There is one of the most unusual and unknown drawings by Federico García Lorca at the Miró Foundation in Barcelona. It represents the double face of a character on which another more schematic face is superimposed, with a cubist aesthetic and a certain nod to the Dalí style of that year, 1927. In the whole of his graphic work it is a rarity. Break with your usual economy of lines in a sophisticated flirtation between the colors red and blue. It is said that the shadowed profile of the head, with protruding ears, is Lorca himself who would be secretly incorporated into his own work. A drawing that he thought to call Mirror, but that, in reality, is a kiss. In the museum, it hangs a few feet from another kiss, captured by Wolfgang Tillmans’ camera in 2002, and from a loving moment, when doctor Fernando Aiuti kisses HIV-positive Rosaria Iardino to show that HIV is not transmitted through oral contact . It is from 1991, but seen today it can be read with hardly any distance. A few meters away, that string of love leads to two upside-down heads of Bruce Nauman who are also about to kiss each other with their tongues. There are barely a few centimeters between one mouth and another, but that tension-filled void could well define The meaning of sculpture, title of the project devised by David Bestué, with the collaboration of Martina Millà, in which these works are framed.
It has been a long time since the Fundació Miró lived such an expansive moment of joy, with an exhibition so bright and so connected to exhibitions of yesteryear. David Bestué, also an artist, has filled the museum with references not only to him as a sculptor, but also to that Barcelona in which he grew up as an artist, from the Sarah Lucas box of tesserae that Victòria Combalia brought to Tecla Sala in 2000 to fax from On Kawara to Manel Clot with the latent I’m still alive. In addition to bringing Miró’s sculptural practice to the present, of a pressing contemporaneity, the exhibition weaves a series of correspondences between the old and the new, the old and the young, the material and the symbolic or the emptied and erased that broadens a idea of sculpture similar to an unconscious place in which something or someone, for a few moments, comes into contact with the world.
It is not the only exhibition that right now reflects on what sculpture is. The IVAM headquarters in Alcoi calls it Infinite sculpture, and the CAAC of Seville, Expanded sculpture. Both are samples that pull from the definition given to sculpture by the North American theorist Rosalind Krauss in 1979 to speak of a kneaded, extended and twisted practice that could encompass practically anything. At that time, it responded to a need to flee from historicism and the idea of a monument, sheltering the fidelity of the materials and the pedestal. Forty years later, that idea has become more elastic and mutant, if possible. The vagueness that hangs over many of contemporary artistic practices finds here one of its best examples. The little distance you have with the idea of display and installation does not make it easy either.
Today, few could agree on what it means to make sculpture. As the only certainties, two ideas. One has to do with the symbolic. Sculpture today is mental: a flexible and porous, asynchronous and somewhat heterogeneous drive, capable of exceeding any idea of representation even knowing that this limit can never be fully reached. An example of “no sculpture”: when Sam Mendes in American Beauty (1999) records for 15 minutes the fluttering of a white bag in front of a red wall. The dance of that bag before the wall as an image of the void. That air charged with electricity. The other has to do with form and materials. Writer Sarah Boxer, magazine regular Artforum, calls it “the intonation of the material, the place and the space”, although I focus on another example of “non-sculpture”: when Rimbaud put on the table his desire to leave behind “old-fashioned literature” to experiment with a poetry capable of playing with impossible associations, like writing silences or setting vertigo. That alchemy.
Sculpture today is mental: a flexible and porous, asynchronous and somewhat heterogeneous drive, capable of going beyond any idea of representation
Surely never as now has there been such a polyphony of artists working with the possibilities of materials and their relationship with the body. It doesn’t matter which ones. Everything is valid and a host of exhibitions currently in force hover over it: marble for Rodin (Tate Modern, London), bronze according to Juan Muñoz (Patio Herreriano, Valladolid), terracotta by Miquel Navarro (Fernández-Braso gallery, Madrid) , ceramics for Teresa Solar (Joan Prats, Barcelona), blown glass for Lara Fluxà (Es Baluard, Palma de Mallorca), carved bone and plaster for Cristina Mejías (Palacio del Almirante, Granada), iron according to Belén Uriel (The Ryder, Madrid), cane and wood for Alegría and Piñero (Musac, León)… Also materials that resist being form, such as those by Fermín Jiménez Landa in El final de unempitud es el primer de otro, project for the Oteiza Museum and which is part of the Hazitegia program developed together with the Huarte Contemporary Art Center.
Faithful to his way of approaching the great discourses of art in a peripheral way, Jiménez Landa relates the void, a central element of Oteiza’s sculptures, with elements related to his work such as walking or the idea of cartography, linking the common root of the term empty (vacuus) with derivative concepts such as bum, vacation, and tramp. From there, the symbolic plot shoots up. As a result of the scrupulous measurement of the void between several of Oteiza’s sculptures, sometimes 50 centimeters by 2 meters, others 50 centimeters by 7,000 kilometers, the artist tries to walk these voids outside the museum, generating an unusual geography that has taken to dinner with strangers or through private homes. Something like a drift between oteizas. Or what is the same: conquer the gap of the intermediate spaces. Meursault’s smile at Maria when she shakes her hair in Abroadby Camus. That extreme intensity of life.
The meaning of sculpture. Joan Miró Foundation. Barcelona. Until March 6, 2022.
Expanded sculpture. CAAC. Seville. Until May 8, 2022.
Infinite sculpture. IVAM. Alcoi. Until October 24.
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