Txomin Badiola Txomin Badiola Another FAMILY PLOT FAMILY 9 788480 265423 Txomin Badiola (2016) - MNCARS - cubierta.indd 2 1/12/16 8:59 1 Txomin Badiola (2016) - MNCARS - 161130.indd 1 1/12/16 8:39 2 Txomin Badiola (2016) - MNCARS - 161130.indd 2 1/12/16 8:39 TXOMIN BADIOLA 3 Txomin Badiola (2016) - MNCARS - 161130.indd 3 1/12/16 8:39 4 Txomin Badiola (2016) - MNCARS - 161130.indd 4 1/12/16 8:39 By employing various media and means of expression and constantly revising and re-evaluating his work, Txomin Badiola has generated an extremely personal body of work of great formal and conceptual complexity which, among other things, engages in critical reflection on the limitations and potentialities of artistic practice and addresses the inherent malaise of the contemporary sub- ject. Convinced that form in art must necessarily be shaped in such a way as to contain its own transgression – and that every form is consequently a ‘bad form’ (one of the two notions, along with ‘misinterpretation’, at the centre of his practice) –, Badiola places much more importance on defining a process in his work than on imagining a particular result and then trying to bring it into being. Since he began his Bastardos [Bastards] and E. L. el Ruso [E. L. the Russian] series in the mid- 1980s – with the first versions of works that later metamorphosed into different forms in the course of his career – Badiola’s works have invariably been the result of a process based on very specific prem- ises, a process that is not self-consuming but remains intentionally open, incomplete, as if waiting for healing that never takes place. And this gives his work a type of complexity linked to the dynamics of desire, because Badiola’s sculptures and installations are in a perpetual state of indeterminacy, of incompletion, of structural deficiency. As he himself says, they are ‘desiring, unsatisfied works’ that yearn for and also deny their own closure, seeking and at the same time rejecting unity of meaning. The Badiola exhibition at Museo Reina Sofía is based on this same processual logic. Through a broad selection of works which date from the early eighties to the present, the show sheds light on the main thematic and structural concerns that have shaped the career of this artist who was a key figure in the so-called New Basque Sculpture and one of the main scholars and promoters of the work and thought of Jorge Oteiza, an artist who is crucial to understanding Badiola’s own work. This exhibition is the fruit of a long and intense collaborative curatorial process that began over five years ago, in which Txomin Badiola convened seven artists from his immediate circle: Ana Laura Aláez, Ángel Bados, Jon Mikel Euba, Pello Irazu, Asier Mendizabal, Itziar Okariz and Sergio Prego. Each was invited to propose an initial selection of the pieces to be included in the show, and later helped to define the way the selected works were arranged and presented. The entire process took place through a series of dialogues and meetings that also involved the participation of a group of younger artists who were invited to carry out technical and mediation tasks. The result is an exhibition structured around eight major sections that allows us to discover Txomin Badiola’s oeuvre and to explore its context and conditions of production. It also emphasizes the importance of collaboration with other artists throughout his career. ‘Since my earliest days as an artist I sensed that things turn out better if we do them together,’ he says to João Fernandes in the conversation that opens this catalogue. The Museo Reina Sofía has clearly been able to understand and accommodate the demands of this exhibition project. As such, this text would not be complete without thanking them for their efforts to bring into being this audacious exhibition, which is a model of dialogue and collaborative construction. Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport 5 Txomin Badiola (2016) - MNCARS - 161130.indd 5 1/12/16 8:39 6 Txomin Badiola (2016) - MNCARS - 161130.indd 6 1/12/16 8:39 Since he began his artistic career in the late 1970s with a series of works in the tradition of minimal- ism and conceptual art, Txomin Badiola has invariably been interested in emphasizing the problem of form. Influenced by the work and ideas of Jorge Oteiza – who was almost a demigod to Badiola and his fellow artists in what critics of the time called ‘New Basque Sculpture’ – Badiola began with the premise that form, in art, must necessarily contain its own transgression, and that every form is thus a ‘bad form’, ‘a form in which desire remains trapped’, he says, paraphrasing Jean-François Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure in his conversation with João Fernandes that opens this catalogue. The idea that forms are always made up of elements that are in turn encumbered by