3-in-One Art

Location: Madrid, Spain

Tuesday June 22, 2010

Instead of cleaning, lubricating, and protecting, three art exhibitions in one building meant being able to go gallery hopping after Prado class in the beautiful air-conditioned Círculo de Bellas Artes building. I was especially impressed by Óscar Muñoz’s Volverse aire (To Become Air), one of the exhibitions that focused on the temporality of an image and capturing that image. He had multiple pieces that addressed how one can never capture a portrait perfectly, because the image is constantly changing and that specific moment will no longer be true a moment later. One on wall, he had five videos running of him in the process of painting five different anonymous portraits with water on hot pavement As he moved on to repaint the next portrait, the just-finished one would start evaporating. On another wall, a mounted video showed the artist’s self-portrait in black coal powder on the surface of water in a white porcelain sink. As the water drained for three minutes, the artist’s image gradually became distorted as the water left the sink, until the image was finally obliterated when the sink gurgled as the last of the water left. On the adjacent wall, a row of small round mirrors that resembled smooth silicon wafers were set up for viewers to peer and breathe into. The appearance and disappearance of the warm breath signified changes in a person image. I realize that my description of this great exhibit is pretty shitty. I stumbled upon a blog from an artsier-than-thou blogger who wrote a much better analysis that makes mine seem quite derderder. Please, have at it.

I didn’t like László Moholy-Nagy’s El arte de la luz (The Art of Light) and Fernando Sánchez Castilo’s Episodios nacionales (National Episodes) as much as I did Muñoz’s. I totally understand that Moholy-Nagy was quite avant-garde for his time, which I do appreciate, and that Sánchez was experimental by featuring blind people –the exact subjects that would not be able to experience PhotoEspaña—in his video shorts. But there was something about the simplicity and focus of Muñoz’s idea that made his exhibition more attractive. And is it bad that I totally loved the stereotypically great commercial photographs at the Save the Children photo gallery that was also in the building? I’m just a sucker for stunning photos with no pretention to changing the art world.

Even though Madrid has about three and a quarter million inhabitants, it seems small when I keep running into IES kids at places of interest. I found Valentina, Nikita, and Alex also checking out Círculo de Bellas Artes for research on their project on Gran Villa. We wandered around Gran Villa to Chueca, hiking five million miles in circles, so that Alex could take pictures. During our walk, we stumbled upon a doggie park. Two-dozen dogs of all breeds played as their owners looked on. One female dog got special attention and unwanted action from multiple excited male dogs around her. It was a shame that no SATC fan was there to get my Elizabeth gangbang joke.