- Venue
- The Curve, Barbican
- Location
- London
Former political cartoonist come artist, Damian Ortega is currently presenting an exhibition at Barbican’s The Curve. For 30 days Ortega set himself the challenge of creating a new piece in response to a newspaper story, photograph or image from that day. The work, commissioned by the Barbican, is his first solo exhibition in London since he presented Nine Types of Terrain at White Cube in 2007, and it follows important solo shows at the ICA Boston (2009), and the Centre Pompidou (2008).
For those of us who know Ortega’s previous works such as Cosmic Thing (2002), the aforementioned Nine Types of Terrain or even from his outstanding piece presented at Frieze this year, this exhibition will most likely come as a disappointment.
However, rather than deconstructing and thus de-contextualising the exhibition and before launching into a critical assault of his work, I would like to point out the strengths.
First of all, Ortega chose to align himself with a certain newspaper renowned for its politically impartial views. He then set himself the task of culling stories to create a piece per day. From the outset, the task is close to impossible. Paraphrasing Seth Price, when an artist moves with the times they become part of the general tenor and it is then difficult to find a dissonant or resistant note. This is indeed Ortega’s first downfall.
The second difficulty occurs as a consequence of the first – how do you produce works of equal quality and resonance in such a short period of time? Most likely, you don’t. Some of the pieces presented are simply a visual interpretation of the newspaper article; pieces of artistic comedy value but which by being overly literal do not encourage reflection. In fact, they produce the same response in the spectator as a newspaper article would – distracted interest at most. The works are certainly not “finished sculptures or installations” and pieces like No Link are a bleak aesthetic interpretation of a written piece. Other works are more successful, exploring specific economic and cultural situations within commodity consumption with that touch of irony characteristic of his work.
Unfortunately, as a whole, the exhibition feels disconnected, the quality of the pieces and their relevance is hetereogenous, and the spectator might wonder what the aim of this is. Until now, Ortega was one of those artists whose works were presented with such clarity that they could stand alone, whether in the middle of the biggest art fair or in a white cube. Here, even the best works lack this strength and need the reference of a piece of newspaper.
Given the short period of time in which the works were created, we can appreciate the experimental feel to them, their immediacy as a response to contemporary occurrences. The exhibition then is more of a proposition than a finished presentation – it is clearly a space for experimentation of prototypes for future projects – a sketchbook. How lucky to be funded to use a space like this to sketch out future pieces! However, I haven’t lost faith in the artist’s capacity to reflect on current events, and I believe it will be more interesting to see what comes out of this exercise. Perhaps from works such as Process, which have certain Mexican-ness about them, he will choose to address what I believe is one of the essential aspects of his work – whether it is possible to consider Ortega’s sculptural pursuits of disconnection as representative of Mexican experience. Perhaps there’s too much Berlin-ness in him at the moment.
