"Post-sentence:" My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today

["February 12, 2019," photo (by the artist) of a piece from the exhibit."]  

If art is to be meaningful it has to say something significant from the private or public world; one artist who does this is Barcelona’s Xavier G-Solis.

Having seen some publicity for his upcoming exhibitions in Barcelona and Vilafranca del Penedes, it’s clear to me that in his work he’s skillfully combining profound statements with more intimate acts of expression. 

In other words (like me), he sees the role of an artist as being someone who communicates in images where words alone don’t do the required job.

What appeals to me most about his creations is the pro-democracy and anti-authoritarian symbols in the exhibition, which has a title that is a play on words of “state”. Or maybe it’s more accurate to also say “State”.

In a piece that could be controversial to some, he uses shoes – his most popular item of choice over his career – in this case alternating red and yellow espadrilles previously worn by dancers at the Festa Major de Vilafranca.

These traditional Catalan shoes are shown with a military-style sword skewering through them. Their hanging down laces suggested running blood and puss to me. The work is entitled “February 12, 2019”, the date when the pro-independence political prisoners’ trial began.

This is what has been termed as a post-sentence installation, arranged alongside some engravings made with an open-casting machine on bare ground: a brutal and forceful technique that the artist hadn’t used since 2012, when the outraged “Indignats’’ occupied the Catalan capital’s most well known public square (as well as Xavier’s attention.)

Next to this are two pieces entitled “Europe”, including a bank safe that has a combination number lock forgotten years ago. Who knows what’s inside. As well as the promise that visitors are going to have the opportunity to manipulate one of the exhibits, the artist has also been scheduled to do some kind of performance in the gallery.

G-Solis, a former lecturer in philosophy, told me: “If you want to understand my work, you may have to start by thinking about the history of the human, the history of the power of man and how it began with the technique of making fire and continued with the gesture of getting on top of the world and other humans: the powerful high classes began to wear skins under the feet or some kind of sandals for ceremonies. Finally, footwear was globalised as a sign of socialisation: repression, distance, simulation, psychological protection, ostentation. All characteristic of the worst kinds of power.”

And that is exactly what I personally want from art, in any of its forms: substance.

We are living in an age where, sadly, the written word is carrying less weight as an important way to influence minds and actions. Increasingly, visual artistic expression is the preferred means for a younger public to get their ideas, and in the case of video, also their information and inspiration.

In private art galleries in Catalonia, there are still legal ways to make our chosen points. If that becomes dangerous or impossible in this European country, then we are no longer living in a place that can claim to be a democracy.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, March 2020.]

"Blurred lives" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

[Photo: Quim Puig]

Without barely noticing it, we are routinely doing two things (or even more) at the same time. 

I don’t mean having the TV on in our houses, as Juan Goytisolo called it, “Spanishing on” in the background like in a typical bar here.

What I continually notice is that our daily lives are an action movie of driving while texting, texting while watching TV, watching while screen-scrolling, scrolling while not listening to our companions.

Without questioning, our species silently changes what we do. Only 25 years ago, the phone had a fixed place in the hallway. Now it’s wherever we go. Some use it to shop at midnight or gamble and simultaneously watch sport. 

We experience a collective near-addiction to the stimulation that technology provides and this means that we are caught in our own man-made bubble of fixation, at work, at home and in between.

Piled on top of this, personal identities are more and more undefined. The more fashionable among us are flexitarian, pan-sexual. What was private is now openly public. We are selfie-supermodels: silicon titty down-shots and dick-picks for the under 30s. 

Even what was someone else’s body can now be yours. There are women you can find wearing hair extensions from an unknown Chinese stranger.

Some do the opposite and cling to identity. I’m my race, let’s leave Europe, get out of MY country, “walls are good things, barbed wire can be beautiful” says Trump, “eat my shorts” says Homer Simpson.

And who still has a 20th century-style job? The blurring of life-lines has of course crossed over into the world of employment. Oh, you’re a consultant? He’s freelance, she’s a temp/intern/trainee and that kid makes big money from playing computer games. The rest of them all have zero-hours contracts.

In fact at this moment in time, my own income comes from seven different sources. I’m a teacher/journalist/translator/author and occasional recipient of parental financial help...at age 50. 

I currently go to how many different work locations? 

Apart from my own home, which is also a workplace, the answer is: 10. That is over five days. Imagine, too, how many more it would be for a truck-driver, a Deliveroo bike-rider, a home-shopping deliverer or an Amazon door-to-door courier.

Added to creeping uncertainty and the old ways being so far gone, across this fragmented society there are “a million mutinies now,” as the author VS Naipual once wrote. 

To unconsciously fight against the disappearance of any real certainty in our lives, internal reactions are made into actions. Gay bashing, wife-bashing, woman-hating, immigrant-hating, Muslim-hating, Jew-bating, tail-gating, restaurant-rating, bomb-making, piss-taking, muck-raking, reality-faking. 

All with the momentum of a mudslide that doesn’t want to stop.

And what are we now scared of? Not the bullies. Plenty of people are frightened of the failed-economy’s victims. People with next-to-nothing: refugees, the homeless, beggars. 

We are not afraid of the unknown (giant multinational companies, faceless billionaires. They are all too abstract). We are fearful of The Other.

One of the ironies here is that as a result of this ‘loss of separation’ and things being so indistinct (possibly because of it) we are probably further away from each other emotionally and physically, even when we eat.

The French are continuing to be an exception to this trend but research has shown that more than one in five [British] families “only sit down to eat a meal together once or twice a week. 40% of them only sit down together to have a meal three times a week.” The average American eats one in every five meals in a car!

All this has made me tired now. I suspect you are too.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, April 2019.]

Spain leads world in number of jailed artists

"Spain leads the world in the number of jailed artists, says Kamchatka, quoting ‘the Danish-based Freemuse organisation which warns of the emergence of "a new global culture to silence others" [something] which is repeated in all countries of the world, "even in the traditional democracies of the West".

This independent organisation, which is responsible for monitoring the state of freedom of artistic expression, has published its annual report, in which it identifies Spain as one of the countries in which the repression of [culture] creators has increased the most. 

Specifically, Spain leads the ranking of artists imprisoned in 2017, with a total of 13, ahead of China, Iran, Egypt and Turkey, and is the third in creators prosecuted, lying only behind Egypt and Ethiopia..."

(Article found through the excellent Business Over Tapas, which calls itself 'a weekly non-commercial newsletter about Spain...without fluff nor filler.')