Faith
and Enthusiasm
In a series of work made in collaboration with Yola Berrocal, who more that my muse is my alter ego, we are developing a project, Faith and Enthusiasm, promoting the idea of popularity as a strategy of visibility. Yola Berrocal’s character is a parody of traditional famous ones, in the same way that recent magazines parody traditional ones.
Following this logic my desire is to make a picture on canvas of Yola Berrocal in the same position as Goya’s Maja Desnuda. A big canvas, in which the roles of artist and muse will be represented by a pair of pathetic persons who try to move from their social class.
Antonio Ortega had paint Yola as
Some preliminary reflections:
If you’re an artist it can be hard to socialize at times.
When you’re introduced to any of the people involved in the art scene, you quite reasonably expect to benefit from the fact of meeting a new person. This happens if you’re introduced to a curator, a director or a supplier or assembler of some specific product. The mental file possibilities comes into action, whether it’s an opportunity to get work, to get funding or to get professional advice.
None of this happens when you’re introduced to an artist. In that situation the artist has to be viewed in much the same way as a windscreen cleaner at the traffic lights: you know they’re going to ask you for something and you can only hope they’re not so persistent as to create an awkward situation. It’s only very well positioned artists that don’t make a nuisance of themselves.
I once heard an illuminating observation in a film. A wife said that people get married because they’re looking for someone to bear witness to their life. According to this theory, you need another person to testify to your life to prove that you existed. I, for one, am convinced. I remember a friend I used to have whom nobody wanted to play billiards with, for the simple reason that he never paid any attention to his opponent’s shots. He would be busy talking or smoking, or he’d actually wander off to the bar and ask you when he came back if you’d managed any cannons, you’d say yes, adding that one of them had been extremely difficult and extremely skilful, and he wouldn’t even listen to your description of your fantastic shot, which was now dead, without witnesses… what good had it done?
Most people are content with a limited number of witnesses to recall their deeds, but that is not the case with artists. At a show whose theme was the creation of art in televisual format, every single one was a close-up of the artist talking about his stuff.
We now have two reasons to feel uncomfortable about introducing an artist into your intimate circle: he’s going to ask you for something and he’s going to tell you his life story.
What’s more, the artist lives with the feeling that it is his duty to bring whoever he’s talking to up to date with the current state of his career, as if he was morally obliged constantly to recite his CV and as if his interlocutor was interested. The artist, then, will require fresh news about his work. The artist will always respond to the rhetorical question asked by the kind interlocutor: what are you working on at the moment?
I know a guy who, when they told him that his exhibition, which was due to open in six months, had been postponed for a further year, couldn’t contain his delight; he now had an answer to the question of what he was working on for much longer. In a period of crisis of visibility the artist will be happy with very long-term commissions.
When it comes to putting on an exhibition we can distinguish four products on which the artist should impose his or her point of view, or at least have a say in.
The press release, the invitation card, the exhibition catalogue and the expository presentation of the work.
In most cases the effort that the artist devotes to these products is inversely proportional to their potential visibility.
Three or four photos, an old catalogue, a text dredged up from who knows where and a brief bio are handed to the person who runs place holding the exhibition so they can publicize it in the press.
One photo, the title and a check to make sure the name is spelled correctly is the work that goes into the invitation card.
Giving the designer vertigo in the attempt to impose a differential appearance and asking for a text from a critic who believes they have understood the essence of the artist’s work is the effort dedicated to catalogue.
In the run-up to the exhibition, the punctilious monitoring and obsessive attention to every least detail means the artist will not be the best possible person to have a coffee with at this time.
The artist’s obsession will be the exhibition.
I remember that in my time as an art student, when we talked about our work, we always referred to the series we were working on.
It was logical enough: our ideal was to get our work into a gallery, and the galleries demanded, with perfect common sense, that a given artist’s work should have a recognizable appearance.
So, if I imagine myself as a buyer of art, who is interested in a Tàpies, let’s say, obviously I will want the fact that it’s a Tàpies to be evident: I won’t want a Tàpies that could just as easily be something else; I’ll choose a canvas on which the ‘T’ or the cross or whatever that mark is that every Tàpies that is clearly a Tàpies has is impossible to miss.
