TLALAATALA Artista / Artist: José Luis Castillejo (Sevilla, 1930 - Houston, 2014) Comisariado / Curatorship: Henar Rivière, Manuel Olveira
Fechas / Dates: 17 de febrero - 27 de mayo, 2018 February 17 – May 27, 2018 Sala / Hall: 2
Coordinación / Coordination: Helena López Camacho
Co-producido con / Co-produced by:
Portada / Cover: José Luis Castillejo. The Book of Letters (2010). (detalle / detail).
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José Luis Castillejo (Seville, 1930 - Houston, 2014) was an experimental writer or, as he preferred to call himself, a modern writer; in any case, a key artist for understanding the complex expanded field now formed by contemporary writing and its connection with other artistic spheres like painting. If there is one word that defines the work of Castillejo that is exceptionality. His art was exceptional, both from the point of view of the objectives he pursued and from that of the means he employed. Exceptional too were his results, and exceptional is the present state of his reception. His objectives can be summed up in his attempt to comprehend the meaning of reality, and by extension, of freedom. His medium was writing, understood as an independent art capable of transcending reality through its inherent qualities. The result is a highly original oeuvre: Castillejo was the only exponent of his own school that was directly connected with the most cutting-edge developments in art and thought, and played an essential role in the progression of experimental writing in Spain. As regards its reception, his oeuvre is appreciated in specialised circles and is surrounded by an almost mystical halo, and yet is practically unknown to the general public. Even for those who are familiar with it, most of his production is still a mystery: the number of books he published is minimal compared to those he did not publish, which have hitherto been seen by very few eyes. For all these reasons, a retrospective show of Castillejo’s work is a genuine historical need. Co-produced by MUSAC in León, CAAC in Seville and the Archivo Lafuente in Santander, the show responds to the need of programming a series of exhibition projects that explore the expansion of the limits of art thanks to the hybridisation of writing and the visual, musical and performative arts from the second half of the twentieth century onwards. In the mid-sixties and linking up with the international trend of so-called intermedia art, a number of initiatives in Spain tried to overcome the traditional division of art into disciplines (painting, music, sculpture, etc.). The fusion of these gave way to new artistic practices such as Action Art, Conceptual Art or Sound Art. In this experimental context, halfway between the neo-avant-garde and postmodernism, the role of writing proved fundamental. Phenomena like concrete poetry, graphic notation and gesture painting had helped liberate it from its traditional servitude to the expression of content, and new investigations would explore in greater depth its materiality, the actual entity of words, letters and signs, and the performative dimension of reading and writing. Castillejo’s connection with Zaj art group is the most paradigmatic Spanish example of the role writing played in shaping postmodernism around the world. Founded in 1964, Zaj was an important and pioneering
JOSÉ LUIS CASTILLEJO AND MODERN WRITING
initiative in the field of new artistic experimentation in Spain and, along with Juan Hidalgo, Walter Marchetti and Esther Ferrer, Castillejo would be one of the movement’s most active members. His encounter with Zaj took place in 1966 when, aged 36, he was already a collector, an art critic and an essayist of international renown. His first creative book was also the first Zaj book, La caída del avión en el terreno baldío (1967), which was followed by Hidalgo’s El viaje a Argel (1967), Castillejo’s La política (1968) and Walter Marchetti’s Arpocratesedutosul loto (1968). Very soon, however, Castillejo set out to explore an individual path characterised by extreme freedom, and consequently his art became difficult to classify. Although his work has been catalogued for posterity in the field of intermedia art as a forerunner of postmodernism, he rejected these categories and advocated writing that was modern in the strictest sense of the term; in other words, pure writing that, far from merging into the other arts, was self-generated, derived from its own specific dynamics as an artistic medium and played with its essential elements —letters, books, ink, signs, etc. This is the sense in which we should understand the connection between his work and painting. Highly influenced by his friend, American art critic Clement Greenberg, Castillejo considered painting the ‘experimental art’ ofthe modern age and an example to be followed in the search for the independence of writing. Castillejo’s foundational book of modern writing was The Book of I’s (1969), which was followed by publications such as The Book of Eighteen Letters (1972), El libro de la letra (1973), El libro de la J (1999), TLALAATALA (2001) and Ventanas (2012). This modest list is only the tip of the iceberg of a much longer series of unpublished titles, most of which are shown in this exhibition for the first time — El libro del trío (1972), El libro de las consonantes (1972), El libro de los rincones (1975), El libro de los errores (1975-1976) and, more recently, The Fall of Constantinople (2009), Maldoror: La caligrafía del mal (2011) and El escritor (2013), to name but a few. This first retrospective dedicated to the artist presents his oeuvre from the early stages of his career as a member of Zaj to his latest years. The objective is double: revising the response to his work and preparing for a historical assessment of it. This assessment is an essential contribution to the history – as yet only partially written – of experimental writing, and of other connected artistic practices in Spain. The exhibition is accompanied by a book that, under the same title of the show, contains an extensive illustrated catalogue of works and essays by several authors (Ediciones La Bahía, 2018) and by a facsimile of the artist’s The Book of Letters (2010).
17.02.18 - 27.05.18
TLALAATALA JOSÉ LUIS CASTILLEJO Y LA ESCRITURA MODERNA
JOSÉ LUIS CASTILLEJO AND MODERN WRITING
SALA 2