agut pep dosier engpepagut.net/archive/agut_pep_dossier_eng.pdfdescents of a river bed that crosses through the artist’s city, and a final series that captures the bare feet of the

PEP AGUT | dossier | www.angelsbarcelona.com |

Pep Agut


BIOGRAPHY Pep Agut (Terrassa, Barcelona, Spain, 1961) studied at the Facultat de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi of the University of Barcelona (1979-84). Played the Games of the XXIII Olympiad in Los Angeles (1984). In 1988 he moved to Cologne (Germany) until 1991 when he was invited to Paris by the Fondation Cartier. Moved back to Barcelona in 1992. He lives in Terrassa. He has had solo and group exhibitions in large events such as the XLV Venice Biennale (1993), Prospekt (1996), the XI th Sidney Biennale (1998), Art Unlimited, Basel (2004) as well as in museums such as the Tel Aviv Museum of Contemporary Art (1993) or the MACBA, Museu d'Art Contemporani, Barcelona (2000) among others. He has coordinated and participated in seminars and conferences and has lectured at the University of Barcelona. PROJECT Departing from his double background on the practice of painting and photography Pep Agut focuses very soon his interest on the problems of representation, the role of the artist and the place of Art. His understanding of the space of Art as properly the public space itself, aside of any epoch conditions or culture particularities, and worried about the modes of production of meaning and the strategies being used to bring art productions into public scene, Agut develops a complex and personal process of work which permits him to imbricate his esthetical project with his political positioning. Pep Agut works on his projects unfolding his research over a wide range of media, techniques and concepts to submit to study the ideas interesting to him along large periods of time working on problems in relation to representation or language, for example. After an arduous process of writing and overwriting any expressionistic narrative form is erased, and the artist can elaborate a complex index of generic models of work to structure his activities. It allows the projects to remain opened to further research and independent of any rigid notion of style while permitting the artist to withdraw of systematic production of the artefacts which would close the process of work. Using the big amount of creative conceptual materials inventoried, Agut can replace any moment of his own artistic history to the present and display it as a site-specific answer to each exhibition opportunity.


Selected works


Partes de [Parts of / You depart from] (2006 - 09) 5 series of 80 black and white negatives projected by 5 slide projectors. Trayecto Galería, 2009 / àngels barcelona, 2010 / ARCO’10 Partes de (Parts of /You depart from) is an installation that pertains to a broad group of works – Regiones (Regions) (2006-08) – which focus on self-representation and the representation of the position of the artist and the public. These works came about as a counterweight to the conceptual density and the resistance to emotional aspects that were involved in Hercules (A self-portrait losing economic value and gaining cultural capital, 2005-07). The Spanish title takes an ambiguous semantic position, opening itself to two discordant fields of meaning. The first, and possibly the more direct, locates itself within a notion of stability, that of belonging to a category, or in this case, that of being part among parts, constituting a fragment that is, at the same time, a unit. The second field of meaning refers to the notion of departure and refers to its essential instability and its double reference: the stillness, by definition, of the place of departure – a place of appearance – and the transitive nature of the subject to whom the title refers to (In Spanish Partes de means both Parts of and You depart from) and who appears in the act of departing, constituting, therefore, a subject that appears disappearing from the place of apparition. The installation is formed by 5 series of 80 black and white negatives projected as transparencies. The traces of the production process in these images, in the camera and in their physical nature, are quite present and repeat themselves like an echo in the projections. Facing them, the spectator easily becomes aware of being in front of an object that mediates between two presences: his/her own and that of someone else, on the other side, in the other part. The relation of the sequences is conceived as a text, a sum of signs, a group of sketches that form brief allegories that the artist turns into an essay, perhaps with glimpses of the (im) possible execution of a further-reaching work, one that, in existing, would allow us to understand that which this work may be about. In this case the apparition of an understandable subject whose subjective identity would open from within the space of art.

Thus, a succession of images that form a text, a series of sef-portraits out of focus, a passage through the ascents and descents of a river bed that crosses through the artist’s city, and a final series that captures the bare feet of the artist descending the stairs, all unfolding on the walls of the gallery to configure a type of phantasmagoria that develops and idea of the unpresent constructed on an innarrative and the intermitence of the apparitions of successive images. We may say that each element of the installation develops in a different plane and weaves each of the threads of a particular weave defined as much by its closely woven parts – dense in their allegorical, subjective representational content – as by their empty ones – dense in the unrepresentation of a content, both formal and spatial – true hiatuses that multiply the potential of the poetic and psychological resources of the spectator facing the image sequences and in his/her occupation of space.

Partes de. View of the installation.


Partes de [Parts of / You depart from] (2006 - 09) 5 series of 80 black and white negatives projected by 5 slide projectors. Complete text of the projection #1 (in Spanish in the original) The side in which you find yourself is a recent invention. Since then images – inanimated – accompany those like you who desire a spectacular event. But don’t wait for anything here. On this side of your side nothing happens beyond what you yourself anticipate, beyond what you yourself bring with you: your own time. If it were not so, I would be the first among us to launch myself through the window that leads without remedy to your side. To talk to you. Text / Detail of the slide sequence for projector #1 Bare feet Descending the Stairs / Detail of the slide sequence for projector #2

Walking down the river bed / Detail of the slide sequence for projector #3

Walking up the river bed / Detail of the slide sequence for projector #4

Revolving self portrait / Detail of the slide sequence for projector #5


“L'Iguana” i altres Regions [L'Iguana and other Regions] (2006-08) Galeria d'art Palma 12. Vilafranca del Penedès, Barcelona, 2008 “L'Iguana” i altres Regions [L'Iguana and other Regions] (2006-08) is a selection of small works that are brief and conscise, fragmentary, ambiguous, necessarily rooted in the poetic and psychological recourses that pertain to what we may call writing, in spite of being images. The visual materials that they are built of come from different sources linked to the quotidian environment: some photographs from a night during vigil caused by insomnia, others passing through the artist's studio or around the block of his house, or an old collection of slides from a trip in an airplane. One may say that each piece follows a thread of a different color in order to develop a fabric that is full of both links tying its parts together and, also, holes that occupy as much surface as the fabric itself. A simple and delicate weave with heterogeneous structures, small sequences configured in a circular order, small rings sewn one on top of another at only one point. 1. “L'Iguana” (Nota sobre l'insomni) is a small sketch in which the artist's eye is reconstructed as an inner vision, representing a self-portrait, articulating an impossible mapping of insomnia's domain, forming a beautiful allegory of imprisonment of the space of art – between those spaces of its own history, the public and the private. The Iguana (Notes about insomnia) (2006-08) Video of a sequence of low resolution digital photos DVD. 5’. Unlimited edition.


