The museum is organising a number of guided tours of the exhibition. The first
will be held at 12 o’clock on Saturday 16 June and will be given by the exhibition curator, Juan Pablo Huércanos. Tours will also be held at 12:00 on 29 September.
- They include the Remigio Mendiburu exhibition, the publishing of the Catalogue Raisonné and the latest call for applications for the Education Grant
The Jorge Oteiza Museum Foundation and Obra Social de Kutxa, through the Kutxa Foundation, today signed a partnership agreement to promote 6 new projects scheduled by the Alzuza Centre for 2012. These include the forthcoming exhibition of the artist Remigio Mendiburu, the publishing of the Catalogue Raisonné of the sculptures of Jorge Oteiza, and the latest call
for application for the Education Grant.
This agreement, which was signed today by Ana Zabalegui, the Secretary to the Oteiza Foundation Board and Director of Culture of the Navarra Government, and by Carlos Ruiz, Director of Obra Social de Kutxa, establishes that the Kutxa Foundation will give 35,000 euros to the Oteiza Foundation for the projects planned for 2012.
The signing of this agreement further consolidates the successful partnership between both institutions, which dates back to 2009 when the first agreement was signed that established the involvement of Obra Social de Kutxa in the Oteiza Museum activities for three years.
The new Agreement includes projects of the ilk of the “Remigio Mendiburu, the Construction of Form” exhibition, which will be held at the Oteiza Museum between 14 June and 7 October, and which showcases the work of one of the essential authors in the renewal of the modern sculpture of the second half of the 20th century, the author of a unique sculpture language and who was part of the Gaur Group, along with Oteiza and other artists.
The second action included in this agreement is the publication of the Catalogue Raisonné of the work of Jorge Oteiza, produced by Txomin
Badiola and which will be released at the end of the year. This new agreement also enables the IV call for applications for the Jorge Oteiza-Kutxa Grant to fund an educational project to be developed within the Museum itself.
As far as publications concerned, the agreement includes, first of all, the critical edition of The Law of Changes, by Jorge Oteiza, a title that is currently out of print. The edition includes the critical study by Fernando Golvano, Art Critic, Professor of Aesthetics and Theory of Art at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), co-director of the Kritikara research team.
Secondly, Cuando veo esto, pienso esto (When I see this, I think this) will be published, a book that analyses the relationship between mathematics, geometry and the work of Jorge Oteiza, by Capi Corrales Rodrigañez, a lecturer at the Algebra Department of the Mathematics Faculty at the Complutense University of Madrid.
Finally, this partnership also includes publishing Monumento a Felipe IV. Historia de un concurso (Monument to Felipe IV. History of a Competition), which describes the participation of Oteiza in the competition held in San Sebastián in 1949 to produce a memorial to Philip IV of Spain, that the artist won but he would never see his work produced. This publication is part of the “Cuadernos del Museo Oteiza” collection and its author is Luis Azanza, lecturer in History of Art at the University of Navarra.
New summer timetable
The Oteiza Museum has also announced its new summer timetable, between 1 July and 31 August, a period during which the Museum will remain open from 11.00 to 19.00 Tuesday to Saturday, from 11.00 to 15.00 on Sundays and bank holidays.
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- The Oteiza Museum has published two new research papers that analyse the artist’s aesthetic thinking
- Oteiza y Unamuno: dos tragedias epigonales de la modernidad (Oteiza and Unamuno: two epigonal tragedies of modernity) and Oteiza y los nuevos paradigmas científicos (Oteiza and the new paradigms of science), new titles in the Centauro Collection
The Oteiza Museum has published two new research papers that analyse Jorge Oteiza’s aesthetic and existential thinking from two complementary viewpoints. The first, Oteiza y Unamuno; dos tragedias epigonales de la modernidad, by Juan Arana Cobos, analyses the philosopher’s influence on the images of Oteiza, while Oteiza y los nuevos paradigmas científicos, by Ignacio Sánchez Simón, investigates the presence of concepts associated with the world of science and mathematics in the configuration of his aesthetics.
