Rafael Spregelburd returns to the Museo Moderno with a piece about Rafael Squirru

In the absence of the speaker, they improvise among ponchos and objects that speak of an improbable art. The death, which occurred under anomalous circumstances, a mix-up between the jockey's clothing and some obituaries signed by a woman, is the reason Cabezón Redrado cannot give the talk on Rafael Squirru .

So the musicians , who recognize themselves disguised as men from the interior, bound by a convention, improvise a sort of essay on modern and contemporary art.

What happens in Nothing Older is close to a collage , an ensemble, an absurdist opera where Rafael Spregelburd diagrams the forms of an essay in the incarnation of two characters.

First, this musician with baroque nonsense and, later, the captain of the ship Yapeyú, where Rafael Squirru performed the feat in 1956 of transporting 53 works by national authors (among whom were Spilimbergo, Antonio Berni and Carlos Alonso) to take them to world markets on a journey through extravagant countries for the time, such as Japan, or cities like Bali.

In that sort of ship of fools where Cecilio Madanes was staging an opera (as an emulation of Fitzcarraldo) and an exasperated Italian was trying to make a film, Squirru was seeking to realize the project of creating a Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires.

It is precisely in this space where Spregelburd and Zypse present Nothing Older , the revival of a work that now coincides with the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Museum's founder .

But the development of this performance opera has nothing to do with a biography. Spregelburd takes this fact as a synthesis and manifestation of a will , but also as the image of a non-institutionalized form.

For years, the Museum of Modern Art was a project , a concept that had no physical space.

Squirru used to say, “I am the museum.” Spregelburd uses this insight to reflect on what modern art is, what it meant to bring the works of modern artists to New York at the height of Abstract Expressionism. He proposes a narrative about conceptual art linked to diverse foundations, a critical mix that discusses, once again, what can be considered art.

A supposed interpretation in a key of incongruity of the piece 4:33 by John Cage or a version of Jijiji by Redonditos de Ricota, also in Italian with operatic overtones, give an account of the associations, but also of a dramaturgical structure that emulates the concept .

The taped banana by artist Maurizio Cattelan, exhibited at the Art Basel fair in Miami, the lemons in glass cases, and a pitcher of water displayed as a work of art are elements of the staging that serve to reflect on the ways in which contemporary works are legitimized and accepted.

The experiment becomes concrete when they call on the public to copy the works to demonstrate whether it is as easy to paint as Pollock or Rothko.

The text invokes aesthetic forms that speak to experience , just as it frames the narrative within a strange perspective. The characters are not specialists, but rather frenzied lecturers who reconstruct the notes of Cabezón Redrado (the supposed expert who died before the commemorative event) to use absence as a sort of fork in the road, where magnanimous and commercial artistic expressions enter.

Everything is a dismembered support that is finally constructed between the real data (the voice of Squirru and a ship's stewardess) and the articulations that are freed from the linearity of time.

References to the conditions of production (the always absent money and the lack of commitment until the project is confirmed as valid) are a tool in the sum of crazy, parodic, but also documented resources that generate a frenzy: an aesthetic piece that discusses its very nature, but is inspired by that first floating sample to question what is possible.

Nothing Older is being shown this Friday at 7 p.m. and Saturday at 9 p.m. at the Museum of Modern Art.