“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” It is not clear whether the phrase should be attributed to Slavoj Zizek or Frederic Jameson, but in any case Valentín Roma, the director of La Virreina Center de la Imatge in Barcelona, believes that it is not true: “Many artists have been imagining the end of the capitalism". And now he brings together some of those fables, from Joseph Beuys to Barbara Hammer, in Madrid, in the exhibition The Great Fable of Capital, in the impressive Vault Room of the Conde Duque Cultural Center.
“Always in contemporary artists, even those who confront the system, there is a question that hovers over: Can art transform reality? Or is it rhetoric? That question about the usefulness of art hovers over the exhibition,” says Roma. That, and the question with which Isabelle Stengers started a debate with Peter Sloterdijk and Bruno Latour: “Philosophers, what do they have to worry about? Of emergencies or metaphors?
The exhibition, Roma points out, “collects artists who do not use the same imposing language of the aggressor, but rather fable, poetry, laughter, metaphor, and not so much proclamations, slogans, machete.” Although it begins with a boxing match: the one starring Joseph Beuys in a ring at the Kassel Documenta in 1972. A symbolic fight “for direct democracy” against partitocracy by an artist between shaman and clown.
Four videos from the Leeds Animation Workshop since 1978 show everything from Thatcherism to sexual harassment, homophobia and racial segregation “with only apparently naive language, with singular perspectives, such as the request for public nurseries from the point of view of a girl”, Rome says. Also unique is the perspective of the writer Esther García Llovet, who travels by car along the M30, the frontier for apartment prices in Madrid, and proposes in a video to convert its islands of vegetation into developable land. And the Barcelona-born Max de Esteban, whose work addresses the infrastructures of current capitalism, presents a powerful animated film that follows the structure of Rimbaud's A Season in Hell to narrate a process of income evasion in a real and legal way.
The videos of fictional characters by Alexander Kluge finally give way to those of Barbara Hammer, in which the disease – her own cancer and the treatment of the patient as an object – are mixed with the enjoyment and laughter of Superbollera, in which a commando of vagina fighters takes San Francisco.
