Daniel G. Andujar Archive » Manifesta 4

Nolens Volens 4/ Manifesta 8.

admin — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 08:35:21 +0000

*NOLENS VOLENS#4*
*Presentación:
*Día 8 de Octubre, 19 horas. *Asociación Cultural. Mediodia Chica, C/Mediodia Chica, 10. Madrid.**
*Dia 9 de Octubre. *Manifesta 8, Los Molinos, Murcia y Prisión de San Antón, Cartagena.**

*Mediascapes. Nolens Volens 4*

Este cuarto número de Nolens Volens ha sido editado en colaboración con Alfredo Cramerotti, miembro del colectivo curatorial Chamber of Public Secrets, en el marco de su participación en Manifesta 8.

El tema de exploración ha sido “mediascapes”. Y los colaboradores han trabajado en torno al concepto de cómo los medios de comunicación no
reflejan el mundo sino construyen un mundo, difícilmente son lugares públicos de información y se han transformando en una industria con una
poderosa influencia y manipulación discursiva sobre la audiencia y la sociedad.

Entendiendo la noción de realidad como un constructo, coordenadas simbólicas que determinan nuestra experiencia de la realidad, resulta evidente la
importancia central, en el mundo contemporáneo, de los media en la definición de los marcos en los que ésta discurre. La construcción de la
realidad a través de los media establece —desde la extensión de las tecnologías, denominadas, de la comunicación— los límites de nuestra
experiencia posible en una construcción de mundo con vocación totalizante. Las consideraciones críticas del simulacro y la hiperrealidad baudrillariano
ó el espectáculo debordiano, cuyas posturas, si bien resultan un eficiente diagnostico del estado de la cuestión, no dejan demasiadas opciones para
operar de manera efectiva, desde posturas otras que se enfrenten las versiones del poder medial, en la construcción del imaginario que determina
nuestra experiencia de realidad. Se trata pues de confrontar con el marco experiencial que se propone desde los grandes conglomerados empresariales de
comunicación otras formas de tratarse, narrarse y, en definitiva, construir este cierto sentido de realidad.

Por último señalar que publicamos un extracto del libro “Estética periodística: Cómo informar sin informar” (2009) de Alfredo Cramerotti,
editado por Intellect, en el que se plantea como la producción de verdad se ha desplazado del dominio de las noticias al del arte y la estética, lo que
marca una nueva postura en torno a la discusión de la posibilidad de un arte crítico a través de la estetización de la información.

Los colaboradores de este número de Nolens Volens son: Carlos Jiménez, Alfredo Cramerotti, Arturo/fito Rodríguez Bornaetxea, Jesús Aguilera,
GenderArtNet, Ramon Parramon, Anders Eiebakke, Erlea Maneros Zabala, Andreja Kulunčić, Daniel García Andújar, Extrastruggle, Michael Takeo Magruder, Nada
Prlja, Nemanja Cvijanovic, Virginia Villaplana, Michael Baers

Manifesta 4

admin — Tue, 10 Sep 2002 08:11:22 +0000

Verena Kuni Translated by Alexander Scrimgeour

Frieze Issue 69 September 2002

Various, Frankfurt, Germany

According to the press release, ‘Manifesta wants to be an interactive workshop for looking at the latest developments in the realignment of current social, political, economic and cultural realities in Europe’. Practically, this is how it works: European curators who don’t know each other organize a biennial of contemporary art in a European city that they also don’t know, and often with artists whom they (and we) also don’t yet know. At the time of Manifesta 1 (held in Rotterdam in 1996) the idea held a lot of promise. It’s debatable, however, whether the curators of Manifesta 4 – Iara Bubnova, Nuria Enguiat Mayo and Stephanie Moisdon – really responded constructively to the show’s premise. They travelled around various countries and tried to meet, in their words, ‘as many individuals as possible’ and ‘construct the exhibition from that diverse mapping of a complex process’, but such mission statements have been described, not inappropriately, as amounting to no more than a ‘K-Mart of buzzwords’.

