Archive: Homage to Manel Clot

Like every August for quite some time now, we’ll take advantage of this month of obligatory rest to draw forth something that is always latent and which we are proud to present. The A*DESK archive is at the forefront of publications, and this enables us to reassess, revise and reinterpret our work.

This year, barely sixteen months after his death, we pay tribute to Manel Clot and his way of seeing, revisiting one of the first texts we published at A*DESK, when we had our own website around the year 2006.

In spite of his brilliant essay, originally in Catalan, titled ‘Cuatro cosas sobre expectativas de transformación y perímetros relacionales de las prácticas artísticas desde el ámbito de la crítica (el crítico como productor o la superación de la psicoastenia’ we have sought to establish ties with other texts and authors who, much later and in one way or another, dance to the sound of Clot’s words, over and above the artists and discourses championed and put in their place by the critic and curator.

Among others, we have retrieved an article written in 2015 by Irina Mutt, who is capable of experiencing and transmitting things in the extreme; in those days she was discussing the symposium of the Catalan Association of Art Critics.

We also rescue Eloy Fernández Porta’s ‘Ex Ex Exodus’, in connection with the critique of the subject as something unitary or univocal and, lastly, a text by Adrián Hiebra, ‘Estética de sistemas, o cómo ser crítico con/desde el arte’ published in a monographic magazine in which we address issues of distribution (October 2012).

‘The critical text neither explains nor interprets, it formulates. It neither deciphers nor decodes. It neither translates nor facilitates, it intensifies’ (Manel Clot). We would like this statement to guide us for many months to come.