Flan Catalan: 2007

There are quite a few artists working with numbers as art.
For example, On Kawara, paints each single day the date of that day. If he doesnt finish before midnight, he destroys the work. He might just say he does this and instead creates a bunch of paintings in one day. But thats not the point. It is conceptual art. It is the idea that counts. Not the method. Even though the method is as much the idea as the idea is the idea. So you have to "believe" the method of the idea, otherwise you loose the point.
It is intriguing and poetic in a desperate kind of way, to see time passing by as a series of canvases. To imagine the routine. Every day somebody paints a number on a canvas. All his work evolves around time and consciousness. How difficult is it to actually grasp time. How can you really imagine "One Thousand Days One Million Years"? His body of work is amazing.
Like Adrian Searle says: Life is short but sometimes it seems to go on for a very long time, in his article in the Guardian; an essay, and a joke? By? On? On Kawara.

This is an exposition with work from seven totally different artists. Seen in the Tapies foundation in Barcelona and to be see again from the 2nd of february in the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela.
"This project focuses on the centrality of what is registered by experience in the acquisition of knowledge and the creation of a personal discourse, and on habit as place - mould or mask - which permits what we feel and learn to be updated every time we encounter something new. "
The central question of this show: how do we decide what is to be registered or archived? And how is it recovered, how is it given a new presence? is very interesting and difficult to answer.

There are the poetic dyptichs from Xisco Mensua; the bizar video from Yael Bertana, Kings of the Hills, (2003) makes you follow her quite neutral observant eye and thinking, why, what a strange world, what a show of macho prowess attempt to scale the most precipitous slopes in some monster sports utility vehicles, the car as a symbol of ultimate potence?
Bartana often focuses on the activities and rituals of everyday life in Israel. She has a personal experience of the political situation in her country, and this plays a major role in her work, as you can see in two of the other videos shown, Low Relief II (2004)and Wild Seeds (2005).
Archive, museum, collection and library are important concepts in the work of Erick Beltrán. Originally from Mexico, wondering why people ask him always the same stereotypical questions about his homeland, he got interested in the classifying and structuring mechanisms and in the role of contemporary society, how, from all that we can find one creates a discourse. For this exhibition he has developed the project Maduración de Ostwald (Ostwald Ripening, 2006), which is an X-ray of the development of an argument, the process of construction of a discourse and which takes two forms: a diary with over 300 pages of which 6,000 copies will be published, and a large archive containing all the images, diagrams, texts, photocopies, cuttings, photographs and maps he has used throughout the process of creating this project. To be honest, completely inunderstandable, just like contemporary society itself.
The thought evoking "Aus Schlafes Bruder" from Massimo Bartolini based on the book Schlafes Bruder (Brother of Sleep) by Robert Schneider consists of an empty space with a sound installation where 276 sounds are being reproduced at the same time. Very interesting, but it is a pity that we do not get to know more about the book or the why of this installation. But maybe its about this thing, believing in the viewer’s responsibility, as Roni Horn says: “I try to reach the viewer by addressing the bodily and not just the mental/non-physical being. The viewer must take responsibility for being there, otherwise there is nothing there.” That seems a logical strain of thought. What if the viewer gives the responsibility for being there to his parents? Then there would be nothing there, I guess. Like the structuralists, she is less interested in the meaning of the work (the “why” and “what”) than in the interaction of action and being (the “how”) and in the creation of art that unites both: “An object that never changes, where action and being, the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ emerge.” It could be that Beltran´s work is that kind of thing, but it also could not be.
It sometimes confuses me, this kind of art talk. It seems too easy. But maybe it is just really difficult and I am really stupid and maybe that is a good thing.
Anyway. It is also not easy to find more info about the book but there is lots been written about the screen version:
"Brother of Sleep" was a 1992 best-selling novel (subsequently published in the U.S.) by first-time Austrian writer Robert Schneider about a natural composing genius growing up in a hinterland mountain village in the middle of the last century with little more than the church organ to fulfill his musical needs."

There is much more to see, here are some pictures. More information on the website of the Tapies foundation and Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela.