yucolo.com :: MACBA - Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona

25. Januar 2008 – 18. Mai 2008

Asier Mendizabal

Asier Mendizabal (Ordizia, Guipuzkoa, 1973) is one of the Basque artists of the new generation who pays most attention to the relations between form, discourse and ideology. His oeuvre could be described as a critique of ideology based on the mise en scène of the structures that shape it. Through the expanded fields of art, rock music, cinema, politics and theory his view on social structures leads him to sketch out a map of the totality of production relations. Asier Mendizabal's transversal, multidisciplinary approach focuses sharply on the difficulties of representation inherent in the political, as well as on the gaps between artistic activity and the "political unconscious" present in cultural productions, manifestations of the collective and mass movements.

The exhibition opens with Cinema (1999), a work that highlights the potential for emancipation of cinema within the context of the class struggle, from the experiments of the Russian avant-garde to the workers' movements of May 1968 (such as the Groupes Medvedkine). The theatralized scenario of political representation is converted into the very mechanism that forms it: the scenery of a virtual stage on which militancy, education and didacticism come together. The work can be viewed as a declaration of intentions on the part of the artist, and also as a beginning, encompassing revolutionary aesthetics (of unrest and propaganda) and the politics of desire.

Mendizabal 's insistence on the cinema as a medium, interpreted as a cinema-without-cinema or expanded cinema, is present throughout the exhibition. No Time for Love (2000) for example, is made up of several cinematographic, sculptural and graphic fragments. The installation is named after the title of a record from the eighties by the band Hertzainak, which is in fact a version of an Irish folksong by Christy Moore. The lyrics speak about the impossibility of love in times of conflict in the framework of the non-aligned leftist internationalism of the eighties. The title works for Mendizabal as the detonator of an even bigger dilemma: the relationships (and choices) between desire and militancy, love and politics or, and amounting to the same thing, the radical separation between public action and the desire of the private sector. The installation includes screening of a 16mm film that fictionalizes the representation of the masses or multitudes, together with a reworked poster, made by hand, of the film Z (1969) by Costa-Gavras, and a sculpture whose shape and material are evocative of such temporary constructions and architectures as the scenarios of meetings and other political platforms.

Asier Mendizabal

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