Because the cows are the least important part of this story, especially for all for those of us sitting in front of the TV. I’m not saying that I want to follow up the fate of these cows: what interests me is our position in front of the how we react when we watch television, whether we are concerned about what we see and how we pass judgement one way or the other. We can always appease our consciences by buying a Pretenders CD, not buying any leather clothes from GAP, or by going to an exhibition condemning injustice in the Third World. And, in fact, the example of GAP is an interesting starting point when considering the options open to works of art aspiring to explicit political commitment. The world of the media and advertising has too many tricks up its sleeve which reduce the effectiveness of such art works, so that they often end up serving as little more than a salve to the conscience of those who already agree with the protest being made. And if it is just a case of appeasing our consciences by means of a little generosity, then we can always sponsor a pig or feed some birds.

Antonio Ortega has indeed sponsored a pig, a sow called Lucy, and one morning he fed some birds outside his house in London. In England, you can sponsor a whole host of animals which, thanks to your help, will be sent off to live on a farm in the lap of luxury. This is what Antonio Ortega did with Lucy: he sponsored her and then presented this sponsorship as a gift to the institution putting on his latest exhibition, the Fundació ”la Caixa.” Now Antonio Ortega's conscience can rest easy, thanks to his generosity and the new life that he has given to Lucy through his work Record of Sponsorship.
Another time, he fed some birds to make the video Record of Kindness. For the first fifteen minutes, we see Antonio Ortega holed up in his bathroom, bent over the toilet bowl, making himself retch and saving the result in a can. After this feat of endurance, he goes out of his front door – he lives on the ground floor - and tips the vomit onto the ground. Then he sits and waits. Soon some birds land on the fence, and after a few minutes they fly down to eat … Antonio Ortega’s own food.

Let’s recap: adopting pigs, cows in India, politically committed artists, feeding birds, buying leather jackets… And now, sitting once more in front of the TV, let’s ask: does all of this really have anything to do with who benefits from our generosity to others, to cows or to pigs? The presentation of the story about GAP and the cows, and the story of Antonio Ortega feeding the birds and looking after Lucy the sow, is falsely ingenuous and deliberately banal, an attempt to provoke a moralistic response about what is suitable and what is not. What matters here, after this simplistic discourse about who benefits from what, is precisely the fact that such a discourse has been created. What is important is to highlight our moral prejudices when we judge the generosity of others, as well as to unravel the personal mechanisms that lead us to be charitable, and how to go about doing this?

That is what Antonio Ortega’s works are about: they pre-empt any institutional discourse or arguments about how and what as regards doing things for others, and go directly to the private, personal mechanisms of how we think and what prejudices are involved in thinking that way, and this is why I have been highlighting our vigil in front of the TV, the situation in which we appease our consciences and make our judgements.

Feeding birds with vomit may, at first sight, seem to be petty, dirty, unpleasant, and perhaps even somewhat contemptible, but let us compare it with sending a sweet little piggy to live in an ideal farm environment, with mud to roll around in and a little hut. She will also have a fence to keep her in the space allotted to her, and she will have a timetable for her meals, consisting of food deemed suitable for her. Lucy's environment reflects our own wishes and desires projected onto her, our human concept of what is a comfortable domestic environment for a pig. In short, to put it another way, it is not a question of giving you what you want, but what I want to give you. Not as good as what I would like for myself, but close enough. In addition, within the Catholic tradition, generosity is measured by the amount of effort that it requires. That is to say, generosity is assessed by how much time and dedication has been involved, and not so much by the gift in itself. To put it bluntly, very little effort was involved in Antonio Ortega’s adoption of Lucy: he simply filled in a form, and the small amount of money it cost was not even his. In contrast, the apparently petty and despicable act of feeding birds with vomit took fifteen minutes of effort on his part, as well as a degree of suffering while he was hanging over the toilet bowl, plus the time spent waiting for the birds to arrive. Although it is true that eating vomit is probably not our idea of gastronomic delight, perhaps it is so for the birds; and in addition, there is no fence or hut, and Antonio Ortega has done no more than imitate the way in which mother birds usually feed their young.

