How to look at art without prejudice

To the cover of Urban talesby Mercè Ibarz (Saidí, 1954) – which I reviewed here – there is a work by the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, a pioneer of abstraction that preceded Mondrian and Kandinski, but of which we did not know nothing until the late 80s, almost half a century after he left us. The paths of art are inscrutable, but Ibarz’s began in the form of a revelation with a Matisse slide at the age of fifteen, when he had not yet set foot in a museum and knew nothing about art. Since then, art has always accompanied her and she has been a professor of audiovisual communication at Pompeu Fabra University. Now away from teaching, she wanted to give us some hints on how to look at the art in one of these Anagram Notebooks which, like other volumes in the collection, is a little gem. the title, Don’t think, lookhe took it from Wittgenstein, rare among the rare.

“These pages are an invitation to look without screens or intermediaries. And above all, whether we look at the original or the translation that is all reproduction, they are an invitation to look at the work of art as the first time you see someone.” It is about looking, above all, avoiding the conditioning: “Social origins and training, the market, museums, historians, critics, artists’ training centers, collectors, art magazines and the fashion magazines, the networks, the influencer sect, the curators of exhibitions”. The author calls for an unprejudiced and unprejudiced look, because often the important thing is not what you look at but the place from which you look. “To be able to distinguish between disclosure and promotion, to be able to look from you to you, to be able to interpret through free examination.”

How to look is clearly the driving force of this short essay, but the substrate is the author’s own experience. We know about his artistic loves: Cartier-Bresson, Feliu Elias, Paula Rego, Maruja Mallo, Miró, Ángeles Santos and, obviously, Hilma af Klint… We know about his vindication of the Catalan modernists and noucentists. Also that in 1990 the centenary of Van Gogh’s death seemed to him the most spurious thing in the world. It was then that he understood that ignoring the chrematistic interests of artistic operations made no sense. Also, Ibarz talks to us about public museums and exhibitions as non-fiction stories. And he laments the disrepute of culture today, the result of mass culture, which has turned it into mere leisure.

I have been a big fan of the cultural chronicles that in recent years the writer Mercè Ibarz has regularly published in The Country. This booklet is a natural continuation of those articles, which proposed a step through the cracks in this parallel world of culture that is often too regulated. Duchamp, who played chess in Cadaqués with Rosa Regàs, said that the posterity of a work of art is in the hands of the spectators. It is we who decide what endures and what burns in the fire of collective amnesia. We are also the ones who decide how to look.