PRESS RELEASE

MUNTADAS. The Construction of Fear and the Loss of Public Space

EXHIBITION

MUNTADAS. The Construction of Fear and the Loss of Public Space

DATES

17 January -  23 March 2008

venue

Centro José Guerrero

visiting hours

Tuesdays to Saturdays, from 10.30  a.m. to 2.00 p.m. 
and from 4.00 p.m. to 9.00 p.m.;
Sundays and Bank Holidays, from 10.30 a.m. to 2.00 p.m.
Monday closed

production

Centro José Guerrero de la Diputación de Granada

collaborators

Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, General Board of Cultural and Scientific Relations.

Spanish Ministry for Culture

State Corporation for Spanish Cultural Action Abroad.
SEACEX www.seacex.es

Entitat Autònoma de Difusió CulturalDepartament de Cultura i Mitjans de ComunicacióGeneralitat de Catalunya

Junta de Andalucía

Caja Mediterráneo

Canal Sur

TV Aula Abierta. Fine Arts College. University of Granada

curators

Yolanda Romero
Mar Villaespesa    

 

SUMMARY OF THE EXHIBITION PROJECT AND CURATORS’ ESSAY  

The exhibition Muntadas. The Construction of Fear and the Loss of Public Space is almost a complete survey of a selection of works from the seventies and eighties to date. The common feature of these works is television, centre of the critical analysis of the mass media or “media landscape”, to quote the artist. In addition, the show is presenting Antoni Muntadas’ latest project in his On Translation series entitled On Translation: Miedo/Jauf, produced by Centro José Guerrero.

In the first place, the selection of works obeys the desire to present the genealogy of what Muntadas defines as “invisible mechanisms” through which information is manipulated (above all on television). This concept underlies the works on show and is also present in later works in which he has continued to explore social and political issues in the space of communication, intrinsically linked to the intersection between public and private, analysing contexts and architecture—his Media Architecture Installations—such as those carried out in a range of supports from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties, when he began the On Translation series.

Secondly, we consider these works to be of reference quality in today’s representations of contemporary critical culture and questioning of the ‘invisibly’ established rules governing television news, for instance, and in their analysis of the emergence of the media as control mechanisms. Besides being a ‘historical’ document, the show is an attempt to reread the artist’s works now that the new technologies and forms of diffusion of knowledge and information are giving rise to changes in the emission-reception dialectics produced on the fringes of the official communication system. Other televisions and on-line TV as counter-hegemonic representations form a part of a micro-reality designed to favour common spaces of social and collective production and demand the right to communication as public space in view of the loss of the latter caused by neo-liberal policies. This explains why the projects On Translation: Miedo/Jauf and On Translation: Fear/Miedo, that stand jointly as the core of the exhibition, are television interventions in the sense that their production entails broadcasting on public television—local and regional television in the contexts where the works are generated, and national television broadcasting from the respective capitals of the two countries bordering the Strait of Gibraltar, Rabat and Madrid. These signify the centres of power and the making of political decisions that affect the border territory, the object and in this case the subject of the work.

On the other hand, the methodology of the projects and of the works displayed is based on dualities such as public/private, reality/media, visibility/invisibility, that associate fear with the mass media and approach its political exploitation, or the ways in which power uses fear to control citizens. Among the media, for instance, television has been one of the chief instruments of control.

The galleries welcome the installations Emisión/Recepción (1974),
On Subjectivity (1978), La televisión (1980), the video-installations
The Last Ten Minutes II (1976), Personal/Public (1980) and the single-channel videos Media Ecology Ads (1982), Warnings (1988) and
Political Advertisement VI – 1952/2004 (2004), while a documentation
space presents other single-channel works, Liège 12/9/77 (1977),
Between the Lines (1979), Watching the Press, Reading Television (1981), Cross Cultural Television (1987), Video Is TV? (1989), TVE: Primer intento (1989), alongside photographic material, diagrams and posters related to the works on display and to others such as Acción TV (1972), Arte = Vida (1974), TV/27 Feb/1 PM (1973), Confrontations (1973-1974) and Two Landscapes (1978). Cadaqués Canal Local (1974) and Barcelona Distrito uno (1976), pioneers in community local television and prototypes of a neighbourhood or counter-information television, are the leitmotifs of a Micro-Television Laboratory set up, in conjunction with Aula Abierta and the Fine Arts College at the University of Granada, as an appendix to the exhibition project. The initiative is designed to take the effects and discourses generated by these works, thirty years after they were made, outside the museum space.

