The Politics of Esthetics and the Esthetics of Politics in Barcelona

8/2/2019 The Politics of Esthetics and the Esthetics of Politics in Barcelona

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The Politics of Aesthetics and

the Aesthetics of Politics in Barcelona

Roger Sansi

Universitat de Barcelona/

Goldsmiths University of London.

1. The Paint Attack.

The 6th of October 2006, the Museum of Contemporary Art of

Barcelona (MACBA), in Spain, suffered the “fury of a group of people

out of control” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMSYzVL8ZeM),

who threw missiles of paint to the façade of the museum. The

missiles didn’t break any window, and nobody even tried to break-in

the museum. Still, the visual impact of the colour paint on the glass

and white surface of the museum was quite clear. The MACBA is a

pristine, spotless modernist building, its cleanliness is almost

uncanny: in more than a decade, I have never seen it tagged, in spite

of being surrounded by old dark buildings covered in graffiti. I often

wondered if the museum has a special brigade of cleaners working

really early in the morning to erase any stain that may sully it’s

shining walls. But that evening, the pure white cube was under

attack. The reporter actually says, “ it seems that the main problem

is the painting”. Seeing the museum splattered in colour was a shock.

Who were these “people out of control”? According to the

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMSYzVL8ZeM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMSYzVL8ZeM



police, they were “Okupas”, squatters, splitting away from a

spontaneous demonstration that had taken place earlier in the

evening. The demonstration started about half a mile away from

MACBA, in another section of the Old Town of Barcelona, as a reaction

to the police occupation of a plot of land. This plot of land, popularly

called “El forat de la vergonya”, the Hole of Shame, was the last

empty plot left in the Old Town. The plot had been used as a small

garden and a playground by the neighbours. The morning of the 6th of

October of 2006, without previous consultation, the city council

started to “urbanise” the plot under massive police protection. This

resulted in the outrage of the neighbours that used the plot, and a

demonstration that walked down from the plot to the city centre, and

from there, to MACBA.

The attack to MACBA resulted in the detention of two people,

accused of public disorder, damage to public property and aggression

to public authority. But they were quickly absolved, since the police

had no proof of their participation in the event. In fact the very

identification of the authors of the “missiles” with squatters was

never proved. To this day the authors of the paint attack to MACBA

remain anonymous. In any case, the media explicitly made the

connection between the demonstration and the paint attack to

MACBA; and as a result a local protest that wouldn’t have had much

coverage ended up having a wide public repercussion. Furthermore,

the European summit on housing that had to be celebrated in

Barcelona some weeks later, was cancelled because of fears of public



disorder.

Why would a local neighbourhood demonstration end up

throwing paint at MACBA? According to the anthropologist Manuel

Delgado, MACBA is not just a contemporary art museum, but a

symbol of the process of gentrification and “Artistification” of the city

(Delgado 2008). MACBA is the White Elephant, o perhaps the Troy

Horse, which started the process of urban transformation of the Old

Town of Barcelona in the nineties into a “radical chic”, bohemian,

artistic heaven. According to Delgado, this process has been

essentially directed from the top down, without direct consultation to

the neighbours. The “Hole of Shame” was the last bit of the city that

escaped from Artistification; according to him, the demonstrators

spontaneously linked alpha and omega, beginning and end of the

process, and some ended their demonstration throwing paint at

MACBA.

2. The Agencies.

Paradoxically, and perhaps interestingly, the museum’s self-image is

the radical opposite. Since the turn of the century, the MACBA

defined itself as a centre of political activism opposed to “capitalism”,

“globalisation” and “gentrification”, a focus of counterculture that

promoted practices of direct action very similar to those that were

directed against the very museum that evening in 2006.

