There’s a feeling of hallucination when I take photographs in the context where photography is exposed and ‘officially’ recognized as a work of art.
The ever evolving, handy, portable and easily available media devices have made anyone with a camera an amateur photographer and anyone with a blog a writer or a journalist. Some of them are even entitled to be pros, and the air-built line between making photographs and just shooting randomly, compulsively photoshopping and immediately exposing them in the Internet, has been totally blown up. Forever, I’m afraid. We are saturated, engorged, overstuffed with casual, dispirited stuff. The Information Age Reality has become a percolating, pervasive monster that ejects, bursts forth, eructates, expels and pours out all kinds of aimless and redundant material.
That makes it much harder to strengthen and cherish a strong vocation, a strong artistic identity, and leap towards the bliss of it, just as Joseph Cambell wrote, in order to find true satisfaction and completion doing what we, the artistically driven, love. In a world where the ability to distinguish real art from casual crap is lost, all photographers and
most writers are struggling, forced to work out of the realms of their passion, in demoralizing and creatively exhausting jobs to pay the rent and the bills.
That’s why, when I go to gallery exhibitions, and I take photos there, a strong, mixed and overwhelming feeling of anger, excitement, jealousy, impatience and awe, invades me, like sensing the future for a second, like feeling the nervous jitters of my first real solo vernissage, like hearing the voices of loved ones and friends, their congratulations, their warmth and happy presence, validating not only the part of beauty I owe to the world, the work well done, the burning drive to serve as a channel or an intermediary for some kind of much needed spiritual message to see deeper and beyond what appears to be, so they can feel free and whole just for that moment.
Then I awake to my senses and follow my arm and my hand where intuition is guiding them and something funny happens: I’m relieved from the burden, from the heavy luggage of those old unmet needs of unconditional love, approval, praise and recognition and I’m only appreciative of what surrounds me, and I know it’s all about not giving up the faith of life to spare the walls for my work to tell a story. If not now, tomorrow, but it has already happened.
I vowed to fulfill my loved one’s needs without betraying myself, because photography is the main vehicle of my love for them all. The only thing I can do for a living that actually makes me feel loving and alive. And galleries feel just like home.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
On releasing the burden
Bipartisan
“Who the fuck are you calling a failure?”
The verbal lash hastily hit me down to the core, while waiting for my beer at the counter of a tavern, after doing some errands.
We all keep one or two alternative selves carefully hidden, and most of the time they faithfully assume the burden of our forbidden desires, our shameful secrets, our bitter regrets. But sometimes, when defenses are weak, or the body is tired, they turn anarch and claim their rights and unmet needs.
All of a sudden, one clearly can hear their voices, and sense their anger, and notice the power that dark emotions hold, and the only mentally sound choice is to remain immobile, passive, almost vegetative, until the uprising cools down.
Enraged intentions go away one sip of beer at a time. You pick yourself together, pay the tapas, fix the discreet smile, the good guy looks, and walk away counting the paving stones. It’s just a flare-up, the beastly attempt of truth to reset its order. As it comes, as it goes.
The annoying telephone operator will spend two hours talking in circles before restoring your connection, and you’ll be affable, polite, complaisant, as if she saved your life. And the bipartisan, the angry one, the deprived will blow the coals inwards and ask for antacids. You probably saw this thing on television, The United States of Tara. Taking the others out regularly would provide great relief, but we live in the land of hypocrisy. Airs and graces, affectation, double-dealing, lip service, double-dealing and falseheartedness. For the common good.
There’s a cafe where you get discounts for the most offensive insult. No wonder plots relish on madness.
Dressing Tunick up (or how to make crazy money as a photographer)
Consciously develop a pattern of grandiosity in both fantasy and behaviour.
Seek for admiration or adulation.
Feel entitled to success and notoriety.
Get as many people as possible to be part of your pictures.
Get as many people as possible to see them.
Get them naked (play with their need for love, approval, self-comparison, rebellion, narcissistic supply).
Be sure they are average.
Get yourself arrested several times for disorderly conduct.
Make your lawyer get all your charges dropped for the sake of art.
Make the whole crap newsworthy. Make the front pages of almost every national newspaper.
Call it an ‘installation’.
Work at sunrise when the traffic jams are utterly annoying.
Establish a record of naked people.
Then establish a record of naked people in a single photograph.
Then beat your own record.
Unintentionally recall the photos from Nazi concentration camps.
Remember that it’s not the telling but the showing that counts.
Hire or invite celebrity guests to your installations.
Proclame yourself an artist, regardless of true merit.
Define the whole thing as “a living organism of hundreds of bodies forming a landscape, the relationship between the anonymity of public space and the human body”.
Rinse and repeat.
Anyone can do it.