Flour Factory

b. 1967, Mataró, Spain; lives and works in Barcelona

Martí Anson was one of 23 artists included in SITE Santa Fe’s 7^th biennial, Lucky Number Seven, in 2008. A Spaniard, he was nominated by Argentinian-born curator Ferran Barenblit, then of Barcelona’s Centre d’Art Santa Monica and now at Madrid’s Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo. Each of the collaborating curators of the Biennial was invited to submit the names of several artists. The Biennial was structured in such a way as to emphasize community (of curators and of artists), collaboration (among artists), site-specificity (all artworks were built in a short time frame immediately before the exhibition) and ephemerality (all work was meant to be dismantled and “recycled back into the Santa Fe community” at the close of the exhibition. (Liza Statton, Lucky Number Seven, volume 1, SITE Santa Fe Seventh International Biennial Exhibition catalogue, p. 54)

As Biennial curator Lance Fung wrote in the Biennial catalogue, “I decided that since the artists were emerging rather than established—their ages ranging from their early twenties to their sixties—the notion of creating a site-specific, permanent work of art might have been daunting. Instead, the conception of works that are intrinsically ephemeral or decidedly temporary would be one of the Biennial’s missions. As I initially stated, I wanted to create a biennial where no works of art entered the art market and where all works of art would cease to exist as such at its closing.” (Fung, Lucky Number Seven, volume 1, SITE Santa Fe Seventh International Biennial Exhibition catalogue, p. 37)

Anson is an artist working within a Duchampian legacy of anti-art gestures that confound the notion of the nature of art and art-making, and concentrating on art as a process and not a product. In 2006, for example, Anson hand-built a boat inside of a Copenhagen contemporary art space over the course of 55 days.  The boat, he knew, was too large to be moved out of the space and so it would have to be dismantled at the close of the show. He repeated the same process at Barcelona’s Centre d’Art Santa Monica the following year. As Barenblit wrote of the project, “And so, as expected from the outset, the boat, which he had put so much effort into building, was destroyed in little over an hour.” This aspect of labor was repeated in the re-creation of a Barcelona flour mill for the SITE Santa Fe Biennial, and though all works in the exhibition were meant to be ephemeral and dismantled at the close of the Biennial, the artist noted in his statement in the Lucky Number Seven catalogue that “[a]fter the exhibition closes, the building will be handed over to the city to take its place among the existing adobe structures for any function, besides being an artwork.” (Lucky Number Seven, volume 2, SITE Santa Fe Seventh International Biennial Exhibition catalogue, p. 17)

Anson’s significance as an artist is largely regional, focused in the Barcelona area but also extending beyond the region to other areas in Spain. His exhibition history also reflects other shows in Europe, including Copenhagen, Brussels, and London. As part of the curatorial project entity Latitudes, Anson participated in No Soul for Sale, A Festival of Independents, at the Tate Modern. Given that Anson works little with objects and mostly with action- and process-based events, his work is challenging to exhibit or collect in traditional gallery or museum venues. Nonetheless, his resume and bibliography still read as an artist who is still “emerging” within an avant-garde, performative field of contemporary art. His resume lists sixteen one-person shows since 1995, all but three in Spain, and all but four of the Spanish shows in the Barcelona area. Within his larger body of work, the flour mill and the boat constructions remain highlights of the artist’s career to date. Most of the artist’s press coverage relates to these two projects. After the 2008 SITE Santa Fe exhibition, Anson exhibited documentation about the flour mill project in Barcelona, complete with a chocolate model of the flour mill. And although his work is anti-object and anti-commodity, he is represented in five museum collections, four of them in Spain.