Art and Politics at the End of Franco’s dictatorship In the Spain of the 1970s, art became an environment for political demands that could not be expressed elsewhere. New forms of intervention in the public sphere took the place of the collapsing experimental art as represented by the Encuentros de Pamplona (1972). The urgent need to create independent spaces for argument and discussion was reflected in the collective work of artists in Barcelona and Madrid, as Spanish society’s growing political activity began the journey towards the Transition. The new styles of artistic behaviour and the collective initiatives that had developed during the final years of Franco’s regime lost their critical support and underwent a gradual process of disintegration.
New acquisitions
The Catalan group stayed in frequent contact with artists from the Madrid art scene such as Alberto Corazón (1942). Plaza Mayor. Análisis de un espacio (Plaza Mayor, Analysis of a Space, 1970-1974), documents human movement in Madrid’s central Plaza Mayor, taking photographs at fixed intervals to explore the behaviour patterns of human groups moving around the public space, thereby eliminating the subjectivity of the camera and turning it into a kind of collective performance. The process of Transition continued, and once the Constitution was approved (1978) there was a widespread deactivating of general militancy, and a weakening of political objectives.
Colita. Serie Antifémina, 1975/2011 Colita. Serie Manifestaciones, 1978/2011 Colita. Serie Autolesionados de la COPEL, 1978/2011 Alberto Corazón. Plaza Mayor, análisis de un espacio, 1970-1974 Alberto Corazón. 18 de julio. Iconografía de un dictador, 1976 Grup de Treball. Recorreguts, 1973 Concha Jerez. Seguimiento de una noticia, 1977 Col·lectiu Video-Nou/Servei de Vídeo Comunitari. Jornades Llibertàries Internacionals. Parc Güell, 1977 Col·lectiu Video-Nou/Servei de Vídeo Comunitari. Jornades Llibertàries Internacionals. Debats al Saló Diana, 1977 Archivo Galería Redor
NIPO 036-14-019-5
The activity of the Grup de Treball (1973-1975) is paradigmatic here for the way it began a materialist-based critical analysis of the political, social and cultural situation. Adapting conceptual art tools (dictionary definitions, documentation from photographs and photocopies, theoretical essays and so on), the group brought together a number of artists united in their rejection of financial structures and repression of civil liberties, and by a desire for the democratization and demystification of artistic practices. A good illustration of these practices is the collective work Recorreguts (Journeys, 1973), which follows members of the group to jail and documents the names of the prisoners that they were incarcerated with. In a similar vein, in Homenatge a l’home del carrer (Homage to the Man in the Street, 1977), Grup de Treball member Francesc Abad (1944) runs through an archive of pictures and testimonies by people subjected to torture by the state. This need to document is echoed in the photographs by Colita (1940), which captured Barcelona’s public reality (from the recent female presence to violent police charges), and in the political documentation of Pere Portabella (1929) in Informe General sobre unas cuestiones de interés para una proyección pública (General Report on some Questions of Interest for a Public Projection, 1976). The flow of information about social reality would become the absorbing interest of collectives like Video-Nou and the Colectivo de Cine de Madrid.
Bibliography AA.VV. Grup de Treball. Barcelona: MACBA, 1999. Corbeira, Darío; Expósito, Marcelo. “Entrevista con Simón Marchán”, en Carrillo, Jesús (ed.). Desacuerdos 1. Sobre arte, políticas y esfera pública en el Estado español. Barcelona, San Sebastián, Sevilla: MACBA, Arteleku, UNIA, 2004. Parcerisas, Pilar. Conceptualismo(s) poéticos, políticos y periféricos. En torno al arte conceptual en España, 1964-1980. Madrid: Akal, 2007. Parreño, José María. El arte comprometido en España en los años 70 y 80. Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1995. Selles, Narcís. Art, política i societat en la derogació del franquisme. Girona: Llibres del Segle, 1999.