Del arte más que del frío
An exhibition by Jacobo Bugarín
Image: courtesy of the artist
Del arte más que del frío [More about art than cold] takes a look at the change of model that institutions are currently undergoing making us of the expansion, fragmentation and change in ways of accessing knowledge, fostered by the progress of technology. The democratisation of information expedites a shift from shared general knowledge to subjectivated personal knowledge. The exhibition engages primarily with the elimination of distance (and accordingly of contemplation) between the artwork, the artist and institutions, but also the distance that maintains us at one remove from affect. In short, it is an artistic project that questions the traditional relations between the artist, the work, the institution and the public. Rapprochement between individuals is dealt with in a literal sense through a play that involves all participating agents and alters the traditional times and forms of reception of ‘artworks’
The core piece explores problems posed by access to knowledge and highlights the paradoxes between transparency and opacity. A conference by Peter Burke is used to objectify an installation closed in on itself, which is rendered in layers and chapters inherent to encyclopaedic knowledge. Power-related obstacles, caused by different problems, are here represented: control exerted by States, specialization in language that hampers the transfer of knowledge or privatization to which it is subjected. Also the balance between the right of some to the access and the remuneration that the others perceive for its elaboration.
The rest of the exhibition unfolded in the gallery is a useless attempt of a structure located on the margins. As a whole it is created through objects and remains in the space of previous works: soft or mixed materials that expand and are not always identified as part of a work, such as light, video-projections, objects and audio, that speak to a different, much more awkward and diffuse way of understanding art in which the material used no longer signifies anything in itself, if not in relation to the rest of the elements of the exhibition.
Hidden behind of what we can see in the installation there is a whole chain of veiled affects, instructions and materialisations that underscore the aforementioned change of perception and displacement of structures, while at once evincing that, without the artist and the network of people that make it possible, the museum would lack any sense.
Despite the display that we see in the room, the proposal of Jacobo Bugarín insists on moving away the institution from the object by proposing the affective encounter, reflection and stumbling as forms of artistic construction. Three levels of reading: the central tables as an art object understandable and recognizable as an art work; the parts and structures around that still pretend to subsist within the physical space on the margins; and a third one, impossible to perceive without the help of another person who activates it, who understands the process, the affections and the people who works in the art centre as a fundamental part of the project.
Distanced from the spectacle and the object per se, instead becoming an imperceptible, futile mishmash, the idea is to set in place a sense of individual subjectivity and to permit bodies to meet within this vast place, thus abrogating the perspective in which the museum’s aesthetic regime is grounded. The purported modern objectivity is just the concealment of an evident situation of inequality among bodies and identities. The project explores the materialisation of the object and the relationship it establishes with the structure housing it; fragmented bodies, (virtual, physical, affective) hidden communications, and new ways of relating with audiences, plus, of course, the impossibility of communication that all of this entails right now.
Del arte más que del frío is the winning project in the LABjoven_Los Bragales Award, organised jointly by LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial and Colección Los Bragales.
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