The exhibition Volume!, on view 23 April 2012, which features 350 works by 75 artists, is the first in a series of presentations jointly organised by the two institutions in various cities, all aimed at suggesting different readings of the 5,500 pieces in the new collection.
Latifa Echakhch “À chaque stencil une révolution”, 2007
The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) presents the first collaborative exhibition combining works from the Collection of “la Caixa” Foundation and the MACBA Collection, as a result of an agreement between “la Caixa” Foundation and the MACBA Foundation. Volume! proposes an itinerary running from the sculptural to the acoustic dimension, and emphasising the consolidation of sound and voice as materials for artistic production at the turn of the present century. Included in the itinerary are a series of specific developments that function as separate exhibitions within the Collection. Such is the case in the chronological section of the MACBA Collection, the recently acquired works by Muntadas, Šejla Kamerić and Anri Sala, and the revision of the work of Aleksandr Sokurov.
This initiative provides the ideal framework for investigating one of the Museum’s main avenues of work: the exploration of artistic practices from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Within MACBA’s programming, this idea has fuelled a long-term project based on an organic and open concept of the Collection, which connects the various presentations with the temporary exhibitions. MACBA is interested in expanding the perception of the arts beyond visuality, toward the fields of sound and voice as creative materials. To that aim we have also developed a programme at Radio Web MACBA, online resources, and a variety of activities within our Public Programme.
Volume! proposes an interpretation of the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century based on a paradigm shift in art in terms of materials, sensory aspects and programming. The exhibition questions the clichés that identify the twentieth century as the ‘century of the image’, and the 1980s with the supremacy of painting (the ‘great irony’, as Brian O’Doherty writes in the afterword to his seminal work Inside the White Cube, of ‘a reconfirmation of all that had been laid bare and rejected’). Instead, the exhibition places the pre-eminence of sculpture and photography at the centre of change at the turn of the present century, by rejecting and surpassing the Minimalist principles that had dominated sculpture until the seventies, and, in the case of photography, by going beyond the concept of the document in favour of a new aesthetic dimension.
Volume! identifies the turn of the century as the moment of consolidation of sound and voice as materials for artistic production. The new model is rooted in experimental video and cinema works that favour a narrative language that gradually frees itself from the image. Precedents for this interest can be found, however, in Dadaist phonetic poetry from the early twentieth century, and in the poésie sonore and Lettrist experiments that followed the Second World War. More recently, as well as the reflections of theoreticians such as Roland Barthes and Mladen Dolar, whose contributions steered the visual arts toward an interest in sound, we have had the new technological possibilities for recording, altering and reproducing the voice. The relationship between voice and image, vocal experimentation, the inner voice and the voice of power, are some of the approximations to the human voice that can be found in this exhibition.
Echoing the formal and material innovations introduced by the historic avant-gardes in the early twentieth century, contemporary artistic practice has dethroned the eye as the hegemonic sense and reinstated hearing in a real and contingent body. The white cube, that ‘machine for looking’ associated to an idea of the museum as inherited from the past, is showing its age. The viewers, re-embodied, have acquired a near-choreographic quality and outstripped its limits through a multiplicity of experiences. The three-dimensional nature of the Euclidean volume (from classical physics) has been replaced by the volume of sound and voice. This change in material has worked profound changes on the perceptive system and on behaviour: based on the convention dominated by what is visual, we can begin to narrate a multi-sensorial history of art.
The narrative itinerary proposed by this exhibition has been conceived according to a circular diagram that connects the different Museum levels. From a chronological point of view, the itinerary begins at Level 1, branching out from there in two directions: one leading from the visual space of painting and photography toward sculptural volume, further developed on Level 2; and another leading to acoustic volume, developed mostly on Level 0. Each area contains a series of superimpositions that form the poetic humus of the different narrations and metaphors. – www.macba.cat