Conversation between Francisco Gazitúa and José Zalaquett – September 2006

José Zalaquett: On previous occasions we have spoken about the difference there is between the progress of language in art and the urgency that many feel in creating novelty forms, in spite of the fact that they are not sustained by anything.

Francisco Gazitúa: Nature, par ex the island of Tierra del Fuego and its lengas—supplies the theme or the musical score and I am the interpreter. The problems of form, structure and resistance that these trees pose are summarized, essentially, in the need that they have to be able to bend under the hurricane-like winds of the Patagonia by a lateral growth, practically touching the ground, at the same time that the roots, that other tree there is beneath the surface of the ground, resist the force of the wind of the south of Chile, the country where I live and work.

Now, to continue using the previous analogy, we know that music has both composers and performers; visual arts today, on the other hand, engage in both roles, although in the past this was not so. If one examines the highest points in the history of sculpture, one realizes that artists were performers. In Egyptian sculpture, as well as in African sculpture and that of the Renaissance until Rodin, subject matter was a given and there were few subjects. For Donatello, Michelangelo or Verrocchio, the point was not so much to work on an original subject as to do a good David instead. Of course, just like Alfred Brendel and Glenn Gould can interpret in very different ways a given piece of music, there were differences in the aesthetic solutions offered by the various sculptors, but not in the subject matter they were dealing with. This attitude, in relation to the problem of creation in art, on the one hand takes care of half the problem, which is the subject matter or motif; and on the other, it liberates them from that harmful imperative of “originality” that has been a characteristic of the XX century, ever since it was thought possible and desirable for artists to be, exclusively and at all costs, innovative. This belief ended up by leading the visual arts to positions such as that of Duchamp, who fancied himself a composer whose productions became works of art for the sole reason that he declared them so. Thus we arrive at a blind alley. I think that the cult of the “avant garde” that emanated from that attempt to do something radically new all the time, transformed the artist into a publicist.
J.Z: Where is boundary between art and craft?

F.G: One thing has never had anything to do with the other. Art concerns itself with cross examinations; it progresses through the method of trial and error. In fact, the itinerary of the majority of good artists is full of doubts and blind alleys. Now then, in order for those errors to have a positive outcome, and so that they may eventually contribute to the achievement of great results, such as those achieved by Rembrandt or Bach one must, on the one hand, explore new fields fearlessly (where one is likely to commit many errors) but, on the other hand, one must have a strong command of the crafts without undue respect for the traditions of the craft. On the contrary, many times craft must be used in ways that it has never been used before. The best example I could give is that of a “Musical Offering” that is born after Frederic The Great gives Bach a small fugue so he could test his collection of harpsichords. The musician’s reply to this craft related event was a formidable composition embodying a compressed building of innovation that, 250 years later we are still trying to unravel. The same thing happens with the Rondanini Pietà, in which Michelangelo, the greatest of craftsmen gradually departed from fidelity to the traditions of the craft in order to carve his best sculpture and die in the process of creating it.

I was as in Seattle as practitioner-professor at a congress of sculptors and designers working on forged steel as a means of expression, I also went 3 month ago to a similar one in iron bridge, England.

A craftsmen repeat a process and produce objects of everyday use, whereas artists use the same techniques for a purpose that is not clear to them. The artist may eventually cause a light to go on, so to speak, but most of the times, none does. I would say that the artist is like a flute player lost in a labyrinth, he knows he must learn to play his magic flute extremely well in order to reach the light some day. In short, he is an explorer in a profoundly mysterious region.
J.Z: In what sense would the artist, who inherits certain themes from the past, become a performer and the craftsman who inherits the same forms, decanted, does not?

F.G: These are two different dimensions. In my lecture, I apologized to all craftsmen present at the event, clarifying that “I come from another source.” I showed them my tools and there was a Japanese craftsman there who made carving tools that were fantastic compared to mine, but both tools cut, both fulfilled their objective. It was very difficult for them to understand that a person who had reached my level, producing all these works involving very complicated technical processes did not come from their world, with all that means in terms of instruments and techniques. The truth is that, in a sense, I come from there, but never really belonged there. I did not have training in the crafts.

J.Z: You have worked primarily on wood, iron and stone and sometimes you have translated a piece from one material onto another. Can you explain the meaning of this transposition of the work into different materials?

F.G: The sole purpose of transplanting form, of interpreting a given subject in several materials, is to investigate how much and how matter weighs in sculptural discourse. I am interested in establishing how a form or image engages and is modified by matter. This has been my field of inquiry for the past thirty years and in this sense I feel I am swimming against the current. In some countries—France, for example—thirty years ago, they closed all practical and technical workshops at the fine art schools. These were the places where students became familiar with matter.

J.Z: In your work, together with developing an interest in the reinterpretation of natural form, you frequently incorporate forms that emerged as a result of ancient technologies.

F.G: Let’s begin by considering the issue of form. As you know, the industrial revolution began in the forge, in northern England in the XVII century: nails, mechanical devices, chains and eventually locomotives. Three hundred years have passed and to this day no one has invented a more efficient way of modelling steel than the forge, red hot, using the hammer and the anvil.

