‘On the intervention in the Espazo Anexo of the MARCO, Vigo'
"A certain R. Mutt - a pseudonym of Marcel Duchamp - introduced an industrially manufactured and commonly used object into the space where objects have no use, or, at least, into the space where their functions are more ambiguous. Only nine years after a century has elapsed since the French artist made this gesture, the limits and boundaries that mark out said uses or disuses have become increasingly blurred and more and more frequently the spectator has become an active element in the realisation, form and narrative of each artistic proposal.
The spaces used for the display of artistic objects absorb a wide range of appliances, often borrowed from the sphere of functional everyday life. These objects end up losing their original function as they come to occupy the boundary between art and life. They form part of a series of objects laid out to be discerned, interpreted and ultimately consumed. These frontiers, though ever at the mercy of the fine threads managed by the art institution, delimit a new field of meaning and set up a dialogue with the spectator.
The interplay of decontextualisation and contextualisation has yielded many of the greatest works of art of last century. Regarding the case concerning us here, the vehicles and the artistic space (Espazo Anexo) throw up several questions about the spectator. The object/context binomial of art proposes a found situation and a new way of positing movables/immovables that are worthy of themselves and of their functions. Such interrelation and confusion of contexts has generated debate concerning the apparent contradiction between visual and environmental situations.
Citroën's C4 Picasso cars, which are manufactured for the world market in the city of Vigo, lie embedded in the walls of the Espazo Anexo, appearing to the spectator to be part of a ‘frozen' action. This suspension in time of a simulated action is intended as a pause; a moment of reflection on the action itself.
Objects half way between art and the public space, seen by the passer-by as cars and by the visitor as decontextualised objects. Suitably signed by the artist who has become an archetype of the contemporary artist of popular culture. More than an appropriation, this is a re-appropriation enacted on three levels: of popular culture, the French car manufacturer, and the intervention in the Annex.
The art work's temporary occupation of both the urban space and the museum space invites the spectator to participate in its development. The installation's initially urban narrative, shaped by its location in a relatively busy part of the city, develops towards its final resolution inside the MARCO's Espazo Anexo. Inevitably, it provides a reflection on the natures of both contexts while shaping an entirely new arena of understanding between movables and immovables. Both intervening elements become the subject and the verb of a dialogue between spectator and spectacle.
The relational space between objects, the city, and the art institution modifies the work by distancing it from the realm of found objects and bringing it into that of encountered situations. These three factors thus interact, not in the manner dictated by urban intervention and its recent past in the dialectics of the monument, but in a more democratic way. In this case the city and the museum are objects in constant narrative permutation, open to the spectator's interpretation.
The city of Vigo has both witnessed and protagonised the changes occurred in the spheres of culture and industry in recent decades. A hive of productivity and constructional creativity right across the spectrum. The proposal conceived for the Espazo Anexo aspires to make a humble contribution from the art world to the debate on the future of cities and their inhabitants".
Suso Fandiño, October 2008