Probably Muntadas' oldest project, and the one that has had the longest life, is not any of his most arduous and recognizable series, some of them still open today, such as Political advertisements, started with Marshall Reese in 1984; On Translation, which started three decades ago, or Between the Frames, which ran from 1983 to 1993. Possibly the largest project undertaken by Muntadas is the construction of a network of interlocutors that grew exponentially as his proposals were developed in diverse contexts across a sociopolitical geography that, seen today, seems unattainable.
Connecting with agents from different backgrounds and at the same time connecting them with each other is, for Muntadas, more than just an agenda accumulated after years of profession. I would dare to say that it is a working methodology, a way of building community.
When the use and especially the abuse of "affections" did not yet exist, when it was not fashionable to appeal to "care," artists like Muntadas practiced a kind of politics of proximity that was in reality a teaching of the craft without too much praise, with demands that were fostered by localist endogamy convictions or by the affinity ghettos that are so comforting and so restrictive. For many of us, Muntadas was one of the first artists we studied and later became someone we turned to for contrasting positions.
This network of affinities and interpellation has unfolded, however, in diverse fields. I am thinking, for example, of the field of pedagogy, in the countless workshops taught by Muntadas around the world, the first of which dates back to 1974, when, together with Bill Creston, he converted the Sala Vinçon into a video production workshop.
From the MIT Architecture Department to the IUAV in Venice, where he was a professor for many years, passing through numerous universities in France, Brazil, Argentina, North America, Australia, Japan and China and spaces such as the Banff Center (Alberta), the Polytechnic of Valencia, the Artele (Tourcoing), there are at least five generations of artists who began their careers attending Muntadas' seminars, courses and classes. It must be said that they gained access to a particular way of understanding work in art from ideological rigor, historical research and procedural methodologies.
For whom?
He condensed it in 2013, when he gave the inaugural lecture of the Arti Visive Laboratory at the University of Venice (IUAV). The title of this presentation is Reflections on the project methodology. Six years later it was published in Spanish as a small volume by La Escocesa, a similar creation factory in Barcelona.
Despite its brevity, the essay contains ten chapters that analyze, from methodological perspectives, various factors that affect the development of artistic projects. The first section explores the notion of a project, while the last focuses on the feedback received by an author upon publicly presenting their work. Between each section, there are sections that discuss research, budget, schedule, and more.
The text might seem like a manual or a recap of Muntadas's practice. However, upon reading it, we realize that his approaches are not prescriptive, but rather full of questions. Furthermore, after each episode, a question appears addressed to a vague time and audience: "Who?", "What?", "Why?", "How?", "Where?", "When?", "For whom?", "How much does it cost?".
Muntadas' talk once again brings to the table another historical process: the one that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the great challenges against the commodification of art, the fetishization of the work, and the heroic status of the artist took place.
A panorama then opened up that perhaps today we read too homogeneously, as a simple shift in the nomenclatures with which the new languages were expressed. Although this paradigm shift perhaps required a comprehensive restructuring, and not only in the order of terminologies, it required those same questions that, decades later, remain open.
There is no such thing as film history, says Jean-Luc Godard, but rather history(ies) of cinema. In the same way, the specificity of each of Muntadas's works generates different methodological frameworks, never interchangeable, to the point that we could say that it is the project that creates its methods, and not the other way around.
The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk said that the history of philosophy could be understood as a grand correspondence with multiple senders, in which Plato sent "missives" to Hegel, although the one who responded was Marx, the same one who answered a telegram from Hannah Arendt or a request. In the same way we could understand Muntadas' projects: as a kind of watering hole of ideas and public positions that we have nourished and that have nourished us from friction and commitment, without self-complacency and in favor of complexity, one of the words Muntadas uses most and that today is so difficult to decline collectively.
