The Artist-Connector, Manuel Borja-Villel

The Artist-Connector

Manuel Borja-Villel

Over the last few decades, there has been a proliferation of artistic practices based on the concept of community, the defense of the local, multidisciplinary creation, working with the archive, and activist assemblage. But in the tension between rupture and self-absorption that has taken hold in contemporary art since the middle of the twentieth century, these practices have often ended up functioning as preestablished positions stripped of their original critical power. One of our main reasons for presenting this retrospective exhibition—although as we shall see, this is not an entirely apt description of what we aspire to in Versifying Machines—is precisely Pedro G. Romero’s ability to work with all these elements while maintaining a political, methodological, and discursive complexity that allows him to circumvent this loss of critical power. Active as an artist since the mid-s, Romero has developed a particular way of making/doing art that is radically “ex-centric” in its heterodoxy and its peripheral condition and intent, and that incorporates collective participation organically, in the sense that it accepts and integrates participatory dynamics and particularities. In his projects, collaborative work and an interdisciplinary approach are constituent elements rather than instrumental strategies or mere tools for (self-)legitimization. And he himself does not settle into a predefi ned position, but dialogues and openly negotiates with the very diverse agents with whose collaboration he carries them out. As such, Romero avoids falling into a sense of security, as sometimes happens with creators who work in the realm of community without bringing about any kind of real shift that would allow them to abandon and move beyond their role as artists. On the other hand, the vernacular also plays a key role in Pedro G. Romero’s practice, which absorbs and explores a certain popular tradition—“that of folk singers and fl amenco”— which has a distinct, albeit fl exible, territorial dimension and is inseparable from his own personal history. The growing trend in contemporary art of generating projects rooted in local contexts, which call for a sort of politics of proximity, all too often ends up giving rise to a certain reactionary logic. This is not the case in Romero’s work because his focus on the vernacular over considerations of identity is based on a defense of jargon (of the notion of jargon itself, not of a particular jargon), in other words, of a way of speaking that evades the normative and deliberately situates itself on the margins, in a position of voluntary clandestinity. Pedro G. Romero’s critical recovery of the vernacular entails a radical contestation of modernity itself. And thus also of the colonial machinery. It is a machinery that began to take shape with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in America in , the very year—and this is no coincidence—in which Antonio de Nebrija published the fi rst grammar of the Castilian language. Romero’s understanding of jargon could be

described as that which resists the standardization resulting from the implementation of a general grammar. And he works precisely in these spaces of resistance, of which fl amenco is a paradigmatic example, generating completely new combinations between them—as when, in A Throw of the Dice, 1 he sets up a dialogue between Israel Galván’s fl amenco dance and the conceptual art of another fl amenco, 2 the Belgian Marcel Broodthaers, based on a poem by Mallarmé—and trying to loosen the dichotomous thought separating the popular and highbrow, the hegemonic and marginal, iconoclasm and iconophilia, as if they were irreconcilable realities. Organized around the creation of process-based and designedly transdisciplinary hybrid artistic dispositives, Pedro G. Romero’s work rebels against not only aspirations to a fully autonomous art but also formalist relational aesthetics. In Romero’s case, relationality is about what Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, and other thinkers who are linked to so-called speculative realism or materialism3 associate with theatricality. In other words, it is about activating artistic artifacts that establish an open interrelation with the reader/spectator and are conceived as works in progress, open to continual reworking and modifi cation. In this respect it should be noted that just as the collaborative-relational approach (often with an explicitly activist dimension) plays a fundamental role in Romero’s work, so does working with the archive. This is refl ected in the two large-scale dispositives he has set up since the late s: Archivo F.X., which revolves around the phenomenon of iconoclasm, and Máquina P.H., the matrix coordinating his research on the imaginaries of fl amenco and popular culture. Steering clear of fetishistic or rhetorical uses of the archive (another of contemporary art’s new comfort zones), Romero is well aware of the arbitrary nature of any attempt at taxonomic classifi cation. And this allows him to not shy away when creating the opaque—in the sense given to this term by French Antillean essayist Édouard Glissant4—endowing it with a certain enigmatic component. In ancient Greece, enigma was essentially a question answered with another question, which is in turn answered with another question... and so on and so forth, without ever reaching closure. This is, in a sense, what happens in Pedro G. Romero’s work. His defi ning condition is the dérive— indeed, Guy Debord is one of his touchstones—and as such he cannot ultimately be circumscribed or contained. This was very much on our minds as we imagined and designed this exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofía. For this reason, rather than a retrospective exhibition—which implies a certain linearity, a teleological reading that provides (or aspires to provide) a comprehensive overview of an artist—Versifying

1. A Throw of the Dice…, Israel Galván, Pedro G.

Romero, Filiep Tacq, Museo Reina Sofía,  April .

An activity organized as part of the project The Book to

Come, curated by Bulegoa z/b for Corpus, a network of performance practices, co-funded by the EU’s Creative

Europe program (–). 2. A play on words, based on the fact that “fl amenco” is also Spanish for “Flemish.”—Trans. 3. Graham Harman, Art and Objects (Oxford: Polity

Press, ). 4. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ).

Machines has been conceived as a survey of Pedro G. Romero’s work from a situated, specifi ed present. To borrow the term used by Catherine David in Documenta X, it is a “retro-perspective,”5 in which the logic of the dérive is integrated into the exhibition narrative. In addition, in line with an idea that Pedro G. Romero himself foregrounds through his strong commitment to a decompartmentalized practice—in which his work as researcher, editor, producer, and curator is inseparable from his artistic practice—that is consciously connected to the social and cultural context it forms part of, we began with a fi rm conviction that it was necessary not to generate a mythologizing view of his work and his fi gure. To avoid reintroducing the notion of the artist as an individual genius through the back door, involuntarily contributing to its resacralization, we have adopted the idea proposed by Moroccan critic and writer Driss Ksikes of the artist as “connector.”6 An idea that ties in with the Deleuzian notion of “minor art”—which at this time of systemic crisis the art institution cannot and should not disregard— reveals the aesthetic and political power of Romero’s particular way of doing/making, his determination to weave together and establish a hundred and one complicities, “apparatus” for refl ection and critical production—“versifying machines”—that are connected to the art fi eld.

5. Jean-François Chevrier and Catherine David, eds.,

Politics-Poetics: Documenta X—The Book (Ostfi ldern-

Ruit: Hatje Cantz, ). 6. Driss Ksikes, “L’indisciplinarité de l’art,” intervention presented on September , , at “Méditerranée, traits d’union?,” a series of roundtable discussions held at the Institut d’Études Avancées d’Aix-Marseille (IMéRA) as part of Manifesta 13 (Marseille).

Tomás de Perrate Coplas de la defensora de Parla. Unknown artist from Madrid, . (Canciones de la guerra social contemporánea, )

Gabriel de la Tomasa Coplas de las barricadas de Cádiz. Unknown artist from Cadiz,  (Canciones de la guerra social contemporánea, )