Presenting:
Perception and Warnings, 2019,
color, sound, 5’31
Arthub is so honored to present Antoni Muntadas’s video work Perception and Warnings, which gathers two of the main Muntadas work lines: Sub-senses and On Translation: Warning. The installation summarizes the universe of his artistic practice where images are used to talk about ideas. Stickers alert the audiences to the need to get involved and the screens warn about the importance of using our whole nature: reasoning, emotion and sensorial perception. All this keeping in mind the significance of sub-senses as taste, smell and touch, and not only sight and hearing, in which the artistic experience has been usually focused.
In the occasion of online screening and Exhibition on the Table project, we have also invited curator and cultural researcher Esteban Andueza to write an article about the “senses” and “sub-senses” behind the video work.
The Metabolism of Perception
Text/Esteban Andueza
Encouraging public involvement is probably the main goal that Muntadas considers for his projects, whatever the nature of the project (artistic, editorial, educational, documentary, etc.). About Warning: Perception Requires Involvement, we could say it’s the leitmotiv that perfectly embodies the Muntadas practice. It’s his manifesto from which he has conducted for years all kind of interventions in public sphere around the world, by translating the message into a diverse range of languages and reproducing in all imaginable formats and supports.
The Muntadas Warning keeps a curious parallelism with the slogans that authoritarian government uses for communicating the propaganda speech since it came to power. Analogies are obvious: a white letter legible sentence on red background; like a publicity message shows up on citizens’ transit to grant them a mandate and request their involvement. However, while in some government’s slogans the mandate appeals to the civilizing spirit in order to create community and the goal of the involvement is aimed to guarantee harmony and social order, in the case of the Muntadas Warning the mandate appeals to the attitude, perception and determination of the individual, and the goal of the involvement is aimed to take part critically, actively and consciously of what senses perceive and conscience translates.
Therefore, the Muntadas Warning has little to do with an imposed discourse, nor a military order, a warning of danger nor commercial propaganda, even though it seems like it, but rather with the radical subversion of all these, and for activating it needs the digestion of the message with our whole rational, emotional and sensorial system in order to start up the metabolism of perception.
Or could be the contrary? Might be the metabolization of what we perceive through the senses which starts up our rational and emotional intelligence? What is in fact the cause and what is the effect?
Perception and Warnings gathers two of the main Muntadas work lines: Sub-senses and On Translation: Warning. The installation summarizes the universe of his artistic practice where images are used to talk about ideas. Stickers alert the audiences to the need to get involved and the screens warn about the importance of using our whole nature: reasoning, emotion and sensorial perception. All this keeping in mind the significance of sub-senses as taste, smell and touch, and not only sight and hearing, in which the artistic experience has been usually focused.
The proposition tries to offer the opportunity to all the senses and enhances touch, taste and smell with the intention of offering the possibility of creating a new aesthetic to which Muntadas refers when talks about sub-senses.
About artist
Muntadas (Barcelona, 1942), lives and works in in NYC but he has developed his works in diverse places around the world. As a multidisciplinary artist, by his works he analyses social institutions, the mechanisms of power that sustain them and the influence they exert on the creation of the collective imagination. Muntadas is interested in topics such as censorship, the mass media, the public and private spheres, and the role of art as a contemporary phenomenon. His projects are presented in diverse media: photography, video, internet, publications and urban interventions. His multimedia works and installations investigate how in present times information channels are used to promote or censor ideas.
His projects have been exhibited in museums such as The MoMa, Guggenhein of New York, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro, Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, and among others. He has selected participant on international events such as Documenta Kassel, and the Venice Biennale. Besides he has received several international prizes and grants, including those of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas 2005, and Premio Velázquez de las Artes Plásticas 2009 granted by the Spanish Ministry of Culture. His works has been collected by all the museums where have been showed, but also by other prestigious public and private collections.
Muntadas was Professor of MIT in Cambridge for more than 30 years. He has taught and directed seminars at diverse institutions throughout Europe, the United States, Latin America and China. He has also been welcomed as a resident artist and consulting advisor by various prestigious research and education centres on the world. Currently is Professor at the Instituto Universitario de Arquitectura del Veneto in Venice. Recent solo shows in China are Muntadas Video Works in OCAT Shanghai in 2017 and Asian Protocols in Three Shadows Photography Art Center of Beijing in 2018.
About the writer
Esteban Andueza (Pamplona, Spain 1966) is a cultural manager and independent curator experienced in cultural exchange between China and Spain. BA in Oriental Studies and MA in Research and Management of Contemporary Art, he lives in Beijing since 2007 and has been involved in the development and organization of cultural projects for public institutions, museums and art centers for over 10 years.
He organized and co-curated the exhibition Muntadas Video Works for OCAT Shanghai in 2017, and Muntadas Asian Protocols, at Three Shadows Photography Art Center, Beijing in 2018.
