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COMISART. NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE ”LA CAIXA” COLLECTION “LA CAIXA” FOUNDATION. THE SPIRIT OF ”LA CAIXA” Exhibition Acknowledgements A CERTAIN DARKNESS This publication is dedicated 6 INTRODUCTION Produced by ”la Caixa” Foundation to my mother, who has worked with images her whole life and Comisart judges David Armengol taught me how to look at them. 3rd edition Ferran Barenblit ALEXANDRA LAUDO Carlos Martín I also want to thank each and Antònia M. Perelló every artist featured in the 8 A CERTAIN DARKNESS Elena Vozmediano show and Vanishing Points; Curator Alexandra Laudo Núria Faraig and all the other

Exhibition design Pep Canaleta (3carme33) members of the ”la Caixa” Banking Foundation who Exhibition graphics Alex Gifreu made this exhibition possible; 58 LIST OF WORKS all the Comisart judges in general and David Armengol Catalogue in particular for accompanying me throughout this process; Published by ”la Caixa” Banking Foundation 64 Patrícia de Muga, Charlie VANISHING POINTS Texts Alexandra Laudo Taché, Olivier Collet and Quico Graphic design Alex Gifreu Peinado; Marta Vega and Pablo Proofreading Tim James Morris Martínez; Irene Sola; Víctor and (www.barcelonakontext.com) Molina; Claudi Laudo and Julia 66 BIOGRAPHY Laudo; Alex Serrano; Joan Online catalogue available at: Fontcuberta; and my mother, Esther Laudo. https://coleccion.caixaforum.com/en/exposiciones https://caixaforum.es/ca_ES/barcelona

Photo credits © David Batchelor, Perejaume, VEGAP, , 2018: pp. 52–53, 22–23 © Bibliothèque nationale de France: pp. 12, 14 © Joan Brossa. Photograph: Gasull Fotografia: p. 32 © Christo: p. 24 © Fundació Joan Brossa, VEGAP, Barcelona, 2018: pp. 18–19, 47 © Pol González Novell: pp. 54–55 © João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva, 2018. Photograph: Rafael Vargas: p. 44 © Juan Francisco Isidro: pp. 30–31 © Ira Lombardía: pp. 50–51 © Michèle Métail: p. 48 © Pedro Mora: p. 34 © / Magnum Photos: p. 57 © Àngels Ribé, 2018. Photograph: Tony Coll: pp. 42–43 © Tim Rollins & K.O.S.: pp. 28–29 © Pedro G. Romero: p. 45 © Jordi Serra Mañosa: p. 21 © , 2018. Photograph: Gasull Fotografia: pp. 36–37 © Pedro Torres: pp. 40–41 © texts, the author © photographs, the photographers © translations, the translator © publication, ”la Caixa” Banking Foundation, Pl. Weiler, 3, 07001 Palma, 2018 ISBN: 978–84–9900–207–1 INTRODUCTION ”LA CAIXA” FOUNDATION

Contemporary art has become fertile terrain for philosophical reflection and It begins with the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in the early 20th speculation. It is all part of its tremendous appeal. Specialists from many century and ends with the same painting vanishing on digital screens held different fields come together to create ideas and discourses around works aloft by hordes of tourists in the early 21st century. Along the way, the show and artists that go beyond experiencing the artworks themselves. They explores the relationship between reality and representation, public and speak about our relationship with images, power, values and certainties, private space, overexposure to images and the disappearance of pictures. about imagination and creation. At the same time, however, this inherently Above all, it seeks out absent figures that trouble and fascinate us. intellectual side to modern-day artistic creation can also prove an obstacle Spectators are accompanied on this journey by a superb selection to direct, fluid communication with audiences. “You need to know so many of pieces by Joan Brossa, Christo, João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva, Ira things to appreciate !” is many people’s reaction. And they Lombardía, Perejaume, Martin Parr, Tim Rollins & K.O.S., Pedro G. Romero are not entirely wrong. As artworks have become wrapped in more and and Hiroshi Sugimoto, among others. Visual poetry, photography, video and more layers of philosophical, sociological, political and literary discourses, installation are linked together by a strong narrative rhythm full of contrasts. they have also become increasingly inscrutable. Alexandra Laudo’s A Certain Darkness is the third and final exhibition The ”la Caixa” Foundation strives to break down these barriers in the 2017 Comisart series, following Arola Valls and Ada Sbriccoli’s H(a)unting and encourages a wide range of people to get involved in current artistic Images: Anatomy of a Shot and Ángel Calvo Ulloa’s Beneath the Arm: Between debates. We do so by putting on exhibitions that shine new light on the the Palm of the Hand and the Armpit. pieces in the ”la Caixa” Collection of Contemporary Art, one of the largest in The ”la Caixa” Foundation would like to congratulate Alexandra Europe, as well as by organising outreach activities, guided tours and talks. Laudo and thank visitors for their keen interest in Comisart as key players Not to mention our cherished Comisart project, open to all young curators in the project. We warmly invite young curators to submit their projects eager for the opportunity to create their own exhibition out of pieces from for the next edition. the Collection. Every year, the three winning shows are presented to the public at CaixaForum Barcelona. No two Comisart projects are ever cast in the same mould. But looking back over its three editions, we can see certain shared characteristics: fresh insight, a desire to forge ties between different generations and cultural traditions, and the ability to craft discourses that bring us closer to key aspects of contemporary culture. From this , Alexandra Laudo’s A Certain Darkness is an exemplary project. Like much of contemporary art and contemporary exhibitions, this show was sparked by a philosophical concern, but its powerful narrative and compelling artworks account for much of its appeal to spectators.

