Antonio Ortega pretending to be taller for the London Biennale 2000
Adolescent Art
Adolescent Art
Shortly, after I decided the subject of this text, I endured the effect called “plastered cast leg”. I will explain it: one day you break the leg
and the doctor plaster it to you. Then, when you stroll around the city or travel by underground, you realize the current is to cross with somebody who is also in your same situation. You wonder if it is possible that has occurred some special event so the cases of broken legs have been increased, because even you try it, you can not remember when you saw last time a plastered cast leg. Nonetheless you think it is impossible that in some many years there were not people using crutches, having plastered cast legs full of signatures and good wishes, wearing a torn jean by the seam and an old slipper not very well matched. Finally, you realize that you have suffered “the effect of the plastered cast leg".
Since I decided the title “The adolescent art ”, I started to see the word “adolescent” linked to the last artistic expressions everywhere: exhibitions, magazines, etc, which confirmed me that it was appropriate to treat this subject. Certainly it is a recurrent subject although the use of “adolescent” has been always about thematic.
From the personal creation, some artists or artistic currents have considered that they could reflect the values of the adolescence for illustrating their speech in a suitable way. It is not a matter of adopting the forms but of representing them. In many cases not even the subject was really “adolescent“ but ideas that were presumably implicit.
Traditionally, the art has rescued the adolescent world as a projection of the beauty, or has analyzed it as a stage of formation of the personality in a more or less autobiographical way.
The difference is that an artist from my generation even he tries to follow the model of an intellectual artist, this model has lost his relevance. Since he is an emergent artist when a footballer at the same age would be retired and when a singer pop should change his registry if he does not want to seem ridiculous.
For that reason, without the analysis of adolescent having disappeared of among the subjects of the art; there is an adolescent style in the appearance of the art and in the use of formal resources. Those resources sometimes are adapted to the evolution of the ideas and to the commitment with the contemporarity.
Firstly to point out, that in the world of the creation of forms, formalization not justified theoretically does not seem appropriate. Any decision from the artist about formalization has to be involved in a standardized communicative resource. We can often listen: “I was looking for an image as the front page of the fashion magazines ", "I wanted to reproduce the spirit of a binge ", " As it is done on television ", " like in a musical video " etc. I am completely sure that those who are listening now, if they belong to the critique, they will have heard some similar expression in some occasion, and if they are artists they will be remembered in themselves saying it. Occasionally some formalization in art is successful and become trendy. My opinion is that the adolescent style is a trend of firm implantation.
It is an art apparently adolescent, nostalgic in many cases. The artist seems to decide his work with the same obliging smile as he looks at the pictures in his old album. This is not a copy of the signs of the adolescent current world, but the revision of those from the past of the artists.
The formalization will tend to the use of the aesthetics of fanzines and posters from the 80´s.
In the art works that it appears a text, it will be a concrete and imperative text. We might consider them next to the slogans, not severe slogans rather impregnated with humour and parody.
Moreover “the adolescent “will appear in the formalizations of those works that try to create an state of mind, organizing festive meetings, promoting the popular participation or creating the remembrance by document, by decoration or any other resource.
If I related that the novelty is referred to the formal application to some aspects of “the adolescent”, unlike when it has been used as a subject, I would like to indicate which are the favourite subjects of those artists, who use this type of formalization and the justifications.
I think the subject it is the one linked to the social analysis, in the main cases as a form of complain.
We can detect also an attitude adolescent in the way in which the topics of social injustice are approached, when we raise the definition of the enemy, answering the question: who is the liable?
Usually everybody can reach an agreement in detecting a social problem. The discussion takes place at the moment we must point out to the liable.
A part from the ideology, all of them will agree that it is a social problem the groups of minors, addicted to glue, who commit small thefts. However when we express as culprit: the absentmindedness of whom they are stolen, to whom they commit the theft, to the police, to the educational institutions, to the insolvency of the centres of reception, to the government or to the social situation -the lack of support and opportunities, lack of incentives, problems in the educational system and in the family environment- we are manifesting our ideological adhesion. Saying it in a different way, it is common to agree about the list of the effects, since they are datum; the divergence is on pointing the causes. Avoid to point out the causes is one of the perversions of the language of current political implication, because it seems that we all have a completely complicity.
The exercise of indicating conflicts is produced in completely harmony.
What does make us to think that the whole world in art has a concordant political thought?
Why an artist think that all the audience will strongly agree with his speech?
