After visiting the Gure Artea show last Friday I went to Galería Carreras Mugica to see an exhibition entitled: Balerdi. Homage to Tarzan, chapter 1: the unwitting hunter, curated by one of the artists selected for the Gure Artea prize, Asier Mendizabal. On show are works by the Basque artist Rafael Ruiz Balerdi 1934-1992. Balerdi is an extraordinary painter (unfortunately, little known outside Spain) and here I had the privilege of seeing an experimental film completed in 1969, which is the central piece in this exhibition. The film is a 16mm copy from the collection of the Filmoteca Española. Balerdi selected parts of a Tarzan film and traced them by hand, frame by frame directly onto celluloid. The result is a kind of dynamic animated drawing in black, white and grey in a fluid state of continual mutation and transformation. Through the specific and evident materiality of the medium of film itself, there is a constant shifting between representation and abstraction. The original Tarzan soundtrack is also maintained and lends a trance like rhythm to the images. Balerdi drew compulsively and this experimental film was an extension of this activity; taking gesture and repetition into a new realm. In the front space of the gallery a selection of wonderful drawings complements the film. There are few artists who embody so well the idea of FLOW developed by the French thinker Gilles Deleuze and although his interest in aspects of transcendental mysticism might seem unpalatable or even naïve for contemporary sensibilities it led him, indirectly, to bypass certain other concerns among his contemporaries and work with much greater liberty and directness. As a painter I feel a definite connection to his work. Credit to Asier Mendizabal for organizing this exhibition which shows that Balerdi is totally relevant today and absolutely contemporary.
I usually prefer to focus my attention on those things that I am drawn to and that I admire in some way. I’ll make an exception here though. On Friday afternoon I went to see Gure Artea 2008 at Rekalde (the main public contemporary art space in Bilbao). Gure Artea is held every two years and is the most important visual arts prize in the Basque Country. All the selected artists on this occasion have studied at the Fine Arts faculty at the University of the Basque Country or have had some connection with it. One of the selected artists Iñaki Imaz is a lecturer there. The main curator/juror of the show is Miren Jaio who has also spent some time teaching contemporary art history at the university. The whole thing is a bit of a closed shop and very symptomatic of the art scene here in the Basque Country. This would be excusable on one level of course if the works in question were of quality. The prize is financed by the Basque Government (with all the connotations that entails). A select group of so-called “cutting edge” artists, almost all graduates of the Fine Arts faculty have become almost institutional artists, reappearing in this prize and other major exhibitions over the last few years. This prize is interesting on one level at least, and that is as a sociological portrait of the art scene here in the Basque Country.
Maider López
Most of the art on show betrays an already conventionalised modus operandi, especially where new media is concerned. Maider Lopez has perhaps made the strongest video piece which documents an intervention in the city of Sharjah in the Arab Emirates. The lines of a football field were marked out in one of the public squares. The camera then documents the social interaction with this phenomenon. The editing though seems clumsy and I couldn’t help thinking of Francis Alÿs who has intervened in public spaces in a much richer way. There is a strong social/critical aspect underlying a lot of the work, the duo Iratxe Jaio & Klaas Van Gorkum for example, whose video piece shows the crude reality of urban development in the Basque city of Vitoria; the camera moves slowly and continuously from left to right showing buildings sites, the paraphernalia of construction, vast D.I.Y stores and builders merchants. When compared to say Catalan director Jaime Rosales’ ambitious and radical use of non-ideological cinema (often incorporating and transforming aspects of video art within the larger scope of cinema) a lot of this video work seems very poor and lacks any rigour. It is visually uninteresting and conceptually weak - employing and motivated by a predictable omnipresent “critical” rhetoric.
New media have an enormous potential for artists (just consider the expansive practice of Adrian Schiess for example, incorporating painting, installation and video) Unfortunately, and despite still being early days, a significant number of artists have adopted predictable ways of using them and have already created a kind of orthodoxy which begins in art school (certainly at the Basque Faculty of Fine Art).
Liam Gillick comes to mind when considering the work of Xabier Salaberria. His work appears to question the formalist and minimalist canons in modernism and its political implications but the objects he creates lack any value because there is no serious working through of ideas via the material of sculpture itself. The sculptural object is almost an afterthought. His piece Part II of an unbuilt Project is an example of this and perhaps of the greater malaise at the heart of this show: the artists operate in a territory which is almost exclusively theoretical yet theoretically limited. It also feels even somewhat outmoded as a discourse. One is left with the desire for something more open and anarchic. An intelligent proposal seems to mean working “conceptually” for most of these artists. However, thought and speculative approaches to art can also be made manifest through practices which manifest fluidity or materiality so absent in much of the current local scene.
Asier Mendizabal
Perhaps one of the most acclaimed younger artists in the Basque Country and Spain (and one of the three prizewinners) is Asier Mendizabal. Though his work is complex it essentially deals with the displacement of political, social & cultural symbols. Though his approach might seem intelligent and carefully focused, this in itself does not guarantee anything and ultimately his piece, Bigger than a cult, smaller than a mass (one, two backdrops), seems simplistic. It consists of two backdrops; the first made of recent newspapers and hanging in front of it a selection of different national flags.
Inaki Imaz
Some of the paintings by Iñaki Imaz (the only painter in the show) work well up to a point but I can´t help feeling his paintings are not pushed far enough. They could be more extreme and so have greater tension. The presentation doesn’t entirely convince me either. The framing, which I assume is meant to be “ironic” in some way, just looks awkward. However, the mysterious yellow painting reproduced here is very good indeed; in my mind the best piece in the whole show. Evidence that through its specific materiality and fragile limits, painting can still offer a rich, layered and more adventurous experience compared to other media.
This prize would benefit from being opened up, maybe to artists from the rest of Spain & Portugal or even internationally. A fresh curatorial angle on each occasion would also be beneficial. This of course would be good for Basque art and contextualize it in a larger sphere. With the spectre of nationalist politics and an immobile social and cultural situation I can’t see this happening soon. I left the exhibition feeling mildly irritated but mostly bored.
