An exhibition review -- Your intrepid reporter steps off the griddle-like streets of Madrid to explore the frozen reaches of the latest enormous summer exhibition at the Reina Sofia museum, “Machinations”. It’s a mad mad mad mad world of artistic experiments, built upon the rickety theoretical pretext of Félix Guattari’s theory of machines. 50 artists, 50 chances to freak out.
Another Reina Sofia museum exhibition, another enormous labyrinth of misery, frustration and madness. If in any doubt that these are now ruling aesthetic emotions, "Maquinaciones/Machinations" should dispell it.
I have been defeated before in my struggle to understand and report these museum projects. This time I shall not fail. I re-enter the museum for the third time determined. And get off on the wrong floor. I am in the waiting room of the small show, “Instituto del Tiempo Suspendido”. I sit on a couch. The number 45 is on the light board. Of course no one is there to attend anyone, and the number will never change. It’s an art show….
I won’t try to figure this one out. I am back down the stairs to find my object of study.
The wall text for “Machinations” explains that the show proceeds from ideas developed by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze on “machines”. I read their Anti-Oedipus 40 years ago and didn’t understand the concept. Years later, their 1,000 Plateaus fell from my listless hands. Historiographically the D&G machine idea is derived from Karl Marx’s text “Fragment on Machines”, which dealt with the relation between the worker as human agency and the machine which capital favored to replace them. But radically extended to cover vast realms of subjectivity.
Machines on Wheels
Wall text explains that the exhibition is organized according to Guattari’s idea of “a machination embracing life as a connective synthesis of affects”. There are three “axes” – 1) War Machines, 2) Schizo Machines and 3) Cinema Machines of Care. Most of the 50 artists are from the Mediterranean countries and Africa.
Felix Guattari with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, 1982. A book resulted, "Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics".
As I study more, I find this 4-minute video explaining the theoretical context for the show. It seems so very clear from this, rather like that moment in high school when the teacher led me to actually understand quantum mechanics. Ha.
This framing theory isn’t easy for the non-theoretically inclined person. Even trained political philosophers struggle with D&G’s ideas; there are no simple correlates. (For you who still strive, I link to the full text; actually, I just found another hidden brochure which might be clearer.) Despite all this, "Maquinaciones” is a tremendous show.
The problem with it, as I suggested above, is its breadth and its density at every point. The historical interweavings at every level in almost every work make for a banquet of fruitcakes.
In the first room is Cachorro [“puppy”?], a cart made by the activist architecture group Todo por la Praxis. It’s a kind of portable protest vehicle, used most recently in demonstrations against cuts in public health. TxP worked with the assembly of the Reina’s Museo Situado (the Situated Museum), a program to support the community of Lavapies where the museum is located.
A sign hangs from the cart, #LasFronterasMatan (borders kill). Domestic workers, who used the cart for one campaign, include many migrants.
This kind of vehicle has always charmed me, since I first saw Nils Norman’s “The Gerard Winstanley Radical Gardening Space Reclamation Mobile Field Center and Weather Station Prototype” (1999). TxP has built a fully functional cart which every cadre of a social movement should have to support their actions in the street. Photos on the wall show the cart in action.
Scattered here and there in the exhibition are drawings, “analytical cartographies” from the archive of Guattari. These obscure diagrams we are told are “assemblages that open, work, and machinate” something something. It is certain they would repay study, colored geometrical drawings of the “politics of meaning”, the “politics of experimentation”, “the angle of meaning”, and etc.
Panicked Pulsations
First video stop at this entrance is a banging, slamming video work by the techno sound collective Test Dept, DS30 (2014). This is a kind of imagistic alternative history of mining in the UK. It pulls many images from the 1984-85 miners’ strike broken by rightwing PM Thatcher in a decisive death knell for union power in the neoliberal era.
Formally it’s fast cuts and loud sounds. (Thump thump) industrial ruins (boom boom) brownfield redevelopment (blang trang) striking workers being beaten by cops. The label says, “with each repetition, a difference. And the accumulation of differences leads to a group consciousness.” Hmm.