2. Regió de l'error [Region of error], takes as its scenario a series of 12 continuous fragments from the floor of the artist's studio – like a real Pollock – over which someone (the artist himself) paces for 12 days. An allegorical figure that refers, in this case, to the habitability of a region that remains ever distant, alien: "I am in my mother's room. It is I who lives here now".

Regió de l'error [Region of error] (2006-08) Digital impression of black and white 6 x 7 negatives on canvas. 186 x 300 cm. (12 parts of 62 x 75 cm.) Ed. 3 3. Regió limítrofa [Borderer Region] uses some slides taken 25 years ago from an airplane window and a list of adjectives that label them to build a small circular narrative, a very brief story of a disappearance in the limits of meaning. We may see it as a version of the myth of Icarus whose inference would be the very act of writing it and not its moral lesson.

Regió limítrofa [Borderer Region] (2007-08) Double synchronized projection of slides labelled by hand with marker. Edition of 3 sets of slides. Unlimited DVD edition.


Hèrcules, (Autoretrat en devaluació econòmica i plusvàlua cultural) Hercules (A self portrait losing economic value and gaining cultural capital) 2004/07 àngels barcelona, 2007 / MNCARS, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Madrid, 2009 The project, using the genre of the self portrait as a pretext, casts a very critical gaze on the position of the author in order to remove it from the system in which he himself—or any other artist—cannot seem to escape.

With caustic sincerity and a healthy dose of (self)irony our “Hercules” confronts an artworld—rather, any world of cultural production—characterized by the spectacle, by a society which forces the artworld's absorption into the economic and historiographic systems to which it is closely tied. With the cultural and political action of art reduced to mere, deactivated, representation, the space of art has stopped being the public space par excellence and has become one of the fundamental scenarios for the consolidation and expansion of the system. The project is composed of three pieces realized in very different media and as it is characteristic of the artist's work, it negates any limiting notion of style.

It includes a photographic piece, Hercules spectacularizing himself, which portrays the artificial production of the “Hero” in our societies; the performance, Public Hercules, throughout the duration of the opening (the material generated from this piece will then be exhibited also). The third work is Hercules (A self portrait losing economic value and gaining cultural capital) which provides the title for the show and is it's central element to the project. Hercules is a work of art and, at the same time, a legal contract. Directed to the collector, this work guarantees the initiation of a process that will bring about its complete depreciation in terms of its exchange value, while at the same time it is reevaluated as a cultural product.

View of the installation. Rooms 1 and 2..


1. Hèrcules (Autoretrat en devaluació econòmica i plusvàlua cultural) [Hercules (A self portrait losing economic value and gaining cultural capital)] (2006-07)

Legal contract, pencil drawing, digital print mounted on engraved cardboard covers. The contract was realized in collaboration with the law firm Enrich Advocats. Hercules is a legal contract that sets the conditions of the sale, dissemination and image rights contained therein. It proposes to collectors an original acquisition price of 7,000 € and describes the process that will be initiated: a devaluation of the work due to its successive re-edition and selling to lower prices until it achieves a completely devalued net worth (49€ for the work needed to produce the piece, priced in accordance with the minimum interprofessional salary set by the state of Spain). Every contract is signed by the artist and the collector. The contract, also regulates the cession of rights of dissemination and of the image rights in general. It offers as compensation to the collectors (8 in total) a relative gain in the cultural value of the piece by way of its sale to other collectors and museums. The first contract was acquired as payment by the law firm that wrote it. The last was acquired by MNCARS, Museo Riena Sofía, Madrid. You can download the contract at: http://www.angelsbarcelona.com/artistas/agut/textos/hercules_contrato_eng.pdf

View of the contract in its display case. Detail view of the contract, the cover, and the cover's image.


2. Hèrcules Espectacularitzant-se [Hercules spectacularizing himself] (2006-07)

Digital impression of a plate of 4x5‘‘. 180 x 229 cm. Ed. 3.

The work was done in collaboration of: Jordi Canyameras (caneraman) and Miquel Àngel Romero (lightening). The piece shows the preparatory scene of a photography studio session to capture the portrayal of someone in the image of a hero. Multiple iconographic references (to Hercules, or to Modernity, for example) nourish the image.

Hèrcules Espectacularitzant-se [Hercules spectacularizing himself] (2006-07)


3. Hèrcules Públic [Public Hercules] Performance: realized on 26.10.07 at Àngels Barcelona. Backdrop, shoes, screws and photographs. After signing, barefoot, the contract “Hercules” with the first collector, the artist placed himself in the shoes nailed to the floor; he remained in the shoes throughout the two hours of the official inauguration, posing for the photographer with those that wished to have their picture taken and giving personal explications of his work. 150 people posed.

Partial views of the performance. àngels barcelona 2007

Some portraits taken during the performance at àngels barcelona, 2007. More images at: http://www.angelsbarcelona.com/artistas/agut/expos/hercules_retratos.htm


No em diguis el teu nom [Don’t tell me your name] (2004) Structures of wood with glass plates, screws and silkscreen ink. Sizes vary depending on installation. In CASM: 1,500 x 1,450 x 72 cm. CASM Centre d'Art Santa Mònica. Barcelona, 2004

