and acces-
sibility. But if you’re one for whom thinking is sexy, even the title of the show
can seem extraordinarily suggestive. What does between mean? What sur-
rounds or flanks this space? (Note Muntadas’ use of such architectural lan-
guage, both literal and figurative.) Does the contingency the curator under-
lines imply centralized power? Where does the discerning perspective end
and marginality begin? What constitutes the line separating critical thinking
from political or social engagement in art?
On Translation: Warning, 1999-…
I also pondered the etymological roots of media and its relationship to the
title of the show. Media shares its root with words like mediate or medium,
which literally mean between. It’s an interesting coincidence—or is it an
unstated one? In the broadest of terms, it’s helpful to think of media as the
primary filter for ideology, for what’s communicated or made public and
9
Antoni Muntadas: Media, Milestones & Memories
then passed along as culture and history. We may think of the media or in-
formation age as new, but if we think about media as the screen on which
ideology is projected, then it has always existed.
Questions inspire questions in Muntadas-land: Do anthropologists think of
media this way? What predated Gutenberg’s printing press, which is cus-
tomarily regarded as the origin of mass media? Certainly oral traditions,
narrative and myth long predate Gutenberg’s technological advance. Such a
perspective enables one to regard media in a much more positive light than
with the disdain many of us hold for the National Enquirer and celebrity-
oriented tabloid culture. Muntadas’ work is likely to appeal to people who
are tolerant of uncertainty and complexity, more interested in questions than
answers. Although his art is not intentionally difficult, or complex for the
sake of complexity, some viewers will experience it this way.
Muntadas is totally aware of this difficulty and the commitment that audienc-
es must bring to his work. His art is obviously not for the passive. But then,
as with students, there are audience members who might require only a
nudge to become engaged. This awareness is evident in the importance he’s
placed on the work On Translation: Warning (1999–), which more familiarly
reads: Warning: Perception Requires Involvement. This artwork-cum-credo
is among the most re-presented works in his oeuvre, distributed throughout
the world in numerous extra-gallery formats. Less obviously, his efforts also
suggest a complementary obligation on the part of the artist. That is, an
unspoken commitment to audiences to make their involvement pay off. Per-
haps something that could be encapsulated (hopefully more poetically) in a
slogan like “Involvement Brings a Broader View of the World.”
In addition to the expansive outreach of non-museum-sited works like On
Translation: Warning, he manifests this commitment to viewers in numerous
ways. Chief among them is his broadening of the notion of the “artwork” it-
self. He prefers the term “project.” The project transcends the artwork, but
10