El arte consiste en representar plásticamente en un cuadro, como lo hizo Goya, ese momento en que el toro entra al caballo y el picador escarba con la puya en el morrillo para inferirle una herida cuya sangre le llegará a la pezuña. El arte consiste en pintar esa brutalidad, pero no en realizarla. Para ejecutar ese acto en vivo sólo hay que tener fuerza y destreza. El arte consiste en llevar al lienzo de forma magistral ese momento en que un paisano le mete la faca en la tripa al caballo de un mameluco un 2 de mayo o captar al día siguiente esa fracción de segundo en que un rebelde abre los brazos ante la descarga de plomo en los desmontes de la Moncloa al ser fusilado por los franceses. Aunque ese paisano, llevado por la cólera, clavara con habilidad la faca hasta el puño y el pelotón abriera fuego a su cabeza con absoluta exactitud, no por eso los llamaremos artistas. Hay mucha gente que hace las cosas bien. Freír buñuelos ¿es un arte o un oficio? Llamar arte a la destreza de pasarse a un toro por la tripa manipulando una tela es un despropósito, por mucho que los aficionados valoren esos lances, y al despropósito se añade la degradación e incluso la ignominia si el ministerio de Cultura equipara ese oficio a la labor de los poetas, pintores, músicos, bailarines o actores insignes, premiando cada año con una medalla similar al torero de turno. Recientemente ha habido un pique entre matadores. Dos de ellos, que se creen ese cuento, han devuelto la medalla al ministro de Cultura, al sentirse agraviados en su arte porque también le ha sido concedido a un colega mediocre cuya fama se debe sólo a la prensa del corazón. A lo largo de la historia la cultura en España ha sufrido una continua humillación a través de la incuria popular, la falta de medios y el desinterés de los políticos, pero ninguna caída es comparable al hecho de que el ministerio haya elevado oficialmente a la categoría de arte la tortura de un animal, que se ofrece al público como espectáculo. No son estos toreros celosos, sino los pintores, músicos, actores y poetas premiados quienes deberían remitir a la ministra de Cultura la medalla ahora degradada al tener que compartirla con el oficio de sacrificar toros diestramente a navajazos.
Born in 1967 in Albuquerque, NM, Villareal began experimenting with light, sound, and video while studying set design and sculpture at Yale University, where he received his BA. He earned his MPS in the design of new media, computational media, and embedded computing from New York University’s pioneering interactive telecommunications program at the Tisch School of the Arts. He also learned the programming skills that enable him to push LED technology far past familiar commercial applications.
Based in New York, Villareal has been included in solo and group exhibitions, and has made numerous site-specific commissions throughout the world, at major cultural institutions such as P.S.1 MoMA, New York; Brooklyn Academy of Music; Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS.
Leo Villareal in his Chelsea studio a week before his third solo show in Manhattan inaugurates the new Gering & López gallery. Leo walks us through his latest three sculptures that he’s exhibiting, including “Hive,” an interactive piece, “Field,” which is a massive sunset-like work of shifting colors and a piece like “Origin” based on Newtonian physics. We also get a peak at the custom software Leo uses to program his mesmerizing patterns of light and get a sampling of other large-scale outdoor installations he’s completed.
Megacities and shrinking cities, »highspeed urbanism« and »slow cities« ¿ the cities of this world are changing. The difference between town and country vanishes, everything becomes town, only varying its spatial and structural character. New forms of cities, new urban landscapes, new global and local networks are emerging.
Multiple City shows current urban developments worldwide as mirrored in central urban concepts of the past 100 years. Their juxtaposition and inter-relationship with leading historical and contemporary ideas illustrate and explain the complex and multi-layered developments of urban planning.
The exhibition presents sixteen urbanistic terms, examining their transformation up to the present: From the garden city at the beginning of the 20th century via the city landscape concepts of the early post-war period to today¿s »Urban Landscapes« and from the »New Towns« of the 1960s to the current establishments of cities in China and the United Arab Emirates; from the leading ideas of a »mobile city« to the »Telepolis« of a digital era and from the »Pleasure City« of a global consumer landscape to the strategy of branding, the city as a trademark. New phenomena appear which, at the same time, can be a product of traditional strategies. These phenomena are heterogeneous, there is neither one manifestation nor one strategy in dealing with the city of today: Multple City.
The variety of city concepts is documented in the exhibition by means of original plans, models and photographs. Among the international examples are »La città analoga«, Archigram’s »Instant City«, a project by Rem Koolhaas for the international construction trade fair in Berlin 1980, original collages by Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown as well as sketches by Lucio Costa for the Brasilia masterplan, to be shown in Europe for the first time. Historical town concepts are compared with current changes of urban spaces in a photo documentation, showing pictures of Dubai, Shanghai and Istanbul among others..
