Leo Battistelli
(artist, cocktail professor, pottery designer
and lifeguard)
What is, in your
opinion, a professional artist?
I looked up the word “professional”
in the dictionary, and I think I quite agree with the definition
that says that a professional artist is someone who can afford
to live on his/her work as an artist. It is the combination between
art and survival with a payment for the job done.
It is to make art a profitable job and adjust the artistic production
so as to make the art-work generate some revenue to survive in
a capitalistic society.
What's the relation between art and money in your work?
Really, I have several jobs,
I make money out of many of them but with some of them I do not
make any money at all. These jobs at the same time mingle, since
I try to unify them in one line, or I try to make them meet in
certain situations. For example, to make it clear, in the summer
I work as a lifeguard at some club swimming pools in Rosario,
in these swimming pools I make my under-water photographs (some
of these works are sold) I read, write, I work out while swimming
and doing gym. In winter, I work teaching how to make cocktails
in a cookery school with a kind of projection over the students
to make them find themselves working at an artistic level, I want
them to think of themselves as artists of beverages in their job
as bartenders. Later, they are involved in my art-show-curator
works like artists of the liquid fusion and they mix with other
artistic projects or with my pottery installations, they are always
linked with aquatic things.
I do my best to try to make the relation between art and money
as broad as possible, without structures to cause any kind of
hindrance in this chain of relations. I always try to have a kind
of amusing attitude while working, and I always bear in mind that
working is like any other physical and intellectual activity that
does not necessarily imply getting a payment.
How do you resolve the conditions of visibility of your work in
the context you work in?
My work is visible in so many different kinds of places that
is rather hard for me to explain, but I will try.
Visibility happens at a moment when, the vision of the visionary
stops or tries to make contact with the work within different
works, for this vision is distinct in the environments where the
work is done, due to the different ways of looking, and the various
ways in which I show my work, e.g.: to exhibit my under-water
photographs at the pools where I have taken them is not going
to be in the same way as I would show them in another context.
In the latter, I would have to work on the visibility much harder
than in the context of the pool, because at the pool I have the
scenery taken to generate a broadness in the visionary’s
vision.
Anyway, this depends on the visionary’s vision broadness
since you could give all the available vision possibilities but
they are not always used.
How would you define cultural tourism?
Cultural tourism is the way to make a trip through the culture
of one or more social groups, wherever you want to live this time-limited-human
experience, whether it would be showing, guiding or experimenting
it at any level.
What's the relationship between control and chance in your work?
Quietly, they both coexist, I think, you never know.
How important is it for you to be able to talk about your work?
To be able to show myself in the works I do and in
the power of recapitulating, something that organizes and heals
my doing.
|