Punk cultural philosopher Mark Fisher called these "sonic mosaics, pulsing with panic"… “a weaponisation of memories and archives, a mustering of resources for a struggle which could be resumed at any moment.” It’s part of industrial “hauntology”, more threatening to the status quo than mere antiquarian melancholy. A lot of this show plunges us into the past and all its unresolved wrongs. Other works queer our present. Maybe we are still upstairs, in the waiting room of suspended time.
Better there waiting than out on the water, in the Channel or the Mediterranean, striving to reach the fabled European land of missing opportunity. Simon Vega’s cartoon 3rd World Space Module Blueprints seem almost wistful. We might imagine far future generations of high tech migrants trying to break into the big space stations, listening to music, taking drugs, and smuggling whatevers.
The Bonsai Tree of Liberty
Cartooning is a major medium in this first grand room. First we pass Angela Ferreira’s “talk tower”, an Oldenburg-sized loudspeaker, inspired by Gustav Klutsis. The soundtrack of Rádio Voz da Liberdade (2022) is drawn from the little-known solidarity broadcasts between Algerian and Portuguese activists in the 1960s.
The main wall in this room is given over to Efrén Álvarez, Propaganda by the Deed of Remembering the Age of Reason (2023), a “schematic composition, a graphic history of ideology” of art against “capitalist homogenesis”. (Theory is like weeds here, growing in every crack of text – def. bio: "method of reproduction in which each generation resembles the previous generation".)
Enlightenment-era figures meet, one trailing deep roots of enslaved people out of sight
This is brutal humor, colonial history in the mode of Mad magazine’s Sergio Aragones. Albarez shows European civilization as a huge bloody pile including vomiting priests and passive kings which vaults the oceans and forcefully converts the folks in the “Terra nullius” (territory of no one) into a similar bloody ruined pile.
There’s a series of panopticon drawings in Albarez’s wall of visual excess that shows cloacal cycles of the outcomes of philosophies, cartoons about the self-deception of the bourgeois elites, the “redistribution of absolutism” and such.
My favorite, the standout objet trouve which kind of says it all, was the “Bonsai Tree of Liberty”, complete with Phrygian cap on a chopstick pole.
In sum, this is an exegesis of European Enlightenment philosophy which strips its high clothing off to expose pure venality. A banner hung high in the room bears the legend, spoken by a ghostlike priest: “La tierra para quien se la roba” ("The land for those who steal it"). A tiny king kisses his hand.
The Wizard of Benin
Georges Adéagbo’s room-scale installation really confused me. I was delighted to meet the 80+ artist at the press preview, and be able to express my admiration for his work. I spoke first with a young French language journalist who expressed amazement at being the only black press person there. “Welcome to Spain,” I says.
After racing through the huge complex exhibition, I returned to chat with Stephan Köhler, who works with Adéagbo in the Kultur Forum Sud Nord in Hamburg, connecting Europe and Benin, where the artist is from. Köhler told me that the array in the “Machinations” show was in the Shanghai Biennale curated by the activist Raqs Media Collective.
Georges Adeagbo's work "The Revolution and the Revolutions…" at the 2016 Shanghai Biennale
Many things then had to be removed from the show in Shanghai – all mentions of Tibet; a photo of Ai Wei Wei (he has been cut out of the photo in a collaged-in clipping shown in Madrid, but that was not enough for the Chinese censors). As well, Köhler said, numerous items disappeared from the array. Sinister? Or… I can only imagine the vicissitudes of traveling with such a massive array of things.
I taught Georges Adéagbo’s work years ago as one of the clearest examples of conceptual art. It deals with real objects signifying real cultural and political pasts placed on the wallsand which is almost exclusively content arranged on the walls, in vitrines, and on the floor. In Madrid stuff is also placed on a rug.
Adéagbo’s subject matter has been European colonialism, its intellectual artifacts (books and printed materials) mixed with traditional African cultural objects – “art”. His work is like a material mindscape, sparking a myriad of connections. It’s like being inside an exploded library or whatnot store in Africa where everything has been purposively arranged as if in some cheesy magic-driven movie – “I think it’s trying to tell us something”.
