https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7159-2398
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Abstract
Artist Luz Broto bored a 5 cm hole in the MACBA museum’s main façade, an intervention entitled Abrir un agujero permanente (2015), within a temporary exhibition. Broto demanded the hole’s permanence, disputing the venue’s temporary nature and challenging the museum’s bylaws, which exempt it from bestowing permanence to artwork. The artist’s drilling of the façade constituted a destructive strategy to impact the museum’s functioning, resulting in juridical and political consequences. This article reads Broto’s use of destruction and institutional regeneration in relation to Spain’s ‘New Left’ neglect of contemporary art institutions and to the pre-existing fabric of cultural networks more generally.
Notes
1 Georges Perec, Espèces d’espaces (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1974).
2 MAIO Architectural Studio, Exhibition Display System for Species of Spaces at macba, 2015–2016, n.p.; available at <https://www.maio-architects.com/project/48-x-48-m-rooms/> (accessed 16 July 2020).
3 Luz Broto, personal interview, 19 October 2019.
4 The term ‘anarchitecture’ was first used by the Anarchitecture Group in the early 1970s. However, the term has been historically associated with the works of only one of its members, Chilean-American architect Gordon Matta-Clark, and is used to name his violent interventions into architectonical structures, in the vein of a destructive anarchist relationship to architecture as an institution. For a discussion on the category, see James Attlee, ‘Towards Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark and Le Corbusier’, Tate Papers, 7 (2007), n.p.; available online at <https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/07/towards-anarchitecture-gordon-matta-clark-and-le-corbusier> (accessed 23 November 2022).
5 According to art historian Alexander Alberro: ‘institutional critique revisited that radical promise of the European Enlightenment, and they [sic] did so precisely by confronting the institution of art with the claim that it was not sufficiently committed to, let alone realizing or fulfilling, the pursuit of publicness that had brought it into being in the first place’ (Alexander Alberro, ‘Institutions, Critique, and Institutional Critique’, in Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, ed. Alexander Alberro & Blake Stimson [Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 2009], 2–19 [p. 3]).
6 The notion of ‘public sphere’ in bourgeois society circulated in the seventeenth century, with the formation of the liberal State. As early as the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant emphasized the importance for citizens to have the freedom to critique the Church and the State, without retaliation, as a way of improving them as institutions. See Immanuel Kant, ‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?’ (‘Answering the Question: What is the Enlightenment’) (1784).
7 See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger & Frederick Lawrence, with an intro. by Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991 [1st German ed. 1962]) for an historical account of the notion of ‘the public’. Habermas’ disregard for the inherent exclusions upon which the public sphere was founded (including women and non-bourgeois men) and his neglect of other articulations of the ‘public sphere’ such as those produced by non-bourgeois persons, through unconventional channels, make his analysis deficient. Yet his emphasis on the importance of preserving the public sphere’s autonomy still predominantly informs the debate.
8 Critic Michael Warner alludes to this problem when he writes, ‘the public in this new sense, in short, was no longer opposed to the private. It was private’ (Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics [New York: Zone Books, 2002], 47; original emphasis).
9 Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins, Social Text, 25–26 (1990), 56–80 (p. 75).
10 I borrow the term ‘instituent praxis’ from Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval: ‘ “Instituent praxis” is therefore both the activity that establishes a new system of rules and the activity that tries to permanently revive this inaugural activity so as to avoid the ossification of the instituent within the instituted’ (Pierre Dardot & Christian Laval, Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century [London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019], 304). See also Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard U. P., 2011), 355–60, wherein they discuss how institutions are part and parcel of the praxis of insurrection, according to a ‘minor line’ in social theory, which argues for social conflict as the very foundational basis of society.
11 Broto’s work has often been identified with institutional critique, a conceptual artistic trend first termed ‘neo-Avant-garde’ in its early stages of institutional criticism, which emerged in the early 1960s, mainly in Europe, Latin America and the US, and has persisted through a series of successive waves until the present on a global level. Its main features are an abandonment of the centrality of the visual regime as denotative of ‘conceptual art’, as Alberro defines conceptual art ‘a growing wariness toward definitions of artistic practice as purely visual’ (Alexander Alberro, ‘Reconsidering Conceptual Art, 1966–1977’, in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro & Blake Stimson [Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 1999], xvi–xxxvii [p. xvii]). Institutional critique also offers a questioning of art institutions’ investment in the reproduction of modernity’s project, as well as their role in capitalism’s advancement through allowing the infiltration, as Alberro has called it, of ‘political and corporate concerns’ (Alberro, ‘Institutions, Critique, and Institutional Critique’, 7).
12 Luz Broto, personal interview, 19 October 2019.
13 Alberro describes the works of Haacke as ‘ “double-agents” that enter into the institution of art to show that much of what it presents as natural is actually historical and socially constructed’. He takes this framing from a conversation held between Pierre Bourdieu and Hans Haacke in which Bourdieu calls the artist’s works ‘snares’ and Haacke agrees with the sociologist. See Alberro, ‘Institutions, Critique, and Institutional Critique’, 7.
14 Luz Broto, personal interview, 4 October 2019.
15 Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, God and the State, trans Benjamin R. Tucker, with an intro. by Paul Avrich (New York: Dover, 1970 [1st French ed. 1882]).
16 ‘Memoria de Las Agencias’, Centre de Documentació Col·lecció MACBA, Centre d’Estudis i Documentació. Donació de John Zvereff; my translation.
17 See Jordi Claramonte, ‘Modos de hacer’, in Paloma Blanco et al., Modos de hacer: arte crítico, esfera pública y acción directa (Salamanca: Univ. de Salamanca, 2001), 383–90.
