Artists: Gema Quiles, Jorge Julve, Lara Ordóñez, Maria Doménech, Carlos Bonet, Leomi Sadler, Blanca Arias, Malaerba, Guillermo Ros, Carlos Páramo, Álex Marco, Lu Rose Biltucci
Exhibition title: The Discredit of Reality
Curated by: Paula Lorenzo and Carles Àngel Saurí
Venue: EACC, Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló, Castelló, Spain
Date: July 2 – September 18, 2022
Photography:all images copyright and courtesy of David Zarzoso and EACC
During the 1950s, the Valencian thinker Joan Fuster wrote an essay entitled “The Discredit of Reality”. An essay made up of brief looks at different moments in the history of Western art with a desire to understand the relationship between the trends of Western painting and reality. It contains artistic reflections, philosophical thoughts, observations on social habits and religious doctrines. Through small texts, the essay constructs a reading of Western art as a space of response to the aesthetic-political constructs that underpin what society perceives as reality.
Reality is thus perceived as Gramsci understood hegemony. And Discredit, then, is the questioning of hegemony and the search for its flaws for the production of an object or critical thought. This exhibition is an invitation to a series of artists and collectives of contemporary thought and creation to discredit the institution and its tangible and symbolic materials.
Based on two types of invitation, a dialogue was opened between the curators, the artists, the invited collectives and the materials and bodies of the EACC. The participants in the process could put in relation, in the exhibition space, an already existing object or action. Or they could work with a material, body or object from the art center’s stores, archives, structure or human resources.
Paula Lorenzo begins the exhibition and catalog text thus:
“A line is drawn between the cultural and exhibition space and everything that contains the possibility. This line is projected, written, shredded, traced, remade, derived, embraced, cured, adjusted, contained, lettered, ironized, discredited. Possibility is subject to budgets, to an idea of what has to be an exhibition and an institution, it is also open to an imagination, to a will, to an energy, to an adaptation, to gestures. The possibility evidences what is there, where the bodies and the traces and the objects that were there are, and at the same time it acts and thinks about how the bodies could move, it embraces the dirt and plays with it, it recycles and invents another path.
Discrediting reality can be an act of creative rethinking that opens up other forms, other aesthetics, other possible discourses. An act of making by undoing what we have. Jack Halberstam wrote that failure allows us to escape the punitive norms of the conventional idea of success: “The queer art of failure revolves around the impossible, the improbable, the implausible, the implausible and the anodyne. It loses silently, and in losing imagines other goals for life, for love, for art and for the self”.
Perhaps losing helps to understand where we are, who we are, what we can do. Losing in order to assume that the constant search for triumph and success entails a lot of frustration and pain; it may not be necessary to accept this systematic violence towards ourselves and others, and we can discredit it by proposing other ways of acting and approaching the intention. Halberstam’s queer art of failure is an attempt to break free from the expectations of an unbridled and cismasculinised neoliberal system, and to build from there more affective, more honest and more cooperative approaches around artistic spaces. This approach also contemplates the need to embrace the insignificant, the small and the anti-monumental; like a hole in the ground, a gap in the glass or a model of the space.”
This exhibition began on a visit to the EACC by Paula Lorenzo in which, faced with the monumentality and hygiene of the white cube, she preferred to approach the small holes left in the floor from previous interventions.
