Guidebooks: reconstructing performance, memorializing exhibitions
The first few books I have found here in Madrid all, in some way, explore the ideas of reconstruction and memorialization. How can performances or interventions on the streets of the city be not only recorded and documented, but also energized and reactivated? How can the exhibition be at one time an archive but also a more dynamic site of memory?
The performances of Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, from the mid 1960s to the early 1990s, from Murcia to Paris, Buenos Aires to New York, have been recreated in a new series of photographs of the artist in the streets of Madrid. Each photograph has then been used as the impetus for a story about it, which range from creative fictions to more documentary descriptions of the original performance.
I found the relocation of earlier performances to the streets of Madrid, in which I was finding my bearings, a compelling introduction to Medina’s work and also how the book itself can act as a guide and testament to the slippery genre of performance art by adopting alternative models of creativity via the stories.
The adaptive Actions group, which started in London in 2007, held a series of workshops in Madrid in 2010 and produced a book that both documented earlier actions and also recorded the Madrid workshops.
The ‘live publication’ of the book in Madrid as well as its unique accordion style design contributed to its status as both archive as well as intervention in itself.
Beyond performance and actions, the question of how an exhibition - and its accompanying catalogue - can act as form of creative memorialization is explored in two books that accompanied exhibitions in Abadía de Santo Domingo de Silos. This still functioning Benadictine monastery in Burgos offers a strange underground space for exhibitions organized by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. The book of the Catalan artist Francesc Ruiz uses the uncanny surroundings of the space to dramatize a fictional guided tour of a comic-book exhibition, playing on repetition, bilingual text and differing comic-book styles and the history of the genre to produce what he dubs ‘expanded comics’.
The Basque artist Ibon Aranberri explores the hotly contested phenomenon (both in Spain and beyond) of the relocation of buildings to make way for newer ones and the reconstruction of those earlier buildings on new sites. The book, as the introduction announces, ‘adopts a similar trajectory to the tour that the visitor makes within the actual exhibition.’
In their own unique ways, each of these books is self-conscious in its own role in reconstruction and memorlalization of both the work of art as performance or action and also the experience of visiting exhibitions.