La Juan Gallery is a space focused on the performing arts: action, performance and the artistic-creative relationship with the body understood as an object. For more than six years of activity it has devised and produced formats and content on the margins of the gallery scene. Maybe for this reason it will not inaugurate its season this September, but will do so in October with the project Galería de arte (Art Gallery): a fiction to illustrate what an art gallery is. Nevertheless, we have a conversation with its founder and artistic director, Juan Gómez Alemán, about the new season on the Madrid circuit.

I

ALBERTO AGUILAR: September marks the beginning of the new gallery season in Madrid and Barcelona, as well as in other cities. Except for this beginning of the conversation, in what follows we will not talk about the art industry. If applicable, in what way does La Juan Gallery question the bases on which the art market is sustained today?

JUAN GÓMEZ ALEMÁN: It must be questioned because we have been dragging or have been dragged along by the same thing for the last sixty years. We also believe that the new generations are gradually becoming less interested in an industry that trades in the object: in buying and selling paintings or photographs. In our opinion, collecting is in crisis; nowadays, why would you buy a work of art if you can follow its author on Instagram, for instance? Our questioning arises from the fact that the public wants to have a moment in common with the artist, to be part of a experience with him.

For this reason, we talk about performing art and we work with artists who generate this kind of dynamics: i.e. projects in which the public attends, takes part and even becomes the piece itself. We propose an experience with a transformative character that maintains the link with what we understand as art: a mirror in which to reflect ourselves, a tool for political or social denunciation.

As a result, fewer people enter them, fewer artists participate in the gallery scene and there are fewer collectors, since the interest in collecting is -as I said- waning among the new generations. This is how we see it.

II

AA: Your diagnosis should lay the foundations for your initiative. That is: configuring the gallery model, the curatorial framework, the relationship with the agents involved, the construction of an audience. Let's talk about it.

JGA: Once we had a meeting with the director of one of the most important national art fairs, with the aim of presenting him a proposal to carry out during the event. His response was that a fair is not a space for generating art but for buying and selling works. I would like to mention this anecdote to talk about our art gallery model.

We go further than the rest of galleries. We manage a place where we create through a process of trial and error, and the public is invited to participate. That strikes us as crucial: that these spaces for experimentation and creation exist beyond the market value that the art works can achieve. It's a bit idealistic. But we are happy to work with artists in this way.

AA: Is not there some kind of contradiction between what you call yourselves and what you are doing at La Juan Gallery? You characterise your initiative as a laboratory or as a hybrid space that works with other formats, but you say that you are an art gallery, you don't dispense with the term. It's fine to call yourself an art gallery and not be one. Perhaps it is another critique of the order of things.

JGA: We do not want to do without it, of course. Although we are known as a space for contemporary creation. Along with other initiatives in the city other than art galleries, we are labelled as such. But we are one of the latter. In fact, a curator I've worked with —as an artist— said that my piece was the gallery, a gallery that breaks with the usual parameters: empty, nothing "hanging" on the walls, where no objects are sold. For him, the work of art was the fact of generating a gallery from such premises.

We are a gallery and people and other galleries recognise us as such. We stress a lot that we specialise in performing arts, this is our point of escape from the rest of the galleries in the city. In our origins as art gallery we were very radical in proposing slogans or mottos: "Death to the object, Long live the subject"; "You don not have to hang anything on the walls anymore because people are not interested in seeing anything on the walls". We were young and ignorant. Today, with more than six years of experience and more knowledge of the market, I would not dare say so.

III

AA: Let us look "outside the white box". Although it is obvious that people are part of urban processes and structures, they do not articulate the city, because this is the task of institutions. It is true that every complex social phenomenon is not the result of an institutional design, but the dynamics of cities are ordered or determined by the institutional fabric. By institution in the sphere of art and culture it is substantial to not only understand the museums and other similar entities, but also “that” which socially sanctions whatever the artistic experience may be.

JGA: Let me to start by saying something about the institution. We look at what the big cultural organizations in Madrid (MNCARS, La Casa Encendida, CA2M, Matadero, etc.) have to offer -in some way- the opposite. Because we contemplate other times, a greater number of artists and more daring in our projects.

With regard to what you comment, we should bear in mind that underground movements -although I am not convinced by this term- draw a spiral: they begin on the margins and end up in the centre, becoming the content of the institutions. For example, museums today are looking at what twenty or thirty years ago was on the margins or even censored: Africa and its diasporas, the demands of the LGTBi collective, and so on. Perhaps it is marginal activity that will define the culture of the future or what the institutions will be interested in a few years from now. I do not think institutions are independent of the social or cultural movements that occur on the margins. They are unable to generate content behind the backs of the latter. I do not know about any movement which has been originated from the institutions. It all starts on the margins.

