Rubén Grau
(visual artist)
What is, in your
opinion, a professional artist?
Perhaps from the artistic point
of view, it is considered as a crack of the utility (“a useless
sacrifice” in the anthropological sense) within utilitarism.
The professional artist gradually sees his or her activity changed
for he or she has to comply with market commitments, mechanisms,
critics and so on.
What's the relation between art and money in your work?
Unfortunately, it is not very
fluid, in Argentina chances are that getting money out of the
artistic work depends on power factors and on public relations,
because there are no independent mechanisms to make the artists’
work enter the market very easily. Due to the lack of support,
you usually have to rely on sponsors without whom the spaces are
increasingly limited.
How do you resolve the conditions of visibility of your work in
the context you work in?
Time and perseverance. Really, the need of the art-work is
the artist’s need, and seems to make visibility like something
secondary, though it is a must to achieve visibility. I believe
the mechanisms for visibility are tinted by an elite which has
the availability of technical means so as to generate a kind of
new dependence (evil transparency) upon the power hegemonies,
which control the novelty and the art discourse.
How would you define cultural tourism?
Everybody is a tourist.
How would you define culture shock?
Novelty control through press operations that comply with
some interests that we do not know.
What's the relationship between control and chance in your work?
Control is another kind of chance that we think we are able
to control. Chance responds to a bunch of laws that are beyond
our rationale.
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