Held on 20 Nov 2018
This encounter, which opens the exhibition Lost, Loose and Loved. Foreign Artists in Paris, 1944–1968 in the Museo Reina Sofía, sets out to examine the complex fabric of post-war national identity and cultural politics through jazz and the relationship it bears to modern art. The encounter comprises a short lecture by art historian Serge Guilbaut, the exhibition’s curator, and a concert by bebop pianist René Urtreger.
Guilbaut is behind the renowned theory that argues how the transfer of art’s capital status from Paris to New York in the aftermath of the Second World War was in response to a string of actions aimed at building up American hegemony from culture. In parallel, something else was conversely “stolen” — the consideration of jazz as a purely French art form, despite its invention in the USA. In this lecture Guilbaut sets forth his ideas about post-war French painting drawing from jazz to cling to modernity on account of American Abstraction.
Upon its arrival on French shores in 1917, jazz was immediately understood as a free and spontaneous style of music, yet these qualities would soak in progressively; on one side through cosmopolitanism, in identifying the genre with the music of racial minorities and, on the other, in the sense of a distinctly French composition. Thus jazz would be split into two styles: the classical, ordered French-style jazz of New Orleans; and the improvised, frenetic and impromptu jazz of bebop. Both styles would have a hand in the reinvention of the School of Paris — a name that brought together different pictorial trends in the city between 1920 and 1959 — at a time when the French capital had become an erstwhile centre of the art world.
Upon the conclusion of the lecture, René Urtreger, one of the most eminent composers and pianists around since the 1950s — when he played with Miles Davis, Stan Getz and Chet Baker — will perform a concert, running through the major themes in bebop.
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Serge Guilbaut is an art historian and professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. His publications include How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (University of Chicago Press, 1985), Sobre la desaparición de ciertas obras de arte (Curare, 1995) and Los espejismos de la imagen. Ensayos de arte contemporáneo (Akal, 2009). He is also the curator of Be-Bomb. The Translatlantic War of Images and All that Jazz (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona, MACBA, 2007–2008) and Lost, Loose and Loved. Foreign Artists 1944–1968 (Museo Reina Sofía, 2018–2019).
René Urtreger is a musician and composer. Regarded as one of the founders of bebop, he has played with Dizzy Gillespie, Lee Konitz, Johnny Griffin and Sonny Rollins, and numerous others. In 1958 he worked with Miles Davies on the soundtrack to Louis Malle’s film Ascenseur pour l’echafaud (Lift to the Gallows), which was based on the album under the same name, recorded by both artists in 1957. The record also featured Daniel Humair on drums and Pierre Michelot on double bass, both of whom would form the HUM trio with Urtreger in 1960. His discography also includes René Urtreger Plays Bud Powell (1955), Modern Jazz au Club Saint-Germain (1955), HUM (1960, 1979 and 1999) and Onirica (2000).
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Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art
23 February – 14 December 2026 – Check programme
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art is a study group aligned towards thinking about how certain contemporary artistic and cultural practices resist the referentiality that dominates the logics of production and the consumption of present-day art. At the centre of this proposal are the concepts of difficulty and deviation, under which it brings together any procedure capable of preventing artistic forms from being absorbed by a meaning that appears previous to and independent from its expression. By ensuring the perceptibility of their languages, difficulty invites us to think of meaning as the effect of a signifying tension; that is, as a productive and creative activity which, from the materiality of art objects, frees aesthetic experience from the representational mandate and those who participate in it from the passiveness associated with tasks of mimesis and decoding.
The economy of the referential norm translates the social logic of capitalism, where insidious forms of capturing subjectivity and meaning operate. In the early 1980s, and adopting a Marxist framework, poet Ron Silliman highlighted how this logic entailed separating language from any mark, gesture, script, form or syntax that might link it to the conditions of its production, rendering it fetichised (as if without a subject) and alienating its users in a use for which they are not responsible. This double dispossession encodes the political strategy of referential objectivity: with no subject and no trace of its own consistency, language is merely an object, that reality in which it disappears.