AA: I am not saying that the institution generates the content or the formats from which —what you call— the culture to come will emerge. What I am saying is that large institutions prescribe the experience of the artistic or the cultural within cities. If a family travels to Madrid to enjoy the artistic offer of the city, they do not usually enjoy "the movements that operate on the margins". They arrive and find a narrative, a choice of formats, themes, artists; in other words, the city offers a certain artistic experience to a wide audience. Of course, institutions are nourished by what operates on the margins. Keep in mind that otherwise they would run out of steam. Organizations, especially those which have a systemic nature, need an exogenous element to turn to it, to assimilate it and, thanks to this movement, to grow. The Biennale Arte 2022 (Venice) and Documenta fifteen (Kassel) are paradigmatic examples of this.

JGA: I agree so. Someone who comes to the city visits the big museums or institutions. It's very interesting what you said: where the museum is going or the idea of an expanded museum. It is something we are already working on. Some years ago we tried to partner with an institution to become part of an expanded museum in the city: whose activity does not just take place in the building it occupies but throughout the city. "Getting out of the white box" is something we are working on. In 2021, 80 percent of our content was produced outside our headquarters. The gallery space is too small for us. We like to work on a larger scale: to have twenty artists for an action, for example. Or to be able to receive a wide audience. That is why La Juan Gallery wants to be an expanded gallery.

IV

AA: At this point, we would like to address one resulting of the previous argument: why does an art gallery look towards the city that surrounds it? Or in other words: What kind of activity can you carry out away from the canonical exhibition format that you present in your gallery?

JGA: The same year as our project began, a study was made in the Lavapiés neighbourhood to find out what the residents knew about the galleries in Doctor Fourquet Street. Among the results, I was struck by the fact that a large part of the residents thought they had to pay to enter. They did not know that the galleries are free spaces that anyone can visit. This lack of knowledge generated a barrier and the consequent gap between those and the local public. So it was clear to us that our space would be a great showcase: that any passerby could see what was going on and could witness -or even take part in- our activity.

For this reason, when we meet with the artists to show them the workspace, I always tell them that they have two areas: the interior and the exterior. This has led some artist to work in/with the street. And for passers-by, in turn, to become an active element of the performance or action.

Regarding the deployment outside our headquarters. The Juan Gallery, as I said, is expanding throughout the city. Teatros del Canal assigns to us the spaces they do not use for its theatre production: so that we can develop actions there. With the Instituto Cervantes we devised a call for artists, Acción por metro cuadrado: each of the selected artists works in a square metre and the whole is conceived as a performance exhibition. We also took over the main square of the historic villages of the Community of Madrid, thanks to the initiative Arte vivo en las villas: the communion between performance and the artists, artisans or folkloric groups of the locality; we created an event in which avant-garde disciplines are related to traditional techniques that are practically in disuse -the work of esparto grass, bobbin lace or jacks, for example-; both coexist for a day in the village, and we update, with this, the traditional. Or, finally, our Cine caliente (Hot cinema) in the framework of the Summer Cinema programme in the Parque de la Bombilla: films that are part of the collective imagination are re-read by creators from other disciplines while being screened to eight hundred people.

In a nutshell: We create new audiences or interact with other audiences. This is one of our most important objectives. And this is achieved far from the canonical exhibition format you allude to.

V

AA: According to you examples, you establish collaborations with those that do not strictly belong to the contemporary art circuit. Why do not the great institutions you referred to earlier exhibit, absorb or soak up proposals like the ones you devise? Allow us the ironic tone, could not it be because it is too soon for them to include the artistic production that takes place on the margins?

JGA: We are looking for new audiences to connect with them through new languages. We are not interested in working in such circuit. Nor do they call us, of course. However, I can tell you that the art centres in question produce content that we work on beforehand. Also we are aware that they pay attention to our proposals. At some time, we have programmed a performance or an action in La Juan Gallery and —all of a sudden— the directors and curators of the main museums and art centres of Madrid attended it. Some of them congratulated us for daring the artistic proposal because they wanted to see it, but apparently political correctness did not allow them to host it in their institutions.

I'm thinking, for example, of the Young Boy Dancing Group, based in Amsterdam, that performed at La Juan Gallery. Maybe in twenty years we will be somehow on the museums circuit: deactivated, of course. It scares and angers me!

VI

AA: Next October La Juan Gallery opens its season with the project Art Gallery. You construct a fiction with the aim of making the public understand what an art gallery is. We would like you to tell us about it to conclude our exchange of views and ideas. It has been a pleasure to get first-hand knowledge of the working and management of La Juan Gallery.

JGA: My past come into play. I was a playwright: I wrote and directed theatre. I found it very interesting to go back to theatre and to conceive a piece called Art Gallery, and produce it, of course, in an art gallery, ours. It is still a parody. I like to work with irony and laughter. I believe that laughter unblocks the spectator, it makes them lower their guard and your messages then reach them.

The public will witness how an art gallery works, but the game consists of the public being a participant, so that they end up becoming a piece of art for sale. We want to convey the idea that the spectator is the artwork itself. First, the piece alters the painting; then, the piece is the artist; next, the public is the piece.

JUAN GÓMEZ ALEMÁN is the founder and artistic director of La Juan Gallery, which has been operating since 2016 in the city of Madrid.

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