The same happens with wood, in which there is no finer technique than the fine carpentry of the luthiers, who begin their work in the forest, seeking natural forms in the wood, which is later cut using a system of wedges, following its vein and structure. In my life as a sculptor in Europe I had to work with the most modern cutting and bench mechanics systems for high precision industrial metalwork and carpentry, but I must say, after this experience, that nothing comes close to the forge for the steel and fine carpentry for wood.

J.Z: All this has to do with the way that the materials and the working methods may condition the forms that you seek to create, which leads us to the point of “content” as the motifs you develop using those materials and techniques have traditionally been called.

F.G: Content in a sculpture is essentially given, as I mentioned earlier, by my referents, as well as other factors. I propose here the example of the four-year project I am working on for the city of Toronto. The competition I won considered the subject matter Lake Ontario and its cultural history. The idea was to open up the city of Toronto towards the lake. My proposal included sails, rudders, and sextants, parts of piers, ships’ ladders, and anchor stones. The form and content of those 100 tonnes of steel and stone that I will finally install 2007 was given by the need that an entire city had to recognize their cultural history, which enters through the Saint Lawrence seaway.

In my last exhibition, content is represented by the lengas on the flag of Tierra del Fuego, called thus because of their shape. This is a motif to which I have dedicated three years of work. These are trees without shadow, because of the weak, oblique luminosity of that zone and because they grow hugging the ground.
J.Z: And to all of the above must be added your option of living and working on the foothills of the Andes. What can you say about your need to be close to nature, to move through it, to investigate it, to find natural forms in vegetation or in stone?

F.G: To answer that question I have to go back to the roots of American poetry and get to the mid XIX Century, to Emerson, the founder of a poetry that has more to do with nature than with culture. Emerson and a chain of followers including among others, Walt Whitman, all of whom represented the first step of American cultural independence in poetry, setting them apart from the European tradition. Emerson wrote:

“This mendicant America, this curious, peering, itinerant, imitative America, studious of Greece and Rome, of England and Germany, will take off its dusty shoes, will take off its glazed traveller’s-cap and sit at home with repose and deep joy on its face. The world has no such landscape, the eons of history no such hour, the future no equal second opportunity. Now let poets sing! Now let arts unfold!

This intuition, this gaze to our own, is taken up by our best poets and above all, Gabriela Mistral, Chilean Nobel price.

My family comes from the country, from the Central Valley. Some members of the family remained in the country and others went to work in the city. The first were “eaten by the soil.” I donned the “traveller’s cape.” I lived in England for many yeas and for some time was one of those who managed to escape “the soil.” In London I taught at college and I realized that there I would be consumed by intellectual discussions and that in order take the steps that I needed to take in sculpture, I needed earth and silence. I returned to Chile and decided to experience being one more of a long tradition of people and let the earth eat me up. This is what Emerson did when he stopped to gaze at the forests of the Appalachians. This is the experience that supports me. In a country like Chile, in which everyone tries to avoid being swallowed by the earth and, on the contrary, turns to the great urban centres, towards “the international” the option for the soil is counterproductive. To remain in Chile, to turn towards the “inner sea” and live in it, is at the same time a renunciation of “being in the right place at the right time.” It is to return, to go down rather than up along that ladder that begins in this southern periphery and ends in the large cities of the northern hemisphere; it is to abide by the popular saying that tells us that faced with the risk of being nothing, it is better to have somewhere to be from.

Los Andes, which is where I live and work on a daily basis, surrounded by limitless geological masses, hides a mystery that deserves to be heard from up front, and with XXI century eyes. In these years in which I have been immersed in this mountainous zone, surrounded by the solemn silence of this landscape, I became aware not only of the fact that our Southern mountain range is empty and unexplored, but also that sculpture, which might create the gates and roads to enter into her, to travel through it and understand it, is even more unexplored as a cultural territory. To return to Los Andes, Chile’s great forgotten is an exercise fit for those who have been swallowed up by the earth.

Perhaps my sculptural forage into the trees represents my first footsteps as a man who returns to the forest in the early XXI Century, when the entire human race that has nature as its only religion, tries to return to it and does not know how.

I have been to the Patagonia on three occasions. I never could examine the trees with the precision that the Renaissance painters allowed themselves, or the botanists of the age of Illustration, who did not gather only a general impression and instead examined every single branch. Something always happened to me on my journeys south: I got lost on the road, I was almost blown away by the wind and I almost froze to death, crossing the Darwin mountains. In fact, my photographic camera froze on me, in spite of which I managed to take some pictures. Finally, I worked practically with an impression of that environment, with the recollection of that way of growing that keeps the trees close to the ground and which is absolutely necessary in order to resist the merciless winds.

J.Z: Something that attracts my attention is that in your contact with natural forms there is an almost Cezanne-like desire to uncover the organic structure of the model. As well as capturing movement, your works reflect a very dynamic sense of proportion. You can see in them the tension of their components, but the group provides a sense of organic exactitude, a feeling that all parts and pieces are secure, so to speak.

F.G: Of course, they have to be! And not only in the image that one shows nor in the environment one tries to create, but in terms of structural engineering too, if one is going to build an object that should withstand winds of up to 200 kilometres per hour.

