Tits and Arse, Clit. Wank Shit. And Bugger Me if I know what’s going on.
In days gone by I would often let rip a tirade of expletives such as this. But I like to think I’ve mellowed a little now. And so, on an evening when my art radar showed nothing much happening, and it turned out not just to be an orgy of scatalogical and eschatological proportions, but the fount of increasing obsecenities.
The evening started serenely enough with Joan Artigas Planas’ show at El Quatre, “Volatilis”. With more than sixty sculptures there was a sense of impending rapture. The female form is no secret to art, and here the artist has created a single character with a slightly pointed cranium, or possibly hair piled up in a twist. This is Nietzsche’s “Superwoman”. I felt a bit over stimulated, and nearly missed some innovative works. Most of the women are in artly predictable poses; sleeping, dancing, stretching. But the key works are those where the artist has given the women walls. Walls to push against, walls to climb over, walls to hang from. The energy expended is palpable, the effort to overcome, realised perfectly. I felt a real affinity with the power of these women’s bodies, their buttocks and legs energetically propelling them against their barriers. These are women who are fighting to overcome their plight, and they look to me as if they are going to succeed very soon. This is feminist art at its most decorative.
Sadly I had to fly, as time was pressing, and Galeria Joan Prats was showing “Nidal” by Victoria Civera. I zipped past the smaller paintings and went straight to the large back room, knowing that this is where you find the good stuff. And in a sense I was not disappointed. In the centre of the room was “Aviador Sibila”, with what I first took to be a cock, but which turned out to be a rather large clitoris. I guess. It was difficult to tell exactly what it was supposed to represent, especially as it was paired with an oversize knotted dog chew. In my own work I have a conceptual series “One thing has nothing to do with the other.” As you might suspect, the idea is to put together two pieces of sculpture or painting that have nothing in common. As you might realise, this is an impossibility. I am either too intelligent, or too creative to have succeeded in creating any actual work. The interconnectedness of everything. “Nidal” appears to be an attempt at this, with little islands of sculptures; maybe two bricks and some straw (“Three little pigs”, anyone?) or two pieces of white perspex held together by a wooden peg (tentative, but “Triangles”, I’m afraid). So while there might be a game, for a little while, ultimately it’s as satisfying as playing Twister. With your clothes on.
If you’re friendless, one solution could be to visit the work of Toni Molins at Mutuo Galería. A host of blow up sex dolls angelically floating above you could take away your solitude for a moment, but the real work is a few paintings of shit and wank. High-brow shit and wank, ‘cos there are paintings of Mahler and The Incarnation. With some jizz or poo. But shit is shit, and wank is wank. And art is art. Of course I’ll defend to the death Molins’ right to make the work, but that shouldn’t be taken as licence to get the paint out. For me the only saving grace was that you could snap up a photoshopped print for only €10. You wouldn’t, but at least you could. If only more artists created work that was priced accessibly.
So my sojourn took me on to Arts Santa Monica, and a collaborative, interactive, hyper-spaced, real time, art and storytelling experience, “Ultraorbism”. From the fucund brain of Marcel.lí Antúnez Roca, and with the help of a team of 30 or more technicians, dancers, videographers and sundry others, the spectacular was created via a live video link to the University of Falmouth, UK. With “Ultraorbism” the story unfolded, literally, from a series of pre-created paintings which became animated through means of digital projection and live painting, with storytelling in Catalan, and a translation into English direct from Falmouth. Monsters and planets and paint and movement intertwined with animations and scowling and cetaceans and a detachable penis. All the better to impregnate the creature’s own vagina. The story seemed to be about the artist’s fantastical and cosmological journey to the end of time. I had no real idea what was going on, but it certainly provided a happy ending to release my mounting frustration.
