Idea: Painting-Force. The Hinge Between the 1970s and 1980s. From November 6, 2013 to May 18, 2014
Armando Montesinos: The exhibition title, Idea: Painting-Force, comes from a gliding of the term “idea force”, which implies that every idea can be transformed into an action.
Painting is able to convey ideas, to make visible not only a representation of the reality or political remarks but ideas, thinking processes, and that is precisely what the artists present in this exhibition do in their paintings.
My name is Armando Montesinos, I am the curator of the exhibition Idea: Painting-Force. The subtitle of the exhibition is The Hinge Between the 1970s and 1980s. This subtitle defines the era of the 1970s and 1980s. Besides, I am especially interested in the term “hinge” because a hinge is what is neither inside nor outside, something that allows an articulation, the movement of the door.
The gliding of the term “idea force” into “painting-force” comes from a series of conversations had at that time, the beginning of the 1980s, with José Luis Brea. We applied the term “painting-force” to the paintings of several artists in whom we were really interested. We were young and we wanted to write art reviews. In those days, Spanish art critics were rather literary. I am not saying that in a pejorative sense, but we were interested in another type of criticism more akin to philosophy and aesthetics than to literature and historicism.
When I was preparing the exhibition and writing the text for the catalogue, I tried to make clear that these artworks are not related to the discourse made in those years, when the return to painting was seen as a return to a classical order in response, or in reaction, to what some considered the experimental excesses of the 1970s. That kind of discourse that implies a return to an order, a return to painting, understood as a superior discipline, was, and still is, wrong and biased.
When the management of the Museum asks me for a project, they are not asking me for a story, a novel or something poetic, they are asking me for an essay. An essay can be a trial and error experiment, but also a speculation about something. In this case, I think that the most significant thing is that we are talking about a period that is wildly misunderstood.
I believe that my work as a curator, and as a critic, is not to produce a discourse, but to produce the conditions for discourses. It is important to be able to think about this essay from our own times, to observe these paintings from our own times, and to see what kind of discourses produce these paintings. The idea of the exhibition should become a “thinking force”.
I would say that in those years, the years of the exhibition, the scene and the stage were very close. When we see someone on stage – the painters in this exhibition, or a musician, or an actor – is because the public, the people who are watching the stage, have put them in that place. That is, scene and stage are intrinsically connected. That proximity arises in those years, and I think that afterwards it ceased to exist, at least in a clear way and generally speaking about the moment when the market was introduced.
ARCO Art Fair was created in 1982, a fact that gave rise to another era, both in historical and ideological terms. In the text, I quote La Luna de Madrid, a major magazine at the time, that included on its cover the words: “Avant-garde is the market”. In the years covered by the exhibition, 1978 to 1984, there was not market. All these artists were working outside the market because in Spain there was not market. The market policy was established in the mid-1980s, with all the consequences involved in it.
We are talking about a few years during which we have a movement of cultural construction based on a situation of creative and political freedom. That provokes a deep ethical, and aesthetic, identification between scene and stage. I think that the introduction of the market in 1982/84 dissolves that ethic identity, something that is quite evident in how are received the artworks of some artists.
Another important aspect of those years, and of those artists, is that all those artists belong to pop culture. When I say pop culture I do not mean pop art, I mean that they understand that the acknowledgement of the diffuse aestheticization of society, quoting José Luis Brea, implies the failure of the academic discourse.
When I was talking with Manolo Quejido about this exhibition, I brought up the topic of pop culture and how these artists were influenced by it, more in an aesthetic and ideological sense than in a pictorial sense, and Quejido told me: “Yes, pop means painting for everyone”. That phrase is very clear: “Painting for everyone”, thinking for everyone to think, curate events to create dialogues. This is very interesting, that is why I understand my role not as someone who creates a discourse, but as someone who generates possibilities of discourse. What I am doing is to shift the role of the curator from someone who defines a path to someone who opens dialogues.
There are two or three songs by Radio Futura that explain this story. In the second album by Radio Futura, there is one song entitled Oscuro Affaire. Oscuro Affaire is the reaction of Santiago Auserón to what was happening. You are doing your things, what you want to do, and suddenly you are “stuck in a dark affair … I don't know how to get out of it.” Why? Because you have clashed with the market, with the industry.
