by Jon Lackman | 12 November 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Contemporary, Museums
At the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Jorge Luis Marzo and Tere Badia have put together an exhibition and catalogue titled “THE BAROQUE (D)EF(F)ECT: Politics of the Hispanic Image,” a deconstruction of the words “Baroque” and “Hispanic” and their implication that there is a “homogeneous framework shared by Spain and Latin America”:
[W]ho built this myth and what strategies have been generated to keep it going down through the centuries, through many different regimes, ideologies and governments? This exhibition … is a meticulous examination of the relation between the Hispanic myth and its principal survival strategy: the baroque … The show [examines] these questions from the viewpoint of contemporary creation, one of the principal heirs to this myth-making narrative. Using cinema, videos, documentaries, animation and installations, the exhibition presents visitors with some alternatives in the debate on the relations between art and power in societies submerged in conflicts of historical memory. The show is the product of six years of research in Spain, Mexico, Peru and Chile, countries of great cultural and socio-political diversity and complexity that have helped by their example to dilute the myth of Hispanic homogenization.
Exhibits address the Prado’s 1990 exhibition of the painter Diego Velázquez; “the great diversity of opinions found in Spain and Latin America surrounding themes such as education, Spanish diplomacy, the tourist market and the myths of religion, language and festival”; the Museo del Pueblo, “an initiative dating from 1931-1936 … to familiarize the people with the works of the great painters in the form of a travelling exhibition”; and “images of the Euro 2008 [soccer] final between Germany and Spain, and reactions in the press all over the country, a literary storm of patriotism and progress once the “curse” of the quarter-finals was a thing of the past.”
CCCB director Josep Ramoneda writes in his catalogue preface (pdf):
[T]he success of the baroque lies in its capacity to penetrate the different strata of the cultures of the conquered America, to create a degree of complicity around it that has made credible the idea of an art for everyone: colonisers and colonised. It could be said that the baroque was an artistic ideology of the State that had the good fortune to be recycled by the people who had been colonized and who made it their own, thereby becoming a shared aesthetic space, above and beyond dysfunctions and different viewpoints …
Of course, the curators’ task involved dealing with an inevitable question: why have we always avoided making a critical reassessment of this issue? The baroque has enabled us to keep certain political myths alive, myths that all parties considered beneficial. It has even resulted in erroneous interpretations that have made the popular traditions of conquered countries the driving force behind this style.
In other news, Getty Publications has issued a translation of Riegl’s lectures on The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome, together with original essays by Alina Payne, Arnold Witte, and Andrew Hopkins.