This happens with the wood carvers of Easter Island, who select their pieces of wood considering their shape and the direction of their vein. That way, the piece they produce plays the same melody of the wood. Half the time I was in the forests of the Andean mountains, gathering wood. At this point there is a difference with the grand tradition of sculpture in the past—Hindu, Greek and even American—in the sense of imposing a form on the stone or bronze. Instead, when I create a lenga in wood, I use the natural curves of the wood. If you then subject that piece of wood to hurricane winds, it will resist. Alternatively, if I had cut the vein of the wood just like one cuts cheese or soap, the piece would not withstand the tension.

The same thing happens with steel. For me it is essential that one can see that the material is suffering, enjoying itself or expanding; that is to say, that the matter contributes to the discourse. I think this is also a critically unexplored field.

J.Z: And as regards the creation of form, with which sculptural tradition do you identify yourself?

F.G: With the tradition of Michelangelo and Rodin. What they enunciate in their work is that the reality that we see is the result of a structure that underlies the surface and that, in order to render an object visible, it is necessary to begin by exploring that which cannot be seen. Sculpture, then, is not the result of a drawing or an idea, but of an analysis of reality.

On the other hand, the unity of contemporary sculpture is much more visual than material. If one seriously considers the vein opened by Picasso with his bombshell of 100 years ago, through his first collages, if one considered all matter as possible subject matter in sculpture, one would be liberated from the slavery of working only in bronze, marble or ceramics and would open up to a field of absolute freedom. From that point of view, it becomes necessary for us to stop and seriously consider the possibility of exploring the territories discovered during the XX Century and which have been explored by the so-called avant-garde movements with the speed and in the manner of a grasshopper. I think that the XX Century is not even a beginning. Instead, it is a huge void. Artistic research finished and we ended up, finally, by adopting in the visual arts the scheme of the rock singer: how to achieve an identifiable look or sound in a career of superficial ostentations, both social and mercantile.
J.Z: In opposition to this void, what makes, sense, in your opinion?

F.G: At the end of the day, what makes sense is not art in itself, not even the artists. There are only people, human beings who move and stir in a space of time delimited by two vast silences. I don’t pretend to understand God; the only thing I am certain of, is that if he has put us in this world, with our strength, our innocence and our capacity to see, He has done so, so that each one of us realizes something special. Therefore, we are subject to two mandates: discover what it is that we came to do in this world and gather the necessary courage to do so. If we do not try to fulfil this mandate, all the strength we have been given will turn against us and will annihilate us.

Having found the answer to the first question in my art, sculpture makes no sense to me as a seal or distinctive trademark, or as a means to compete or become famous, not even as the defence of certain aesthetic principles. On the other hand, it does make sense to me to view sculpture as that labour to which I have dedicated my life and my work, work that has accompanied me as a magic flute in the labyrinth. Sculpture is the instrument from which the sound of my hammer springs forth, a sound that has been echoing back for more than forty years from the foothills of a mountainous landscape that is always present, but which I cannot take in all at once with my gaze; it is like the sonar of a submarine that draws the contour of the bottom of the ocean in which it moves, submerged.

At this point in my life, and my artistic trajectory, it makes sense for me to bring together in a single narrative the two histories I have lived as a sculptor: that of my pieces installed in parks and streets, my catalogues and CVs and, on the other hand, that of the twelve hours a day of silence and work in my studio, accompanied by my master-sculptors of the past and by my friends sculptors who are somewhere in the world, working just like me, defended by my poets in the inevitable journey that takes us from hell to heaven, through purgatory.

Finally, it would make a lot of sense to me that the visual arts would emigrate from the museums, that they would cease to be a theoretical problem for specialists to deal with and instead that they would return to the streets that they should have never left.
José Zalaquett
Art Critic
September 2006
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Franscisco Gazitúa: From Chile with Love
Sculptural Integrations about Time, Space & Memory.
John K. Grande Published in “Dialogues in Diversity”. Pari Publishing Sas ,Italy, 2005
Born in Santiago, Chile in 1944, Francisco Gazitua is considered one of Chile¹s most senior and accomplished sculptors. With a succession of commissions and individual exhibitions, Francisco Gazitua has been a major voice in establishing a particularly Chilean branch of contemporary sculpture. During his 35 year teaching career Gazitua taught sculpture at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, the University of Chile and at St. Martin¹s School of Art in London, England. He was likewise a visiting professor at the Royal College of Art. He helped found a school of marble sculpture in Kornaria-Istria (then Yugoslavia) and has taught marble sculpture in Portugal as well. At present he works in Pirque near Santiago, and continues to participate ins symposia and workshops worldwide. During this interview John Grande gains some insight into Chilean sculpture in general, Gazitua¹s sculptural influences and some recent commissions and initiatives.
JG: Your most recent commission for the Harbourfront area in downtown Toronto Hamilton & Scourge is quite unusual for the era we live in. The sculpture merges a historical theme with some quite intricate spatial and linear abstract form.

