Trigger

The incident as pictured in a contemporary newspaper

It's been a century since that 28^th of June which ended the world as it was known since then, although The Great War wouldn't start until a month later. Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austria-Hungarian throne, was in a trip to observe the scheduled military manoeuvres in Bosnia, as commanded a year earlier by the Emperor Franz Joseph I (Empress Sisi's husband, for those of you fond of romantic literature). After a brief inspection of the military barracks, the six car motorcade led Franz Ferdinand and his wife Duchess Sophie to open the state museum of Sarajevo in its new premises.

Danilo Ilic, local leader of the Serbian Black Hand, had spread six of his men along the motorcade route to make they wouldn't miss their chance. Two of them missed their shot. The third one, Nedeljco Cabrinovik, threw his bomb at 10:10am but the timed detonator made it explode under the next car or the parade. Alerted by the explosion the procession sped away towards the town hall, cancelling the visit to the museum. The other three murderers failed to act as the cars passed them at high speed. History would have been so different if Franz Ferdinand stayed in instead of going to the Sarajevo Hospital to pay a visit to the affected by the explosion. On that second motorcade they were supposed to avoid trouble using a different route, but no one told the driver and thus they ended up being too close to Gavrilo Princip position, one of the murderers who after failing had moved to a better position. Princip got as close as five feet and fired two shots with a Belgian-made 9x17mm semi-automatic pistol. The first bullet wounded the Archduke in the jugular vein, the second inflected an abdominal wound on the Duchess. Both died the same day. The Austria-Hungarian Empire demanded Serbia an explanation, this one answered that the matter did not concern the Serbian Government. So the former sent the July Ultimatum, which was not conceded, and then the declaration of war. Germany was an ally of the Empire while the Kingdom of Serbia was supported by Russia, member of the Triple Entente alongside France and the United Kingdom. Hence the conflict between Serbia and Austria-Hungary was the trigger of the first world wide conflict.

Alliances map of Europe in 1914

But why did Serbia attack its neighbour? That goes back to the Treaty of Berlin signed in 1878 by the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Austria-Hungarian Empire, Italy and the Russian Empire. With that treaty Serbia, Romania and Montenegro where recognised as independent kingdoms, but Bosnia remained attached to the Austria-Hungarian Empire. On the first years of the 20^th Century Serbian military officers led by Dragutin Dimitrijevic, who also took part on the 1914 assassination as the leader of the Black Hand group, stormed into the Serbian Royal Palace, killed the former king and installed in its place Peter I of Karadordevic. A new dynasty more nationalistic was born and their purpose was to reunify all the territories that belonged to the Serbian Empire (which collapsed on 1371, get over it!) including Bosnia.

So even if Austria-Hungary (and Germany) longed for an excuse to attack, it was originally Serbia who, in the shadows, broke the Treaty of Berlin. Once the conflict started the Allies came out defending one each other and although the Triple Entente was helping the “guilty” kingdom it really didn't matter any more because all these countries had little unsolved issues between them. The tension had been in the air for so long and the death of Franz Ferdinand was only the straw that broke the ice.

What would had happen if the Archduke had listened to his wife fears instead of enjoying the chance of a day out with her (as a Czech countess she was treated as a commoner at the Austrian Court so public displays of affection were not aloud, not even to sit next to her husband)? Highly probably, and sadly, history wouldn't have change much. Germany or Russian, the most eager for battle, would have found another excuse among their allies to face each other and extend their territories. Who knows if in that case Germany would also have had to pay, unfairly, most of the costs of the war and hence lead Europe, and the world, to the second major conflict of the last century. Because, after all, the Second World War was in a huge part the continuation of these unsolved issues that had been wounding Europe for so long time.

Archduk Franz Ferdinand and Duquess Sophia on 28th June 1914 in Sarajevo

Then

During the last month of February it was held in London the second edition of the Waterloo Vaults Festival. For six weeks the labyrinth of tunnels under Waterloo station were filled up with concerts, art and alternative theater. We enjoyed so much Then, the new show written by and starring Yve Blake supported by the Young National Theatre Studio.

Entrance to the Waterloo Vaults Festival

The stage is almost empty: a microphone stand, a computer, a projector and a curtain for the few but effective costume changes. But as soon as the show begins Yve Blake takes care of covering the entire stage with monologues, interacting with the projections, singing, dancing... and she even dares to go with rap!

The show begins with three questions: Who are you? Who you'll be? And, most important, who you used to be? It is from this last question that the the full show is developed. We are always the same throughout our lives? Or the situations we live make us change gradually while we grow up? Then talks about the past we used to live in, but also invites us to reflect on what this implies about changes and about life .

The project started well before staging with the creation of the website Who Were We where people around the world was invited to anonymously submit their stories, pictures or memories about the people who they used to be in the past. From there the artist created a speech including more than a hundred of the stories received to make us think about ourselves, as most of them are stories which anyone can feel identified with, putting aside a comedy look that turns the reflection in a fun and entertaining show.