6 7 ALEXANDRA LAUDO A CERTAIN PROLOGUE One morning in August 1911, a man in a white smock entered the Louvre, in Paris, lifted the Mona Lisa off the wall in the Salon Carré and walked out with it under his arm without anyone batting an eyelid. It was only the DARKNESS following day, more than twenty-four hours later, that the museum realised Da Vinci’s masterpiece was missing. News of the theft soon spread and made the front pages. For months, people queued up to look at the gap on the wall where the picture had been, including Franz Kafka and Max Brod, who travelled to Paris together to see the empty space. Many of these visitors had never seen the original painting or even been to the Louvre before. It wasn’t long before Guillaume Apollinaire and were called in for questioning as suspects in the case. Both had publicly defended Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, which had called for museums to be burned and classical artworks to be destroyed in order to make way for a new art. Moreover, it also transpired that some years previously they had both been implicated in the disappearance of some Iberian sculptures from the Louvre. Although they were quickly cleared of any involvement in the theft of the Mona Lisa, Apollinaire spent a week in prison. In December 1913, the Mona Lisa was found in Florence, when the thief tried to sell it to an art dealer. The culprit was identified as Vicenzo Peruggia, a painter and decorator who had worked at the Louvre. The painting had spent the previous two years hidden under the false bottom of a trunk in Peruggia’s modest boarding house in Rue de l’Hôpital-Saint-Louis, in Paris. During the two years it was missing, as the Louvre filled with crowds eager to see the blank space on the wall, in the outside world the image of the Mona Lisa was being reproduced anywhere and everywhere. Before the theft, the painting had been considered a masterpiece, but it was nothing like as popular as it became over the following decades. Its absence made it an icon. It is currently the most widely reproduced artwork in history.

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1 others. This propagation of ideas beyond the walls of the exhibition space evokes the Mona Lisa’s time outside the institutional context of the museum It’s not what you see that’s art. Art is the gap. and its secret existence during the time it remained hidden. In contrast to

the easily accessible works in the show, these extra pieces require a more proactive approach and an inquisitive spirit if spectators are to track them A few years ago, a friend told me about the theft of the Mona Lisa and down. lent me a book that analysed this incident from the perspective of art and psychoanalytic theory.1 Since then, I have been fascinated by this story and many of the events surrounding it, not only because it is an exciting 2 and captivating affair in itself, but also because I believe it raises highly relevant questions on how we relate to images, including many pertinent The thing that struck me most about the disappearance of the Mona Lisa was issues for thinking about the condition of the artistic image in these times not so much the details of the theft or the thief (although they are certainly of furious images.2 interesting asides), but rather the image of all those visitors staring at a A Certain Darkness starts with the dark, empty space left behind gap, an empty space, the absence of an artwork. In Stealing the Mona Lisa: on the gallery wall by the missing Mona Lisa and goes on to explore the What Art Stops Us from Seeing (the book I borrowed), Darian Leader poses links between images, ways of looking and artistic practice. At its core is what is surely the most germane question about this event: why on earth an exhibition that brings together a selection of artworks and documents would anyone go to see an empty space? Leader draws on psychoanalytic connected to the ideas of opacity, concealment and absence, as well as theories to explain that the urge to look is closely connected to the notion concepts linked to ways of seeing, the technology of representation and that there is something hidden. Images that put up resistance, or images what it means to be a spectator. It also examines how the visual arts can we can’t see, are the ones we are most eager to get a look at. create practices and strategies to act as forms of resistance to today’s However, in addition to this scopic drive to see a recalcitrant image, hypervisual, ocularcentric world. what brought crowds of people to see the gap on the wall at the Louvre A series of additional artistic initiatives and materials ties in with the was first and foremost the need to see what had happened for themselves, show at different sites across the city and in cyberspace. Under the heading to witness it firsthand. Indeed, it is often the case that if we want to feel Vanishing Points, these offshoots take the exhibition out into new spaces part of an event, and bear witness to it, we need to be physically present and branch off in new theoretical and artistic directions, some more closely at the place where it took place, rather than reading about it second hand. intertwined with the works on display and the overall curatorial project than This behaviour validates an empiricist epistemic model in which knowledge acquisition is mediated by the senses, above all sight—a sense which, thanks largely to the influence of Descartes’ theories on optics and sight, held 1. The friend in question was Víctor Molina, PhD, essayist and teacher at the Institut del Teatre, whom sway throughout the whole of modernity, a period that saw the rise of an I thank for his valuable contribution to this and many other curatorial projects of mine. The book he ocularcentric model during the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. lent me was Darian Leader, Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us from Seeing (London: Faber and Faber, 2002). Above and beyond this epistemic justification, the idea of those masses of visitors gathered around an absent image also leads us to think 2. The concept of furious images was put forward by , who analyses it in depth in his book La furia de las imágenes. Notas sobre la postfotografía (The Fury of Images: Notes on Post- about ways of looking and the ties between sight, memory and imagination. photography, Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2016). We can imagine that as they gazed at the absent Mona Lisa, those spectators

