Daniel G. Andújar, Operating System
This exhibition and its corresponding catalogue explored a crucial historical problem for leftist artists: how to produce and disseminate subversive art without being assimilated by art world institutions that the work seeks to critique? In 1967, one of the organisers and participants of the Collage of Indignation (1967) “resolved” this dilemma by the total destruction of the work to prevent its institutionalisation by museums seen as complicit with the Vietnam War. This act, however, creates difficulties for any “archive” of the Left, which seeks to present documents, objects and recordings that counter dominant cultural narratives. With this exhibition of Andújar’s radical work, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía was, in the words of its director Manuel Borja-Villel in his text for the catalogue, “forced to question how to include such projects without institutionalising them; how to present them without neutralising them; and, ultimately, how to deal with Andújar’s operating system without operating it into the system”.