Presenting the absence of a concept as a concept in itself seems almost to have become standard practice. It’s not a problem if the resulting exhibition is any good. But there’s the crunch. Among the great number of works by comparatively unknown artists there were in the end very few convincing pieces – mostly, again, from artists who are already quite well known. These included: Pierre Bismuth’s Jungle Book Project (2002), a Babel take on Disney’s 1967 animation classic assembled from many different dubbed versions, so that Balou the bear speaks Hebrew and Bagheera the Panther Arabic; a video essay by Jun Yang, Miss June Young (2002), which was a thrilling mixture of autobiography and pop-culture documentary about the cultural misunderstandings that arise from the pronunciation and spelling of the artist’s name in Vienna, where he lives; Yael Bartana’s video Trembling Time (2001), which in a single shot of night-time traffic in Tel Aviv conveys an ever-present mixture of solemnity and danger when sirens start to sound, marking the national Soldiers’ Memorial Day; and Gerard Byrne’s video Why It’s Time for Imperial … Again (1999), which is based on a conversation between Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca and Frank Sinatra about the advantages of a luxury car, originally made for an advertising spread but now recreated by actors as if it were a row between two petty crooks.

Want to sell statements which reflect average ideas? No problem! This is what Mans Wrange attempts with The Average Citizen Project (1999-ongoing) which he paid a PR company to promote. The only thing you need to sell an idea is a masterplan, and it’s smart marketing, not necessarily the product which will make it succeed. Which, in a way, also describes the curatorial approach of Manifesta.

You could say the fact that only a handful of the works here stood out reflects the reality of the European art scene. But the criterion for selection stressed by the curators – avoiding redundancies in the relation between the works selected – led to very few moments of interesting tension. What, for example, connects the record of Hans Schabus’ boat trip through the sewers of Vienna (Western, 2002), which itself stands in ironic relation to the climactic scenes of The Third Man (1949), with Gerard Byrne’s work? The fact that both artists used methods of transport to convey their concepts?

It’s especially surprising because ‘networks’, ‘contexts’ and ‘relationships’ feature prominently among the tired buzzwords of ‘Manifesta 4’. But even in the communication platform set up by David Andujar of Technologies to the People, ‘e-manifesta.org’, it was surprisingly quiet, even weeks after the opening of the exhibition. The relevance of Sal Randolph’s project ‘free.manifesta’ within the framework of ‘Manifesta’ is just as debatable as the quality of the works. Nevertheless Randolph, who paid $15,099 to participate after Christoph Büchel (who had originally been invited) decided to auction his place on eBay, has without doubt been more successful at connecting to the local scene and activating her own networks as well.

La bienal de arte joven Manifesta abre sus puertas en Francfort

admin — Wed, 26 Jun 2002 19:30:23 +0000

CIRO KRAUTHAUSEN – Berlín – 26/05/2002
El País

Dos semanas antes de que en Kassel (Alemania) se inaugure la más importante de las muestras internacionales de arte contemporáneo, la Documenta, en Francfort se abrieron el viernes las puertas de la Manifesta, una dinámica bienal en la que participan más de 80 artistas de toda Europa, en su inmensa mayoría ‘jóvenes’, ‘poco conocidos’ y ‘conectados con una realidad diversa’, según afirma la española Nuria Enguita Mayo (Madrid, 1967), que forma parte de la joven y femenina troika directora.

‘No quisimos limitar la selección a un tema muy estricto, aun-que sí nos han interesado sobre todo aquellas obras que se ocupan del contexto, no sólo político y social, sino también personal y mental’, afirma en conversación con este periódico la historiadora de arte, de 35 años, que también dirige la Fundación Antoni Tàpies, en Barcelona.

Dispersas por toda la ciudad -como también sucede en Kassel-, las obras expuestas hasta el 25 de agosto abarcan todo el espectro del arte contemporáneo: instalaciones, pinturas, dibujos, esculturas, fotografía, arquitectura… Y vídeos, por supuesto (‘más de los que quisiéramos’, dice Enguita Mayo). Los artistas -he aquí una diferencia no sólo con la Documenta, sino también con otras bienales- proceden exclusivamente de Europa. Las otras dos directoras de la muestra son la rusa Iara Boubnova (Moscú, 1961) y la francesa Stephanie Moisdon Trembley (1967).