FG: Hamilton & Scourge is a big commission. The official commemoration will be this fall in Toronto. The sculpture is 17 metres long and 22 metres high. This is one commission that I actually won and it rarely happens like that. I have been working with the theme of transport and boats in particular for a while with my sculptures. Some examples include El Barco de la Vida (1999), Berganton Endurance (2000), Jaimes Caird¹s Boat (2000) and in Santiago Esmeralda II (2000) located in a large open plaza called the Centro Commercial Mega Center. The Toronto proposal was to work with a theme often touched on in American literature, namely river navigation. Not just one, but all aspects of navigation. So I went to Canada and studied the canoes and am now making this big flying canoe. It is like a schooner. In 19th century North America, they were designed like a canoe for shallow water. Such boats were used in the War of 1812 between the United States and Canada in Lake Ontario. This commemorative work is for a ship that actually went down near Hamilton Ontario. The project is part of a planning effort to shift the focus of downtown Toronto towards Lake Ontario, rather like the city of Chicago has done in the past. Concord Adex, the people who commissioned the piece asked for a second adjunct to the Hamilton & Scourge commission that will echo the first. This second work will be located on Spadina St., adjacent to Toronto¹s Skydome baseball stadium. The project snowballed and I was asked to also add architectural features, notably the staircase design which is all on rollers. The inner section of this staircase, interestingly, relies on balance.

JG And this is actually like a turn-around for a railroad line with rails?
FG: Yes. There will be a canopy as well. So I will ultimately be working in three or four different areas to be developed in the Front St. and Spadina Avenue parts of Toronto.

JG: Your Toronto project then, is amazingly big, one of the largest you have ever worked on.
FG: Yes. The actual stone for the project will be cut direct right here near Santiago in Chile and shipped to Canada and the steel elements are also cut forged and welded in Chile.

JG: So your Toronto project brings back the idea of mapping, exploration and territory. It integrates a part of North American history into a very contemporary urban context whose own history is rapidly being transformed.
FG: Yes. But history interpreted and realized with an imagination that is of a South American sculptor.
JG: South American and North American histories do have their similarities. Colonization by European explorers, whether Spanish, English, French or otherwise. The histories of exploration and colonization are similar. The explorers came, made native contacts, colonized, got sick, struggled and eventually took over the new territories. How long have had a studio up here on the mountainside overlooking the Maipu River?
FG: Around 15 years now. My home is located close to stone quarries. They recently discovered the mummified body of a Peruvian boy with royal blood in the mountains at Cerro El Plomo 5600 metres up in the middle of the largest glacier in the Andes mountains near here. IU was riding my horse up there. He was brought by the Incas from Peru and this is very important to us Chileans. The prince was brought from Cuzco, Peru and is proof of a religious alliance between the ancient powers in Peru and Chile. He was eventually put in a museum.
JG: Your sculptures maintain a cultural and geo-specific context is that you are introducing a sense of context but they do it without descending into caricature or nostalgia. Contemporary, a fusion of abstraction, history and actual sensitivity to the environmental setting. Often contemporary outdoor sculpture avoids any actual context and is reduced to a series of sudden syllables or caricatures, even references media culture and imagery. Imagery and hybridity have replaced any reference to origins and place…

FG: Context is very very important to Chilean sculpture and the musicians are very important. They played flutes called the Flauta rasgada, a flute with sections. Musicians were the top thinkers in Chilean society. The created very harmonious sounds.
JG: And you have made some large scale stone refabrications of the Chilean flute image. Will they go to a museum?
FG: No. They will go to the campus at the Universidad del Maule in the south of Chile.

JG: Some of your public stone carving commissions reminds one of ancient Inca sculptures and architectural features, even of Macchu Picchu. There are those fine linear joins in the stone. They are contemporary, for sometimes the cuts are incomplete, only reference the aesthetics of stone cut architecture without necessarily completing them. You manage to keep a balance between the stone and the carved elements, even make it sectional.
FG: It is again the idea that the sculptor is working with nature as an equal partner. soomething I learned while living for long periods in Macchu Picchu, Peru. This contrasts with the European way of going against nature. I have even done this on my property with the outdoor stone tables I have been adding to, made from the best stone in the nearby quarry.
JG: One gets this sense that time stood still. Do you feel you are an indigenous Chilean artist or are the international influences more important in your work?

FG: The influences originally was very much European, and French in particular. If you wanted to become a sculptor in Chile one place you could go to train was in Britain, so I went to England at eventually taught at St. Martin¹s School of Art in London.
JG: Yes and I believe Anthony Caro and you became good friends. Caro has written he sees poetry in your work… Working his poetry (Gazitua) may help all of us, which is the point of art.² Do you like Caro¹s more recent allegorical abstract, even religious work?