Promotional image for the show

Many of the stories are read by the interpreter from behind her computer, some of them accompanied with images from the projector, while others are put together into songs linked by themes and tidying up the speech by age of this past persons. So throughout the show we see our thoughs when we were infants, how we saw the world when we went to school and the problems of becoming a teenager. The last part of the show, however, brings together the reflections of older people who also collaborated on the website and give us an idea of how they see it was their life when they were 20, 30 or 40 years old.

One of the positive parts of this structure is the increase in the intensity of emotions. Leaving the reflections of older people for the end of the show allows it to start in a much lighter and fun way, including the preference for sandwiches without crust, to gradually pass to the typical adolescence body concerns and self-acceptance. Getting to the end of the show one of the most tender and sweet songs is “You grow me up, now I'll grow you down” where, without leacing completely aside the bold and fun touch of the show, we can reflect about elderness and how generation after generation some help us to make the road to success in life while in exchange, sooner or later, we will have to help them rid the road of life.

Finally, the show concludes with a final song bringing the most interesting responses to this particular question from the site : If you had five minutes with your past you, what would you say? We invite you to answer it yourselfs.

Ricard Gispert
@ricardgispert

Discussing Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtentein (1923-1997) was an American Pop Art painter, graphic artist and sculptor, specially known for his large scale representations of comic art; but today at Cultural Crops we want to debate whether an artist can be considered as it or not.

Ricard Gispert: From all Lichtenstein professional career we can only think of him as an artist for the works in which he is author of all the material, the ones in which he hasn't borrowed anything from any comic strip. In all those other cases the artist is the cartoonist, the comic drawer who had created original contents using his own technique and stile, different from other comics. It is not totally a plagiarism because Lichtenstein does make changes on the artwork, but it is true that the cartoonist like Irv Novick or Jack Kirby should take credit for the work. They are the ones who should enjoy the fame and money.

Guiomar Sánchez: ‘Good artists borrow, great artist steal’. It was said by Picasso that the true genius was to know how to flip what has already been done, and it could be said that, perhaps, in art we can never ever speak about “original content” or at least virgin on form or concept. It will always have been done before, the primal idea from which the artist starts to create his own concept will have been conceived before. We have quite clear examples in the same Picasso with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, “copying” or better said “seizing” from African masks and Romanesque eyes. This past that moves towards creation appears also inside artworks, more or less clear, showing gratitude for the referent, or even a criticism, as for example Manet's Balcony, by Magritte, when Manet had also inspired himself in Goya's balcony.

RG: Totally agree: gratitude as a result of admiration or the criticism of an artist justifies the inspiration in the masters that precede us; but the difference in Lichtenstein artwork is that he imitates other artists as a support for his message, not as part of the message. As you have properly indicate he is not the first author looking at others' work to keep his own moving forward, and I will even go further taking as example Miro's Intérieur Hollandes or Las Meninas by Picasso, trully copies of the homonyms artworks, but in this cases the copy is part of the message: homages to great painting masters read under the filters of contemporary art. However to make an homage to an artist this one must have a certain fame, but what Lichtenstein does is to take advantage of other people's work who has less popularity than him without not even giving an artistic value to this appropriation.

GS: It has nothing to do, on my point of view, the fact that those artist are less popular. Lichtenstein uses comics as an artistic purpose and, indirectly, involves comic culture, playing with an everyday element as it was typical in Pop Art. Referencing again to Picasso, remembering the famous cubist faces, he extracts this idea from African masks, the author of those we don't even know who might be, because that culture doesn't care about authors as mush as we do in Occident.

RG: But still the difference between Picasso and Lichtenstein is that the first one extracts an idea from African art, as you have said, while the other one copies entirely fragments of comics drawn by other authors. It is not only an inspiration in other people's work, even if sometimes he does collages with fragments from various comics. Another important difference is that any book or Internet source will explain how the cubist artist based his faces on African masks, while very few are the sources where it is said in which authors was based Lichtenstein work, you must feel lucky if you find a reference to DC Comics. So if we highlight Lichtenstein as an artist we must do so with Jerry Grandetti, Russ Heath and so many other comic artists.

GS: The fact is, I think so, comic and its authors had never been considered artists, but it was seen as a simple entertainment. Lichtenstein artworks push comic aesthetic to an art level and somehow, even without quoting their names, is extolling this authors and the symbolism of comic's world, giving way to a global recognition that they didn't use to have.

RG: Yes, we can agree that it extols comic's symbolism, but not the authors, as so many of them still remain anonymous nowadays. However it is also true, as you have well indicated, that History of Art feeds itself, evolving to present new artists ans styles, and seeing it that way Lichtenstein is a one more piece of this big puzzle that is contemporary art.