Gallery flyer by David G. Torres "Don't tell me your name, I don't want it, don't tell me", "Is your gaze legal", "Say: silence", "I speak, I lie", "It passes, truth passes, overwhelmed by light", "Remember that oblivion is memory". These phrases painted on large sheets of glass on modular tables, and others that are harder to read because they're on a second layer of glass and are therefore covered or semi-covered, make us consider Pep Agut's proposal in terms of literary references that would immediately connect with poetry, but even more so, in the light of his work as a whole, with the problematization of language and meaning, of reality and representation. The challenges to literature thrown down by Mallarmé and others led the French poet to consider that there was only one certainty, syntax, i.e. writing not its significance or the relationship between words and their possible meanings but the very language itself. That was the basic level. The result of this search and constant questioning in art is that the only certainty is the actual context of art, what Arthur Danto, referring to Andy Warhol and his box of Brillo pads, called the real world of art. Clearly, Arthur Danto's remark can be taken much further in time, in the same way as literary references can be brought much closer. But the important thing is what both have in common in the perception of the collapse of a number of certainties, as if the ground had crumbled away under our feet, and the renewal and expansion of the working contexts that this involves. Faced with this, some people believe that this is precisely where the nullity of contemporary art lies, when in fact it is where the intensity of any consequent creative challenge is really demonstrated. What remains after this basic level is commitment: the artist's commitment in the most general sense we can give to the word with his time. Because this commitment can only be made from a radical awareness of failure, of the failure of any discourse that is assertive, fundamental or of undeniable truth. Pep Agut's phrases are taken from intellectual, poetic and literary reference points and even from domestic or everyday situations. Perhaps even the most seemingly poetic phrase is able to reveal its protofascist origins, or vice versa. In the same way as the sheets of glass and layers of phrases are superimposed on each other, so the layers of meaning are also superimposed. And if we want to delve further, we can become trapped in a game of interpretation in which the only thing that is real is language itself: words are ultimately there to deny the representative or significative capacity of language beyond referring to themselves; words are image. In an article in the catalogue of his exhibition "To the Secondary Actors" at the MACBA, Barcelona, Pep Agut wrote: "Images are words; words are images; the artist is the audience; the audience is the artist." The tables are not so much at eye level (like a picture) as at hand level, and in order to read them you have to walk round them in all directions, squat down and step back; they conceal as much as they reveal, and combine the visible and the invisible, thus seeming to proclaim both the need for interpretation and art as a privileged territory. A privileged territory precisely because of the absence of firm ground beneath our feet; because of that often ridiculed context that at its extremes involves incipient doubt; and because it provokes a critical appreciation that questions reality. Doubt in the representation and doubt in the meaning are only the beginnings of a wide-ranging doubt and a radical questioning of reality. In this spirit, Pep Agut builds an affirmative monument to the need to play with thinking, with the intellect. The catalogue of "To the Secondary Actors" included an extract from an article by Michel Foucault: "The role of an intellectual is not to tell others what to do. [...] It is to keep questioning the evidence and assumptions, to shake up habits, ways of being and thinking, to dissipate the accepted familiarities [?] and, on the basis of this problematization, to take part in forming a political will". Indeed, if the artist and the work involved in art have an intellectual ambition it is because it comes from a will to problematize, and this is where the commitment in art, its political dimension, is measured.

Barcelona, October, 2004.


View of the installation and details of No em diguis el teu nom [Do not tell me your name ]


Als actors secundaris [To the supporting actors] 1989-00 MACBA, Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Barcelona, 2000 In 1998 Pep Agut was invited by the MACBA to develop a retrospective show that would cover the last 10 years of his work. The artist proposed a retracing of his work that did not use pieces that had been produced in the past, taking instead the generic models that he had developed for them in each moment and which had not been produced in their day for diverse reasons such as economic factors, or issues related to space or context, etc. In this way, Agut tried to force a connection between the possible narration by the spectator in his/her time with that which the artist traced in his.

La fênetre. Part I, [ The window. Part I] 1996 Framed cColour Photographs mounted on perspex. 360 x 325 cm (Part I) and 180 x 470 (Part II) Views of the exhibition at MACBA


S.T. (Habitaciones exactas. Dormitorio), 1989 S.T. (Habitaciones exactas.Sala de estar), 1989 Exact Rooms. Bedroom and Livingroom, 1989 Framed Colour photographs mounted on Perspex. 100 x 150 cm each.


S/T (Der Stand der Dinge) [El estado de las cosas / The State of Things], 1994 827 x 503 x 366 cm. Wood, canvas and sound hardware with DVD. Sound structure: Partiture by Pep Agut; Composition and editing by Vicenç Vacca. Views of the exhibition at MACBA

On arribo a veure-hi [Where I reach to see] 1991 Wood, canvas, iron and paint. 180 x 560 x 900 cm Views of the exhibition at MACBA


Als actors secundaris [To the supporting actors] 1993-96 View from the first part of the installation.

Detail of the installation. The Magician (slide projection), 1993-96


Als actors secundaris [To the supporting actors] 1993-96 View from the second part of the installation with visitors on the stage.


Rehabilitating the future (or what is to come)

By José Lebrero Stals on the work of Pep Agut.

