Longevity

At the beginning of autumn things seem to begin to go slow — time seems to stretch and the dark, shorter days seem to spread the weeks out. We wanted to dedicate this month of October to longevity, to extended periods and to slow cooking, to the proposals of old that are still valid and to the discourses of yesteryear that still seem relevant.

Yet in Catalonia, our home, we were ignited by a disruptive process whose dimensions have yet to be measured although, to tell the truth, all that is clear is that the solution will be a long time coming.

What is long and constant, if not directly repetitive, is the career and oeuvre of Yoyoi Kusama, an artist who has been the object of a retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, and which travelled to the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), surveyed by Jeffrey Schwarz. By the way, the exhibition was a blockbuster, beating records where it opened and culminating in the opening of a monographic museum in Tokyo.

In another order of longevities, Carolina Jiménez talked to Martín Llavaneras about things that take their time, more in accordance with the durability or the senescence of matter, to quote the artist himself, whose exhibition Fruit Belt staged at Fundació Miró (Espai Tretze) won the Art Nou award and triggered this interview. Montse Badia signed an essay on artistic projects that unfold over the course of more than ten years, like Jeremy Deller’s proposal at Skultpur Projekte Münster, for instance, or those by performers Eva & Adele, or Andreas M. Kaufmann. All these are examples of proposals that develop their own agendas and terms, aside from institutional needs or today’s urgency and speed.

Last but not least, Xavi Acarín wrote a substantial essay that returned to the current trend of revisiting the classics, perhaps starting from the existential doubts of the present (not only of the art market), in which change is constant, renewal is permanent, and the trace of the long-lasting, apparently absent.

As we draw to an end, the anxiety hasn’t reduced — while it is necessary to emphasise the validity and relevance of proposals that seem to preserve their space in spite of their age, it is also important to note that in some cases this space has not yet been transcended, with all that this implies.