SIGNALS, CALLS AND MARCHES
(…what military music is to music)
Curated by Asier Mendizabal
This project by Asier Mendizabal runs through the different kinds of pop music that make up collective enjoyment. It is a unique program that observes how some songs appropriate musical forms such as hymns, marches, choirs and “charanga”, revealing unexpected results and relationships.
Asier Mendizabal (Ordizia, Guipuzkoa, 1973) is one of the Basque artists of the new generation who pays most attention to the relations between form, discourse and ideology. His oeuvre could be described as a critique of ideology based on the mise en scène of the structures that shape it. Through the expanded fields of art, rock music, cinema, politics and theory his view on social structures leads him to sketch out a map of the totality of production relations. Asier Mendizabal’s transversal, multidisciplinary approach focuses sharply on the difficulties of representation inherent in the political, as well as on the gaps between artistic activity and the “political unconscious” present in cultural productions, manifestations of the collective and mass movements.
Jota Izquierdo talks about Capitalismo Amarillo, about the informal economy, underground entrepreneurship, exoticization, and pirate ingenuity and reproducibility, all to the rhythm of cumbia.
Rogelio López Cuenca looks back at some of the key aspects that led to the creation of three works now in the MACBA Collection: 'No (W) here Postcards' (1998), 'Beaux Arts' (1992), and 'Musée Élan' (1989).
Asier Mendizabal, Peio Aguirre and Bartomeu Marí speak about the exhibition "Asier Mendizabal".