Graduated in Art History from Universidad Complutense, Madrid, since 1999 Marta Mantecón (Santander, 1971) has developed her professional activity as an art worker, curating exhibitions, coordinating cultural projects, teaching and writing on contemporary art and visual culture with a gender perspective.
She is currently Director of Sala Robayera in Miengo, a faculty member in the Design Department at Centro Universitario CESINE and a lecturer in the seminars on Contemporary Art History at UNATE (Cantabria). She collaborates with a number of associations and institutions, and is a member of the editorial board of M-Arte y Cultura Visual.
Offstage
This could be the place from where I speak: woman, white, lower middle class, Spanish, art worker from a peripheral realm. I imagine that these should, in theory, be some of the identity-based coordinates or political fictions that define me from outside, though appearances are almost always spaces of confusion 1The artist ORLAN demonstrated as much in her first surgical performance (The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, 1990) when she read aloud the following extract from La Robe by Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni: “I have the skin of an angel, but I am a jackal, the skin of a crocodile, but I am a puppy, the skin of a black person, but I am white, the skin of a woman, but I am a man; I never have the skin of what I am.”. I grew up in a working class neighbourhood of a profoundly conservative city in the north of Spain, which proved instrumental in forging my class consciousness. With the passing of time, I discovered that the models of domination and exclusion underpinning issues of class operate with the same logic as the rest of binary divisions, whether we are talking about sex-gender, race or ethnic group, functional skills or our animal species. It all depends on which side fate has placed you, whether you are in the realm of being or non-being, in the centre or on the margins, with all the privileges or oppressions either side brings with it. My interest in the histories of art has to do precisely with this need to question myself, from a position of constant perplexity, about who we are and what is our place in the world.
Except for a few cases, the academic environment in which I was formed was basically focused on shoring up the canon, in such a way that almost all my learning was geared towards the virtues of white western man, purportedly heterosexual, upper middle class, qualified, individualistic and the endless producer of unique and original masterpieces that fit like a glove in the evolutionary history of styles and parameters of the so-called high arts (the low ones were for everyone else). It took me a good many years to unlearn all this. And I’m still at it. Art problematizes with what power ignores, so I simply try to look for new optics and perspectives.
Images are my thought space, and this is true for all aspects of my work and life: research, teaching, curatorship and activism. I try to uncover the political, social, economic, technological, cultural, aesthetic and symbolic forces at play in our scopic regime, those that govern the ways of seeing that have permeated our subjectivity—and other space-time contexts—as well as the way in which they are perceived and felt. I am interested in reaching the limits and stepping beyond them, in discovering blind spots, shadow areas, spaces of peripheral vision and, by extension, everything that is offstage 2Between 2007 and 2010 I was at the helm of the Foconorte Photography and Video Festival and in 2013 I developed, along with a dozen artists, the project Jaque al Ojo, exploring the boundaries of perception, at La Caverna de la Luz in Santander. Both projects gave me an opportunity to explore some of these issues in greater depth.. Like an undisciplined anthropologist, I also try to observe the mechanics of the art system, of the institutions that define us 3I start from the assumption, following Pierre Bourdieu and Andrea Fraser, that institutions are embodied in people: “it’s not a question of being against the institution: we are the institution. It’s a question of what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to”, in Andrea Fraser. L’1%, c’est moi, exhibition catalogue, MACBA, MUAC and UNAM, Mexico City, 2016, p. 37., of what is on one side or the other of the pairs of opposites that have heavily conditioned our culture.
What matters to us, and why? What are the outsides with which we operate? Who is the enunciating subject? And from where? Who is questioned? Why? What are the structures that govern us? How is the legitimacy of art exercised? Why do we question so little? How is the art produced in a certain place connected with its representative institutions? What is the social value of art today? What is the threshold between aesthetics and politics right now? What’s behind our fear of the real? How do we give an account of all this?
