A Luminous Interval in Bilbao

“Can a ‘luminous interval’ represent the decline and fragmentation of modern man?”

John Bock, Palms, 2007. Video digital color sound (59 min., 14 seg.), car and various objects. D.Daskalopoulos Collection.

A Luminous Interval in Bilbao
Ilaria D’Adamo

Can a “luminous interval” represent the decline and fragmentation of modern man? At the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao the question remains open.

For the first time, the D. Daskalopoulos Collection is presented to the public, one of the largest and most comprehensive private collections of contemporary art in the world, housed in the geometry of rupture and angular prospects of the most important examples of avant-garde architecture of the twentieth century: the Frank O. Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao.

Given its ambitious scope, the exhibition “The Luminous Interval” was entrusted to chief curator Nancy Spector and assistant curator Katherine Brinson of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

There are about 60 works on display, with particular emphasis on installations and sculptures.

How is it possible to conceive of life as a luminous interval? Light, that propagates through space. A wave, which multiplies as it shatters on matter, multiplying into infinite rays of light from different coloring.

The exhibition title, inspired by the Greek philosopher Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957), whose paradigm lies in making a protagonist of the equation of light=life. Life, whose complexity is understood as a striving for beauty, though ultimately infeasible, except through Kantian Kritik der Urteilskraft, is recognized in the shadows of the unconscious and the irrational, of beastly instincts connoted by the human form of degradation and decay—assumptions, then, of rebirth from the ashes, of creation.

This exhibition is based on a series of works made in the 1980s and 1990s by celebrated artists like Louise Bourgeois, Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Paul McCarthy, and Annette Messager, but also brings to the fore projects of young talents like Paul Chan, GuytonWalker, Nate Lowman, and Wangechi Mutu, covering the more important artistic progress of recent decades.

The large scale of these works is the hallmark of the Daskalopoulos collection: sculptures and installations fill the first two floors of the museum, most notably with Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Hombre Cavernícola” (Caveman, 2002), Mona Hatoum’s “Current Disturbance” (1996), reality disturbed inside a rectangle of electricity, Kendell Geers’ “Akropolis Now” (2004), the urn from which someone fled in “The Asthmatics Escaped” (1992) by Damien Hirst, “Tomato Head” by Paul McCarthy, “Küba” (2004) an intense recursive video installation by Kutlug Ataman, where distortion of the world of communication is in act, where the viewer becomes the protagonist, the subject lives and becomes important only when he finds himself inside thousands of TV sets in normal suburban living rooms.

“Palms” (2007), the complex and obsessive video installation by John Bock leads us into a catacomb remnant of nights of Rebel without a Cause. It emphasizes the inevitability of a bloody destiny and a magical, gloomy, divine justice, injected with black magic and subliminal messages. In them, morbid Cronenberg elements echo back with a dialectic irony of fate, constructed by man himself in the moment of wanting to avoid Jodorovsky.

“I Was Overcome By A Momentary Panic At The Thought That I Might Be Right” (2004), by Walid Raad faces, however, the crises of contemporary life in inquisitive narratives of the role of individual identity, fractured and victimized by the fertile age and the decay of the body in a degenerative society. It is an accurate picture of our day, a spiral that leads to a dialectical tension in contemporary society raped by itself, scared and at a precious search for a lost identity.