So, paying due regard to our potential future access to the commercial gallery scene, we applied ourselves to the production of series, and strove to display a clear and uniquely individual style.
Apropos of which, Forges likes to recall that in his early days as a cartoonist he was given the following invaluable advice: ‘make sure your drawings are identifiable at fifty feet’.
In this day and age, art students no longer imagine exhibiting in a gallery; instead their fictions are aimed at the Art Centres and Museums, with the result that conversations in art school cafeterias nowadays are all about the students’ ‘projects’ where we used to talk about our ‘series’.
The reason is that in the context of the institution as transmitter of the art phenomenon, the formalization adopted in the presentation of the work done in art that justifies the exhibition, and the demand is therefore for one artist-one project. There has thus emerged a class of individuals who specialize in a new trade: that of the curator. The curatorial task can be exercised by a critic, a thinker, an artist or whatever: curating is purely a trade — a trade that consists in nurturing or selecting from the artist’s work in order to have pieces in the exhibition space. The curator’s role is meaningless outside of the exhibition format, so that the person most interested in putting on an exhibition is the one who wants to perform the task of curating.
What I am getting at here is that the exhibition is consubstantial not with the artist or with the artwork but with the office of curator: an artist doesn’t need an exhibition to be an artist, a work of art doesn’t have to be exhibited to be art, but a curator is a curator only when he or she is curating an exhibition.
One of the priorities of every artist should be to catalogue the different modes of presentation and analyse their effectiveness, so as to decide on the mode of presentation that is best suited to it and take effective control of its expression.
We all know someone whom —not wishing to be offensive— we could describe as being time-management challenged.
These are guys who are always late and who, if you bump into them on your way somewhere, will make you late, too. They’re always in a hurry and always have things to do, but they act as if they had nothing to occupy them at that particular moment.
My personal list is topped by Pedro. What’s more, the period when I had frequent dealings with him was back in the pre-cell phone era. When being stood up was just how it’s supposed to be: agonizing.
Pedro has ideals and a profound sense of social duty, so on the occasion of some demonstration or other he told his wife that he wasn’t going to be around that afternoon.
The demonstration had already been under way for some time when Pedro arrived home with a couple of sticks. He wanted to make a banner. He found a piece of cloth, got some paint and some brushes and thought up a slogan. He was busily absorbed in painting it when his wife told him that if he didn’t get going immediately he would find that the demonstration was over.
So Pedro left the last letter of the first word of the slogan he had decided on half finished —the ‘T’ of ‘SHIT’— and went running off with his banner. In a side street that led straight to the heart of the demonstration he unfurled a piece of cloth tacked to two sticks bearing a single word listing steeply to one side and came running up flushed and sweating carrying his limpid ‘SHIT’.
Nobody seemed to notice that the banner wasn’t finished, and Pedro kept it for future occasions, sure that it would fit the bill again.
It seems like a decision aimed at making the most of the effort invested. A decision that, allowing the public to project the content on the final meaning, enables it to assume different signifieds and thus accommodate itself to a variety of presentations.
Consciously or unconsciously, with theoretical justifications developed or acquired for the purpose, a lot of artists do this kind of thing in their work.
We can identify them by their discourse. They tend to say that they want the public to be involved in defining their work, that they’re trying to provoke reflection or that they like to lay bare the contradictions so that people are free to adopt their own position on the issue, and so on.
Artists who engage in this delegation of meaning to the public are also, by extension, likely to delegate decisions about the modes of presentation to the curator.
Someone once said that they no longer expected people to be intelligent, but that they should at least be responsible. I share this view, which seems resigned and is not uningenuous. We should demand responsibility from all those who set themselves up as transmitters of ideas, and the first premise to be met is that of being responsible for the content they communicate. That responsibility starts with not indulging in lack of understanding or lack of definition, but seeing to it that the message is univocal.
A brief survey
An English artist of some repute has an unusual agreement with his gallery. Traditionally the task of the gallery is to sell the things produced by its artists. In this particular case, however, the gallery owner also arranges for the artist to take part in exhibitions and paid events of one kind or another. Like a musician’s agent, the gallery owner gets the artist gigs in return for a percentage of the fee.