Desde que fuera creada, a inicios de los años noventa, como un foro para nuevas e innovadoras expresiones del arte, la Manifesta ha cambiado cuatro veces de escenario: Rotterdam (1996), Luxemburgo (1998), Ljubljana (2000) y ahora Francfort. Dentro de dos años, en 2004, el turno por primera vez será para España: la muestra se trasladará a Donostia, según se ha conocido en estos días.
Artistas españoles

Los artistas españoles invitados a Franfort son cinco: Daniel García Andújar (Valencia, 1966), que ha diseñado el espacio de presentaciones y una página web de la muestra; Ibon Aranberri (Bilbao, 1969), con un pabellón propio a orillas del Meno en el que el visitante se encuentra con una reproducción virtual del Guernica; Bleda y Rosa (Valencia, 1969, y Albacete, 1970), fotógrafos con una serie sobre el paisaje y la memoria, basada en ciudades arqueológicas; Jon Mikel Euba (Bilbao, 1967), con un vídeo que, sutilmente, gira sobre una de sus obsesiones, la violencia; y Alonso Gil (Badajoz, 1966), con otro vídeo, que reflexiona sobre la relación entre los que dan y reciben limosna en las calles de Sevilla.

‘Se nos va a comparar con la Documenta, pero nuestro trasfondo financiero y temporal es completamente distinto’, dice Nuria Enguita Mayo, quien, junto a sus dos colegas, ha contado con un presupuesto de 2,1 millones de euros. La peregrinación de los críticos y amantes de arte a Kassel -a escasa hora y media en tren de Francfort- es una oportunidad de oro para conocer la Manifesta.

Press Manifesta 4

admin — Fri, 24 May 2002 09:08:42 +0000

Press Manifesta 4. May 24th, Frankfurt
Iara Boubnova, Stephanie Moisdon Trembley, Nuria Enguita Mayo

A lot of things had been said here already that allows the entrance
to our project, so I will try just quickly to add how this project has helped us, and I hope will help also the audience, to clarify better some of the questions that shaped our understanding of the reality.

I would say we have acquired this knowledge through the contact and communication with all the participants in Manifesta 4. Thank to them we have gone inside some of the questions, and we have learn about very diverse strategies to discuss given structures in society, as well as very different ways to develop strong personal narratives.

As Adrian Piper wrote some time ago, art has the potential to set up (to activate) an experiential process of knowledge and change. Cultural agents has no any recipe to give instructions to confront the complexity of our contemporaneity but I deeply believe that any form of cultural practice allow us to think better our position in the world.

Manifesta 4 was always thought as a rhizomatic structure, and a process under construction. Today we present it in a developed stage where some nuclei have been defined.

Manifesta 4 includes propositions and platforms coming from groups or individuals (but always based in the idea of “collaborative work”) who are trying to give life to more critical, flexible, autonomous, temporary and open infrastructures on cultural, economic, social and political fields: providing new spaces of creativity and real, not utopian, strategies and tools for all the people; integrating the diversity, the special cultural sensibilities, working on local and specific community contexts, thinking different ways of government and alternative economies, denouncing technology as current new utopia, revealing contradictions in the systems of security and control.

Closely related to the former issues some others groups and individuals deal directly with the urban conflict, the effects of
mass –consumerism in our contemporary society and the more and more problematic relationship between public and private spheres: the strict control of the former one and the disintegration of the later
one due to standardisation . Strategies to occupy the public space as the real place of antagonism is present in the work of many of our participants, through activist manifestations or poetical proposals which slightly changes our perception on daily urban experience.
In close relation to the former domain there is some people dealing with modernism in architecture as an utopian model of development which has definitely failed.

Critical approaches to mass-media and global information, revealing manipulation on the construction of meaning related to present and past history constitutes another line of our rhizomatic project, which expands also in other works exploring symbolical processes of cultural construction through the variable meaning of objects and images in history.

You will find another proposals who are trying to rethink processes of identification revealing, and confronting, state organised strategies, mass-media clichés, nationalistic approaches and gender strategies that defines close, restrictive and sometimes dangerous identities.

The space as an act of presence, as has been noted by Vanessa Joan Muller in our catalogue, is also a strong conceptual and experiential rhizome in Manifest 4. And mobility, as a characteristic of Frankfurt, also underlined by Jochen Volz in his text, has been a driven force for our project.

There are, as you will see, many connections between the artist and also a lot of disagreements and disconnection. We tried to work, as we have already said several times within an open frame which will allow us to check very different approaches to reality, and I hope each individual now can produce its own narration out of this project.

As Jacques Rancière reminds us “aesthetic experience “ is one of heterogeneity, and we would like to keep this idea as a sub-text in our project.