Yesterday afternoon ... I went through the THEREDOOM Gallery with the aim of visualizing the second installment of the FURTIVOS project, whose first staging generated a controversy that still demands a critical review (by both parties).

 

From the current proposal I have to say that I find it splendid and resounding. An exercise of emplacement and extremely eloquent concept, especially in the light of those challenges and scandals of past weeks, where a wave of fanatics and radicals decided - bypassing every barrier of respect and peaceful coexistence - to attack the gallery in a sequence of acts that reminded me of the typical barricades of fascist terror. Acts that, it is worth noting, were not only discursive but also came to aggression against the gallery staff and the space of the gallery: scratches, spits, and insults of the "slave" type (term used by Rafael Doctor to refer to Andrea Piedralzar ). Situation that led, as it could not be otherwise, to the police intervention, once Rafael Doctor Roncero, accompanied by a kind of radical sect of inflamed automatons, presented himself at the gallery doors to utter all kinds of insults, Disqualifications and various repudios, remembering those nefarious passages of the Cuba of the 60s, when everyone who thought differently from the new regime and its establishment was called worm and scum, under the slogan DOWN THE WORM, DOWN ... let them go, that they leave…. And the, the, the, the ...

 

Society, by force majeure, will be a space of civilized practice when the subject (s) of acting and modeling understand, in a "fucking time", that coexistence in the same plane of different discourses and of ideological positions that contravene ours without jeopardizing that area of ​​beliefs that we consider our own. The danger, the tremendous danger, resides and manifests itself when the reason of the other has to be - by reactionary disposition - my reason, assumed from the withdrawal implied by abortion to my capacity for replication. I accept, admire and applaud every cultural and political act of resistance-claim-defense of any type of subjectivity (the animalist included), BUT I REJECT TO THE MOST CONFESSED VISCERALITY violent acts and repudiation of the value and place of the voice of the other who has, like me, the same right to arbitrate his speech according to his reasons, whatever they may be. To argue does not mean to disavow, to reduce and to annul the discursive identity of the other: to argue is to confront the wave of thought (of thoughts) in the context of difference and value judgments, not the opposite. The other, what do those who suddenly assume a new creed, a new ideology or a new platform from which to raise their voices, is called deterministic reaction, barricade of subjectivity and authoritarian-exclusive affirmation. Therefore, and by virtue of this, they become voices that claim to become entirely reactionary and of dangerous leftovers in the face of a possible social debate.

 

With such good luck, and despite the sustained public derision suffered by gallery owners and artists who are part of the gallery's payroll (the one that still persists, under other equally denouncible forms), the FURTIVOS project continues and with it the possibility of manage, at least, an area of ​​debate in the rancid context - aseptic and reproductive - of the artistic practice that takes place in Madrid. FURTIVES, for those who have not yet learned, is a platform for aesthetic and discursive action in which artists from the gallery will systematically intervene (or not) in an exercise of altering the meaning and conferring new meanings to what is understood as the gallery space to use, as prone, as we know, to the most conspicuous conservatism that neglects risk and shock for the benefit of the tacit pact with complacency and comfort.

 

The set of proposals that will be drawing the emphatic narrative of this project will have, in the words of the gallery owners, "a more or less discursive perspective, but always off tape, giving the aesthetic fact an interpellant value and meaning." Predisposition manifests that I can only celebrate when I reside in an intellectual context where the critical discussion about art and its practices, rejoices in its absence and where it seems that the only visible transgression is the childish pose of a certain artist that every day in his Facebook wall exhibits some part of his body and, in a gesture of clumsy defiance and a narcissism with a phyllo-gay accent, he tells us “mamones, have a fucking Friday” or the work of another artist - everything is symptomatically reduced In the virtuous phallic order - he draws women as “desiring and submissive whores” in a narrative of the conquest and of the knees.

 

In this panorama rarefied by the anorexia of ideas and the bulimia of figurative (and figurative) stupidity anchored the retinal domain, FURTIVOS, at least, is announced as a project that seeks and wishes to establish a possible (and necessary) critical context. The lack of management of the avid thought of debate on the artistic practice (its place and function), is directly proportional to the celebratory hyperbole of the work carried out by certain “curators” and artists that we could signal within the scale of the Ágrafo stadium or the nightlife agorero who is diagnosing historical evils within the so-called common place of art. Tresaco himself, taking stock of what happened, writes to me “it is true that our proposal was somewhat controversial, especially because of the physical and virtual escrache that occurred; but essentially he more than fulfilled his goal of awakening debate and uncomfortable approaches; although for a short time because following the wise instructions of the police, the exhibition was dismantled to avoid greater evils, with the exception of the shits that the cattle gave us, which remained company to the urinary solitaire for two more weeks ”.

 

In the same line of reflection and considering those aspects that could make pilgrimage what was assumed as the plot structure of the narrative script of this gesture, Tresaco, yesterday afternoon, told me “speaking of the unitary of Duchamp I wish to clarify that I have nothing against; On the contrary, I think he is one of the brilliant artists of the most recent art history to whom he owes the greatest subversive acts of the last century. The mystery may not have mystery and it is in reality where the true substrate of epistemological doubt that should mobilize all aesthetic action is hidden. In the end, and ironically, I had the immense honor of sharing with Duchamp the fact that we were dismantled by both the intolerant and reactionary. Therefore, immediately afterwards, we assemble the installation that you have seen, and in front of which you manifest an astonishment and a complacency that pleases me greatly. In it, as you well pointed out, an intense but constrained feeling is expressed, bounded, reduced to a potentially polysemic space ”.

 

It is so polysemic that, in this case, a hermeneutical displacement that affects the subject of contemplation, reaction or enjoyment is corroborated. This time, contradictorily, a question opens up about who the barbarians are - in purity. The piece is sophisticated in its assembly and neat in its discursive articulation. It is the typical minimalist staging that sustains, in its very morphological sobriety, the grace and privilege of any rhetorical deviation. It is, in essence, a reactive trap that metaphorically underlines the rates of aggression, violation and emptying of the other's discourse against the mirror of fanaticism and intolerance assumed as a flag. The gallery space has been upholstered by a kind of fabric with barbed wires. An element that takes on a high symbolic meaning in a cultural stadium where violence, in all its variants, has become the trough of a critically pathological morbidity. Even for those who go from “defenders of good causes” the management of the violent act becomes a pretext that justifies their claiming action.

 

I think and advocate systematically and vehemently in my texts that artistic practice and the art object must be understood, for the discomfort of that culture and that dominant discourse, as an exercise of relevance and effectiveness. Relevance when updating and referring to the subversive and destabilizing debate; effectiveness in the way in which this discussion is channeled and in the resources that are provided for such purposes. FURTIVES, at least today, prays like the project that burned the butt of this pale scene.

Candela, what I want is candela.

 

ANDRÉS ISAAC SANTANA