If Pierre Bourdieu is right when he states in his essay On Television that there are revolutions that disrupt the material bases of a given society and symbolic revolutions carried out by artists or scientists that disrupt mental structures, then we believe that when these works that reflect on television were made they helped change to a certain extent our way of looking, thinking and representing. And they can continue to ‘disrupt’ and, as Muntadas declares, help to “make the invisible side of the image visible”, like On Translation: Miedo/Jauf and On Translation: Fear/Miedo.

Set within the series entitled On Translation, begun in 1995 and comprising over thirty works based on the concept of translation to explore linguistic, political, economic and cultural issues, On Translation: Miedo/Jauf attempts to show, to quote Muntadas, “how fear—a cultural/sociological construction based on politics and economics—is a translated emotion that appears in very different ways on each side of the border”, by means of a number of interviews and a visual collage of contextual and archival images, quotes, press headlines and film excerpts. The material is approached “as a personal construction”, in an endeavour to “create a metaphor of situations in which translation, interpretation, what is left unsaid and silence all form a part of the narrative.”

Quoting the artist himself, “On Translation: Miedo/Jauf is not a work on African/European emigration/immigration. Nor is it a work on religion or on terrorism. Two different realities separated not by the sea but by border fences and boundaries on both sides. The search for the north, with its man-made paradises that for many remain lost; fear as an emotion/sensation inserted in the decision of crossing. The construction of the south as a fiction/reality linked to phenomena of the unknown, exoticism and difference. The attraction between two different realities in which information circulates from person to person via the media and through stereotypes. An attempt to perceive and understand hope in a continent “forgotten” by the Western world; Africa as a hope for the future. Teamwork and a choral interpretation.”

Coinciding with the exhibition, Centro José Guerrero has edited the work On Translation: Miedo/Jauf on DVD, and a monographic publication with essays by Eugeni Bonet, Pedro Jiménez, Amador Fernández-Savater and Luis Navarro Monedero, Yolanda Romero and Mar Villaespesa.

 

ON THE ARTIST MUNTADAS: CURRICULUM VITAE

Antoni Muntadas (Barcelona 1942) addresses through his works social, political and communications issues such as the relationship between public and private space within social frameworks, and investigations of channels of information and the ways they may be used to censor or promulgate ideas. His projects are presented in different media such as photography, video, publications, the Internet, and multimedia installations.

Muntadas studied at the Technical School for Industrial Engineers in Barcelona and the Pratt Graphic Center in New York, where he has lived since 1971. He has taught and directed seminars at diverse institutions throughout Europe and the United States, including the National School of Fine Arts in Paris, the Fine Arts Schools in Bordeaux and Grenoble, the University of California in San Diego, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Cooper Union in New York, the University of São Paulo, and the University of Buenos Aires. He has also been welcomed as a resident artist and consulting advisor by various research and education centres including the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, the Banff Centre in Alberta, Arteleku in San Sebastian, The National Studio for Contemporary Arts Le Fresnoy, and the University of Western Sydney. He is currently Visiting Professor at the Visual Arts Program in the School of Architecture at the MIT in Cambridge and the Instituto Universitario de Arquitectura del Veneto in Venice.

Muntadas has received several prizes and grants, including those of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, Arts Electronica in Linz, Laser d’Or in Locarno, and the Premi Nacional d’Arts Plàstiques awarded by the Catalan Government. One of his most recent awards is the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas for the year 2005 granted by the Spanish Ministry of Culture. His work has been exhibited in museums around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Berkeley Art Museum in California, the Musée Contemporain de Montreal, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, and the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, while other artistic events and biennials in which he has presented work are the VI and X editions of Documenta Kassel (1977, 1997), and the biennials held in Venice (1976, 2005), the Whitney Museum of American Art (1991), São Paulo, Lyon, Taipei, Gwangju and Havana.

Subsequently to On Translation: I Giardini displayed at the Spanish Pavilion in the last edition of the Venice biennial, his latest solo exhibitions include Protokolle, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Muntadas. Proyectos Urbanos (2002/2005)… Hacia Sevilla 2008, Centro de las Artes de Sevilla, Muntadas. Histoires du couteau, Le Creux de l’enfer, Centre d’art contemporain, Thiers, and Muntadas. On Translation: Stand By, Gimpel Fils gallery in London.

He has recently published the book Stand By (La Fábrica, Madrid), and presented the installation On Translation: Social Networks at the Inter-Society of Electronic Arts in San José, California, a two-year public project realized in collaboration with students of the CADRE Laboratory for New Media at the San José State University.  

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2007 Muntadas/BS.AS. Espacio Fundación Telefónica - Centro Cultural Recoleta and CCEBA, Buenos Aires [cat.]