GS: Well, is perfectly understandable your position, specially because of the injustice it suppose, by the artistic institution and society at large, the treatment received by comic authors, who has been relegated to the background or even labelled as simple entertainment. It should be given – or maybe Lichtenstein should have done that – a higher treatment to this kind of handwork – labelling it as art – that has been a referent for great artists.

#1yearCC

Ricard Gispert

@ricardgispert

Guiomar Sánchez

@guiomar_sp

Museum or not?

A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.

If we assume that this ICOM (International Council Of Museums) definition of a museum attaches and educational and study purpose, which means the museum can be seen as a tool for knowledge; can museums be based on any subject? The evolution of museums from the little cabinets of curiosities to the actual idea of museum has left us with the most odd institutions: a museum of bad art in Massachusetts, one about phallus in Iceland, another one all about carrot in Belgium or a Turkish museum of human hair, including of course the museum of broken relationships that has already appeared previously in this blog. But all of them are institutions focused in a very specific field of knowledge, so they still meet the requirements to be called museums.

Let's go now one step farther and take a look at the wax museums: the educational purpose starts to be less clear. Which useful knowledges can we get from seen famous people turned into wax figures? Figures that, in addition, represent only a particular moment in the life of the represented celebrity, as if it was a 3d photography that will never get old or change the hair style. We could also open a Museum of Famous People to simply fill up the walls with pictures of famous people classified according to their professional area, and that would give us the same study and knowledge than a wax museum. What it is then that gives the wax museum its quality as a proper museum? The answer is the history of wax figures which, even if nowadays are only an entertainment, have their origin in the Middle Ages when it was used as a corpse substitute in the European kings' funerals.

Finally, there is one cas I have known about recently even if it has been active since 2007 at Kentucky (USA), and I still doubt it can be called museum: the Creation Museum o museum of the creationists, which explaines and stages the Bible to get to answer the typical questions that make anyone doubt about God's power and word. We are not going to mess now with religious matters and I don't see anything wrong in using an institution with high resloution videos, animatronics and a planetarium to approach the Bible (leaving aside the irony because of the eternal fight between science and religion); but what have dinosaurs to do in all that matter? According to the Creation Museum “biblical history is the key to understanding dinosaurs”.

Dinosaurs were created the sixth day, at the same time than humans and all the other animals (if we haven't found evidences of human bones next to dinosaur bones to prove the coexistence is only because they were buried separately), and, as they were all at the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, they were all vegetarians, ad before the “fall of men kind” no animal died, specially not as food for the others. Dinosaurs were inside Noah's Ark, absolutely all kind of dinosaures (“probably about 50”) as they were not that big. They, in fact, survived the Flood Myth, as it is proved by the existence of dragons in the Middle Ages, but they were extinguished because of the climate change and the humane diseases.

Where is the educational and study purpose? Where is the knowledge after a visit to the Creation Museu? What can be learnt? The treatment that his dinosaur sections receives is as valid as it would me a museum about unicorn's extisntion or about vampire wars in Mexico. It is not the topic what is wrong but its treatment. A museum about vampires is completely justifiable as long as it sticks to the knowledges we have about this mythological race, pointing the legends that rise this believing and its influence in cinema, but the educational and study purpose is lost when reality and fantasy get mixed together. In the same way there will be no possible objection against the Creation Museum if it could prove his speech against all scientific theories about dinosaurs. What do you think? You take it as a museum or not? Do you know any other examples of museum that doesn't provide any knowledge? 

Ricard Gispert

@ricardgispert

Wooden Horses

Chinese New Year is near and with it also its celebration worldwide to welcome the year of the horse. Precisely for that reason the British sculptor James Doran-Webb has created a big sculpture for the ceremonies at Singapore. Each one of this horses weighs 500kg, supporting the weigh of up to four persons, and it took a total of six month to make this puzzles of more than 400 pieces of driftwood, even having an interior skeleton of stainless steel.

Driftwood sculptor is how Doran-Webb defines himself, but his relationship with this material started long before than his artistic career as his parents had an antique restoration workshop and he owned a little weekend stand on Portobello Road's market (London) when he was a teenager. 

In 1989 he travelled to the Philippines, where popular art and culture of the archipelago awakened in him an interest for the work with driftwood. This wood from trees of various species come to the rivers ans beaches banks, washed and processed by the waves and salinity, and making each single peace, whatever its size, a particular and individual form the rest.

The next year, in 1990, Doran-Webb started to import to Europe thanks to a design company: boxes and frames inlaid with shells or marbles, papier-mâché animals and some furniture made from recicled wood from the Philippine houses. However it wasn't until the beginning of the 2000 decade when he thought about designing furniture directly with driftwood.

It was playing with driftwood pieces for that furniture how he end up making his first animal sculpture. Later on the big amount of driftwood he had available allowed him to make works of different sizes, just playing and combining the forms and characteristics of each one of the pieces to give movement and vitality to his creations.

