“In 1971 Daniel Buren alluded to the economic function of the museum in the following way: ‘The Museum gives a sales value to what it exhibits, has privileged/selected. By preserving or extracting it from the commonplace, the Museum promotes the work socially, thereby assuring its exposure and consumption’ . Reflections on the institutional context in which works of art are displayed have fed an ongoing interest held not only by Buren but also by other exponents of the first wave of Institutional Critique which, in the 1960s and 1970s, sought to subvert the role of the institution by questioning its limits and power relations within the context of the museum.

It is in the light of this allusion to the role of the museum as a generator of value described by Buren in his The Function of the Museum that many of Karmelo Bermejo’s works can be viewed, since they critique the system to spark a discussion about the power games that surround the art work and define its market value. They reference the strategy that has expanded over time to include not only the institution but also the agents of the entire art production system (which has the spectator at one end and the museum director at the other) and which Bermejo uses to articulate a series of pieces that have in common negation, occultation, and non-presence.

A full stop is a punctuation sign that marks the end of a sentence. On its own, as in the title of this exhibition, the full stop implies the annulment of the word, or sequence, that preceded it. Indeed, Bermejo employs negation as a tactic to question conventionalisms or, in this particular case, the rules shaping traditional museum practices. The full stop appears here as something outside the narrative context, and it is in this abstraction that it acquires the format of any other piece, with a place of its own within the scope of the display: the exhibition title.

. (2011) is also the representation of an end. It is the annulment of a narrative, the absence of a beginning, a development and a dénouement. But above all, the full stop is an intervention in a space, a political transgression, the rupture of a conventionalism.

This decontextualisation, together with invisibility, is another of the characteristics recurrent in Bermejo’s work and which are played out in the exhibition space that the artist appropriates in a clear allusion to the ‘phagocytosing’ power of the institution. Museificación. Tarifas de entrada del Guggenheim Bilbao aplicadas al MARCO Vigo (2011) functions as a metaphor of this power and alludes to another of Bermejo’s strategies — self-sabotage — by fixing an admission fee of 13 Euros, which is the price charged by the most expensive museum in Spain. The piece has an element of ‘contribution’, which comes from a series of early works the artist made called Aportación de trabajo gratuito al Grupo Deutsche Bank, Aportación de vigilancia al Museo del Prado, Aportación de ruido al ruido and Aportación de fuel a la Costa da Morte. In this new piece, by fixing an admission fee — entrance is usually free — money is paid into the public coffers.

This performance piece shows the same duality that is present in all of the artist’s works: on the one hand it annuls the exhibition because access to the gallery is blocked, and on the other it represents the artist’s entire oeuvre, by physically and conceptually encompassing all the other works in a built institutional context that modifies the public’s perception of them.

Since its beginnings in the 18th century, the modern museum has rested on the concepts of conservation, acquisition and education. Already since the Renaissance, the museum was conceived as a utopia that encompassed the entire world, like a microcosm of the macrocosm , or like an accumulation of time, a place inside another place, or like a ‘heterotopy’ as Michel Foucault would later describe it . Between the first and second waves of Institutional Critique the object of analysis expanded out from the institution to other spaces, and it is this relationship between the subjects cohabiting within the institution that particularly interests Karmelo Bermejo. Working from the inside, he analyses this orthodoxy that characterised the mission of the museum since its origins and critiques, not without irony, the functions of ideology and representation attributed to it.

By accepting as true all that we see in a museum, the spectator becomes part of the conventional mechanisms of reception of the artistic work, thereby assuming a role that changed with the avant-guards when the artist moved away from the centre of the artistic process and allowed the spectator to step forward. The piece <. Pepita de oro macizo pintada de oro falso (2011) condenses this antagonism between true and false. It addresses the idea of value in an art that ‘always turns the real into a façade, into representation, and into a construction ’. Unpolished gold, as extracted from nature, is confronted with its own representation in a strategy we encounter again in Postcolonial Layer. Pieza arqueológica precolombina proveniente de un expolio, adquirida con dinero público en una subasta europea y cubierta posteriormente con una pátina de falsa antigüedad (2011), where the artist denounces the increase in value that happens to certain archaeological finds with the passing of time.