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In the early 20th century, when the Mona Lisa was stolen, European society was not as densely iconic as our own, but it was undergoing a series of technological transformations that were reshaping its relationship with images, at a time when pictures were beginning to proliferate and become more accessible in both the public sphere and private life. The increasing availability of photography and the invention of cinema led to more and more mechanical reproductions of reality and substantially transformed the value and meaning people gave to images, especially artistic images. Photographic and cine cameras created artworks that were no longer unique and made it possible to reproduce existing artworks. In their book Practices of Looking, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright revisit Walter Benjamin’s classic text on the technical reproducibility of artwork and point out how, paradoxically, the rise of the photographic image led to a reaffirmation of the value of the unique image and the cult of originality.5 It is worth remembering that while “Visitors looking with interest at the four iron pegs that had secured ’s painting to the wall”, Le Petit Parisien, 30 August 1911 hordes of visitors were queuing up at the Louvre to see the empty space the Mona Lisa had left behind, the image of Da Vinci’s painting was becoming increasingly present in many spheres of public life, having been reproduced were also remembering it, picturing it and therefore seeing it in a different in a whole range of different media: in newspapers and magazines, in the way. We live in an eminently visual culture that worships images, and as cinema, on postcards and posters and even on boxes of chocolates. In The theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff has observed, one of the most striking features of Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, when talking about his 1957 talk The this visual culture is the growing tendency to visualise things that are not in Creative Act, Duchamp tells Arturo Schwarz that art isn’t what we see: art is themselves visual.3 Joan Fontcuberta has said that in the post-photographic the gap. The artist identified this gap as the distance between an artistic idea era, in which we have all become producers and consumers of a constant and its materialisation, the difference between the intention and realisation swirl of images, perhaps—difficult though it may be to accept—images are of the work. It is in this space of impossibility, of distance, where art is to no longer created to be seen.4 An image that isn’t looked at, Fontcuberta be found. Following Benjamin’s reasoning, faced with the proliferation of says, is an invisible image, a non-image. In this hypervisual age of tired images of the Mona Lisa stripped of any aura, perhaps visitors went to eyes, maybe the only images that are created to be seen, made for the the Salon Carré in search of an authentic image, one which could only be purpose of being looked at, are those that are not there, those that have appreciated in the trace it left behind, its absence. disappeared or, going back to psychoanalytic theories, those that put up resistance. Gaps, absence, darkness. 5. Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Walter Benjamin’s essay has been published in several different editions. This text made use of the first edition, which Benjamin viewed as the basis for his work and 3. Nicholas Mirzoeff,An Introduction to Visual Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). which he used to edit the French of the text, published during his lifetime, and the revised German version, published after his death. It is available in English as The Work of Art in the Age of Its 4. Joan Fontcuberta, La furia de las imágenes. Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008).

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Another captivating aspect of the affair is the fact that the thief, Vicenzo Peruggia, lived with the artwork in his modest Paris boarding house for two years. In contrast to the mediated and codified access to the artwork imposed by the context of the Louvre as a museum, Peruggia’s extremely intimate and domestic relationship with the masterpiece can be seen as a radically emancipated gesture, a hugely disruptive action that destabilised the system of institutional values and thrust the artwork into the epicentre of everyday life. Interestingly, Peruggia’s theft of the Mona Lisa had been echoed almost exactly a hundred years before, when Napoleon had the very same masterpiece moved from the Louvre to his rooms in Fontainebleau Palace, where it remained for five years. Only a few years previously, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the Louvre had been turned from a royal palace into a public museum, offering access to art collections previously owned by the monarch. The creation of a public museum out of a royal palace reveals a profound change of mentality in terms of the social function that art was to play in society and in deciding who would have the right to access and see artistic images. In contrast, the Mona Lisa’s sequestration from the Louvre to Fontainebleau Palace captures in artistic terms the fate of the revolutionary values that came to an end with Napoleon’s coup d’état in 1799. From this perspective, the Mona Lisa’s later journey under Peruggia’s arm from the Louvre to his digs is somewhat ambiguous: on the one hand, it has a touch of Napoleonic haughtiness, placing the artwork outside the context of public ownership; on the other, it could symbolise more radical upheavals in its relationship with artistic heritage. Peruggia’s act can be read as an act of appropriation that unconsciously expresses the failure of the enlightened spirit that inspired the French Revolution6 and also captures the irreverence and daring of the artistic avant-gardes. It is worth remembering that in 1919,

6. In his defence, Peruggia claimed that he had stolen the painting as his patriotic duty: to bring it back in glory to its true home in Italy and avenge Napoleon’s rapacious plundering of artworks across Europe. He was, however, mistaken: it wasn’t Napoleon who had brought the Mona Lisa from Italy, but Da Vinci, when he came to live in Amboise under the patronage of King Francis I, in 1516. Nevertheless, Peruggia’s line of argument also expresses a position on who should own artistic images, in this case seen through the filter of patriotic ideology. News of the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, published in Le Petit Parisien on 23 August 1911 15 A CERTAIN DARKNESS ALEXANDRA LAUDO only a few years after the theft, Duchamp created L.H.O.O.Q.7 by cheekily simultaneous viewpoints and putting forward a way of understanding the pencilling a moustache and goatee onto a postcard of the Mona Lisa. phenomenon of vision as a complex, unstable process produced by an eye At the time, there was some speculation that Peruggia’s escapade in constant motion. Taking up Futurist maxims, Cubism attacked, albeit might have had something to do with avant-garde art. Suspicion initially fell symbolically, a whole artistic tradition and Cartesian understanding of reality, on Picasso and Apollinaire, for reasons that illustrate many artists’ antagonistic including the convention of perspective, one of whose greatest exponents relationship with the artistic canon. The two artists had previously been in the visual arts had been Leonardo da Vinci. linked to the theft of a set of Iberian sculptures from the Louvre, an action that may have been motivated by a desire to link themselves to a given artistic tradition or to stress their interest in it, as well as by their interest in 3 reinterpreting this tradition as contemporary artists (in this case, by taking the first avant-garde steps towards Cubism, since the sculptures appear A Certain Darkness gets under way with a photograph of a group of visitors to to have inspired Picasso to paint Les Demoiselles d’Avignon). In addition, the Louvre staring at the empty space on the wall left behind by the missing Picasso and Apollinaire had publicly defended Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, Mona Lisa, together with several other materials setting the theft in context. which had called for museums to be burned and classical artworks to be Accompanying these documents is the first artwork in the exhibition space: destroyed: dominant, normative images had to be eradicated to make way Joan Brossa’s object-poem Elegia a Leonardo (Elegy to Leonardo, 1998), for a new form of artistic expression. This provocative exaltation of the a piece that also explores absence and traces as aspects of memory. It is destructive act is also linked to an appropriationist approach, as analysed made up of an empty compass case set on top of a slab of white marble, by artist Pedro G. Romero and explored by Carlos Martín in this exhibition a material that recalls not only Renaissance sculpture and architecture, space in 2016.8 Iconoclastic action bestows value and power upon vandalised but also tombstones and funerary altars. Although none of the parts of the artistic objects. compass set are present, we can make out the sunken recesses where they Sturken and Cartwright make the point that questions about looking would have gone, like a fossil or negative mould of the object. Echoing the and experiments on how to represent new ways of seeing played a central empty space that Da Vinci’s painting left behind on the walls of the Louvre, role in the French avant-gardes in the late 19th and early 20th century. The Brossa’s piece alludes to an object through a trace left behind in an empty Futurists not only planned to destroy artworks, but also wanted to remove space. Although absent, the pair of compasses evoke a scientific approach the possibility of looking at artistic heritage. Perhaps the most radical part to representing reality shaped through the convention of perspective so of their manifesto was not so much the proposed aggression against the enthusiastically developed by Da Vinci. They also bring to mind Da Vinci’s object, but rather the violence aimed at a whole history of looking. In the and his studies on the ideal proportions of the human figure, hands of Braque, Picasso and Apollinaire, among others, Cubism shaped which became the cornerstone for the aesthetic canon that governed artists’ a fragmented, kinetic form of representing reality by offering multiple, visual interpretation and representation of the body for centuries. As well as paying homage to the figure of Da Vinci, Brossa’s elegy can also be seen as proclaiming the end of his aesthetic conventions and the rationalist vision of the world. 7. The very name of the piece reflects this punning spirit: when pronounced in French, the letters Brossa’s piece is followed by a selection of artworks created by hiding L H O O Q sound like “Elle a chaud au cul” (She’s horny). or removing an image; many of them contain visual barriers—some more 8. Iconoclastic Gestures, Heterodox Images, CaixaForum Barcelona, 4 March – 5 June 2016. evident than others—between the spectator and the artistic object. These

