The MACBA Collection in six Critical Episodes (1957-2011) ► More than 200 works by 64 artists, including Chillida, Hans Haacke, Sanja Iveković, Mike Kelley, Oteiza, Hernández Pijuan, Tàpies, Oriol Vilapuig, Susana Solano, Dorothée Selz, Jaume Plensa and Àngels Ribé, amongst others. ► New organisation of the Collection, occupying the whole Museum and, in the case of a work by Allan Sekula, entering the public space, in Plaça dels Àngels. ► The MACBA Foundation, 25 Years Building the Collection. ► The AXA Foundation, the main exhibition sponsor, renews its commitment to MACBA. Title: Critical Episodes (1957-2011). The MACBA Collection. Official opening: Wednesday, 7 November at 7.30 pm. Exhibition: Since 8 November Organised by: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). Exhibition sponsor: AXA Foundation. With an exhibition entitled Critical Episodes (1957-2011). The MACBA Collection, sponsored by the AXA Foundation, MACBA, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, presents a new organisation of its collection. The selection suggests certain antecedents to what we now call systemic crisis. The show, which features more than 200 works by 64 artists, is organised into six “episodes”: Content Becomes Something to be Avoided Like a Plague; The Art of the First Globalisation; Fissures; Voyeurism, Fetishism and Narcissism; Work, Power and Control in a Globalised World; and Déconnage. These episodes occupy all the Museum floors and even venture out into the public space in the case of Allan Sekula’s work Shipwreck and Workers (Version 3 for Kassel) (2005-2007). Part of this piece, which was shown at Documenta in Kassel in 2007, will be installed in Plaça dels Àngels, the other inside the Museum. The exhibition coincides with the 25th anniversary of the MACBA Foundation, which celebrates a quarter of a century building the museum’s collection. The artists featured in these Critical Episodes include Ignasi Aballí, Lara Almarcegui, Art & Language, Judith Barry, Dara Birnbaum, Marcel Broodthaers, Joan Brossa, Eduardo Chillida, Öyvind Fahlström, Peter Friedl, Hans Haacke, Joan Hernández Pijuan, Mike Kelley, David Lamelas, Paul 1 McCarthy, Matt Mullican, Miralda, Hélio Oiticica, Jaume Plensa, Pere Portabella, Robert Rauschenberg, Àngels Ribé, Gerhard Richter, Allan Sekula, Andreas Siekmann, Susana Solano, Antoni Tàpies and Krzysztof Wodiczko, amongst others. The exhibition takes the form of a sequence of episodes that can be visited independently, and which place social and political transformations in the immediate context of the crises that have marked the progress of contemporary art. One of its central episodes takes up the American art critic Clement Greenberg’s phrase “content becomes something to be avoided like a plague” to revive the self-criticism of painting that began in the 1960s in response to an art that appealed strictly to individual perceptions. This section begins with interrogation of modern painting and moves towards a review of artistic practices that strive to understand contemporary social reality. The Art of the First Globalisation shows the result of this historic process. The third episode, Fissures, focuses on the idea of the subject, questioning the criteria we use to build our world vision and asking how we can unlearn what we have learned. Voyeurism, Fetishism and Narcissism, which also explores contemporary subjectivities, takes us into the new visual regime of a world accustomed to the narrative conventions of film, the screen. Finally, Work, Power and Control revolves around new lifestyles and production systems linked to advanced capitalism. This last episode features a showing of Déconnage, a video essay devoted to the Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles on the centenary of his birth. The exhibition features works by the following artists: Ignasi Aballí, Vito Acconci, Sergi Aguilar, Lara Almarcegui, Neville Almeida, Art & Language, Ángel Bados, Eugènia Balcells, Sandra Balsells, Judith Barry, Nestor Basterretxea, Erick Beltrán, Dara Birnbaum, K.P. Brehmer, Marcel Broodthaers, Joan Brossa, Victor Burgin, Anne Lise Coste, Gérard Courant, Eduardo Chillida, Erró, Marcelo Expósito, Eulàlia Grau, Öyvind Fahlström, Andrea Fraser, Peter Friedl, Dan Graham, Silvia Gubern, Federico Guzmán, Hans Haacke, Raymond Hains, Nigel Henderson, Joan Hernández Pijuan, Pello Irazu, Sanja Iveković, Mike Kelley, David Lamelas, Maurizio Lazzarato, Angela Melitopoulos, Paul McCarthy, Juan Luis Moraza, Matt Mullican, Cildo Meireles, Miralda, Robert Morris, Hélio Oiticica, Jorge Oteiza, Marc Pataut, Perejaume, Raymond Pettibon, Falke Pisano, Jaume Plensa, Pere Portabella, Robert Rauschenberg, Àngels Ribé, Gerhard Richter, Dieter Roth, Allan Sekula, Dorothée Selz, Richard Serra, Andreas