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Grey Flag springs from the duty to demonstrate the existence of art as a necessity, as well as our commitment and obligation to society to offer it. We should regard art as the gauge of its civilisation and culture and as such appreciate the practical value of art and the status of the artist as a homo politikon and as a social being who generates an environment of relationships, products and values, an environment that encompasses the aesthetic values of the work of art.
This project brings together a series of posters commissioned from a number of artists that make reference to the world of art itself, its ideas and circumstances, in every instance treated with a certain sense of humour, irony or sarcasm.
The title of the project, Grey Flag, is based on a derivation of Black Flag, the British anarchist paper, and white flag, the flag of surrender, thereby reviving the anarchistic attitude and aesthetic and combining it with the need to see every possible scale of grey, especially in the light of the current economic, political and moral crisis.
The posters in Grey Flag Programme, with asurface of 100 square meters each, are exhibited on the façade of ARTIUM's West Wing edifice. Two posters are on show at a time.
Curator: Blanca de la Torre
With the support of Mario Legorburu
Kepa Garraza (Berango, 1979). Sin título 1 (The Need for Art)
This artist's pictorial work employs a deliberate literality to posit a reflection on the realm of art and its role in society. Based on a solid immediacy, Garraza uses meta-language to question the processes whereby institutions legitimise themselves and to ironically discuss their hegemonic discourses, as well as the structural fragility that reflects the state of a society in permanent crisis.
Using devices such as appropriation, self-portraiture and clichés—on this occasion the artist himself facing an empty frame in what seems to be an exhibition room in a museum—he comments wryly on the iconic nature and the fetishizing of the artwork and the mechanisms that shape official tastes.
Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa (San Sebastián, 1963). Reeducation
This artist's work is structured around the permanent questioning of reality and the channels through which it is staged, in other words, culture and its media. The numerous readings of his works, in which words play a prominent part, add to the irony of a series of depictions that defy a single interpretation.
On this occasion, the scene features a bulldog, an obedient and tractable animal par excellence, standing in a solemn posture and wearing a collar bearing the word “re-education”. As a backdrop, fairground banners repeat the word in Basque, Spanish and (berriz hezi, reeducación, reeducation). This concept calls to mind the Cultural Revolution, which advocated the re-education of the entire population of China. Under the guise of ‘re-education', Mao sent millions of university graduates to rural areas to learn from the peasants, who were now responsible for teaching the people.
The background party aesthetic provides a playful touch to the scene, while at the same time emphasising the need for us to cast aside certain socio-cultural legacies and to remain in an ongoing process of re-education.
Laurina Paperina (Rovereto, Italy, 1980). Art Is Dead
The predominant feature of Laurina Paperina's work is her caustic sense of humour bordering on the macabre and tinged with a certain naivety. The protagonists of her works are characters drawn from popular culture – television, cinema, music and especially the art world itself – creating fictions on various formats such as cardboard, wood, canvas, paper and even video animation.
The art world is portrayed by the artist with large doses of irony, subverting its codes and playing with the absurd in order to deconstruct the discourses of some of the biggest names in the contemporary art world.
On this occasion, Paperina has used Arthur C. Danto's now legendary phrase “the end of art” to create a mock class graduation photo portraying the cadaverous faces of famous artists.
The theory of the supposed “end of art” in the contemporary world, based on Hegel's Aesthetics, has served the artist to ironize dramatically about the figure of the artist and the role of art today, especially in these turbulent times around us. Her aim is to appeal to the viewer's consciousness and suggest, as Danto himself did, that it is indeed definitely time for change.
Artemio (Mexico City, 1976). Bandera pirata
The work of Artemio (Mexico City, 1976) revolves around questioning the discursive dogmatism found in issues such as violence, war or the art world itself. Artemio uses cynicism and caustic humour to reflect on the manipulation of the mass media, from which he appropriates elements in all its categories (television, film, advertising...) to expose its vacuity and euphemistic content, with the aim of showing that how something is said is as crucial as what is said.
On this occasion, he has created a pirate flag by appropriating certain all too familiar codes from various artists in the star system, such as Murakami's eyes, Jeff Koons's dog or Damien Hirst's and Gabriel Orozco's skulls. With this work, he once again comments on power structures, the media and violence, noting how the art world has neither been spared from the strategy of appropriation ever since it assimilated the same industrialisation processes.
“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination.” (Jim Jarmusch).
2012 July to December
Francesc Ruiz (Barcelona, 1971)
Francesc Ruiz works essentially in the realm of drawing, which he gives expression to by employing first and foremost the language of comics, posters and cartoon strips. From this starting point, he develops a series of germane tales which, in their seeming everyday simplicity, reflect a satirical gaze at all kinds of social problems.
Ruiz thus straddles both ‘high-brow' and ‘low-brow' culture—as they are perversely termed—which come together with strategies deriving from Situationism and conceptual art in a kind of ‘expanded comic' to redraw an ironic narration of the context in which we dwell.
In this instance, he takes as his basis two phenomena related to memes, registers of information passed from one mind to another or between different generations. The first of these is rage comics, which are currently on the rise and which came into being spontaneously, generated by a host of cybernauts in various forums. The second is the smiley, one of the first memes of the pre-Internet era which he has revived. Popular in the 1970s, it was synonymous with ‘good vibes' and reappeared in a new version in the late 1980s with acid house.
The artist confronts us with "good vibes" faces and "bad vibes" faces, the latter of which are a reference to the present day. The relationship between them is connected to keeping up appearances, decorum and manners at a time when they are of questionable relevance.
Ruth Gómez (Valladolid, 1976). Another Reality Is Possible
Ruth Gómez's work is a reaction to contemporary everyday scenes. The animated stories she creates reflect firstly on the human condition and secondly on forms of escapism through fantasy. It is an extension of her own experience that could be ours and on occasions takes the form of shared projections in which reality and fiction are interblended.
Her images, noted for their dynamism and her highly individual use of colour, are influenced by classical drawing, Pop art and Japanese anime. They are the product of a complex mesh of lines and dots that imbue the digital media employed with pictorial qualities.
For Grey Flag, she has designed a work containing references to graffiti and the aesthetics of murals, in which we are suddenly transported from an uncomfortable place, such as today's, to another that is very different, another possible world. She thus offers a nonconformist response to a set of circumstances by representing a rejection and longing at the same time. She also speaks to us of the usefulness of art as this liberating vehicle, one that enables us to imagine other truths.