GENE

In January 1986, in a basement under a block of flats in Madrid’s Chamberí neighbourhood, Maite Arratibel, Celia García Bravo, Nacho Pérez de la Paz and Pedro Roldán founded an alternative art space, ironically naming it Galería Nacional. At the same time, in the same month of the same year, Manuel Saiz set in motion the Servicio Postal de Exposiciones Múltiples y Propaganda (Postal Service of Multiple Exhibitions and Propaganda), a mail art initiative presented as a “non-orthodox magazine, in which the pages and articles are received one at a time and separately, a gallery in which every dispatch will display a work to the spectator’s house, not the other way around”. According to the publisher’s simple, plain note: “a slot for artistic opposition”. This radical collaborative project would, a few months later, coalesce with the critical spirit of the members and friends of Galería Nacional, where Manuel Saiz was guided by Julio Jara, a fellow exhibition worker at the Villalar Gallery and an early collaborator on both projects. Based on this encounter, and via contributions from other artists and theorists such as Javier Colis, José Díaz Cuyás, Celia Martín, Pamen Pereira and Alberto Vidarte, a decision was made to bring both independent initiatives together in one common project: GENE, a gallery of collective production to publish editions of postal multiples.

Influenced by multifarious references, ranging from Kurt Schwitters to Joseph Beuys, from Lao-Tse to Gustav Landauer, and with a strong attitude of rejection towards the cultural policies of the new progressive Madrid of the time which, in painting, had found a path returning to order, GENE focused its attention on regular meetings, gatherings which, between 1986 and 1988, resulted in seventy-seven numbered postal consignments made by more than twenty artists, different actions, and the creation of a publisher, GENE Ediciones. Initiatives which, from a complete precariousness of media and evident marginality, brought about alternative networks to disseminate artistic ideas and works which, with their attitude, short-circuited some of the official spaces devoted to art. One such example is the controversy caused by Pedro Roldán in the show 13 Young Painters, organised by the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, where as a final work he submitted, after having passed through the selection process with a different piece, a scrap of paper with the drawing of a headstone and the inscription “Space Won/Space Taken”, signed with the name GENE. Another example is the body of a run-over dog and presented as a collective work in Punto 87, an exhibition of annual youth art organised by Madrid City Council.

GENE. Topia and Revolution: 1986–1988 assembles, for the first time, all of this unreleased and disseminated material in a documentary show devoted to one of the great anti-establishment groups of 1980s Madrid, a collective which is absent from the history of Spanish art but which, nevertheless, was present in the official press of the time owing to their reverberant actions. As the collective’s members asserted in a self-interview published in issue seven of the art journal Buades, “the artwork is more about attitude than object. A liberalising attitude of the individual and, through them, collectiveness. An individual attitude to life/art, revolution and death”.