Curated and organised by: Jorge Blasco Gallardo, Koré Escobar Zamora y Raquel Álvarez Rodríguez.
In collaboration with: Javier Ayarza, Miquel Cid, Rufo Criado, Eva González, María Jesús de la Puente, Rafael Lamata, Alejandro Martínez Parra, Jesús Max, Pepe Ortega, Clemente Rodero, Néstor Sanmiguel, Ramón Valladolid, Julián Valle.
Based on the documents ceded by the group A UA CRAG to the Spanish
autonomous community of Castilla y Leon, and deposited at the region’s Contemporary Art Museum (MUSAC), the team responsible for staging the exhibition has worked on the presentation of art practices using what always remains in their wake -including the artworks themselves, and has done so by exploring the forever complex relationships between archive and exhibition.
Furthermore, the team has sought to narrate one of the possible threads of this artistic group, based on what the documents themselves have to reveal, and without alluding to what the literature has already told us about them.
Accordingly, a selection has been made of batches of documents, without considering their origin within the archive’s classification table –albeit always leaving a trail back to their source within it- and then these documentary samples have been used to create the following array of categories:
– document-tension
The manner of perceiving art over the past two centuries in the guise of markets, galleries, museums, collections, etc., has been used to bring to the table the issue of the value of everything that surrounds an artwork, but which is not part of the piece itself, yet without which it would not and could not exist.
This long-standing issue of the document often appears whenever a decision has to be made as to whether it should be part of the collection or archive, and even more so in the case of works whose medium is performance or any other ephemeral variation that vanishes as soon as it is created.
These manifestations leave behind photos, invoices, production guidelines, scripts, sketches, etc., and sometimes even an actual part of the work itself.
This category has been used to select documentary samples representing the tension or stress that the aforementioned agents exert upon them; a tension that fully coincides with the problematic issue of defining the boundaries of art practice today, whereby it generates piles of documents with a diversity of usages: being directly converted into museum pieces, or consigned to a secondary role as fetishist items of huge monetary value, or simply given an administrative treatment, as they are, indeed, essential for this purpose.
– document-territory
This category has involved the selection of batches of documents that unveil the tools used by the group of artists to address the polysemic reality of territory.
Although the concept is admittedly complex, priority has been given to its status of “concept-tool” over and above a reflection on the term that lends its name to the category. In other words, the group’s attention to places outside the country, the explorations of working spaces, capturing in the photographic image whatever is worth remembering; in short, items depicting that «something» which appears to claim the word territory for itself, etc.
– document-the mundane
Despite being considered purely mundane documents or everyday paperwork, art in the nineties gave aesthetic value to such automatism. Nevertheless, such aestheticism would not have been possible without their true value as the foundation for any life in society, from birth to death and all stops on the journey. The practice of art is not alien to this documentary evolution, and those documents end up becoming part of a complex creation in which an artwork is sometimes produced. All within a constellation in which they cannot be ignored, as in terms of the artwork, they are often “all there is left”.
– document-relationship
The interactions between groups of people give rise to one or more types of records that precisely refer to the ties, affections, disaffections, etc, of their members. This information cannot be disengaged from the creative task undertaken by the group, and the documents themselves record it fully and comprehensively.
Using different media, and without any bibliographical intent, this documentary collection called for the creation of this category and the grouping of the different documents that, even dispersed throughout different dossiers, narrated the way the A UA CRAG group created art, constituting an essential part of it.
– document-discussion
This may be the most monolithic category in terms of medium, as it consists of hours of audio. If there is one characteristic feature in the way A UA CRAG created art, it is the fact they recorded their conversations, discussions, agreements, disagreements, giving rise to yards of tape in which the word plays its part in their work in a somewhat unaffected manner, within the everyday reality of people who have decided to dedicate themselves to art, and at the same time seem to be aware of the ephemeral nature of many aspects of that practice.
– document-portrait
As the technologies of representation evolved, through to the advent of photography, there have been changes in the way creators of all kinds depict themselves. As an art genre, portraiture and self-portraiture have undergone numerous metamorphoses until, in many cases, they have become part of the work or the actual work itself. This category includes pictures of the members of A UA CRAG during the creative process. Nevertheless, they have not been considered “photos of the creative process”, but instead as a vital part of the group’s oeuvre, taking self-representation to be another one of the components of their art practice.
Most of the documentary series selected for display in the exhibition were produced during the gestation and undertaking of a series of projects of artistic exchange, which the actual members of A UA CRAG referred to as “International Projects”.
These projects were experiences involving the sharing, discussion and production of art that the group undertook between 1990 and 1994; during which time an art group from abroad was invited to their hometown of Aranda de Duero, in Spain, to work in situ and hold open sessions to discuss topics of artistic interest. In turn, A UA CRAG returned the visit to the guest group’s place of origin, thereby inverting the experience.
The exhibition hall provides an “interpretation desk” with a bibliography on and by A UA CRAG, where one may learn about the group’s history and all its activities, as a complement to the work undertaken on the group’s documentation, its documentary strategies and the compilation of its archive, as the true epicentre of the display.
What’s more, there are a number of showcases dedicated to the activity called Vitrinas Abiertas [Open Display Cases], in which those interested will be exposed in groups to very specific documents, opening the showcases and providing an opportunity to handle them, turn pages, etc. This makes a modest attempt to resolve one of the main problems involved in exhibiting books and documents, namely, overcoming the glass barrier while still preserving their original condition at the time they were created, which involved nothing more than their use and handling in different ambits.
amateurarchivist.net