We are living in dystopian times in which superficial practices are fashionable, foregrounding an epidermal knowledge of things, encouraged by accelerated consumerism and the cult of the new (or civilization of lightness and liquid modernity as dubbed respectively by Gilles Lipovetsky and Zygmunt Bauman) 4In 2017 I had an opportunity to reflect on this matter in the exhibition Anatomía de lo leve (y sus turbulencias), produced by CAAM, Las Palmas, through the work of four artists: Esther Aldaz, Antonio Díaz Grande, Zuhar Iruretagoiena and Tito Pérez Mora.. Neoliberalism has demonstrated its effectiveness in absorbing, neutralizing and depoliticizing any critical process on the margins, especially any that calls it into question 5Highly illuminating in this regard are the essays by Alberto Santamaría, Paradojas de lo cool. Arte, literatura, política (La Vorágine, Santander, 2016), Alta cultura descafeinada. Situacionismo low cost y otras escenas del arte en el cambio de siglo (Siglo XXI, Madrid, 2019) and Políticas de lo sensible. Líneas románticas y crítica cultural (Akal, Madrid, 2020).. And all without the need for justification. In this regard, we should recall that, for the market, as Martha Rosler once argued, art functions as one of the deposits of excess of capital. The result of such strategies are substitutes with short-range political scope aimed at privileged minorities which invisibilize the underlying technologies of power, thus naturalizing relationships of domination and elitism. Instead, it is worth focusing on proposals that unmask these processes of fetishization, especially when they do so through irony and humour, and offer alternative ways of seeing and experiencing reality or of inviting disorder from an authentic engagement with the common.
Deconstructing, decolonizing, unlearning
We are still trying to come to grips with the awkward question Linda Nochlin asked in her celebrated essay from 1971: “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” 6Originally published in ARTnews, vol. 69, no. 9, January 1971. It is patent that sexualized, racialized or non-normative bodies have been and still are the object of all kinds of violence, ranging from invisibility to death, which makes it absolutely essential to apply feminist, trans-inclusive and anticolonial perspectives to all fields of life and knowledge which can show us other ways of being in art and, by extension, in the world.
Old hierarchies and divisions are crumbling. It is pressing to denaturalize them and to undertake a transversal critique of all these modes of oppression, to investigate spaces of epistemic injustice and to seek a wider framework for an analysis of the sex-gender system in all its diversity of bodies and identities (Paul B. Preciado or Judith Butler), different forms of colonialism (Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Gayatri Spivak, Audre Lorde or bell hooks), the historical development of capitalist violence and the fight against the patriarchy (Silvia Federici or María Galindo and, in general, Latin-American feminisms, from which we have so much to learn) or our coexistence with the environment, between ourselves as humans and with other species (Donna J. Haraway). All the authors aforementioned in brackets have built spaces for profound thought which have proven invaluable for me.
If the hegemonic narrative handed down to us by Art History no longer serves nor is able to explain the complexity of the world nor our relationships, then we have to put forward other narratives that will activate a change in the paradigm, which is to say, the corpus of learning we share or are prepared to share as a community. My early research along these lines centred on some cross-boundary disciplines, like textiles or action art, still largely underhistoricized in the official canon.
Textile practices 7Marta Mantecón: “Penélopes, Ariadnas… y otras hijas de araña. Mujeres que tejen, cosen y bordan en la plástica contemporánea”, in Trasdós. Revista del Museo de Bellas Artes de Santander, no. 9, 2007, pp. 8-34., just like other ‘minor arts’, were the best way to begin following the thread and unravelling this tangled web. The point of departure was a revision of classical myths, particularly those about Penelope and Ariadne, which afforded an opportunity to reflect on the concept of waiting and of connecting different temporalities through action. I later continued with an analysis of the early avant-gardes and other pioneering experiences that shifted textile learning to the field of art, until arriving at the first manifestations of the feminist movement, with its call for gender awareness as a means of taking up the legacy of our anonymous predecessors, ensuring that the personal became openly political. The operations of spinning, weaving, sewing and embroidering also underscored a tactile dimension, as opposed to the hegemony of the visual, and emphasized the process, highlighting the importance of the fragment while at once making time visible. In addition, they have conformed a kind of writing and a new space of political struggle able to fuse utility and aesthetics with critical knowledge, and enabling the individual—autobiographical and experiential aspects—to be incorporated into the collective weave, inventing other forms of care and reparation. All these deconstructive operations, with their rippling symbolic resonances, have also proven to be truly effective tactics for the socialization, survival and transmission of learning by means of shared action that has been passed down to the present, all over the planet, connecting with new technologies through cyberfeminist practices; in fact, today they are fully integrated as yet another discipline in the art system’s spaces of legitimisation.