“The good Utopian first commits to himself to being an inexorable realist. Only when he is sure that he has looked long and hard at reality, without the least illusion and in its bitterest nakedness, does he become generous and set out to reform it in the sense of the impossible, which is the only one with any meaning.” / José Ortega y Gasset. Obras completas. Tomo V, pág. 439. Throughout the course of the 20th century the notion of the potential spectator increasingly affected both the gestation of art and the processes of its material realization. The importance of the context has come to have a profound bearing not only on the ways of mediating on and understanding the discourse but also on the conception of the meaning and intentionality of the aesthetic formulation itself. Precisely what we might call the ‘exhibition factor’ plays a key role in the way that Pep Agut (Terrassa, 1961) has organized the exercise of retrospective reflection on his artistic production over the past decade which the museum, the MACBA; invited him to undertake. The project A los actores secundarios (To the supporting actors) is Agut’s critical commentary on the museological notion of the retrospective exhibition. With a title inspired by the 1982 film Der Stand der Dinge (The state of things), by the German director Wim Wenders, the show is articulated as a false compilation of some of the most important works the artist has produced over the last decade. However, the final material outcome of the process of dialogue between the artist and the museum is crystallized in this case in a set of works executed specifically for the present show. For this reason, and as speculative fruit of the expressive appearances of memory, it might be said that on this occasion what is being exhibited are testimonies to a past hidden from the public light that not even the artist had ever seen until now. A major part of the work thought up by Agut does not exist physically. This archive of unborn creative acts, which have not yet seen the social light shared by all art artefacts, is made up of annotations, descriptions of projects, possible diagrams or alternative solutions to works which have indeed been realized. We are dealing, in short, with potentially objectualizable creative material which, thanks to the opportunity to exhibit, is finally revealed as the unitary testimony to a discursive whole. Declining to show the well-known artefacts which would supposedly represent the ‘best of’ his work, the artist proposes, in contrast, a new cartography, an up-dated state of (his) things on the basis of a number of his prototypes, concerns and obsessions which existed on paper. This premiss remits, not directly but in full, to one of the great artistic debates of the 20th century: how industrialization reifies culture and reduces it to banality in such a way that the monumentalization and the spectacularization imposed by the laws of free competition end up voiding it of contents. With this project Agut makes of his own artistic history an ‘exhibitory thing’, manufactured to commission. He articulates a mechanism which can in the future be set up and exhibited as it adapts once again to specific circumstances. By means of this gesture of problematizing the idea of patrimony, the artist thus looks back at what is behind him without turning round, constructing a kind of back-projection as an alternative to the usual retrospective scenario: “admit that you too dreamed of display cases stuffed with worlds already old for being future, where neither you nor I will be even a possible memory, when people can turn the ruins of our gestures into art,” Agut declares. The opportunity of occupying the space of the museum institution in order to express the state of things of his recent artistic trajectory led the artist a reflect on the operation of some of the mechanisms that conventionally and by definition cause the museum assume a fundamentally conservative function as the guarantor and protector of an already manufactured physical patrimony. What is innovative about Agut’s premiss in relation to this question is not the invention in the present of an alternative fiction other than what has already been made, but the recovering for the here and now of the place and the time of today: of that which, while it might have been has not yet come about but, in also being the manifestation of a certain ethical attitude, can be recovered for the present and even for the future. Faithful to one of his favourite aphorisms of Kafka, with this attitude he endorses the perception that “beyond a certain point there is no turning back. That is the point that has to be reached.” He therefore refuses to play the common card of bringing together a certain number of works selected from among those he already has, which would in theory allow him to ‘take the stage’ with the best of what he has produced up until now. The show consists, in contrast, of versions specially produced for this occasion of twelve generics selected from the repertoire of ideas he developed over the course of the last decade. In giving these form and substance, Agut takes the social and ideological dimension very much into account, together with the architectural characteristics of the place that houses them, in that he devotes meticulous consideration to the setting and installs a scale itinerary. He presents, for example, previously unshown versions of ideas that had only existed as a catalogue project, such as the dwelling, the scenario or the light models in accordance with the scale of Meier’s architecture. Up until the very day of the opening of the show no-one, not even the artist, will ever have seen the final formulation of this premeditatedly deceptive retrospective. The fundamental gesture of rescuing ideas from the back archives in order to put them at long last into practice is thus the origin of a complex ‘site specific’ installation consisting of twelve new works. Converting the retrospective into a deliberately manufactured unit is part of the strategy that Agut employs here in his attempt to call into question the cultural supremacy of the original work regarded as a unique and unrepeatable cultural object, as an artefact supposedly capable of containing exceptional meanings or bearing witness to heroic gestures, but an artefact which for this artist is first and foremost the visual indicator of a working process. This unusual way of rehabilitating fragments of his past career which might be classed as peripheral not only enables him to make public formal options alternative a other earlier ones, but converts Agut into the executor of an action of revolt against the canonizing of art objects, an adept speculator exploiting the field of signification that unites and separates the material and the immaterial. Historically, the tendency to mythologize the object has been gaining


ground ever since the work of art first acquired exchange value on attaining definitive bourgeois status and recognition. In Benjaminian mode, Agut’s counter-images (the works) which result from applying this working method of back-projection to a concrete situation constitute a challenge to the semantics of progress: in being new they announce a time to come; although in coming from where they do (from a personal historical archive) they also paradoxically give rise to the recollection of a time now past. The concept of retrospectiveness traditionally applied to art exhibitions tends to be established around an idea of tribute and the revision of certain concrete and more or less conceptually closed objects which are confirmed as stable by being officially ratified. In this way there is instituted a type of dominant cultural ritual by means of which the exceptional nature of the artistic, the open and dialogic form of its discursive quality, losing critical force, is inevitably converted into commonplace and referent of accepted public use. From its resistance to this type of process, the project A los actores secundarios expresses the mistrust and scepticism of its creator with respect to the form of power that the passage of time bestows, by definition, on any kind of reified representation. And it does so by proposing an inverse game: in this case by resorting to the tactic of what is known as inexact repetition, which evidences, beyond the object in itself, the contents that are to be channelled through it, the motives that feed it and serve to justify it in the pursuit of a communion with a public audience. The spectators are the supporting actors whom Agut needs to articulate his discourse. But in Agut’s case, they are offered a leading role in the representation they stage together in the scenario of the exhibition of a work made up of words and images. As an artist, Agut questions his status as a possible figure of authority by organizing a kind of arrested world composed of silenced constructions, of relational artefacts which, by definition incapable of being autonomous, are completed as a work on being walked through. And he does this by declaring himself to be immersed in the very problem that is central to any audience: “my shadow is a wall, yours a mirror.” Whatever happens in the place of mutual encounter that his personal artistic activity gives rise to, the constructed mechanism merely enables the two parties to be all the more conscious of having a shared existential problem, of suffering from the same linguistic disease: saying/ listening is irremediably an act of mirrored projection and as such unsatisfactory; art as a second-degree reality, as a stretching out of that limitless waiting which characterize some of the stellar moments of 20th-century culture, cannot take the place of the reality. The sole (extremely difficult and complex) operative function that Agut’s work potentiates is the maximum activation of this state of expressive suspension, precisely revealing (re-veiling) the location of some clearing in the dense thickness these difficulties generate. In his practice, the surface of the work is an incomplete entity in need of an reality external to itself in order to organize itself and postulating with its argument in favour of the spectator a theoretical continuity between the realm of the artistic and that of the world. While Agut has never attempted to renounce the conflictive condition of painter, early on he turned to photography as a means of setting himself apart from a Barcelona scene pictorially dominated by the language of Abstract Expressionism and Informalism. He subsequently abandoned the self-representational expressionist photograph, returning to a pictorial experimentation now liberated from symbolist pressure and gaining programmatic weight. His years in Cologne in the second half of the eighties proved crucial in enabling him to establish the conceptual parameters and the formal rhetorical elements that were to characterize what — beginning with the work Avui no sento res (Today I feel nothing), 1988 — can be regarded as a perfectly constructed and increasingly articulated discourse. The twelve works which constitute the elements of A los actores secundarios look like sculptures, photographs, paintings, furniture, objects or architectures, although they never cease to be things constructed and positioned intentionally in order to produce a necessary relation with the gaze of the spectator. No doubt encouraged by the artist, the perception of these artefacts frequently raises doubts as to whether they are really art, together with the unanswerable question of whether the idea they express might be art. Shown as a composite whole, this formal diversity produces in the first instance the visual sensation that we are dealing with a group exhibition and not a personal work. In what, then, does this kind of non-style of Agut’s consist? The signs here express the artist’s personal refusal to be identified with any one exclusive form that would make his work explicitly recognizable or would faithfully testify to the presence of a formula, a trademark or a personal logo, in terms invented by the language of advertising. At the same time, this formal versatility has nothing to do with rhetorical tactics of appropriation or pastiche, or with a cynical unbelief in the fin-de-siècle fashion of recent times. A resolute persuasive intention governs each of the dense formal embodiments: time and again the central articulating idea of the essential itinerary of A los actores secundarios leads the perceptive experience to one of the most extreme and complex sites in the tradition of contemporary creation in the second half of the 20th century. These are paths that had already been explored, not only by other artists from generations who came before Agut, but also by some of his peers: that entity we know as the work of art always proves to be an insufficient representation of what it could be in itself, is incapable of transmitting truths without palliatives. For those who think in this way, art is a language of the failure of speech and the artist an actor (as underlined, for example, by the generics of the photo of the magician or the mime). A prisoner of his own condition and in thrall to the imperious need to express himself, the most to which the artist can aspire is to posit, with the greatest possible precision and effectiveness, the great uncertainty that comes from feeling oneself to be caught up in this historical circumstance posited as the expressive condition of language itself. Although it is focused on the analysis of the Western idea of representation, destined to exercise a function demonstrative of uncertainty, Agut’s work does not correspond to the classic agenda of analytical conceptualism, in that, as José Luis Brea has noted, “it is not a question of replacing direct language with an analysis of language (which has more to do with philosophical art). It is something much closer to those rhetorical strategies that Paul de Man recognized as key forms of the avant-garde (the production of what will continue to be known as the ‘allegory of vision’.”


