Pablo Santa Olalla: Transatlantic Conceptualism

© Pablo Santa Olalla

Transatlantic Conceptualisms: Spain, Latin America and the Displacement to the United States, 1972-1989. Muntadas’Acción/Situación: Hoy. Proyecto a través de Latinoamérica as a Case Study

The hegemonic historiography of the artistic conceptualisms is often based on national or regional studies about the different versions of a supposed one-piece phenomenon, giving priority to the variants occurred at the centers of production. Nevertheless, conceptualist art plays a main role within the transition between artistic modernity and its postmodern overcoming. Thus, conceptualism cannot be analysed with traditional methodologies, which do not take into account the mutations that succeeded in the last decades inside the art field. This lecture wants to present a transnational analysis of the conceptualisms from Spain and Latin America, putting special attention to the spatial turn of the contemporary thinking. Taking into account the latest contributions of anthropology, sociology and geography, Olalla posits the opening of the South-Atlantic space of conceptualism, studying the different instances from which it is composed: the internal ones,—space’s topology, human and non-human actors, institutions, circulations, reception—as well as the external ones—position into the global context, space’s linkage with the North. This space and its analysis work conjoined toward an ‘other’ paradigm beyond the borders of the modern/colonial world system, from which they try to get far away, although they are still working inevitably from its interior. In order to clarify this theoretical and methodological approach, Olalla will present it from the case study of Antoni Muntadas, and especially from his 1975-1976 artwork Acción/Situación: Hoy. Proyecto a través de Latinoamérica.

Pablo Santa Olalla holds a BA in Arts and an MA in Advanced Studies of Art History, both from the University of Barcelona. As a researcher, he is currently developing a PhD thesis about the networks between Latin American and Spanish art conceptualisms within the framework of the research group Art Globalization Interculturality (AGI) and the research project “Decentralized Modernities: Art, Politics and Counterculture in the Transatlantic Axis During the Cold War [MoDe(s)]”. His interests lie in art conceptualisms, the transition from modernity to postmodernity—and beyond—, sociology of the arts, network and systems theory, post- and decolonial studies, visual culture and the nexus between art practice and its context. He is also interested in curating and archiving art. He has recently curated the exhibition Tedium Vitae at the gallery ADNplatform as a member of the selected group for the practical phase of the curatorial workshop “On Mediation/2”. He started collaborating with the Arxiu Muntadas more than a year ago. His writings have been recently published in Interartive and will form part of a book published by the University of Granada (Suffering, Repression and Political Censorship in the 21st Century Culture, now in press).