On the other hand, I am also interested in the aesthetic-political dimension of the body, of all its becomings, as a place of enunciation and speaking out. Action art has shown itself to be one of the best tools to challenge dominant representations and to formulate other problematics, other ways of speaking; however, its History is devoid of any prehistory 8The canonical narrative situates the origins of action art within the framework of Futurism, Constructivism and Dadaism. See Roselee Goldberg: Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. Thames & Hudson, London, 1979., which would make it worthwhile to outline an alternative extra-official genealogy that would include what we could call “action art before action art”, ranging from the staging of hysteria in the late-nineteenth century 9Georges Didi-Huberman said that he was nearly compelled to consider hysteria as a chapter in the history of art. See Georges Didi-Huberman: The Invention of Hysteria. Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière. The MIT Press, Cambridge Ma., 2004, p. 4.–including its extensions up until the art of today—to the original protests of the first suffragettes, taking in the dissident narratives embodied by a number of women (and the odd man) who transformed their bodies into a true battlefield and a space of resistance by means of posing, metamorphosis, masks, disguise and gender performance offstage. This is the case of Virginia Oldoini, Alice Austen, Luisa Amman, Elsa Plötz, Marie Høeg, Claude Cahun, Pierre Molinier, Nahui Olin, Maruja Mallo, Dora Vivacqua… and a whole roster of courageous and rebellious nomad identities with extraordinary disruptive and transgressive power, who chose to narrate their own insubordination, dismantling binarisms and imagining themselves outside the canon, building a different performative genealogy 10I wonder how many women would enter into a compilation like those made by Jean-Yves Jouannais in Artistes sans oeuvres: “I would prefer not to” (Fernand Hazan, Paris, 1997).. Moving forward in time, one could also dedicate a special chapter to practices of concealment and appearance by a series of artists who developed strategies with which they overturned ways of looking—closely related, by the way, to other proposals from the international scene—thus making it possible not only to think of other subjects and other bodies but also to name and be named from other spaces, with other forms and other gesturalities, as argued by Maite Garbayo in her insightful research into performance and feminisms during the late years of Franco’s regime 11Maite Garbayo: Cuerpos que aparecen. Performance y feminismos en el tardofranquismo. Consonni, Bilbao, 2016..
In short, it is a question of providing new references and critical perspectives on art and, basically, to articulate new genealogies and seedbeds with which to reconstruct lost kinships following so many centuries of invisibility. In this regard, I would underscore some outstanding projects undertaken in recent years in a context close at hand, continuing the enterprise begun by Christine de Pizan 12The writer tells how three ladies (Reason, Rectitude and Justice) appeared to her and commissioned her with the construction of a city for ladies. See Christine de Pizan: The Book of the City of Ladies. Penguin Classics, London, 2000. in the fifteenth century: Queridas Viejas by Maria Gimeno, Womankind or Herstorymuseum by María María Acha-Kutscher, Tal día como hoy by Diana Larrea or, from the perspective of coming together and passing on learning first hand, Consejo de Sabias by Sra. Polaroiska; having said that, it is worth asking whether at this point it is still desirable to be included in the canon and for what purpose. In any case, “it matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories”, Donna J. Haraway wisely warned us 13Donna J. Haraway: Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, Durham, 2016, p. 35..