To stress the element of process in the formation of the discourse as evidencing above all a content and not a formula, to uphold the richness of the dialogic speculation against those who give primacy to the autonomous fetish, or to opt for the establishment of places of poetic transit rather than of repose, we would surely be justified in conceding to Agut’s artefacts, three-dimensional or not, the condition of portability and adaptability. His way of handling the ideas that engage him, elaborating an inventory of techniques and possibilities, manifesting at once a severe conceptual rigour and a broad formal versatility: photographic images, re-scaled display cases, re-labelled objects, embodied text, anti-paintings... This way of co-ordinating his media, putting together a catalogue of generic prototypes, of standard abstractions, opens the door, as we noted earlier, to endless specific formulations. It corresponds to an ideological tendency which, although far from frequent in the recent history of Spanish art, has proven extremely important in terms of understanding one of the most outstanding passages in the history of the art of the second half of the 20th century, which Rosalind Krauss has described as the shift from the iconic to the indexical. The concrete results of this project corroborate the fact that over the past ten years his work has decidedly ceased to be first and foremost iconic in order to become indexical, in such a way that what might have been an aesthetic of mimesis, of analogy or of similarity has been ratified in an aesthetic of referential contiguity. This type of conceptualism, as Rainer Rochlitz notes, contravenes the widely accepted modern idea which holds that the artist has to develop an original idea, or a small number of original ideas closely related to one another, varying these ad infinitum in terms of a limited formal repertoire. The diversity in the resolution is, in contrast, a challenge to this idea; such an attitude is frequently encountered in artists who, although working to sometimes very different agendas, have clearly had a hand in rewriting the history of the Western art of the second half of the 20th century. For example, it is part of the multifaceted nuclear paradigm present in the now classic work of Bruce Nauman; it can point to recent prefigurations, in Michelangelo Pistoletto’s ‘minus objects’ of the mid sixties; or opens up territories of speculative novelty through the process-based tactics of masking that Mike Kelley has been engaged in since the seventies. In Agut’s case, however, the narrative aspects that might point visually to the existence of a personal mythology are reduced to the barest minimum, although they remain cryptically enclosed in the works. Objectualizing the generic features of the different prototypes, he neutralizes the temptation to cede symbolic ground to their inherent fascination. Apparently lacking in privacy, his motives are simple, recognizable, revealing and hermetic. Like any other artist, he sets out from the desire to see, to make concrete, what concerns him. He then goes on to set in motion a process of stripping down designed to neutralize, as far as possible, any formal influences or personal experiences, seeking to clarify an order, to find a line of argument in the vortex of information and experiences to which he is subject in knowing himself incapable of starting out from a virtual tabula rasa. Without renouncing the personal or the autobiographical, in the formal resolution of each work the artist deliberately causes the aspects of his privacy that have served as the initial impulse in making the work possible to disappear, in order for the concealment of himself to facilitate the coming into play of the privacy of the spectator in the encounter with the artistic proposal. “When the conversation is not a mere exchange of verbal mechanisms in which people behave almost like gramophones, but really speak about the issue, a curious phenomenon takes place. As the conversation advances, the personality of each speaker becomes progressively dissociated: one part of it attends to what is being said and collaborates by speaking, while the other, attracted by the subject itself, like the sparrow by the snake, withdraws more and more into its intimate depths and devotes itself to thinking about the matter. When we talk we live in society: when we think we are alone. But the fact is that in this kind of conversation we are doing the two things at once, and as the conversation progresses we do so with increasing intensity: we attend with almost dramatic emotion to what is being said and at the same time we become more and more immersed in the abysmal solitude of our meditation. This growing dissociation cannot he held in permanent equilibrium. So it is that one of the characteristics of such conversations is the arriving at a moment in which they suffer a syncope and a dense silence reigns. Each interlocutor is absorbed in himself. The very fact of thinking makes it impossible to speak. The dialogue has engendered silence and the initial society precipitates into solitudes.” José Ortega y Gasset. “Los Dos utopismos” [The Two Utopisms], in Obras completas. Madrid, Ediciones de la Revista de Occidente, 1970, vol. V, p. 437 During five days in May 1983 the art cinema Socialet in the town of Terrassa showed the film Der Stand der Dinge (The State of Things) by Wim Wenders. Pep Agut attended one of the screenings of the film, which the year before had been awarded the Leone d’Oro at the Mostra de Venezia. The short critical note by J. M. López Llaví included in the programme revealed interesting conceptual parallels between the way the critic interprets the premiss tackled by Wenders in one of his most ambitiously structuralist films, and the manner in which Agut addresses the question of art. López Llaví wrote: ‘A challenge to the spectator, anxious that things should happen, by means of a film whose theme is the impossibility of explaining a theme and a discourse on ethics, on playing clean and playing dirty, on the dread of getting bogged down, on responsibility and the sharing of responsibility’. Wenders presents a description of the reality of the art world by constructing a fiction of art inside itself, with the aim of establishing a self-reflective space of the medium as linguistic entity. Agut’s interest in the cinematic language of Wenders, as also in the stage language of Beckett and the literary language of Bernhard, rests on the fact that all three are engaged in their work with manifesting a common concern: so much said only to arrive at the tragically mediocre outcome of an insolent Babel inhabited by blindness and noise! David Harvey, in a rigorous analysis of another and far more popular later film by the German director, Wings of Desire, describes this as a visual investigation of the relations between time, space, history and place. The problem of the image versus the telling of a story in real time has in this case a crucial role to play in the construction of the discourse. The exhibition A los actores secundarios, in turn, can also be understood as a complex scenographic act, articulated in twelve moments that have been organized in sequence, one after another, in line with the previously worked-out script of a perfectly planned montage. The internal organization of the diversified corpus of works Agut presents here, bringing out and staging these projects he had until now kept in the archive, his particular supporting actors, clearly makes use of the film tradition. It draws