FG: Anthony and I were very much were close friends. I cut with him twenty years ago and have been sculpting in Chile ever since. Though I never forgot that I trained in London, I wanted to be South American and indigenous. There was no question… So I have to be referential in my sculpture. But cultural and natural context I am referring to is not that brief historic or cultural phase, but the whole ancient landscape. It has been cultivated and evolved in a very different way from elsewhere in the world. The channels and waterways in Chile were set in place by the Incas. And the Spanish and Arab explorers were here 8000 years ago. Arab and Inca… at its roots you will find Inca and Arab in Chilean history. So it is very difficult when people ask who you are. If you don¹t let yourself be influenced by the short term history of art and turn it the other way around you can study the geologically ancient landscape and the monuments here. These monuments stem from an ancient cultures some 30,000 years old. It has its own cultural and artistic history.
JG: So you are in a conversation with time.
FG: Absolutely. I will tell you something. I once discovered something about image and materiality, that if you put a silhouette next to an actual object, the image is the same. With two objects the message becomes the same. The image always changes. My experiments in wood called the Serie Lanzadera (1992-2002) when I apprenticed with a luthier. I made wood sculptures that were like making a cello. The sculptural problem was the same, but the message was essentially experiential, to do with perception and form.
JG: These works are complex material transitions. The way some of your sculptures hold together remind one of the elemental character we find in original forms in nature. You are making sculptures that are neo-figurative but never entirely literal. Could one call this a permacultural conversation?
FG: Between 1985 and 1987, I worked with ideas derived from the sculpture of primitive peoples, particularly from Brazil who work with a machete. I came to discover that a particular material¹s character can express a form. I made sculptures where the grain went with the form.
JG: In our modernist tradition, we generally go against a natural form or try to contain or dominate it.
FG: Yes… What I discovered was that by applying any elastic or living form to sculpture, the material could play the same role that memory does, or as the message I wanted to express.
JG: So the idea that contemporary art can reference permanent cultural elements – the nature inherent to matter itself – rather than the ephemeral or fashionable, even potato chip – is really interesting. It links us to history – both natural and human, and it reflects some aspect of infinity, what John Ruskin would call the ³wear of time². I presume most humans are looking for some link to history, at some level in their life. I talk about recognizing this last thing – stone. I started to write about the use of horses in the South American Andes. We are completely colonized by horses. Then around the year 2,000, I started to make the Steel Horses. They alternated with the others.
JG: And you drew on various materials from heavy cable, to cut steel, to tie rods in making these large in situ sculptures.
FG: I even wanted to make one of the horses in the Inca way. So I actually installed this one in the mountains, in the upper Andes. The subject matter of this equestrian sculpture was the figure of a horse. I designed it so it could likewise function and make sounds as a wind instrument. The deepest referent for Chilean culture is a horse, a cultural horse. It is that impossible horse that all we old Chileans carry inside of us and which we will never own, regardless of how many real horses we may own or have owned. It is a horse that could only possibly be created in sculptural form. The Andes are the main referent for this horse… Beyond this, though, the deepest referent is the enigma of the Andes. The Andes mountains are an enigma ³such that we may die from its absence² I believe the Chilean poet and writer Gabriel Mistral once wrote. I must say I agree with Anthony Caro that ³A sculptor must be obsessive with sculpture, live sculpture.² God knows I have been obsessive and I have done that.
JG: At the Plaza Pedro de Valdivia in Santiago, you completed one of your largest commissions in stone with waterways and walkways. It is a central focal point in Santiago. The stone is once again cut very precisely, to interlock and fit, much like ancient Inca architecture. The stones fit together like a natural jigsaw. The effect is very calming and reassuring. As compared to Caro, who obviously takes everything out of context, abstracts only to reinvent allegorical meaning(s), you have removed the pretense from your sculptures. After all – the public does matter.
FG: That was actually Caro¹s main point – the removal of representation and context. He would say to me: ³We have to make a revolution to free sculpture up.² We started with abstract and clinical way of working and over time it became more and more figurative. That happened in Chile as well.

JG: …and that was 1950s modernism – sculpture breaking through – a rejection of figuration

FG: When Caro would write letters to me, he would say things like, ³Do you know how much I am fighting to liberate culture from figuration.² So I believe he achieved his goal. And I am grateful. In spite of doing his job, the effect is aseptic, a nothingness, academic to the worst degree. It became too clinical, a sculptural cul-de-sac so to speak and my generation came back to reality in order to survive. Some sculptors claim Caro¹s move to abstraction was orchestrated, even designed to remove sculpture from a social context…
JG: So you agree then, there has to be some connection to a public in sculpture. Your plaza Pedro de Valdivia (1999) in Santiago is like a playground in the surrounding citycape. It reflects the landforms, the geology and the ancient architecture one finds in the Andes. At the same time you leave some of your sculptural elements open. You don¹t always try to sculpt everything. Not everything is modeled. The stones are allowed a voice in the overall project and speak for themselves.
FG: One problem with that project was the architects put a lot of concrete there. Sometimes, architects feel compelled to leave their mark. If I had my way I would remove all the concrete and leave my stones. There is also this aspect of water, effectively geometricized, channeled as ancient Inca drainage systems were.
JG: In a sense, you are a memory filter. You are filtering experience and recalling the effects of time and memory in your own idiosyncratic, yet accessible way. You are reconfiguring memory for the public sphere. Often there is no dialogue with a public in public commissions. They seem to have been built and conceived for the city planner, or the comittee who comissioned them. The artist is often afraid of referencing their own experience because it exposes their vulnerability.
FG: I agree. Pablo Neruda – the great poet from Chile always referenced his own experience. He became a voice who supported his culture through words. His art has a poetic memory and I made an homage to Pablo Neruda in Holland for a recent symposium with living tree and plant elements called La Barca de Neruda.
JG: This markedly contrasts your early sculptures which were so referential.

