PRESENTATION

PRESENTATION

Disagreements arises from a will to build a historiographical counter-model that can overflow the limits of official academic discourse and contribute to the laying down of foundations for the reconstruction of a critical public cultural sphere. To critically chronicle certain art policies can only be carried out by putting explicit new models of cultural management into practice. To this end, setting up a decentralised structure and a networked collaboration between diverse cultural institutions seems crucial in order to free working dynamics that occasionally overflow institutional boundaries so that other environments of cultural critique can operate without being subsumed nor unnecessarily subject to pre-conditions.

With this project we seek to track cultural practices, models and counter-models that differ from the over four-decade-long succession of dominant structures, cultural policies and practices in Spain. In addition, Disagreements proposes to elaborate a critical history of these same structures and policies that continue to act as the established models in the administration of art and culture.

In short, a dual-natured task that will investigate both the bonds between cultural and institutional policies, art, market and economics, the public sphere, civil society and counter-hegemonic proposals in Spain, as well as the possibility of generating a social and institutional network capable of bringing together, linking and giving common ground to cultural experiences or situations that have occurred in the past or are occurring now.

Disagreements is presented as a research and documentation programme, a gathering of conferences and public exhibitions, to bring into public awareness the projects and art practices that are studied within it, as well as a series of publications, among which is the www.desacuerdos.org website, a public portal to the project that is already available for use.

Disagreements was introduced to the public on 8 October, 2003 at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona with a course, ongoing at the moment, entitled The Shadow Line: Art Policies and Culture Industries in Spain from the mid-seventies political transition to the present.

In study workshops held on 22, 23 and 24 October, 2003 in Arteleku, Donostia/San Sebastian, the principal lines of research around which Disagreements is articulated were brought together and introduced. The analyses of the primary collaborators were gathered and contrasted: File 1969, which seeks, from within the context of art practices relating to new social subjects, to explore their political potential following a progressive articulation of the antagonistic subjectivity present in the current historical cycle and political struggle; Lines of force, or the axial lines relating to trivialisation, commercialisation and theatricalisation; the descriptors specifying key mechanisms to be able to understand, from within cultural hegemony, its motive powers; Case studies, exceptions that mark paradoxes with which to critically redirect the design of research and draw a map of impelling forces to complete ideological currents and the instruments of previous fields of work.

MAP

MAP

Lastly, an approximate map of the Disagreements project presents the fields of research, documentation and analysis.

File 1969: The idea of rupture in this presentation is of a dual nature. First, the hypothesis is put forward that 1969 was a historic "cut-off" period in which diverse areas of art practices converged with opposition movements in Spain, opening up a path to a scenario of linguistic or political schism. Secondly, "the 1969 ruptures" are presented as the historic ascendant to a possible approach to the Spanish art events of recent decades, which, viewed from within the practices of the opposition, antagonist or alternative perspectives, allows us to draw a completely different map from those previously imposed. The crisis arising from the cycle of 1968 struggles brought with it the implantation of the post-modern cultural counter-revolution under the protection of which the capitalist revolution was able to take place. The dispersion of oppositional politics during the eighties was the result of the proletariat crisis as the central political subject in the primary opposition that consisted of the capital/labour dyad. The 1968 cycle radically illustrates the plurality of political struggles based on the spreading concept of the political subject as a plural. That is to say, the scattering of opposition in the eighties was the result of the 1968 crisis and the capitalist "triumph" as much as it was a logical consequence of irreversible historical change: the pluralisation of the political subject. Thus, a new map is sought with the hope to reconstruct an account that can connect the 1968 ruptures to the revitalisation of current antagonist art policies, and include the opposition to the eighties cultural counter-revolution. Reconsideration of languages: art practices and historiographical models: the irrigation of Marxism, structuralism, feminism, etc.; Political transition, cinema and peripheries: Of independent cinema and the "republic of radicals": Pere Portabella, Paulino Viota, Antonio Artero, Joaquín Jordá, etc.; Politics and art in the derogation of Franquism: practices in Catalonia, the Basque Country and Madrid: Grup de Treball, Assemblea Democrática d'Artistes de Girona, La Familia Lavapiés, etc.; Feminism(s): The irruption of the nineties, a critical retrospective look at the sixties: Carmen Navarrete, Erreakzioa/Reacción, María Ruido, etc.; Productive networks and areas of convergence in the eighties and nineties: Models of production and collective and decentralised dissemination of experimental music: Macromasa, Francisco López, Esplendor Geométrico, etc.; Independent video: Bideoaldia, Encuentros de Vídeo en Pamplona, etc.; The art of action: Archivo AIRE, etc.; Groups and associations as resistance practices in the eighties and nineties: Agustín Parejo School, Preiswert Arbeitskollegen, LSD, Industrias Mikuerpo, etc.; New management models, novel exhibiting mechanisms of the nineties; Return to reality, return to the policies of the nineties: Feminism and critique of representation, Public and collaborative art: La Fiambrera, Federico Guzmán, Ramón Parramon, etc.; Subjective overflow: New political subjects in globalisation from below: The Internet, activist/decentralised communication and co-operative practices: Las Agencias, global movement and emerging social movements, etc.; Art mapping in the global age.

