The Postcard

Kathleen Florence
April 2023

An interview with poet Fausto Grossi from Bilbao, Spain

Fausto: Poetry is at the basis of life and it must be lived in this way. Life is poetry and poetry is life at the same time, at each moment. And I would go further to affirm that life and poetry are the same. Poetry and life are not separate places, where that place one could be called utopia, although, said in this way, may sound naive.

Kathleen: I understand what you mean. For me poetry is both literal and not literal.

F: Over time experiences undoubtedly influence me. What I want is to live life fully, or this is what I try to do and art is an essential part of it.

K: The postcard of you performing illustrates a literal poet. Without the letters, the sign, how could you convey a poet?

F: That’s right. I cannot live life in any other way than as a poet, and regarding this postcard we could say that it is a tautology, but a tautology that expresses a belief of mine, that to be a poet, one must go through life (poetry) naked (practicing poetry). I mean that I have to be sincere, honest and I recognize that it’s not easy for me. Certainly I play with language as in “a Basque does not make a Basque” or with critical irony in “I am a clown”.

Deep down we always wear a mask or assume a character, where the mask and the character we assume are always ourselves! Wondering what’s closest to poetry, whether the word or the letters, is like wondering who comes first, the chicken or the egg. What we have to do is lose the fear of death. In other words, we have to live.

Or maybe I could add something else.

It is about the imperceptible thread that unites us, the one that makes something universal personal, or integrates the two. I also think that our way of being in the world is poetry.

K: Conveyed through signs.

F: Poetry is made of signs and life itself is made of signs. Signs understood in the broadest sense of the word. We could understand the sign as a signal. The sign could indicate a path, it could be the flow of events, the sign can be understood as what remains of what happened. And so on.

K: What is your practice of art making or creating, and how has that changed? For me, writing was a daily practice and still is, though I’d broaden it to the word communicate. But underneath that, I feel what’s more important than writing is observing, or being present. Has Buddhist philosophy got it all wrapped up with being here now?

F: What pushes me to practice, to take action, responds to the drive to bring out experiences, experiences and desires that go back to my childhood. I cannot say exactly what they refer to, I can only say that they have left a residue, from which I perceive the emotion that inevitably influences me in the present, in the here and now. This present concerns me, I am passionate about it, it worries me, it excites me.

K: This makes me think of this poem by the American poet Charles Stein called “A Parmenides Machine”

Halfway through this poem it goes:

Your youth comes into being as you grow old.

The aged priest-thinker,
hobbling into the sun blaze of his agedness
appears as in his youth to put the questions
before the ancient machine – thus to become
young again and for the first time.

This is not the most striking part of the poem (the beginning is, as it leads the reader into the dark and back out into the light again) but it is the part that came to mind when I read what you wrote about youth.

F: In one of his poems, Antonio Machado says: “Walker there is no path, the path is made by walking” (Walker there is no path, the path is made by walking). A reflection on life itself!

About the philosophy of Buddhism, I have friends who practice it. However, I don’t have deep knowledge. If I have done anything related to it, it has been unintentional. I try to be present because that is when the body and mind work in a coordinated way. That’s why I try to develop careful attention, to be aware of what one’s own mind and one’s own body are doing, but this rarely happens to me. I think Buddhism is an ethical stance towards life. The question lies between the “know-how” and “know-how”, between ethics and morals. Between the non-I and non-dualism.

K: Is there something else, beyond being present? I don’t mean memory or anxiety, but spirit or afterlife. Is this important or necessary for you to consider as an artist?

F: I think it’s important, that you have to be present and be aware of this. We have to be in the immediate present, because that’s where we really live, where we act. It is there where action acquires its importance, to take action and build actions, situations. It is through action that we gain experience and have the possibility of transforming our being in the world. I have wondered about the afterlife in the past, but now I am very busy living life to the fullest. I am not capable of physically being in several places at the same time. For me, presence and action are necessary and determining factors for gaining experience in life. Goethe, in his best dramatic work of the same title “Fausto”, he has him say: “In the beginning was the action”. Guy Debord, for his part, wrote “The theory of drift” as a form of action in urban space…

So, beyond presence, maybe there is nothing more than the consciousness of being, of being there. The awareness that if we don’t make decisions ourselves, others will make them for us and we cannot allow this. We can’t afford it! For a long time, we have not been educated to this, but to accept other people’s decisions. With the digital acceleration, the financialization of life, the dematerialization, and the virtualization of relationships as happens for example with social networks, the situation turns even more dramatic. The body is no longer erotic, physical, emotional and desiring.

K: To clarify, I don’t mean spirit as afterlife but as manifestation. In my experience, what I create creates a path. So, yes, the actual experience is the walking, but before the walking, what is the imagining doing? And specific to art making, what kind of “spirit” does the work, performance, creation do for that path? Art making as ritual, I suppose, but that category doesn’t seem to get at the “magic” art can do.

F: Thank you for letting me know that I didn’t realize you were talking about spirit as a manifestation. Sometimes I think I understand what the interlocutor is talking about, but he is telling me something else or in a completely different way. So it is important to at least clarify the concepts and intentions we express.

It is not easy for me to explain the concept of spirit and spirit as manifestation. I could identify the spirit as the essence of the human being, but what does this mean? Is spirit the essence that defines us as a human being? I only have limited and tentative answers to these questions.