Both papers, which have been published with the collaboration of Kutxa Social, are the result of the research projects awarded Itziar Carreño grants by Fundación Oteiza in previous years and which have now been published in two volumes, included in the Centauro Collection that was opened recently with the work titled Crónlech vasco y zorro japonés. De Jorge Oteiza a Akira Kurosawa (Basque Cromlech and Japanese Fox. From Jorge Oteiza to Akira Kurosawa), by Juan Antonio Urbeltz and Mikel Urbeltz Navarro
The first of these two volumes, Oteiza y Unamuno: dos tragedias epigonales de la Modernidad, analyses the Bilbao author’s notable influence on the configuration of Oteiza’s thinking and his identification in Unamuno’s religious conflict. This volume analyses Unamuno’s presence as the fundamental philosopher who accompanied Oteiza throughout his artistic and intellectual investigation process and from whom he inherits his tragic view of life. According to Arana Cobos, “Oteiza quotes and comments to the philosopher in depth in fundamental works such as Interpretación estética de la estatuaria megalítica americana (Aesthetic interpretation of American megalithic statues), Quousque Tandem…! and Ejercicios espirituales en un túnel (Spiritual exercises in a tunnel) and he is a constant reference in purely Unamuno-related themes and his persistent dialogue or struggle with his ideas. He dedicated a late bust to Unamuno and many unpublished writings and notes.” Both authors also share “the need for creating a reality through fiction to renew cultural situations whose stagnation is evident, as is the case of the crisis of modern thinking.”
This book looks at the problems affecting the scientific concepts used by Oteiza to illustrate his theses. The range of themes examined is extensive, but also includes specific, measured themes associated with the most rational and abstract of disciplines: mathematics. And said discipline includes the most important and most hidden link between the process of geometrical abstraction of the 19th century and that of Oteiza’s work: the crisis of the concept of dimension brought about by Georg Cantor’s discovery in 1877. Accordingly, the main thesis of this study lies in the association between said discovery and Oteiza’s need for “breaking the connection between Time and Space” at the end of his sculptural period, as well as the privileged use of section in comparison with projection for achieving said purpose, applying all his sculptural work to the concept of wall as a “cut that summarises a hyperspace”.
The Oteiza Museum has extended the exhibition dates of Pedro Osés’s intervention at the Alzuza centre, as part of the Interpretations exhibition cycle. The intervention called “The Cromlech, Sacred Place” can therefore be seen at the Museum until Sunday 29 April.
Jorge Oteiza’s different analysis and interpretations of prehistoric artistic expressions and his study of the Pyrenean Cromlech, as an expression of a “spiritual” space, are the starting point of this intervention. Pedro Osés interprets Oteiza’s reflections in an ephemeral project, produced directly on one of the walls of the Oteiza Musuem and which creates an unusual collage, made up of texts, drawings and other pictorial elements to weave a plastic and narrative fabric.
See video here.
The Jorge Oteiza Museum Foundation has chosen the current Director of the Oteiza Chair, Francisco Calvo Serraller, as its new Chairman, after accepting the resignation of his predecessor, Pedro Manterola, who held the post from June 2009 and who proposed Calvo as his successor.
This agreement was adopted during the meeting of the Foundation Board held on Friday 23 March 2012, according to Ana Zabalegui, Secretary of the Oteiza Foundation and the Government of Navarra’s General Director of Culture.
The Board unanimously thanks Pedro Manterola, who had previously been the director of the Oteiza Museum, for his work as Chairman, as well as for his endeavours and input to showcase the figure of Jorge Oteiza and turn the museum into a benchmark in the art and cultural world.
Francisco Calvo Serraller (Madrid, 1948) was appointed as Director of the Oteiza Chair at the Public University of Navarra in 2008. He has a PhD in Philosophy and Letters from the Complutense University of Madrid, where he has been a full professor of History of Contemporary Art since 1989. Calvo Serraller is also a permanent academician at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts and was the Director of the Prado Museum between 1993 and 1994. In addition to his teaching and research work, he has also worked as an art critic for different papers and journals, including the El País newspaper. He has directed and spoken at many international courses, congresses and seminars on art. He has been a member of the Scientific Committee of major exhibitions and numerous international events and has been the curator of numerous exhibitions at the main museums and art centres of Europe and America.
