The Macba is still the great taboo of our museum system, that white building by Richard Meier that unfortunately gave more space to Richard Meier than to the museum, but which still dignifies the heart of the Raval while trying to shout in our ear that we are contemporary beings. That we cannot avoid being modern beings, because, however much we like the classics, it turns out that we live in the present. However, living in the present is also an option: there are too many people who prefer to ignore the present, what is happening now, and take refuge in the infallible shelters of Modernism, of Gothic or Romanesque, of our Impressionists or of the Dalí-Miró-Picasso triumvirate. It is an option. Closing your eyes is an option.
At most, to catch up, some drop by exhibitions on digital art or venture to announce museums of technological art in the Fàbrica de Canons. They say that the present is this, that the future is this, and then it doesn't surprise me that we all end up visiting virtual golden mummies in the Ideal. If the present is this, if the future is putting on glasses or taking the tablet or pressing the screen to enjoy a three hundred sixty, immersive, tactile and three-D, or four-D experience, that makes you feel as if you were inside the brain of some genius because technologies allow you to understand everything much more (and above all entertain you), then we are losing sight of the present. While all this is happening, which is very good, contemporaneity is exhibited at the Macba. Not only at the Macba, but at the Macba. If you want to know where you live, in what year you live, in what culture you live, in what anguish you live. You can also miss it, obviously: ancient Egypt must be much closer to you, for sure.
The Macba has found a discursive line that lies between raging current events and our celebrated avant-gardes: drawing from its collection. Being the custodian of one of the most important collections in the country, but also the most eclectic and with the greatest potential for surprise, the policy it follows today is to hold fewer temporary exhibitions (very expensive) and more displays of the heritage safeguarded in the center. This is not very different from what the MoMA does, where we never tire of seeing Warhol's soups, Picasso's ladies, or Monet's water lilies repeated. The difference is that at Macba we find our contemporaneity, combined with other international contemporaneities. Our vision, our contribution. What the hell does our era say about us, and vice versa.
At Macba we find our contemporaneity, combined with other international contemporaneitiesThe exhibition Poetic prelude/intentionshows the museum's willingness to put the work at the center, much more than a narrative, much more than an exhibition of heritage: come, we have made poetry. This work is here because it connects well with this other one, like a verse, like a song, and it shouldn't be necessary for anyone to explain why: nobody explains why one note goes after another, or why one color follows another in the rainbow.Every work of art has a poetic intention, as does the Universe, and Macba has decided to have its own as well: emancipate yourself from guides, from explanations, from logic, and come to enjoy a work of art in the form of a museum.A true immersive experience: immerse yourself, for a few moments, in your century. It's like Tàpies' splendid bed or theDemolishof Abellí that permanently hang on the two main walls: hello, from here we have things to say. We exist. And that should be enough.
When Max de Esteban intends for us to get lost within the projection A Forest, we get lost in the world of Artificial Intelligence, but focusing on the ideological frameworks where it operates: that is, not so much on the technology as on its social implication, and we even wonder if the forest that appears is real or generated. When Fito Conesa installs a wind and brass orchestra next to a lake, it is to see if the earth responds; when Bernat Daviu shows us a group dancing inside a museum, through mobile phones displayed on a wall, he is asking why young people dance and film themselves outside museums and not inside; when Antoni Llena exhibits Senyals de fum des d'un subsòl, he refers us to the pandemic and the fragility of the stroke, the passage of time, to artistic references in the form of a drawn diary; when Regina Giménez plants geometries and colors that evoke old geography or geometry books, she makes color and the absence of color take center stage.
And then we move on to pieces that have less to do with the senses and more with language and letters: Brossa's visual poems, Broothaers' breaks in meaning, Mestres Quadreny's impossible scores. And when we delve into works with a more domestic connotation, Domènec places clothes hanging in the Mies Van der Rohe building and Lucía C. Pino talks to us about the materials that today plasticize our soul under a light that is half restorative, half toxic. To highlight, and greatly, Pedro Torres's House of the Sun: a large installation that takes us from the most astronomical language to the most everyday reflection of a ray on the wall.
All this happened, and happens, while we believed that modernity was a click away. Modernity is in the heart of Barcelona's old town, and it is worth a hygienic visit to update oneself. It's not that going to the Moco or the umpteenth virtual room is bad: it's that it has less to do with us. And even less to do with poetry.
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