2006
On Translation: Social Networks, Inter-Society of Electronic Arts, San Jose, United States
Protokolle, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart [cat.]
Muntadas. Proyectos Urbanos (2002/2005)…hacia Sevilla 2008, caS, Centro de las artes de Sevilla, Seville
Muntadas, Stand by, La Fábrica Galería, Madrid
Atencao, N.O. Gallery Contemporary Art, Milan

2005
On Translation: El tren urbano, Public Art Project, San Juan, Puerto Rico
Trois Installations, Forteresse de Salses, France
On Translation: I Giardini, Spanish Pavilion, 51st Venice Biennale, Venice [cat.] Two Installations: Emisión/Recepción, 1974-2002, La televisión, 1980, Kent Gallery, New York

2004               
Muntadas Projekte (1974-2004).
On Translation: Erinnerungsräume.
On Translation: Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten, Neues Museum Weserburg Bremen, Bremen [cat.]
Muntadas: Proyectos. On Translation: La Alameda, Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City [cat.]
Antoni Muntadas, Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo
On Tanslation: On View, Location One, New York

2003               
On Translation: Das Museum, Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund Muntadas.
On Translation. New Projects, Brigitte March Stuttgart, Stuttgart 2002   
On Translation: Museum, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona [cat.]
Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires
Great Theatre of the World, Taipei Biennial, Taiwan
Petit et Grand, Galerie Gabrielle Maubrie, Paris
Galeria Moisés Pérez de Albéniz, Pamplona [cat.]

2001               
On Translation: The Audience, Berkeley Museum of Art, Berkeley, California
On Translation: Le Public, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Montreal
Meetings, Velan per l'arte contemporanea, Turin [cat.]

2000               
Warning, Centre pour l’Image Contemporaine - Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva
Proyectos, Museu de Arte Moderno, Río de Janeiro
Centre St. Charles, Université de Paris 1, Paris
Muntadas: Recent Projects, Kent Gallery - Crosby Street Projects, New York

1999               
On Translation: The Audience, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam [cat.]
Intersecciones, Casa de la Moneda, Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Bogotá [cat.]
Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana, Montevideo [cat.]
Touring: Asunción, Paraguay; Lima, Perú; Santo Domingo, República Dominicana/Havana, Cuba

1998               
Muntadas: Proyectos, Fundación Telefónica de Arte y Tecnología, Madrid [cat.]
On Translation: The Monuments, Museum of Contemporary Art, Ludwig Museum, Budapest [cat.]
On Translation: Culoarea, Arad Museum, Arad, Romania

1997   
Yokohama Portside Gallery, Yokohama, Japan
Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires

1996   
Des/Aparicions, Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona [cat.]
On Translation: The Games, Atlanta College of Art, Atlanta, Georgia
Nancy Solomon Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia

1995               
Vera List Gallery, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts [cat.]
New York: City Museum?, Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York [cat.]

1994               
Between The Frames: The Forum, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Musée d’Art Contemporain Bordeaux, Bordeaux
The File Room, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago

1993               
Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck [poster]
Art Space, Sydney [leaflet]

1992               
CEE Project, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam
Intervenções, Fundação de Serralves, Porto [cat.]
Worte: Der Press Conferenz, Orangerie Munich
Muntadas: Trabajos Recientes, IVAM - Centre del Carme, Valencia [cat.]

1991               
Museum Stadt, Galerie de Lege Ruimte, Bruges
The Word, the Press, Conference Room, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis [cat.]

1989               
Stadium II, Cornerhouse, Manchester, United Kingdom [cat.]
C.E.E., Galerie des Beaux Arts, Brussels
Stadium III, Ikon Gallery Birmingham, United Kingdom [cat.]

1988               
Híbridos, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid [cat.]
The Board Room, The Power Plant, Toronto [cat.]
Muntadas a la Virreina. Instal·lacions/Passatges/Intervencions, Palau de la Virreina, Barcelona [cat.]

1987               

Generic TV, Musée d'Art Moderne, Villeneuve d'Asq, France Exhibition, Exit Art, New York [cat.]

1985               
Selected Video Works: 1974 – 1984, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles [cat.]

1983               
Sygma Bordeaux, Bordeaux Media Landscape, Galerije Contemporary Art, Zagreb [cat.] 1982               
Media Landscape, Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, United States [cat.]
Mediasites/Media Monuments, Washington Projects for the Arts, Washington D.C. 1979               
Personal/Public Information, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver [cat.]

1978               
Projects: Video XVII, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

1977               
Anthology Film Archives, New York Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York

 1976               
International Cultureel Centrum, Antwerp The Last Ten Minutes, The Kitchen, New York [cat.]    

REQUEST FOR GRAPHIC MATERIAL AVAILABLE FOR THE PRESS:

CD with texts and photos of the exhibition, in different formats.  

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centro.guerrero@dipgra.es
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