His research has focused on studying the sources of the history of contemporary and modern art, on the artistic historiography and methodology in the contemporary period and on the history of contemporary art. His numerous publications include España, medio siglo de arte de vanguardia (“Spain, Half a Century of Avant-garde Art “,1985), El arte visto por los artistas (“Art Seen by Artists”, 1987), Vanguardia y tradición en el arte español contemporáneo (“Avant-garde and Tradition in Contemporary Spanish Art”, 1989),
La novela del artista (“The Artist’s Novel”, 1991), Enciclopedia del arte español contemporáneo (“Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Spanish Art”, 1992), Breve historia del Museo del Prado (“Short History of the Prado Museum”, 1994), La imagen romantic de España. Arte y arquitectura del siglo XIX (“The Romantic Image of Spain, Art and Architecture of the 20th Century”, 1995), El Greco (“Greco”, 1995), Las Meninas de Velázquez (“The Meninas by Velázquez”, 1996), Columnario. Reflexiones de un critic de arte (“Column. Reflections of an Art Critic”, 1998), Libertad de exposición. Una historia del arte diferente (“Freedom of Expression. A Different History of Art”, 2000). El arte contemporáneo (“Contemporary Art”, 2001) or Los géneros de la pintura (“The Genres of Painting”, 2005).
The Menchu Gal Foundation is hosting the “Oteiza/Gal. Two perspectives covering in Irún”, which features a selection of the works of Jorge Oteiza consisting of a series of 31 drawings divided into seven blocks and 8 sculptures from the Oteiza Museum collection, along with a set of works by Menchu Gal, the painter.
The exhibition, whose curator is Iñaki Moreno Ruiz de Eguino, features a selection of works by Oteiza, produced during the 1950s and 1960s. This project strikes up an open dialogue between the work of both artists, without any emphasis on matching, by spotlighting their different way of understanding art at a the time that sought rupture and commitment, the post-war period and Franco’s dictatorship. The two cases delve into the realms of plastic arts and their experimentation.
The exhibition will be opened at 7.30 pm on Friday 16 March 2012 and will remain open to the public until 10 June. The opening hours are: Fridays and Saturdays from 6.00 p.m. to 9.00 p.m., and Sundays from 11.30 a.m. to 1.30 p.m. Guided visits for groups or collectives will be organised every Friday morning between 10.00 a.m. and 1.30 p.m.. These visits must be pre-booked through the SAC.
Further information: www.irun.org
- The work offers a comparative anthropological journey through two metaphorical universes of popular culture
- It is the first of the Centauro Collection for research projects
Crónlech vasco y zorro japonés. De Jorge Oteiza a Akira Kurosawa
Published by Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza in collaboration with Obra Social de Kutxa.
Centauro Collection. Volume 1
Authors: Juan Antonio Urbeltz and Mikel Urbeltz Navarro
350 pages. €18.
This publication, which is the first of the Centauro Collection and involves the collaboration of Obra Social de Kutxa, includes a double essay that summarises numerous interconnected investigations. The first focuses on the cromlech, or mairu-baratz, referred to by Jorge Oteiza. The second looks at the first of eight stories in the film by Kurosawa, Such Dreams I Have Dreamed, used for the opening scenes of this film based on the Japanese saying kitsuné no yome-iri, whose equivalence in Basque, eseguzkia ta euria, axeri boda, says that foxes get married when it rains and the sun shines.
The persistence of the metaphorical images analysed here is
based on the fact that, according to the authors in this work, “When any part of reality is declared taboo, the substitution that is made has to be discovered, which is an extremely difficult task. Thus, hidden behind the fox or the Moor (mairu) of folklore, the mosquito is the confusing cover that disturbs all and stands as a good expression of the idea put forward by Ernest Jones whereby only what is rejected is symbolised”.