The exhibition is conceived as a ‘work in layers’; layers which are superposed, erased or complemented through their invisibility. A genuine piece painted over to look (falsely) ancient — a bogus falsification — speaks of how museums can re-set the value of objects; but it also alludes to the decontextualisation characteristic of ‘ready-made retrospectives . Bermejo’s pieces have a transversal quality that suggests multiple meanings as well as a political dimension. In Attachment. Cabeza de toro disecada girada 180º y empotrada en la pared (2008-2011) and - 0. Mástil de bandera girado 180º y clavado en el suelo (2011), two sculptural pieces, the symbols of patriotism in each (the bull’s head and the flagpole) are used in conjunction with a technique of occultation and inversion of symbols, which is also the case of the earlier pieces Escarpias de oro macizo para sujetar obras de arte. Las escarpias quedan ocultas por las obras de arte que sujetan (2009), o Componente interno de la aspiradora del director de un Centro de Arte reemplazado por una réplica de oro macizo con los fondos del Centro que él dirige (2010). Regarding the technique of inversion, Bermejo seeks ‘to break the natural order of automatic understanding and to force the viewer to participate in an event’ , as Joseph Kosuth said about his inverted images known as Cathexis.

Along the same line as the aforementioned piece, in which Ferrán Barenblit’s (director of the CA2M, Madrid) vacuum cleaner was intervened upon and the funds he was responsible for were supplemented as a result of the project, enriching him in the process, is Jacuzzi instalado en el despacho del director con los fondos del Museo que él dirige (2011). Again we encounter the technique of negation, since the public is denied access to the piece and is left to trust the statement that appears on the information card, which is presented in a ‘de-materialised’ way and projected, life-size, on a wall, in a simulacrum of fetish that introduces fiction into the exhibition as well as the concept of physicality and presence/absence. We see the information card’s meaning expanded, for in addition to being something that provides information, it is an intrinsic part of the exhibition, of the construction of the work for Karmelo Bermejo opts to leave the card next to the piece, in the director’s office, and move the projection to the exhibition space.

The irony underlying these works is also present in Transparencia 0. Réplicas en plomo macizo de las obras de arte de la colección personal del director del Museo (2011). Here a series of lead monochrome pieces are made in a foundry using moulds obtained from pieces in the private collection of the institution’s director. The polychrome is eliminated, the image is faded, and with it the work’s authorship is also hidden, as are its value and the director’s personal tastes. In the gallery, the replicas are presented as an accumulation, as booty, without any information to help the visitor form an idea of the individual tastes of the person responsible for choosing which artists and works are to be shown in the museum. A conflict between public and private arises from these strategies of occultation of content and cancels out the pieces’ true value.

Public money is the central pivot of the works 0. Devolución de una subvención del Ministerio de Cultura por no haber realizado ninguna de las obras de arte para las que fue otorgada (2011), and + 0. Abono de los intereses por un año de demora en la devolución de la subvención (2011), both of them consisting of two official documents and two bank documents stating that the artist gave back, after previously accepting, a grant from the Ministry of Culture and assumed the 75.34 Euros incurred through interest rates during the process. Had he rejected the grant he would not have been able to secure the money, and by accepting it he prevented other artists from benefitting from it. An artist’s private space should not be the object of public appreciation until he decides to stop doing the work for which he is paid. Like Bartleby, the writer in the book by Herman Melville, Karmelo Bermejo ‘preferred not to’, not to carry out the work for which the Ministry gave him 2000 Euros. Again the negation, this time as a response to bureaucracy and red tape; it is the same negation that lingers in the air of Bartleby’s office and which permeates Bermejo’s work, in this case because the artist chooses to defy the rules and regulations dictated by the structures of power and remain inactive.

In 1920 Man Ray photographed Marcel Duchamp’s Le grand verre, also known as La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, one of the most commented, disputed and interpreted works of the 20th century. The photograph was taken at a time when Duchamp’s ‘installation’ had already gathered some dust due to a pause in the artist’s productivity when he was busy playing chess. Entitled Élevage de poussière, the photograph can be described as an accumulation of dust reflecting a conscious process going on in Duchamp’s mind: dust as a ready-made. Bartleby’s negation and Duchamp’s deliberate inactivity are equivalent to Bermejo’s absenteeism from work, which, by giving back the grant introduces in his work a reference to the mechanisms of (self-) control in the public sphere of public money.

The public sphere and power relations is where the meaning of - 10.000. 10.000 euros de la Fundación Botín enterrados (2011). The project consists of burying 10,000 Euros, awarded by the Botín Grant for the Plastic Arts, in a public place. Placed inside an airtight box so that the bank notes do not deteriorate, the money is rendered inaccessible and we know of its existence only thanks to a bronze plaque put up at the site of the ‘treasure’. The spectator witnesses the result of an action negated by the impossibility of seeing or verifying it. Like the aforementioned Jacuzzi instalado en el despacho del director con los fondos del Museo que él dirige (2011), it is an Étant donnés with no chance whatever of voyeurism”.

[Extract of the curatorial text for the exhibition catalogue]