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Interview with Francesc Ruiz, who is currently exhibiting at the CASM. Both Francesc Ruiz and Lars Arrhenius, who is also showing three pieces at the CASM, use drawing in their work. It is a medium that seems to be in fashion. As well as this interview, we are publishing an article by Rafel G. Bianchi, another artist who has used drawing in the past and continues to do so, and who here looks at some of the artists working in this medium and some of its characteristic features.
INTERVIEW WITH FRANCESC RUIZ
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| Francesc Ruiz. Kiosk Downtown, 2006 |
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DAVID G. TORRES
What are you doing at the CASM?
A comic in the form of a news-stand like the ones you find here and that tend to spread over the whole pavement with their newspapers and magazines and stuff. I don’t think this expansion of news-stands and all their wares occurs in other places. And for this reason I think it’s a site-specific work, which has to do with the city, and with Barcelona in particular. In fact, we’ve chosen the Barcelona type of news-stand.
Why a news-stand?
Before the Internet existed, the news-stand was a place in which to discover things. And it still is: magazines and periodicals describe and reveal things. |
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Here all the magazines are yours.
What I’ve done has been to draw all the covers of the magazines on the news-stand. I’ve used different models and types, with the help of the designer Pedro Mériday. I’ve followed the rules regarding the layout of publications, with the title always at the top and the headlines on the left; or, where a face appears, the eyes always at a certain level. It’s all to do with how they are displayed.
What are they about?
The covers and the news-stand together generate a narrative. I remember how in the film My own private Idaho by Gus Van Sant, there’s a news-stand in which suddenly the boys on the magazine covers start talking to each other. I’m trying to make something like that happen. There is also one important factor: all the texts are in English. But a very odd English, which is either my own, which is very bad, or that of the Google translators, which is also very bad. So finally there is a language of its own that is to some extent free from the rules of grammar. It’s something I’ve done in French and in German too.
Your news-stand: could it be in the street?
Well, it would have required a different type of production. These are only covers – there’s nothing inside. And they are all one piece – you can’t pick them up individually. The whole news-stand is a single piece made specifically for the CASM. This interior cloister space reminds me of any city square with the windows facing inwards and its arcades. It’s like the local news-stand in the square.
But is it a sculpture or a comic?
It certainly has this sculptural dimension, but it’s read like an expanded comic. I don’t see it as very different from other works of mine that are, as it were, flatter and follow a sequence like a comic strip. Here there is also a narrative through the drawings that form the covers.
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Comics
How did you start using comics and drawing in your work?
At first I did sculptures that were models of buildings – in other words, I already had an interest in crowds and public spaces where things happen. So I went to on describe these things. There’s nothing programmed and I don’t know in which direction I’ll eventually go, nor do I think of it like that, as a programme to be followed. However, in actual fact the comics are a recovery: they’ve always been there in my life.
There’s something freaky about a comic.
I don’t agree. In the 1980s, the production of comics was so huge and popular that it’s not simply that it wasn’t freaky, it was mainstream. It was modern! I’m thinking of TBO, of Mortadelo y Filemón. But I |
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| Francesc Ruiz. Kiosk Downtown, 2006 |
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discovered adult comics (Víbora, CIMOC, Cairo and Makoki) when I pinched them from my elder brother. You can go in for opera, for films, for comics or for whatever. It’s simply that comics and films are popular culture, and being freaky – I adore freakies – is a state of mind..
What do you like about comics now?
The interest lies in the fact that it’s a practical medium. On the one hand, I came to it from the representation of crowds, groups, associated with a certain density of image, and it was a natural step from there to comics. But, above all, it offers the possibility of representing and giving immediate visibility to different things. Among many other aspects, I’m interested in comics as the visibilisation of the gay culture in Ralph Koenig, in the Yaoi, or in the gay/les/trans magazines, where it’s an important tool. But I’m also interested in how it’s used by ultraconservative Catholic groups in the USA in order to attack these other groups. The comic as cultural production is as old as the cinema. The important thing is that it’s
an agile medium for transmitting ideas, and I think it
has incredible potential.
It depends on how you use it.
Of course. Recently, in Jerusalem, I saw a pile of
Far West comics in a second-hand bookshop. In other words,
at a given moment in time, in Israel people were reading
a lot of cowboy comics: the conquest of a territory, Indians,
settlers, etc. Which shows that comics have the capacity
to reflect more things that they are actually narrating.
And I’m interested in this whole potential of comics and how they can be used in so many ways. And I’m
even more interested in all those aspects of comics rather
than the drawing in itself.
You’ve said that it’s an immediate medium.
Yes, it’s an immediate and a democratic medium. Anyone can make a comic somehow, it’s cheap, and even the distribution is something you can organise yourself. People are now producing comics on the Internet, which is very interesting, with people like Scott McCloud, who use that idea of the expanded comic, but doing it through the Internet. We are also seeing a lot of autobiographical comics, as a hard-hitting medium: such as Fabrice Neaud, who reached such a level of autobiographical commitment in his daily comics that he ended by losing his friends. This is the potential of the comic and it’s
being recovered in interesting new productions. I obviously
feed on all this.
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Barcelona
At the beginning, you insisted on the Barcelona type of news-stand. Barcelona is a place or theme that is present in a lot of your works.
Well, I’m from Barcelona. I’m an artist who lives here, and if I have to talk about things I talk about what I know. That’s why I told you that this piece is site-specific, because the specific site is Barcelona. However, when I go somewhere else, I work on that other place.
But the Barcelona of your work is not so obvious.
It’s a city that is here. And the Corte Inglés that appeared in one of my drawings is not something that’s not obvious. What happens is that I don’t represent it as it is, I use a filter. But I don’t show anything that isn’t there, that doesn’t happen or that cannot happen. One thing is a supposed visible normality and another thing it what actually happens.
A bit like David Lynch?
I don’t describe anything I don’t know. And I’ve sometimes been labelled “sex and violence” but the fact is that I see it everywhere. I don’t know whether I have that filter. But the violence and the sex are there, very obviously so.
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Fashions
Going back to comics: Do you see any difference between the comic in art, in an exhibition, and the comic as a publication?
Categories are changing and the art institution is more laid back and more generous. We’re talking about visual culture and the expanded field of art, and that’s a relief.
And how do you see this supposed fashion for drawing and comics in art?
The critics’ attitude to drawing right now seems to me to be very superficial. There are some important group exhibitions showing a specific type of production. And they seem good and generous. But it’s also necessary to look at it more closely and in greater depth. For example, in the Kunsthalle in Dusseldorf, the exhibition “Diving Trips. Drawing as Reportage” showed the medium and graphic narrative applied to the field of reportage, where drawing can get into places that a camera cannot, such as courtrooms.
Even when people try to use reference points in art, they turn to Pop Art, and Pop Art is not the same as comics. Ad Reinhard did comics, but Andy Warhol and Liechtenstein didn’t – they did ready-mades. In parallel with his paintings, Ad Reinhard has an enormous production of comics. And he uses it to criticise art. |
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Finally, the obligatory question: what else are you working on?
I can see how my work develops along different aspects at the same time: a psychographic mapping aspect, an autobiographical aspect and the site-specific idea using comics and drawing as a vehicle. I’m waiting to see what the next thing is that will occur to me.
And specifically?
I’m going to do a residency at the Kunstverein in Frankfurt, and among other things I’m preparing a work that’s called La zona alta (The upper zone) for an exhibition called “Registers and habits.Time machine/images of spaces” next September at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies. |
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