Gleaning, resignifying, making strange kinships
In his film Les Carabiniers (1963) Godard imagines, with a script by Roberto Rossellini, an anti-war parable which tells the story of two dirt-poor peasants who are recruited for war with the promise of untold riches and absolute exoneration from the consequences for any actions they might commit. When they return home they believe that they are bringing with them “all the treasures of the world” in a suitcase full of postcards arranged by subject, having confused the real with its representation, and they believe that all these images are “acts of property”. Susan Sontag uses this scene in one of her best-known essays to evince how collecting photographs is, to some degree, an act of appropriating the world given that “it means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power” 14Susan Sontag: On Photography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1977.. Meanwhile, in The Gleaners and I (2000), Agnès Varda suggests another way of relating with images, not by making them but by gathering them; a highly sustainable practice with which to confront a visual ecosystem marked by excess 15I have compiled some of my reflections on this matter in “Todos los tesoros del mundo. Apuntes para una re-colección de fotografía”, a lecture given at El Almacén de las Artes, El Astillero (Cantabria), 28/09/2019.. Working with remnants, with what is left over, between archaeology and gleaning, enables a resignification of images, to rethink their true statute and to once again lend them value at a moment of iconic and semiotic hypertrophy and saturation driven by social media and mobile prostheses. What can we do with the millions of images that no longer have any material or bodily existence? What value do they have when there are so many of them and they are so easy to produce? How can we order so much information? 16Joan Fontcuberta analyses these issues in the essays La furia de las imágenes. Notas sobre la postfotografía (Galaxia Gutenberg, Barcelona, 2016) and La cámara de Pandora: la fotografí@ después de la fotografía (Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2010)..
Ever since the first Wunderkammer (wonder-rooms or cabinets of curiosities), the accumulation of objects, presided over by a colonial gaze, has been a way of possessing the world, as was the case with the peasant-soldiers in Godard’s movie. Many projects have endeavoured to get a handle on the unyielding plurality of the real, some particularly extensive like The Archives of the Planet by Albert Kahn or People of the 20th Century by August Sander, numerous conceptual proposals, the typologies of the School of Dusseldorf and its derivatives, or the almost encyclopaedic compilations by a good number of contemporary names. Archive praxis as an artistic proposition began to gain traction in the closing decades of the past century until becoming a tendency assimilated by the mainstream, as Hal Foster evinced 17Hal Foster: “An Archival Impulse”, in October, no. 110, 2004, pp. 3-22.. I am particularly interested in those compilations involving taxonomies, classifications and inventories of reality that follow rebellious, eccentric or anarchic typologies: excessive lists, absurd anthologies, impossible atlases, bizarre museographic collections and baffling diagrams that include a playful perspective, questioning conventions by mixing categories which have apparently little or nothing to do with each other 18See the enlightening texts by Georges Perec, especially Thoughts of Sorts (David R. Godine, Boston, 2009), Umberto Eco in The Infinity of Lists (Rizzoli, New York, 2009) or Roland Barthes in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (Hill & Wang, New York, 2010).. These kinds of projects, able to subvert the classical guidelines for systematizing the real, accept archive work as an aporia, demonstrating the absurdity of wishing to order the world by trying to give it a more logical appearance, as Borges showed with the odd enumeration of animals in his Chinese encyclopaedia 19Discussed by Michel Foucault in the preface to The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Vintage, London, 1994). or the brilliant Sei Shōnagon when she wrote, in the late tenth century, her wonderful collection of poetic lists 20Sei Shōnagon: The Pillow Book, Columbia University Press, New York, 1991., until arriving at the unbounded index of the network of networks that is the internet today. All systems of classification end up disclosing the profound tension between the real and its representation, given that there is always something that is never mentioned, that is never spoken, that remains offstage 21See Marta Mantecón and Wendy Navarro: Open Corner. Listados poéticos de una colección, exhibition catalogue. Biblioteca Central de Cantabria, Santander, 2014.. Accordingly, they operate like a permanent work-in-progress, an open narrative able to be continued ad infinitum, where the poetic of the fragment imposes itself over our logic and calls into question everything we take to be known.
