"Here, in this game, the most engaged wins”. The phrase is uttered by a lady spy in a run-of-the-mill Hollywood film abounding in conspiracies and paranoia of global terrorism. Yet to me it reveals one of the foundations of work in art: engagement. Engaged to the extreme: obviously engaged with one’s own work, one’s own practice, with the piece, in other words, that which, from a distance, is seen as coherence, stubbornness and obsession. But commitment is also linked to the place where you work. And that’s where the global issue reappears.

The most immediate effect of the globalization of art was its internationalization. Though it may seem contradictory, this process has revealed the significance of the local dimension of artwork.

The internationalization of art has obviously been highly influential and led to the appearance of macro-exhibitions everywhere and the international biennial phenomenon and its effect on the discovery of international curators and artists who, when all is said and done, set out to promote a sort of international-style art, polite and obedient with a few fashionable ideas. But beyond this effect, internationalization is linked to a process which prevents us from speaking of an art capital. As an alternative our language has filled with the plurality of art capitals, which is not so much the negation of the existence of the idea of the artistic capital, rather a multiplication of it. In other words, if we were not able today to talk of the Paris School or the New York School it would not be because we were obliged to name a sort of floating international school but because these have multiplied, so in art what takes on sense is the context of work.

However, when speaking of context another confusion arises typical of the international style. Context consists not only of social and political elements on which artists may or may not reflect; it is, before all else, intellectual context.

If art is an intellectual activity it is because it is developed amidst a constant discussion, or as Arthur Danto puts it, “Being an artist in the world of art means adopting a position with relation to the past and to contemporaries whose position vis-à-vis the past is different. The work of any artist is thus a tacit criticism of that which went before it and that which follows”. It is in a local context that this game of vis-à-vis, of occasional complicity, of affirmation, continuation and negation is most intense. It is also there that the engaged nature of artwork is revealed and underlined.

And the defence of ‘local’ as a field for committed action in contemporary art must not be mistaken for a localist or sectarian defence of art work. On the contrary, it is fruit of the selfsame internationalization of art, of the belief that art works not only blossom from intense contexts but also from the curse and the flow of expanded, global information in which we live. It would be a case of admitting, with all that this would entail, that the Paris or the New York Schools were local settings, in order to understand the implications, complexities, intensity, discussion, collaboration and complicity involved in artwork.

Only from this consciousness is it possible to work in art in an attempt at the construction of a discourse.

Thus, “looking further, thinking through” constitutes an attempt at the reconstruction of a narrative of common interests, of links between the works of Barcelona artists from different generations and with distinct attributes. It could, in this sense, be considered a history of engagement.

The history of this engagement in Barcelona has, to a large extent, consisted in establishing the site of the battle of art, due perhaps to the weight of conceptual tradition and, going somewhat further, to its relationship with surrealism and Dadaism. It is precisely this conceptual weight and desire to define the field of action that has led a generation of artists such as Ignasi Aballí, Mabel Palacín, Pep Agut, Pep Duran, Montse Soto, Eulália Valldosera and Jordi Colomer to, on the one hand, subject concepts like representation to a kind of third degree in order to create a non-representational, hands-off piece of artwork and, on the other, to wonder about the rule of the image, not only in art but also in today’s society. Thus the work of Ignasi Aballí is the fruit of solving a kind of puzzle: how to create non-representational painting with no expression and no hands. The way out of this conflict is at the same time a radical wager on painting, almost to the extreme of purism, but this solution lies at the border of doing nothing. Perhaps because in this immobility the bases may be found of a certain commitment in art. At the other extreme is the work of Mabel Palacín, made up of layer upon layer of images, each linked to others which, while assisting in their mutual understanding also demonstrate the importance of interpretation, of developing a critical eye. In short, the field of art is that of interpretation, of thinking beyond the appearances of things; thus art becomes established as a territory of conflict and engagement.

If Tere Recasens has adopted the role of the artist as the subverter of reality, arrogantly looking how find a space of freedom, Antonio Ortega presents the entire background of conceptual art to certify that this space of freedom may only be constructed out of faith and confidence in artwork as an intellectual exercise. Obviously this intellectual exercise is in itself abstract, fleeting and interpretive and, thus, is exercised by projection. And it could be no other way, because as much in Martí Anson’s works as in those by Daniel Chust Peters nothing happens, like some kind of space open to the development of a speculative thought. Nothing happens precisely due to the impossibility of developing an assertive thought and thus this apparent doing nothing is an intellectually valid way out. Fundamentally because, as in all the previous cases and in that of Carles Congost, sense of humour and irony are turned into a weapon.

These are the terms, the common interests, the narrative and the context that “looking further, thinking through” sets out to reconstruct. From the examination of representational problems in contemporary art and reflection on the rule of the image in today’s society, to the role of the artist and of art in society and its political effectiveness in relation to the use of sense of humour, links are established which are not always visible or evident but whose final reason for being is that of belonging to the same context.

A local context, naturally, also full of international connections but which defines the intensity of work in art in terms of its creation of intellectual context, reflection and thought in art. It is therefore not so much the exposition that establishes a thesis or a set of ideas, but rather these ideas find the exposition, as if they were preordained.

If this is the history of an engagement then that engagement is contextual, because it is an engagement to thinking in art, and is intellectual because it is political.

“looking further, thinking through” attempts to define the relationship between art and thinking: how the look is linked to the thinking, how looking in art involves seeing further and thinking by means of objects and images. In short, how art in its relationship with thinking seeks and generates critical points of view and rebellious thinking that do not conform to the appearance of things and which reveal the political and ethical condition of artistic practices. And that is not a thesis.

David G. Torres
Barcelona, February 2004