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18 Joan Brossa. Elegia a Leonardo, 1998 A CERTAIN DARKNESS pieces put up some resistance to being looked at, in that the represented object is partially or fully hidden from sight. The act of hiding, covering or removing something breaks or weakens the artwork’s representative function, but at the same time spurs spectators on to discover this something, to overcome this visual resistance by using their imagination. Some of these works also hint at longstanding formal conventions that have conditioned our ways of observing artistic images. José Maldonado’s painting Ventana II (Window II, 1989) shows a half-open window whose frame runs right the way around the edge of the canvas, coinciding visually with what could be the wooden picture frame. Maldonado constructs an image combining the Renaissance motif of the window with the illusory space of Baroque artifice, disregarding Alberti’s theories on perspective in painting, which stated that the canvas should act as a window onto reality. The traditional image of the window in paintings as separating interior and exterior is reformulated to show us a dark background, against which inside and out can no longer be distinguished at all. As in many of Maldonado’s pieces, Ventana II shows the artist’s interest in issues concerning vision, looking, the limits of perception and the mechanisms of representation. Perejaume’s El lloc i la data (The Place and the Date, 1991) also explores some of these questions and analyses the relationship between representation and represented object, presence and absence. Two lengths of different materials are arranged at right angles as if to form the bottom and right-hand side of a picture frame, while also mapping out a space-time coordinate, the space axis running along the bottom and the time axis up the side. As is often the case in Perejaume’s work, this metareferential piece alludes to the language of art and its role as a representational device. A frame, which serves to separate the represented object shown in a painting from the surrounding reality, and which demarcates the artistic image by determining how we perceive it, here becomes an abstract system of representation, a speculative space which could potentially be filled by any painting the spectator might choose to imagine. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work falls within the category of environmental art and takes the form of temporary interventions in natural or urban surroundings. In their interventions, the artists surrounded, lined or

20 José Maldonado. Ventana II, 1989 22 Perejaume. El lloc i la data, 1991 UNA CERTA FOSCOR ALEXANDRA LAUDO

wrapped buildings, geographical features, landscapes or other noteworthy objects in natural or synthetic fabric to significantly alter their outward appearance. Their wrappings are probably their best-known interventions, and have had a major role in shaping how we see iconic locations, leading us to think about our own ways of seeing. The action of hiding, designed to block the visual dimension or reformulate it from an opaque perspective, is often at the core of their work. Wrapped Monument to Cristobal Colon (1984) is a preparatory sketch by Christo for a project that never got off the drawing board, but which would have seen this artistic duo wrapping the iconic monument to Christopher Columbus at the bottom of La Rambla, in Barcelona. Gold Alice I (1984–1989) is a large-scale collaborative painting by artist Tim Rollins and a group of students at a public school in the Bronx, New York, who go by the name of K.O.S. (Kids of Survival). This and similar pieces were produced as part of the Art and Knowledge Workshop, an alternative learning platform set up by Rollins for students written off by the official education system. Students on this informal-education programme created artwork and read literary classics; the overlap between these two areas of knowledge gave rise to pieces such as this. The large rectangular painting contains a hidden picture: a portrait of Lewis Carroll’s Alice. The painting is hidden beneath a layer of pages from a copy of Alice in Wonderland, which, in turn, is almost completely covered by a thick layer of gilded enamel, save for a narrow strip all the way around the edge, in which broken words and lines from the book can just about be made out. The piece has the final appearance of a beautiful, practically monochrome, painting, but beneath it lies a literary text, and beneath that is a figurative image of its main character. Gold Alice I reveals the tensions between literary representation—a text doesn’t impose a specific image of what it describes, but invites the reader to imagine it—and figurative visual representation, which is unique and specific. In this piece, Rollins and K.O.S.’s representation of Alice is not, in the end, what they opt to offer spectators, but rather what they choose to hide from them, by concealing it quite deliberately behind the very literary text that inspired the representation. The shiny golden surface alludes metaphorically to the function of fiction as a speculative space and the realm of imagination. But this work also

