| War and death |
David Castillo
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| War, war, war, war, war, war … We have become old, have changed men, there have been revolutions, counter-revolution, the empires have fallen. The only thing that has not disappeared has been the war. And we are faced with the mass murder, the American and British soldiers finishing the wounded in the phantasmagoric Fal·lúa buildings. All sentimental education we can remember from childhood: Vietnam, Cambodia, Biafra, Palestine, Sinai, Beirut, Sumatra, Granada, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Somalia, Eritrea, El Salvador, Colombia, the Balkans, Rwanda … up to In the Gulf War, the oil war, which has had two parts with a parenthesis in which the episode of the Towers and Afghanistan is located, where the Americans have continued the war of the Soviets, transforming the friend into an enemy, like so many other times.
Big wars and powerful, small forgotten wars, so much is worth. Geostrategic changes, economic interests, religious conflicts, any excuse is good to reproduce the horror, to feed the arms beast. Do not shut up, do not look, do not think, be independent, do not show yourself anti-American, be immune to the news, do not depress yourself, exercise, master your emotions until the War is Alive! as a device generating news, experiences, novels, movies … It is all worthwhile. All for art The poet JM Calleja offers us a tasting of war through a collection of pieces, elaborated with fragments of newspapers from the seventies, a reflection on the death through social art in formats that have given me remembered the poor art recovered by the Puerto Rican artists in the last biennial of New York. They are pieces that combine some of the artist’s interests, the permutation between visual arts and literature, the interaction between visual and concrete poetry, the claim of the image as a stereotype of creative abstraction. The exhibition collects a few moments, perhaps some invaluable information as repeated, that most indifference generates. The inertia of death and journalism, of journalism on death, is no excuse but a pretext for Calleja’s reflection, which alters realism with conceptual contributions to the mechanisms of censorship, of chance in the widespread murder that war implies The government wants to regain friendly relations with the United States, meanwhile, the United States spreads its fire everywhere. With their companies they show the greed and infinity of theorists and contributors justify and bless this whole state of affairs. Faced with such a shameful situation, these pieces of J.M. Calleja reminds me of the insurgent spirit of my old friend, the Latin communion between aesthetics and ethics, the survival of art against the massacre. |
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| Text submission ENSW NEWS. H20 Gallery. Barcelona 2005 |
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