Tulio de Sagastizábal
(artist)
What is, in your
opinion, a professional artist?
To start talking about a profession,
we had better ask: Who is a professional?. This takes us back
to the olden time scenes of the ancient men working hard on some
images , images that are, were, their images of the world. Those
images of the world were products that would become merchandise.
This way of production and profession forged an alliance that
gave the artist a place in the world. An acknowledged, acceptable
and useful place. The professional condition emerges like a social
niche. And the professionals have been and are, the ones that
do that recognisable job, I mean, in their speciality. So professionalism
is thus a function. And the function by definition does not define
itself. It is made up by the relation it embodies. The image of
that body is unsettling, because it no longer is a neat modelled
item. We are no longer confident to be able to understand it thoroughly,
or worse still, we doubt whether such body would present itself
twice alike. So: what function and in what place? Who is a professional?
The sequence of events keeps going and the ancient men are not
there any more modelling their merchandise manually, though, as
a background curtain many of them remain concentrated on that
activity. But the limelight, now, focuses on the professionals
designing projects to be done under certain circumstances, with
the support of some institutions because work demand has diversified
and the function concept moves from the image production place
towards an elaboration place of new signification relations. The
author stopped being the sculptor of religious images, he is indeed
the producer of queries, or to be utterly exact the very same
query function goes beyond the strict image production. It is
the weakness of showing that arises as evidence of the ineffable.
Possibly, the whole body of queries is no longer bound by recognisable
or sensible topics to be answered by an image. Moreover, it is
more necessary to tear down the solid discourses than reproduce
the precepts of the ways of how to say them. So, similarly the
new scene that gave us back the picture of the professionals well
placed in the institutional niches producing, at a great extent,
the answers to the needs of a contemporary show, as the main work
demand, depicted a function that is going rarefied. Which function
is foreseeable to produce which production? Perhaps, the ever
lasting return, an anonymous fate would be the fair price to such
nonsense. Let Caesar keep his share as usual. The artist is like
an author, like the heir of modern times, and so is condemned
to draw up strategies for his or her own dissolution. This is
the credible consequence of his/her paradoxical profession of
incredulous faith.
What's the relationship between control and chance in your
work?
To talk about the chance and control dialectic or control
and decontrol, similarly, I would like to start with the moment
in which the perception of chance is transformed in such a way
that, what was perceived as the appendix of making and chance
like an accident, becomes its opposite: the real continent. The
artists’ relation with this supposed “encounter”,
in the development of a chance production that validated and legitimated
the produce, is historic. In this way, it was a kind of chance
that has always been the articulation with the overriding world
of languages, leaving aside in a dark place the question about
origin, pertinence and the reason of the legitimating value of
such minute chance. This attainable idea of chance eased the belief
in the strength of the discourses, dominant, fetishist, avoiding
to cast a proper look on the nature of making. Once the inversion
is done and chance has gone back to the universe of “no control”,
which is the unattainable background and the sudden boundary of
all sense expectation; “the making” rebuilds itself
in a more fragile image which can be understood better. And because
we can understand much better the need of control and construction,
the search of continuity and the articulation of fragments, we
can comprehend much better the fictional mould of the languages
and the need to get detached from the incomprehensible. And we
can get to the point of perceiving our works as a vigorous attempt
to establish our own chance in the unknown. Thus giving up the
idea of seeing chance in our making but seeing our making in “chance”,
all track of time becomes ephemeral and we can pick up “the
daily flower” much calmer.
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