While on a field trip to Barcelona, I have attended the art exhibition “Del vell al nou, del nou al vell” (active between February 15 and March 4, 2018), which took place in Arts Santa Monica Museum. The name of the exhibition translates from Catalan as “From the old to the new, from the new to the old” and suggests somewhat of the reconceptualization of the artistic values against the traditional approaches to European fine arts. As a European born person who respects the ‘old’ ways in fine arts, I was eager to see what do the exhibited artists propose for the “new” in the day and in the future of Catalunya. As it had been described in the official website of the exhibition by Fina Duran:
“From the past, fragments of their reality reach us, and from the present, we are weaving them until they set up a memory. Our own story helps us to create an identity that characterizes us and gives us clues to what we want to be from one yesterday we have built since today. The artist is part of that intersection that helps create our memory; But, at the same time, from his point of view, it can help us to put in question reasons and reasons that have made a certain story that configures us. The exhibition ‘From old to new / From new to old’, it raises several views of artists and theorists that help us to question the memory that has come to us in order to build a new reality”.
It stroke me that the entrance to the exhibition was completely free of charge. The questions ‘how does the museum profit?’ and ‘do they suggest that the new art is created for all people regardless of their social status?’ enticed me to closely examine the public who attended the exhibition in their ethnicity, age and social status based on their attires, as well as the ideas which stood behind the pieces of art and installations inside. I have noticed many European couples walking around the exhibition; however, few people were on their own; I had also noticed black and Middle Eastern people contemplating on an installation which had drawn my specific attention too for my own reasons (described below). Interestingly, I’ve counted that more men than women attended the museum; no women but myself walked without an accompaniment during the hour and a half I’ve spent inside. I have not noticed any groups of people exceeding two, or any people who’d seem as tourists on a sightseeing run. The visual age of the attendees varied between early 20th to middle age and 50th. Most of the people were visibly in their 40th; there were no kids (who were probably in school at 1-2.30pm) and no elders (who are most likely unmotivated in supporting the new ways of art) present when I walked around the halls. The attires of the public were quite moderate but fashionable; I took a liberty to place those attires as belonging to middle and upper classes of the society. It was silent but vivid inside; I felt quite comfortable mixing with the crowd in this exhibition.
The collection of art pieces features both the internationally renown as well as the local artists: Daniela Ortiz and Xose Quiroga, Jesus Galdón, Tom Carr, Jordi Tolosa, Patricia Gomez and Maria Jose Gonzalez, Jordi Canudas and Isabel Banal, Mariona Moncunill and Sergi Botella, Sitesize andCarlos Pazos. The goal of the exhibition was to question the heritage of the city based on the identities of its present dwellers: “our own story helps us to create an identity that characterizes us and gives us clues to what we want to be from one yesterday we have built since today…The artist is a part of that intersection that helps create our memory; but, at the same time, from his point of view, it can help us to put in question reasons and reasons that have made a certain story that configures us” (Fina Duran). Visual elements of hip-hop culture were a silver-line to all the exhibits, basically attributing all “the new” in the name of the event to the globalized movement.
An installation which had drawn my special attention featured a bunch of old junk, piles of car tires with some agricultural instruments peeking out from them, a boxing glove sticking into a steampunk hat, an old radio [from 1930th or 1940th?], a bass guitar thrown into a street trash can, a plasma TV with hip-hop rapper on it (whose name unfortunately escaped me) with no sound. The ancient Egyptian yellow tiles on the floor contrasted with the illuminated wool patches against the black opaque walls. There were no other lights in the two tiny rooms of the installation but the TV, a neon sign, and the illumination inside artificial wool clouds on the floor. Additionally, there was some black shiny sand on the floor which reminded the obsidian or a crashed vinyl. Among the piles of the tires, there was a pagan worship post which I attributed to possibly South American tribes; together with the ancient Egyptian tiles on the floor, the deities on that post reinforced the presence of a tribal spiritual practice. I particularly got excited about the tires barricades which reminded me immediately of the last revolution in Kiev, Ukraine in the winter of 2013-2014, when people lived on the main square of the city in tents during the coldest months of the year, burning barricades of tires in the means of protest to the corrupt government and police. It was, indeed, a struggling people’s installation, a call for the real human values such as freedom, movement, dreams, spirituality, equity, self-expression, and creativity.
Another exhibit which caught my eye featured the four pebbles: the “shrink-wrapped stone” (Majorca, 2012), the “stone with contour lines” (Catalunya, 1957), the “opened stone” (Azerbayan, 2011) and the “dated stone “28-10-1956 – 11-2-2007”.” (Rangpur, 1990). I thought the pebbles may represent the modified will of human beings in its intricacy and scarceness, underlining its origins in raw nature, hardness of its body mixed with the fragility of the substance, exposition to polishing by water, finally, the differences in the artistic ‘experience’ and ‘destiny’ which each of the stones had.
The halls of Arts Santa Monica were filled with paintings, graffities, paintings of graffities, collages, photographs, and caricatures embodying all the colors and shapes of today’s society with the hip-hop connotation in them. Indeed, the exhibition “Del vell al nou, del nou al vell” proved that Barcelona had fully accepted hip-hop culture as its own democratic route of developing the urban society by looking into the important things left behind in the inattentiveness of the passing dominant cultures.
Stasie Gonikberg Blog 