The Darkest Room
Exit right, you’re in a room with a shadowy occluded platform. A title on a screen: “The performance will start soon. Please enter the stage”. This installation is built off a film record of the Living Theatre’s performance of Paradise Now, probably the most famous collectively created participatory theater piece in postwar history which toured US & EU in ‘68 (Alexander Tuchaček paradise now - Echoes from the Future, 2019).
Not sure why this is here, except as a type of ‘machination’ which it surely is, and a big inscrutable cool thing, which it also is. Except for a bit ‘o’ history – I recall Judith Malina was raped several times during these performances, a pre-Altamont early inkling that the hippie liberation had a dark underside.
The rest of the room is given over to decolonial art, which for me is the strongest tutelary aspect of “Machinations". Much of it is unsubtly enraged. In this company the elder Adéagbo seems suave and suggestive, able to draw on a settled set of traditions (in Benin) to punctuate his associative panoramas of cultural artifacts.
Many of these artists are grappling with dispossession, either unresolved historical crimes or ongoing assaults in the present day. The postwar question posed by the German philosopher Teodor Adorno, how to make culture in the wake of catastrophe, is starkly present for them.
Works in film, bas relief, video and installation speak to colonialism and its inheritances. It is composed in many different registers, as artists work the archive at multivarious strata, or lock themselves firmly in a personal dreamworld.
This room holds a number of works in film, bas relief, video and installation which speak to African colonialism and its inheritances both north and south.
Filipino artist Cian Dayrit’s heavy tapestries embroidered over period photos printed onto the fabric are dense political cartoons, rough and tough like the 18th century work of James Gillray. The Philippines was colonized by both Spanish and Americans, and indigenous elites picked up the ball. Dayrit has annotated the colonial era images with patches and embroiderings to show the continuities of colonial, corporate and corrupt politicians’ oppressions and exploitations.
Dayrit is an activist. Not for him the irony and humor of Kidlat Tahimik's massive multi-scene colonial anti-monument, "Magellan, Marilyn, Mickey & Fr. Dámaso. 500 Years of Conquistador RockStars" we saw here at the Palacio Cristal in 2021.
Kidlat Tahimik's installation in Madrid, 2021
Sammy Baloji's 2018 work is titled A Blueprint for Toads and Snakes. It's an evocation of a Katangan native company town in the era when the King of Belgium literally owned millions of Congolese. Baloji uses plot maps of the native town and a built stage set in a kind of cynical realism around the era of colonial administration. The set is flanked by two walls of reproductions of period portrait paintings of, one supposes, actual inhabitants of this deep jungle company town.
NEXT: A few more cries for justice, then “Machinations” takes a turn into the asylum, stepping off the train of reason to get truly weird.
Baloji's installation
LINKS
Mark Fisher quotations from “Test Dept: Notes from the Underground” (Ludmilla Andrews, 41:44; 2021)
A documentary about the post-punk music and video group. The doc focuses on the work in the “Machinations” show, DS 30, on the history of the mines of UK’s northeast, and the 1984-85 strike broken by prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKZt98DImsc
Benin-Germany collaborative cultural organization working with Georges Adeagbo
http://www.kulturforumsuednord.org/home.html
Maya Kovskaya, "Propositioning the World: Raqs Media Collective and the Shanghai Biennale", 2016, an interview (from 2016 journal Yishu)
https://criticalcollective.in/ArtistInner2.aspx?Aid=143&Eid=1034
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The Living Theatre’s “Paradise Now” documentation is on YouTube in some kind of edit by someone
Sheldon Rochlin’s documentary on the group, Signals Through The Flames A Living Theater Documentary (1:36; 1983) is likely a better source on LT's work
"Particular attention is given to Paris in 1968 in a performance called "Paradise Now" and the occupation of the Odeon Theatre."
https://archive.org/details/SignalsThroughTheFlamesALivingTheaterDocumentary
Rebecca Anne Proctor, “Biennale Star Cian Dayrit Was One of Dozens of Artists Arrested in the Philippines for Supporting Farmers’ Rights”, June 14, 2022
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/cian-dayrit-arrested-2129854
Congolese artist Sammy Baloji's gallery page links to several interviews
https://www.salpica.es/2020/11/12/sammy-baloji/
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