Places categories: IVAM Centre Julio González

“Many of the borrowed pieces here might perhaps point in the direction of something missing, something we’re lacking – and I refer to more than just the IVAM’s Collection. A collection in many ways represents the conscious and unconscious realm of the community it is built from. Music, for instance, plays an important part in this exhibition, as in the superb musical scores by František Zelenka, or a reading of the collection and its treasures by El Niño de Elche, from the Intonarumori by Luigi Russolo to Symphony No. 1 by Glenn Branca. And is trap pop, or a commodity? Let us not call it “urban art”, a suspect category if ever one existed. But a whole community is speaking through trap. The evidence is there in the Nueve, Panamá video by Brooke Alfaro. Yet there are still people who have no voice, voices still silent. A key piece in the exhibition is the borrowed film <…-OhPERA-MUET-…>, [à la date du 23 setembre 2016], by Alejandra Riera, a film on the grand narratives of history and what is buried under its monuments, a film by those who speak from below, from the ruins. popular shows the murmurings and the silent, those who have no voice. Although that might be too loud a claim to make. We might say they appear, disappear and reappear. Perhaps these examples can give some indication of the workings of this research and how we’ve approached this exhibition”.

Pedro G. Romero

The songs (and one)

This magnificent collection of scores by Jaroslav Ježek, illustrated by the architect František Zelenka, was an opening for us to present, in some way, songs as one of the privileged spaces for the relation and emergence of the popular. Both were Jewish artists linked to the Czech avant garde; Zelenka was murdered at Auschwitz in 1945, while Ježek had died two years earlier of illness in exile in New York. The particularity of this repertoire, linked to the explosion of vernacular forms of music as a result of colonial movements in the 1920s, is exception in this respect. The popular emerges just at the point where displaced political representations fold that have based their success or symbolic potency on their necessarily subaltern position. This is the era of the slate record, and the birth of the global industrial culture later to be known as pop, or popular music.

• Bugatti Step – Dajos Béla Orchestra
• Don Juan (waltz) – Osvobozené divadlo
• Don Parola & Don Pandero (paso doble) – Jiří Voskovec, Jan Werich
• Europa Volá (rumba fox)  – Jiří Voskovec, Jan Werich
• Europa volá (rumba) – Jiří Voskovec, Jan Werich
• Ezop a Brabenec (foxtrot) – Jiří Voskovec, Jan Werich
• Ježek Teď ještě ne! (foxtrot) – Miloš Štěpař
• Kleopatra (tango) – Osvobozené divadlo, Melody Boys
• Mercedes (tango) – Karel Hruška
• Prazska Java – Jiří Voskovec, Jan Werich
• Prodám Srdce (parodie) – Jiří Voskovec, Jan Werich
• Prodám Srdce (tango) – Jiří Voskovec, Jan Werich
• Skafandr (fox) – Jiří Voskovec, Jan Werich
• Slovník lásky (waltz) – Vladimír Konůpka
• Zivot je jen náhoda – Osvobozeného divadla (Teatro liberado), Karel Ančerl, M. Schlesingerová, Jožka Srbová

The songs (and two)

The simplistic division between visual and musical culture has a strongly theological background to it. Reducing sound to abstract, spiritual or ritual categories without recognising it as symbolic representation, imagination and material figuration is above all the result of the totalitarian Enlightenment ordering of the world. What actually exists are continuities and relationships. Between poiesis (way of making), esthesis (way of seeing) and phonesis (way of speaking), there is always circulation. More than a specific cultural product, the popular is a result of circulation which runs through different means that can also multiply. The relationships between the writings, sounds and images selected here are based on that principle. There are avant-garde pieces, academic music, products of the cultural industry, studio experiments and street experiences, and the possibility of the popular runs through all of them.

• Bonet de San Pedro y los 7 de Palma Raska-Yú, 1943
• Charlie Haden Dream Keeper, Montreal Jazz Festival, 1990
• Dara BIRNBAUM, New Music Shorts, 1981 Color, sonido, 5’41’’
• E.L.T. Mesens (compositor) Drie composities voor Klavier, ca. 1920-1923
• Franciszka y Stefan Themerson (dirección), Karol Szymanowski (compositor) Orquesta conducida por Ronald Biggs. Sophie Wyss (soprano). Extracto de The Eye and The Ear, 1945
• Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov (compositor) Pastorale, compuesta ca. inicios SXX. Registro de 2011
• Heitor Villa-Lobos (compositor) / Jan Sommer (intèrpret) Distribuição de flores, 1932 
• José Padilla (compositor) / Charanga a to pastilla (intèrpret) Valencia (pasodoble)
• Julián Carrillo (compositor) / Ensembre neuverBand, Gare du Nord Basel, 2017 (intèrpret) Preludio a Colon, 1925
• Julio Bustamante Senyoreta X
• Kurt Schwitters Ursonate, 1932
• Los incansables de Torreblanca Tengo un tractor amarillo, 1998
• Luigi Russolo / Antonio Russolo (compositor) Serenata per intonarumori e strumenti, Registre de 1924
• Marcel Duchamp La Mariée mise à nu par ses Célibataires, même, 1934 Versió per a pianola de Petr Kotik
• Pascal Comelade feat. PJ Harvey Love Too Soon, 1998

