What is the art? Difficult question if ever there is one. There may not even be an adequate answer, much less a consensual one. For some it is beautiful; for others, the ugly; There are those who defend that it is what is born from emotions, but there will be those who maintain that it is what comes out of the hands of an artist. There are as many definitions as there are points of view.
That is why the next IVAM exhibition, «An indefinitely smooth common continuum»that opens on the 16th, is configured “as a tool that gives us the opportunity to generate other readings of the works, visions that are equally valid, since they are based on the uniqueness of each experience,” they explain from the art center on Guillem de Street. Castro. “The pieces shown will take on other meanings depending on the perspective from which they are analyzed,” they add. And each experience is unique.
The mariée mise a nu par ses célibataires même Boîte verte, ca 1934, by Marcel Duchamp.
The exhibition «A definitely smooth common continuum. Projections on the contemporary in the IVAM collection»curated by Diana Guijarrogather more than 130 works between paintings, photographs, sculptures, videos and installations of artists like Pablo Picasso, Bruce Nauman, Julio González, Marcel Duchamp, Dan Graham, Georg Grosz, Sigmar Polke, André Derain, Jacques Lipchitz or Gerhard Richteramong others.
The exhibition, made up of works from the IVAM collections -almost all of them-, the La Caixa Foundation and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León (Musac), can be visited from May 16 to October 20. From the museum, they delve into the fact that the common thread of this exhibition revolves around the concept of the contemporary: “how can we approach” this term and its complexity through the narrative that is configured with the selection of pieces from the IVAM Collection, understanding said collection as a historical and social construction. In that sense, the exhibition “invites us to look at the pieces from a much broader and more complex perspective to ask ourselves questions such as what is the function of the museum in the contemporary world, what are the mechanisms by which it moves or what role do artists play,” they say from the IVAM.
House on Fire, 2005, by John Davies.
The role of the museum and the artist
Through the works on display, the exhibition serves to reflect on the nature of the museum institution, the role of the artist and his identity and, finally, the anticipations of certain movements that change responses to art. The exhibition is divided into three sections: “When something is missing, when something is not there”, “Contradiction as a principle” and “A place means defining a field”.
To begin with, the IVAM self-reflects on what a museum is. “Inside of the contemporary art and its continuous shock In the face of the postmodernity that it has had to live through, we find a museum that moves in a globalized social context. A world in which even the delocalized seeks a certain identity and in which, to survive, this institution must commit to other modes of production. The museum is teaching us that it can function transversally, that it can show us what we normally do not see and that we can learn to read events in other ways,” they point out from the IVAM. «A collection is a historical-social construction that allows us to trace a multiplicity of codes, ideologies, fashions and conditions. It is an artifact that sheds light on an era that also needs to be looked at transversally,” they add.
Optician’s Display, Paris, 1936. Herbert List.
On a second level, the artist will be the object of study in this exhibition. «Analyzing the figure of the artist is not and will not be a simple task. We must not forget that we are faced with a system configured by errant relationships where figures of nomadic identity. Within the worlds of art, some of these figures have guided or oriented us in the classification of Artistic movements and in the reinvention of aesthetic taste. A phenomenon that caused – and still causes – the condition of the work of art and the artist to move like someone who moves things around.
Woman with amphora, by Julio González.
To finish the exhibition tour, the visitor will find himself faced with the fact that “the works tell us that something different is coming and that we must decide how to face it. The decision we make will be contemporary or it will not be, it cannot belong to the past or the future, only to the present», they conclude from the IVAM.
