PLATFORM ACTION TO FEBRUARY 2023
Maria Jose Aranzasti
GUIDED TOUR. SECTIONS/INTERSECTIONS. 25 YEARS OF THE COLLECTION OF THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM IN BILBAO.
I still remember perfectly how a group of people belonging to Platform A demonstrated.[1] in front of the Guggenheim Museum, after also surrounding the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, in one of our first actions that we carried out on International Museum Day, May 18, 2013. The objective was to simulate the conquest of spaces for the artists.
We were a few meters from Puppy, of Jeff Koons’ flowery guard dog and as we approached the stairs to access the Museum, one of the security people promptly urged us to leave the place. The image of the star exhibition of that time was Art at war… We were not at war, but we were immersed in a powerful activism in favor of the equality of artists in the art system. Ten years have passed…
The Guggenheim Museum since then began to hold individual exhibitions of artists and very good ones, by the way. some of them excellent[2] like the last of Alice Neel o women of abstraction. This last exhibition presented numerous unknown artists of the mid-19th century and the 1980s, even for art historians and experts, highlighting important contributions that made this movement so important during the 20th century, contributions that called into question the canon of abstraction as we had learned it up to then. Many of these artists, invisible or forgotten up to that moment, became visible and the exhibition opened up the possibility of investigating, of studying other artists, so necessary on the other hand, as authentic references. Invisible or forgotten, these artists who were neither recognized nor considered at the time, some of them have later become precursors of the abstraction movement. And that is the path to follow: rescue, make artists visible and investigate and study about them to create references that should be part of the history of art.
We, Platform A together with other associations such as MAV (Women in the Visual Arts), Clásicas y Modernas, CIMA (Association of Women Filmmakers and Audiovisual Media) and many other associations related to performing arts, music and culture in In general, we have continued in our process of real equality search for artists, in our case, in the area of plastic arts. We are aware that many advances have been made in these years, but they are still insufficient.
The video of the Platform Action, guided tour is as its name indicates a guided tour of the exhibition Sections/intersections. 25 years of the Guggenheim Museum Collection In which, room by room, the guide belonging to the Platform explains who is part of the exhibition and how the artists who are part of the aforementioned Collection present themselves in the space of the rooms. They are the very works of the exhibition that reflect the harsh reality. There, in the video itself, are the real data: ArtistOs, artistOs and more artistOs…. This has to change. Other purchasing policies are needed and we need them now so that the artists can enter and be part of History and for this we will also observe and pay attention to the budgets that are designated for it. What we ask for is real equality.
[1]
Platform A. https://aplataformablog.wordpress.com/
[2] Yoko Ono, Niki de Saint Phalle, Louise Bourgeois, Fiona Tan, Esther Ferrer, Joana Vasconcelos, Jenny Holzer, Lygia Clark, Alice Neel, Women in Abstraction… etc…