The very first thing we should say about James Doran-Webb work is the double game, thus from far in the distance it seems like what you see is an animal, or at least a uniform bloc of mass, but when you approach the sculpture you can observe how the whole is made from hundreds of little parts, and even the driftwood colors are used to enhance the artistic quality. It is also very interesting this step forward from furniture to animal sculptures, because that way nature is no longer a tool serving the human kind for its pleasure and commodity, it becomes an expression of itself. With nature it is created another representation of nature, in a way that we could also include here atomic theories: this little parts of wood become one thing or another depending on how are they combined between them. Finally, the fact of creating only animals gives vitality to his productions. The main material for his artworks is wood – wood than once was part of a living being but has went to a process of death and transformation – but from this material we only get again representations of living beings. So in some way that death wood get an allegorical second life: a life, in that case, engaged to beauty and art.

Ricard Gispert

@ricardgispert

London Unknown

London is a big city which drags more than 14 million tourists a year, but it is such a big city that with one visit barely can be copsed a little part of the whole. British Museum, National Gallery and Tate (Modern, not “the other one”) are the undeniable Top3 for the visitors around the globe, but today we are proposing you a Top10 beyond the tourist crowds at the more popular places. Here you have our list of 10 hidden gems that you could see on your next visit to The City.

10- SAINT JAMES CHURCH

A small church down town, right next to Piccadilly Circus. Its sober outside serves as placement for a dairy market (food, antiques and collectibles, arts and crafts...) while its interior hosts evening concerts. Free entrance.

9- HAMPSTEAD

This high class north-eastern neighbourhood has always been residence for the intellectual elite. Nowadays commerce and restaurants are the main appeal even if it is also nice to just walk around. And for nature lovers just walk a few more minutes up to Hampstead Heath and enjoy the view or have a fresh bathing in one of the three lakes that serve to that purpose.

8- SIR JOHN SOANE'S MUSEUM

What can be more interesting than visiting a museum? To visit one as how it was in 1830. When he died, the architect Sir John Soane had disposed his home-museum should remain untouched, although the museum concept of that century is far different from the actual British Museum. 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields is a house full of the worldwide discoveries of the architect and his own models of the old roman temples. Free entrance.

7- GREENWICH'S ROYAL OBSERVATORY

You must pay to access the courtyard where you can take a picture of you with a foot on each side of the 0 meridian, but the visit to the Astronomy Centre is free entrance. Also there is a huge park to enjoy in sunny days and, again, great views. The best way to get there is with the DLR, a train without conductor which you can catch at Bank station, and you can take the chance to visit also de National Maritime Museum.

6- WESTMINSTER CATHEDRAL

Westminster Cathedral, not to be mistaken with Westminster Abbey, is a Neo-Byzantine building quite near of Victoria Station. It is surprising when you find it as it doesn't seem to fit in its surroundings. Inside, the big coloured marble columns contrast with the vaults of blackened bricks, while the chapels are decorated with mosaics enriched with gold leaf. Free entrance.

5- CHARLES DICKENS MUSEUM

Whether you like literature or not we invite you to step in this Victorian house where Dickens used to live. The various rooms seem intact while you discover not only life facts of the famous writer, whose life was closely related with his works, but you also see how was life in any London house of that period. Entrace: 8 pounds.

4- IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM

The most notable part of this war museum is the section about the Holocaust, actually the longest of its exhibitions which includes even a final reflection about what could have done Great Britain to avoid that situation. Now, however, it is close for a renovation that will see the light this summer to celebrate the centenary of First World War.

It is also part of the IWM family the Second World War battleship HMS Belfast and the Churchill War Rooms where the British Prime Minister sheltered during that same conflict; but while the museum is free entrance the other two have an admission charge.

3- BOROUGH MARKET

This is not a market like Camden or Portobello Road, is one of the oldest food markets in London. Under its typical structure of cast-iron architecture you can find wine, sausages, meat and fish, fruits and vegetables, different products like truffle oil or cheese with walnuts and quirky products like grass juice and zebra or crocodile hamburgers. It is a good place where to have lunch, as it is close to the Tate Modern and The Shard, the new tallest building of the city. You can try the traditional English pies or south-Asian deli, and end your feast with sweet pastries, chocolates or the typical British fudge.

2- SOMERSET HOUSE

In this Tudor palace there are always very interesting temporary exhibitions, keeping a balance between free and charged entrance. The permanent collections, which includes artworks from Da Vinci, Manet, Van Gogh and Picasso among others, can be found at the Courtauld Gallery. The entrance to this gallery is 6 pounds, but Mondays is half price.

1- MUSEUM OF LONDON

The museum of history of the city, the best place to learn about London's evolution from the neolithic settlements and the Roman foundation until the present day. Museography is somewhat uneven because in occasion of the Olympic Games it was specially reinforced the dialogue in the segment of Roman history of the city. However must also be mentioned the audiovisuals about the two big Middle Age crisis (Black Death and 1666's Great Fire) and the space recreations: a prison, a Victorian Market or a cinema from the beginning of 1900's among others. Free entrance.

