The first thing I did was order a black coffee as our future. Or rather, to try it, because I didn’t get it, I ran into one of those waiters who does everything they can think of except serve me: he swept the bar, dried the crockery, cleaned the bottles, broke lemons, refilled the ice, cleaned two cameras, regulated the volume, changed the barrel, ordered the newspapers, changed the roll of the machine, gave change for tobacco, raised the heating and even completed the 303 model with a certain class. without coffee – the possibility that it was actually invisible. Or even that it didn’t exist and I was just one more work of ARCO,
a performance that would like to symbolize the metaphysical loneliness of postmodern society, something halfway between De Chirico and Hopper. The truth is that I have been reading for a few days Cabanne and Duchamp and I suppose that the enthusiasm did the rest. But the truth is that I’m not lying, the waiter never came to see me. And, knowing I was dimensionless, I went through the box office with the pride with which freight trains pass through abandoned towns. And I thought that if a shadow is the reflection in two dimensions of a body of three, it is possible that a body of three is the shadow of one of four that we do not perceive. And, therefore, that a man without a shadow, like myself, was perhaps a symbol of transcendence itself, the spirit of Duchamp strolling through this taciturn Madrid.
At that time, Russia was invading Kiev, you know: the world is collapsing and we see contemporary art. But in reality, Europe was long dead. as with Cezanne, the tradition that aspired to the perfect work died once more to give way to an era of professional artists, made to work, not to create, made to eat three times a day and not to starve in each work. I saw this clearly at the moment when I knew I was invisible and I was able to fly over the Ifema pavilions like a madman. And since no one might see me, I was able to pose next to the works, take selfies with mustachioed artists and stick out my tongue at visitors. And what visitors. They all wore those clothes that I never find. Perhaps the clothing worn by ARCO attendees is another work of art. I saw a man buying an engraving of Chillida which was worth less than his apparently casual suit. Life.
Because there is nothing more right-wing than the art world. And the more countercultural, the more right-wing. And the more to the left the pose, the more posh the look, and the more progressive the look, the more conservative the agenda. From Miguel Angel artists approach money to survive and money approaches intellectuals to legitimize themselves. It is symbiotic: without a patron there is no revolution. For «épater le bourgeois», it is convenient that there be ‘bourgeois’. But, as the other said: “it doesn’t matter: ‘le bourgeois’ is also us”.
In ARCO there is no carpet and the space looks like a Brooklyn loft, a mix between a museum, a shopping center and a fair that sells art as it might sell hams. But, since I was invisible, I decided to look for others like me. And it was plagued. I saw an invisible drummer from Esther Schipper play 4:34 of tamborrada in ‘loop’. That’s when I pulled my beard like an asshole. Those next to me looked at me as they look at a ‘Michelin star’ which they enter saying ‘take advantage!’ There is only one thing that I find more hateful than the ‘ultra lovers’: the ‘mega haters’.
In ARCO you desensitize yourself and end up going through masterpieces as if you were going through calendars of naked women hanging in a workshop. And everything doesn’t matter. yesterday I read to Uriarte ask yourself, “How long does it take to see a painting?” And once I heard Garci Say three quarters of an hour. Today I ask myself: “How long does it take to see a stand?”. I think a lifetime because, in reality, what matters is not the work but what stands between you and the wall. And that is as long as your depth is. Actually, that is art and what has value is the idea that arises in the dialogue with your references and your traumas. And speaking of references I saw Magritte into five men in bowler hats. I even saw Magritte himself next to me at the urinal, I’m not lying. what of Duchamp, I suppose. And then his bowler hats in ‘Project ESD’, along with the portraits of two men with clown noses leading to that apple from ‘The Son of Man’.
And more invisible men. Actually, if you look closely, everything in ARCO is invisible, the whole space is full of absences, memories, partial presences, people who have left and people who have not arrived. Because art is not ornament but crime, they are effects whose causes we do not know, small disasters caused by anonymous people, which is still another degree of invisibility: women who left, men who have not arrived, natural disasters and shipwrecks. . The best of all in Cibriangallery located in that carpet where Esther Gaton dialogue with Susan Cianciolo in a transmaterial and transgenerational encounter between ‘art’ and ‘craft’. In his work I saw hanging the wing of a dinosaur, a bone tempura, algae on branches and a viscous substance like newborn art, even in the shell. And preserved hands of invisible men made by Miguel Angel Gaueca in Espacio Mínimo, perhaps the gallery with the most powerful proposal: Moraza –«solids are memory of the liquid»– and Liliana Porter with its exceptional proposal with echoes of Genovés.
And through the corridors, wine glasses abandoned by other invisible men. And dark circles that anticipate what is coming their way. Because everyone thinks ARCO is full of fakers and it’s probably true. But no greater fraud than the artist who wants to continue selling hyperglycemic landscapes to clueless grannies.
Following with invisible men. In Vera Cortés I saw Monet’s water lilies without Monet. And to the ‘Ophelia’ of John Everett Millais without Ophelia. And then a pantonary of skies by Cristina Garrido in ‘The Goma’. And the best: Enric Farrés disappearing live, giving away his signature and blowing up his work in ‘Bombon Projects’.
And I left as I came: surpassed, transcendent and invisible. There are excursions for retirees in ARCO and nothing would be as contemporary to me as seeing their grandchildren playing tute and praying to the patron saint of the town. Perhaps his invisibility, like mine, is just a performance. But if you told me how much it’s worth, maybe I’d save up to buy it and destroy it. And really, I can’t think of a more beautiful ending.