The word spirit comes from the Latin “to breathe” and this makes me think of when I said that for me making art is like breathing. This breath of life is inextricably linked to poetry. I don’t think in the spirit separated from the body. If that were the case, we could not have any experience. Experience is the walking and walking is the experience. I think the spirit makes us lose the fear of death and stimulates us. It is the spark that sets us in motion, it is the imagination that excites us. There is no spirit without emotion. I love what excites me. I’m talking about the emotion that has been banished by Western patriarchal culture in favor of reason, which believes it can do without it. With respect to rituality in art, Roberto Rossini in his essay “The performance – between art, myth, ritual and game ” he tells us that yes. I point out that ritual is present in daily life when we take a shower, when we talk to others, when we cook, when we read and so on.

I agree with you when you point out that this category doesn’t seem to get to the “magic” that art can do and I would add if this doesn’t “excite” us.

Returning to the real experience of walking, I want to reiterate that nomadism is part of our human condition, both on an intellectual and a physical level and I would like to conclude with what the contextual art theorist Jan Swidzinski wrote on page 139 in his book “The ‘art et son contexte: au fait, qu’est-ce que l’art?” edited by Inter Editeur, Québec in 2005.

In summary, it tells us that we, the artists, are like tourists. We travel and during the journey we stop to rest, we talk to people we don’t know, without trying to convince, we just try to have a pleasant time. It is the momentary contact that counts, solidarity, kindness, in a concrete place and moment.

In the eyes of the people, this has become our artistic activity, our performance in the world. We influence each other by the mere fact of having established contact. In the end what matters is the meeting, if this has stimulated us to a certain extent, excited I would add, and helps us to free ourselves from our limits.

To what I have said about practice, I want to add and clarify this: generally when I am asked to carry out an action, I always ask myself at least about the place and context where it will take place and I build it according to these. I always carry with me elements that allow me more freedom to decide. Most of the time, having arrived at the place, the idea changes. There are many influencing factors. The place, the people, the situation, the mood, the communication. All these factors influence me and the action becomes something else.

There are events we witness and thoughts we listen to. They seem forgotten with the passing of time, until one day, for something we are attending, reading, or listening to, they come back to our memory, taking us by surprise! This is what we have as people who live in language. I’m not just talking about the language of the word, of speaking, of written language, but also of non-verbal language, the language of gestures, of the positions and expressions we assume…

I consider that daily life, with its situations and events, is a source of knowledge and a possibility to establish communication between me and the other, where the other and I already form a community. Finally, if we want and are capable of actively seeing, although not necessarily empathizing with others, with the relationships that are established between us as human beings, with our geographical, social, economic, and political environment, with the psychological-cultural factors that derive of it and vice versa, we have to act to increase the possibilities of choice. That is, to increase our ethical possibility.

As a person and as an artist what I try, through the experimental, creative, inclusive and intuitive practice of artistic language, is to enable other experiences and other ways of reading everyday life, to change it where possible or at least change myself. That is why I believe that there is nothing better than taking action, being present, listening, communicating, as you also affirm, seeking direct and human contact, communicating, cooperating, socializing and not competing, since competing is constitutively antisocial.

K: I relate to this idea of competitiveness being antisocial all the way back to childhood. Not only to classmates, but the community. There seems to be embedded in culture the need to be the best, affirmations of success in being better than your peers. Rather than pursuing art as counter-culture, artists may fall prey to embracing mainstream ideas of success and recognition. I succumb to it myself sometimes, but then I wonder what am I doing? To myself, and all of us?

F: In this regard, Humberto Maturana is conclusive when he affirms that “those who compete do not live in what they do, they become alienated in the negation of the other”. We have to be fully present, that’s the only way in which we are ethical action and ethics of action at the same time, where presence, observation, communication are a determining part of the experience. This is basically my practice, which over time adapts to new situations and new challenges. As for defining, I think this is important strategically, because it helps us to specify, pin down, delimit our field of action, however, its provisional status must be kept in mind.

K: I like how your statement says “the only project I have as a human is to live.” I wonder if that had been a starting point, would you have pursued a life of art? Would you have started differently?

F: Regarding the starting point, I would certainly choose life considering that art is my way of life. Otherwise I would not be the person I am, but another person. I’ve been trying my whole life to understand what art is. Over the years I’ve experienced almost everything. I still have not achieved an understanding of what art is. This is why I continue. The desire to know and experience everything was worth it to me, although over time some practices have been left behind, like painting for example. I realized that my behaviour and the behavior of others fascinated me, perhaps because as human beings I need to socialize, but I understand that telling you all this like this is very hasty, but could be a good start.

K: It’s a good start, to jump right in. Why do we pursue art, or why do we continue, yes, it is a way to understand ourselves and others. It is a lens. Artists are interesting. I am curious about people who pursue work and play that isn’t status quo. Art is a way to communicate that starts with an open door or a field, rather than a wall.

F: Art has sought me out, not the opposite and I don’t’ know why this privilege. That’s why I say I don’t understand art or maybe it’s an excuse to continue. Like you I am curious about people, about all people, and it is through people that we understand, know ourselves and we know and understand others, or that is how I would like to think…..If something bores me, it is institutional conceptual art.

K: Yes.

F: Thank you Kathleen, for stimulating me and at the same time for giving me the possibility to think more carefully, to make the effort to try to focus, to go deeper, on what is the central theme of artistic practice. Ultimately for me, it’s living the day to day of life, ethically and aesthetically, according to my own concerns. Therefore, what follows is not definitive but is in constant evolution. Surely, and you say it clearly, it is essential to be present, observe and communicate. I would add listen. I consider it important to observe, communicate and listen to ourselves.

K: Thank you, Fausto. For sharing your walk.