« Art Critics' Reading List
PACO BARRAGAN
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Paco Barragán (Oviedo, Spain) is an independent curator and an arts writer based in Madrid. He is curatorial advisor to the Artist Pension Trust (APT), New York. Some of the shows he has curated most recently are “The Non-Age,” Kunsthalle Winterthur, Winthertur, June-July 2009; “Marc Bijl. Arrested Development” (co-curated with Javier Panera), Domus Artium 2 (DA2), Salamanca, April-September 2009.He is author of The Art to Come, 2002, Subastas Siglo XXI, The Art Fair Age, 2008, CHARTA, and editor of Sustainabilities, 2008, CHARTA, a series of essays by leading contemporary thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek, Simon Critchley and Gilles Lipovetsky.
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Boris Groys. Art Power. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008. Boris Groys is undoubtedly one of the leading thinkers in contemporary aesthetics and art practices. His writings are very dense and provocative, and I always have a pen at hand to underline some of his propositions. I read a couple of years ago Sobre lo nuevo (On the New) in which Groys, in a magisterial manner, analyzed how in contemporary society all production must submit itself to the tyranny of the new in order to achieve cultural acknowledgement. Incomprehensibly enough, On the New has not been published in English. For this reason the selected writings gathered in Art Power include an article bearing that title. Basically Art Power is divided into two parts: a series of articles related to art as a commodity and another series related to art as a tool of political propaganda. The notion of art as a paradoxical self-critical commodity, the doubtful idea of the curator having lost his power in favor of the artist, the introduction by Fascism of the age of the body together with critical references to utopia, revolution, urbanism, the market and the post-Communist era are some of the gems that make Art Power a must read.
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Jacques Rancière. Le spectateur émancipé. Paris: La Fabrique, 2008. Last and also least, Rancière’s collection of essays published in French under the title Le spectateur émancipé does not really respond to the expectations heralded on the cover. Rancière analyzes theater and recalls that we no longer live in a time in which playwrights want to explain to their audience the reality of social relations and the means of fighting against capitalist exploitation. He literally beats around the bush with the idea of the spectator as an active actor that makes the story intellectually his own. And it would be in this so called act of association and dissociation where the emancipation of the spectator would lie. Really disappointing!
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Questioning History. Imagining the Past in Contemporary Art. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2009. Published within the NAi “Reflect” Series, Questioning History. Imagining the Past in Contemporary Art is a very interesting book edited by Frank van der Stok, Frits Gierstberg, and Flip Bool that deals in a challenging manner with how visual media play a key role in reshaping our historical consciousness. With contributions by among others Jennifer Allen, Zoran Eric, David Levi Strauss, Joachim Koester, Jan Verwoert and the above-mentioned editors, this collection of essays shows how history has become more and more an essential element for contemporary societies, while at the same time our history is being dulled and re-staged in order to enhance (in)visible commercial, political or ideological interests. Maria Barnas shows how in Goethe’s “Haus” the desk has suffered different shapings under the influence of insights and tastes over time; in Gierstberg’s “The Big History Quiz” how history has become a booming business and how the process of globalization has led to a quest for identity; or in Frank van der Stok’s “Mental Images” how artists apply strategies that allow them to offer parallel, alternative or deconstructive histories.
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