This museum is next to the Barbican Centre, a cultural centre with a very interesting calendar of temporary exhibitions, conferences and dance shows.

Ricard Gispert

@ricardgispert

Post-art or the Angus McDonagh case

Angus McDonagh works appears with colourful designs and large colour patches that recall Andy Warhol's serigraph printing paintings, it's a branch of the pop-art that we could call post-art. Actually McDonagh's work consist in around 50 post stamps of simple appearance, most of them with his own face on it, and thanks to it this Somerset resident has been able to send letters without spending not even a pound in stamps

His work started as a protest claiming against the extinction of the stamps and ordinary mail on behalf of Internet and social media. “The Queen’s head, it seemed to me, was going to disappear from stamps and be replaced with lots of other images and I felt I had to act” he told a couple of weeks ago in an interview for London free newspaper 'Metro'.

The author created the stamps deliberately with a simple and silly appearance, but still he managed to send more than a hundred letters to destinations as far as Australia, Canada or Hong Kong, with only one of the letters being returned for having a fake stamp. Therefore are we talking about an artist or a scammer? What do you think? Because we know what Royal Mail thinks about it: the British national post company insists it is an offence both the creation or use of fake stamps and so they want to take actions against this case. Although on the other hand it was Royal Mail who was supposed to detect the fake stamps during this last three years.

It should be also said that Angus McDonagh never wanted to avoid the postal costs and he tried to send checks to the post company, but those have been returned. If that is so, instead of a criminal can we see here an artistic protest, a Banksy of the mail services? Or even a better question: Royal Mail's reaction would be the same if it was Banksy whohad  played this “scam”?

Precisely one of the last activities of Banksy in his new period in New York has been to sell his own artworks in a street stand, like the ones that usually sell fakes of his art. What is the difference between them to say that Banksy is an artist and McDonagh isn't? Both of them create original material to supplant as a protest; non of them looks for the economic profit (proceeds from the sale of originals in New York, at $ 60 a piece, were all for the shopkeeper). But beware! Banksy hasn't forced a national company to lose profits, only four strangers who were redecorating their home have lost some money. Does that mean McDonagh is an example that in Art, as in everything, you must be careful who are you protesting against to?

It comes out again the big question “What is Art?” and one of the most plausible and indefinite answers is: “Art is what the somehow (culturally, economically, politically...) more powerful decide that is Art”. It is not everyone's decision, not mine, to decide if McDonagh is an artist, that's a decision for the ones who, sometimes without us knowing completely, decide so much for us. Under that point of view contemporary art is not such a different thing from the Renaissance or Romanticism art, where the great artists were the ones who pleased better their patrons or exalted with better grace the bourgeois class. The trick must be to please who must be pleased and not criticize what mustn’t be criticized.

Ricard Gispert

@ricardgispert

Time to be thankful

Thanksgiving is coming, one of those big American things that we know about only thanks to TV series and films, but in the same way that happens with Halloween (originally All Hallows Eve) it is a festivity that Americans had inherited from the European tradition.

Thanksgiving origin can be found in the traditional church masses and religious festivals that were used in this time of the year to thank Lord (or Nature if you prefer a more secular speech) for the harvest success. Those festival, usually joined with great feasts, were also one of the last opportunities to join the social life before the cold winter arrived and became time for family home confinement.

But the 4^th thursday of November isn't a too late date to celebrate the harvest? Exactly. That is due to the fact that United States Thanksgiving is influenced by the British tradition in the period of the Protestant Reformation during the reign of Henry VIII. As part of this reformation in 1536 the number of ecclesiastic festivities was reduced from 95 to 27 days per year; but the more radical Puritans didn't agree and wanted to eliminate all the festivities, including Christmas and Easter, and to remain only with Days of Fasting to fight against God's disasters or judgements (as droughts, floods and pests), and Days of Thanksgiving for the little miracles like the victory versus the Spanish Armada or the failure of Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot against the British Parliament. This last historic fact became into an annual Day of Thanksgiving since de 5^th of November of 1606 and nowadays it's still a festivity (Remember remember the 5^th of November).

The first Thanksgiving , J.L. Gerome Ferris (c. 1915)

With this base it couldn't be rare that in 1621 the Pilgrims and Puritans who migrated to the “New World” continued this tradition celebrating Days of Fasting and Days of Thanksgiving, one of which had a special importance at Plymouth, now in Massachusetts State. It was only ten month since the Pilgrims landed and, after the hard previous winter, they were ready to celebrate their first harvest success. Aware that they wouldn't have survive in hostile territory without the native's help they decided to invite the Wampanoag tribe. It were days of feasts and plays, but also of cultural exchange, learning from the others and thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving tradition was already born, more than 400 years from our days, but it still had a long way to run. At the beginning it was only home-made celebrations with still a great remain of the harvest festivals and each State celebrated it on a different day. It wasn't until 1876 when Sarah Hale started a campaign to turn Thanksgiving into a national day, and only 17 years later Abraham Lincoln listened to her ans established November's last Thursday as the National Thanksgiving Day as a treat for the victories of the Civil War.

