[M]UMoCA, this museum is garbage

2023-04-28 21:54:08

Tomás Ruiz-Rivas has a problem at home: he can’t tell his art collection from the trash.

The Prado Museum erases the life of Guido Reni

Further

A few days ago, he asked a graffiti artist for proof of his work to continue his peculiar collection. The artist handed him the papers that he had used so as not to stain the wall that he had worked on. He handed them over, of course, crumpled and inside a plastic bag, which he had been hanging on the handle of one of the doors of Tomás’s house. The ‘work’ was there while the custom-made methacrylate fish tank arrived that he had commissioned to introduce the piece of paper and add another piece to the “poorest museum in the world”. The situation reminds a cardboard box of Doritos that in 2013 the artist Henrik Olesen left in one of the rooms of the Reina Sofía Museum. No one except him knew if this was garbage or art.

That is the basic idea of ​​what Tomás Ruiz-Rivas has called [M]UMoCA. ¿[M]UMoCA? “Unofficial Museum of Contemporary Art… the idea was to make the acronym sound ridiculous”, replies the author. Indeed, he has achieved it. “Museums also buy things that should be in the trash and turn them into art,” explains Ruiz-Rivas, a 61-year-old from Madrid and a benchmark critic of the art system, through Antimuseo.org. His collection and museum coexist in the rooms and shelves of the house he shares with his partner. “The thing multiplies, it does not stop growing. It is somewhat invasive,” she adds.

what doesn’t work

This Wednesday he has shown his museum in public for the first time. More than 40 pieces collected in almost four years. As he himself says, it is a portable museum made up exclusively of the remains of the artists’ creative processes. That is, the waste, the failures, what is useless: “What did not become art.” The pieces that do not interest museums, but that discover their contradictions. “The idea was to create a poor museum against the public museums that have been building political powers throughout Spain and emptying them of content,” he says.

It is a game, that is, a very serious complaint. There it goes. “The mission of this museum is to show the construction in the museums of an unquestionable canon. One that is actually just as arbitrary as the one I use in the [M]UMoCA. It is as disposable as what a museum that makes history tells. Well, story between many quotes. This canon serves to close access to most of society. It has been built as a limited capacity and today its postulates are very difficult to sustain”, Tomás Ruiz-Rivas lucidly assures.

The first sample of these objects has happened with the “involuntary collaboration of the Belgian Serrería”, in Madrid. Tomás has taken advantage of the margins of the institution to place his “artistic garbage”. On a bench, on a wall, scattered around the square… And many attendees interested in seeing live one of the few critical proposals against museum institutions. When we ask him how to cite him, whether he is an artist or a collector, a researcher… he indicates that part of his work is to question the established categories of art, “that is why in this project I am both the artist and the curator.”

beyond the fetish

He says that he has made this collection with “artist garbage” from Madrid, thanks to the fact that it was given to him as a gift. “I can’t afford to buy art,” she says. For example, a boot used for work sessions, by the artist Marco Prieto. It is the latest addition. It is fully spotted, although the black skin appears. It seems that the sole has come off the toe. It has so many layers of paint on it that it has become a painting.

Beyond the object, the fetish, the context matters. This museum reveals the conditions in which artists work. That is to say, in precariousness. It is the museum of the context that the museum prefers to ignore. Some dedicate themselves to polishing the work of art as the result of genius; others, like Tomás Ruiz-Rivas, prefer to think about the economic, political and social conditions that have intervened in creation. Very little cool.

We know Marco Prieto for his “beaten” busts. He makes portraits of beings without identity, whose acrylic and fluorescent heads emerge with brushstrokes against the canvas. Art as a punch fight. Instead of working with candles that make art disappear, Prieto does it with impacts and splashes. These bursts make up distressing busts that could resemble Munch’s famous work. But these are disfigured figuration. And that boots the consequence of his fight and his production conditions. “The millionaire artist is a myth supported by thousands of artists who live with just enough,” says the curator of this particular museum.

No tourist interest

There is more. He [M]UMoCA is also a denunciation of the cultural entertainment policy of neoliberalism. Museums like amusement parks, posing as depoliticized and friendly places, perfect for tourism. “This is what we have to discuss. This is the conflict that this museum poses, one without tourist interest ”, Tomás describes his project. In a way, he does the same thing as the institutions he questions: he turns what he touches into gold. He acknowledges that if this were not the case, “it would lose its ability to confront museums.”

From the artist Esther García Urquijo, it preserves “two hands on a reduced scale, with four broken fingers (included) and remains of plaster that were stuck to the mixing glass”. They are part of the first version that the artist made of the piece Bondage japanese businessman. It was an idea discarded when he later decided to make it on a natural scale. “Garbage makes us all equal. Garbage also unifies everything, which is why it is a very comprehensive museum. There are artists with whom I would do nothing but who have left a deep mark on the city. The director should put aside his personal tastes in order to understand and show the diversity of cultural society ”, this poisoned dart without a name and surname Ruiz-Rivas launches. An impertinent project like this is only possible from underground, because it only makes sense by putting it in conflict with museums. At the moment, he preserves and shows garbage, but the market lurks.