Intervención realizada con motivo del Día Internacional contra la Violencia de Género. Aptitudes 2015, en La Rambla, Cordoba.

Estado Patriarcal.

La acción consistió en poner frases machistas de políticos españoles en los contenedores de basura.

Patriarchal State. 

Intervention made on the occasion of International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.

Aptitudes 2015, La Rambla, Cordoba.

The action involves putting macho phrases of Spanish politicians in dumpsters.

 "The more naked, more elegant". José Torres Hurtado, Mayor of Granada.

"In our group no one has dedicated one euro to fix her doormat". Matías Llorente, deputy spokesman of the PSOE in the deputation of Leon.  

  

"You think you walk into an elevator and there is a girl wanting to get you the turns. He gets you in the elevator, the bra or skirt and starts shouting out that you tried to attack."

Javier Leon de la Riva, Mayor of Valladolid.

"The quality I prefer in a man? Responsibility. Is the quality I prefer in a woman? That is a woman"

José María Aznar, former president government.

"I love animals, and if you are female and two legs, the better [...] I am racist, but not women"

Juan Hormaechea, former higher and former president of Cantabria Santander

"In Spain there are over a thousand violations of the Year" and "you can not put a policeman behind every citizen". Francisco de la Torre, Mayor of Malaga.

"Every time the [sic] see his face and those Lips think so, but I will not tell here."

Javier Leon de la Riva, Mayor of Valladolid.

"Last year the girls Were With panties on hand for you to dry"

Teresa Porras, Málaga Party councilor.

"Cinderella is an example for our lives for the values it Represents. Receive abuse without question"

Ana Botella, former Mayor of Madrid. 

"Do They Have kitchens in the new offices?"

Enrique Mugica, Justice Minister Felipe González

I do not believe in the value, I find calved

 Javier Leon de la Riva, Mayor of Valladolid.

"Laws are like women, are to rape"

Castelao Bragaño, Former President of the General Council of the Citizens Abroad.

"Most of the complaints of domestic violence are false. And prosecutors did not pursue them. The statistics are skewed". Toni Cantó, UPyD former deputy

"Freedom of motherhood is what makes women women authentically"

Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon, former Minister of Justice.

"You have to live with the shadow economy as some women. There they can be removed."

Manuel Fernandez, Deputy PP canary.

 

"Tomorrow, the Constitution turns 18, If were a girl would dress long; If were a citizen could vote tomorrow"

Miguel Angel Rodriguez, spokesman for the government of Aznar.

"We want a Europe of the Merchants will go to the hell of bitches."

Juan Manuel Sanchez Gordillo, Mayor of Marinaleda

 

 "The need to use irrigation and women, very carefully, you can lose one."
Miguel Arias Cañete, former minister

"Many ... you had to suck to be where you are"

Rafael Sanchez-Acera, PSOE spokesman in Alcobendas.

 

"The debate between a man and a woman is very difficult because if you abuse of intellectual superiority, or whatever, it seems that you are a male who is closing in on a defenseless woman (...) If it appears in your intervention that could higher self, can be considered macho "

Miguel Arias Cañete, former minister.

"The only interesting thing was that lady showed her cleavage."

Manuel Fraga, Franco minister, founder of PP.

JOANA VASCONCELOS | "MATERIAL WORLD", Phillips, London, 2015

Juan Giralt

Esther Ferrer. Extractos de "El arte de la performance: teoría y práctica"

Esther Ferrer. Extractos de "El arte de la performance: teoría y práctica" from Es Baluard on Vimeo.

China Censured Photos and Videos at Galerie Paris-Beijing

“Temporary Boundary” at Galerie Paris-Beijing in Paris is a two-part survey showcasing a selection of photographs and video works by Contemporary Chinese artists that have been censured in their own country. These include Chi Peng, Gao Brothers, Liu Bolin, Mo Yi, Ren Hang, Zhang Dali, Liu Wei, Wu Junyong, Ma Yong Feng, Huang Xiang, Jin Shan, Chen Shaoxiong, Jiang Zhi, and Xu Yong.

The photography section has been curated by Romain Degoul, founder of Galerie Paris-Beijing, and the video section has been guest-curated by China Independent Film Archive (CIFA), a non-profit organization based in Brussels and Beijing that is devoted to the presentation and preservation of Chinese independent films.