Christo. Wrapped Monument to Cristobal Colon (Project for Barcelona), 1984 25 A CERTAIN DARKNESS ALEXANDRA LAUDO poses an implicit question linked to the role images play in political art. As impoverished ways of looking can be linked to the forms and technologies a group of at-risk young people whose art aims to empower its members used to represent images. Technology undoubtedly moulds the way we and denounce injustice, Kids of Survival has sometimes been accused of look, often imposing a stock repertoire of hegemonic images. The rise of producing excessively beautiful, formalist art. However, Rollins and K.O.S.’s television played a major role in expanding spectators’ visual references, but work can be understood as deliberately eschewing the use of explicitly also encouraged a standardisation of this visual imaginary, largely aimed at political images and embracing formal beauty and opacity as admissible promoting consumption. As Jonathan Crary9 has observed, television turned and valid ways of creating political art. spectators into consumers. Nonetheless, beginning in the 1950s, the boom Juan Francisco Isidro’s Los continentes sumergidos (The Drowned of television and film culture emboldened many artists and filmmakers to Continents, 1991) is made up of 160 standard white business envelopes laid experiment with audiovisual images and carry out projects to destabilise out on a large rectangular surface, each containing a photograph of the the uniformity of hitherto normative visual regimes. same object, visible only through the transparent rectangular window in Pedro Mora’s Untitled (1989) is a sculptural installation that explores the envelope. Designed originally to show the recipient’s postal address, the history of the technology of the image and representation. It is made up in this piece these windows act more as cinematic screens showing a kind of six almost identical artefacts that recall old stereoscopes and other pre- of broken, discontinuous sequence of the photographed object, in which cinematic instruments. The viewfinders entice spectators with the promise the images are partially hidden. The wavy red lines running across the of an intimate encounter with an unknown image. After triggering their painting from one side to another make it hard to get a good look at the scopic drive, however, the work soon thwarts it: the artefacts don’t contain photographs and increase the tension between what is revealed and what remains hidden. We find echoes of this exercise in Joan Brossa’s object- any images and are stuck fast to the wall, making it impossible for any poem Sobre el sobre (On the Envelope, 1988), which puns on two different light to get in. As in much of Mora’s work, this piece reflects an interest in meanings of the Catalan word ‘sobre’ by placing one white letter envelope addressing questions linked to memory, absence, emptiness and the limits on top of another, almost completely covering it and hiding any recipient’s of perception. address; all that can be seen is the portrait of King Juan Carlos I on the Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photograph Rialto, Pasadena (1993) forms part of stamp poking out from underneath. one of his famous photographic series, Theaters, in which he photographed 1920s and 1930s Art Deco theatres that had been converted into cinemas. This photograph frames the inside of a cinema and clearly shows the screen, 4 the front few rows of seats and part of the walls and ceiling. There is no trace of any human beings, and no recognisable image can be made out on the Following the previous set of works featuring absent, hidden or concealed screen, just intense white light. Sugimoto achieved this effect by setting images, the exhibition continues with a series of artworks that explores the exposure time to equal the running time of the film, thus condensing emptiness and visual vacuity in projected and moving images. all the light emitted from start to finish and removing all evidence of any In Jean-Luc Godard’s film Éloge de l’amour (2001), a woman in the shadows with her back to the camera looks out of the window and wonders aloud when the gaze went into decline. The main character—off screen, never seen, only heard—replies: “Was it ten, fifteen or even fifty years before television?” In this scene, Godard asks whether our increasingly 9. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London and Brooklyn: Verso, 2013).

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30 Juan Francisco Isidro. Los continentes sumergidos, 1991 UNA CERTA FOSCOR ALEXANDRA LAUDO

specific image, thus reducing the film to pure light. As Amelia Groom10 has observed, Sugimoto shows that the flow of things results in their own disappearance. This photograph and the series it belongs to explore the dichotomy between light and darkness, presence and absence, as well as the relationship between still and moving images. Taken in cinemas that were once theatres, these photographs also allude to the transformation of the figure of the spectator, and explore how the way we look at images evolves with changing technology. Pedro Torres does something similar in Distancia (Distance, 2014), an installation featuring six slide projectors from different periods, many now obsolete. Although switched on, the empty devices don’t project any images, just their own light beams, which vary depending on the features of each model. Together they create a series of different geometric patterns on the wall. The work hints at the essence of cinema and sparks a certain nostalgia for this almost defunct technology for producing and reproducing images. The installation also works as a negation of cinema, by stripping the devices of their ability to project images and condemning them to the poetry of still silence.

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Àngels Ribé’s Invisible Geometry 3 (1973) is made up of two very similar black-and-white photographs displayed alongside each other at more or less spectators’ eye level. Both photographs are front-facing headshots of the artist looking slightly downwards. The main difference between the two is that in one photograph Ribé appears to be looking at a point somewhere to her right, while in the other she is looking off to her left. The title gives a clue as to what might be going on here: as we look at the piece, our eyes cannot help but flit between the two invisible points she appears to be

10. Amelia Groom, “There’s Nothing to See Here: Erasing the Monochrome”, e-flux journal 37, September 2012. Accessed on 20 April 2018 at http://www.e-flux.com/journal/37/61233/there-s-nothing-to-see- here-erasing-the-monochrome/

