Only for the Masses.

To the Gray Mass

 

 

The last collective exhibition that the Blanca Soto Gallery presents before leaving its current location is a project that PSJM has organized around a conflicting idea: knowing to what extent the latest art connects with the masses. If the public's mission is to understand what a vanguard of a social nature can mean, the difference between the rebel and the revolutionary lies in the willingness to surrender to the task of modifying the system from within or simply to devastate it. On the other hand, avant-garde phenomena have always been produced in society, at least, that is their medium, sooner or later. If not, the disconnection in the triangle formed by the spectator, the artist and the exhibition venues may be caused by the effectiveness of advertising, a true tool that has made it possible today, for example, to form long lines of an audience massive that patiently awaits entry into museums such as the Prado or the Thyssen. What happens when the arts to a large extent use the same means as other commercial products to reach the largest number of individuals? Why do people flock to these places and not to other spaces such as the art galleries themselves?

 

The task of creating auditoriums, bringing culture to the public, although it is still a rhetorical procedure, is also an effort to bring art into action, as is the case with the conceptual work of Josechu Dávila -already recently presented at the same gallery-, where they want to make the residents of one of the privileged areas of Madrid enter in an ironic way in a quantitative and qualitative way in a work of art. Chus García-Fraile presents a painting that, without being properly advertising -there are no recognizable trademarks-, is at least effective due to its metaphorical nature, pointing towards the darkness of the passage that has to lead us to some neutral meeting point like the one proposed by Pepe Medina (You are here) or in the case of the El Perro collective when they show a video where, using billboards, they invite the citizen to consume themselves in boredom. Then the viewer, aware of his dissatisfied and denial character, directs his messages towards a society where he does not know if he will be heard (PSJM), a challenge to the individual who continues to spin like one of the great imaginary records presented by Pelayo Varela. It is while waiting for the general public to which the exhibition seems to be directed, that the use of advertising mechanisms becomes an apparently utopian and effective action, a certain shipwreck like the one represented by Avelino Sala on top of a surfboard, knowing that, although the wave does not arrive today, perhaps it can do so tomorrow, at least, creating new audiences and auditoriums.

 

Only for the masses will continue soon at the Cristóbal Gabarrón Foundation in Valladolid, showing that if there is something that belongs to the masses, it is precisely its grayish character, a commitment to the ironic use of new audiovisual media and a certainly conceptual approach where it wants to get across. culture to the widest possible public with a disruptive intention -more than informative-, a necessary risk to revitalize the world we live in without falling into the complacency of the artist separated from his social place. Something already pointed out by Antonin Artaud when referring to art aimed at the public in contemporary societies: “If the current crowd no longer understands Oedipus Rex, for example, I would dare to say that Oedipus Rex is to blame, and not the crowd”.

 

 

 

By José Luis Corazón Ardura. Published in www.sublimeart.net on 01/20/2005.