The artists in “Temporary Boundary” have been censured and/or censored for either exhibiting works that present aspects of China’s culture, history, and society in an overtly critical, satirical, or cynical manner or for dealing with subjects that are taboo in China such as politics, sexuality, propaganda, revolt, and the country’s historical errors, the organizers say.

Highlights of the photography section include Mo Yi’s negative images of the 1989 Tiananmen square protests, the Gao Brothers’ image of an imagined meeting of history’s most notorious leaders, Liu Bolin’s “invisible” portrait of himself camouflaged into the Chinese flag, Zhang Dali’s investigations of Maoist propaganda, and Ren Hang’s poetic nudes and sexual scenes.

The film section highlights include Jiang Zhi’s video of Mao Zedong, Deng Ziaoping, and Jiang Zemin running, one after the other; Huang Xiang’s video of him carving the word “Demolition” in Chinese onto a man’s torso; Wu Junyong’s surreal, absurdist animated critiques of society’s cupidity and  pride, and American director Alison Klayman’s documentary film “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry.”

“Temporary Boundary” is at Galerie Paris-Beijing in Paris until December 19.

The Louvre Is Empty

One week after terrorists killed 129 people in Paris, the French capital remains quiet, including its museums. One of our writers, Rob Colvin, visited the Louvre today, and rather than the usual crush of people mobbing the Mona Lisa, he found the gallery almost entirely empty. An eerie moment of tranquility caused by a burst of brutal violence.

Art Historians Find Racist Joke Hidden Under Malevich’s “Black Square”

Over the years, many an artistic masterpiece has been discovered hiding beneath layers of paint on reused canvases. There was a portrait of a woman behind van Gogh’s “Patch of Grass” (1887); a portrait of a bearded man beneath Picasso’s “The Blue Room” (1901); and a painting of a woman with a child, bull, and sheep under Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist” (1904). But unlike the painting that art historians recently discovered under Kazimir Malevich’s “Black Square” (1915), none of these hidden compositions contained racist jokes.

After examining “Black Square” under a microscope, researchers from Russia’s State Tretyakov Gallery, which houses one of three versions of the Suprematistcomposition, found a handwritten inscription under a topcoat of black paint. They believe it reads “Battle of negroes in a dark cave.”

Though they’re still deciphering the handwriting, the researchers assume this phrase is a reference to what is widely believed to be the first modern monochromatic artwork, a 1897 work by French writer and humorist Alphonse Allais, called “Combat de Nègres dans une cave pendant la nuit” (“Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night”). If their speculations are correct, then “Black Square” is in some kind of dialogue with Allais, who was well-known in Russia at the time Malevich worked, and whose “Combat” piece was considered a joke by contemporary European audiences, even if it is clearly a racist one.

Alphonse Allais, “Combat des Negres dans une cave, pendant la nuit” (“Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night”) (1897) (via

Now often referred to as the “zero point of painting,” “Black Square” is widely considered an avant-garde masterpiece. It has considerably degraded over the years due to poor conservation, having spent years unattended in Soviet archives. As art critic Peter Schjeldahl put it in the New Yorker, “The painting looks terrible: crackled, scuffed, and discolored, as if it had spent the past 88 years patching a broken window.”

In addition to the inscription, two other images were found under the black topcoat. “It has been known that under the image of the Black Square some other, underlying picture exists. We’ve found out that not just one, but two images are [underneath it],” Ekaterina Voronina, a researcher from Russia’s State Tretyakov Gallery, told Russia’s Kultura (Culture) TV channel. “We proved that the initial image is a Cubo-Futurist composition, while the painting lying directly under the Black Square — the colors of which you can see in the cracks — is a proto-Suprematist composition,” she said.

ENTREVISTA CON ESTHER FERRER: “SOY AGNÓSTICA CON RESPECTO A TODO, INCLUIDO EL ARTE”

En estos últimos años parece que por fin se empieza a reconocer a esos artistas silenciosos, esenciales para comprender el conceptual en España, esos artistas que han trabajado siempre casi escondidos. Esther Ferrer primero Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas y poco después Premio Velázquez y luego Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, también Premio Nacional primero y este año Premio Velázquez.
Hablamos con Esther Ferrer, la performer más deseada, esa artista que a pesar de su silencio, de su distancia, cada vez que aparece arrastra a todos, con sus declaraciones aclara cualquier situación.

