Crisis. Against appearances
04.12.08 > 24.01.09
Opening : 04.12.08, 20h.

Vacca’s work explores the different aspects of art based on sound elements. Since 1990 he has developed an artistic practice that approaches the communicative potential of sound and its processual dimension. His works bestow a special importance on reality, on the quotidian experience and on background noise, in line with his militancy for the emancipation of art from the attractive or from essential intentions. Vacca has shown his projects in solo shows, or in collaboration with other artists, in various spaces such as the MACBA, La Capella, Centre d’Art Santa Mónica, the Fundació “La Caixa” or the Teatre Lliure (Barcelona); Espai Guinovart de Agramunt (Lleida); el Palau Ducal Dels Borja (Gandía); MNCARS or the gallery Helga de Alvear (Madrid) and the gallery Play (Berlin). Some of the artists with whom he has collaborated include Pep Durán, Carlos Pazos or Javier Peñafiel.

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HOW THREE Fs MAKE A FRAGMENT OF DOMESTIC ROMANTICISM
by Lola Donaire

A time of crisis, we say, as if at some point there had been a time without it. W. Benjamin understood history as a dialectical relation of culture and barbarism; now, we should include another tension: the one that lives between globalization and extermination in every sense, within which occurs the rapid liquidation of all products. A while ago the work of art as a commodity went on sale. It is necessary to liquidate the stock, as the remains of the most recent new thing will soon have disappeared. Surely it is of little importance, because something will replace it at once, just to disappear quickly in turn, before there is even time to digest it.

This has also been affecting representation for quite some time. Most of Vacca's works indicate this liquidation of representation, however, they do so in order to stop a work from being automatically consumed and thrown out. The only requirement is the patient attention of the listener.

Three sound fragments from three audio tracks sound separately. One is audible, the other two are only heard through headphones. It is never possible to listen to all threes sounds of the piece at one time. Only after awhile will the listener be able to reconstruct the sound mentally. F. & F. en F drama (romàntic) is a piece that Vacca has reconstructed from diverse sonorous fragments, including a few fragments of F. Chopin and F. Schubert, all in the key of F.

Recovering two fundamental musicians of Romanticism with such a simple presentation turns out to be a strange task, or at least an unusual one in the context of sonorous art today. It is obvious that the notion of romanticism is wide enough to capture all at once a whole world of lights and shadows that were developed throughout its history, a history which appears incomplete due to resistance towards exhausting some of its forms, which themselves are only made present through fragments.

Rescuing these two composers that have been demoted within the circles of the classical music and exhibiting them in a negligible contemporary context, is akin to recovering something forgotten only to show it on the sly. As if appealing to these two figures of the past was illicit behaviour, as if it were only possibly to approach them in the space of domestic intimacy.

Vacca calls it domestic Romanticism. It is an idea that allows the artist to satirize how modernity operates in the present. It is a humorous wink at innovation and rapid consumption and moves towards an aspect of Z. Bauman’s notion of liquid modernity: that forgetting, not learning, is now one of the things that characterizes our reality. The rapidity with which everything happens prevents the assimilation of any idea or event, skipping from one thing to another without allowing time to establish any relation or meaning.

The amplification of the senses is another common feature in Vacca's works, although he is never neither univocal nor direct and resists a transparency that that would end up destroying any imaginative suggestion or any intent of subjectification. There are occasions in which meaning, like in this work, can be presented in an ambiguous form, and appear like a vague and unstable fluid that calls to our attention this permeable situation that stimulates the resignation of knowledge in pursuit of immediacy and poorly digested innovations. From this point of view, we can interpret this work as an act against appearances.