The thesis to be set out here is the following: many works of current art present themselves wrapped in the text of their own justification — in the catalogue text in which they are embedded — as though they were necessarily tied to it, when in reality the work itself, in its material-conceptual formality, need not refer to that text at all. The artist takes their intentional subjectivity to be inscribed in the work; as though the force of the ideas, experiences, and feelings that led them to create it remained embedded in its material realisation in such a way that the public, even without knowing that origin, ought to smell and experience that intention, ought to intuit, when not actually recognise, the very same ideas and feelings. In reality, no such thing happens. Any work of art, removed from its context of justification, holds itself up only by virtue of its materiality — and it is from that materiality that aesthetic experience and the public’s opinion are constructed (not *re-*constructed).
Let us look at some examples taken from this source: vanitatis.elconfidencial, where an expert curator explains which works at ARCO 2023 (Madrid’s international contemporary art fair) are the most interesting, and why. Of Teresa Margolles’s Vestido para concurso de belleza en México (“Dress for a Beauty Pageant in Mexico”), he writes:
This evening dress represents luxury, sophistication, beauty… all of which are deeply tied to happiness. What Teresa Margolles wants to tell us is that we are not always aware of what is hidden behind appearances. As we approach the dress we see a series of crystals sewn onto the gauze which are, in truth, fragments of glass from cars blown apart by El Chapo Guzmán after a shootout in Culiacán, Mexico — cars and people, of course. These shards point to death, to suffering, to what lies hidden behind so many of those drug-trafficking mafias, so often linked to luxury. Margolles slaps us in the face for being complicit with elements that reflect beauty but drag pain and death along behind them.
What is hidden behind appearances could be anything. Such an expression, deployed for the sake of depth, ought really to provoke philosophical suspicion: what does appearance mean here? In this example, the concern is plainly not metaphysical but rather economic-political, and the artist is reminding us that the conditions under which many of the products the market offers us are made are sometimes sinister and horrifying. But to remind us of so obvious a thing, is this work necessary? Would it not be enough simply to say so, plainly and directly? If one wished to delve deeper into the problem, one would have to turn, in any case, to journalistic, historical, or sociological reports. An artistic object on its own delves into nothing; it can aspire only to an aesthetic impact — and only after we have been instructed, through the corresponding text, in how to be impacted.
Of Atriles entre los árboles (fondo manganeso) (“Lecterns Among the Trees [Manganese Background]”) by Cristina Lucas, we read:
Cristina Lucas is the most interesting Spanish artist of the moment. This piece is a portrait of you, of me, of the photographer working on this report. Why? Because it is a clinical analysis. All human beings share 26 essential elements out of the 92 contained in the earth’s crust: iron, phosphorus, calcium, magnesium… Cristina takes those elements that appear in our blood tests and gives each one the colour its pigment naturally has, and so she creates this piece, made out of the very same matter that composes the human body. It is a portrait of all of us. These are the colours of our body. A brilliant work.
We are also informed that the work is made of Pigments, rocks and elements, which is not saying much, because everything painted has pigments in it — and elements, what does that refer to? It will be said that those are the elements used as the base for the pigments, but there is no way of knowing such a thing unless it is explained, and it adds nothing distinctive to the material appearance of the work that could not have been achieved without such elements. What we actually see is an abstract painting to which the “essential elements” are gratuitously associated. Any other association would have been equally possible: why not, playing with colours and rocks, the flags tied to a particular territory, as a critique of patriotism?
Érase una vez una mujer (“Once Upon a Time There Was a Woman”) by Alicia Framis also has its little paragraph:
With these pieces, Alicia Framis speaks of the glass ceiling for women in contemporary society, but she goes further by referring to all the women who throughout history have carried on their heads the weight of water, of fruit, of sustenance, of the household economy. Centuries and cultures have passed, and women still bear that glass ceiling. The sculptures stand on a plinth, and on the plinth there is a mirror in which all of us see ourselves reflected, because we, as a society, are all complicit in glass ceilings.
Unlike the previous ones, this work is fairly explicit, provided one is up to date with the dominant ideologies. It consists of several ethnic female figurines standing on mirrors — so that you see yourself clearly and feel guilty — with sheets of glass on their heads. It could not be simpler. The artistic question, qua formal and material, seems to be a pretext for the artist to deliver her sermon, which may well be entirely just but which has no need of these stagings to make its case. One can imagine a certain will toward media impact, in which case we would be talking about plain propaganda.