The MACBA opened in 1995 in the Raval, back then a poor,



dilapidated neighbourhood in the Old Town of Barcelona. The

building was commissioned to the American architect, Richard Meyer,

who claimed to have designed a building in response to its historical

environment, but in fact produced an international modernist white

cube structure, in brutal contrast to the dark and old nineteenth

century tenements of the area. In front of the Museum a big, empty

square was unfolded to “lighten up” or “sponge” the densely

populated neighbourhood. The MACBA was clearly following the

model of the Pompidou in Paris, as a “catalyst for the regeneration”

of the neighbourhood.

The “container” of the museum was defined very clearly since

its origin, but the content, not so much. When Manuel Borja Villel

became the director of the museum in 1998, he had the clear idea

that the museum had to engage with radical politics. But at the

beginning, what this engagement would entail was not totally clear.

On the one hand, Borja (as I will call him from now on) organised

exhibitions of 1970ies political art. Together with these exhibits, Borja

and his team also proposed projects that would “rearticulate the

relation between the museum and the city” (Ribalta 2010: 225). The

first project was the workshop “Direct action as one of the Fine Arts”.

This workshop was explicitly organised in response to the events of

Seattle in 1999 and the public emergence of the anti-globalisation

movement. The objective of the workshop was to create a platform of

coordination of the movement in Barcelona. Its immediate result was

a project called “Las Agencias”, the Agencies, in 2001. The Agencies



were set up some months before the World Bank meeting

programmed for June 2001 in Barcelona. According to Jorge Ribalta,

Head of Public Programs of MACBA, Las Agencias had a central role in

the organisation of the counter-summit, in particular “designing

communication strategies and public visibility that transformed the

methods of the anti-capitalist movements in the city” (2010:235).

These strategies of public visibility were developed on various fronts:

a media agency that constituted the base of the local Barcelona

Indymedia website; a bar in the ground level of the museum, that was

used as a “relational space” by different political collectives to

organise actions; and in particular, a workshop that developed a line

of “fashion” to be used in demonstrations ( Prêt a Revolter) and

“photographic shields” to be used in demonstrations, “Art Mani”

( playing with the words “art: and “demonstration”, “manifestacion”

or “mani” in Spanish).

Las Agencias were formed by various activist collectives like La

Fiambrera Obrera (http://www.sindominio.net/fiambrera/) from

Madrid, who took charge of the bar, and Ne Pas Plier

(http://www.nepasplier.fr/) from France, who was a source of

inspiration for the demonstration artwork. Another source of

inspiration were the Italian group Tute Bianche, white overalls. Both

Ne Pas Plier and Tute Bianche were born in the nineties proposing

alternative forms of organising political demonstrations. Highly

inspired by art practices, their objective was to rely on visual shock

rather than actual physical confrontation. Tute Bianche, white

http://www.nepasplier.fr/

http://www.nepasplier.fr/



overcoats, presented themselves as a “block” wearing white, in a

sign of peace and non-violence, but at the same time they could be

seen as a threat because of their organised uniformity. Las Agencias

were building on these ideas; Pret a revolter proposed to dress up in

very colourful, carnivalesque clothes designed for direct action-

paddled to offer protection from physical attack. The objective, in

their own terms, was to provide clothes for direct action but also for

direct representation (http://leodecerca.net/proyectos/pret-a-

revolter/). Art Mani had a very similar objective: the posters displayed

high quality, big sized images of children and Zapatistas without any

written slogans, looking more “art” than demonstration posters. Both

Art Mani and Pret a revolter had two objectives: one, confusing the

police with a non-aggressive, Carnivalesque, arty appearance, and

two, creating a good, positive image of the movement for the general

public.