Lines of force: The trivialisation phenomena of the seventies, the underground and oppositional and transitional cultural policies: while unravelling the myths that contributed to the zealous cultural policy concerning the introduction and prefabrication of the fledgling Spanish democracy, a highly critical analysis is made of the steamrolling of art practices under the reigning publicity and propaganda of the times; The mechanisms of art commercialisation commenced in the eighties by ARCOS and the new cultural ties between economics and art: Beyond statistical studies regarding the invention of the art market in Spain through the intervention of State art collection and the expansion of regional policies, and once commodity fetishism and mass culture consumerism have been left behind, an approach to the significance of the new culture capital asset of consumerism is proposed; The designing of the theatricalisation of the nineties with special emphasis on audiovisual practices in art: In the same way that marketing techniques helped audiovisual practices subsume the narrative of opposition in cinema and video during the seventies and eighties, equivalent "theatricalising" mechanics have brought about such diverse phenomenon as filling containers for new museums and art collections, the proliferation of national and international biennial exhibitions, the usurping on the part of the art market of the free movement introduced by new reproductive media, the creation of cults around new art practices through new copyright laws, and the creation of individual standards in the chrematistic activity of the artist.

Case studies: Vanguardist policies: Models for the institutional depolitisation of the arts, from the late-Franquism period to the Real Royal Trip, passing through the Socialist policies of the eighties; The Pamplona Meetings: The public impact of experimental art and its consequences; Visive poetry: from concrete poetry to opposition on the network of national events between visual art and poetry; Figura and Arena magazines: The spectrum and impact of Spanish artistic modernisation through the evolution of the two magazines; Sevillians: Market accidents from the mirror of La Máquina Española to the mirage of Juan Delcampo; Parallel action: Discourse and critique ranging from El Aleph, Acción Paralela, La Societe Anonyme, etc., to Rhizome and Visual Studies. Technologies for the people: discourse and critique ranging from Technologies for the People, Ex-amics del IVAM, e-valencia.org, etc., to e-Irrational and Open Source.

PROGRAMME

PROGRAMME

Wednesday, 3rd December 2003
· 17:00 h
Screening:
- After... Part 1: No se os puede dejar solos (You guys can't be left alone), Cecilia Bartolomé and José J. Bartolomé, 1981, 90'
- After...Part 2: Atado y bien atado (All tied up), Cecilia Bartolomé and José J.
Bartolomé, 1981, 99'

· 20:00 h
- The revolution is over: we won. The "ruptures of 1969" and their legacy
Round table discussion with Julio Pérez Perucha, María Ruido y Fefa Vila, moderated by Marcelo Expósito

The discussion is a presentation of the 1969-… Rupture hypotheses for a political art history in Spain project. The rich scenario that opened up with the convergence of art, cinema and opposition policies after the "ruptures of 1969" in Spain will be analysed as well as the difficult dissemination of oppositional practices in the dry desert of the eighties cultural counter-revolution.

Thursday, 4th December 2003
· 18:00 h
Screenings:
- Ocaña. Retrato Intermitente (Intermittent Portrait), Ventura Pons, 1978, 82'

· 20:00 h
- Withdrawal from disenchantment: disappointment and euphoria concerning a cultural critique of the Spanish transition period
Dialogue between Cristina Moreiras-Menor and Juan Pablo Wert, moderated byPedro G. Romero

From an essay by Teresa M. Vilarós, a debate centred on the processes of the trivialisation of underground and counterculture art in Spain between the seventies and eighties. If there exists an agreement to unmask and unravel the cultural and artistic zeal of a decade inevitably presented as either marvellous or dreadful, then there is also now the opportunity to ask the scandalous question, Can a "situationist" reading be made, with the instruments that situationism offers us, of the epiphenomenon known as the "rollo" of Barcelona or the "movida" of Madrid?

Friday, 5th December 2003
· 18:00 h
Screenings:
- Caucus, Agustín Parejo School, 1985, 15'
- La muerte de Juan Delcampo (The Death of Juan Delcampo), Juan Delcampo, 1992, 5' 55''
- Llegó la hora del saqueo (Plunder Time is Here), Preiswert, 1994, 20'

· 20:00 h
- Who sings the socialist anthem nowadays? On the processes of the internationalisation of art in the period of the Empire and globalisation
Round table with Jorge Luis Marzo, Jesús Carrillo and Valentín Roma, moderated by Esther Regueira

Faced with exhibitions like Big Sur, Bad Boys or The Real Royal Trip, authentic slogans of a cultural policy that still seems to confuse the promotion of tourism with cultural colonialism, we ask: Where does the need to situate Spanish art on the international scene come from? Do all those biennials of modern art serve a purpose, and do all those foreign scholarship programmes? Does the internet serve a purpose? This is not, of course, new programming rather a prolongation of the late-Franquism and Socialist government policies of the eighties. In the prefecture of this province of the Empire, does no one question the intrinsic value of many of these art practices?

[All screenings and lectures will be open to the public]

Thanks to Cecilia Bartolomé y José J. Bartolomé, Ventura Pons, Agustín Parejo School, Juan Delcampo, Preiswert.

PARTICIPANTS

PARTICIPANTS

Jesús Carrillo, professor of Art History of the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid.

Marcelo Expósito, artist and independent curator.

Pedro G. Romero, UNIA arteypensamiento coordinator for Disagreements.

Jorge Luis Marzo, art critic and independent curator.

Cristina Moreiras-Menor, associate professor of Spanish Literature and Cinema and associate chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literature at the University of Michigan.

Julio Pérez Perucha, cinema historian.

Esther Regueira, art historian and independent curator.

Valentín Roma, art historian.

María Ruido, artist and instructor at the department of Image Arts of the School of Fine Arts of Barcelona.

Fefa Vila, sociologist and feminist researcher.

Juan Pablo Wert, professor of Art History of Castilla-La Mancha University.

[All participants are members of the Disagreements project team]