Madrid,
Almost fifteen years ago, in 2010, Georges Didi-Huberman curated “ATLAS. How to carry the world on your back?”, a collective focused on Aby Warburg’s legacy in terms of knowledge and critical interpretation of contemporary visual culture; We can now see a continuation of that exhibition in the same center, once again designed by this French philosopher whose studies revolve around the history and theory of images from an aesthetic and philosophical point of view and from the Middle Ages to our time. .
“In the moved air…”, which will later travel to the CCCB in Barcelona, takes its name from a verse by Lorca in the Romance of the moon, moonand precisely the original manuscript of the same begins the exhibition, and with it the reference to the gaze of the child, of those affected by conflicts and migrations: from this approach theoretical and graphic reflections of philosophers and artists are compiled around the evocative power of the images and transformations that emotions can provoke when they transcend the individual to become collective.
We will see that Lorca and his poetic handling of the duende will not be an evanescent presence in the tour, which consists of three hundred pieces by almost half of the artists and that precisely dives, through free associations, into that transition from individual emotion to shock. group or social; Huberman defines the latter as a concatenation of emotions, an event capable of affecting an entire group, an environment, a relationship and not just an isolated psychological subject.
Seven thematic sections structure this circular exhibition, which begins with the Lullaby of the big horse of Shrimp Island background: Childhoods, Thoughts, Faces, Gestures, Places, Policies and again Childhoods; They display paintings, sculptures, installations, audiovisuals or documentation.
When delving into the depth and wonder of childhood’s view of the world, Huberman has resorted to The spirit of the hive by Erice, photographs by Robert Capa and Val del Omar, the film Ten minutes older by Herz Frank, compositions by Frank, Goethe, Goya, Lorca, Miró, Rossellini and even a montage of poems and images by Bertolt Brecht related to the childhood suffering of wars. Along with these children, another protagonist of this section is the moon that the Andalusian poet looked at, continually appealed to in his verses and also in Goethe’s drawings; In fact, Lorca seems to have relied on the German notion of demonic when writing his Leprechaun game and theory from 1933, also in the exhibition, and remembering it, our author is placed here alongside the greatest figures in the history of ideas in Europe, poet-philosophers such as Schiller, Nietzsche and Georges Bataille. From that perspective, duende would be another aesthetic category, linked to the commotion, so difficult to explain, that cante jondo generates.
Graphic, musical, literary, photographic and audiovisual works are linked in this second chapter around thought, the most theoretical of all: the essays of Descartes, Kant or Darwin are associated with the drawings of Charles Le Brun or Lavater. On the one hand, an attempt is made to offer rational explanations to emotions from organizational principles or method rules such as dictionaries, grammars or alphabets; The documents gathered were formulated, in addition to the aforementioned thinkers, by Aristotle, Camper, Comenius, De Irala, De Villafranca, Duchenne de Boulogne, Dumas, Esquirol, García Hidalgo, Gómez, Ignacio de Loyola, Janet, Lersch, Londe, Michel , Richer, Rousselet and Spontone. On the other hand, the chaos and complexity implicit in these feelings, so claimed in Romanticism, is highlighted through texts and images by Bataille, Beethoven, Bergamín, Binswanger, Bruno, Calderón, Deleuze, Erasmus, Freud, Goya, Hegel, Hölderlin, Kant , Kluge, Lacan, Montaigne, Morente, Nietzsche, Nono, Saint-Simon, Scarlatti, Schiller, Spinoza, Warburg or García Lorca himself.
The great stage where these emotions are reflected is the human face, never impassive in the face of pain, madness or sexuality. We will contemplate the faces of “El Chocolate” and Inés Bacán in the photographs of Michel Dieuzaide, two images of mediums by Albert Von Schrenck Notzing or the very silent ones of Auschwitz survivors interviewed in a video by Esther Shalev-Gerz. There will be no shortage of final gestures, through the death masks of Hegel and Nietzsche, or other pieces of this type that crystallized powerful gestures, such as the Masque de Montserrat criant by Julio González. We will enjoy drawings by Picasso, photos of mourners by Franco Pinna, drawings of almost surreal faces by Lorca or very expressive sculptures by Medardo Rosso; we will also discover the mirrors Breath by Oscar Muñoz, in which the viewer can exhale on their reflection to bring the faces of deceased people back to life.
The entire body, in fact, participates in the gestures, which Huberman refers to as fossils in motion. They can also become wind, air and space when giving rise to choreographies and their great vehicle is the hands: we will appreciate it in those of Suse Byk, Nijinksky, Israel Galván, the dancers portrayed by Man Ray or the drawing of the Sevillian bullfighter of, again, Lorca. Automatic gestures, linked to alleged madness or experimentation with psychotropic substances, will be represented by Artaud, Salvador Dalí, Henri Michaux or Unica Zürn; and the section is completed with works by Auguste Rodin, Pedro G. Romero, Kafka, Yves Klein, Oriol Maspons, Bellmer or the recording of Return to rue d’Eoleby Greek filmmaker Maria Kourkouta.
As for the sites, these are not explored in a physical sense, nor as possible containers of objects or experiences, but as critical spaces susceptible to being impregnated with the psychology of the human being, his obsessions and desires; Therefore, as a medium affected by pathos or, according to Huberman, by the moved airs. Two paintings by Miró with a very simplified composition, but vibrant through dots or flashes, coexist with a large canvas by Simon Hantaï, with whom the curator published in the nineties The crash. This author folds and folds the canvases before painting them, so that the support comes into contact with itself; as the philosopher explains, in his case the canvas is a dialectical field, a field agitated by battles that take place everywhere, both in extent and thickness.
This piece contrasts deeply with Fred Sandback’s sculptures with threads, subtle wounds in space, and with the oscillations of fluids, skies, mists and winds to which collected works by Baraduc, Duchamp, Ensor, Fontana, Goethe, Goya, Victor Hugo, Marey, Mercadier, Giusepe Penone, Gerhard Richter, Salmon, Sjöström, Tarr and Trouvé.
In the political chapter, Huberman reminds us that revolutions begin with shocks, often related, as a consequence, to mourning and struggles. We will see photographs, drawings, engravings and film extracts in still and moving images (The Turin Horseby Béla Tarr) about lamentations and mourning, as well as speeches and public events, books, photomontages of image and word, engravings, drawings and films conceived as a response to injustice and pain. Among its creators, Brecht, Capa, Esteva, Goedhart, Goya, Hibakusha (Hiroshima survivors), Jahnsen, Picasso, Pinna, Friedrich, Guareschi, Heartfield, Kollwitz, Masotti, Michel, Pasolini, Rimbaud and Tucholsky.
“In the moved air…” ends with a return to the beginning, to the children who search for their language between the real and the original and who, according to the curator, are disturbed by the presence of ghosts while at the same time they throw around as many goblins as possible. Tree sculptures by Pascal Convert dialogue with drawings by the Guayaki children collected by the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres; We will contemplate testimonies of children affected by various wars and Huberman will defend the option of adopting an ethic with a “minimum of joy.” Returning to Lorca, This laugh today is my laugh from yesterday, my childhood and countryside laugh, my wild laugh, which I will always defend, always until I die.
The liquid terrain of this extensive exhibition is, therefore, that of emotion and the amazed look, hence there is no one who is not its target audience.
“In the moved air…”
NATIONAL MUSEUM REINA SOFÍA ART CENTER. MNCARS
C/ Santa Isabel, 52
Madrid
From November 6, 2024 to March 17, 2025