In the light of all this, feeding vomit to birds isn’t so bad, and a farm is not such an ideal environment; our initial moral response was proved wrong, yet even when we discover the truth we do not feel entirely satisfied. Perhaps the subject of Antonio Ortega's experiments was not the pig or the birds, perhaps  it is the spectator him or herself. Record of Kindness and Record of Sponsorship are simply experiments. : The first records the behaviour of birds, while in the second the subject of the experiment is Antonio Ortega himself, sponsoring an animal. However, the spectator is the final judge, on the basis of whatever some criteria or other, it is he or she who gives a moral response as an answer, and who is forced to go beyond this to examine its whys and wherefores. It is a kind of test in which first you have to give a “yes” or a “no” answer, and then you have to explain why. The word “record” almost corresponds to an entry on a page of a field diary, and Antonio Ortega's approach is similar to that of those ethnographers who end up driving the native population crazy by asking them: why are the tents round and not square? Why is it permitted to marry cousins on the mother’s side but not those on father’s (or vice versa)? Why don’t they eat pork? Why do they fast? … Why? Why? Why is Lucy the pig so enchanting and Antonio Ortega seems so disgusting, feeding vomit to birds when, if we think about it carefully, Lucy has been given a miserable life, while Antonio Ortega has been quite generous? And why, out of Lucy’s ten delightful piglets, has only one, Alan, been saved? What happened to the other nine? Maybe they’re in India?

The questions that Antonio Ortega asks us, just like those of the irritating ethnographer, are difficult to answer and make us feel uncomfortable, not because they are complex, but for quite the opposite reason. They are questions about our own behaviour and the setting in which they are asked is that of our own everyday, domestic life. The video Record of Kindness is shown on a monitor placed in a setting which is deliberately domestic: a carpet and some poufs to make ourselves cosy to watch some images that may prove unpleasant; sitting on a sofa is a domestic act, but so is vomiting. It is this situation in front of the television that I wanted to stress, because there is where our lives happen, the place where the logic of the behaviour that defines us gives itself away. And none of this takes place behind the screen, where GAP, cows, explicit political commitment and institutional discourses are such a long way. Antonio Ortega's record is one of situations, and of our behaviour when confronted with a proposal that slightly unbalances our everyday lives; the recorded experience consists of inducing subtle changes to see what happens. Ortega himself has declared that his intention is to make dents in the flatness of everyday life.

They are records in which the exceptional appears to be only a millimetre away from the futile, and it is within that space of a millimetre that his works take place, where the work is diluted, where its form begins to blur and becomes difficult to pin down. The artist’s interest in “lowering” a work of art, to such an extent that it is virtually at floor level and becomes confused with the course of the domestic life, as a simple record of something – results in an intensification of the work’s symbolic coefficient. The document, which is a seemingly simple, anodyne portrait of an experiment carried out by Antonio Ortega, at the same time provokes intense sensory reverberations. And everything is linked to humour, the sense of humour and that kind of candid smile caused by Lucy and the birds in London: despite the unpleasantness of the birds’ diet, the video still strikes us as being amusing, as does the roly-poly Lucy, with Alan and company. A candid smile raised by their simplicity, but falsely innocent. Ernst Lubitsch once warned us that “the true sense of humour arises out of a deep existentialism."

But to return to Lucy and Alan, her funny little piglet: what did Alan have that his other nine siblings didn’t? Why has Alan become the object of our generosity, and the other nine possibly part of our diet? It is difficult to eat a pig that has a name (how about “Alan with potatoes and plums with a touch of tarragon”). Ortega’s The use of proper names is neither arbitrary nor innocent. When he I depicts our behaviour, or discusses the symbolic potential of a work of art and the sense of humour, he I was using proper names, just like yours and mine. The candid smile that Lucy brings to our lips, or the apparent naivety of feeding vomit to birds may not seem funny and give rise to a rictus of concern, if we consider that Lucy's life is also ours, that her domestic environment is like ours, that for some unknown reason Alan seems nicer, and that is why he is still alive, that we eat what we are and we are what we eat, and that our vomit can be delicious food for somebody else.

Thinking about others is thinking about us-and-them, and laughing at others is laughing at us-and-them - if we still feel like laughing after considering the possibility that it is not me who is speaking about Lucy, but Lucy who is speaking about me. Laughter is a virus, or existential, for Lubitsch, and a work of art is not merely a nice, comforting object to hang above the sofa. André Breton declared that art must be convulsive, or it will be nothing at all. Perhaps that is what I am trying to say now: that art has to cause some kind of convulsion, because if it is merely limited to being an intellectualised object, confined to itself, just a silent object in a museum, then the effort that went into its creation seems to me to have been a waste of time. Works of art speak to us, they speak about our lives, our surroundings, the world. Antonio Ortega questions our different  forms of behaviour at the same time as he is portraying them, and asking us about them; he questions our ways of life by means of other ones, through a sense of humour, and he does so from a standpoint of ethical and political commitment.

He makes us feel uncomfortable, uncomfortable about ourselves… I leave institutional arguments and political correctness to others.

David G. Torres
Barcelona, marzo 2000.