FG: Yes. In the early days I would even use a model. I once made this arrangement of a woman pushing this piece of clay… The effect was abstract but completely based on the structure of the human form. All the energy was coming from the simple fact of cause and effect. We started with abstract and clinical way of working and over time it became more and more figurative. A woman making a pot.
JG: But again this is a Chilean – not a European characteristic, the way the forms are interlocuted, both visible and invisible.
FG: I haven¹t mentioned that I invented a school in what was then Yugoslavia for making marble sculpture at the Kornarija quarry fifteen miles from the Adriatic Sea. In 1980 the International Sculpture School ³Kornarija² was founded in Marusic´i. The idea arose from Toni Biloslav, The director of Obalne Galerije Piran. The school was realised in collaboration with the Local Community of Marusic´i and its cultural organization ³Bratstvo². In July and August 1980, I brought the first students from St. Martin¹s School of Art of London there and for the next five years, stayed there working with other students coming from Italy, Spain and former Yugoslavia. The school is still going on there.
JG: And you even made an ephemeral ice piece in Antarctica in the 1990s …
FG: It is easy for us Chileans to go nd work in Antarctica due to proximity. Anyways, Antarctica has a very changeable climate. It was during a particular brief period when there was no tempest that I went out to make a piece. It was mostly simply about being there and leaving a trace. So I found this snow capped thing floating along. It came to the iceberg I was on. So I left there with a transmitter and a radio. The temperature and climate changed so quick sometimes you had to work quite quickly. So what I did was to make a big sphere with a hole. It had to be re-made every day I was working on it because the weather was so fierce. The completed piece took me 11 days, and it moved around a lot. The last day when I completed it, it was taken away by the sea….
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Publicado en libro Escultura Chilena Contemporanea, Editorial Artespacio 2004
Francisco Gazitua

To be in matter – to be in sculpture.

My life as a sculptor has been a cohabitation with material.

This thirty-five year coexistence constitutes my deepest order.

I’ve lived with the material, accepted the fact that I am a stonemason, carver, ironworker, potter, technical drawer, industrial welder, engineer metallic and wood carpenter, instrument maker, worker by trade, geometric planner, botanist and geologist.

With the tools of this trade in my hands, I’ve wandered the labyrinths of matter and have discovered in it a deep intelligence similar to our own.

An intelligence that has one advantage over ours, that of the human race.

A stone, a piece of any rock or bonze lives in peace in its own tranquility, in the silent coherence of its crystals and mathematic formulae, embodied in the transparency of quartz, the red grains of southern oaks, or in the blue translucency of icebergs, in the flexibility of water, in the softness of sand.

A piece of stone lives without explanations, without justification or defense, without trajectory.

It has taken many years to understand the silence of stone, its strict laws of functionality, its exact manner of being.

It has taken many years to accept its indifference to the human species, of which I form a part.

I took a step forward and invited myself to live amongst the stones in a quarry, at the foot of the Andes. Hammer in hand, I have transformed tons of this matter, from geological to cultural state. Certain masses as well, from its geological state to functional state, in design and architecture.

At the end I was there.

In the interior of stone, in its illuminated temple, I spent all the time I could, almost blew through its insides, through its pores, searching for osmosis.

Its peace lives within.

Finally I learned that, as with stone or iron, a sculptor has no path to traverse, for his work serves no end, but instead shows the instant in which a man finds a mutual understanding with the material.

Because the life that runs through the veins of a sculpture I am inspired by this: the same stubborn life is the admirable destiny of the material.

In conclusion, I follow this example of the given stone or iron – that a sculptor competes with nobody, has nothing to prove to anyone, has no fixed path to follow, and finally, his work serves no end, but only in the best case is to reveal:

An instant when man understands, and is understood by his material.

Ver Más

Drinker of the Winds
F. Gazitúa, 2003

The Wind

The Ecuadorian photographer Pablo Corral once said, “The true lord of the Andes is the wind. In Patagonia and Bolivia’s High Plateau, in the mossy moors of Venezuela and the foothills of Ecuador’s volcanoes, random winds blow:

The history of the Andes is one of the winds.
We are all huairapamuska, sons of the wind.”

My horse-sculpture also seeks that wind. Its structure is that of a musical instrument. It seeks that wind in order to sound in the high Andes.

It seeks the wind at Las Llaretas, a borderline plateau and one of the best wind-catching chutes in the Andes. Three thousand three hundred and sixty one meters above sea level, between mount Aconcagua and mount Mercedario, the highest summits of the Andes.

“On May 4, 1899, we climbed to the plateau” the geographer Luis Risopatrón tells us, adding: “…and the force of the wind was such that we had to struggle to remain seated on our mules. Stones two and three centimeters in size flew right by us.”

So I named my horse-sculpture ‘Drinker of the Winds.’
Beyond the sound of the stones carried by the waters of its rivers and the creaking and cracking of its glaciers in the night, beyond its thunder the sound, nay, the voice of the Andes is the sound of the wind.

These winds are born far away, in the middle of the South Pacific, between Australia and Polynesia. After days of travel, they blow onto the shores of America and race up the Andes where convection increases their speed, crossing over to the other side only to dissipate in the heart of the Argentine Pampa. The winter cyclones turn into white winds made all the more deadly by their force and the ice that they carry.
The Place – Las Llaretas Plateau

This mountain crossing is undoubtedly the best in the central zone as you come from the north. It forms part of the ancient Inca Trail, whose itinerary from north to south was: Cuzco – Oruro – Potosí – Quebrada de Humahuaca – Salta – Tinogasta – Pampa de Yaguaraz – Barrial – Los Manantiales – Espinacito – Paso las Llaretas – Alto del Cuzco – Putaendo.

The route was first laid down by nature through its geological faults and later it was the immigration route for the first inhabitants of America, twenty thousand years before the Inca.