The political uses of referentiality, more sophisticated today than ever before, sustain the neoliberal-extractivist phase of capitalism that crosses through present-day societies politically, economically and aesthetically. Against them, fugitive artistic practices emerge which, drawing from Black and Queer studies and other subaltern critical positions, reject the objective limits of what exists, invent forms to name what lies outside what has already been named, and return to subjects the capacity to participate in processes of emission and interpretation.
Read from the standpoint of artistic work, the objective capture of referentiality may be called transparency. Viewed from a social contract that reproduces inequality in fixed identity positions, transparent in this objectivity are, precisely, the discourses that maintain the status quo of domination. Opposite the inferno of these discourses, this group aims to collectively explore, through deviant or fugitive works, the paradise of language that Monique Wittig encountered in the estranged practices of literature. For the political potency of difficulty — that is, its contribution to the utopia of a free language among equals — depends on making visible, first, its own deviations; from there, the norm that those deviations transgress; and finally, the narrowness of a norm which in no way exhausts the possibilities ofsaying, signifying, referring and producing a world.
From this denouncement of referential alienation, fetishisation and capture, Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art turns its attention to the strategies of resistance deployed by contemporary artists and poets. Its interest is directed towards proposals as evidently difficult or evasive as those of Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Kathy Acker, María Salgado and Ricardo Carreira, and as seemingly simple as those of Fernanda Laguna, Felix Gonzalez Torres and Cecilia Vicuña, among other examples that can be added according to the desires and dynamics of the group.
The ten study group sessions, held between February and December, combine theoretical seminars, work with artworks from the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections and exhibitions, reading workshops and public programs. All these formats serve as spaces of encounter to think commonly about certain problems of poetics — that is, certain political questions — of contemporary writing and art.
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art inaugurates the research line Goodbye, Representation, through which the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship seeks to explore the emergence of contemporary artistic and cultural practices which move away from representation as a dominant aesthetic-political strategy and redirect their attention toward artistic languages that question the tendency to point, name and fix, advocating instead for fugitive aesthetics. Over its three-year duration, this research line materializes in study groups, seminars, screenings and other forms of public programming.
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This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
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The third session gazes at film as a place from which to dismantle the idea of one sole history and one sole time. From a decolonial and queer perspective, it explores films which break the straight line of past-present-future, which mix memories, slow progress and leave space for rhythms which customarily make no room for official accounts. Here the images open cracks through which bodies, voices and affects appear, disrupting archive and questioning who narrates, and from where and for whom. The proposal is at once simple and ambitious: use film to imagine other modes of remembering, belonging and projecting futures we have not yet been able to live.
Remedios Zafra
Thursday March 19, 2026 - 19:00 h
The José Luis Brea Chair, dedicated to reflecting on the image and the epistemology of visuality in contemporary culture, opens its program with an inaugural lecture by essayist and thinker Remedios Zafra.
“That the contemporary antifeminist upsurge is constructed as an anti-intellectual drive is no coincidence; the two feed into one another. To advance a reactionary discourse that defends inequality, it is necessary to challenge gender studies and gender-equality policies, but also to devalue the very foundations of knowledge in which these have been most intensely developed over recent decades—while also undermining their institutional support: universities, art and research centers, and academic culture.
Feminism has been deeply linked to the affirmation of the most committed humanist thought. Periods of enlightenment and moments of transition toward more just social forms—sustained by education—have been when feminist demands have emerged most strongly. Awareness and achievements in equality increase when education plays a leading social role; thus, devaluing intellectual work also contributes to harming feminism, and vice versa, insofar as the bond between knowledge and feminism is not only conceptual and historical, but also intimate and political.
Today, antifeminism is used globally as the symbolic adhesive of far-right movements, in parallel with the devaluation of forms of knowledge emerging from the university and from science—mistreated by hoaxes and disinformation on social networks and through the spectacularization of life mediated by screens. These are consequences bound up with the primacy of a scopic value that for some time has been denigrating thought and positioning what is most seen as what is most valuable within the normalized mediation of technology. This inertia coexists with techno-libertarian proclamations that reactivate a patriarchy that uses the resentment of many men as a seductive and cohesive force to preserve and inflame privileges in the new world as techno-scenario.
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