Reasons and non-reasons
for doing what I do
ANTONIO MARTORELL
To reach that other self, to peer into that unknown world
that I hope to explore within me, to catch any single reflec-tion
from that other half of the mirror, to make it into a
false coin that at some point of its circulation will find its
true worth, consigned, but never resigned.
This is the communication in art that interests me, however
ambiguous, conflictive or elusive it may be.
This need has sometimes led me by the hand, at others
dragged me compulsively, precipitated the encounter with di-fferent
discipUnes and genres of expression. Painting, drawing,
etching, televisión, cinema, theatre, dance, radio, journalism,
and the hardest of all, which is the slow leaming process they
all entail: Ufe.
During this effort, art has frequently substituted life, or
taken to a high point of excitement, to an exalted mode of
experience and to an eventual and easily predictable confusión,
but very difficult to prevent.
Nevertheless, art continúes to be an exercise in freedom,
where the artist tries to impose his own tyrannical limits that
exceed those of any military dictatorship, more binding than
the monthly wage, more terrible that the worst nightmare.
Yet there are moments of such pleasure during the process,
of such constant joy, anticipated, savoured and remembered,
that for its sake, as happens with great passion, the artist will
risk all. It isn't surprising then that such circumstances lead
the artist to pretend he is the architect of mansions that will
accomodate such passion, that will protect such cherished
Aatoaio Martorell.
Víot^"'^
Aatonio Martorell.
madness, that dangerous brand of the imagination the poet
called the household's madwoman.
Perhaps that's why I have an ancestral obsession with the
doors and windows which my mallorcan grandfather built,
and that I have to open wide. Perhaps that's the reason for
this cursed contemporary sensibility of grilles and gates that
I approach in order to destroy. Perhaps that's why I have
this generous mania for roofs, this inherited phobia of infinite,
menacing space.
To find lodging for what is unlodgeable, a refuge for the
nomad, a prison for freedom, is the essential paradox of the
artist that as serial killer seriously begs and implores that he
be arrested to prevent the next crime he is evidently desiring.
But, careful, it isn't the execution of a crime, ñor the pro-fession
of an art, both terminal and ominous words. In any
case, we can always talk of the celebration of an ever fresh
subversive, if not perverse, action, of the elated search for
transformable matter, of unexpected changes like the ever-green
doors which my aunt Carmelin beholds with her third
vigilant eye opening a voide onto endless happy paths.
•And while auntie serves us coffee, and with her free hand
traces in the dining room's warm air a luminous are which
defines the next project, the new born illusion which her ata-vistic
gifts of carribean mediumship proclaim, we have a fore-taste
of approaching sleep, the fresh blood that will career
like a child along our veins, loosing itself in the body's laby-rinth,
to be found any day or any night at the beginning of
a new task that is really a game.
A team or a solitary game, its end product will be the pro-cess,
infinite chances governed by self-imposed rules, the fa-thoming
of critical laughter, the secret mechanism of all irre-verence
that leads to the worship of the ideal accident, the dis-order
that spawns a new order of surprise where the Ten
Commandments won't forcé us to lie and the house will no
longer be shut in by ten closed, exitless doors.
New York 8th January 1993.
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