The unusual case here suggests that such a transfer has to come from very archaic periods of civilisation. Although it has not been demonstrated, it is reasonable to suppose that in ill-fated situations, the powerful clouds of mosquitoes were considered the devil’s work and the mosquito as the devil in person. Based on that, the fear of mentioning it comes from long ago. It has always been important to be careful, since if the devil or the mosquito is named, there is a serious risk of them appearing or if a curse is made in their name, of it coming true”, they point out. “Everything comes from an atavistic circumstance according to which, for primitive humanity, the name is the same as the thing that is named. Consequently, the substitution had no choice but to open up to the metaphor”. This circumstance enables the inspiration of the same saying at both ends of the Eurasia.
The Centauro Collection is dedicated to research and begins with this work. It will include the next edition of the publications Oteiza y Unamuno: dos tragedias epigonales de la modernidad (Oteiza and Unamuno: two epigonal tragedies of modernity), by Juan Arana Cobos, and Oteiza y los nuevos paradigmas científicos (Oteiza and the new paradigms of science), by Ignacio Sánchez Simón.
Museoa.
Mikel Urbeltz Arregi (Donostia 1969), a graduate in Basque Philology, EHU (University of the Basque Country), he is a member of the Ikerfolk Association and director of the Udazkenean Folk Festival (1995-2005). In 1995, he published the record Berrizko Itsuari, where he uses a new style of traditional violin based on the sound of the alboka. He also collaborated on the record Bedaxagar, published by Ikerfolk and Fonti Musicali, and with various groups and soloists both on stage and in the studio: Anje Duhalde, Mikel Udangarin, L.T., Txuma Murugarren. With the group Argia, he has taken part in shows that include Zortziko, Muriska, Alakiketan, and the more recent Axeri boda and Aunitz urtez. He has also participated in various works of popular theatre in the Suletino dialect of Basque (Pastoralak), including Sabin Arana Goiri, Atharratze Jauregian and Iparragirre. He has given courses and conferences on various areas of folklore and traditional music and has done radio programmes, such as Baskistan on Bilbo Hiria Irratia, and collaborated with folk clubs that include Dantza Ganbara in Bilbao. He is a current member of the Zenbat Gara Association and sits on the management team of Kafe Antzokia.
- The work produced in the workshops organised by the Oteiza Museum with patents from the Pamplona Mental Rehabilitation Clinic to be unveiled
In March, April and May 2011, the Jorge Oteiza Museum Foundation ran a series of workshops with 36 patients from the Pamplona Mental Rehabilitation Clinic. Inspired by the Homo Ludens, Art at Play exhibition, held at the Museum, 6 workshops were run with the aim of transforming the work of art into a work tool that could tackle the problems of the patients.
The focal point was play, which formed the basis to develop practical-theoretical actions based on poetry, chess, cards and football. The works of artists of the ilk of Ramón Acín, Tristan Tzara, Grupo Texto Poético, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Joan Brossa, Rafael Bianchi or Zbigniew Libera, who exhibited at Homo Ludens, were the starting point to work on internal aspects of the patient from the ludic and symbolic aspects, and recover moments of relaxation, laughter and group work.
This programme used the inherent resources of play, which accompanies the human being throughout their lives, to impact the emotional world. The ludic experience combined with the creative process of art thus helped to foster communication and sociabilization and improve the mood of the person, in an experiment that, for the first time, enabled art and the Oteiza Museum to become a therapeutic tool for the Clinic’s patients.
This project will continue in 2012 with the new workshop programme to begin at the Mental Rehabilitation Clinic in March. The workshops will be linked to the Jorge Oteiza experimental laboratory and will be funded by the La Caixa Foundation.
This exhibition continues a cycle of exhibitions related to the social educational workshops run by the Oteiza Museum and showcased at Civivox Iturrama , including the “Building Dreams”, organised with the El Molino Special Education Centre, and “Your Box, My Refuge” programmes, with the Pamplona Penitentiary Centre.
