The ultralocal imaginary in the postglobal

It is well known that Cadaqués, as an isolated town and island of artists, has created a repertoire of images and symbolic texts from its ultralocal, apart from the depredation of the civilization of leisure. Dalí's appropriation of the landscape as a backdrop for his paintings of voluntary and permanent exile helps to explain this, as does the plaster mold of the soles of Duchamp's feet full of dry flies for a impossible nap. It is clear, then, that the ultra-local is not a positivist or mimetic phenomenon with the place, but that an identity under construction is nourished by both the sublime game and its eschatophilia. In a very eloquent way, Richard Hamilton activated his verbal games by provoking an attack on the association between the licked beauty of the place and its counterpoint with the bad smell: a twilight postcard with the rock sticking out in the middle of the bay turned into a shitty typhoon.

In these half-hermetic, troubadour and avant-garde games, art is opposed to reality elevated to symbol and its consumption by the masses. The end point is a shock that causes hilarity, because it has gone down to the popular humor that breaks the ideal. But its effectiveness lies not so much in the punch as in the analysis of the constructive processes of a lucid critical intellectual nature.

We have just had a renewed test with the drawing of the road sign of a continuous line that the artist Jordi Mitjà has used this summer as a claim for his exhibition at the Cadaqués gallery. This is a paradox, since the code indicates that the dashed line only delimits the lanes, although everyone understands that it is possible to advance and, in the mountain that winds towards Cadaqués, it is very difficult to advance with its 150 turns. Even more: in the summer everyone gets stuck. The artist has taken large-format posters from the old and closed Peter Moore Museum, the former secretary of Dalí who collected by print, and, cutting them to size as a store poster, has recycled them for the print of the icon of entrance to the road to Cadaqués. The palimpsest is made up of the aesthetic failure of the bad taste of the mass consuming art. The topic: difficulty as a value. Muntadas, at the end of the Franco regime, in the summer of 1974, turned the gallery into a live and deferred television set. On the prototype Cadaqués local channel, there were recordings and interviews of village life in the winter period, which had nothing to do with the summer, nor with the unique television, unique information, such as the system of communication during the dictatorship.

And we could go on and on, showing an archive of pieces of art that were created at the time when the advertising brand Cadaqués was growing until its implosion. In fact, on the contrary, art was already exploiting its greedy identity. The English artist Oliver Chanarin, about to move to Cadaqués, is based on a Duchampian quote and a Mironian cloud. Based on the idea of the three pieces of rope that Marcel Duchamp dropped to the ground and used to build a system for measuring chance, he tested a rope in zero degree. From the suspension in gravity he redefines the artistic object. Thus, doing an exercise in physics, with the most advanced technologies, exhibits what, given as random, is real or which, being a product derived from post-technology, is a fetish of art. After all, our identity was unpredictable: gravity between distant objects.