Francesc Torres (Barcelona, 1948), a political artist with a blessed narrative vocation, publishes The Hermetic Bell (Catedral/Univers), a memoir that, beyond autobiographical data, is a compendium of knowledge and reflections on art and life. He has exhibited in the most important international museums (Whitney, MoMA, International Center of Photography), lives between Barcelona and New York, is back from almost everything and doesn't hold his tongue.
He states that the artist's profession is very harsh, even cruel, and that the entire art system seems created to destroy the artist. How has he managed to survive?
I have considerable work capacity and monumental stamina. It's not a lantern. If it wasn't, I wouldn't be here right now. I don't think there is anyone who gets up in the morning thinking: “Let's see what I can do to destroy artists”. It is capitalism. The art market needs scarcity. If there is a lot, bad, because those who sell it, the intermediaries, need that there is little for it to be worth a lot. You cannot lower your guard or the intensity of the effort at any time because if you do, a troop will run over you. Your position will always be filled by someone else.
Is the market the only filter of legitimation?
Until relatively recently there was criticism, which had a specific weight, with figures that competed with each other just as we competed in ours. There was the entire academic context, which influenced art... And above all there was more flexibility for artists to be able to open new territories that sooner or later they had to recognize. But we have shamelessly swallowed the wild neoliberal model where the only thing that legitimizes art is success, the market. This, on the scale on which it is happening, is unprecedented. And if it was hard before, now it's a pitched battle.
He also states that however radical it may be, art always ends up being decorative.
In this profession, everything is elusive, the laws are not written, things are not said... Everyone understands where the shots are going, but nobody speaks because if we all spoke and said what we know, the art world would have two newscasts left . You can't say why it's a torpedo on the waterline and why everyone is worried, scared or scared, and thinks that if they open their mouths they can go sell encyclopedias. Here you can not question things as elementary as the 50% that the galleries take. But it is universal. When was it decided? Who were they? Where were you? Because Robert de Niro's agent gets only 15%. Those things, with which we live every day, cannot be said. And if you say them, be prepared. It's like a house of cards that if you blow, goodbye, it collapses. And everyone is very aware.
How do you live that paradox that from a very marked ideological position you end up in the house of whom you criticize?
First you have to be very honest and not tell stories to yourself or to others. There is a space between the shredder and the artist, small, but it is there.
What is the most decisive fact of his biography?
The most important event in my personal life, what has made me do everything I have done and be the way I am, happened nine years before I was born: the Civil War. And she is a monumental whore. Because I have suffered the same consequences without being able to defend myself. If I left this country it is because in a certain way I was escaping from all this. My life was gone. If I stayed here I would have had no choice but to fight politically but by all means, that could not be fixed if it was not shot.
Are art and life the same?
The equation between art and life is one of the worst things that has happened to contemporary art. Luckily it seems that now it is running out of steam. In the sixties it seemed like the idea that was going to cure everything. The goal was always to try to suppress the difference between art and life. It was almost like a mantra. And it seemed to me, and today even more so, silly. It sounded very good, oh, how nice, I get up in the morning, I make a fried egg and it's art. Allan Kaprow sometimes did this. Okay, very nice, but from that to life is another story. Art happens within life because if there is no life there is nothing, but not the other way around, there can be life without art. I think it has done damage because we have wasted too much time basing ourselves on simplicity.
You came to art through your father, a Sunday painter.
My father who was a very excellent person but with little bellows, the one with the bellows was my mother, but she was a great professional and since she was little she wanted to be an artist. He came from a very poor family and they couldn't afford it. My grandmother was a widow with four children. My father started working when he was 10 years old. He was an advertising cartoonist. Before graphics were invented he had worked for pharmaceutical companies, record covers and things like that. He ended up doing that because it was the closest thing to his sensitivity. He painted in his spare time and he didn't do it too badly. As a child I found it fascinating. When my father began to paint, the whole family was attentive and he did it in the summer or at the Viladecans country house. My grandfather's friends came to visit and maybe my father had thought of painting a nude that had all the appearance of being my mother. It was madness. “This is Maria!” they said. And when I was just a few years old, I thought: "There's something happening here!" The important thing is that the art is made, it is not so important that it is good. If it's good, better, but if it's not, it doesn't matter.
