Antoni Muntadas
Stadia / Furniture / Audience, 1990
Folder of 12 Cibachrome prints and cover, 100 x 80 cm
The society of the spectacle has developed increasingly elaborate customer-loyalty strategies and has managed to take root and appear attractive, even within the cracks existing in its own system. The resources it shows are sophisticated and are able to show something and its opposite just as naturally as consumption itself, justifying nearly any attitude and purpose. The society of the spectacle is that of information in liquid times, when generation of information is not limited to those who have designed their informational channels and have maintained and broadened them with their media companies, which focus more on running a business than providing information. Today, information is similarly and especially a ceaseless process of production and consumption of news as well as true and false notifications that are contrasted or launched like trial balloons, giving rise to the difficulty of discerning between banal opinions and prepared information and, therefore, of assuming an appropriate frame of mind. Politics are based on murky and contradictory strategies that are one-sided and far removed from the pursuit of common good. This is why neoliberal attitudes are defended with social-democratic reasoning, for example, or far-right ideologies emerge in democratic societies that allow them to exist precisely as examples of plurality. Political art is a useful tool for analysis and criticism of societal and political realities of contemporary societies, and it must make use of transversal strategies that are able to reveal such attitudes.
Antoni Muntadas (Barcelona, Spain, 1942) is among the artists who have best managed to interpret the contradictions inherent to the system and to respond with aesthetic and graphic resources, using to a great extent public spaces to question matters of public debate. To this end, he has made use of media such as video, design and some advertising resources such as hoardings or lighted signs that have a direct bearing on the public’s consumerist gaze and enhance their desires in order to bring on debates on the critical function of those who see them. Insofar as visual language, in art, the gaze completes a dual function as producer and consumer. Those who produce encoded works in visual terms construct a discourse of images; a collection of images that must be decoded (read) by those who observe the said works.
This interchange is the essence of the communicative aspect of art, and Muntadas influences, analyses and asks questions within its nuances, which become more complex as a society becomes more complex. The series Stadia / Furniture / Audience consists of 12 photographic compositions, and another created with text, like a concept cloud, that serves as a model or cover. Individually, the 12 compositions are identically structured: three images vertically aligned in the centre of the page, each corresponding to one of the three concepts indicated in the title. The photographs at the top show different models of stadia: from Roman coliseums that look like monumental ruins, to modern-day stadia for football, baseball or rugby that are empty or filled with spectators. The central image is smaller and reflects the concept of properties, in a broad sense of the word. From the columns or statues that accompany this architecture designed for competitive activities, to signals, hoardings, the Nazi affiliation of the competitors, chairs or the desired championship trophy, these elements are charged with the intrinsic ideology that accompanies sporting events; a kind of "continuation of the war with other media". The image at the bottom is a reference to the audience; to the typically massive attendance of the public at such events, where the overriding concept is that of the crowd rather than the individual.
Among other honours, Antoni Muntadas has received the 2005 National Award for Plastic Arts and the 2009 Velázquez Award for Plastic Arts. In addition. a large number of his works and installations are part of prestigious private and public collections and have been shown in the most important art museums and centres worldwide. His critical gaze, of a globalised conception, owes much to his having been established as an artist in New York since 1971 and to his equally decisive teaching activity, which includes over 35 years of experience as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his involvement at the Iuav University of Venice. He created the concept of time specific, which includes the variable of duration of the specific interventions (site specific) located in public spaces.
References
Muntadas:trabajos recientes, IVAM Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia, 1992.

On Translation: I Giardini, Dirección General de Relaciones Culturales y Científicas, Madrid, 2005.
Entre/Between, ACTAR, Barcelona / Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2011.
Á. de los Ángeles