The CITY CENTER OF MADRID and its surroundings constitute a space densely populated with different contemporary artistic manifestations. Contemporary art, being an expression of the complex implications of today's society, has not always been able to involve citizens in the communication it seeks to establish. On many occasions he has been accused of "closing himself in his ivory tower" and frequently resorts to circular approaches and hermetic reflections that keep the bulk of the population away. The possible causes of this secrecy are varied and some of them were noted in previous articles. The opposite, however, is also true. There are certain contemporary artistic manifestations with a genuine communicative vocation, but as they belong to a field whose predominant image is that of its impenetrability, these other proposals are contaminated by the dominant image.
This is the case, for example, of the mutant installation on display in the LAPIEZA gallery. It is a space devoted to open communication with the community in which it is located. A space without elitist pretensions, which strives to spread a different concept of contemporary art than the one popularized by major art events, always linked to scandalous budgets that discredit them. A space, whose proposals include visitors in different ways, either through their participation in the 'performances' they organize or through their involvement in the socio-plastic actions they propose, or simply through participatory and/or reflective inclusion in the changing series. of the installation that is constantly displayed in the room. One of the advantages of this space, and its cumulative and mutant installation format, is that since it is made up of an endless number of proposals, they exert a powerful enhancing effect on the experience. One of the possible experiences is the perception of certain aesthetics of resistance.
What are resistance aesthetics?
We consider aesthetics of resistance to those proposals that support narratives that are opposed to some extent to the hegemonic or dominant discourse, through the use of plastic strategies that explore different forms of communication. The environment of LAPIEZA, in itself, is already an aesthetic proposal of resistance, at least as regards its relational narrative, and the radical contrast it offers with respect to other 'art gallery' models. But in addition, its specificity in relation to the formal languages that it favors (which is manifested in the type of art that it "exhibits"), also constitutes a certain aesthetic of resistance, since it allies itself with some historical avant-garde discourses with evident implications "of resistance” (from dadaism and constructivism to situationism).
But in addition, already within the installation, in the field of particular proposals, plastic forms of communication predominate (that is, messages) that also refer to narratives that resist what we commonly take for granted. In this context, those aesthetics that imply procedures contrary to those most requested or valued can be considered critical. Thus, the accumulation procedures oppose the dominant dynamics of rapid replacement and increasingly shorter useful life, while the aesthetic 'do it yourself' D.I.Y. (do it yourself) resists the characteristic finishes of elitist design and inaccessible exclusive consumer goods. The 'work in progress' strategy, in addition to misrepresenting the mercantilist logic of the finished product ready for consumption, favors the process over the result, in those cases in which the result is conceived as a separate product artificially from the mechanisms of production. In this sense, many of the goods that are consumed in the globalized environment are presented to us in such a way that they hide the cruel and unfair processes that sustain them. In this context, looking for an aspect that is openly unfinished, in all senses (unfinished as not finished and in progress, unfinished as not finished by luxury processes that give elitist properties to objects, unfinished as lacking a closed meaning, etc.) , acquires dimensions of aesthetics of resistance by challenging various conventions related to valuable merchandise, that aesthetic that justifies the overvaluation of the price, which increases the difference between use value and exchange value.
In the same way as accumulation, reuse also challenges the obsolescence on which the growing production of merchandise is based, a material base that determines the entire system of consumerism and that ultimately generates disastrous socioeconomic repercussions. Reuse not only lengthens the permanence of objects as a way of combating obsolescence, it also reinserts into the system signs that have been prematurely excluded, and their reuse maximizes their communicative capacity. This 'semi-nautical' facet of aesthetics, its ability to open up new avenues of meaning that interconnect signs that remained isolated from each other, is in itself also a resistance against rigid and univocal meanings, against the preconfigured and immutable meanings of hegemonic discourses. . The semionautical processes of reuse lead to important resignifications when it comes to establishing resistance discourses from the available elements, understanding that only those elements that the hegemonic discourse tolerates are available, even when it tolerates them only because it uses them for the elaboration. of his own speech. The resistant discourse is elaborated from the same signs as the hegemonic, but it elaborates alternative meanings for the same signs.
Installation in LAPIEZA that acts as a gigantic hypertext
In this same sense of resignification of elements of the hegemonic discourse, aesthetics derived from contemporary phenomena such as hypertext or the metaphor of networks also operate. Other phenomena are univocally resistant, although the dominant discourse can use them for its own purposes of hegemony. These are aesthetics based on the concept of open source or assembly community.
In this way, LAPIEZA, both in its installation set and in its individual proposals, generally constitutes an accumulation based on largely reused materials, in which the characteristic finish of the D.I.Y. aesthetic predominates, when developing complex processes. semionautics of relationship between different signs that are reinserted in the installation as a whole, which in turn remains continuously in an open process of work, and therefore unfinished and ready to continue incorporating meanings and communicative material. Thus, the installation functions as a gigantic hypertext, a message riddled with references and links that refer to other "texts" such as performances, PALMA CENTRAL events, and more distant links that address different aspects of our culture such as the concept of art, the democratization of creativity, neighborhood relations, and ultimately the possibility of art to contribute to renegotiating the common. LAPIEZA works, therefore, as a gigantic representation of one of the most hopeful cultural productions of today's society, open source. Open to participation and collective renegotiation of the meanings of what is common to all.