Of Ici repose notre bien aimé Pablo Picasso by Eugenio Merino, we read:
Eugenio Merino is one of those artists capable of turning his pieces into compelling stories about contemporary art. This piece speaks of how institutions can end up instrumentalising a figure like Picasso for their own benefit. This year marks 50 years since the death of Pablo Ruiz Picasso, and both the Government and the city of Málaga — and perhaps Spaniards in general — have instrumentalised him, glossing over questions like his far-left positions or his exile. We use his name while skipping over what doesn’t suit. Since Picasso has become a selfie for the institutions, let him now be a selfie for everyone: a mass selfie.
The instrumentalisation denounced here is, once again, fairly obvious. What many contemporary artists do not seem to notice is that their own denunciatory work is itself instrumentalised by being part of the circuits of the Artworld. All those denunciations that saturate art fairs and galleries have no traction outside them — unless they descend into vulgar provocation — and they are the food of a market that feeds on the visionary pretensions of creators.
Naturally, the denunciations want to call our attention to the great topics of the day, such as climate change. Here is one last example concerning the work of Cristina Lucas, mentioned earlier — the source is plataformadeartecontemporaneo.com:
According to the interpretation given there, the artist “warns us about globalisation and climate change.” Setting aside the matter of globalisation — since we should first see what is meant by the term — the boldness of coming forward to tell us what everyone already says is striking, and what scientists say with considerably more grounding (and not without controversy). But of course, the artist tells us so plastically with her work, with her use of grey colours that simulate an encounter between a soot-covered earth and a sulphurous sea. From a plastic point of view, the work is certainly notable, but what is at issue here is the barely concealed manner in which certain artistic products are gratuitously hitched to the dominant ideas of the moment. Because however much it may be said of the artist, alongside proclamations of her feminism, that she “confronts the constructed narrative, the one taken for granted or believed to be natural, and questions it by seeking out its cracks in order to break it open,” her narrative is hardly subversive — quite the opposite. The bulk of contemporary art, as a properly luxurious branch of the dominant capitalism, swims with the current. The abundant ecological, democratic, antifascist, and feminist denunciations are the official narrative — I invite anyone to defend opposing narratives and see what hail of blows comes down on them — and their storyline is no more natural than that of their enemies. The final paragraph is even more illuminating:
Lucas makes evident through her work that the current economic system is not an abstraction, but rather affects us in a very direct way and always takes form by leaving marks on our bodies — those bodies which, as in her Composiciones series, are made of the same elements that industry now sets about commercialising or manipulating in order to transform them into commodities to traffic in. Lucas proposes giving a new meaning to history, halting it in a continuous present, in a time of going and returning, that makes us conscious of the moment we are living in order to envisage new possibilities for a future which, otherwise, will not exist.
The denunciation of the current economic system does not, of course, reach as far as art itself, which is as commodified as any other field, if not more so. We can also see, in the reference to those marks on our bodies, the omnipresent influence of postmodernisms and their biopolitics — once again mainstream food for cosmopolitan philosophers, who see exploitation and the trafficking of human flesh everywhere, as if such things were not a constant of history and as if our era were not, in fact, more than ever pacifying and denouncing those atrocious dynamics (what I am suggesting is that all these denouncers are not the cause of progress, but its consequence). The quotation resolves itself with an abstruse reference to time and meaning — pure idealist fanfare that says nothing. In any case, I do not attribute this verbiage to the artist herself — though she will doubtless feel flattered by such grandiloquent references — but to the scribblers of art-world marketing: critics, commentators, gallerists, curators, and Connaisseurs of every stripe, who need to give their product a patina of depth that conceals its plain materiality. In short, what is so often deployed in contemporary art is a spontaneous philosophy that, simply by being illustrated in visual metaphors — sometimes too cryptic and sometimes too obvious — claims to elevate itself and to enlighten a public not yet sufficiently aware of all those problems that lacerate the artist’s soul. In reality, far from being the privilege of creative sensibilities, denunciation and solidarity are commonplaces of the dominant ideology of our day, a commonplace easy to fall into from the pedestal of prosperity, because who does not count as a sensitive person, concerned about the troubles of others, about the suffering of the other, of minorities? Is there anything in the world other than suffering and exploited minorities, which we, the committed contemporary artists, track down and denounce?