I thought that was the best title I’ve seen in a long time, but then my next work is called hell, so I’m a bit biased. Also I’m pretty much just immersed in the collective fascination with the Baroque and the aesthetic gore of horror and grotesque. So, any exhibition with the title The Hell of the Beautiful is obviously going to have me slipping off my chair, and that’s even before I’ve read the artists’ list. The exhibition is at Salamanca Ciudad de Cultura, and there’s some really cool stuff on it at da2salamanca.
In general, we have approached the Neo-Baroque from three complementary viewpoints. Firstly, we have taken those pieces that literally refer to historical Baroque or reinterpret it from a current perspective, such as the work of Philippe Bradshaw, Lars Nilsson, Elena del Rivero or Eve Sussman, who refer to Boucher, Poussin and Velazquez, respectively. In other cases we have selected work that from a formalist point of view could be considered “Baroque,” in which ornamentation, allegorical impulse, tendency to excess predominate – with the Dionysian, the grotesque, the mask, transvestism, or blown-up painting. Within this section we have included artists like Matthew Barney, Erwin Olaf, Assume Vivid Astro Focus or Fabián Marcaccio. Lastly, we have selected work that can be considered conceptually Baroque, due to the extraordinary “vanitas” created, in pieces by Jake and Dinos Chapman or Berlinde de Bruyckere, installations by Jan Fabre, Judith Barry and Juan Muñoz, or the fascinating reflection on immigration by Julian Rosefeldt.
Baroque and Neo-Baroque – The Hell of the Beautiful
(Spain-Salamanca) The project Baroque and Neo-Baroque. “The Hell of the Beautiful” has led to an exceptional show of more than 70 artists, both national and international, taking place in various spaces around the city – after all, to all intents and purposes, Salamanca is itself a neo-Baroque city.
Since the mid 1980’s, a large number of authors (Calabrese, Sarduy, Deleuze, Virilio, Buci-Glucksmann, Baudrillard etc.) have attempted to arrive at a working definition of contemporary culture using the terms “Baroque” and “Neo-Baroque.”
Neo-Baroque should not represent a simple return to the celebrated style of the XVII and XVIII centuries, but should also, and above all, reflect a spirit or aesthetic category, a form of cultural organisation with its own representational strategies; a cultural metaphor for our own era that adopts and re-defines –sometimes in a contradictory way –an aesthetic and socio-cultural behaviour that has been developed since classical times.
From our point of view, the Greek Laokoon is as Baroque as the monster from Alien. The Carnival of Rio Janeiro or the Berlin Love Parade are two of the most fascinating neo-Baroque manifestations of our times. The designs of Christian Lacroix, Galliano and Jean Paul Gaultier are clearly neo-Baroque – actually, I would say that the fashion industry as a whole moves within the parameters of neo-Baroque. Visual media like pop video are tools of neo-Baroque representation in their omnivorous vampirization of ideas from other languages. When a DJ remixes music of different styles, he is re-defining, in a neo-Baroque way, current musical styles. Internet is a virtual space which is as Baroque and overwhelming as a vault painted by Tiépolo or Andrea Pozzo; the Cyborg will probably be the last great creation of the Neo-Baroque…
The selection process for the works was largely born out of a number of “symptoms” proposed by Omar Calabrese to define our times: “Limit, excess, detail, fragment, rhythm, repetition, instability, metamorphosis, knot, labyrinth, disorder, chaos, distortion, perversion…” The majority of the pieces are notable for their scenographic qualities and their tendency to combine various media and supports in order to attain a strong visual impact. As we have above, the Baroque has always been considered a time that favoured the trompe l’oleil, theatricality and articifice, dreams and visions…”The world is just a great stage,” “life is just a dream…”
In general, we have approached the Neo-Baroque from three complementary viewpoints. Firstly, we have taken those pieces that literally refer to historical Baroque or reinterpret it from a current perspective, such as the work of Philippe Bradshaw, Lars Nilsson, Elena del Rivero or Eve Sussman, who refer to Boucher, Poussin and Velazquez, respectively. In other cases we have selected work that from a formalist point of view could be considered “Baroque,” in which ornamentation, allegorical impulse, tendency to excess predominate – with the Dionysian, the grotesque, the mask, transvestism, or blown-up painting. Within this section we have included artists like Matthew Barney, Erwin Olaf, Assume Vivid Astro Focus or Fabián Marcaccio. Lastly, we have selected work that can be considered conceptually Baroque, due to the extraordinary “vanitas” created, in pieces by Jake and Dinos Chapman or Berlinde de Bruyckere, installations by Jan Fabre, Judith Barry and Juan Muñoz, or the fascinating reflection on immigration by Julian Rosefeldt.
At the same time, some of the works refer directly or indirectly to thematic regions previously explored during the original Baroque period, such as the “picture within a picture,” “reality and simulacrum,” “loops and adornment,” “allegory and parody,” “love and death,” “torment and ecstasy,” “festivity,” “journey,” “metamorphosis, the grotesque…”
We could even use a cinematic metaphor to explain how we have approached the Baroque in this exhibition: the notion that Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons – which refers literally to the universe of seduction and the look of French Rococo – is as neo-Baroque as the Wachowsky Brothers’ The Matrix which anticipates a future dominated by Cyborgs and Virtual Reality; in between there are directors like Greeneway, Fellini, Luhrman or Almodóvar, that present neo-Baroque imaginaries placed within a contemporary context.
Taking as its starting point, then, that it is not possible to think about modernity without taking into account its “Baroque moment,” we wanted the exhibition to take a critical approach towards our times. The subtitle, “The Hell of the Beautiful” comes from the celebrated essay by Karl Rosenkranz (1853) and makes for a perfect metaphor on the “extreme moral tension” through which a large body of contemporary art instil a sensation within us that “beauty can mask the real and dazzle and distract us from hardship or injustice” (Steiner); the tortured search for “impossible reconciliations” between pleasure and political commitment, complicity and shame, conformity and rebellion, mask and over-exposure, miscegenation and globalising uniformity…the unnerving sensation that both the Baroque and the neo-Baroque – its imperfect double – express a beauty that is, consequently: “beyond good and evil.”
But at the same time we wanted an exhibition that can be enjoyed, even, I would say, one that gives pleasure of all kinds since, as already mentioned, the original Baroque was an art that attacked the senses from two directions: spiritual and Dionysian (The Ecstasy of Santa Teresa by Bernini for the Cappella Cornaro, with its allegorical fusion of myticism and eroticism would be the mirror into which – even today – some artists look with varying results, which as Calabrese says, makes us “more or less” neo-Baroque.