GENÍS CANO
(Genís Cano is a professor of fine arts in the University of Barcelona and one of the principals theorics of the performance in Cataloni.)
Text and photos by Georgina Castillo

–You've been teaching at the fine arts faculty for some years, I presume you might have noticed an evolution on the tastes and trends of young people who intend to become artists.
–In the 80s, the conceptual postmodernity frame, which came from architecture, allowed some eclecticism and experimentation, it became a kind of sociological concept. Being a postmodernist implied a chance to do research, to experiment. In the 70s, when I was at the university, the anarchistic motions would distribute pamflets telling us to give up the university as they considered it an ideal place for fascist mottos. Strangely enough, during the 80s, postmodernity brought about new people at the university and a certain jumble took place between pupils and professors...there was some connection between us and our teachers. This has changed nowadays. There is great distance between us, there have even been reports...for several reasons, the educating community that used to work out right during the 80s, has stopped doing so. There is distance, confrontation and mutual overseeing. I would state that left-wing people are, once more, critical towards the university. During the 80s there used to be a kind of "implication", people wanted to find out what was happening at the university. I remember I used to see punk students with coloured tufts at my classroom, and I used to like it a lot. There's still some colour at the lecture rooms, but it looks as if it was an abandoned territory. I presume that, generally speaking, the social increase of neofascism, with its total lack of respect for other people's life, affects every aspect of the everyday life. There is this lack of respect towards the student, from the institution towards the pupils and from the students towards the professors, not too explicit, not too evident but, still, there it is. I remembre that when I entered the lecture rooms I used to think that those students were my friends, and that I had to give the best of me, I always did my best. Later on, everything started to change, these confrontations and missunderstoods took place. The aplication of neoliberal policies began at the university , the fact that 40% of those working at my department have absolutely precarious contracts, keeps young people from becoming professors, the path for becoming a university teacher has become rougher and rougher. Therefore, the degradation of this profession, and the fact that a specific students' sector can perceive these professors as losers, makes them live in an extremely precarious labour situation, they don’t know if they’ll still be working at the university the following year, and this makes investing on research or in one’s own education dangerous. Doing so, affects the quality of the professor’s self-esteem and the evaluation that the students give it. None believes that an educating community or anything can be done there, any longer.

–Plenty of people claim they are artists, thousands and thousands of young people have millions of innovating ideas each.
–The amount of graduates in art history, fine arts and art and profession schools, the new image degrees, is a huge one. There’s quite a great mass of people who pop up in the market and there’s not enough demand, this implies a lot of trouble. This artists find that the only way they can earn money to survive is by doing lots of different strategies. In a way, those who claim they’re artists or creators, think they are the 21st Century Picassos or new Duchamps, there has always been a kind of deification, a certain ego arise. Not finding a job, puts you in your place, it puts your feet back on the ground, it’s as if one did a humility cure. This is mostly what teachers do.

–How did you survive to that adversity?
–With total respect to other people’s life. But I wouldn’t dare to profile. We need huge operations to achieve an external promotion of the artistic works we produce , with private or public capital. The Italians are great experts at inventing things such as the Art Povera , transvanguardism, and selling the urbi et orbe.. The local cultural commisaries and managers don’t know how to do so or can’t find the resources to do huge operations that can export this creative capital, as we don’t have enough interior market, so the only thing we can do is exporting it. Exporting this creative capital.

–However, what we do is importing artistic movements and adapting them to our lifestyle
–You’re right. This is done world-wide, you see, when Wall Street is in crisis the whole world is, when the hippies appeared in San Francisco the whole planet changed because of them. With the telecommunications boom the global village is created , and that’s how things are, we can’t do much about it…kids skate and windsurf, the leisure lexicon is full of English words. Everywhere news arrive and they are adapted. For instance, the performance has a substratum here. La Fura dels Baus, which is now an internationally well-known company started doing traditional celebrations and then changed for actions (or performances) . Every local culture has its resources which, mixed with imported motions, cause new creations to emerge. In fact, culture has always worked this way. I did an effort to promote performance as a genre because there was no lecturing or research on it, and I was surprised by the amount of people who were eventually interested in it, perhaps because there is a certain "resource economy" to it, you can do very expressive pieces without having to invest on materials.

–Don’t you think the artists are very exhibitionist nowadays? They tell us what they feel every now and then, they tell us what their art means, what they intended to express with that book, that painting…
–And again, we are talking about how the media influence the world of creation. When the most important thing in order to achieve an official subsidy or to sell is to appear in the media, creating a strange or eccentric identity, is coherent with the needs of a journalist who intends to create characters, that have a personality, a special biography. This causes a kind of contagion that allows both to float in the news flow, these strugglers have to play a role as well, that is, they create a specific image, they always talk about their tastes and so forth. If the one who does the art critiques is a journalist, it has a lot to do with his/her situation. Then everybody gets "stained", I don’t think the whole thing is about the artist’s narcissism, in fact we all want the others to appreciate us and our work, being well-known...If you are on TV, even if it's only for a minute, it implies a victory, and of course, everybody wants to do so. Therefore, the more strange, eccentric the creator is, the more possibilities he/she has to float in this huge information ocean. It’s hard to define the current artist, because there are artists of all kinds, very sensible artists, hard-working artists, and cheeky artists. All journalists are victims of this gear as well.

–How have your lectures been?
–I gradually changed them. At first I was very theoretical and then I wanted my pupils to act by themselves, I wanted to prepare people in order to help them solve their problems individually, following the project method and carrying it out during the course, that is, using the economic resources provided by the districts or the university itself, controlling bureaucracy a little bit…they used to do a lot of interventions such as performances or public installations on the pavement. There was this social art aroma. I started giving up the theoretical lectures.