Luis Camnitzer, Hospicio de utopías fallidas

Luis Camnitzer's exhibition Hospicio de utopías fallidas (Hospice for Failed Utopias), curated by Octavio Zaya, can be visited at the Reina Sofía through March 4, 2019. This retrospective offers a global, contextualized overview of Camnitzer's multi-faceted proposal, developed over almost sixty years. As an essayist, critic, curator, teacher, public speaker, and creator of objects, actions, and musical compositions, Camnitzer has focused on art's transformative capacity; he sees art, in essence, as a product of reflection. His practice, be it artistic, essayistic, or pedagogical, is characterized by the will to engage controversial issues of our time, such as the critique of art-as-commodity, the demystification and obsolescence of the role of artist in a consumer society, the strategies used by power in order to impose its logic and perpetuate its dominance, and neoliberal society's ability to transform education into an instrument for propaganda and thus render it irrelevant, all of this through the meaning-producing function of language, its ambiguities and arbitrary elements, and the evocative power of images. With these tools. Camnitzer seeks to prompt viewers to participate actively and to involve themselves in the artistic process. The exhibition is organized around three phases. The first one covers Camnitzer's singular conceptualism, which has the dematerialization of the art object as its starting point but, unlike its most conventional counterpart, does not stop at the self-referential aspect or at the autonomous condition of art, but extends into political and social reality. The highlights in this section are such mail-art works from the 1960s as Adhesive Labels (1966) and Envelopes (1967); the series Autorretratos/Selfportraits (1968-1969); and the installation The Living Room (1969), where the objects on the walls and the floor are represented by means of linguistic descriptions, thus blurring, in the small space of a single room, the boundaries between the visual and the textual. The second phase in the exhibit involves the natural denouement of the previous one, with more declarative and evocative works in which visual elements acquire greater prominence. These works could be grouped under the umbrella label of "political art". Although this tendency in Camnitzer's career began with Leftovers (1970), it was not until the 1980s and 90s that the artist produced his most resonant political works, like The Uruguayan Torture Series (1982), Los San Patricios (The San Patricios,1992), or El Mirador (The Overlook, 1996). The third phase pays attention to Camnitzer's most recent productions, based on an awareness of political failure and the triumph of the neoliberal system and interested, above all, in defending the postulate that art must function in complete communion with education, the latter understood as learning, speculation, interrogation, challenge, discovery, and the facilitation of knowledge as a collective task. This set of ideas is found in series like Insults (2009) and The Assignment Book (2011), and in large-scale installations like Lección de Historia del arte, Lesson Nº 1 (Art History Lesson, Lesson 1, 2000) or El aula (The Classroom, 2005). The exhibition as a whole takes its title from Utopías fallidas, included in this section, by explicit decision of the artist. In consonance with Camnitzer's usual ironic stance, it makes reference to the "dark" history of the Sabatini building first as a hospital and then for "demented or judgment-impaired individuals." But also to the fact that this retrospective traces the course of utopia in Camnitzer, who defines it as "a process through which one seeks perfection; like a mirage, it rushes away constantly at the same speed one believes to...