The Speed of the history

Many times you have said that you paint the music that you are listening, or at least, you always paint listening to the music.  I also know that you understand a lot about music.

I draw what I listen, that is true, but I can also paint in silence, I get concentrate in a different way, I need the music to have different environments, rhythms, my work of art needs rhythms.  My drawings in pen, in ink, can also be seen as musical notes.

Personally, I believe in the rhythms of the things.  Every city has a particular rhythm, for example, a problem has a rhythm, a given reflection has a rhythm. Many times, may arise a sense that in certain moments catch up us.  If you say that you work with a rhymth it can be one of the way that you chose to face a sense, a word not pronounced, not detailed.

It may be as you say, the rhythm is also linked to that automatic, that organic, to the body itself. It has the property to appear and disappear preventing the sense expectation on these drawings.  The music also has different stages : a climax that becomes intermittent, there is a process, there are evolutions.  An evolution ....

¿to where?

To an evolution of shapes.  My drawings are related to this fact, there are some that are structurals, I think on them like this, and then I read them like this, they never stop, they seem that they want to meet everything, with a totality sense that get through branches.  What is the boundary of this? I don’t know.  The sceneries show many intensities that reinforce a composition, show the myth, go up and down, and there is a mistery, a lot of mistery … Everything is an evolution towards the purification of dialectical, I search for the cleaning up for successive coats.  The anomalous about the musical element helps me to generate, to feed up works of art, to make the line or the color always mean an experience.  This is what concern my method of work.  Nothing more than that.

How much of what you listen is processed by your work of art?

I listen the street, the city, to be sunk into the volumes of the city, its extension, I do believe that on its extension the city makes noises, the outer suburbs the noises, the sounds have changed to become foreign and unlike.  When I was kid, I always thought in industrial outskirts, a lot of machine, a lot of technique. I was interested in going beyond the contex. That is why I like the random music,  the noise, or the breaks style Zappa, Gong, Sun Ra, Faust, Messiaen, Soft Machine or Arthur Brown, these names have been written many times on my work of arts. This is like to render tribute. We were talking about music, remember that I collect music since I was very young. I run away from working at offices or work in group just for being lisenting to the music all day long.  To paint and draw with music has been a sort of therapy.  There are irregular strengths in the several kind of languages, music, architecture, I don’t know .... and they merge their forces in silence. ….

On the other hand: you talked about the peace, and I remember one scene, another context, when you talked about the movement, the velocity, in some way it seemed to me visual and full of sense: you said that history means velocity.  You mentioned that about the political prisoner who escaped from High Security Jail in New Year 1997, by proposing that they had done this feat with the velocity coming from history, about the Santa Marìa in Iquique killing, about the Red Week of Santiago, about the popular crowd Meetings on 60’s and 70’s…, and I was very interested in that sense on velocity. Do you listen that velocity : I want you to tell me about the velocity in your work of art.

This is a central and outstanding topic.  I try to live life in a full sense.  This deals with the velocity of history is a matter of freedom, oneself must go faster, don’t lose the time in the social fiction more structured, close to media and less in the current ideological imprisonment, at last, this is how you  design that little space of freedom that oneself manage, and that can grow for ever and become bigger.  And of course, the act of these men running away from jail has other velocity, a velocity that has not social order.  On them the history has worked differently. This is also the most political act that happened in years, I don’t remember another one.  They run away to a political place. The velocity of the history belongs to them, not to social communication that are astonished looking at what they can see.  Words here have no sense.

And what is your time ? Georges Didi-Huberman says that in every work of art there is a job with the time, when you see a work of art what you see is time.  How do you feel that you are working with the time, or how do you live the time when you are working your work of art?

In my work of art full of details, one can say that there is an important inclusión of time, working time, a big number of hours dedicated on a work of art, this is a way of job that deletes and redo every possible diagram, a plenish of something, what you want to mention is experience, by giving shapes, to make it real.  The art for me is to carry out life, to go against general truth, performance of a experience.   What is time in our body? It is hard to define as the time goes by in life.  How to support that thing that was born and passed away, how to retrieve the time, to bring it alive, the only way is just by means of a work of art? If not, we cannot realize about the time. Instead, it works the administration, the time administrated that is fixed by economic means, from what I run away most of the time.

It seems that you put first the material nature, the bodies, to an empty lecture, to a time managed only by a speech ruled by history.   Looking at your work of art, and to go through the language – omnipresent in your job– it seems that you always put the history by means of certain statements, or by certains historic words, and then to work with the rythim, with the material on the line, on the shading, on the clut that cross. Is in that way that the body is displayed in your drawing-painting?

I am just trying to show new noises to historic experiences that want to be completely deleted. We already know that the history administration, slowly delete what it wants, what it needs to avoid, and this is slyly made to do not become shame nor in the chaos. The history that writes a certain hegemony knows how to hide the annoying, the anomalous.  The art itself is a matter of power that has more than one face, the masks are even every day more perverted.  You must know how to read the communication.  That is why I write about my drawings, because the reason that clasify in detail what go behind and forward, is a concept process, very theoric.  I think I break a little bit that unthinking communication. And here we have the name of Andreas Baader, Rosa Luxemburgo, of Sorel, of Debord, or even of Nixon. There was a time, about Robespierre, I don’t know…. Each of them has a rol, its inter-texto inside the job that I performed that I met with the program of another history.  In my works there is moral concern to outline those experiences where individual faces in front of communication.  Today everything is communication !!  What is really important?  I am really interested to see beyond the shape, all the troubles unresolved pictoric diagram unstructured. If I want to talk about micropolitics, sometimes I do. I do believe that te body, my body, is in those shades, cluts, stripes, images, brush strokes and dripping painting. There is nothing more organic than this?

