24 Galleries, a museum: The Survey as a Design Tool

Abstract In the mid-1970s in Madrid, it’s possible to identify a series of experiences that went beyond traditional architectural practice, the established domains of academia and the usual dynamics of editorial and institutional activities. The art galleries, with their publications, curators, collectors, critics and visitors, proved to be a prolific setting for an informal network of agents and institutions that, through programming events of various formats, instituted an active mediation in the critical formation of the citizenry. The seminar “Nuevos Comportamientos Artísticos” (“New Artistic Behaviors”), held at the Madrid’s German Institute in 1974, was one of these events. Its gallery proved to be a pioneer in the exhibition of practices linked to art and design, which openly promoted their expansion into other fields of knowledge based on a local interpretation of what was noticed in Spain as “conceptual art”. The action “Survey of 24 art galleries in Madrid,” was the contribution to the seminar of the multidisciplinary collective Grup de Treball (GdT), and serves here to illustrate the activation of this network of galleries as a ‘counter-project’. An act of design, based on Peter Eisenman’s definition of ‘Conceptual Architecture’, that transcends art and controversies to offer an alternative. The exhibition of the survey’s answers accumulated the values of language, interface, platform and medium necessary to redefine the framework of relations between its participants. Whose association gathered a community with the capacity to be a Museum: a dematerialized, fragmented and heterogeneous institution that challenged conventional relationship between art, citizenry and the market.