Spanish Contemporary Art Network

THE LOOKING GLASS (Debord Revisited, Part 1)

Greta Alfaro, Maria Canas, David Ferrando Giraut

 

 

January 17th to February 25th 2017

 

 

SCAN (Spanish Contemporary Art Network) is pleased to present a curated series of videos by artists Greta Alfaro, María Cañas and David Ferrando Giraut. The works examine themes of voyeurism, memory, death and the reflective qualities of longing.  Devises and images are interrogated for meaning and for traces of the lost, the absent or the dead. The technology of image production (and consumption) is present in all the works – not only by implication (how the works were made), but also as a kind of guilty presence, a reminder that the means is also the end, or at least provocation, at times.   

 

Is it already a cliché to mention the omnipresence of total exposure, the pornography of everyday (if edited) experience present in our handheld devices?  With technology we are able to perform our own lives to ourselves and many audiences, and to an extent perform beyond our means and lives. We dare each other and ourselves to show more, and more. But perhaps it is the structures that are relevant, rather than the means. The app may be only an amplifier of an existing economy.

 

2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. Developments in social media, politics and pop culture have made Debord’s text seem frighteningly prescient and newly relevant. Debord exposes the mechanisms by which authentic experience is supplanted by what he calls the spectacle and relates this to the function (and power) within a consumer economy based on desire and a necessary and fundamental lack. Contemporary apps and social media seem to be the inevitable and predicted children of Debord’s text. Even the format of much of the original text seems to anticipate the word count of a tweet – short, focused, repetitive. The Looking Glass is both lens and mirror- it refers to the gaze of the subject who, in reflection is revealed as the object of the spectacle.

 

Greta Alfaro addresses the iconography and formalism of the baroque - and in particular the feast- as a means of implicating the spectator within the spectacle.  María Cañas deploys satire in spliced video collages on love and murder that call to mind the films of Hitchcock and Kubrick and the political collages of Hannah Hoch.  David Ferrando Giraut weaves text onto image in an analysis of the absence and the fetishism of the proxy.

 

 

The first evening (17 January) will feature a single screening of Guy Debord’s 1973 film (based on his 1967 text) The Society of the Spectacle.  The following six weeks we will present the artists’ works separately, for two weeks each per artist.