It is very interesting how your words become puzzles, because it is not only to read that statement, but it start to circulate again.  It seems that to face communication as circulation, as something with no sense you leave this message to become a puzzle.

These sentences must be turned around many times, the words in the history, such is the case of Baader-Meinhof.

About Baader-Meinhof, I remember about the ways of psychical tortures and killing used against its members, this was the first time when we heart about the “sensory loss” techniques.  I think, that these techniques launch something  in the global culture.  That sensory loss, applied in this “lab” – official we are talking about german State – has something to deal with the way that we live today: our own communication and its circulation, it has something about of that sensory loss.

That is true, what you are talking about the culture influenced by the communication means.  And of course, there is an official reality sensory from the mainstream that becomes ideology.  This is a kind of false conciense, however, everybody wants to participe with it, i.e., an hegemonic fetishism.   The world has been split into counterparts which are not required.

I think I feel a reflection about this on your work of art, a sort of psychic maps in movement.

My works try to provide almost unconsciously a psychic-geographic  matter.  And if I go quite often to 60’s on the artistic experiment about architecture, from the space reviewed by the man in an ideal future. I think that mind gets the space and make it aesthetic. In the collective Archigram, or New Babylon from Constant for exemple, there is sophisticated aesthetic of maps, geographies, habitability, territories…

And Chile, in psychic geography terms, what is it?

Chile? What it would be chilean? I had to live the ideological speculation that can be offered by a social space.  In this sense “the chilean” is an exclusive laboratory, its a kind of school to have political strength and brightness. The hegemonic here stays getting bored and destroying as it better can be the everyday life.  The interests about this are clearly defined, however, there is little done to change this.  In art and political environment there are good administratos who watch out and there are few who really realice it, chilean society is very inwary.

In Chile there were also words that enshorten the geography, for instance, there was the statement “country or death”.  But, let’s think about the Sebastian Acevedo movement, or Acevedo himself who burnt himself, less noise.  We loose many other acts, because there are not vertical.  There is something with the communication system, it is too vertical, it makes us to ignore other transversal movements.  You insist on being out of communication means, you don’t like to in the center or not being on the dominant time, it can be seen in your movement technique –to call it in somehow–, just like if you don’t want to consider the supports that are today.   It seems that your way of insistance or rejection, is your way of being stuck on  reflective terms it seems that it has to be with the supports and techniques that you use.  I feel that there is the stronger sign and in some way it is out of fashion,  démodé. Anachronistic, Didi-Huberman would say, with the full critic load, that tries to disconnect the time, to interrogate.

That is true, I like to go by the laterals, even it makes me fun, I don’t believe in the scene, specially not today. The dominant time, is a dead time, I have already explained to you before, it is a suffocating dimension, it is paralysing, it makes that everything be homogeneous, it is a sheet in blank, there is nothing writing on that.  The noise of communication involves to many, a very few knows about fiction, they just do rol playing.  What I do like is to work out of scenes that works to become hegemonias in the market, we must know how to handle this, in that way it becomes real.  There is a lot of bureaucracy on this, please remember : the fashion of art: – what it is seen up to get exhausted – it is likw a clerck, and inside of that nothing interesting may happen, but only a lack of discipline with the time. I love the german expresionism from the begining of the century (laughters) I think that I had there my first real experiences with the painting and drawing,  Nolde, Kirchner, Dix, Corinth, Beckmann, they are so amazing, they are beast and then Twombly, Still, Broodthaers, Joan Mitchell or Louise Bourgeois I don’t know… I have heart many things. There is a scale of experience that goes from the primitive attitude up to a critic of the history, I am interested in get what is hide on each escene: the disrespect, the fact of being out, to be very far away, to always be a foreigner, the art as a extreme experience, full of moments and situations, as Lefebvre said.  The art must be an emotional experience and politic in the history, and any support may be to produce a kind of work that strength and break out the administered time.  I remember  Beuys and his felts.

The fact that you never wanted to be in an art academy deals with that.

The academy is a delay, there is an absolute and complete lack of life experience, it is a bourgeois enclosure specially today, more than ever, they are like cloister, a real boring stuff, I have never been interested in performing the “artist life”.  As I told you, for me the art timings have nothing to do with art commertial administrations, its employees  and their so called intelectual speech.  In Chile, this matter is a scholastic matter and it is just used to make politic campaign (laughters).  You must look for a wounded radicality, and in the academies it is not.  The art has been full of insustantial estrategies, of jokers, there has been a lack of courage to make things differently. An extreme case, e.g., : today the art employees believe that they have more words than the artists themselves,  these are things that must be changed, and the art domain about this, nothing is said, this is the art poverty on its administration step, made-up and it want to cover everything.  The mediocrecy of this matter nobody talks about, there is fear and confusion.  This is natural, this is an explicit effect from the academies, so called “Schools”, of their habitus and their politic and economic program.   The artist who is inside, works well, but he has nothing important to tell or to do, just imagine, in that way only very unlikely languages may be. There are no more options, the art today is a matter of class, of militancies.