News
The Metabolised Collection. The viewer as the central figure in the museum narrative
With the digitisation of museum collections —a process that has been further accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic— new opportunities have opened up for displaying their constituent items. On the other hand, we are seeing the emergence of a new regime of visuality that is altering our forms of attention, intensifying the paradigm shift brought about by technical reproducibility. As Walter Benjamin warned almost a century ago, it is no longer the viewer who goes to art, but art that comes to the viewer.
This is the central leitmotiv of The Metabolised Collection, a multi-sided (meta)tour of the Banco de España Collection, created by art critic and theorist Carles Guerra. As Guerra explains, since the collection first began to take shape at the end of the eighteenth century, it has experienced several other "crises that have altered the relationship between the viewer and the works or articles themselves". What makes the current crisis special, he believes, is that it hinges on what might be termed an "economy of access" that appears to fulfil the long-held utopian aspiration of enabling everything to be viewed and accessed.
Lorenzo Coullaut Valera: Tribute to the Banco de España by its Employees (1910) | Guillermo Lledó: Threshold (2000) | Jonathan Monk: This Painting Should Be Installed by an Accountant (2011)
Guerra argues that as well as "opening the doors wide to a vast heritage," this new "economy of access" also enables the artworks and the comments they inspire to travel across the same channels. The irony is that this expansion of virtual accessibility comes precisely at a time of greatest on-site segregation, when direct contact with art has become the exception rather than the rule.
Moreover, our perception of the digital images we see on our devices is still largely conditioned by our memory of standing in front of these (or similar) works. "They awaken memories anchored in our bodies (...). What we saw and felt in the past, in the world of real encounters, re-emerges as an intimate personal archive" that determines what we now see and experience on the screen. In other words, faced with this "stream of online works" our response is somatised; as Guerra says, it is now "we (who) are the museum, the ultimate Wunderkammer. The metabolised collection".
Isabel Quintanilla: Wall of the Urola Studio (1969) | Art & Language: Hostage LXVI (1990) | Wolfgang Tillmans: 6407-19 (Silver Series)
Guerra has picked twenty-five works from the bank's collection to create an itinerary that highlights the labour of the viewer in the process of artistic communication. "If this crisis is to serve for anything," he says in his essay Apuntes para entender una colección online (in which he develops on the ideas set out in the introductory text), "it must be to recognise that, in addition to the labour encapsulated in the works themselves, there is another labour which is expended in every approach to them, by both the expert and the untrained eye". He believes that the "great unfinished business of the art system" is precisely to determine "how to incorporate the voice of the public, the discourses of the viewers who have been written out of the institutional account, whose record goes unregistered in the museum's technologies".
Through very different channels, pieces such as Tribute to the Banco de España by its Employees (1910), by Lorenzo Coullaut Valera, Threshold (2000), by Guillermo Lledó and This Painting Should Be Installed by an Accountant (2011) by Jonathan Monk, offer visibility to those historically silenced viewers, explicitly or metaphorically drawing attention to their presence and challenging them to participate directly in the process of constructing the work's meaning. In other cases, such as Wall of the Urola Studio (1969), by Isabel Quintanilla, Hostage LXVI (1990) by Art & Language and 6407-19 (Silver Series), by Wolfgang Tillmans, Guerra shows how virtual, online, viewing constrains the way we receive works that require a phenomenological experience (i.e. physically standing in front of them).
Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo: One-Hundred Peseta Note (1898) | Daniel García Andújar: Capital. Merchandise. Guilloché (2015) | José Villegas: The Artist and His Inspiration and Hippogryph in Flight (1903)
Guerra's itinerary also includes a number of pieces from the Banco de España Collection with which he traces the "schematic genealogy" of an issue he considers to be of key importance: the relationship between the art world and the movement of capital. As Guerra reminds us, the roots of this relationship "go back to the nineteenth century". Yet far from being openly addressed in the artistic context, it has always been confined to "the realm of the implicit". This section includes works such as One-Hundred Peseta Note (1898), a small oil painting by Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo depicting a life-size banknote hanging from a red ribbon, nailed to a wall; Sevillian painter José Villegas's banknote series, with allegorical scenes, The Artist and his Inspiration and Hippogryph in Flight, dating from the early twentieth century; and Capital. Merchandise. Guilloché (2015), by Daniel García Andújar, in which the Alicante artist uses digital processes to reproduce the Guilloché technique —one of the methods traditionally employed to prevent forgery— to make eighteen models of banknotes with iconographic motifs alluding to the arms industry, the security business and migration crises.