The plateau has the best sample of Llaretas (laretia-acaulis) I have ever found in my travels through the Andes, some eight hundred hectares distributed among the small valleys nearby.

Because of fertile soil in this sector of the Inca Trail and also because of its well-trodden track, the greater part of the army of liberation, approximately 1,800 men, 5,000 horses and mules, crossed the Andes here in 1817, with O’Higgins himself and San Martin leading the way.
I have placed my sculpture there because of the quality of its histories, geology and vegetation. It is through these qualities that this place earned for itself its cultural status.

Horses

Drinkers of the Winds are a secret breed of horse that has twice the capacity of other horses to absorb oxygen, as each orifice in their nose is individually connected to its respective lung.

I decided to make a sculpture based on the idea of these horses open to the winds and during the two years it took me to make them, I followed a route opposite to that of Ulysses in the construction of the Trojan Horse, whose interior was built to conceal. All horses after that, the great horses of sculpture, that of Marcus Aurelius in Campidoglio, the Coleone and Gattamelata follow the same constructive scheme. The only horse whose surface reveals its interior stands 50 cm tall at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, Chile. It is the equestrian monument to General Lynch by Rodin, which was never executed.

Unable to find referents of open horses in the greater history of sculpture, I decided to experiment with my own horses, which I might describe as belonging to the Creole-Andean breed.

The real life models I used were: Rey de Bastos and Buen Amigo. These two horses live and pasture in the hills surrounding my studio and usually watch me as I work.

“The artist must be obsessive, he has to live, think and dream sculpture,” my friend Anthony Caro told me not so long ago in a letter.

This obsession also affects the referents of sculpture.

Thus I lived horse, I thought horse, and I dreamed horse, and I also rode them along the thousand equestrian tracks of the Andes.

In these horses there is a mix of all breeds and also the wisdom of five hundred years of genetic adaptation to the mountain ranges.

Very little is known about this breed. In my life with them, I have realized that they contradict all theories about horse species, such as those that assign horses a “flight ceiling” of 3,500 meters above sea level. In March 2003, we rode them practically to the summit of El Plomo, which is at 5,200 meters.

I can say that they are as fine and sure-footed as the mule but with the same discretion and loyalty of all horses. Also, they tread lightly and are as easily governed as the Chilean horses of the valleys.

I have also seen them withstand temperatures of –10ºC in high altitudes, resist powerful winds and carry loads of up to one hundred kilos on journeys ten to fifteen days long.

Perhaps not too beautiful according to established cannons of equine beauty, short-legged and very strong, they are best described as useful work animals rather than the “spirited stallions” of Rubén Darío.

Accustomed to eating anything, they are born and bred at an altitude of between 2,000 and 3,000 meters in the Andean high plateau. They are tamed by the road and their price is never beyond 140 U.S. dollars, although I would not sell my own for even a thousand.

After all these years of our mutual acquaintance, I can say that they are the true ‘drinkers of the winds’.
The Sculpture

A steel horse weighing two tons, 5 meters tall and 2.5 meters wide. It began to be conceived three years ago, gradually developing in the 24 sculptures comprising the collection “Steel Horses.” Its current form is the result of the work process. The self-imposed limitations I faced in the process were:
Models: Two horses: Rey de Bastos and Buen Amigo.

Subject: a sculpture of a horse that at the same time makes sounds like a musical instrument.

Sound advisor: José Pérez de Arce.

Material: Forged and welded steel

Technique: Construction in modules for disassembly into 30 pieces.

Size: Large, visible in the mountains.

Weight: Maximum 2 tons as it must be carried in 30 parts weighing 70 kilos each, using a 30-mule train on a 2-day journey along a mountain track.

Structural Calculations: Steel plates and welding technique, reinforced to resist wind speeds of up to 200 km/hr., four 1-m3 foundations, each one weighing approximately 2 tons.

Work Process

Considering the final objective, I began working on the idea of an open horse. For this purpose, I produced approximately 30 small-scale sculptures whose form provided greater or lesser resistance to the wind and which somehow produced sounds through vibration:

Three wire-mesh horses completely open to the wind.

Six versions made of forged steel plate, opened up.

One version in steel cable

Five versions in forged steel

Three versions with a laminated structure (Origami)

Three versions in which the steel is used in large masses to oppose its physicality to the wind.

Three versions in heavy forged steel following the actual structure of a horse.

One version in oxyacetylene-cut steel designed to make the wind whistle through its cracks.

One version made of steel sheets.

Two hanging sculptures, very light.

Three versions of ‘Drinker of the Winds’ combining structure with plates that can be adjusted according to the direction and force of the wind.

Subject Matter

I mentioned in the beginning that the subject matter of this equestrian sculpture was the figure of a horse placed in the middle of the Andes and designed to make sounds as a wind instrument. However, the deepest referent is a cultural horse: that impossible horse that all we old Chileans carry inside of us and which we will never own, regardless of how many real horses we may own or have owned. A horse that is only possible in the form of a sculpture.

I also said that the referent for this sculpture was The Andes. However, the deepest referent is the enigma of the Andes, an enigma “such that we may die from its absence” (Gabriela Mistral).

However, on the same level as these unattainable referents and with the same intensity, the referent of this sculpture is sculpture itself. That sculpture I have lived all of my life, that which can only be had by making it, and which one never has.

