Portrait of the artist as a young man narrated by himself

In the hall in Egia Cultural Centre in Donostia, where the D.A.E. Super-congress was held, a single question filled the air. With just a little bit of imagination you could even manage to visualise the thick columns of smoke from the cigarettes like thousands of air bubbles in comics that, covering the ceiling and walls, showed a single caption: "And where is the art?" Will art perhaps be down the mine, on the dole or at the disco, well, at least making fun of "the structures of reality"? (After saying this, one will try -in vain of course- to keep the loyal promise not to submit "the structures of reality" once again to the torture of "penetration interruptus by art") No, dears, that's not where art is to be found, art has gone off to summer camp in an "Emancipation Bubble".

So the "bubble" in question is a project by Alex Mitxelena and Hugo Olaizola that Saioa Olmo presented at the SK which provides a solution to the problems of the modern young (artist). "Emancipation Bubble" is a kind of bubble-tent fitted out as a dwelling that residents can connect up, for example, to the window of their parents' house. So, the adolescent that fulfils the conditions of a) being broke, b) wanting to live without paying away from their parents' while c) still living with them, also without paying, has a solution in their hands that everyone will be able to afford in the shape of this emancipation device that in the near future will replace the satellite dish as the prime feature on facades in the suburbs.

If in some away this multipurpose crude metaphor (because the metaphor is the infallible tacky last resort of a vulgar hack in a tight spot) can be used to define art that has problems in its paternal-filial relationship with reality and is absorbed in its own bubble, then let's stretch out this greasy element: throughout the thirty performances by artists aged between twenty and thirty at the SK we could also see clear symptoms of "emancipating bubble" syndrome, that is, signs of the classic tension that artists experience between their desire to establish a self-indulgent distance that is assigned to artistic creative work and the determinants that reality imposes on them -the "How can I question reality on the basis of what I do?" and its reverse side "How can I earn a living with what I do?".

These were not the only questions that came up in debate in Egia. Among the many good things about this SK, which was a mixture of an Amway congress and a "keep thirty individuals in captivity for 72 hours" -style laboratory experiment, is the fact that it has encouraged a dialogue that fluctuated between curiosity and confrontation. Which themes came to the fore? Well more or less the usual questions that are raised nowadays: the conflicts about what to do to carry on being an "up-and-coming artist" or an "artist who is forever young" (or to stop being one); the countless artistic proposals that avoided the gallery exhibition space like the plague (services on the Internet, sales catalogues, magazines, furniture, flyers, music, fashion, dance, etc.) and the fairly surprising scruples that some people seemed to have (I don't know if these are faculty obsessions or not) when it came to accepting some of these practices as being "legitimately" artistic; the demand for interdisciplinary elements in everyday artistic practice;… and a curious fact: the term "ideology" was used actively and passively with obscure and sometimes contradictory meanings.

Well, over the three days of the "Portraits of young artists" gallery that the Super-congress was turned into, each one took advantage of their turn to define themselves in words by showing their own work, their friends' work, work in collaboration with others, talking about their lives (because in almost these cases practice and life run in parallel) or making the presentation itself an artistic event. You could entitle the portraits seen here in many different ways: "The young artist grows old", "the super-producer of images", "the angry young man", "the pragmatist", "the mediator", "the encoder", "the collaborators", "the artist deep in thought, "the effective artist" and even "the pedant". Among the best things about all this was that it showed that a bar in Ordizia can be as rewarding or unrewarding for art as four consecutive scholarships in a country with endless winters.

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