- Two Previously Undisplayed Works from Oteiza’s Earliest Period on Show at the Museum in Alzuza
- “Woman before a Mirror” (1939) and “Family Figure” (1951) are on loan from the Carreras Mugica Gallery
Two works created by Oteiza during his earliest, figurative period have now been installed in the Oteiza museum, where they fill a gap in the “Oteiza. The Collection” exhibition. The two works, neither of which has previously been exhibited are Woman before a Mirror, made in Buenos Aires in 1939 and Family Figure, made in 1951, a few years after the artist’s return from South and Central America. The two pieces will initially be on display for a minimum of one year on loan from the owner, the Carreras Mugica Gallery in Bilbao.
They will be exhibited in the collection of work from Oteiza’s early artistic career, which includes pieces from the early 1930s, his sojourn in South and Central America (1935-48) and the period immediately following his return.
Woman before the Mirror (49.5 x 19 x 25 cm) was made during his time in the Americas. The piece, in glazed ceramic, is unusual in the context of his oeuvre. Made in Buenos Aires in 1939, it ties in with the expressionist discourse of his early pieces. It plays with a reality in which the mirror the woman is gazing into extends the almost Velazquez-like space which he would reintroduce in some of his later works. The reflected face is not a mere incision; it protrudes from the plane of the mirror in a game of unrealities, defining a compositional mode that would not be seen again in his subsequent work and which marks a turning point in his artistic quest.
Jorge Oteiza lived in Buenos Aires from 1936 to 1942 and in 1941 he taught at the National School of Ceramics. A year later he was hired by the Colombian government to organise ceramics teaching in Colombia and he lectured at the University of Popayán. The sculpture, dated 8 November 1939, is dedicated to Elena Jiménez, daughter of Pedro Jiménez Ilundain (an industrialist and intellectual from Navarra who had corresponded extensively with Unamuno), who was given it as a birthday present. The Oteiza Museum has three drawings related to the sculpture Woman before the Mirror.
following his return from the Americas and before he moved to Madrid.
The singularity of this piece is that one of the figures depicted has a face on the front and back. In this way Oteiza worked with the idea of simultaneity, i.e., two different moments from a single figure occurring at the same time. This idea can be seen in other works, such as Essay on the Simultaneous, made the same year. During this period, Oteiza worked on weakening the figurative expression and on projecting the depiction of the figure in space. Here, as in other works from this period, the volumes seem flattened and the planes are oriented towards convergent points outside the material.
These two pieces belong to the Carreras Mugica Gallery in Bilbao, which has agreed to loan them to the Oteiza Museum for a period of one year with the option of renewing the agreement after that time.
“Intruders in the House. Modern Art, Sacred Space” examines the renovation of religious art in the twentieth century.
New book examines the prohibition of the Arantzazu project and reproduces a large number of previously unpublished documents.
- “Intruders in the House. Modern Art, Sacred Space. Arantzazu, Assy, Audincourt, Rothko Chapel, Vence, 1950-1971”
- Published by Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza in collaboration with Kutxa, Obra Social
- Authors: Jon Echeverría and Friedhelm Mennekes
- 452 pages. €28
The destruction caused by two world wars was to have important consequences for relations between the Catholic Church and modern art. Many damaged churches had to be rebuilt and other new ones erected. In the resulting debate as to the most suitable style to be followed, a clear gulf emerged between the preferences of the Catholic Church and the most avant-garde movement in contemporary art. “Intruders in the House. Modern Art, Sacred Space. Arantzazu, Assy, Audincourt, Rothko Chapel, Vence, 1950-1971” published by the Museo Oteiza in collaboration with Kutxa, analyses the aesthetic and cultural implications of this attempt to modernise religious art. It also looks at the controversies and prohibitions surrounding construction of the new Basilica of Our Lady of Arantzazu (1950-1969). The project, which involved artists such as Jorge Oteiza, Carlos Pascual de Lara, Néstor Basterretxea, Eduardo Chillida, Xavier Álvarez de Eulate and Lucio Muñoz, was a landmark in mid-twentieth century art and architecture.
