Dora Garcia. Today I wrote nothing. Doesn´t matter

Dora Garcia. Today I wrote nothing. Doesn´t matter

From August 6 until September 6, 2020

The Origins of Totalitarism
Chapter Five: the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie
II: Power and the Bourgeoisie

“The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours. Property owners who do not consume but strive to enlarge their holdings continually find one very inconvenient limitation: the unfortunate fact that men must die. (…) The finiteness of personal life is as serious a challenge to property as the foundation of society, as the limits of the globe are a challenge to expansion as the foundation of the body politic.”

The sentence I use as a title is an entry in the diary of Daniil Kharms, a Russian poet of tragic and short life who in January 9, 1937, wrote these two short sentences in his blue notebook. By the time he wrote it he was not allowed to publish anymore, having been labeled as anti-Soviet. Daniil was never of his time, as he said: “my philosophy is deeply hostile to the present”. He was, however, as most artists, deeply aware of his duties as a writer, and when the act or performance of writing depended only on his will, he would write whatever the circumstances, having a sense of almost religious responsibility for words. But when this performance was forbidden by the authorities, and it was clear to him he could not do anything against it, he would simply relax and do nothing:

“I was most happy when pen and paper were taken from me and I was forbidden from doing anything. I had no anxiety about doing nothing by my own fault, my conscience was clear, and I was happy. This was when I was in prison.”

Although the intensity of my life has been nowhere near the intensity of Daniel Kharms’, I was happy when the confinement decreed by the Spanish government on Saturday 14 March halted my endless traveling between Barcelona (my family) Oslo and Geneva (my teaching) Madrid, Paris, Frankfurt (my art making). I was exhausted. For ten years I have had the equivalent of a 100% teaching job, next to an equally full-time career as an artist and author. I couldn’t renounce to any of the two. My teaching job provided for my family with the regularity needed, and it gave me the freedom to produce as an artist whatever I wanted, without worrying about market considerations – or something like that. My artistic production … my artistic production was one of a kind. I haven’t had a studio for twenty years, simply because the time I could spend in it was not enough to justify the rent I had to pay for it. Making a virtue of necessity , my work changed so as not to need a studio, creating a network of collaborations (collaborations as equals: I never could afford an assistant – and perhaps I have something against the very idea of an assistant) that would keep production going, very much like film or theater companies function. These two lives running parallel for ten years had reached a critical point and in the last year I started to suffer seriously from insomnia and then panic attacks.

Then, confinement “took pen and paper from me, and I had no anxiety about doing nothing.” Smiling and happy after sleeping one week-long, I wrote with Daniil Kharms: “Today I wrote nothing. Doesn’t matter”. Except of course that very statement means that you have written something, nevertheless.

My difficult relationship with production was, as it was the case with Kharms, always paradoxical: I have regularly produced a lot of text, books, films, performances, exhibitions. But, also, I have had a life-long fascination for non-productive artists. Artists who refused to comply with the demands and expectations that have been imposed upon artists, no discussion possible, already in the art schools we went to, and the post graduate schools we went to, and the artistic residences we went to. It was said that artists needed a website and had to send to the world constant updates about their activities, in the form of newsletters (90’s) or social media presence (late 00s). The production competitiveness was and is brutal. Lack of presence meant failure. Time off was advised against, as it was difficult to come back.

One of the high points in my career was when I represented Spain in the Venice Biennial with the project “The Inadequate” at the Spanish pavilion in 2011, 45th Venice Biennial. It was also the first time I asserted with stubbornness my refusal to comply with expectations (while complying with a lot of expectations at the same time). My name was nowhere mentioned in the pavilion, the work presented was a six-month-long performance that had been shaped by a group of people and performed by an even bigger group of people, there were no explanatory text on the walls, in fact there was absolutely nothing on the walls, and nothing was recorded, translated, or sound – amplified. If you wanted to see it you had to listen carefully, stay long in the pavilion, and do an effort to understand the language. One of the performances presented on site was called “The artists without works: a guided tour around nothing”. This was a monologue, that opened as follows:

“You have come here hoping for what most artists are ready to give you, a generous flow of artworks being displayed in front of your eyes. I’d like to tell you about this artist that will let you go empty-handed and empty-eyed.

