Fig. 8.
Eight-hour day banner , Melbourne, 1856.
La pancarta colgante ocupa todo el espacio.
El pequeño público que divisamos está
situado al otro lado del texto, de manera que
podemos imaginar que la otra cara también
está ocupada, posiblemente por una imagen.
Así, el objeto agit-prop sería completo en su
confluencia de texto y figura / The hanging
placard takes up all of the space. The scanty
public we perceive is on the other side of the
text, so we can imagine that the other side of
the placard is taken up by an image. Hence
the agit-prop object would be complete in the
confluence of text and figure.
Fig. 9.
Manifestación por la jornada de ocho horas
en las inmediaciones del Parlamento /
Demonstration for an eight-hour day around
Parliament’ ; Spring Street, Melbourne, c.
1900.
it we can see how the back of the pictures shows other scenes and doubtless other
emotions, but this time they are independent, in kaleidoscope, and what’s more, public.
20th century violence: the atomic bomb, the Treaty of Yalta, prohibition, the fall of the
Berlin Wall… in grisaille, like the great Flemings, adding as it were distance or simply
trying to depict it. Leonardo called it prospettiva aerea , which makes everything grey at
a distance. RGG did not include the bombing of Guernica, maybe because Picasso had
already done it in grisaille, like a press photo: the back, the reverse; the dark part, the
background ; everything we can imagine behind that word, background, depth, at the
back, undercurrent, behind.
In Espacio de trabajo…, like in altarpieces with wings, what is shown above
all is the fracture of space and time, that phenomenon or whatever it is that physicists
describe but that normal people never quite manage to understand. A working space,
and at the back, a space for destruction. A space for people and another space for
History, the surroundings that have possibly acquired prestige just because they expelled
people. We have already said it – RGG is a strange political artist, an engagé of another
species.
I would like to imagine the sullen King Philip II in Madrid, opening and closing
the triptych by Hieronymus Bosch, his favourite painter, before his astonished guests. This
is a picture that is activated, when open it shows one world and when closed another one,
related to the former but different. This is not just a visual painting – it is performative, it
asks the viewer to do something. RGG asks the viewer to look at the back of his painting,
the other side of the coin. Heads and tails, a bet.
A pendant is a very specific object. (Figs. 8 and 9) Painted on both sides, it
aims to proclaim its form or content to the four winds, on the front and on the back.
It is like a painting that has been pushed off the wall and pushed into life. In some
nineteenth-century photographs and engravings, workers’ banners in demonstrations
were pendants ; they did not just hang from a horizontal pole but sought to expand their
message frontwards, no doubt to the police or the army, and also backwards, towards
their own followers. RGG seems to be an impartial reporter, a simple mirror between one
side and the other. Even so… straight away I suspect he is something more.
In Espacio de trabajo … we are not talking about the public / private dialectics
so characteristic of art in the 1970s (Vito Acconci, Martha Rosler, Cindy Sherman…) but
rather a point of flight, a perspective that extends or expands private work to the public
sphere. Maybe it is no more than a form of consolation, the idea that the abyss of
subjectivity might one day be stored in something like a common conscience.
Words in the background
Background, the exhibition in Santander taken as a whole, is an exercise of combination in
which texts and images generate thought; this is why RGG’s dark painting is accompanied
by complex titles and thereby opens up the field of image to a condensed narrative, dark
and doubtless ironic. How otherwise could we understand that the artist calls an image
of his studio Extract from an imagery borne ? Or that a video showing the constructive
process of the exhibition, a kind of vision from backstage, is called Laboratorio de procesos
en ciernes (Laboratory of processes in the making)? There is poetry in these images just
as there are images in this poetry that the artist writes for the names of his works.
Does an artist have the right to christen his own paintings? Initially it would
seem he does, of course. The name is the link that joins the pictorial form and the
world of narration. And yet the artist has painted a picture and maybe the name lies
somewhere else, in more literal or literary lands. When an artist like RGG christens one of
his paintings Nunca me miras desde donde yo te veo / siempre te evades hasta que ello te
ciega, después de Lacan (Never look at me from where I can see you / you always avoid
yourself until you are blind, after Lacan), he might still be painting, finishing the piece or
maybe he is just putting the icing on the cake. Picabia used some of the most enigmatic
and fearsome names of the last century – the symmetric Unique Eunuque in 1920, and
the alchemical Très rare tableau sur la terre painted five years previously, for example –
so when a painter christens one of his pictures we still do not know if he is exercising a
kind of professional encroachment on writers, and above all, we do not know if he is still