Babel 21st (English)

The project Babel 21st comes from a discussion I had with a Madrid based artist, Daniel Polo. Our conversation led to a discussion about the logistic problems I would meet for the transportation of art works from Spain to England where I planned to set up an exhibition. From this mere material concern (but it's essential: the materiality), a new idea for a new project arose.

PITCH The project is an independent and free call for artists in Spain. The art projects will be exclusively proposed in a writing form and they will be received and built in England, by groups of artists of different disciplines (theatre, fine art, music, choreography and writing). The realisation of the pieces will be confined to special material conditions (see the flyer). However, no constraints would be imposed regarding age, profession, etc. for the participants. The call will close on the 25th of December 2009. Five projects will be selected. The criteria of the judgement won't be defined beforehand, but its choice will be justified through the Blog during the first half January 2010. The five pieces will be shown at a two-day festival-exhibition in Dartington College of Arts during the first half of 2010. The curators will try to take this festival to other places in England, to different galleries. The pieces will be photographed and filmed and these testimonies would be published in a catalogue and through Babel's Blog.

We came upon the original idea, as it seemed to us a platform for different ideas relating to the several questions towards an artist's status in its society. What is at stake here? What questions are generated by the call?

After a group reflection, we distinguished three important points.

1) The actual form of our call, through the Internet, contains, per se, the fundamental idea of the project: we have created an email address and a Blog specifically for the project. In these we will receive and publish all the propositions of the Spanish participants. The exhaustive publication of the art proposals on the Web matches our intention to create free circulation of ideas as all the rights will be conceded to Babel and won't be protected in any way.

This point is essential. With Babel 21st's call we want to encourage a free way to expose concept that corresponds, modestly, to the original ideas of conceptual art: the dissociation of Art with merchant strategy. Our project reflects, on a modest scale, our critical thinking towards the recuperation and transfiguration of the conceptual in Art. In its origins Conceptual Art contrasted with a traditional way of making Art that involved the creation of an object that could be attributed a commercial value. The legacy of the movement is huge and is, ironically, the current norm. And, as a norm has to sustain a market (the Art market here), the immateriality of the ideas was lost. The ideas started to be reified, to be turned into objects and, above all, assigned to private names. The object came back and, in a time of intellectual twitch, the ideas had been sucked into it, in order to quantify, exchange, tax and value them. When ideas in Art are transformed in concrete objects, they potentially start to be monetized.

Thus, the name "Babel 21st" seeks to represent the universality of ideas that is at stake here. As a metaphor, the idea of the division in several languages matches with the reification of ideas, with their assignation to the private usufruct, the division into private cells. The metaphor of the building of a tower corresponds to our will to build a bridge between two countries, illustrating a general social idea. The call will be closed on the 25th of December, the anniversary of the incarnation of the Word.

2) The other dimension that interested us in the project was that of delegating the making, of the faire.

The space between the idea generated by Spanish participants and its realisation by English artists is completely free and will be defined by the people involved only. The call is free of themes or any kind of constraints; is open to different disciplines (see above); and is open to all forms of project (from a mere score, concepts, to an elaborate plan for an installation, a device of a piece). Thus the degree of direction is free: it may include a mere concept or score; or it could be an elaborate plan for an installation or for a device of a piece. It is entirely up to the Spanish participants.

With these unconstrained conditions for the delegation of the faire, all the pieces will be unique. And this peculiar split between the idea and the realisation can be compared with other types of division.

On a first hand, we could refer to the modern corporation of craft, specific to the pre-capitalist societies, existing all over Europe until the 20th century. Young sons of merchants (and other rich professionals) were assigned to different craft corporations. In the Art corporations, tutors taught children and adolescents craft skills but they were also in charge to prepare them to work within the very hierarchical society of their time. Thus, when the Maestro delegated the realisation of his work to his students (like Runbens, Tiziano, etc.), the transmission was didactic, a manual and intellectual bequest.

This type of transmission contrasts with the contemporary model of subcontracting. This model, relative to post-industrial society, is a response to several economic needs. A consequence (more than a cause) is the preservation, the monopolisation of the ideas. It conceals the secret of fabrication of product and, thus, thwarts competition. And this peculiar way of delegating exists, ironically, in contemporary Art as well. Artists like Damian Hirst or Jeff Koons are well known for delegating the realisation of their ideas and define themselves, sarcastically, as the owners of an idea, a name and an economic value that are, essentially, private. In that way, the manufacturer of the pieces of art, as much as the manufacturer of car seats, can't compete with the personal owners of a name or brand.

With our project we are trying to create an original form of delegation, different from these models, that permits a free space between the idea and the realisation. A type of transmission closer to a dialogue, a mutual curiosity, rather than a mere unidirectional link. The nature of our function, more than mere management through Internet, is to focus the artwork on the transmission itself, as much as on the idea or the achieved pieces. This transmission, this space leaning between them, we want to call it Art.

3) This last point introduces a third problem: the displacement of the artist's role.

The displacement relocates the work of art in a dominion that could be named Meta-Art, the Art of the Art. It consists only in appropriate conditions. The work is the immaterial space of communication that constitutes, per se, the artistic production. This is why we want to distinguish our call from other standard calls: Babel 21st seeks to create something, a field, that conforms to specific ideas on free circulation of ideas and dialogue between artists (points one and two).

This artistic statement is close to the concepts developed by the French curator Nicolas Bourriaud: Post-Production. In this short book, the author compares the role of the artists with the editing process, the final stage, in cinema production. In his interpretation, the art doesn't seek to create products out of nothing but rather filters what is already there; it acts as a hover of the material reality with intent to rebuild it differently every time. This strategy of reworking the existing has a purpose: to reinsert humanity in mainstream media, to connect people. It creates questions, affective links, and psychological spaces and occupies all the abandoned places of mainstream production with human sensibility.

Our project doesn't treat material objects but art proposals. However, it concurs with N. Bourriaud's analysis that we create a bridge of communication between two groups of artists, of people: we define our role as smugglers.

These three points constitute the conceptual background of the production of the pieces' proposals and realisations during the project Babel 21st. However, the pieces created will carry their own problem, their own strength, and their own stake that will be independent from our call. Our function justifies its own existence but will generate products that won't be controlled. This is crucial: to create an art field, a fertile environment, where what we generate escapes us in the moment of its birth.