Joan Brossa. Sobre el sobre, 1988 33 ALEXANDRA LAUDO ALEXANDRA LAUDO

looking at, drawing an invisible line linking the two photographs. Through this tiny, subtle gesture, revealed to us in just two snapshots, Ribé sculpts an invisible, immaterial experience that places both action and artistic object in the space of the imagination. As in many of her actions, the artist explores aspects linked to perception and the act of seeing, using her body and movement as tools for artistic creation and instruments for probing space. This piece follows on from previous works on intangible images and draws spectators’ attention to eyes and the gaze. It opens a section in the exhibition featuring a series of works and documents that use the eye to explore phenomena such as vision, blindness and reading. In 1637, René Descartes published a treatise on the anatomy of the eye and human sight to accompany his Discourse on Method. In this treatise, considered by many to lay the foundations for modern visual culture,11 Descartes defined light as a material element rather than a manifestation of divinity, and explained that the eye works like a kind of : images are formed inside it through the phenomenon of refraction. Descartes introduced a new notion of vision that would acquire great importance in modernity, dominated by the sense of sight and an ocularcentric model. João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva’s Modelo ocular (2006) shifts Descartes’ theoretical model of sight from the realm of scientific description onto more symbolic terrain. The artists built a camera obscura out of rather unusual parts, such as an ostrich egg and broken egg shell. By strategically steering the light and carefully arranging a series of objects inside a dark, closed room, Gusmão + Paiva manage to project the image of one of the parts onto the surface of another part. In this way, by combining light, darkness, object and image, the artists create their own personal representation of the phenomenon of sight, giving mythic and magical aspects room to overlap with scientific ideas. Gusmão + Paiva suggest a way of interpreting humans’ relationship with reality which, like much artistic work, destabilises the rationalist vision of the world.

11. Nicholas Mirzoeff, 1999.

Pedro Mora. Untitled, 1989 35 36 Hiroshi Sugimoto. Rialto, Pasadena, 1993 A CERTAIN DARKNESS ALEXANDRA LAUDO

Many iconoclastic gestures take the form of removing or damaging the eyes 6 of images. Pedro G. Romero’s project Archivo F.X. brings together over a thousand photographs and audiovisual documents of iconoclastic actions In “The Aesthetics of Silence”, Susan Sontag posits impoverished art as a linked to the anticlerical political movement in between 1865 and 1945, strategy for improving the artistic experience, and claims that silence, emptiness from the first bourgeois revolutions to the postwar period. Many of these and reduction can promote new forms of looking at and approaching works items are images of saints, the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ whose eyes of art.12 Following a selection of pieces centring on the eye, the exhibition have been vandalised in one way or another. In the archive, these images now moves on to a set of works that take a conscious position of the role of are indexed under relevant art history headings and concepts, related above the artist as a producer of images and which question creators’ relationship all to the modern avant-garde. By giving these images an artistic reading, with the visual regime. The first piece is an invitation to an event that took the Archivo F.X. compares iconoclasm and the modern project and uses place on 29 May 1977 at the West Side Highway, Manhattan. Under the title a method of relational similarity to draw parallels between political and Works to Be Destroyed, a group of artists including Àngels Ribé, Francesc aesthetical radicalisation. Under the entry “Les yeux” the archive contains Torres, Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson and Gordon Matta-Clark organised an image of the sculpture of Saint Bruno with his eyes gouged out and an an art event to present a series of works which, as ephemeral actions, would information sheet that reflects on the eye as something that both attracts necessarily be destroyed at the end. The project was in keeping with an and terrifies. Alongside this entry is an artist’s book by the same author,En artistic mood against creating lasting artworks, and reflected the profound el ojo de la batalla (In the Eye of the Battle, 2002), which brings together a transformations that had taken place in New York in the 1960s and 1970s, series of texts and visual materials from the Archivo F.X.; its title is a nod to when the notions of process, ephemerality and dematerialisation came Georges Bataille, many of whose writings feature the eye as a philosophical to the fore. The title, Works to Be Destroyed, directs the aggression of the construct. One of the texts in the book, Horacio Fernández’s “Males del iconoclastic gesture not against a foreign image but against the artwork ojo”, contains anecdotes and events with the eye at their core, ranging from itself, thus challenging the dominant understanding of art as a cult of the remarks under the entry “Eye” from the Dictionnaire critique that Robert object and presentation. In a contemporary world saturated with both objects Desnos, Marcel Griaule and Georges Bataille published in instalments in and images, and in which most of the images in circulation have no physical Documents magazine, to Jacques Lacan’s reflections in Minotaure on the existence, Ira Lombardía’s Visual Strike (2012) updates this act of resistance case of the Papin sisters, who gouged out their mistresses’ eyes. to artistic overproduction by focusing it specifically on cyberspace. In May We find an echo of Saint Bruno’s empty eyes in the mask Joan 2012, Lombardía went on “visual strike” and removed all the images of her Brossa places between the white pages of an open book in his object- artworks from her website. During the thousand-day strike, visitors to her poem Lectura (Reading, 1984), which alludes to both readers and literary website found a manifesto explaining what had led her to take this course characters, as well as to reading as an ironically speculative action. On the of action, including the need to do away with visual consumerism and iconic front of Michèle Métail’s Carte postale pour sourd-muet (Postcard for Deaf- bulimia, as well as pressing for an ecology of images. Lombardía sees Visual Mute, 1980s), instead of a picture we find the words ‘Carte postale’ written Strike not only as an action that creates a break for tired eyes but also as in sign language. By shifting these signs to a printed medium, they become a rebellious act of resistance. a metareferential text, albeit a somewhat opaque one to any spectators who don’t understand sign language.

12. Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence”, in Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969).