Because of the massive mobilisations that had been foreseen,

the Word Bank summit in June 2001 was finally cancelled. But the

anti-summit demonstration wasn’t cancelled. There the Tute Bianche

group used the Art Mani posters. The demo of June 24th 2001 ended

up with the police chasing back some demonstrators to the MACBA,

and the MACBA Bar/ Activist centre was smashed to pieces. As a

result, the director of the museum, under direct pressure of the local

authorities, had to cancel the project. Still, Las Agencias participated

actively in the demonstrations against the G8 summit of July that

same year in Genoa. But Genoa was also a moment of crisis. The

http://leodecerca.net/proyectos/pret-a-revolter/






extremely violent police repression of the demonstrations in Genoa,

where one young man was killed and many injured, questioned the

effectiveness of “arty” approaches. The dominant images of Genoa

were violent police and “ Black Blocs”. The Tute Bianche and people

like Las Agencias were almost ignored by the media. After Genoa,

the Tute Bianche group went into crisis, and disintegrated. Las

Agencias, without an institutional base at MACBA, were also

disbanded.

3. Dissent.

After this abrupt ending, MACBA entered in a phase of in-depth

discussion on what it meant exactly to work on the “edge” of art and

politics. The work of Jacques Rancière, could perhaps provide some

answers. In May 2002 , Rancière was invited to give a series of talks

at MACBA : “ Aesthetics and Politics, a bond to be reconsidered”1.

Rancière discussed amongst other things, the relation between art

spaces and their context- Art “inside” and “outside” the Museum.

Rancière questioned this very topography that separates the “inside”

from the “outside” of the museum, and the assumption that this

separation is a problem to solve- the museum has to “reach out” of

the museum. This “reaching out” is a result the notion that the

museum as a public institution has to create “consensus”. There,

Rancière radically disagrees: for him the political function of the art

1 Published as Sobre Politicas Esteticas (2005)



space is to “discover new forms of dissent, ways of fighting against

the consensual distribution of authorities, spaces and functions”

(Rancière 2005: 76). The art space has to create dissent, as opposed

to consensus, which produces a clear separation of responsabilities

and authorities. The art space has to question these separations.

This notion of dissent, or disagreement, became the title of

MACBA’s next big exhibit, Desacuerdos, Disagreements. But

disagreements on what grounds? Desacuerdos proposed to

challenge the historiography of contemporary Spanish art, aspiring to

propose a “countermodel”. Together with the exhibit, it involved a

massive “research” project, conferences and texts (The catalogue is

a four volume publication, and it doesn’t have many pictures). And

yet, it very clearly restricted itself to a “disagreement” within the art

world and its particular narratives. In this sense, the MACBA had

clearly retreated from the “Outside”- even if for Ranciere, it doesn’t

really make sense to make these distinctions.

By 2006, the director of the Museum, Borja Villel, could

explicitly say that the Museum had moved on from its “activist” past.

“ We are not withdrawing from the political dimension of artistic

practice, but we are emphasising more knowledge and poetics (…)

This doesn’t imply (…) a renounce to politics (…) but to rethink the

politics from the poetics” ( A-Desk). In another interview, to justify

this connection of poetics and politics, Borja makes reference to

Rancière - who said that human beings are political animals because

they are literary animals (ARTELEKU, 2003:46).



Some months after this interview, MACBA was attacked by that

group of people “Out of control”. a “prank”, a “joke”. And as I

mentioned, the official reaction was not of bemusement: the

suspension of an European summit on housing and real state that had

to take place in Barcelona a month latter. For the second time in a

few years, the MACBA was at the origin of the suspension of a major

“power” event in the city, even if this time, involuntarily.

Not only the MACBA had changed from 2001 to 2006. The city

had changed. The Irak war and the terrorist attacks to Madrid had

produced massive mobilisations in 2002 and 2003. One still could

say, by then, that these mobilisations were directed to an external

enemy: globalisation, American imperialism, etc. Barcelona could still

present itself as a “radical chic” city, with art museums that hosted

anti-globalisation activists. But by 2006 the enemy became much

more explicitly internal. The transformation of Barcelona into a tourist

destination with very expensive real state was starting to affect the

everyday life of its citizens directly, who started to be unable to pay

their mortgages and rents. The Barcelona model of which many felt

proud in the early nineties became the enemy. The consensus

started to crack down. The attack to MACBA in 2006 was nothing but

another example of the growing distance between political activism

and the institutions that once claimed not just to support it, but to

promote it.