Finally during World War II there would be one more change for this celebration of humility and gratitude. It was already sometime that the day after Thanksgiving had been established as Black Friday, the beginning of Christmas shopping season with the big department stores offering unmissable discounts. The American National Retail Federation asked president Franklin Roosevelt to enlarge one week the Christmas season and therefore Thanksgiving in USA ended up being celebrated the 4^th Thursday of November (in Canada is celebrated the 2^nd Thursday of October, as for the different weather the harvest season started earlier).

So there we have another traditional festivity which has been depraved century over century until being turned into something completely different, even if in this case we still have the background of being grateful at least once a year. Cultural Crops wants to be part of this thankful spirit in the air and so we thank you all for reading us and for following us on Facebook or Twitter. Without you it wouldn't be the same, we are working hard to improve and we hope you can all see the results soon.

Ricard Gispert

@ricardgispert

Theatre evening

Going to the theatre is a whole experience for me. It is not only to sit on a more or less comfortable sit and watch a play on the stage. There are a lot of little sensations that enhance the theatre experience.

The evening can start easily with your companions having dinner together or sharing some drinks before the play. Usually catching up or any new topic fills the conversation and you almost don't talk about the theatre, it is not time yet.

Afterwards you get to the theatre building, normally with a magnificent entrance. It doesn't matter if the theatre is in the big city or in a country village, the main door has always a look of greatness, full of people and light. For me it has a kind of class that you can not find in the cinema. Even if both of them are cultural business, for me the cinema looks more like an enterprise (more capitalist), more contemporary. The entrance to the theatre, instead, has a more classic feeling, a remain of old centuries, maybe even a bourgeois style. All together it seem VIP, as if it was an elite reunion, even if the audience dresses in the most miscellaneous ways: from the young ones in jeans to the elder marriages dressed up as if they were going to church, or the romantic couples boarding on a date shared with the stage. There, at this cultural VIP entrance, between the lights, the perfumes and a bit of a smell of tobacco is where the theatre experience starts.

Magnificent entrance to the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya (Barcelona)

As it has been said a theatre is a business company, so it is very usual nowadays to find a shop or a stand at the very entrance of the building giving you the chance to buy the booklet or various merchandise. That is also an extra point of the theatre experience. I like to take a look at this little shops even if I won't buy anything. I don't want to buy a t-shirt with the show's poster printed on top, specially if even before buying it I already know it will end up being a summer pyjamas; but instead I like to collect the booklets, this little dictionaries of the play where you can find out a lot of things about the show or the actors, and sometimes they also include interviews to the director or the main stars.

At the shop we can also buy sweets, candy, chocolates or popcorn (although we associate this las ones to the cinema). All of them, anyway, the perfect companion while you access to the stalls area, feeling butterflies in your stomach while you look for your sit. First the row, then the sit number. Dammit! Is in the opposite site. Better if I go back that way. And probably the first thing you do once you are already sit is to look at the stage to see how you see it, if you see it. When you bought the tickets online the row seemed closer to the stage, or the sit more central. That is very possible, the stalls map they show you usually has strange and delusional optical effects. But soon or later you get use to it and you convince yourself that after all you will enjoy a good view of the show.

As the room gets crowded it starts to be loud and quackery. At the beginning it's only a few whispers but soon the voices get louder and for a moment you think you will hear nothing from your far position if they don't shut up all together. That can maybe be followed by a little moment of internal reflection, voluntary or not, when you hope you are going to enjoy the show you have chosen for that evening, and after you realise how much you like this atmosphere and decide you should do your best to go more to the theatre. And while I think about all this feelings and thoughts that the theatre experience brings to me I also think if they are the same for everyone. What are your feelings when you go to the theatre?

But slowly the lights turn off and they take with them all the chatty voices leaving only, again, a whisper in the aire. The curtain opens.

Ricard Gispert

@ricardgispert

Go back there!

- Tomorrow I'm going to the Tate Modern.

- I went there three years ago. You're gonna love it!

- Yes, I want also last year. It's great.

- Oh! Then why are you going back?

- ...

Maybe is because I really love museums but I have had this little conversation more than once. There is a lot of people who thinks of museums as collectibles from a catalog: I have visit it, I can cross it now from my list of museums to see, let's go for the next one. If a museum doesn't show temporary exhibitions it almost seems like we should forget about it, as if the permanent exhibition has no more to offer. But is not like that.

The London National Gallery is always adding little artworks
which qualifies its artistic discourse. Go back there!

