MACBA

One one of the last days of 2008, happily on vacation in Barcelona, I stopped in at the Museu D'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). In addition to the permanent collection there was an exhibit up entitled Universal Archive: The Condition of the Document and the Modern Photographic Utopia. Traveling with four others who all saw the exhibit at different times, we all felt at least one thing about it: it was in need of a good editor.

The first problem that presents itself is the layout of the show. The museum lacks a flow from room to room, which doesn't disrupt the diverse permanent collection but makes for an interrupted thought process when viewing one exhibit. The entrances to rooms were often blocked off with wall text, causing a distracting traffic jam at the start of each room. Funneling into one of the rooms, visitors are greeted by an astounding amount of photography. In the introductory essay in the companion book all visitors are given when entering, Jorge Ribalta writes that, "[t]he exhibition provides a historiographic prototype, not a visualization of a single linear account of the history of photography, but a constellation of accounts of the genealogy and trajectory of certain discourses. To this end, the different parts are articulated as specific, temporal, interconnected points of reference, making clear continuities as well as discontinuities."

This "constellation of accounts" is organized as divisively as possible; individual rooms are filled with "Politics of the Victim", "Public Photographic Spaces", "Comparative Photography", "Topographics", "The Photographic Construction of Barcelona in the 20th Century" and "2007 - Metropolitan Images of the New Barcelona". Indeed, the last two themes alone fill the second floor of the exhibit. The entire history of photography for the rest of the world has it's own (equally sized) floor, which visitors pass through first. The first few rooms are devoted to the "Politics of the Victim" and feature documentation of worker's struggles, child labor, Weimar-era Germany and America around the start of World War II. There is an interesting newsreel from America entitled, "The Plow that broke the Plains" which could just have easily been included in the propaganda section. The "Victim" rooms were my favorites, but I suspect this is at least in part because the sheer amount of energy required to sort through all the photographs in this show was a drain on my enthusiasm. By the time I reached the Barcelona floor, which is much less broad in scope, narrative in style, and (in a word) relavent, I was honestly worn out.

The problem that arises in Universal Archives is not the works themselves, but the "show" itself. The Propaganda section is an interesting exception, displaying fascist propaganda in the way it was shown in it's day, all black and red backdrops and powerful displays. There is also an interesting moving picture (forgive the pun) showing footage of Steichen's Family of Man exhibit at the time of it's world tour. Even the Barcelona section, startlingly narrow in it's worldview as compared to the first floor, has interesting pieces, although not as many. The problem is that there is just too much of everything. The "constellation" of photography starts to feel more like a galaxy as you walk past hundreds and hundreds of documents. And the organization of these photographs into specific places in both time and space (often interpreted as 'nation') does more to highlight the disconnections between cultures than the connections of photography. A bit of shaking up and a bit of paring down would have done Universal Archive a world of good.

Nothing needs to be said here about the architecture of the museum, of which much as already been written. The permanent collection is quite unique, casting an eye not only to Europe but other Spanish-speaking countries in the Western Hemisphere. A few personal favorites include David Goldblatt's prints of South African Apartheid-era advertisements, (an example can be seen here), Öyvind Falhström's Second Feast on Edlund drawing, an strange composition in reds and blacks, and Vito Acconci's "Open Book" video, in which the artist reads from a text about openness without closing his mouth, which takes up most of the frame. Oddly enough, I found that video on YouTube:



Also an exciting (and long overdue) discovery on my part was the work of Marcel Broodthaers, whose thought process and meands and methods of expression could not be a more timely discovery for me.