4. Concluding. On Political subjects and Aesthetics.



I know this is a recurrent cliché, but as Marx said, history repeats

itself the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. This means

that history never actually repeats itself, but when an event seems to

repeat a previous one, we have to think about their differences. Two

major international political summits were cancelled in Barcelona in 5

years. Both cancellations had to do, somewhat, with events of “public

disorder” around the Contemporary Art Museum of Barcelona. The

first time the public disorder was a direct result of “ The Agencies” of

the museum. The second time around the museum seems to be not

so much the agent but the victim of the attack. And yet, some

argued, ultimately this attack was motivated by the museum itself,

and what it stood for: “Artistification”. The second time MACBA was

the object of playful attack of a group of people that performed very

similar actions to the “direct representation” that the Agencies had

proposed some years before, but there wasn’t any pretense of

making “Art”. The event was improvised, it wasn’t the result of a

carefully planned artistic project, and the “authors”, the “people out

of control”, could not be identified.

What would Rancière say of the attack to MACBA? I doubt he

would disapprove; like other people in the art world, he would

appreciate the iconoclastic “prank”. Perhaps he would appreciate its

aesthetic dimension: its intention was not just to attack the museum

but to create an image, the image of the pure white museum

splattered in colour. Both events could be described as having an



effect: the cancelation of two European summits nonetheless! And

yet to reduce these events to its supposed political effects wouldn’t

be enough .From Rancière’s perspective, more than the particular

political effects of aesthetics, what is important is the emergence of

political agents through aesthetics (Rancière 2008).

I agree with Rancière’s questioning of the reduction of aesthetic

events to their effects, but perhaps for a different reason. Rancière

holds that an aesthetic event is important because a political subject

emerges out of it. I am not so sure this is always the case. Rancière

describes political subjectivation, I quote, as “ the process through

which those who don’t have a name, attribute themselves a collective

name, which they use to re-name and re-qualify a given situation”

(…)“a collective of enunciation”( Rancière 2005: 83). In my

understanding, this may work for the first “Art” events – in which

collectives like Tute Bianche (re)present themselves clearly as

political subjects. But not so clearly in the second event, which was

much more murky and ambiguous: its authors reject any explicit

identification, any affirmative “aesthetics”. Still, this rejection of “the

aesthetic” can be seen as an aesthetic, a device that produces

images, but perhaps images closer to the black bloc than to the Tute

Bianche. And as my colleage David Graeber said recently, the black

bloc is not a collective, but a tactic, a tactic of anonymity. This is a

political subject that resists being identified, recognised, represented.

The attack to MACBA didn’t have an author, it couldn’t be identified

with any particular collective. The basis of its “affective” (not just



“effective”) power is being unidentifiable, unrecognisable, “out of

control”. The power of an amorphous “mob” that emerges out of

nowhere in a glimpse, as it were, incorporating the “mood” of the

city speaking to itself- as an affect, an internal convulsion. Can we

explain this affect in Rancière’s terms? I am not so sure.



Bibilography.

A-Desk, “ Entrevista a Manuel Borja-Villel, director del MACBA”, No7, 04-09-20006A-desk.org

Arteleku 2003 ”Entrevista a Manuel Borja director del MACBA, Museu d'Art Contemporani de

Barcelona” Zehar Nº51, p.46

Delgado, Manuel 2008 “ La Artistización de las Políticas urbanas” X Coloquio

Internacional de Geocrítica

Rancière, Jacques, 2005 Sobre Políticas Estéticas. MACBA, Barcelona--2008, Le Spectateur Émancipé. La Fabrique editions, Paris.

Ribalta, Jorge 2010 “Experimentos para una nueva institucionalidad” ObjetosRelacionales, MACBA, Barcelona.

The Politics of Esthetics and the Esthetics of Politics in Barcelona

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