Rosa Olivares: Ganaste el Premio Nacional y el año siguiente lo ganaba Isidoro Valcárcel Medina. Ganaste el premio Velázquez y al poco lo gana Isidoro… ¿Forma parte de algún plan maléfico, es parte de una performance o simplemente se hace justicia a vuestro trabajo con tantos años de retraso?

Esther Ferrer: Se hizo justicia por lo que se refiere al trabajo de Isidoro. Por mi parte no ha habido ningún complot o plan maléfico, pero puede que a los otros miembros del Jurado les sobornara la CIA o el Estado Islámico, a mí no me han contactado, a lo mejor es que soy insobornable. Hablando seriamente, entre los candidatos había muchos que lo merecían, por supuesto, al final ganó Isidoro y para mí fue una gran alegría.

R.O. ¿De qué sirve ganar un premio más allá de los 70 años en una sociedad artística que está diseñada casi en exclusiva para los jóvenes? ¿Ha cambiado mucho tu actitud hacia el mundo del arte desde tus inicios hasta ahora?

E.F. Sirve en primer lugar para que yo acumule más angustia que la normal y dude todavía más sobre mi trabajo. Pasados los 70 hay muchísimas cosas, para bien o para mal, que pierden importancia, la gloria por ejemplo y todo lo que comporta, etc. Quizás para mí ha sido una ventaja el que me los hayan dado a esa edad, pues me ha permitido trabajar tranquilamente, haciendo muchas performances, pero a la vez pudiendo realizar mí obra plástica tranquilamente, sin el agobio de las exposiciones. Si miras mi CV he expuesto relativamente poco durante muchos años, aunque a mí me parece suficiente.
Por lo que dices de los jóvenes, yo creo que lo tienen muy duro, incluso más duro de lo que fue para nosotros. No vivíamos en la sociedad de la abundancia, podías vivir con poco dinero y encontrar trabajos que te permitían pagar el alquiler, comer y poco más, es cierto, pero era una época en que creías o te convencías de que creías que el arte podía cambiar la sociedad, que era posible, y hoy…
Mi actitud no ha cambiado, creo yo, porque nunca he estado sumergida en el mundo del arte, aunque parezca difícil creerlo, vivo bastante al margen y conozco poca gente, hay muchas batallas artísticas que no me interesan, soy agnóstica con respecto a todo, incluido el arte.

Esther Ferrer. Biografía, 1977. Cortesía de la artista.

R.O. Vivimos en estos momentos una especie de revival conceptual, y la performance parece ser la atracción principal de estudiantes, artistas y curadores. ¿Qué opinas de esta aceptación general de una actividad por lo general minoritaria?

E.F. Pues que está de moda, hace vender, al parecer, y el mercado la ha recuperado al máximo. Mientras el mundo de la acción era cuestión de unos cuantos artistas que organizaban los festivales, sin intención de recuperar los derivados, funcionaba de una forma muy libre, entre otras cosas porque había muy poco dinero. Hoy la institución, el mercado, se interesa, hay dinero por medio, y la performance es el comodín que sirve para todo, hace vender perfumes, vestidos, libros, etc. Hoy hasta el Louvre programa performances… incluir la performance es ser contemporáneo, ¡aunque tenga más de medio siglo de existencia! Todo esto la ha hecho evolucionar, para bien o para mal, hay de todo y eso está muy bien, como en todas las artes.

La institución quiere seguridad; quiere controlarlo todo, incluso la tan traída y llevada participación, todo está bajo control, como en un jardin d’enfants. La consagración de los elegidos pasa también por ella. Pero todo esto, no son más que avatares de su azarosa existencia y, ¿por qué no? Lo importante, lo que puede hacer cambiar las cosas, es la posición de los artistas frente a esta situación. Podríamos hablar también de su evolución formal y conceptual, pero eso es muy largo de contar.

R.O. En tu trabajo hay casi de todo, objetos, ready made, fotografía, pintura, instalación, performance ¿Cual crees que sigue siendo más desconocida para el público y por qué?