The songs (and three)

This collection of songs by Niño de Elche with the collaboration of Xisco Rojo travels the – often blurred – limits between sound, music and the popular in song. Agustín García Calvo said that the popular qualities of a song could be measured in how likely you are to hum it in the shower. Whether through electronic dance music, spoken word, Latin diasporan music or flamenco, Niño de Elche has tried to connect some of the pieces in the IVAM collection, some of its images, with possible ways of being sung. Or hummed in the shower: be it a phrase by Juan Hidalgo or the petenera repeated by the Mexican people portrayed by Paul Strand, a fandango dedicated to Helios Gómez or the musical imprint of VALIE EXPORT’s tattoo on Rosalía. An image is also a song.

• Corderet de Déu – Niño de Elche
• Coro Brut – Niño de Elche
• El Correo de Euclides – Niño de Elche
• El Luchador – Niño de Elche feat Pablo Cáceres
• El Piano – Niño de Elche
• Hombre / Mujer / Mano – Niño de Elche
• Klein Grosz Mappe – Niño de Elche
• La Gent – Niño de Elche
• Los 10 Mandamientos – Niño de Elche feat Eric Jiménez
• No Sex Popular Vam 2023 – Niño de Elche feat Ylia
• Peteneras de Paul Strand – Niño de Elche
• Sangoma – Niño de Elche feat Wekaforé
• Valie Export – Niño de Elche
• Ven, Miguel – Niño de Elche
• ¡Viva Octubre! – Niño de Elche feat Diego de Morón

There is a quality in the work of Per Kirkeby (Copenhagen, 1938–2018), which is a result of his diverse, modern art education. Kirkeby studied Geology at the University of Copenhagen, but later enrolled at the Ex-School (Experimental Art School), Copenhagen, where he acquired a broad range of artistic knowledge in various disciplines including painting, graphic design, film and performance. Seen in perspective, his work is a compendium of these formal concerns, as well as others such as the essay and other forms of writing; architecture and sculpture.

While Kirkeby’s work can easily be situated within Danish art as a whole, for instance in the 1984 exhibition Uit Het Noorden (From the North), which grouped him together with Munch and Jorn, his work tends to be more closely associated with that of German artists. However, he also cannot be neatly fitted into the dialectical opposition between the formal practices of Richter or Baselitz and the more ideologically based work of Beuys or Polke. This variety of works and styles was well-represented in the exhibition at the IVAM Centre del Carme.

In another facet, during the transformation of the Turia into the city park it is today Kirkeby installed the architectural sculpture Valéncia (1989) in a site along the riverbed. Built with handmade bricks, the piece pays tribute to the city’s Roman and Arabic history. This and similar works since 1972 have become the Danish artist’s most representative pieces throughout the world. The maintenance of this magnificent work, which was partly constrained and hidden after the building of the Pont de les Arts, has been a complex affair. Its reconstruction and re-siting to the Parc Central, where the IVAM’s new museum building is to be situated, will give the piece a second, more visible life and better possibilities of conservation.

Seldom has an exhibition so clearly defined a museum programme as Spiritual America did at the IVAM Centre del Carme. The architecture of this part of the museum is highly representative and pushes younger or mid-career artists to make specific installations; whereas the Centre Julio González exhibits art histories in their most representative tendencies and names. With a catalogue conceived by the artist as an art piece in itself, Richard Prince (Panama Canal Zone, 1949) began what was known as the Col·lecció Centre del Carme series of publications. Many of these, as well as some of the posters in the series, (in this case also designed by Prince) became cult publications.

The work of Richard Prince is known for his appropriation of images from the mass media (television advertisements, films, magazines and other sources), for conversion into autonomous art works in which opposing elements are paired. The idea of the autonomous art work is disputed, with some seeing art as an ideological instrument and others as a thing in itself, in isolation, with its own rules of communication. Whichever way we see it, Prince considers that any situation can give rise to an image that can then become an artwork susceptible to interpretation.

The principle content of this exhibition was a series of photographs ‘lifted’ from Marlboro cowboy adverts, and the re-use of comic strips from magazines, particularly the New Yorker. In answer to critiques of his work claiming that he had “stolen” images from other photographers or graphic designers, Prince has always preferred to describe his work as “piracy”. Piracy here is the same thing that multinational brands do when they appropriate identities and principles – such as freedom – to encourage consumption of their products. Spiritual America confirms the IVAM’s support of pluralistic, critical, contemporary pop art.