Artists have diversified the sources of their income. An artist who produces video art gets paid for taking part in an exhibition, paid for the rights to the public dissemination of their work in the communications media and other non-exhibition formats run by a management entity, paid for the exploitation of their work by a video distributor per copy sold and rights for its public communication, paid for the production of a range of para-artistic products such as pieces for magazines and, finally, may have a conventional gallery .
Bad habits, good habits
One of the fundamentals of promotion in art is having something to offer.
One of the wrong models is the scheming artist: what a now-retired Argentine psychoanalyst has defined as a compensation syndrome. This syndrome takes the form of believing that the very fact of conceiving of yourself as an artist and dedicating yourself to this activity entitles you to compensation from the rest of the population, who should therefore finance your chosen way of life.
A lot of people, including quite a few public officials, believe in this model, which manifests itself in programmes of direct grants to artists.
There are many reasons why I am against this practice.
Let me give a demagogic and polemical example.
Certain political regimes intervene in the territory in the same way that people change the furniture in their living room. Thus, between 1918 and 1930 the Soviet authorities decided to channel the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers that feed into the Aral Sea, in order to irrigate a vast area of desert in what is now Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The scheme was a success, and today the region is fertile and productive. By contrast, the Aral Sea has been shrinking at a desperate rate since the 1960s. Wind-blown salt from its dried-out shores kills vegetation, and its water is increasingly unhealthy, with high levels of salinity and pollution from insecticides and fertilizers. This ecological disaster was no accident; the officials who decided to go ahead with the civil engineering project referred to the Aral Sea as a soldier who has to sacrifice himself for his country. They knew for a fact that they were killing it.
The town of Moynaq in Uzbekistan was once a thriving port with a fishing and canning industry that provided jobs for up to 60,000 people; today it is dozens of miles from the coast.
The Soviet government drew up a resettlement plan, with significant incentives and the guarantee of new homes for the displaced population. Many of them didn’t want to leave.
Interjection: I have no wish to justify a megalomaniac policy or to advocate a resigned acceptance of the plight of the people of Moynaq. The daily lives of the region’s inhabitants involve living with a high levels of lung disease; arable land is increasingly scarce thanks to the effects of salt and pollution, and the formerly dynamic fishing industry is now all but non-existent.
The point is that faced with the refusal of so many people to leave Moynaq, the Soviet government opted to import fish from the Sea of Japan and the Baltic in order to maintain some activity in the canning industry.
Let’s do an exercise: let’s imagine that the drying up of the Aral Sea had been due to unavoidable natural causes, and that, having considered the government offer to resettle them elsewhere, some people decided to stay. In the light of this situation it was decided to prop up the moribund canning industry, effectively prolonging the agony. It’s hard to imagine, but the scenario would be: a benevolent government and a stubborn local population who abuse its willingness to help to achieve something that doesn’t even meet their basic needs.
This is how I see the policy of helping artists by way of direct grants: a bunch of people who want to go on engaging in a form of work now evidently exhausted and continue this activity on the back of subsidies that are in any case insufficient.
This is not to say that the state should not allocate funding to the arts, simply that the model of direct subsidy is not effective in achieving its supposed purpose of fomenting the careers and the professionalization of our cultural agents.
So we’re back at the start of this chapter. One of the fundamentals of promotion in art is having something to offer.
There are artists whose physical presence or vital attitude is itself enough to offer a fantasy of seductive moments.
One of the bases of the collaboration between a curator and an artist, both friends of mine, is that the artist is off his head and the curator is very formal. The artist offers him moments of pure adventure and escape, thus forging a strong bond between them.
If an artist has these intrinsic qualities to offer in a personal relationship with other agents in the world of art, he or she should make the most of them. I don’t have much advice to give. If, on the other hand, he or she looks like and has the lifestyle of an assistant in a chemist’s shop, they need to make a bit of an effort.
My recommendations are easy to set out. In an interview, a footballer was asked what the recipe was for beating a much stronger team. The footballer said that the recipe was easy: cut out the rival midfielder who distributes the ball, tie down their fast striker, keep possession of the ball, attack down the wings and finish on target; the difficult thing, he added, is doing it.
Show you have faith in your career
Develop a product
Generate a public
Create a context.