on resources characteristic of the origins of the cinematic narrative such as popular traditions (whose imaginary is applied in this case as a means of resolving the photograph of the mime or the generic of the projections); it is influenced by scientific thought, in that it takes on the task of breaking down and analysing phenomenological aspects of perceived reality (present in the use of reticular mathematical formulas or the application of the laws of physics in the display cases; finally, of course, it incorporates fundamental elements of the modes of bourgeois representation such as painting or theatre (in Agut’s paintings or in the scenario). While Wim Wenders makes use of cosmopolitan, iconically strong cities such as Berlin, Tokyo or Paris, in search of the right place in which to develop the mesh of impossibilities and failed encounters, our artist establishes the geographical parameters of his imaginary territory of representation in an extremely private realm to which it is almost impossible to obtain access, to enter inside the intimacy of the language, and which only with extreme difficulty affords a glimpse of what the private world of the artist, his intimate symbolic space, might be. The rest, what is left, that which can now be seen and occupied in the transitory space of A los actores secundarios, is his bid to hand over some control of meaning to all those who are so often excluded from taking part in the definition of the ceremonial of the culture. This change of attitude that his work proposes, after a first sensation of perplexity, calls in effect for a little extra effort. All the more so in a time in which the art marketing of bread and circuses on the one hand and the hypocritical proclamations of suspicious new social redeemers on the other make it so difficult to attain even the most minimal intellectually libertarian personal spaces. By means of this falsifying retrospective, Pep Agut rehabilitates for himself and for the spectator a passage and a future which if not better is at least very real. Time to come in which there clearly resounds the Benjaminian desire to be able to influence events, to take moral and political responsibility as conscious agents in the shaping of a destiny of our own. Even that alone, the attempt, already augurs the success of his enterprise.


PEP AGUT (Terrassa, 1961) SOLO SHOWS 2009 Partes de. Trayecto Galería. Vitoria- Gasteiz. País Vasco. ES. 2008 "L'Iguana" i altres regions, Galeria d'art La Palma,12, Vilafranca del penedès, Barcelona ES. 2007 HÈRCULES (Autoretrat en devaluació econòmica i plusvàlua cultural). àngels barcelona. Barcelona. ES 2006 Sobre la idea de hablar. Trayecto Galería. Vitoria-Gasteiz. País Vasco. ES. 2005 Form-Fiasco-Faith-Information . Palma XII Galeria d'Art. Vilafranca del Penedès. ES.

¿Es legal tu mirada? Galería Helga de Alvear. Madrid. ES. 2004 No em diguis el teu nom. CASM. Barcelona. ES.

Avec tes yeux, avec ta voix. Art Unlimited. Art'35. Basel.CH. 2003 Avec tes yeux, avec ta voix. Red District. Marseille. FR. 2002 Las casas de Adán (La idea de hablar). VELAN Centro d'arte contemporanea. Torino. IT. 2001 Following / Swallowing. Trayecto Galería. Vitoria-Gasteiz. ES. 2000 Als actors secundaris. MACBA. Barcelona. ES.*

Bridge / Ruin. Galería Helga de Alvear. Madrid. ES. 1998 Excipient / Excedent / Excrement . Galerie des Archives. Paris. FR.

Los síntomas son palabras atrapadas en el cuerpo. Instal·lació permanent a la seu social del Grupo Editorial Bertelsmann. Barcelona. ES.

1997 Carceri. Musée Départamental de Rochechouart. Limoges. FR * Jardins Publics. FRAC Languedoc-Roussillon. Montpellier. FR*

1996 MONOCROM: N,S,E,W. Galeria Estrany-de la Mota. Barcelona. ES. Artist-Representation-Audience. Galeria Estrany-de la Mota. Art 27'96. Basel. CH.

1995 Rescue Attempt.Nonsense. Galerie Nordenhake. Stockholm. SW. LÁrtificialité du Néant. Galerie des Archives.Paris. FR.