The issue of representation is an intrinsic part of any discussion on the function of art. In order to certify a tendency we need a view of the whole, a collective view of what comprises a particular context. This exhibition was given the title of what was first a famous television programme and then a well-known book by the writer John Berger. Ways of Seeing was, for its curators, a “subjective, partial view revolving around the last ten years of painting in the Valencian region; (…) which does not intend to exhibit a ‘school’ (sic) or a generation, and certainly not of a ‘Valencian’ manner of seeing or understanding art”. It was a “passionate commitment to nine artists whose work extends far beyond the geographical borders they happen to have lived in”.

This (to some extent) generational commitment may be of great help in understanding some of the later movements relating to the importance or unimportance of art as a driving force for transformation, or simply as a mere historical record. It also invites us to notice the partisan use of art in changing cultural politics. The varied trajectories of the artists, some of which focus on the university, on activism or performative practices, some of which follow a more canonical approach, can now be seen as an explicit, well-documented piece of a period in Spanish and Valencian art history.

The first exhibition at the IVAM Centre del Carme fulfilled its purpose of displaying the work of young, internationally-known artists who at that moment were providing new perspectives on contemporary art. While emphasis was given to artists who made specific interventions in the splendid architecture of the Ferreres and Goerlich museum rooms, the inclusion of José María Sicilia (Madrid, 1954) focused discussion on painting of an abstract, expressionist leaning whose makers, however, avoided defining it as such, preferring to escape hackneyed labels.

In Sicilia’s paintings from 1987 and 1988, we see a search for a fertile dialogue between form and background, but also between the painting and the canvas, with the latter understood as a container and the former the content; and also an attempt to break away from the aforementioned formalistic conceptions. Outlines of plantlike figures, particularly flowers, appear in fusion with the background but marking out an organic terrain that contrasts with geometric figures. The duality between painting and canvas, that is, between the painted matter integrated as an abyss into the support, is a reflection of the duality between the organic and geometric, the solid or opaque and the transparent or veiled.

Sicilia studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, and moved to Paris in 1980, where he shared his artistic exploration and discoveries with the artist Miguel Ángel Campano (Madrid, 1948 – Cercedilla, 2018). He was awarded the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas (National Plastic Arts Prize) in 1989.

Walker Evans (Saint Louis, Missouri, US, 1903 – New Haven, Connecticut, US, 1975) wanted to be a writer, then became a press photographer and reputed professor as well as a reporter. His photographs have become part of the History of art in their own right; his projects and photobooks can without doubt be said to have marked the development of photography over the following decades, and some of his images have become icons of the modern age. His work for the Farm Security Administration photographic project, supported by the government of Franklin D. Roosevelt and coordinated by Roy Stryker, brought together a group of outstanding photographers whose ranks include Dorothea Lange, Ben Shann, Louise Rosskam and Jack Delano.

Havana 1933 brings together Evan’s photographic illustrations for The Crime of Cuba, a book by the politically committed writer Carleton Beals, made over a period of three weeks in spring 1933, when the island was being governed by Gerardo Machado. Machado’s government, which ended the same year, had turned into a bloody dictatorship. The scenes in this series show ordinary people like peasant farmers, prostitutes, beggars and the unemployed, but also the Cuban elite in Evans’ characteristic compositions: different types of architecture, urban signposting, frontal views and a certain distancing, which is not cold but reveals Evans as a great observer and newcomer to Cuban reality.

This exhibition was the first to bring together all of the photographs in the Havana series, practically unseen until then. It underscored Evans’ importance in later photographic history. The American photographer can unmistakeably be situated as a key figure in the transition between what we know as documentary photography and photography as an artistic or “plastic” discipline as defined by Dominique Baqué.

Some exhibitions pursue aims that go beyond the basic necessity of showing a collection of works by the same artist. For certain artists, a particular city can mean much more than a birthplace or one to live and work in. For Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (Valencia, 1863 – Madrid, 1923), Valencia was a trove of symbolic and emotional properties. Similarly, the city (and many of its inhabitants) equate the painter’s gaze with something resembling a collective identity. Technical and formal characteristics of Sorolla’s paintings such as projected light, the clarity reflected in his subjects’ bodies, fabric and objects, the depiction of an evocative Mediterranean atmosphere, the artist’s genuine capacity to freeze a moment in time, with every movement occurring at once, are aspects that have come to be fused with the city and the education of the painter’s gaze.

While the chronological history of the IVAM began with Ignacio Pinazo, who was fourteen years older than Sorolla, localising the museum’s perspective as a means to propose its own narrative of universal art history with Valencia situated on the international map, the exhibition of Sorolla’s work positioned the IVAM in its own city. It was visited by thousands of viewers, and it was an introduction to a gradual process of education on modern and contemporary art. The wide range of styles and semantic plurality in art which the IVAM sought to incorporate in its early years marked out a new, successful path.