18 Jordi Claramonte, personal interview, 27 March 2019.
19 Martí Manen, ‘Creatures. Retazos de un momento de explosión curatorial’, Zerom3, 29 July 2014, <http://zerom3.net/pdf/text1406713366.pdf> (accessed 18 January 2023).
20 A couple of years prior to this incident with Creatures, Rosa Olivares, founder of Lápiz, the international art magazine edited in Spain since 1982 (and its director until 1999), stated ‘España es un país sin crítica. Pero no porque no haya voces y capacidad crítica, sino porque a esas voces se les niega la existencia’ (Rosa Olivares, ‘Un país sin crítica’, Pautas. El Arte y sus Revistas [1997], 14–15 [p. 14]). Her cultural diagnosis pointed to the institutional blockage that existed against unconventional perspectives, particularly threatening if they came from politically radical collective practices, as there was a fear that they would unsettle the State’s ideological understanding of cultural production. A state-imposed culture of consensus that neglected cultural representations that were invested in profound and discomforting anti-establishment critiques—that which Spanish critic Guillem Martínez and others have defined as ‘cultura de la Transición’—whether that was pushing the boundaries of how things were normally done, whether it was about impeding certain issues to come to light, or to prevent certain classed and gendered identities to take centre stage (Guillem Martínez et al., CT o la cultura de la Transición: crítica a 35 años de cultura española [Barcelona: Mondadori, 2012], passim).
21 See Juan Albarrán, Disputas sobre lo contemporáneo: arte español entre el antifranquismo y la posmodernidad (Madrid: España Producciones de Arte y Pensamiento, 2019), 41 & 117; and Marcelo Expósito & Manuel Borja-Villel, Conversación con Manuel Borja-Villel (Madrid: Turpial, 2015), 101–02.
22 Chantal Mouffe, Prácticas artísticas y democracia agonística, trad. Jordi Palou & Carlos Manzano (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona/Univ. Autònoma de Barcelona, 2007), 22.
23 See Jorge Luis Marzo, La memoria administrada: el barroco y lo hispano (Madrid: Katz, 2010), 312.
24 Expósito & Borja-Villel, Conversación con Manuel Borja-Villel, 112–13.
25 Jaime Vindel, ‘Desplazamientos de la crítica: instituciones culturales y movimientos sociales entre finales de los noventa y la actualidad’, in Desacuerdos 8. Sobre arte, políticas y esfera pública en el Estado español, intro. de Jesús Carrillo & Jaime Vindel (San Sebastián-Donostia: Arteleku-Diputación Foral de Gipuzkoa, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona/UNIA Arte y Pensamiento, 2014), 290–319 (p. 291).
26 Expósito & Borja-Villel, Conversación con Manuel Borja-Villel, 111.
27 See the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona’s mission statement: <https://www.macba.cat/en/about-macba/museum/macba-foundation> (accessed 9 July 2020).
28 See ‘The Contemporary Art Market Report 2017’, n.d., <https://www.artprice.com/artprice-reports/the-contemporary-art-market-report-2017/renewed-growth> (accessed 19 September 2019).
29 See <https://sindominio.net/fiambrera/sccpp/feb_may/okupasa01.htm> (accessed 30 January 2020).
30 Jordi Claramonte, Arte de contexto (San Sebastián-Donostia: Editorial Nerea, 2010), 55.
31 Jorge Ribalta, ‘Experimentos para una nueva institucionalidad’, in Objetos relacionales. Colección MACBA 2002–2007, ed. Manuel J. Borja-Villel (Barcelona: Edicions de l’Eixample, 2010), 224–66 (pp. 234–35).
32 Claramonte, Arte de contexto, 56.
33 See José Ángel Montañés, ‘Barcelona, el cambio que no fue’, El País, 22 May 2017, <https://elpais.com/cultura/2017/05/18/actualidad/1495082809_522902.html> (accessed 2 December 2019).
34 See the webpage for this festival at <https://www.biennalciutatoberta.barcelona/en> (accessed 20 September 2019).
35 It is worth mentioning that despite my attempts, I was never able to interview Joan Subirats to clarify his position on these issues.
36 Semolinika Tomic, personal interview, 2 May 2019.
37 See the webpage of Cultura Viva, Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2018: <http://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/culturaviva/en/> (accessed 18 September 2019).
38 Itziar González Virós, personal interview, 7 October 2019.
39 My requests for an interview with Dani Granados to discuss his views on these issues went unanswered.
40 British critic Claire Bishop has termed this move ‘participatory art’, following what she calls art’s ‘social return’. She locates this turn in the 1990s when the process of dismantling the Welfare State began. At that time, a nostalgia for a receding communism upon the fall of the Berlin Wall was met by neo-liberal governments’ encouragement of citizen’s responsibility for social tasks, which up until then had been attributed to the Welfare State. In her study, Bishop has suggested that instead of bolstering democratic processes as it promised to do, participatory art from the 1990s and 2000s can in fact be seen as depoliticizing. If the democratic process is experienced as an art form at the service of strengthening social ties, it confines democracy to very specific dynamics that obscure the forces of antagonism responsible for change, resulting in a deactivation of politics. Thus, art seen as a community-building tool, denies it its poetic register to uphold a political dimension in its own terms. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London/New York: Verso Books, 2012), 19 & 3.
41 Luisa Elena Delgado, La nación singular: fantasías de la normalidad democrática española (1996–2011) (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2014), 72.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.