The publication is divided into three parts. The first is a text, also entitled Intruders in the House, by Jon Echeverría (a researcher at the Universität der Künste in Berlin, whose doctoral thesis from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra was on Oteiza), makes an analytical and historical examination of the crisis of renovation of religious imagery. If the Romanesque and Gothic are taken to be an expression of the specific characteristics or features of a given historical period, under what stylistic suppositions should the work of construction or reconstruction of churches in the twentieth century be undertaken? This sections analyses this problem faced by a sector of the Catholic church which fostered a profound debate on religious architecture, but also on the visual arts in general. During the period between the two world wars and, particularly from 1945 on, the issue of the nature of visual images and forms for new religious spaces sparked intense discussion inside and outside the church. At the centre of these debates, the study analyses a number of iconic projects, such as Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce in Assy, Sacré Coeur in Audincourt and the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, promoted by some of the more progressive elements within the Church and carried out by leading modern artists, including Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Georges Rouault, Fernand Leger, Jacques Lipchitz, Marc Chagall, Germaine Richier and Jean Bazaine.
One particularly important project was the construction of the Arantzazu Basilica, which led to a prohibition from the Vatican’s Commission of Sacred Art on some of the artwork.
The second chapter of the book consists of an extensive selection of documents, most previously unpublished, relating to the process of constructing the basilica at Arantzazu, with accounts by the artists, the characteristics of the works and issues related to the Vatican ban.
The last section of the book is a piece entitled “The footprints of the spiritual in contemporary art” by Friedhelm Mennekes (director of the Kunst-Station in Cologne and expert on Beuys and religious art), in which he analyses the presence of the religious in the works of modern artists, and reviews and documents exhibition projects and international publications on the subject published since 1980.
Educational activity
Paralleling publication of the book, the Museo Oteiza, in collaboration with the Navarre Delegation of the Basque and Navarre Architects Association, has organised an architecture workshop entitled “Aranzan-zu?”, targeted at children between 6 and 11, to be run by the Maushaus Studio.
The aim of the workshop is to find the essential relationship between architecture and other arts, assessing sculptural and pictorial work as construction elements in the Aranzazu Basilica. The activity will be structuredinto two working sessions (the first on 28 and 29 December and the second on 4 and 5 January, 2012) and the final result will be a model/interpretation of the Arantzazu Basilica made using a wide variety of materials including cardboard, liquid plastic, white paste and tempera.
On Tuesday 22 November at 7 pm, Renato Bocchi, architect and lecturer at the University of Venice will give a lecture in the conference room of the Oteiza Museum entitled The Construction of Emptiness. From the Spatialist Sculpture of Oteiza to the Architecture of Sáenz de Oiza’s Museum.
The talk has been organised in collaboration with the Navarre delegation of the Basque and Navarran Association of Architects and is buy cialis a reworking of Mr Bocchi’s recent address to the Keywords / Places seminar held on 18 October at the Polytechnic Institute of Milan, where spoke on The Design of Emptiness: the Fundación Oteiza Museum by Sáenz de Oiza.
The lecture will take a comparative look at the conception of emptiness in underlying architecture and contemporary practise in the work of contemporary visual artists. The event will consist of three parts: Gap and Emptiness; Empty space in the work of Eduardo Chillida and Jorge Oteiza and The empty space in the architecture of Oteiza and Sáenz de Oiza, relating these artists to others such as Mies van del Rohe, Le Corbusier, Luigi Moretti, Craig Ellwood, Carl Scarpa, Rem Koolhas, Kengo Kuma and Juan Daniel Fullaondo.
Renato Bocchi (Trento, 1949) is a lecturer in Architectural and Urban Composition at IUAV in Venice, where he headed the Department of Architectural Projects from 2006 to 2009. The main field of his research is the relationship between architecture, city and landscape, on which he has organised seminars, workshops and lectures in many European universities (including Lisbon, San Sebastian, Las Palmas, Thessaloniki, Volos, Glasgow, etc.). He was a visiting lecturer at the National University of La Plata, Argentina in 2005.
