Descending Into Meaning
To be alive is to acknowledge death (a little art meditation).
When I walked into the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Helga de Alvear in Cáceres, Spain—a tiny and hilly city with lots of old buildings and churches and 95,000 inhabitants in the middle of nowhere, close to the border of Portugal, surrounded by farmland and desert and cork trees and not much else—I thought we’d be in for another semi-boring art experience. Sterile. Global. A view from nowhere.
The entrance is modern and light-filled and airy (which is to say: looks like most new-ish museums). An audio installation that sounds like a kind of TSA security announcement greets you. NO DROGAS. ALCOHOLES. PROSTITUCIÓN. It drones on. There’s an Ai Weiwei piece—something like a chandelier, the size of the large, main room, red and gaudy and overwhelming, sitting on the floor.
Off to the side, a room displays dozens of Goya’s Los Caprichos prints, small etchings he made to satirize Spanish society in the late 1700s—comical sendups of any and all moral failings and double standards and religious zeals. And then, set 15 feet or so in the air, a tiny sculpture of an angel, or what looks like an angel. It’s a Yves Klein piece, in his signature vibrant International Blue, a depiction of the winged Greek goddess Niké. In another room, also up in the air, another tiny angel-esque sculpture—Lucio Fontana’s Madonna col Bambino, a mess of terracotta raggedly pieced together into just enough of a shape to be readable.
A theme emerges: we are being watched by imperfect moralists; the Goyas and the TSA-esque voice and the strange angels all shaking their heads at the conspicuous consumption of modern life—the gaudy chandelier, the museum itself, me (hungover from the night before, it felt as if the disembodied voice was peering into my soul…how did it know about the drogas and alcoholes??).
The museum’s entrance is at the top of a hilly street in Cáceres, and so to continue through, you must descend. And so we did.