Ideas que devoran / Voracious ideas

Artists, works of "art," critics, spectators, institutions, market, media, and advertising and communication resources are all part of this enterprise devoted to entertainment that Ampudia traps and displays (in a manner that is somewhat unnatural, or unstructured, sometimes, as the exhibition is partly retrospective, and not a specific production to address this "system") in a show that comprises twenty-three video works, installations, photographs, interactive works and sculptures. This show, entitled Eugenio Ampudia ...sólo una idea devoradora (Eugenio Ampudia... Only a Voracious Idea), shows the art world as a digestive system that absorbs, sucks, swallows, digests and finally evacuates, in a complex itinerary of transformations and mutations, any element/food or idea/icon referring to the work of art, in which all the parties collaborate, even the viewers, who -like in reality tv shows- activate the visual, expressive, fetishist and consumer operations that take place. "From the moment an element enters the art market until it leaves it through a different, distant point," says Ampudia, "it travels along a lengthy itinerary. In its nucleus, everything is combined and, also, the substances that enter the system are transformed by enzymes, hormones or acids, which extract what is ‘useable' and turn the rest into material that can be defecated." As Jorge Luis Marzo says: "When I think of the title Ampudia has given the exhibition, ‘...only a voracious idea,' I can only think of the conscience of the artist before an artistic structure that is influenced by its implosion, its bulimia, its self-absorption" (Jorge Luis Marzo, "Fantasmagorías en el final del arte" [Phantasmagorias in the end of art], en Eugenio Ampudia ...Only a Voracious Idea , exhibition catalogue).

Yet, from where does the artist extract the critical capacity to enter the complexity of this digestive system? Is this space not reserved for theoreticians, critics, specialists? Is the artist himself not included in that absorption ? More than an "artist" -since the artist should also be questioned, if it is a case of questioning, from an ironic, ludic, enlightening perspective, not from a moralist point of view, the system and dismantling its mythologies-, Ampudia is a manufacturer of sensations and illusions, he is an "operator of ideas," an intermediary agent, who is not interested in the creation or production of artistic objects -that technical contradiction that art can never solve, and where its aesthetic uselessness and its silenced contradictions reside-, but in the administration and transmission of ideas, in the mise en scene in the actual museum of the operation of the enterprise, of the commercial emporium, of the factory that produces icons and meanings. His works and installations follow designs or borrowed ideas with an anonymous nature, which elude the question of authorship and the sublimation of the figure of the author, with which the artist denies his expressivity to enter a game of failed gazes and actions carried out by the viewers on what they observe and by the actual work on the place of reception and transmission. Consequently, his activity is also displayed in the management of spaces dedicated to net.art, digital art and audiovisual art; in shows dedicated to ephemeral art, which he curates; in "domestic technology" workshops, in the media and in his own website: www.operariodeideas.com.

However, Ampudia, as stated by the curator of the exhibition, Mariano Navarro, in the catalogue, "does not address the art system or world as a mere exercise of intellectual recognition; he stresses (more than warning, he is implying) the sentimental illusions and prejudices that underlie and coexist in our aesthetic judgments and preferential criteria." Consequently, his pieces and installations constantly involve the viewers in their perception, in a phenomenology, an iconography, in sensations and in a spatiality that confine them like a trap, which albeit false, fictional and virtual (it is just "art," i.e., it is harmless), is no less worrying, and its experience finally induces them to the perception of reality itself as being false, fictional, virtual... and dangerous. In all, it destabilises the actual criteria and value judgments which we use to measure the world. Starting with the artist's myths: Picasso (who moves his eyes at the viewer's command, by moving the mouse), the mythical and paired portraits of Che Guevara and Dalí and the "return of the ghost" by Joseph Beuys in Chamán (Shaman, 2006), immaterialised and trembling in the steam of a machine. Although the work appears in all its ludic, poetic and participative magnitude in pieces, video-installations and productions like Mesa de pe(n)sar (Thinking table, 2003), Lluvia interior (Interior Rain, 2005-2006) and Bleu ii (1994 ) , it is in video-installations like Hámster (Hamster, 2005-2006) where Ampudia fully enters the "digestive tract," with the creation of this trap -the gallery- that shakes the intellectual structure of the observer/observed. Hámster is the spatial representation of a cage in which the visitor inexorably and unconsciously ends up trapped, fed, looked after and looked at by someone (a giant boy) whose eyes watch him through a hole from an unknown outside place: the world that used to belong to the viewer. Turned into a human-mouse, the now disappeared viewer loses his elegance and posture, and is observed, monitored and "played with" by Ampudia himself. Consequently, the question of the work does not concern the meaning so much as the synergic activation of the thought of the viewer who sees his ideas of the work being broken down and turned into a game, a deceit which, even once outside the museum, will make him doubt the actual context of the reality he inhabits.

Another notable video-installation is Fuego frío i (Cold Fire i , 2003): the Museum is on fire and the flames slide invisibly down the walls of the gallery, without penetrating it. There is nothing but an illusory fire, there are no sensations, no heat, it is dematerialised; pure illusion. Beauty can finally be experienced without the danger of the matter, and that pure, phantasmagorical, visuality, that floating in illuminated space and that real absence of an element that, nevertheless, has symbolical connotations of destruction, lights a void that may be the set, the show, the madness. The museum library is on flames in Fuego frío ii (Cold Fire ii , 2003), books sizzled virtually by virtual flames that will never actually burn them. This is the sign of the times: spectres, ghosts, imaginary and virtual presences, transparencies and vacuity, which Eugenio Ampudia, the operator of ideas, squeezes into capsules of information and transmits through networks of spectral signs and images. In Estadio (Stadium, 2001), competing is all that matters: running incessantly around a circular room after a merchandise that is not only an object, it is meanings, ideas, concepts, programmes, figures. The product is ready and enters the circuits of the market for its distribution and consumption. The dolls run eager for transcendental ideas, in an interminable marathon, anxiously following the added value of satisfaction. In the work En juego (At play, 2006) he exploits the agony of competing for the maximum value: novelty. The representation ? A room carpeted with synthetic "grass" where visitors watch a "live" football match, in which players fight for the latest Robert Hughes book, The shock of the new . Maximum tension between merchandise and entertainment, between mental projections and economic systems, between fetish and screen. Marx's spectre is not far off.

Translation: Laura F. Farhall