One of the programming pursuits of MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo, is the organisation of "thesis" or "theme" exhibitions, which are generally collective and multidisciplinary, national and international. This intended series, displayed on the main floor of the museum, started with the inaugural showing entitled "Cardinales" and is now continued with the setting up of "Melodrama. The latter has been already showed at Artium (Vitoria), as its inaugural exhibition, as well as at Centro José Guerrero (Granada).
"Melodrama", as in "exteriorisation and exaggeration of feelings", has become the central motif of many present-day artists. The logical and distant approach of conceptual art during the seventies and sixties and the more historical and sociological interest which dominated contemporary art until the late eighties were replaced in the nineties by a growing appreciation of feelings.
Melodrama is an exhibition which reflects that attitude. 34 artists participate in it, people working in different fields of creation and using different media: painting, sculpture, photography, video and installations. They are not all melodramatic by choice, intention or judgement; but they all recognise the possibilities of the genre, whether it be through affinity or through a critical or ironic process, they consciously use melodramatic techniques in order to reach their goals.
A brief look at the historical background
Melodrama first appeared in France and England, and took on its specific characteristics after the French Revolution and the start of the Industrial Revolution. Before that time, only official theatres could make use of speech in their shows. The other theatres, closer to the emerging middle and working classes, started resorting to the exaggeration of gestures and the abundance of tunes and stunts in order to compensate for the want, which materialised in a new dramatic language. In spite of these new times, these expressive resources had been so successful that their aesthetics of excess were never abandoned.
The melodramatic look
Melodrama, as a genre, established a repertoire of types (the hero, the heroine, the villain), of codified gestures (exaggerated grief and mirth) and of stereotypical messages (the happy ending, good and evil); This aesthetic, to sum up, was adopted by the cinema industry, publicity, television an the mass media. In this way, different semiotics intrinsic to each one of these media which, in turn, constitute a rich linguistic repertoire for current plastic artists. Nowadays, as there is no border between good and bad taste, numerous creators explore in their work the aesthetic of melodrama and look into its procedures.
Submersed in a sea of audio-visual stimuli, stunned by the impact of messages globally cast by the mass media and the entertainment industry, these artists are very aware of the fact that what was said in a self-contained fashion before, must now be expressed "in style". Exaggeration of feeling is a central motif to many of them, as are the attempts to emphasise the "I" and to find a deeper meaning in an alienated world deprived of the idea of the sacred.
Some of the keys or epigraphs which will help us understand better the contribution of each one of the pieces to the exhibition's discourse are as follows:
- Melodramatic nature (which pieces such as Robert Longo's or Stuart Klipper's)
- Melodrama and cinema (Tracey Moffat, Farra Bajull)
- Melodrama and TV (Julian Rosefeldt, Christian Jankowski)
- Melodrama and music (Vasco Araujo, Natalie Melikian)
- The innards of melodrama (John Isaacs, Sue de Beer & Laura Parnes, Bryan Crockett)
- The aesthetic of excess (Liza Lou, Wim Delvoye, Francesco Vezzoli)