431 These ideas travel in our exhibition of the XXV anniversary of the IVAM through key works from its Collection. From Dubuffet to Soulages, from Anthony Caro to Tàpies, from Saura to Millares, from Gottlieb to Appel or Ad Reinhardt. Passing through fundamental works of Pop from Warhol, Oldenburg, Rosenquist or Baldessari, or of the generation of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauchenberg or Richard Serra. And without forgetting more nearby and not less important names such as those of Chillida, Oteiza, Chirino and Alfaro, or Arroyo, Equipo Crónica, Miquel Navarro and many others that in the Collection of the IVAM are already key names. 5 Throughout the decades of the 80s and 90s, normalization had a growing and widespread acceleration. The 80s was a moment in which a progressive aestheticisation of culture prompted the loss of that utopian burden that fed the ideas of the previous decades and their critical ability. A strong and widespread individualism filled the symbolic spaces favouring a recess of critical ideas. It was a question of an important draft in the process of transformation of the modern culture that certainly turned out to be accompanied by an almost bloated growth of the art institution. The circuit of museums, galleries, critics and market... were accomplices in a story that had made art into a component of the system of symbolic exchange that characterized the post-industrial societies in a moment of maximum expansion. Jean Baudrillard analysed the retro-scene of this exchange, which again made evident the Baudelairean “tout devient marchandise”. That loss of horizon was claimed from speeches such as Walter Benjamin – you spoke of a ‘benjaminizacion’ of criticism – inspiring reflections such as October and other platforms of thought that analysed the implications of what Craig Owens called ‘the allegorical impulse’ of contemporary art. There has been talk of an ethical spin of the culture of the late 90s. Events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War generated the illusion that led to speak of ‹the end of the history›. All had been concluded and the time had come to celebrate the end of the trip, crowned by the triumph of liberal capitalism, such as the form and method of organization of the world. The art system does not endorse this easy and naive optimism, preferring to sit on the sideline and decide those strategies that would allow art to endorse the big problems of the world, understood in its most cosmopolitan dimension. Since then we can say that it is difficult to try to build the agenda of these problems without reference to the work of art. In all situations of emergency, the voices of the new conflicts were constituted. It should be enough to recall some events of those years. It brings to thought the Whitney Biennial of 1993, in Rites of passage of 1995 or in the Biennale di Venezia of 1996 which returned to consider from the critical border between Identità e Alterità, that since before was already one of the strategic axis of the art world. They are all moments that represent the ethical shift that art has made when thinking about its relation to culture and the world in which it is inscribed. Equally the rotation affects the orientation of the forms of criticism, now forced to leave the neutral space of the formalists analysis, derived from a linguistic tradition that denied the contexts, to register now in a perspective in which complexity of the cultural facts returned to dominate the reading and interpretation of the artwork. It will no longer think independently, but as a cultural fact, enrolled in the system of relations that crosses every culture. A debate that takes on a particular significance in recent years and that equally affects the ideas and strategies that should govern and guide the art institution. In this sense it is curious to observe how well the problem of identity has become one of the central issues of the contemporary debate. The different critical traditions that more effectively have collaborated to define the problem have made possible a type of analysis that covers both its historical perspective as its political implications. For some and others, it is clear that the alleged cultural identities are never something that come given, but are built collectively from the experience, memory, tradition, as well as a wide variety of social and political cultural practices. Obviously these processes are not autonomous. On the contrary, operating within a dynamic system of interdependencies, whose logic is not a stranger to the relations of domination that have governed the different cultures. Foucault and E. W. said, as well as Gayatri Spivak, King Chow or Homi Bhabha, among others, have shown the behaviour of the symbolic worlds in conflict. For these analysis it is necessary for us to affirm our dense features, our differences, both those lived as well as the imagined. The plural and always important reflection of the postcolonial perspective – as it has been developed by cultural comparativists and theorists – has opened new directions for interpretation in the light of the interdependencies are structurally fundamental in defining the different cultural worlds, that were previously considered autonomous. From this point of view, every culture must be understood as an incomplete production of meaning and value. In this way culture extends to create a symbolic textuality as Homi K. Bhabha writes in Nation and Narration, all symbolic order postulates. All these ideas are the basis for a possible starting point for rethinking the project and the art forms. One and another poke today when emerging from a new social body that emerges in contemporary societies by dragging along all the problems of the anthropological and political recognition. It is a new situation, of increasing complexity that presents us with the demand for an open debate to help raise the new geographies of the social issues. It touches art and the culture of the project draws the cartography of this new world, that is to say, to construct the maps and concepts that allow us to think contemporary societies in its overall complexity. But the work of art is oriented to the different fields of experience, intervenes on their symbolic dimensions, descends to the interstices of a experience that seeks a recognition, or adventure to explore the experience of the limit that always accompanies the human condition, its lights and shadows, its silence. It does not cease to be exciting to see those works from Robert Smithson to Richard Serra, Cristina Iglesias to Juan Muñoz, Tony Cragg to Cabrita Reis. They indicate the silence ar
Colección del IVAM. XXV Aniversario
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