Usually the “permanent” exhibition of a museum shows only a little part of the collection that they keep in the warehouse, and so the good museums try to have a little rotation with the exhibited artworks. That not only helps to a better conservation of the collection but it also creates an appealing reason for the visitors to come back after a while. Sometimes it is just an artwork replacing another one; but it also can be, and here is where in my point of view the thing gets interesting, a complete new distribution of the artworks. That second kind of change allow us the see again artworks we have already seen, but this time under new perspectives. For example, it could be that the first time we see a certain Caravaggio's still-life the museum shows it in the same room than the other works of the Italian painter, but after some years we go back and we find the same piece surrounded with still-life from other artists. Thereby the first time we see that artwork we perceive it as a part of Caravaggio's work, while on our next visit to that museum we can better appreciate the technical and style differences between all the still-life's.

Bilbao's Guggenheim offer is based on temporary exhibitions.
Go back there! whenever you can.

Besides from that main reason nowadays most museums have also a library open to the public and organize different activities and conferences, some of them even host contests, all of that to remember us that they are there waiting for our next visit. Sure you can also find your favourite museums online, not only with its own web page but also with Facebook and Twitter profiles to keep you informed with their news. Museum shops offer the chance to buy souvenirs with their main artworks on it, exhibition catalogues, books and drawing material; while some big museums have also a coffee shop or restaurant, a good place to host a nice and cultural dinner.

Therefore we encourage you to go back to the museums you have already visit, to repeat if you loved them or to give a second chance if their wasn't what you expected (maybe this time you will feel better in there). 21^st Century museums are, or at least they should be, alive institutions, full of life and movement, institutions that change, offer activities and want to interact with the audience. In my own experience there are museums where I have discover a new thing with every new visit. Take the chance this weekend with the International Museum Day and discover, or even better re-discover, the museums in your city.

Ricard Gispert

@ricardgispert

The riddle of modernity

The concern for being modern, for being trendy, it's not only a human life condition; it also happens in literature, for example all the novels with the same subject that came out after the success of a best-seller or even the fan-fics are a prove of that. But that concern can also be found in art subjects. That's how the different art movements arise: someone inspired tries to be original and changes the rounded arches for the highest lancet arches giving way from the Romanesque to the Gothic architecture; Edouard Monet started to paint outside instead of being closed in his study, his fellow contemporaries liked it and copy it. Originality becomes trendy and that is only break again when someone else original appears. That explains why we remember the virtuous who generate changes but most of artist who copy the new style just remain anonymous forever. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

African masks/ a portrait by Pablo Picasso

But also at the same time in art, like in trends, everything is cyclical. The bell-bottom trousers are back, or the thick plastic frame glasses... The old stuff that once was left aside is now original again. Otherwise what is vintage fashion? Well then in art it happens exactly the same: the Renaissance raises the balance and harmony typical of the Greece-Roman classic art, afterwards it comes the Baroque filling up everything with ornaments and recharged compositions that will only stop with the Neoclassicism, a new return to Greece-Roman art. Thus century after century, cycle after cycle, we arrive to contemporary art, which seems to ignore the cycle: everything is innovation and every new change looks like a complete break with all previous art. Precisely “break with everything” was the idea that contemporary artist had in mind; but intentionally or not it all still feels like a return to earlier periods. Art feeds itself. Pablo Picasso's cubism is inspired in the African traditional masks while Andy Warhol's works, despite the innovation of the technique, are just new interpretations of the portrait and the still-life, two of the main topics in Baroque paintings.

The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living, Damien Hirst (1991)

And that's how we get to Damien Hirst, a very controversial British artist in recent decades for his work with dead animals preserved in formaldehyde. Death, the main topic in Hirst's artworks, has always been deeply laden with symbolism and a strong personal meaning. A lot of artworks talk about death, but if we use death as a tool and not only as a theme: outrage! A lot of people would say “that is not art”. Aberrations of contemporary art! But, oddly, Damien Hirst hasn't been the first one in using corpses to express himself artistically. To prove it we invite you to go to Rome and visit Santa Maria della Concezione dei Capuccini's crypt. The brave who dare to go in will discover a peculiar 17^th Century decoration which the Cappuccin monks made with the bones of its ancestors: skeletons turned into statues, altars made entirely with skulls, barrel vaults decorated with tibias and pelvis... It has nothing to envy to Hirst's shark in formaldehyde.

That is the riddle of modernity: what it's now modern is what it used to be old. Two opposite poles which are touched by the tips. So now we invite you to play a little game with the comments. Help us find more examples of modern art that can be linked with ancient art.

Ricard Gispert

@ricardgispert

Shirts, oak trees and social art

"The Blue Route", Kaarina Kaikkonen (2013)
at Fabrica space in Brighton & Hove

During this May it will be easy to find clothes hanging on the street of Brighton & Hove coinciding with the Brighton Festival. That will be the second part of the installation “The Blue Route” which is already on display at the Fabrica gallery. The project started with the Brighton Dome collecting old shirts from the citizens, as the Finnish artists Kaarina Kaikkonen works always with second-hand everyday objects, and it's her work to later on create this sort of collage with the clothes that match her design.

