Iratxe Jaio + Klaas van Gorkum

11 October: We are participating in a colloquium between Basque artists, featuring Nestor Basterretxea and Josu Rekalde, and moderated by Fernando Golvano, in the 1st International Congress on Art, Memory and Democracy.

Conference venues
Bilbao and Gernika: 9,10,11th october 2012
Elai Alai aretoa Gernika and Auditorium of the University of the Basque Country (Bilbao)

Presentation
Great works of art weave many senses and different aesthetic, ethical and political values into a single form. They set off genuine research into human existence and historical and social events, redefining what is thinkable, visible and experimentable. Picasso’s Guernica, painted in 1937, is a case in point of an artistic creation that brings together all these meanings in an open, critical, enigmatic dialogue. Painted at the time of the Spanish Civil War and commissioned by the government of the Republic for its pavilion at the World’s Fair in Paris, it continues to be ackowledged as a universal symbol denouncing the barbarity of the bombing of civilian populations.

2012 marks the 75th anniversary of its presentation, in the Year of Cultures for Peace and Freedom. This provides an ideal setting for a review of its current significance and ongoing commitment to democratic values. It is also a good time to reflect on the deep-rooted links between creativity, remembrance and the permanent institution of a democratic project in the Basque, European and global contexts in the present time. This congress sets out to discuss these issues from the viewpoints of historical and philosophical clarification and of artistic and literary investigation.

The idea that we will be defending here is that certain contemporary artistic practices, indebted to the conceptual, post-conceptual and/or relational practices of recent times, are loaded with a series of tensions that point towards an interesting and fertile terrain of crossbreeding between what we could describe for now, in a generic and somewhat imprecise way, as “social”, on one side, and purely “aesthetic”, on the other.

Some of these practices, such as those we shall be commenting on in this text, work as a clear example of the potency and tensions arising from these types of performative operation when they are surrounded by an excess of intention. And, in this sense, they are a further example of a process that is becoming a symptom of contemporary art: the urgency of recovering the certainties of interpretation (of hermeneutics) in response to the unbearable ambivalence that is constitutive of every performance, with this recovery running the risk of neutralising what there is of discovery in performance.