Boothworks

The film Boothworks, which lends its name to Cristina Garrido’s first exhibition at the gallery, is a pseudo-fictional documentary that narrates, from the optic of the future, how the current art market undergoes a radical transformation induced by art fairs: gallerists, forced to abandon their conventional gallery spaces, now treat booths at fairs as their normal work place, innovating with the possibilities these places offer and ultimately creating a new artistic medium. Garrido rekindles the 1960s conceptual practices that instigated performance, ephemeral creations and site-specific works, connecting them with the present situation. The narrative of the video is made up almost entirely by quotes from well-known art critics, artists, curators, historians and other cultural agents, digging up art practices from the revolutionary decades of the sixties and seventies. Garrido has intervened minimally in these texts to adapt them to the current context while at once projecting a walkthrough of the world’s main art fairs.

While questioning art critique is fundamental in Garrido’s work, it should not be viewed solely in one direction as focused on the art market. It is obvious that we ought to examine how the economic model of the art fair conditions the choice of artists and artworks shown. But we should also ask ourselves about the institutional role of this model: its specific temporality and spatiality, the role of the art critic and the mass media, and even the effect on the artwork itself in having to respond to the rapid demand and immediate interpretations of a highly segmented audience. The series Best Booths is made up of collages arranged in perspex boxes, in which photographic reports of different stands selected by online platforms like Artsy or Artnet engage with high prestigious international institutions. To accentuate the role of the art fair as a purported new institution, the artist has also intervened with gesso and oil on the fabric tote bags of various museums and has arranged them at a height to simulate the signs that identify a gallery’s location within an art fair.

A signature feature of Cristina Garrido’s work is to expose the mechanisms that promote and assign value to art objects, inviting the participation of other agents. The images from the Boothworks video are taken from Vernissage TV (mass media) and the quotations from agents in the art world. Bruce Nauman’s performance, Michael Asher’s institutional critique, Gustav Metzger’s auto-destructive art or Robert Smithson’s earthworks (whose presence in one of the rooms evinces the relationship with the exhibition title) are theses for the commencement of a journey, a series of prints to follow that could lead to many others, on a transient and uncertain path.