As an artist I work with every technique that interests me, and in one way or another I always finish by mixing them up. I don’t make distinctions between procedures. I use programming but I am not a programmer, I use video but I am not a filmmaker, I use photography but I am not a photographer, I use motion graphics but I am not a designer, and I feel like I am painting but I am not a painter. In fact my profile is far from any of the above finite art categories. That’s why I haven’t found yet my place within a specific community. It is not that I feel special. I am not that conceited. I am just trying to find my place, one where I might feel comfortable. If I were a plumber I would say it clearly and proudly, “Yes, I am a plumber and I fix pipes! Give me a faucet!” That would be wonderful indeed, but I guess my role is not that obvious.
I am standing in nobody’s territory where resources and concepts are being shared and reused with different purposes, but never defined. I deal with hybrids with no name, and I know that here is my fight.
A few years ago I decided to move to New York, basically for two reasons: Firstly, because I wanted to learn about technologies in the same country that produces these technologies, and secondly because I wanted to see for myself how these technologies affect daily life. In technological terms (which is essentially the same as saying in social terms, following McLuhan’s terminology), I think Europe’s model will be more and more similar to the United States’. It is just a matter of time. For me, being in the U.S. is like having the opportunity to see what the future will look like. I see Europe as a dictionary, where things have to be settled and clearly explained. This makes Europe move slowly, while the U.S. works as a website, being continuously updated, rapidly moving on, even when things are not so clear. “Use it or lose it,” I heard the other day on the street.
They are two similar but different places. Europe is on one side, America is on the other, and I am in the middle, like Clint Eastwood in “A Fistful of Dollars”. I enjoy this
game of pushing the boundaries, because comparison enriches me so much, and I’ve been in the middle of something all my life. Although it is not a very comfortable position, I can handle it.
Perhaps this is why I am so attracted to concepts like the neutral spaces called “non- places” that are places and non- places at the same time. Their product is the “average man”, or in other words the conventional individual- “the everyman”. Both are protagonists in my videos. I’ve been working with video for quite a few years now. From time to time, I’ve inserted my personal work in different mediums, such as TV and publicity. I developed an art-TV-show, directing and producing a project which was on the air for two years in Spain, and I’ve made experimental documentary films released on TV as well. I don’t just want to show my work in a gallery, a museum, or through a fine art video web portal, but rather it is for everybody.
I feel comfortable handling a camera, because when you are shooting someone and you know there is no second take you learn to be quiet, not to ruin the take. In this way a cameraman is like an anthropologist, observing while taking notes, trying to interfere as little as possible. In my work I try to follow this ideal of not imposing a discourse nor taking the residual part of it, called the “spectacle” by Guy Debord. Mass media already does this. It feeds the hungry audience, giving us brand new spectacular messages every second, matching mass expectations, and raising the stakes.
When I started studying fine arts, my wish (same as every novice artist) was to speak in order to change the world, to affect people’s minds. Nowadays, in this society made out of mass media and speedy changes, I don’t think it’s worth provoking another change. I don’t think people need more external changes in their (our) lives. Accordingly, I am convinced that my role is not to give answers. In fact the essence of my work is to question. So how could I give answers? I would rather use the term “opportunity”. The chance to review our own routines. Through my work I examine my own regularity, the issues I am accustomed to, and therefore the things I tend to ignore due to their familiarity. When you get used to something you ignore it. It is a natural
process, like when you are learning a language. There is a moment when you know how to speak it and no longer need to be aware of the grammatical rules, otherwise you’d never be able to articulate a word. In order to achieve this you don’t forget these conventions, you internalize them.
The process is the same with the panopticon’s effect, as explained by Foucault. “Panopticism”, as he called it, is based on the presumption of pre-established rules (not questioning them, as a consequence). What the anthropologist Marc Auge defines as the “average-man” is a kind of human behavior, a product of Panopticism. Sometimes familiarity with certain situations makes us act in a conventional way, following conventions without noticing them, not even knowing we are following them. They are “normalized”. Conventions are predefined-massive determinations that tell us how to react to something. In the end they are answers. The hard work for me is to locate them and find the questions hidden behind them.