Why shirts? Easy. Because, in Kaarina Kaikkonen's own words, “a shirt is the closest to the heart. The person is there.” Such a bucolic step from the intimacy of a personal shirt to the opposite immensity associated to the colour blue that names the artwork; but in this way, once the work is finished, the spectator not only can play to find its shirt between the crowd but also ends up finding himself as part of the artwork, giving to it new subjective interpretative values. However, the citizen who has give his shirt will become also part of a social workshop once the Brighton Festival is over: all the shirts collected, the ones finally used in the artwork and the ones excluded, will be given to Oxfam. So in this case the social function of the art turns into a practical side.

Joseph Beuys' rocks at Documenta 7
as he left them

Art has always had this social function, either extolling the virtues of a particular social class as in more traditional artistic performances or as a criticism of social and political systems, a concept much more contemporary; but there are not that much the artworks in which the social function implies something beyond the concept like giving more than 100 shirts to charity. Perhaps one of the first remarkable examples of this kind of art are Joseph Beuys' “social sculptures”, a true believer in art as a power for the revolutionary change. 

Once moved the rocks and oak tree was
 planted next to their new location

Thus in the Documenta 7 in 1982 Beuys spread a pile of basalt rocks, which from an air-view could be seen as a big arrow pointing an oak tree that he had planted. Afterwards he announced that the rocks should only be moved if they planted an oak tree to its new site. As a result of this initiative 7,000 oak trees were planted in Kessel, Germany. I can be said that the social and environmental change that Beuys sought was more than achieved.

So let's not participate a little in the comments below: what do you think about “social art”? Do you know any other artworks like that? In which art social project would you like to take part? Or which one could we create ourselfs?

Ricard Gispert
@ricardgispert

Don't Cry For Me Argentina

 “Don't Cry For Me Argentina” as it was sung by Madonna in the 1996 film version of the musical Evita (1976), a work by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber. If I were Argentinian I would cry too, but because of the musical. I'm not talking about technical or theatrical reasons, and even less about the music, I'm complaining for the historic facts that Evita represents, or rather for HOW these are represented.

It is true that, even if for me Eva Perón (1919-1952) was a fighter with very modern ideas, when she was alive she already was object of controversy and her followers were as many as her detractors; but that just gives even more reason to be careful when making a musical of her biography. However, the British duo based their work in The woman with a wipe, the first anti-peronist biography written by Mary Main in 1952 when cancer killed the Argentinian actress and politician. The result is a booklet in which the morality of our protagonist is in doubt: a woman who leaves home as the lover of a guitarist man, who uses men to move forward in her artistic career, who marries Juan Perón because of the social advantages and who runs charity events only for her own benefit. No wonder that shortly after the musical's première Nicholas Fraser and Marysa Navarro published a more neutral biography: The Real Lives of Eva Perón.

Hence Evita is one more example of the importance of the historians (Hollywood gives us examples with almost every historic film they produce). It is not enough to have a good story it also needs to be accurate with the historic facts; and that implies that one source of information isn't enough to get to the true. We can never know which flaws might have the source and that is why is necessary to contrast it. Even if in 1976 Rice and Webber could only count on Mary Main's work as the only written biography existent, sure they could had newspapers or even witnesses to talk to. Or at least they could have drawn a profile of the book's author so they could know how accurate it would be. But of course they chose a much easier path. And now I ask you: how would have British people reacted if two Argentinian had made a musical trivializing Margaret Thatcher? I guess it's something unthinkable in the 70's when the north hemisphere had some kind of absurd moral superiority against the south hemisphere, but what would happen nowadays? Has the situation changed enough?

Ricard Gispert
@ricardgispert

Portraits

Julius II (1512) Rfaello Sanzio

We can find it in many museums: portraits of Popes, Kings, nobles and courtiers. Nowadays we admire it as an artwork, but every portrait is also a historical document of a time and a specific ideology. Art is not only about beauty. What makes a work to be art is precisely its link with the context and, in the case of Renaissance and Baroque portraits, WHO was the person portrayed and why. Hence it is through art that the most important characters of an age are immortalized and every portrait becomes a reminder of their legacy.

For example one of the most prominent names of the Hight Renaissance would be Pope Julius II, the Warrior Pope and also Michelangello's and Rafaello's patron. But which contemporary artist could leave us a portrait of the new Pope Francis I? In the effort to preserve our past aren't we ignoring our own footprint? The answer is no. What really happens is that our footprint has changed over the centuries so the right question here will be: What will we find in futur museum when we look to portraits of our the 21st Century?

Marilyn Monroe (1960's) Andy Warhol

The figures we see immortalized in contemporary art are no longer the political and religious leaders, these groups are not anymore the most important for our society. Think about famous portraits of the 20^th Century. Probably one of the most famous would be Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe. The show business! The most important characters of our time, those that are now immortalized, are singers, actors and athletes. What would we see in futur museums showing our age? Lady Gaga's portrait.

Ricard Gispert
@ricardgispert