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Reviewed by:
  • Utopías artísticas de revuelta by Julia Ramírez Blanco
  • Fernando José Pereira
Julia Ramírez Blanco. Utopías artísticas de revuelta. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2014. 312 pp. Hardcover, 16,00 €, isbn 978-84-376-3233-9

The book Utopías artísticas de revuelta is written in an experiential and engaged style. This dual format entails a whole range of inherent issues and limitations. It is, however, a choice that the author mentions early in the preamble in a clear and transparent manner.

The book refers to artistic interventions and the very concept of art itself in a comprehensive way, considering art as well as all visual interventions that appear in the protests and in the various situations that are described. The text focuses largely on recent events in the so-called camp of the indignados in Madrid, known as Ciudad del Sol. The author also researches relevant historical events, gathering insights that she integrates into the analysis of current events.

In the first two chapters, the author gives a very detailed picture of the events she has chosen to analyze as precursors to recent events in Ciudad del Sol. The first of these is the British opposition movement against the construction of motorways, focusing on the development of controversies culminating in the forced eviction of occupied Claremont Road. The second chapter analyzes the emergence and development of the British movement called “Reclaim the Streets.” A third chapter serves as a bridge between the historical analysis (the author is a historian of art) and the key chapter of the book, which is dedicated to the indignados of Madrid. This third chapter analyzes the expansion of the revolt aesthetic to a new global political context.

The author refers to the lack of distinction between what she considers the established territory of contemporary artistic practices and what she calls outsider art, trying to overcome in this way the problems that cut across the entire book and analysis: What are the artistic and aesthetic results from interventions? What relationship do these results have with an idea of [End Page 646] artistic quality? What kind of utopian register, understood in the context of artistic practice here, is being discussed? There is even a certain feeling of distrust of the art world. Is the author right in this distrust, since we know that most media actors in the mainstream of art move in very distant latitudes of utopian assumptions and, above all, maintain a visible complicity with the neoliberal pragmatism of global capitalism? We must look closely at the geostrategic moves of artistic interventions and at the proliferation of biennial and mega exhibitions in countries with a more dubious relationship with the idea of art and the freedom (utopia) that is associated with it but with a strong presence in the new global financial world.

It is not desirable to generalize or to produce a reductive or in a certain way naive division between artists said to be of the art world and others who are apparently outside it. It may be true that some artists are known for their relationship with the political, but this does not seem to be enough to relegate them to outsider art. The truth is that however much one may be in accordance with the political movements and interventions described here (and I am), it is also true that, as Claire Bishop states in her book Artificial Hells, an “ethical turn” alone is unable to produce examples of artistic interest. I would say with Bishop that an ethical imperative must be added to the “aesthetic regime” that defines artistic possibility as an enhancer of freedom and consequently various utopias. Art is a longing and open possibility, and its production is a utopian gesture.

Utopia is presented, according to this view, as a theoretical possibility of exceeding the compulsive entropy to which we are subjected by the total/global conditions we face. I place utopia in the field of possibilities opened by desire. Therefore the relationship that I had as a reader with the text seems to be insufficient or, from another point of view, deceptive. While the author describes the events very well...

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