38 39 ALEXANDRA LAUDO

40 Pedro Torres. Distancia, 2014 UNA CERTA FOSCOR ALEXANDRA LAUDO

42 Àngels Ribé. Invisible Geometry 3, 1973 UNA CERTA FOSCOR ALEXANDRA LAUDO

João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva. Modelo ocular, 2006 Pedro G. Romero. Archivo F.X.: Entrada: Les yeux, 2001 A CERTAIN DARKNESS ALEXANDRA LAUDO

ALEXANDRA LAUDO While Lombardía was temporarily turning her images into white spaces, artist and urban archaeologist David Batchelor was searching for empty spaces between the overabundance of visual stimuli in the city. Since 1997 he has been photographing rectangular white surfaces found in the urban environment in London and other places he visits. These gaps are images stripped of any image, white spaces that go unnoticed amid the avalanche of visual stimuli, and which are now at risk in the face of the growing proliferation of new means of advertising in cities and their peripheries. Gathered together under the title Found Monochromes, they make up a photography archive which, although constantly growing, appears to document an endangered urban species. Towards the end of the show we find a metareferential film which explores the production of images from the subjective perspective of its character, a filmmaker. Pol González Novell’s filmLe quatrième mur (The . Lectura, 1984 Fourth Wall, 2014) is structured around a monologue by French filmmaker Joan Brossa Olivier Giroud (an invention or alter ego of González Novell himself), whose next film will be based on an enigmatic series of events involving a girl. Giroud shares his concerns about which images the film should and shouldn’t include, and reflects on the gap between the idea of a film and the film itself, including what gets lost when making it, an idea that takes us back to Duchamp’s space of impossibility, that empty hole at the core of any work of art. An earlier version of Le quatrième mur included four scenes featuring a sequence of images of a girl. Sometime later, González Novell made a new version in which all traces of this sequence had vanished. It is interesting to wonder about the status of these images, which at one time formed part of the work and were seen by spectators at screenings but which are no longer there. What is the current nature of these images? Does this new version mean that they are no longer art? In this exhibition we screen the final version of the film, without any images of the girl. However, as part of the Vanishing Points offshoots, these cut sequences can be found somewhat hidden away somewhere in the exhibition space, within a film the same length as the original but featuring no images except those of the girl. As a result, this new film, in which the only visible images are those that never made it into the definitive version of Le quatrième mur, acts as a negative or opposite of the final cut.

46 A CERTAIN DARKNESS ALEXANDRA LAUDO

Michèle Métail. Carte postale pour sourd-muet, 1980s Works To Be Destroyed, 1977 50 Ira Lombardía. Visual Strike, 2012 UNA CERTA FOSCOR ALEXANDRA LAUDO

52 David Batchelor. Found Monochromes, 1997–ongoing 54 Pol González Novell. Le quatrième mur, 2014 A CERTAIN DARKNESS

EPILOGUE

A Certain Darkness began with an image of visitors who had come to the Louvre in 1911 to look at the absence of an image, the empty space left behind on the wall following the theft of the Mona Lisa. Walter Benjamin drew a distinction between an image’s cult value and its exhibition value, and reminded us that the first artistic images were at the service of magic: what was important was not the fact that they were seen, but that they existed. Benjamin commented on how the ritual value of these images even demanded that they remain hidden.13 In our own hypervisual times, what matters is not that images exist, but that they are displayed, circulated and accessible. However, paradoxically, this omnipresent display often means that images are never looked at, condemned to a phantasmagorical life in a kind of nonexistence. The exhibition ends with a photograph taken by Martin Parr of hordes of visitors to the Louvre in 2012 taking photos of the Mona Lisa with their mobile phones, desperate to capture the image of another image that remains in the background, out of focus, almost like an absence, an empty space.

13. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008).

56 Martin Parr. Paris. Le Louvre, 2012 LIST OF WORKS LIST OF DAVID BATCHELOR CHRISTO Found Monochromes Wrapped Monument to Cristobal Colon 1997–ongoing (Project for Barcelona) 250 images, 1 hardback book, 1984 1 digital slide projection Mixed media on paper Courtesy of the artist, Ingleby Gallery, 243 × 144 cm WORKS Edinburgh, Galeria Leme, São Paulo ”la Caixa” Collection of Contemporary Art

JOAN BROSSA JEAN-LUC GODARD Lectura [Reading] Éloge de l’amour 1984 [In Praise of Love] Object-poem 2001 Paper and fabric on wood 35 mm film transferred to DVD, 9 × 62.7 × 31.3 cm (artwork); b/w and colour, sound, 98 min 11 × 82.9 × 51.8 cm (artwork with Excerpt: 2 min wooden base, signed) MACBA Collection. MACBA Consortium. Joan Brossa Collection. POL GONZÁLEZ NOVELL Fundació Joan Brossa deposit Le quatrième mur Sobre el sobre [The Fourth Wall] [On the Envelope] 2014 1988 Single-channel HD video, Object-poem, 10th ed. colour, stereo, 21 min Various materials on wood Courtesy of the artist 7.5 × 24.7 × 22.8 cm Galeria Joan Prats Le quatrième mur. Le souvenir d’elle [The Fourth Wall: The Memory of Her] Elegia a Leonardo 2018 [Elegy to Leonardo] Single-channel HD video, 1998 colour, stereo, 21 min Object-poem Courtesy of the artist Various materials on marble 17 × 40 × 40 cm MACBA Collection. MACBA Consortium. Joan Brossa Collection. Fundació Joan Brossa deposit

