Ruidos y susurros de las vanguardias - Medialab Prado

The exhibition proposed by the group “Laboratory of Intermedia Creations”
(“Laboratorio de Creaciones Intermedia”) is the material and the dissemination of
the results of a research work of several years, which attempts to display some
pioneering works belonging to an historical context and some risky and
committed artistic movements with the construction of the future understood as a
whole of form and content. The construction of history leads to great silences, it
necessarily implies a synthesis exercise that shows the fragments considered
more relevant, but those fragments are the visible exponent of a great submerged
mass of time experimentation usually forgotten or restricted for the experts'
detailed view. The exhibition makes visible (and audible) a series of works which,
as they cannot be easily classified into a specific discipline, or by its experimental
degree or temporal character, have not been easy to consider as a museum
object, but without a doubt, they collaborated in the expansion of the field of what
is possible in the field of art and culture, without forgetting the vocation of some of
them to also influence the scope of politics and society. The exhibition proposes
also to break the silence of these proposals by remaking them (not restoring
them, since there is no other material but the documents for their execution or the
documentation of their performance). This is, therefore, an exhibition that as it
constructs again, brings the objects to the present and makes their sounds
audible. A necessary and meticulous research work, but also creative and
suggestive, with a clear objective to divulge and ideologically committed as it
confronts with the present time some of the fundamental values of the vanguard.
Before a work of this nature, materialized in a exhibition of these characteristics,
we must be able to learn, enjoy and value what we still owe those artists who
pledge in the first half of the century to an extension of the artistic concepts clearly
committed to the currents of their time.
Emilio Martínez
Interdisciplinary research and the “Laboratory of Intermedia Creations”
(“Laboratorio de Creaciones Intermedia”)
In recent years, and curiously enough coinciding with the integration of Fine Arts
at the University level, there has been an irreversible update process of art
teaching in accordance with the evolution itself of plastic arts. The Department of
Sculpture of the Faculty of Fine Arts of Valencia has played a decisive role in this
process by promoting interdisciplinary elements increasingly more frequent in
artworks. Sculpture has been one of the disciplines that has experienced a deep
transformation process from the 1960's to now, which has entailed a good starting
point to cope with what Krauss called in the beginning "the expanded field of art".
We have currently confirmed that this was not but a principle of new "expansions"
including spheres, concepts and places of action in accordance with our new
cultural reality and where the burst of new technologies will be a new and
determining element for the work of art.
This process has been carried out with the complicity and encouragement of the
group of professionals of the Department of Sculpture, who individually or
collectively have striven for this attempt, by developing lines of work and future
prospects. The research group “Laboratory of Intermedia Creations”
(“Laboratorio de Creaciones Intermedia”) is, in this sense, an essential referent.
Parallel to their educational activities, university departments have the
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responsibility to carry out research and produce knowledge, the main goal of the
university, together with the dissemination of that knowledge. Research as a
fundamental activity in the education of arts, clearly appears in interrupted
programs of modernity, like Bauhaus at its time. In our context, it has not been
recognized adequately until the integration of the university education of the arts,
not so long ago. Since then and until now, a continuous work has been developed,
and now it seems to be ready to start showing its results. The Laboratory of
Intermedia Creations has been there from the beginning, making up a workgroup,
investigating in the wide field of artistic creations based on the confluence of
several disciplines and different technical means. At the same time, they have
gone deeply into specific lines of research like the use of sound elements in
artworks, and the study of devices and sound-generating machines.
At present, in the field of art, we are facing the challenge of the constant
adaptation to the changing situations of the current scene that have entailed the
burst of the new technologies. Innovations appear so fast that we seem to
witness a time of prodigies never before experienced in the history of culture. We
glimpse the horizon of upcoming prospects and speculate on the future. We
experiment with the tools provided by the application of new technologies to art.
We think in terms of future and we are not ourselves but the future of the
generations that preceded us and also thought like us in terms of future. This time
circle brings us closer to the ultimate sense of proposals like this one presented by
the “Laboratory of Intermedia Creations”, taken from the sometimes neglected
historical avant-gardes, pushed into the background by more conventional works,
more suitable for the commercialiation of the artistic object.
This project of reproduction of sound and art works from the European historical
avant-garde movements, which would delight museums, collectors and art
lovers, prepared by the group “Laboratory of Intermedia Creations”, has also the
virtue of interpreting with topicality the pioneering spirit of those ideas and
provides us with a fundamental tool to confront the stimulating challenge of the
burst of new technologies in today's cultural production and in the future.
Marina Pastor
Research and avant garde
There are frequent discussions about the regulation and the meaning of research
in the field of the Arts, which threaten the art's epistemological statute that
articulates the different theories of art we know today. The different conceptions
that correlate the artistic task and knowledge were never so controversial as in the
avant-garde age, in which research became experimental and in which the
different fields that lay out the aesthetic opened to other ways of rationality, an
opening-up widely dealt with in the discussion itself between modernity and
postmodernity, to a certain extent finished today, before the pretension to
consider avant-garde proposals as capable or not capable of laying out an
unfinished project that will have to still be considered or definitely abandoned.
The beginning of the new millenium seems to have obviated the controversies
that marked the publications by intellectuals at the end of the 20th century, and
focused the attention on the concept of culture as visual culture, and
consequently on the concept of artist as producer of knowledge from the
gestation of an interdisciplinary knowledge that finds a difficult position in the
university educational frameworks, but that seems to be able to invent a new