their own history was already behind Badiola’s first Bastardos [Bastards] sculptures. The pieces in this series are driven by an impulse that is both anthropomorphic – in their yen for corporeality – and genealogical – in their need to trace the past and their tendency towards (self-)referentiality –, both of which became a con- stant presence in his work. At the same time, Txomin Badiola believes that forms in art never fully account for themselves. On the contrary, they reveal the gap between the representation of a thing, and the thing itself. They are ‘unsatisfied forms’ that reject the urge for closure, the desire for wholeness that nestles in our psy- chological perception. The perpetual dissatisfaction underlying these works reflects the contemporary subject’s frustration at feeling trapped between what Badiola describes as two deaths: surrendering to our drives (and being expelled from the social) and submitting to language (and being condemned to an always-mediated relationship with the real). The Txomin Badiola exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofía is structured around eight sections. Without altogether renouncing linearity – insofar as the show aims to reflect the gradual accumulation of the problems that emerged in Badiola’s work over time, and his progression in dealing with them – the sections are not chronological, and works from different periods are presented simultaneously in each. The first section, ‘Desiring, Bastard and Unsatisfied Forms’, brings together a series of works that revolve around the creation of structures that are somehow at odds with themselves and look for meaning outside. Like Duchamp’s ready-mades or Malevich’s Black Square, they show that in spite of attempts to restrict or control things, the essence, the seeds of a possible expansion, remains in them. The critical potential of these works lies in the paradoxical capacity to be (re)activated in very different ways as a result of the disclosure of their own insufficiency. In the works in the following two sections, ‘Surviving Among Signs. Being Sign’ and ‘An Image-Self. Inescapable Alterity. All is Vanity’, Badiola explores the implications of the shift from reality to rep- resentation in postmodern societies, in which things have gradually lost their objectual materiality, becoming signs that require decoding. These works pose an insoluble dilemma: if we are simply signs in a representation, then everything that is outside of language – everything that exceeds or cuts through it – verges on inhumanity; but this is precisely where reality appears, at the failure of language. The relationship between public and private, inside and outside, personal and political, are at the cen- tre of ‘Public Needs/Private Passions’ and ‘The Group, the Band and the Commando’. On one hand, these sections feature works in which Badiola uses a very specific installation model – the kiosk or 7 Txomin Badiola (2016) - MNCARS - 161130.indd 7 1/12/16 8:39 small pavilion – as a complex hybrid artefact that can accommodate element-signs of different ori- gins, in various media. On the other, they include a selection of works that show how the idea of ‘fam- ily’, and all that it entails, has influenced the subject matter and structural aspects of his work, as well as his ‘way of being in art’. In this latter sense, it is worth noting that Badiola has always felt the need to become part of artists’ groups or to create them around him. This exhibition is a paradigmatic ex- ample of this approach, given that both the selection of works and the way they are presented are the result of a long and intense collective curatorial process in which Badiola convened seven artists from his immediate circle – Ana Laura Aláez, Ángel Bados, Jon Mikel Euba, Pello Irazu, Asier Mendizabal, Itziar Okariz and Sergio Prego – as well as a group of younger artists who carried out technical tasks and acted as mediators with the first group so that Badiola could remain in a decentred position during part of the process. The difficulty involved in establishing a connection between a commitment to an artistic practice that is closely linked to the notion of form (of the ‘bad form’) and the various issues (political, religious, meta- linguistic, physiological, and so on) that Badiola felt called upon to address, is the focus of the section ‘Form Events’. And ‘Spaces, Bodies and Language’ revolves around the formulation of the corporeal presence in his work, initially as a mere suggestion, then gradually losing its phantasmagorical quality. As this corporeality became increasingly evident and recognizable over the years, the spatial config- uration of his work also became denser, and began to include a wider variety of elements. In some cases, his works even became a kind of stage, opening up to the fields of narrativity and the theatrical.