There is no concept. There is a manic compulsion to create images that express and / or mobilize emotions. There is anxiety, fear of death, resentment, thirst for revenge, pleasure watching / recording / collecting digital images of a city -Buenos Aires- which will collapse within 15 years.
Happiness -yesterday- on seeing some violet bougainvillea (wisterias?) (Santa Ritas?) blending in with the blue sky, coming out of a house wall in Barracas , joy that Colombian ´vallenato´ music exists, admiration for poets that wrote the lyrics to my favorite ´vallenato´ songs , melancholy, permanent desire to spit out: I don’t give a flying fuck about the art market , advertising, fashion and design. Which is the same as saying: I need to be, stay in fashion, advertising, design and in the market. I need the money. I like money to pay for hours and hours of freight taxis to take my scenography wherever takes my fancy…no matter the cost.
I need to provoke, swear. Repeat phrases from high school: as I have no sister, I entertain myself with yours. Rehash clichés: "Homeland or death, will we defeat...?"
Make jokes: "Until the victory, secrets".
Quote Glauber Rocha: "do not demand coherence from me". Do more and more of whatever I please. Even get married. Even retire early like Nicolino Locche.
Embroid Ñandutí (lace from Paraguay ), make a "photo-report" in Villa 31, photograph ´jacaranda´ trees like Aldo Sessa, grab a book from Robert Mapplethorpe and try to paint his portraits with watercolors, increasingly disbelieve in the entire political class and all its leaders. Those from the city, those from the nation and especially a roundish woman smiling and looking blank, in a giant plastic photo with a green background that is on the corner of Corrientes and Montevideo. It is a real ecological, institutional, moral and ethical disgrace to spend money on those obscene posters.
I would like to be someone else. I would like to paint just like David Hockney. I like to be in church choirs and sing the songs they sing when couples enter the church to get married. Sing the Ave Maria and cry. Cry a lot in church, hidden away in the little altar boys´ rooms.
Yesterday, as I was driving along a narrow cobbled street near Puerto Madero, I stared too hard, notoriously so, at a ´cartonero´ (a poverty stricken person collecting cardboard to sell) who was stretched out eating cold noodles with his partner on some mattresses, plastic, bottles, dozens of objects, and the guy realized by the way I was looking, exaggerated. He stopped, came up to 30 inches from my face, and said:
"What are you looking at knob head, do you think I am going to rob you?"
I looked down and did not answer him… obviously. I waited fifteen milliseconds for the traffic light to turn green and drove off, with my tail between my legs. With a kind of shame, emotion, distress, which, I think, will last until next year. Until mid-2013
Marcos López