The artist without works: a guided tour around nothing is exactly what the title says it is: a guided tour of the works of an artist who doesn’t produce any. This artist’s rejection of the game’s most fundamental rule—which is to show something—is an attempt to get beyond Francis Picabia’s evil, atrocious, and supposedly exhaustive alternative: “Artists can be divided into two categories: the failed, and the unknown.”

There I was in the Spanish pavilion, automatically classifying myself as a failed artist. And I felt undoubtedly a great joy in that, placing myself outside of the hyperventilating self-promotion machine, proudly disappointing, being inadequate.

I was however enjoying a double privilege. One was a tongue-in-cheek privilege: as a woman artist, and in the words of the Guerrilla Girls, I never had to suffer the embarrassment of being called a genius. I was never expected to be front row – as for instance, Santiago Sierra was expected – because I was a woman. Female artists represent just 2 percent of the market, whatever that exactly means. So, I could do crazy because no one was making any real money off me, anyway.

But the second privilege was a more serious one, and it made me suffer moderately: I could refuse, because I had been offered a position. In the words of the author Andrea Valdés: “to enjoy refusal, one has to display privilege first”. It is true as Andrea Valdés says, that this privilege is most of the time male, but in my case, I had a privilege, being there. And there was a certain paradox in declaring oneself inadequate while being the national representation in the Biennale. I was embarrassed to be where I was and I thought I had to compensate for it, to make up for it.

I was at the center of a network of labour, being responsible, in this production network that substituted an artist’ atelier, for a group of people. I had the responsibility to administer public money (the pavilion’s budget) among a group of professionals (the network of collaborators) and the economic compensation was equal, for me and for them. This was the only arrangement I could live with.

Many years later, you may have heard about it, an even greater conflict appeared when I was one of the invited artists to the Aichi Triennale, 2019. I was presenting a performance, The Romeos, which engaged ten performers, contracted by the Foundation to perform daily. Then there was a censorship problem, the work of a group of Korean artists was removed because it portrayed the historically proven mass kidnapping and rape of Korean women by the Japanese army in WWII. Immediately, the Triennale artists signed a letter in solidarity with the censored artist, condemning censorship. But a more radical position was taken by some, to remove the work from the exhibition, in solidarity. But as usual, things were complex. For what matters here, my personal complexity was: I could not, like other artists did, just close the room were my work was shown. Removing my work meant to cancel from one day to the next the work contract of ten workers. It was a heavy pressure, which today I understand as part of the untenable structures of the global art world “grand” exhibitions. The AT foundation was probably honest about wanting to put up a politically radical exhibition, including the “Statue of Peace” work. They clearly underestimated the political climate in Japan – including the prime minister, the right denies this episode of massive rape ever happened. The AT foundation was confronted with a double bind: keep the exhibition open and face death threats, close it and meet accusations of censorship. It was relatively easy – I believe – for the international type of political artist to close their exhibition room. They simply had to ask the staff – the ones who were suffering violence every single day – to do it for them; by then they were far from the troubled site. The choice was not so simple if you were engaged with the local community and if you were working almost daily with people from Nagoya – to cancel your work meant to cancel a collaboration that was important for them both economically and politically.

Today after the pandemic experience, I believe such a situation would have been impossible if the AT international exhibition had been made with artists who were able to spend a considerable amount of time in place to produce their work, and who engaged in a deep manner with the local structures. Which is an exhibition model that does not adjust to cultural tourism. If that had been the case, we the artists would have known what was at stake. We could have contested the extremely hierarchical, male-dominated AT pyramid, where the ones who had to daily suffer verbal – and sometimes physical – violence or renounce their job were mostly highly educated female assistant curators. We could have calculated, refined, made more precise the terminology, the mediation, the communication. We could have built moral and dialectical barricades. But the way the exhibition was built – exactly the same as every other spectacular international exhibition – the artists had to follow a hit-and-run pattern: present your politically engaged work, if there is time give a talk for a very small number of people, then take the plane to your far-away next destination, as blissfully ignorant (or knowledgeable) as before of the context where your work had been presented.