E.F. En realidad hay bastantes aspectos de mi trabajo poco conocidos por la simple razón de que lo he expuesto muy poco o nunca, por ejemplo las instalaciones espaciales, los lienzos, los objetos. En algunos casos, como en el caso de las instalaciones, es porque necesito espacios adaptados donde se pueda disponer de suelos, techos, paredes, y en muchos centros o galerías no es el caso. Otras razones, pues porque a veces son series que quiero continuar tranquilamente, cuando tengo tiempo y que no necesitan demasiada experimentación y las olvido.

R.O. El Museo Reina Sofía está preparando una exposición tuya con motivo del Premio Velázquez, ¿Puedes adelantar si va a ser una retrospectiva, sobre qué aspectos de tu obra va a girar?

E.F. No creo que sea una retrospectiva, las comisarias, son dos, están haciendo un pre-proyecto de una exposición transformable, pero te puedo decir muy poco más porque estamos verdaderamente en los prolegómenos de la cosa.

R.O. ¿Qué es lo que no has hecho aún y te gustaría hacer?

E.F. Levantarme por las mañanas sin angustias ni obligaciones, poder “dar tiempo al tiempo” como decía mi madre, abstraerme de una sociedad y un mundo que me agobia y entender algo de algo, porque todo me parece tan absurdo…
Por lo que se refiere a mi trabajo, tener tiempo para sacar del fondo de mis papeles dos proyectos que nunca he tenido tiempo de desarrollar, que a lo mejor no valen nada y por ello mi inconsciente me hace olvidarlos, los he dejado siempre de lado, uno tiene relación con el ballet y el otro con el teatro.

'UH-OH: Frances Stark, 1991-2015' at Hammer Museum is an enthralling midcareer survey

Frances Stark is not a computer whiz. Her digital skills appear to be no better than basic.

Most of her art is made with some paper and a pair of scissors. Collage, which has been around for a century, is her analog staple in our digital world.

Yet, at 48, Stark is nonetheless emerging as the visual poet laureate of the Internet age. Writing code may or may not be in her toolbox, but deep artistic intelligence most certainly is.

Her enthralling midcareer survey at the UCLA Hammer Museum is unthinkable without the virtual experience that characterizes life today. The artist deftly navigates a notoriously unstable new environment. In fraught matters of human interaction, the work is a marvel of clear-eyed equilibrium.

Stark's wide-ranging work is an uncanny fusion of the analog and the virtual. Her materials incorporate paint and video projection in equal measure, plus scavenged art gallery announcements, orchestrated hip-hop sound, reflective silver Mylar and a PowerPoint presentation."UH-OH: Frances Stark, 1991-2015" features 56 drawings, collages, video projections and mixed-media works. The witty title, with its guttural blend of caution and dismay, says a lot: She's going to venture out onto a limb, just to see what happens; be prepared.

Like the vibration of a musical note hanging in the air, a spoken word whose substantial presence lives in the otherwise spectral space of memory or smoke rising from the glowing tip of a burning cigarette whose nicotine helps focus the mind, physical presence mingles with ghostliness.

It's topsy-turvy. Think Goya's satiric Capricho etching of chairs sitting atop women, rather than the other way around, which inspired several Stark works. Hints of chaos frame a related mixed-media painting, which shows a reclining female figure, not quite life-size, simply holding a sheet of paper. We see her from above, pointedly looking down on her.

That puts the woman's faceless head down at the bottom of the canvas, near a viewer's feet, her tangled splotch of black hair a visual ink-drop blown up to gigantic scale. Her torso and legs unfold upward. We're gazing straight at her feet. She's faceless, stripped of identity.

Her black-and-white, peek-a-boo dress is pieced together from bits of semitransparent rice-paper. Stylistically the restless, shifting angles make the striped dress Cubism morphing into Op art.

This is no conventional odalisque — no seductive harem girl displayed in the imperialist Turkish manner of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, nor a concubine laid out on an upholstered daybed, like Edouard Manet's combative "Olympia." Stark weaves Western art history, its profundities and shibboleths, into much of her work, and her differences with the past help clarify the present.

The sheet of paper held by the upside-down woman is an actual sheet of paper, which Stark pasted onto the canvas. Handwritten across it in black ink: "Why should you not be able to assemble yourself and write?"

