“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’1. 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) [Museification. Admission Fees of the
Guggenheim Bilbao Imposed on MARCO Vigo] 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 macrocosm2, or like an
accumulation of time, a place inside another place, or like a ‘heterotopy’ as Michel Foucault would
later describe it 3. 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 avantguards 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) [<. Solid Gold Nugget Painted in False Gold] 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 construction4’. 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) [Postcolonial Layer. Pillaged Pre-Columbian Artefact Acquired with Public Money at a European Auction, Subsequently Covered in a Patina of Fake Antiquity], 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 retrospectives5. 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) [Attachment. Stuffed Bull’s Head Turned 180º and Embedded in a Wall] and - 0. Mástil de bandera girado 180º y clavado en el suelo (2011) [- 0. Flagpole Turned 180º and Stuck to the Ground], 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

1 Daniel Buren, The Function of the Museum, 1971

2 Andrew McClellan, The Art Museum. From Boullée to Bilbao, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 2008, p. 16

3 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, Routledge, London, New York, 2006, p. 1

4 Mike Kelley cited by Nicolas Bourriaud in Postproducción, Adriana Hidalgo editor, Buenos Aires, 2007, p. 48

5 Karmelo Bermejo in conversation with the curators