59 A CERTAIN DARKNESS LIST OF WORKS

JOÃO MARIA GUSMÃO JOSÉ MALDONADO MARTIN PARR TIM ROLLINS & K.O.S. + PEDRO PAIVA Ventana II Paris. Le Louvre Gold Alice I Modelo ocular [Window II] 2012 1984–1989 [Eye Model] 1989 Pigment print Gilded enamel and paper on canvas 2006 Charcoal and varnish on canvas 101.6 × 152.4 cm 182.5 × 317 cm Installation 180 × 130.5 cm Martin Parr / Magnum Photos ”la Caixa” Collection Camera obscura system with a wooden ”la Caixa” Collection of Contemporary Art table, ostrich eggs, lenses and focus of Contemporary Art Varying sizes PEREJAUME MACBA Collection. MACBA MICHÈLE MÉTAIL PEDRO G. ROMERO Foundation. Work acquired thanks El lloc i la data to the Fundació Puig Carte postale pour sourd-muet [The Place and the Date] Archivo F.X.: Entrada: Les yeux [Postcard for Deaf-Mute] 1991 [F.X. Archive: Entry: The Eyes] From the series ‘Fête de la Lettre (Paris)’ Rail and frame 2001 1980s Media installation, ink printed JUAN FRANCISCO ISIDRO 130 × 198 × 14 cm Printed material ”la Caixa” Collection on paper and b/w photographs Los continentes sumergidos 10.4 × 15.5 cm of Contemporary Art Varying sizes [The Drowned Continents] MACBA Collection. MACBA Study Courtesy of the artist and the 1991 Centre. Joan Rabascall donation àngels barcelona gallery Window envelopes, photographs, ÀNGELS RIBÉ red ink, glass and wood En el ojo de la batalla. Estudios sobre iconoclastia e iconodulia, historia del 126 × 392 cm PEDRO MORA Invisible Geometry 3 ”la Caixa” Collection 1973 arte y vanguardia moderna, guerra y economía, estética y política, sociología of Contemporary Art Untitled 2 gelatin silver prints: sagrada y antropología materialista 1989 43.2 × 60.8 cm each [In the Eye of Battle: Studies on Iron, paraffin, rubber goggles and glass MACBA Collection. MACBA Iconoclasm and Icondule, Art History 6 units: 13 × 43 × 24 cm each Foundation. Work acquired thanks IRA LOMBARDÍA and Modern Avant-Garde, War and ”la Caixa” Collection to Dinath de Grandi de Grijalbo Economics, Aesthetics and Politics, Visual Strike of Contemporary Art Sacred Sociology and Materialist 2012 Anthropology] Online action 2012–2015 2002 Installation Artist’s book Varying sizes 24 × 17 cm Courtesy of the Galería Alarcón Criado Archive. MACBA Study Centre

60 61 A CERTAIN DARKNESS LLISTA D’OBRES

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO —

Rialto, Pasadena Works To Be Destroyed: West Side 1993 Highway, New York City [...] May 29, Gelatin silver print 1977; Artists: Vito Acconci, Laurie 42 × 54 cm Anderson, Jacki Apple [...] MACBA Collection. MACBA 1977 Foundation. Brondesbury Holdings Printed material Ltd deposit 15.2 × 10 cm MACBA Collection. MACBA Study Centre. Antoni Mercader donation PEDRO TORRES

Distancia [Distance] 2014 Installation with slide projectors Varying sizes Courtesy of the artist

62 65 VANISHING POINTS

A series of additional artistic initiatives and materials ties in with the show at different sites VANISHING across the city and in cyberspace. Under the heading Vanishing Points, these offshoots take the exhibition out into new spaces and branch off in new theoretical and artistic directions, some more closely intertwined with the works on display and the overall curatorial project than others. This propagation of ideas beyond the walls of the exhibition space evokes the Mona Lisa’s time outside the institutional context of the museum and POINTS its secret existence during the time it remained hidden.

POL GONZÁLEZ NOVELL JOAN RABASCALL

Le quatrième mur. Le souvenir d’elle La voz de su amo [The Fourth Wall: The Memory of Her] (from the series “Spain is Different”) 2018 1973 Single-channel HD video, Documents, preparatory materials colour, stereo, 21 min and offshoots from this piece Video half-concealed within Special Collections Room at the the exhibition space MACBA Study Centre Library

GUILLERMO PFAFF MARIO SANTAMARÍA

Exili The Non-Imaginary Museum [Exile] Work in progress 2017 Project and action in cyberspace Mural painting exhibited on the Active throughout the exhibition period premises of the Galeria Carles Taché Please contact the artist for access: [email protected]

65 BIOGRAPHY

ALEXANDRA LAUDO BIOGRAPHY Barcelona, 1978

Independent curator and art critic. During the 2017–2018 season, she curated the cycle La possibilitat d’una illa in Espai 13 at the Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona) and prepared a project for Collective (Edinburgh). During the 2015–2016 season, she took part in the CuratorLab curatorial research programme at Konstfack University (Stockholm), where she created the performative talk An Intellectual History of the Clock, which she has presented at art spaces and festivals across Europe, including Malongen (Stockholm), Timelab (Ghent), L’Iselp (Brussels), Halfhouse (Barcelona), Ciało/Umysł (Warsaw) and the andriesse eyck galerie (Amsterdam, as part of Amsterdam Art Weekend). Her recent projects include As Slow As Possible (Festival Embarrat, Tàrrega), Constel·lacions familiars (EspaiDos, Terrassa; Museu de l’Empordà, Figueres; Espai d’Art Moritz, Cornellà; Can Palauet, Mataró), La distància adequada (Fundació Suñol, Barcelona), Asuntos domésticos (Visiona, Huesca), La bonne distance (Vidéographe, Quebec), La condició narrativa (La Capella, Barcelona) and Viaggio al centro della Terra (Museo della Città, Sassari). She has also worked as assistant curator at several art spaces and platforms, including Sant Andreu Contemporani (2013–2015), Sala d’Art Jove (2011–2012) and Loop Festival (2009–2010). She has published and edited a number of works and writes regularly for A-Desk and b-guided. After graduating in humanities, she went on to study cultural management at , in Barcelona. She also has an MA in Visual Arts Administration from New York University, which she attended on a scholarship from the ”la Caixa” Foundation.

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