Art about politics – how might you make it? In an earlier career Mexican artist Damián Ortega used to be a political cartoonist. Nowadays his mostly sculptural work ventures into the world of social and political reality through the sideways, associative poetry that ordinary materials are implicated in.
For this show ‘The Independent’, Ortega has taken on current affairs with greater directness, by filling the Barbican’s Curve with a sequence of sculptures all made in response to a particular newspaper story or advert, from each day of the month of August: here’s a breeze-block wall, dividing a grid on the floor, on one side nothing, on the other, a field of broken eggshells. It’s about illegal Mexican migrants to the US, the zig-zag wall and grid making a graph of the rising numbers. It’s titled ‘Immigrant Song’. Or how about a concrete cast of an oil drum, which contains a chamber in which a candle burns, only visible through a closed-circuit video feed. It’s about the 33 Chilean miners trapped underground, and called ‘Greed or Graft’.
Ortega’s sculptures inevitably reflect the generally dismal view of the world the news media report – all ecological disaster, war, strife, human suffering. Ortega’s concern is with the different speed and power of art images versus news images, and so ‘The Independent’ offers us the problem of whether the art is diminished by its dependence on passing, temporary events, or rather invests them with a lasting depth and drama that fleeting reports cannot capture.
But Ortega is editorialising too, choosing some stories over others, and revealing a particular conception of what it means to feel politically responsible as an artist; the problem is that here, this seems to mean being overwhelmed by the tragedy and catastrophe the news media revel in, while being unable to take a broader view. Good news is no news, an imbalance that undermines the artistic independence ‘The Independent’ seems to desire.