Art at the Bottom of the Ocean: When Everything Falls Apart

The initiator of the construction of the modern notion of the sublime, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, was the first to use the brilliant expression “ocean sea” to refer to the abysmal experience of contemplating a vast horizon from the coast. As painter Caspar D. Friedrich would later capture, taking the figure of the solitary aesthetic subject in Modernity to the extreme, erected on a cliff above the ocean; but then trampled by the hordes of tourists who visit the lighthouses and stop their cars on the highways at the lookout sign.

In the nineties, in the midst of post-modernity, the skilled writer Alessandro Baricco rescued the expression for the title of a novel in which opposes everyday life by the sea facing the immeasurable ocean. It was here that the curator of this exhibition, Iñaki Martínez Antelo, director of MARCO Vigo, an art center open to the Atlantic Ocean, from northern Europe to South America, began for years.

He is an expert on the subject, from whom one cannot expect commonplaces, beyond the meaning memory of the Prestige oil slick disaster on the Galician coast, documented by photographs of allan sekula (Pennsylvania, 1951-Los Angeles, 2013), Fragments for an opera.

The exhibition opens and ends with two large installations. The large conglomerate of artifacts collected in everything falls apart per Jorge Peris (Valencia, 1969), covered and on a salt base, evokes a ceremonial architecture previously submerged at the bottom of the seawith all the possible connotations of finding ourselves in front of hidden treasures or perhaps in front of ruins of modern progress, that is, brought from the future.

It is just strange and irritating for visitors that the white canvas on which this installation was planted during assembly has been left behind, a constructive display that goes wrong with the poetic and attractive title of this exhibition, to which viewers arrive already delivered. and are immediately rewarded with this impressive and very suggestive piece.

The exhibition repeats a collective scheme with different media. 'Interesting' exhibitions, but never 'round'

At the conclusion of the tour, the imaginary is also invoked. The installation of Vasco Araujo (Lisbon, 1975) with sixteen large watercolor notebooks – around sixteen are the tips of the compass rose used for navigation – overlooking sea horizons. Under all kinds of placid and stormy skies, accompanied by generic reflections on life in an insecure and penciled script, takes us directly to the common experience – at least, before, without cell phones or networks –, when we stand before the sea and reconsider who we arewhere we came from and where we want to go.

In addition, there are two other important pieces, although their reading is less intuitive. The two simple wooden ramps facing each other Maria Luisa Fernandez (León, 1955) acquire a new meaning when we read its title: Red Sea, whose waters Yahweh divided in two to allow the Jewish people to escape. According to Baricco, the origin of all the seas.

the video of rosana antoli (Alkoi, 1981), I will give you the sea, 2020, belongs to the confinement harvest due to the pandemic and it is likely that the author will reconsider over time, purging the entire testimonial part of those limitations in another version. Above all, for the powerful sinister sequences which, as Eugenio Trías would say, are always contained in the sublime of the sea and liquids in general.

The rest of the proposals, from the sculptures by Grace Schwindt (Offenbach, Germany, 1979) for Laia Estruch (Barcelona, ​​​​1981), going through this beautiful, but already recurring video of submerged photography among the crystal clear waves of Mar Guerrero (Palma de Mallorca, 1991)they seem to be there to complete the formula that has been repeated in this Vaulted Room in recent times under the seal of the private firm MadBlue.

[The sea changed history: the revolutions that brought about the conquest of the sea]

A company that, although the Centro de Cultura Contemporânea Condeduque, dependent on the Madrid City Council, disappeared during the construction and consolidation of Matadero and Medialab due to lack of budget, has returned to the Madrid agenda, seems to repeat the same scheme over and over once again exhibiting collective with pieces on different supports. And with similar results: exhibitions interestingbut never round. To the point of practically erasing the idiosyncrasies of each commissioner. A formula that seems to respond more to economic and business criteria than to an artistic program committed to the singularity of excellence.

Frankly, after more than half a dozen exhibitions cut by the same standard, it becomes increasingly difficult to visit again to see just what is interesting, a category of Modernity that, although it had the virtue of breaking canonical quality criteria in the Old Regime, he does not deserve to preside over the artistic system today.

[Panorama of research in the oceans]

In art, if we still want it to be something more than entertainment, a certain individual or group adventure epic, game or bet is required. Even if it ends in an honorable failure.

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