Creació Jove Mercè'99
"A document with significances comes from a specific localization, selected from what it tries to transmit".
One of the premiss of the contemporary art of this decade shows us a whole range of meanings produced by mediums that we all have within our reach. There are a number of exemples of these multi-species which have been transformed into a collection of significant data.
More than three decades ago, the so-called new artistic approaches were championing a reaction against the traditional artistic object and the growing merchantilism of art, defending the surmounting of limits, the destruction of boundaries between disciplines, the rejection of all hierarchies related to the use of techniques and materials, the dysfunction of aesthetic concept, the change of the artist's role as creator and theoretician of his/her work and the increasingly active role of the spectator.
Turning back to the distinction between genres is difficult these days to say the least, if we bear in mind the intervention of what it has to be explained rather that the same specific and identifiying signs.
We could say that art is always the reflection of its time.In the same way as when historians and archaeologists approach the study of past times the analyze artistic manifestations so as to find out a little more that just the thoughts, feelings and, in short, the conception of the world from the society that has generated them, the projects of contemporary artists become the perfect portrait, sometimes involuntary, of the spirit, the contradictions, the absences, the yearnings and desires of the end of this century in which we happen to live.
However, the most immediate modernity also has a pile of properties built around it, where what is important is created by many factors, but above all, by how the results are transformed and what the final product is.
Artist attempt, somehow, through their works, to find a meaning to the times in which we live, considering questions that help us to understand the world and ourselves.
The continuous revision and updating of modern tools, such as photography, electronic art or video, re-organizes for us this framework of constant changes of attitudes, uses and manipulations of the tools from new standpoints. The careful gaze, employed once again to express, describe or explain, more than to formalize in a pure sense or to plan without any previous script.
Just one year from the end of a century that coincides with the close of a millennium, we live in an impasse of social, economic, political and cultural redefinition, accentuaded by the new information and communication technologies. The future, in which the concept of global village is already a reality, can be imagined as one that is transcultural and decentralized.
Globalization, multicultural approaches, the end of western ethnocentricity, the tyranny of the virtual world and the omnipresence of new technological mediums are some of the factors that are generating a transformation of the creative fact, which is then transformed into a heterogeneous mass of productions, a diversity of creative processes, and the distancing of the artist from the phenomenons of education.
Given, then, these variables, we could say that we are preparing to attack in a clear way: with specific, significant acts.
L. Górriz/Dalmau
Montse Badia