Inflammable II

The new artistic conceptions provided by visual culture studies are erasing the often artificial boundaries between artistic disciplines, between high and low culture, between elite and mass culture.

And so the revisions of the history of modern visuality in Andalusia that can be made from an archaeology of modernity are a wide, unexplored field of work, which will make it possible to recover operations of artistic meaning for those who are now working with concepts of visual construction.

A monopolistic history of art has tried to sideline many of the aspects which made tradition appear modern in the visual culture of Andalusia. Popular phenomena like flamenco, bullfighting, civil and religious festivals, etc., have given prestige to an elite art that soon betrayed its own political and social environment, giving rise to a schizophrenic relationship between modern works of art and their audiences.

Many of these artistic productions halfway between experimental culture and mass culture have often been abandoned to the whim of the market and once elite culture has digested them - as a life experience or a biographical incident - they have been suppressed from official history and forgotten.

Many of those phenomena occur around flamenco, a popular modern art which, due to its own critical incapacity and the various abuses and manipulations to which it has been subjected, seems to be divorced from the currents of modern art in which it was generated. Which is inexplicable in the fields of musical and choreographic studies, where it has no place as a modern phenomenon, unlike similar traditions such as jazz, tango or Afro. In the visual arts, it is also important to point out its meaning, since in many cases it has been an emblem of resistance to mass cultural consumption, highly officialised and instrumentalised by colonial phenomena, or what today is known as globalisation.

Marked as a phenomenon of production, in the sense Walter Benjamin used the word in the 1930s, flamenco is intimately involved with the phenomena of economic expansion of any mass culture. Marked first by the railway, then by the phonograph, the radio, the cinematograph and television until now, when it is doing business on internet. Each of those media has also generated a "craftsmanship" of its own with which to make flamenco, popular culture, community.

Inflammable II revolves around one of those "craftworks", the film productions which from the mid seventies to the mid eighties, the time of the so-called transition to democracy, have been made in Andalusia. The films by Gonzalo García-Pelayo, Fernando Ruiz de Vergara, Carlos Taillefer, Miguel Alcobendas, Joaquín Arbide, Pilar Távora, Juan Sebastián Bollaín, Juan Manuel Calvo, i.e. everything that has so often tried to present itself as Andalusian cinema and which just as often its authors have denied. Political issues, social portraits and erotic scenes are shown as commercial cinema, experimental cinema and ethnographic documentary, with no respect for the borders between genres. With three exceptions: the Surrealist ascendant of Ese oscuro objeto del deseo (That Obscure Object of Desire) by Luis Buñuel, the testimony of Ocaña, retrato intermitente (Ocaña, An Intermittent Portrait) by Ventura Pons and the Situationist descendent with Corre gitano in Tony Gatlif’s part.

Nevertheless, we can say that the centre of Inflammable II, the beginning of its journeys, starts from the 1978 film, Vivir en Sevilla. Gonzalo García-Pelayo, director of this film experiment, tried to create a cinema rooted in the culture of cities like Seville, Jerez de la Frontera, Cádiz or the Costa del Sol. His experimental trilogy Vivir en Sevilla, Corridas de alegría and Frente al mar - which the critical shortsightedness of the time dismissed by associating it with the nouvelle vague, a Godard in a beret, quite evident in its starting points, but whose results were closer to the preaching of Jonas Mekas and the wave of American camp avantgarde - is an attempt to find channels for a new visuality which mixes the underground aesthetic with the most racial flamenco, formal experimentalism with erotic touches - along the lines of the Pasolini of the Trilogia della vitta (Trilogy of Life) - to draw new and wider audiences.

Vivir en Sevilla is a flawed masterpiece, an unmarried machine about desire, whose plot mixes stories of the return from exile and the repression of crime, erotic and philosophical adventures, film-within-film and metastories, Miguel Ángel Iglesias and Farruco, sexual liberation and old novel archetypes, flamenco rock and "pure" flamenco dancing, and most of all a free wandering, a chaotic drift around the city of Seville which gives the film its title. Julio Pérez Perucha explained it well when he talked about a “syntagma salad” to define its cinematographic text. Everything is there, documentary cinema and fiction film, deconstruction and cinéma vérité, ethnographic documentary and social criticism, musical reportage and political comedy. And taking that model the Inflammable II cycle has been created, a range of film productions which have their common substratum in the popular culture of Andalusia.

Inflammable II, however, is not about Seville, not even about Andalusia or any of its creative modalities linked to the relations between popular and modern. Although it includes all that, the project has to do with the different forms of action and reaction which have confronted a modernity coming from the project of the Enlightenment with a popular culture which had digested the pre-Enlightenment, festive or Baroque cultural substrata in a different way. The paradox is that in that theoretically anithetical world modernity found the necessary substrata for a critical renewal of its modern, enlightened project. And that was possible mainly because that popular substratum was not outside the process of the modernisation of elite culture but, as Georges Bataille warned, “had been able, better than anyone, to assimilate the contradictions of modernity”. That is evident in the set of materials we are presenting, a clear precedent - the Ocaña and Nazario group is obviously linked to Andalusian "emigration" and Pedro Almodóvar always acknowledged his "libertarian" debt to a film like Frente al mar - of what would later be Rrollo culture in Barcelona or the movida of Madrid. But it is also a parallel phenomenon, contemporary with Brazilian tropicalism or the funkulture of Afro-Americans.

Inflammable II is also a set of examples and copies of that great machinery for the production of meaning formed by flamenco song, dance and touch, with the culture and civilisation they have generated around them. When thought about the multitude and the phenomena of collective creation return to the foreground of intellectual and poetic reflection, Inflammable II could be seen as a case study of what that poiesis means in community.

Activities

• Programme
• Andalusian Scene, Popular Culture and Political Resistance

Other activities of 2005

• The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
• Fernando Bryce
• Aspects of Publishing Books on Contemporary Art
• 15 years (1990-2005)
• Collection 2005
• Enthusiasm