The year 1734 saw the opening in Rome of the Capitoline Museums, which was possibly the first art institution of a modern kind to open its collections to the public. Over the past three centuries museums of ancient, modern and contemporary art have acquired, catalogued, preserved, ordered and exhibited their collections in order for society to benefit from them. It is easy to imagine that during that period, several hundreds of millions of visitors have admired the collections of these museums around the world. Nonetheless, almost nothing has survived of their visits, experiences and emotions. The two works that comprise the present project are an homage to the spectator’s “ecstasy” and an act of witness to his or her physical presence, the stubborn roots left by that person’s journey through the history of the Prado. For me the essential and most remarkable aspect of this phenomenon is the cumulative presence of all these people and their desires, emotions, ecstasies, reflections, joy, rage and silence, which have filled the Prado and so many other museum-environments. Many years ago Giacometti wrote: “There was a time when I visited the Louvre, and the paintings always gave me a sensation of the sublime. Now I go to the Louvre and all I can do is look at people as they contemplate the works of art. For me the sublime now resides in their faces as they are looking.” The infinite portrait that constitutes this project is an account of the “spectacle of the spectator”, a richly diverse group of people who are exposed to the history of art.
The project consists of two works: a short film and a video-installation, both presented in the Museo del Prado as an homage to the spectator. Every day the Museum witnesses an encounter between the place and its visitors that revolves around a sense of belonging. Visitors’ looks and voices and the routes they take around the building imbue the works of art and the architectural space in which they are located with a sense of familiarity, giving the impression that the Museum comes a little closer to its visitors. The project’s overall aim is to construct an atlas of people in the Prado, a visual encyclopaedia of all those who keep the Museum and its works alive. Who are the men and women who have stood in front of the works of Velázquez, Ribera, Goya and El Greco in these early years of the 21st century? The project is also the start of an ethnographic archive of this human landscape.
A fundamental element within Jodice’s approach is that of “transgressing the museological box” and he consequently aims to take the work of art outside of the museum, devising new “places for looking” in the manner of “extra limbs of the museum space”. On this occasion the film being shown in the Prado will also be projected in around 400 cinemas across Spain. The work of art will thus spread like a virus into a space traditionally devoted to film, obliging a public not necessarily familiar with art to confront it.
Francesco Jodice