Marco Baravalle has published a wonderful article in The Institute of Radical Imagination (https://instituteofradicalimagination.org/), where he says: ” (When), if not now, should we try to abandon the paradigm of growth attached to the neoliberal concept of the event? ”

The confinement put a brutal spoke in the wheels of the neoliberal exhibition machine. All exhibitions were postponed or cancelled, there were and there are some awkward attempts to breathe life into the corpse by means of a multitude of online events. But the machine did stop. However, an uncritical celebration of this forced pause is similar to celebrating the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions because of the confinement. We know those emissions will come back dirtier and larger than before – in fact, they can hardly wait, everyday they are pushing for the “back to normal”.

The change we need will not be brought by the virus, we have to do it ourselves, we have to change the paradigm of art production and distribution holding to this “window of opportunity”. Always very much aware that this change of paradigm cannot function unless it is integrated in a wide-ranging change of paradigm.

Baravalle says:

“The revolution of art institutions could only be initiated by, and will only march parallel to, a much wider revolution. (…) A revolution able to make significant steps forward on different yet interconnected grounds: the achievement of a universal basic income and new housing rights; a serious commitment on climate justice towards the end of extractivism; the reconstruction of a democratic health-care system damaged by decades of privatizations; the end of gender, race, class and species asymmetries; all elements that structure and permeate the current social, financial and political order.”

How will this new paradigm be? Perhaps we can start discussion on that point. Baravalle gives a few suggestions:

“The idea … intends to shift attention from “the showing” to “the inhabiting” allowing a new space-time dimension for projects that want to engage with the context and that until now too often result in paternalistic and unattended social counseling. (…) This model, ideally, could also generate a labor force less obsessed by the frenetic deadline-fever of the neoliberal event – by its nature concentrated on the vernissage and the finissage”

The same way as our uninterrupted intellectual activity is only made possible because of an army of less privileged people/ precarious workers cleaning our houses and cooking our meals, we must understand that our archipelagos of abstract and flexible artistic labor, which are used as models for the ideal neoliberal free-lance worker, are possible because they are “surrounded by an ocean of exploitation”.

We must not deconfine until the revolution is well under way, the revolution of everyone and of everything.

Born in 1965 in Valladolid (Spain). Lives and works in Barcelona (Spain).

doragarcia.net

Dora García uses the exhibition space as platform to investigate the relationship between the visitor, the artwork, and place. To this end the artist often draws on interactivity and performance. She represented Spain at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011.

Dora Garcia’s works have been exhibited in Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), Fondation d’Entreprise Hermes (Brussels), Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (Toronto), Fonderie Darling - Centre d’arts visuels (Montreal), Punkt Ø (Moss), Centre d’Arts Visuels (Montréal), FRAC Ile-de-France (Paris), Tate Modern (London), MNAM - Centre Georges-Pompidou (Paris), MUDAM (Luxembourg), SMAK (Gent), MUSAC - Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, MACBA - Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Index Contemporary Art Foundation (Stokholm), Fundació La Caixa (Barcelona), Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (Madrid), Tel Aviv Museum (Israel), MAC’s - Musée des Arts Contemporains (Bossu), MOCAK (Krakow), Fondation d’entreprise Ricard (Paris), Villa Arson (Nice), Henry art Foundation (Seattle)...

Dora García participed at the 54th, 55th, 56th Venice Biennale (Italy), (d)OCUMENTA 13 (Kassel), 2nd Athens Biennale (Greece), Lyon Biennale (France), 29th São Paulo Biennial (Brazil), 16th Biennale of Sydney (Autralia), 10th Lyon Biennial Gwangju Biennial (Korea) and more.

Her work is part of prestigious collections as Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), San Francisco MoMA, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (Sevilla), Coca-Cola Foundation Collection (Madrid), CNAP - National Center for Plastics Arts (Paris), La Caixa Contemporary Art Collection (Barcelona), Fundación ARCO (Spain), De Bruyn Collection (Rótterdam), Flannan Browne Collection (UK), FRAC: Bourgogne / Franche-Comté / Ile-de-France Le Plateau / Languedoc-Rousillon / Lorraine, Henry Art Foundation (Seattle), Kadist Foundation (Paris/San Francisco), MACBA - Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, MUSAC - Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Artium, Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo de Vitoria-Gasteiz (Araba), Patio Herreriano - Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Español (Valladolid)...

Michel Rein Paris/Brussels represents Dora García since 2004 and has dedicated to her 7 solo exhibitions (2005, 2007, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2017).