The earlier silent movie's flat projection screen is here pushed into the three-dimensional white cube of a contemporary art gallery. The domestic fuses with the institutional, blurring private and public. Its text is the legend of a rake — an Internet Don Juan — merged with sad-clown Pagliacci as Mozart plays on the soundtrack.

The show's excellent catalog uses the descriptive word "porous" for Stark's art. One meaning of porous is "capable of being penetrated," and the sexual implication is apt. Stark conflates the explosion of Internet sex with the established modern convention of artist as free-thinking libertine.

She's teasing out the artist's ambiguous place in today's befuddling society, money-obsessed and entertainment-possessed. The moment an artist moves her work from studio to gallery, she begins performing for the crowd. So Stark's charming collages include a series featuring a life-size chorus girl.

Her jaunty costume is a burlesque cluster of disks, each striped in black, blue and green, which optically twirl like pinwheels when your eye moves across them. It's post-Toulouse-Lautrec.

My favorite is "Chorus Girl Folding Self in Half," which she does with her back to the viewer. Bent over forward, she peers out at us from between her legs like a Belle Époque poster remastered in Marcel Duchamp's eye-bending optical roto-reliefs. The chorine assumes the famous music-hall pose that ends a raucous can-can.

Why not, indeed. The artist invents herself as she goes, writing and assembling her persona into being. The self-portrait that results is wholly distinctive yet utterly anonymous.

Its unique inventiveness arises from engagement with the Internet, where sock puppets and catfish play. The digital universe, with its weird aura of alienated intimacy (or, is it intimate alienation?) is crystallized in cyber sex. The show features three video projections built from the artist's experiences cultivating online flirtations. They're among the most poignant, sly and moving pieces on view.

The first stars a virtual Adam and Eve. Rudimentary talking avatars court a fall from grace in pop-up Eden.

The second is a silent movie — a tragicomedy made from projected text and improvised piano accompaniment. Its tender tale of recovery from an audacious online entanglement is a heartfelt foray into humanity's eternal discombobulations.

The third is a full environment. A visitor curls up on a chic gray sofa to read black texts projected onto three surrounding white walls.

Suddenly, you realize she is actually mooning you.

The work unpacks socially constructed biases toward women in general and artists in particular, then delivers a visual raspberry. Marvelously interactive, the fictional chorine talks directly to its anonymous audience as surely as the artist does in an online chat room.

Stark attributes her interest in artistic communication to her mother, a lifelong telephone operator. Her job was to connect strangers remotely. The digital revolution changed the terms of the hookup but not the desire for connection.

One Stark sculpture — it derives from a performance costume — seems a mom-homage. The ensemble is black, its outstretched arms with cascading sleeves held above a voluminous skirt. A big rotary dial is attached to the front of a mash-up of traditional Asian robes — Korean hanbo, Japanese kimono, Chinese hanfu.

The overall shape evokes a handset cradled atop the housing of a vintage telephone. A black cord unfurls out the back, rather like a pesky rodent's tail. It's notably detached from the wall, as if to say, "I'm sorry, you've been disconnected."

Stark carries within her remote remnants of a lost world, partly from her youth. And partly it's the once-radical, now conventional Pop landscape of artists like Claes Oldenburg. Mining past art and autobiography helps navigate new terrain.

The exhibition is large. The 21/2 hours of video culminate in a marvelous multichannel installation in which text and imagery merge USC, a privileged school where Stark taught until a controversial curriculum change prompted a high-profile split, with the "University of South Central" — the school of the street.

The hip-hop duet with Bobby Jesus, a street kid who is her talented young studio apprentice, unfurls on a vast chessboard landscape scanned by celebrity klieg lights crossed with police searchlights. They finally unite at the far horizon into a single orb that rises like the sun.

Although large, the show is beautifully paced. Hammer curator Ali Subotnick, working with the artist, traverses nearly 25 years not through chronology but through echoes, repetitions and revisions among art objects. They footnote one another as they talk with us.

That isn't easy to pull off. "Frances Stark: Intimism," a smaller focus show last spring at the Art Institute of Chicago, also included compelling work — some the same as what's in the Hammer exhibition. But sequestered in a warren of rooms, it felt chopped up and impermeable — disconnected rather than porous.

This one doesn't. "UH-OH" is among the finest solo museum shows this year.