Siekmann, Susana Solano, Antoni Tàpies, Francesc Tosquelles, Oriol Vilapuig, Jeff Wall and Krzysztof Wodiczko. An itinerary in six episodes Critical Episodes (1957-2011). The MACBA Collection opens with two episodes that are central to the review of modern painting and its move towards artistic practices committed to social transformations. Content Becomes Something to be Avoided Like a Plague and The Art of the First Globalisation will be open to the public on the Level 1 of the Museum until June 2013. ■ Content Becomes Something to be Avoided Like a Plague This episode evokes the famous war cry proclaimed by Clement Greenberg, one of the most influential of modern art critics. In the mid-20th century, the idea that painting should be reduced to a field of visual perceptions was predominant. Whilst Greenberg, 2 like other critics, often referred to a painting that should eschew all forms of representation, new artistic practices in the 1960s and 70s caused art to move in another direction, towards a collective effort to understand the world. Joan Miró’s gesture, provoked by the film-maker Pere Portabella when, in 1969, he erased the mural he had painted at the Barcelona headquarters of the College of Architects of Catalonia, goes a long way to summing up the revision of painting that was taking place in those days. The film Miró, l’altre [Miró, the Other] serves as the prelude to a self-criticism that led to such options as the inclusion of objects and advertising imagery on the surface of the painting. Works by Robert Rauschenberg and Antoni Tàpies illustrate the use of the former, whilst the latter is seen in Raymond Hains’ décollages and Nigel Henderson’s manipulated photographs. Also featured in this respect are analytical revisions of painting, found in works by Àngels Ribé and the monochrome canvases of Joan Hernández Pijuan. In the context of this vision of art as pure sensory perception, isolated from all discursive impulse, exhibition centres and institutions like museums address spectators in a language that encourages a disinterested perception, free of complexes that often degenerates into an invitation to the most hackneyed sensualism. “Enjoy”, “Feel” and “Emote” are slogans habitually used by art centres, and are also messages satirised by such artists as Andrea Fraser, who, in her institutional critique, unmasks the rhetoric of latest-generation museums. We find another revision of in the work of Robert Morris and the Art & Language group, the first artists to take a critical gaze at the division of labour that reigned in the art system in the 1960s and using the tools of art criticism for artistic production. In their view, the discourse on art was material of the highest order, and not merely commentary on the work. ■ The Art of the First Globalisation In the 1960s and 70s, and parallel to this self-criticism in painting, the world saw an unusual interconnection thanks to the media and the new means of transport that combined to form a global system. New artistic practices advanced towards a collected effort to understand the contemporary world in all its complexity. In the aforementioned historical context, this episode features a fertile crop of artist journalists, artist sociologists and artist poets, who shared the challenge of attaining a global gaze that went beyond strictly national realities and those corresponding to a closed art system. Whilst one of Öyvind Fahlström’s variable structures, The Little General (Pinball Machine) (1967-1968), transforms 1960s political icons into one of the popular pinball machines, whilst the Catalan artist Miralda documents the fusion of cultures through eating rituals in Santa Comida (1984-1989). Partaking of these global visions, Hélio Oiticica and Neville Almeida builds a powerful festive installation in which cocaine becomes a metaphor for a world seen as merchandise. This section also includes works by Marcel Broodthaers and Hans Haacke, which speak of art understood as a self-sufficient system. Finally, Dorothée Selz, Eugènia Balcells, Sanja Iveković and Gerhard Richter denounce the media construction of gender models that, nonetheless, perpetuate their hegemony in this new historic moment. Continuing with these Critical Episodes, the MACBA Collection explores the complex nature of contemporary subjectivities. On Level 0 del Museum and until 17 February 2013 two more episodes are presented: Fissures; and Voyeurism, Fetishism and Narcissism. 3 ■ Fissures This section comprises a meditation on some of the figures of the self that, despite constituting us as subjects, are usually silenced. The section includes works by Anne Lise Coste, Peter Friedl and Silvia Gubern, artists who revive the fragility and provisional nature of drawing as one of the first representations of