A text by Iñaki Martínez de Albéniz and Gabriel Villota Toyos, from
Complicidades = Konplizitateak = ComplicitiesThe idea that we will be defending here is that certain contemporary artistic practices, indebted to the conceptual, post-conceptual and/or relational practices of recent times, are loaded with a series of tensions that point towards an interesting and fertile terrain of crossbreeding between what we could describe for now, in a generic and somewhat imprecise way, as “social”, on one side, and purely “aesthetic”, on the other.
Some of these practices, such as those we shall be commenting on in this text, work as a clear example of the potency and tensions arising from these types of performative operation when they are surrounded by an excess of intention. And, in this sense, they are a further example of a process that is becoming a symptom of contemporary art: the urgency of recovering the certainties of interpretation (of hermeneutics) in response to the unbearable ambivalence that is constitutive of every performance, with this recovery running the risk of neutralising what there is of discovery in performance.