So, yes it is; because the reasons of the conflicts are not expressed, or they are expressed vaguely.
I think we can detect adolescent attitudes according to how is defined the liable. I dare to saying that from an adolescent thought is common to indicate liables from the highest hierarchy and in the less concrete definition in individuals. We can also observe that when the individual is blamed (the Pope, a King Etc). Previously they have been turned into a sign.
I detect some differences between adolescent attitudes of the art thought. A few differences that are confronted as always.
It is amazing to observe that the most irreconcilable enemies are those that have very much in common: An adherent of Jung and other of Freud, an Israelite and a Syrian, one supporter of the Barcelona team and other one of the Real Madrid team, in final, the shade.
On one hand there is the artist who dissolves in a group, habitually, linked to a curatorial project, included or not a curator. They indicate like the main liable of the social injustices on biggest trade marks as:
Shell
Mc Donalds
Nike
Banking
It seems that the enemy is everyone that represents an unscrupulous enrichment.
That’s why they firstly veto their products and against their great advertising campaign: counter-advertising.
Basically this one would be the right strategy and the purpose of the art work. An art that it takes on an enormous task. It seems that that part of the task has rooted to the media tasks as denunciator but, in an immediate analysis it reveals that the media are not denouncers but in any case accomplices. And they are accomplices because on one hand they also are multinationals and for other another they live from the advertisements of them.
At this point, the question would be: If there is an art of adolescent appearance and if among its favourite subjects there would be the aim of revealing the social claims, how to link both things?
My thesis is the next: The artist as a committed person with his time takes part ideologically. He discovers the social conflicts and he wants to point out the culprits. However he observes that the art market has unacceptable details, as the speculation, some unclear money around and a tacit hierarchic order. He discovers that in many occasions his claims are difficult to maintain from his own social being.
He also watches TV, and he watches in a documentary a few inhabitants of the south of Somalia, who, apparently, live in harmony with the nature, go to the nearby capital to exchange goats for Kalashnikovs.
There is a concept that produces embarrassment only naming it, “the good savage", but this idea is not completely overcome. Moreover I consider that idea is in the basis of any current art which denunciates the illicit enrichment of big multinationals practice.
Since for carrying out the criticism about these practices the artist courts himself in a position of no guilt so, he can not promote what he rejects. He will look for an ethical model free of fault and he will find it in his own teenager past.
The artist, as a committed person with his time, takes part ideologically, he discovers social conflicts and he wants to indicate who the liables are. He needs to arm himself as non suspected of cooperation with that he wants to fight. In the absence of the good traditional savage, he retrieves his own thought when he was a teenager. An idealistic thought, a generous thought on the social point of view...
He only needs to give some type of clue, a wink, not to be branded as naïf, because it is difficult to defend a dogmatic thought if it is possible to discredit it for been ingenuous. I, personally, miss analysis as the Joan Brossa ones, who said the solution to achieve the success of the Catalan culture would be that the Barça football team fall to second division.
Said differently, I accept my condition of naïf up to his last consequences.
In one occasion, I was at home watching an entertaining TV movie, on Saturday evening, when the telephone rang. I turned off the TV sound with the command to answer. When the phone conversation was finished, I watched again the TV, still without sound. It was John Wayne acting, thirsty, in the middle of the desert, dirtily and dragging his boots. The fact of having lost the concentration in the film for having answered the telephone and watching it without sound, made me see John Wayne in a ridiculous situation, as a huge child playing cowboys.
I am sure that he also suspected something when he was acting among shot and shot. But in the show business on occasions we have an excess of faith that it saves us from the cynicism. Because of that I believe that there is not anything more pathetic than a plastic artist, either a singer or an actor who has not attained the success, since only doses of success can neutralize the sensation of naïve of an artist overturned on his career. If you still have some doubt on what I meaning, please follow me at the next exercise:
Press mute to the success of any artist of international prestige. Think about any successful artist and imagine that he only shows his work to his parents, already elders. Every Sunday he goes to have lunch to his parent’s house, with all his family. Finishing the coffee, he shows his last artistic projects to them... I believe that you only will need thirty seconds to reproduce the scene in your mind and give the main character to the artist you wish.
(White space)
I don’t know you, but I imagined Joseph Beuys, very worthily and very slowly, gathering with a tray, clots of fat hooked on the dining room walls of dad’s and mom’s Beuys home. That’s why; I repeat I do accept my condition of naïf, because I believe in the art that believes that it is worthwhile to continue on this.