Between 2004 and 2010 he coordinated (with M. Cunico and E. Fontana) a series of eight international lectures on these subjects under the title “Dessiner sur l’herbe” and in 2009 he directed the international seminar “The Belly of Architecture (Space and Landscape)” at the second biennial of the Canary Islands. He was editor of the magazine “Restauro & Città” (1990-95) and director of the architecture magazine “Archint”, 1998-2000. He now edits the series “Spazio Architettura Paesaggio” for the publishers Gangemi, Rome. His most recent book is “Progettare lo spazio e il movimiento”, published by Gangemi, 2009.
The book titled Oteiza y el Cine (Oteiza and Cinema) analyses the artist’s aesthetic experimentation and his search for a new “spiritual tool”
Published by the Oteiza Museum and the Reina Sofía Museum, it includes two unpublished texts and analyses by Santos Zunzunegui, Paulino Viota and Jenaro Talens
- Title: Oteiza y el cine (Oteiza and Cinema)
- Authors: Jorge Oteiza, Santos Zunzunegui (Ed.), Jenaro Talens and Paulino Viota
- Published by Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza in collaboration with Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2011.
- 300 pages. RRP: €22.
The book Oteiza y el Cine (Oteiza and Cinema) published by Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza in collaboration with Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía de Madrid, bears testimony to and analyses the projects and reflections of Jorge Oteiza on the language of cinema as a stage for aesthetic investigation and a “spiritual tool” for the creation of a new symbolic awareness.
The book, which includes two unpublished texts by Oteiza and contributions by Santos Zunzunegui (Ed.), Jenaro Talens and Paulino Viota, analyses Oteiza’s interest in experimenting with the narrative structure of cinema, moving away from the dominion of reality in preference for, in Oteiza’s own words, “A cinema of ideas that is openly subjective, elliptic, synthetic and natural”.
When he considered he had finished his investigations in the world of sculpture, Oteiza was impelled to change the area he was exploring at the beginning of the 1960s. As the artist himself said, the time had come to seek out and speak to the spectator there, at the place where he hid, fleeing from his vital responsibilities. For Oteiza, that place was the cinema hall, a place where people could live other lives as if they were the own. To return the lost spectator to life, a new way of conceiving cinema had to be found, capable of capturing “the man who flees and who needs help, there, inside cinema, inside the narrative of films”. Accordingly, the reflections Oteiza sought to take to the cinema were heavily influenced by his own plastic experience. “In this narrative, episodes follow the construction of an empty, receptive space that is apt for occupation by the spectator’s reflexive attention, for my encounter with him”.
The result of this action (an example of what he called “existential aesthetics”) was a cinematographic project in the form of a fiction feature film that was to be screened in commercial cinemas and produced by X Films under the title of Acteón. The project was never realised.
This book reproduces two essential, unpublished texts by Oteiza: the script titled Escenario de Acteón (Setting of Acteón), which shows the practical state of Oteiza’s ideas on cinema, and the so-called Estética de Acteón (Aesthetics of Acteón), a document created by the artist so that his collaborators on the project could become imbued with his creative options.
The publication also includes the analytical texts titled Subordinaciones heterogéneas. Las “artes prohibidas” de Jorge Oteiza (Heterogeneous subordinations. The ‘Forbidden Arts’ of Jorge Oteiza) by Santos Zunzunegui, editor of the book; Contar hasta cero (El Quousque Tandem…! y el cine) (Count to Zero (The Quousque Tandem…! and Cinema)) by Paulino Viota, and El «vacío habitable» de Jorge Oteiza y la interrogación sobre el sentido (The ‘Inhabitable Void’ of Jorge Oteiza and the Interrogation of Meaning) by Jenaro Talens.
The book was presented at the Reina Sofía Museum of Madrid on 20 October as part of a programme of the same name that includes an audiovisual season and seminar. The programme began on 14 October and is set to end tomorrow, 21 October, with a paper by Gabriel Villota titled Los dos televisores de Oteiza (Oteiza’s Two Televisions), followed by a roundtable, El cine sobre todas las artes (Cinema above All Forms of Art), which is to involve Víctor Erice, Javier Aguirre, Paulino Viota and Fernando Golvano.
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