Muntadas: a conversation with the world
Every representative artist contributes a unique and distinct quality through their language. In the dominant corrua of visual and philological artists with progressive roots, ideologically constructed in Catalonia during the long dictatorship, each one contributed a poetics of theuniversal ultralocal made of identifiable signs in what is personal and yet also collective. The specificity of a Miró or a Tàpies is explained because, starting from anonymous iconographic gestures, their own sign makes them identifiable.
The public's adherence to this artistic adventure made up of individualities that did not conform to the system was achieved more through rapport than communication. A line of continuity and leaps has continued to this day and has offered a landscape of exceptional subjective monogrammatic artists.
The triumph of this poetic and abstract art, made up of extreme individualities with shared programs, born with the avant-garde movements, was transferred from Europe to North America in the midst of the fascist occupation of the great art capitals, from Berlin and Paris to New York. Modern art, a symbol of freedom, will play a role in liberal democracies in opposition to the dictates of directed social realism, which aims to indoctrinate and educate the masses. Free art had a price in the market. Liberating it from its system enclosed within a system of order and values (museum-gallery, codification-good taste) was the priority task of a generation of dissident artists trained in universities in the midst of the revolt at the end of the 1960s for a change of life that would escape binary dialectics.
In Catalonia, during the late Franco era, in the midst of the struggle for freedoms, the group of conceptual artists were the most virulent in extracting art from its formality in the two-dimensional space of painting and the totemization of anthropomorphic or abstract sculpture. Art had to reach the new masses through new behaviors, new technological media, and new, more analytical exhibition spaces. Two dominant currents: sociology replaced the art of Freudian introspection, and linguistics altered consumerist advertising mediation and closed political messages. The artist had to cease being a tribal idol and become a critical worker using the instruments of the new languages of communication to activate an open, public and individual, non-standardized reading of artistic artifacts. The Working Group opened a gap in the Catalan canon established by the free art generation.
Antoni Muntadas, who was part of it despite having settled in New York in his youth, will be the Catalan artist who best represents the change that goes from the search for a multiple local identity in the global scene that thins it out. An earthquake that represents in Catalonia, historiographically, a paradigm shift in the dominant poetics of a subjective art for a new line of art of a sociopolitical nature.
The resensualization of subsenses in the body of the artist and the spectator, and the socio-communicative and community framework were the first proposals of a Muntadas who, soon, will deploy his work with procedures and means not considered artistic from outside the market in intellectual exercises with a vocation. The NY that Muntadas found did not correspond to the American Dream.
The arms race, the sacrifice of youth in armed conflicts, economic crises, instability in democratic processes, control over the market, mass consumption of tourism, information manipulation in mass media, the control of political messages, the protocol of history are issues of yesterday that are always the same in the local and global framework.
When Muntadas printed the work September 11, 1974 - September 11, 1978 in the Mallorcan artistic and alternative newspaper Cork Neon, freely distributed, something had happened in the Catalan and international context. The artist had dedicated himself to archiving, displaying and contrasting the front pages of important international newspapers (The Daily Telegraph, The Universal News, Le Monde, Herald Tribune, Corriere della Sera, De Telegraaf) with a date of great historical and political significance in Catalonia and Chile. Each newspaper offered a different perspective, a different variation. Fifty years later, September 11th is also a date of global confrontation.
Since Tàpies, the demiurge and organizer—he and the gang that built the national art plan of modernity—I don't know of any other Catalan artist who, like Muntadas, has become a humble reference for current generations of artists, trained in the universities of so-called Berlin and of knowledge in the knowledge society. The workshop of this artist, a citizen of the world, is empirical observation on the street and reading the press, and his field of action, public cultural spaces. Materiality matters little: comments, sentences, recordings. His proposal at the ARA makes us look at the world anew through art and challenges us to a profound degree.