17th december 2022 – 21st december 2022
I remember the video Sara sent me. She was in the doorway of her home. Every day she rose early and went to the door to wait.
Waiting for what? Was she Waiting for Godot or merely waiting for what could be seen.
She was not waiting for someone. She was waiting for something, harder than ever because it was not the rain. She was waiting for a label. She was waiting, as if for a diploma from a school of magicians, for a document or a person that would tell her she was an artist.
This small, unframed, morning action, just the video she sent to me personally, reflects the anxiety felt by artists and by her generation: matters linked to identity within a society and products that melt away when the medium is one’s own body. This is a live art that is changing as the Ben Vatier billboard on the promenade at Nice proclaims: I am art.
The Fluxus group to which Ben Vautier and other artists belonged in the 60s and 70s, taking as their references those of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage who made the limits between life and art disappear, considered that the ways of making and expressing art are processes of, on the one hand, their daily life and on the other, the exceptionality of any other daily life. Thus the separation between life and art and art and life is diluted, particularly evident in the case of the performance. Cases in point are Semiotic Kitchen, 1975 by Martha Rosler or the performances by Bruce Nauman that express his anxiety over the processes of creation. The 3D Blanco group with Sara Gema Domínguez, Judit Vaquero and Ignacio Rivoira follows along these lines, working with aspects of the daily life of the artists and their procedures with an added touch of humour. In this vein they presented two performances for the Isabel Hurley Gallery. The first, in the morning, made the announcement of the evening event from a van complete with loudspeakers, just like the upholsterers who cruise around the streets touting their wares. The evening performance was a site-specific one for the gallery, showing how they had worked, their brainstorming and the creation of the perfomance presented. A matyroshka of Russian nesting-dolls, enabed us to bear witness of the creation of the performance in the performance presented.
Their models are artists who are presently active on social media and thanks to this fluid means of communication they are able to attend performances and, as spectators converse on subjects that interest them. This is the case of Veronica Ruth Friás in her latest performance in the same gallery a few days ago where she brought to life her books on art, performance and gender by constructing her library around her head, helped by the people close to her life and work. Ana Esmith and her character Miss Beige parody daily aspects of our consumer society and cult of the image in their performances as she moves like a foreign body around Madrid. There are other examples of artists for 3D Blanco for, as Veronica Ruth Friás says during her performance: “This is my library”. Her books and life experiences are her cultural references and are part of seed of the work created.
In the end, neither Sara nor Judit nor Ignacio need anyone to tell them they are artists. All three make and live art. They feel themselves artists.
Blanca Machuca
Works