My work is based on the issues of daily life, on the routine of the average-man, on patterns of conduct that are similar in all lives. Trying to show these hidden questions is the best way I can encourage the audience to think for themselves. If all we want is just answers, then we have religions, newspapers, magazines and TV among other social artifacts designed for that purpose.
Computers give us answers as well, so I do not rely on my computer. That’s why I feel like I’m continuously fighting with it, and believe me, it is like my third hand. I do not rely on art as an independent tool to change our universe either, because if I do so, assuming this fake freedom, then I would be under the effect of the Panopticon before even starting. Of course I am not out of its radius of action, I have my own average- man inside of me, like everybody else, but I struggle, at least to be aware of it.
I focus my view on the daily affairs -the superfluous actions we usually overlook. But by keeping an eye on them, I can find something new, something unexpected that twists everything and makes me start over from the beginning. One detail changes the entire context around it, and context changes everything, including the context itself.
This task of recognizing the conventions and ignoring them at the same time requires a constant exercise of abstraction, so as not to be caught in a paradox.
I think the world we are living in is full of paradoxes. They surround the average- man and keep him from moving forward, from making decisions. The average man needs a surround sound system, but he listens to compressed music tracks, with no quality at all. The average man has an Internet connection to make him feel he is in the center of the world while living in the outskirts of a city, and he owns an HD-TV with a screen enormous enough to be immersed in a fiction that substitutes reality.
I think the monotony of commuting is a paradigmatic example of this paradoxical situation. Although the commuter travels day after day, he doesn’t go anywhere. Vladimir and Estragon in “Waiting for Godot” were great commuters. Of course the importance of these commutes is not where you are going or where you are coming from. The relevance is in the commute itself, in how, why and when it is taking place.
As a creator, I see myself as a commuter, trying different approaches to something that is always the same thing and totally different at the same time. Here the journey itself becomes the important issue. That’s why I see my pieces as links in a chain --- eventually my work results in an accumulation of attempts. I can say then that I’m leaving traces of a path built from reconsiderations, reevaluating what seems to be anodyne. Reconsiderations also because I know I cannot avoid interfering in reality. I try to interfere in many ways. In other words, always “ruining the take” at the end to see what happens. Trial and Error. This is my method. The further I go into the impersonality of the every-man, the more personal my visuals become. Maybe this is to balance one with the other. So the more personal, the more impersonal. One extreme denies the other one. It is a part of this process of destruction that is the creation.
I have to deconstruct what I am saying at the same moment I am saying it.
As a creator, I don’t want to sermonize. I think my task is just the opposite, but I was taught artists are supposed to speak as loudly as they can... are they? Are we? Socrates never wrote a word about his thoughts and he is one of the most relevant
pillars of the current-western way of thinking. Isn’t it ironic? When he was waiting for death, surrounded by his pupils, his last words were to remind them to pay a pending debt. Imagine their shocked faces, hearing that while waiting for high-flown words from their dying master.
Sometimes when I visit an exhibition I feel surprised by the work on view, so I know it is possible to reach others in the same way. In fact it is not that I want to reach them, but they’ll reach me instead. I am not fighting for an audience.
Since I’ve mentioned Socrates, he held also that the ignorant always want to teach, whereas the wise always want to learn. I am not a wise man, but through this personal exercise I’m struggling to be less ignorant.
McLuhan said, quoting A. J. Liebling, “a man is not free if he cannot see where is he going, even if he has a gun to help him get there.” Well, I have no idea of where am I going, but I know I don’t want to be a hyper-specialist who works on a little part of a project without knowing what the larger project is about. I will keep on improving my skills not to become a programmer, or a filmmaker, or a photographer, or a designer or a painter, because at the end I think that knowing where you are going is just as important as knowing where you are not going.