Just like lists and taxonomies, visual essays are an exercise in understanding and a poetic (and political) laboratory to invent encounters with and between images, to create new discourses and to propose other iconographic and iconological methodologies. It is a matter of playing with them, grouping them together by elective affinities and breaking with the traditional demarcations of time and space, dispensing with aesthetic hierarchies and exploring other potential relationships. In 2019 we undertook the Manual para construir un museo imaginario en tres actos (Manual to Construct an Imaginary Museum in Three Acts) project at Museo de Prehistoria y Arqueología de Cantabria (MUPAC), a profoundly symbolic space for us. It consisted of a series of actions and encounters between art historians and artists of various generations, taking Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne, André Malraux’s imaginary museum and Griselda Pollock’s virtual feminist museum as our point of departure, as well as Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-Valise and even the DIY logic of feminist fanzines. Our idea was to create a museum from bottom up, without walls and without a ceiling (thus circumventing the glass one), after having verified the lack of interest on behalf of public collections and the majority of Spanish institutions in establishing parity among artists in terms of gender and other variables. In fact, the museum was no more than a portable structure that could be rolled out, modified and extended as much as we liked, as it only contained images that we paired with actions with which we wished to rethink ourselves, to fill some gaps and invent news spaces of self-designation.
Subverting the norm also means questioning the very forms of visually writing and telling the History of Art that have delimited Western thinking, in order to analyse its multidisciplinary contents by means of, for instance, the rhizome, following Deleuze and Guattari’s model 22Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The Athlone Press, London, 1999, pp. 3-26., in which any given point can connect with another, as an alternative to the tree-shaped model, synoptic tables and the classic linear evolutionary layout that generally prevailed in these kinds of representations. In this regard, it is fascinating to look back at some singular proposals by artists from the early avant-gardes up to the present (from Torres García to Ward Shelley) 23Various: Genealogies of Art, Or the History of Art As Visual Art, exhibition catalogue Fundación Juan March, Madrid and Museo Picasso, Malaga. Madrid, 2019. This publication compiles canonical classifications along with surprising proposals from a wide roster of artists from the seventeenth century until the present., or indeed any cartography, graphic, outline, diagram, plan, table, map or allegory that, accepting a fractioned temporality and accommodating a play with anachronisms, tries to reflect other visual narratives of art history or histories.
All these practices can help us to imagine new epistemologies with which to confront the complexity of our realities, to propitiate a cognitive shock and to disclose the tensions of the present. Gathering images, thinking with images, linking them with one another by means of new associations and, in short, making strange kinships and ingenious connections, as Donna J. Haraway suggests, would mean reinstating their effectiveness as spaces of meaning and recovering their political impact.
Reimagining the common
It is beyond doubt that we have become mass producers of images while at once the relationships between aesthetics and politics, between signs and their referents, has been destabilized to the extent of situating our collective imaginary on the verge of collapse. The world becomes sentient through its representations, but our perceptiveness has been blocked and our sense of the real has been pulverized. And if we add to that the fact that we are survivors of a system where everything has to be given-to-be-seen and even the most insignificant detail of our lives must be recorded, controlled, monitored, turned into an anecdote or mere narcissistic exhibitionism, images are presented as dangerous recording systems that, at the same time, have seen their ability to represent the ordinary curtailed. Hito Steyerl rightly pointed out how image spam has become the true avatar of the people, standing in as negative substitutes and absorbing the flak of the limelight on their behalf 24Hito Steyerl: The Wretched of the Screen, Sternberg Press, 2013..
Today diversity is concealed beneath a regime of hypervisibility and overexposure that tries to erase all difference. Pasolini predicted this situation in an article published in 1975 on the disappearance of fireflies—a beautiful metaphor of spaces of insurgence and clandestine communities situated on the margins, in the shadows, offstage—under the glaring spotlights of the society of the spectacle 25“L’articolo delle lucciole” by Pier Paolo Pasolini, published in Corriere della Sera (01-02-1975), is one of Georges Didi-Huberman’s starting points for his analysis in the essay Survival of the Fireflies (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2018).. What is exposed to the light, permanently visible, may not be the most interesting thing and, perhaps, the evocation of these luminous creatures serves us—at least symbolically—to try to re-establish the semantic potential of images, beyond the normative, returning them their status as artefacts for thinking and making politics as part of a community of desire, able to collectively reimagine itself.
