New Social Aesthetics

The term "social aesthetic" alludes to all the elements that are seemingly insignificant but that organise the daily life of a specific community or group. Park design, clothes, certain ways of speaking, gestures and other forms of behaviour based on rituals make up these social aesthetics. More than art, politics or history, an aesthetic approach to social affairs produces ideas that form the basis of the most dynamic trends and movements in society.
In the very latest Basque art, this is a trend that appears subtly in the work of certain artists. Recently two projects have been presented that negotiate with this.

"Goierri Konpeti" is a video documentary by the artists Iñaki Garmendia and Asier Mendizabal set in the Goierri area, right in the heart of Guipúzcoa, which is where the artists come from. It's an area where the mixture of rural and industrial features is combined with a relative economic boom among the young. It is also a place in which the natural and cultural landscape constantly remind us that we are in the middle of a social urban clash of identities. This is an ideal setting for the development of youth subcultures that aim to strengthen identity through the use of aesthetics, rituals and leisure activities. One of these subcultures revolves around the cult of racing or rally cars. "Goierri Konpeti" is a gang, as this is understood in a Basque context; a group of male friends whose social relations are organised around the object of the car. This is the sociological portrait of a generation that forms the basis of the new situation that we currently find ourselves in.

Initially conceived as a documentary, both artists have tailed these youngsters over a year, and have lived and collaborated with them, and the result is a video that follows the codes of a feature that mixes in narrative structures that are more commonly found in art. Despite what the subject might suggest in advance, the tone of the video is intimist, reflective, and even poetical at times.
"Goierri Konpeti" stresses the importance of the physical landscape in conserving traditions, customs and values that are rooted in our collective identity. It is this very power of the landscape that gives the narrative its cohesion.
Moving in another direction, the artist and fashion designer Ainara García has published "Orrazkerak-Haircuts", a kind of fanzine in which she provides a review or genealogy of local haircuts of the last twenty years. At a time when there is a punk revival, with the drooping crests sported by football and pop stars, Ainara García goes back to the explosion of punk in the phenomenon known as "Radical Basque Rock" at the beginning of the 80's, to a time in which the revolutionary youth aesthetic was acquiring a style of its own that has constantly evolved and readapted right up to the present.

The interesting thing about social aesthetics is that they manage to combine the concept of youth with the concept of revolution, and the aesthetics of fashion with the aesthetics of revolution itself and all this is done by mixing street or musical movements that range from Rastafarian rock to the scalped look.
Conceived as a catalogue of rather unglamorous haircuts for hairdressers, the publication mixes modern images with period photos and details enlarged from other fanzines. Some of the images are self-portraits of the artist, who owing to her youth, has only hazy memories of these beginnings, so the product centres more around fascination and desire than factual evidence. The artist recently made a name for herself with some designs for t-shirts with the names of villages in Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa printed in ink over bright colours both on the front and on the back.
These two examples may be useful as samples of social aesthetics that have been cannibalised by an artistic method in which the references to the political and social climate in the Basque Country emerge as residual side effects, like a commentary that resists being trivialised and simplified by a mere allusion to hardcore nationalist underworlds. These projects deal with the creation of collective identities through aesthetic elements and behaviour that are widespread throughout different sectors of society.

These social aesthetics are characterised by the difficulty that outsiders have to interpret keys and signs that form part of local micro-societies.
A resistance to interpretation that leads the audience to identify, or confuse, a beautiful landscape of valleys, mountains, winding roads and pines with some obscure plot lying behind this.

Peio Aguirre. 2002

Published in the Culture(s) supplement. La Vanguardia, Barcelona, 04-09-2002

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