1994 Persona. Galería Elba Benítez. Madrid. ES.* Habitaciones no exactas. Galleria Bordone. Milano. IT. Jo sóc aquell qui no és. ART 25'94. Galeria Antoni Estrany. Basel. CH. Rescue Attempt.Nonsense. The Chisenhale Gallery. London. UK.*

1993 Terrains à vendre. Galerie des Archives. Paris. FR. Solars en venda. Galeria Antoni Estrany. Barcelona. ES.

1992 My bedroom and its image. Helena Rubinstein Pavillion. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Tel Aviv. ISR.* 1991 Dilluns, Dimarts,...Diumenge. (Pep Agut & Christiane Stals). Bienal 0. Sala del Roser, Escola Municipal de Belles

Arts. Lleida. ES.* 1990 Habitaciones exactas. Galeria Antoni Estrany. Barcelona. ES.*

Pep Agut. Galeria Graça Fonseca. Lisboa. POR.* LLum, més llum. Col.legi dÁparelladors. Vic. ES. Pep Agut. Galeria Sebastià Petit. LLeida. ES.

1988 Pro-posicions. Palau Marc. Barcelona. ES.* 1987 Pep Agut. Galería Gamarra y Garrigues. Madrid. ES.* 1985 Pep Agut. Galería Fúcares. Almagro. ES. 1984 Imatge i presència de Mari Barbola. Amics de les Arts. Terrassa. ES.

Pep Agut & Ramiro Fernàndez. Galeria René Metras. Barcelona. ES. 1981 Instal·lació (amb el grup Tal Taca). Arxiu Tobella. Terrassa. ES. GROUP SHOWS (Sellected) 2010 Landscape. Landscape?. àngels barcelona, Barcelona, ES.

Julia Ostochek Collection - I want to see how you see, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg. BRD 2009 La colección. MNCARS, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, ES

Trescientos mil kilómetros por segundo (aprox)". Galería Trayecto. Vitoria-Gasteiz. SP Season Favourites. Loop Festival. Àngels Barcelona. Barcelona. SP Itinerari Col·lecció MACBA. Barcelona. SP Prisons of love. Espacio OTR. Madrid. SP Roma. The Road to Contemporary Art '09. Palma XII. Roma. SP Zona MACO. México DF. Palma XII. México. MX

2008 ConParada. Fundación Caja Vital Kutxa. Vitoria. Harun Farocki / Pep Agut. Festival Loop. Àngels Barcelona. Barcelona. SP Miradas arquitectónicas en la colección del IVAM. Valencia. SP Itinerari Col·lecció MACBA. Barcelona. SP Art Protects. Yvon Lambert. Paris. FR Roma. The Road to Contemporary Art '08. Palma XII. Roma. IT


2007 New Contemporary Art from Spain. KIAF. Seúl. Korea. 2006 Identidades críticas. Museo Patio Herreriano. Valladolid. ES.* 2005 Identidades críticas. Fundación Rafael Botí. Córdoba. ES.*

Artissima. Galeria Palma XII. Torino. IT. IV Encuentro Iberoamericano de Fotografía. De la crítica a los nuevos compromisos. Sala Mendoza y Fundación Cultural Chacao. Caracas. VEN.* Acentos. Sala de las Alhajas. Fundación Caja Madrid. Madrid. ES. *

2004 El poder del arte. Arco en el Fòrum 2004. Barcelona. ES. * El poder del arte. VELAN Centro d'arte contemporanea. Milano. IT.

2003 Trésors Publics, 20 ans de création dans les Fonds régionaux d'art contemporain. Srasbourg, Nantes, Avignon, Arles. FR. Art 34'03. Galería Helga de Alvear. Basel. CH. Itinerari. Col.lecció MACBA. MACBA Barcelona. ES. * Col.lecció d'art contemporani 1. Centre d'Art la Panera. LLeida. ES. Dispersions. Bass Museum of Art. Miami. USA. * Contra.voz. Trayecto Galería. Vitoria-Gasteiz. ES. Contra.voz. Trayecto Galería. Vitoria-Gasteiz. SP.

2002 Et in Arcadia ego. Chai du Terral. Saint Jean du Védas. FR. Col·lecció MACBA. MACBA Barcelona. ES. Art Forum. Galería Helga de Alvear. Berlin. GER. Mensaje de texto. Galería Helga de Alvear. Madrid. E.

2001 Presente Remoto. La década de los '90 en el Museo de Bellas Artes de Alava. ARCO'01. Madrid. ES.* Voyage à Cythère. Collection du FRAC Languedoc-Roussillon. Espace Gustave Fayet. Serignan- Herrault. FR.

2000 "en aparté". Château Le Bouïs. Gruissan. FR. Insumisiones. Fundación Marcelino Botín. Villa Iris. Santander. ES.* Begijnhof I. Galeria Estrany-de la Mota. Barcelona. ES. Ragtime. Sala Municipal de exposiciones del Teatro Calderón. Valladolid. ES.

1999 Ragtime. Galeria Estrany-De la Mota, Barcelona. ES. Ragtime. Galería Helga de Alvear, Madrid. ES. Miradas especiales. La fotografía contemporánea en España. Casa de monjas del Ayuntamiento de Cenicero; Sala de exposiciones del Ayuntamiento de Logroño. ES. Balade en Sol Mineur. Sélection des oeuvres du FRAC Languedoc-Roussillon.Musée Pierre-André Benoit.Alès.FR. Futuropresente. Prácticas artísticas en el cambio de milenio. Sala de exposiciones de Plaza de España. Madrid. ES.*

1998 El punto ciego. El Arte Español en los 90. Kunstraum Innsbruck. ÖST* Every day. XI Biennale of Sidney. Sidney. AUS. * Coincidències. Museum Dhont-Dhaenens. Deurle. BEL.* Fetiches/Fetichismes. Passage de Retz. Paris. FR.

1997 Collection, découverte. CAPC Musée dÁrt Contemporain. Bordeaux.FR. Procesos. Festivales internacionales de Lima. Casa Grace. Lima. PER. Indoors. Galeria Antoni Estrany. Barcelona. ES. Colección de Arte contemporáneo. Fotografía/Escultura. Fundación Coca-Cola. Sala El Brocense. Cáceres. ES.* A bruit secret. Entorn de lárt i el sagrat. LÁlbergueria.Vic. ES.* Descoberta de la col·lecció. MACBA. Barcelona. ES. Bienal d'Art de LLeida. Espai Leandre Cristòfol. LLeida. ES.

