Warning: Participation in the Museum of the Commons

Since 1999, as part of his long-standing project On Translation: Warning, the artist Antoni Muntadas has been displaying a simple sentence on ephemeral publications such as postcards, flyers and billboards in public places, set in white capitals on a red background: ‘WARNING: PERCEPTION REQUIRES INVOLVEMENT’.

This warning, which could be read as an invitation, a statement of intent, an exhortation or even a threat, alerts us to the mechanisms that are present in all forms of communication, with a particular emphasis on those triggered by works of art. It also hints at the strategies employed in media and advertising for the benefit of the market and of politics as spectacle. In our current social and cultural context, passivity appears to be encouraged in uncritical recipients by the proliferation and mass reproduction of images, consumed via endless scrolling. As Andrea Soto Calderón explains in her book La performatividad de las imágenes (2020), the paradoxical effect of living in a world saturated by images is a drastic reduction in our ability to observe attentively. From this perspective, the real issue with the exponential growth of image production-and-perception in today’s society is the steep decline in the power of the image: a kind of erasure through excess. Against this backdrop, the message conveyed by Muntadas’s On Translation: Warning is like a snap of the fingers that breaks the spell, draws us out of our perceptive lethargy and revives the possibility that we may actively participate in the process of perception. Warning: involvement is essential for true perception.