1996 Cosas transparentes. Galería Helga de Alvear. Madrid. ES. Mais tempo Menos História. Fundaçao Serralves. Oporto. POR.* Prospekt. Shirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. DE.*

1995 Arte Contemporáneo Español. International Artfair. Athens. GR. Country Code. Bravin Post Lee Gallery. New York. USA. Des limites du tableau. Les possible de la peinture. Musée Départemental de Rochechouart. Limoges.FR.* Architecture(s). CAPC Musée d'Art Contemporain. Bordeaux. FR.* Seeing Things. Galeria Antoni Estrany. Barcelona. ES. Peninsulares. Galeria Graça Fonseca. Lisboa. POR.*

1994 Los Universos Lúcidos. El Pabellón. ARCO'94. Madrid. ES. Escriure imatges. Galeria Antoni Estrany. Barcelona. ES.* Choix de Bruxelles. Espace Jacqmotte. Bruxelles. BEL. Anys Noranta.Distància Zero. Centre dÁrt Santa Mònica. Barcelona. ES* Bibliofília transformista. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo. Lisboa; Fundació Caixa-Castelló. Bancaixa. Castelló. ES.

1993 Designated Space II. Space as Scene. Museum Dhont-Dhaenens. Deurle. BEL.* El lloc enlloc. Galeria Antoni Estrany. Barcelona. ES.* Emergency/Emergenza. Aperto'93. XLV Biennale di Venezia. Venecia. IT.* Exchange II. Shedhalle. Zurich. CH. Iluminaciones profanas: la tarea del Arte. Arteleku, San Sebastián. ES.* Iluminaciones profanas: la tarea del Arte. Galería Elba Benítez. Madrid. ES.* Bibliofília transformista. Sala Balmes 21. Barcelona. ES. Onze Nadals i un Cap dány. Galeria Palma XII. Vilafranca del Penedès. ES. Colección Pública II. Ingresos de Arte Contemporáneo (1991-93). Sala Amárica. Vitoria. ES.*


1992 Historia Natural. El doble Hermético. CAAM. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. ES.* Los últimos dias. Salas del Arenal. Sevilla. ES.* Pasajes. Expo´92. Pabellón de España. Sevilla. ES.* Espagne.23 Artistes pour lán 2000. Galerie Artcurial. París. FR.* Constants de lÁrt Català. Centre dÁrt Santa Mònica. Barcelona. ES.* Small,Medium,Large,Lifesize. Centro per lÁrte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci. Prato. IT.* Barcelona Abroad. European Visual Arts Centre at Christchurch Mansion. Ipswich. UK.* Acrochage. Galerie des Archives. Paris. FR.

1991 Europe Unknown. Palac Sztuki TPSP. WKS Wawel. Kraków. POL.* Emergences. Centre Culturel Espagnol. Paris. FR. Artistes catalans del fons d'art de la Generalitat de Catalunya. Espace Sophonisbe,Tunis. TUN.* Gymnopèdies. Galeria Antoni Estrany. Barcelona. ES.* Mòdul. Galeria Antoni Estrany. Barcelona. ES. Collection du CAPC. Musée d'Art Contemporain. Bordeaux. FR.

1990 Colectiva. Galeria Graça Fonseca. Lisboa. POR. Confrontaciones. España-Bélgica. MEAC Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo. Madrid. ES.*

1989 Catalunya-Signografies . Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores. Dublin, Köln, Edimburg, Helsinky, Genova. * 6 Konstnärer frän Katalonien . Kulturhuset. Stockholm. SWE.*

1988 De Nueva lente a Photovision. 25 años de fotografía española. Musée Cantini. Marseille. FR* Col.lectiva d'estiu. Galeria Thomas Carstens. Barcelona. ES. Col.lectiva d'estiu. Galeria Arteunido. Barcelona. ES.

1987 Tria tres. Galeria Dau al set. Barcelona. ES.* Del bell al sinistre. Itinerant (Arles, Tarragona, Barcelona). *

1986 Negre sobre blanc. Galeria Joan Prats. Barcelona. ES. Catalunya, Centre d'Art. Casa de la Cultura. Girona. ES. Spanish Young Photographers. Houston Fine Arts Museum. Houston. Texas. USA Festival internacional d'Arles .Arles. FR.

1985 Journées de Jeunes Créateurs. Galerie Séguier. Paris. FR. Julio 1985. Galería Fúcares. Almagro. ES. De papel. Galería María Genís. Sevilla. ES. Natura morta. Galeria LLuc Fluxà. Palma de Mallorca. ES.

1984 Saló de Tardor'84. Saló del Tinell. Barcelona. ES.* Barcelona. Nuevas imágenes. Colegio de Arquitectos de Aragón. Zaragoza. ES. Supermerc'art. Galería Look. Barcelona. ES.

1983 III Mostra d'Art Català. Monestir de Sant Cugat del Vallès. ES.* Biennal de pintura jove de Terrassa. [2ºn premi].Amics de les Arts.Terrassa. ES. Saló de Tardor'83. Saló del Tinell. Barcelona. ES.*

1982 XXI Premi de dibuix Joan Miró. Fundació Miró. Barcelona. ES. Agut/Bussé/Fernández. Galeria Tot Art. Sabadell. ES.

1981 22 Joves Artistes. Amics de les Arts. Terrassa. ES. Bienal de pintura jove. Amics de les Arts.Terrassa. ES.

COLLECTIONS (Selection) ARTIUM Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vitoria. Vitoria Banco de España. Madrid CAM Caja de ahorros del Mediterráneo CAPC Musée d'Art Contemporain. Bordeaux Colección Caixa Terrassa. Terrassa Colección Fundación Cajamadrid. Madrid Colección Fundación Coca-Cola. Madrid Dhont-Dhaenens Museum. Deurle ECB European Central Bank. Frankfurt Fons d'Art de la Generalitat de Catalunya. Barcelona FRAC Haut Normandie. Rouen FRAC Languedoc-Roussillon. Montpellier Fundació La Caixa. Barcelona MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Barcelona MNCARS Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Madrid Musée Départamental de Rochechouart. Limoges

Documents

agut pep dosier engpepagut.net/archive/agut_pep_dossier_eng.pdfdescents of a river bed that crosses through the artist’s city, and a final series that captures the bare feet of the