I agree with my master Anthony Caro: “a sculptor must be obsessive with sculpture, live sculpture…” and God knows I have been and I have…

In the course of this work, it finally became clear to me that a sculptor must not only be obsessive with sculpture but he must also be obsessive about his ultimate referents. If he is, somehow, at some point in his life, he may begin to put together things from outside and things from within, the history of sculpture with his own personal history.
Great sculpture has always been created like this: on the fringes of art.
Ver Más

A conversation with Luisa Ulibarry
1998
Your work today involves the emptying of the quarry you inhabit and the creation of eighteen granite sculptures, in a sense, a confrontation with matter. Is it legitimate for human beings to aspire to continue to transform matter? If so, why?

That’s right, bit-by-bit I empty my quarry, and again, yes, this is a legitimate aspiration, simply because it is what I like to do.

Matter, and myself silently working on each other over the years. This is the most powerful dialectic relationship I have experienced. Everything is here. There is nothing else I need. I have the materials of my sculpture, my stones and my pieces of wood, the subject matter and content of my sculpture: my Maipo river with its irrigation ditches, stone walls. It’s geological formations as well as its trees, birds, insects and fossils. The hills of my childhood that I left without ever leaving and to which I have returned, the scenario of my dreams, the places I love and know well, the places where I can see clearly.

I ride out on a mule to gaze from afar and also to look closely, using a magnifying glass. There, lost in the hills, I spend hours amongst the trees, distinguishing between leaves of litre, boldo, ñipa, lun, coronillo, boyen, quillay, huingan, peumo, lingue, corcolen…

I return to my studio, which opens out onto the hills, without walls, without windows, to represent what I have seen in the landscape and in this process of representation, I transform matter.

To say the truth about what one has seen involves still another kind of journey, a journey to examine and select from among a vast number of particulars. In the course of such a quest for exactitude I feel once more the perplexity and emotion of encountering the world to which I am so attached.

This is my choice, to live the chaos of materiality, to get to know aspects of materials, to try and represent materiality through its transformation (stones, in the case of this exhibition)

A group of stones creating an environment that speaks on my behalf.

If, in the end, sculpture finally gives birth to an image, it is in such a way sheathed in matter, to such an extent pushed into and submerged into matter as to become inextricable from it. Therefore, my sculptural language is stubborn to the image.

Put another way, one could say that my wood is the message, that my stone is the message.

I realize this is not so, however. A stone is but a stone yet, at the same time, a stone, no matter how much sculpture is put into it, will continue to be a stone. I have a price to pay to matter on which an image attempts to reside.

Although the image may remain, in changing the material, content escapes, only to be replaced by another. The all-powerful image does not control my sculpture.

The all-powerful image has been the great betrayer of sculpture. If a sculpture wishes to enter the Internet, it must do so through its image. Sculpture must be photogenic and enter into the screen devoid of materiality, weightless and odorless, through the narrow orifice of a camera lens.

Only its image, the wonderful chaos of materiality remains outside.

Devoid of materiality and only without it, a sculpture may become an image of itself and then a sign to be combined with other signs in the structuralist discourse into which sculpture finally disappears together with my quarry, my river and, what is worse, with the poets that accompany me in my journey. These are the founders of American culture: Emerson and Whitman up north and Gabriela Mistral down south.

Finally, I would like to say that in this harsh scenario in which sculpture develops, I move towards the historical pole of attraction of my art: physicality.

What do you think about the sculptors active in the local artistic scene and practice of the past years? About the production of sculpture in relation to a system of thought and representation of the contemporary image that is a legacy of post structuralism and minimalism and, finally, about the presence or absence of “theoretical gurus” in today’s sculpture?

This is undoubtedly a very favorable scenario for sculpture. City parks are filling up with sculptures. New generations of sculptors have places where they can learn the craft. We have created galleries specializing in sculpture. Sculptors who visit us are surprised at this almost unique panorama in the world context.

The weak point is the almost non-existence of adequate theoretical discussion about what is going on. We need theoreticians in our studios, in order to reflect about what we are doing, to project the work into the future, theoreticians who are capable of explaining and promoting the work among the public. The majority approaches sculpture as you say, with little paper dresses, of the kind there used to be in the past in order to try and fit into them.

My impression is that for years now sculpture has no longer fitted such little paper dresses.

This problem is not new and we are just one more generation in the troubled relationship between sculpture and the theoretical systems of each period of history.

Michelangelo had to navigate between the neo-platonic ideas prevalent in his youth and which derived in the flourishing of Early Renaissance and the Counter Reform that cooled down his old age. In order to explain his process, he chose Vasari, a painter, chronicler-theoretician who writes and describes the work from the studio of the master himself.

Rodin invited Rilke, this time a poet, to work from Rodin’s position but from the point of view of poetry. Rilke writes about a sculpture table at which Rodin had modeled for years. His words are useful because they almost sink into the clay on that table.

All these writers have characteristics in common. They attempt to understand sculpture, and this effort generates in them admiration for the field of sculpture and that admiration produces respect and a humble attitude in their discourse at once useful to the public and to sculptors.

In Chile and South America, as a broader cultural zone, most thinkers of the visual arts have emerged under the influence of French structuralism and think from the standpoint of the world of language, words, signs and the unconscious, hard pressed to find historical connections, demanding from the visual arts geographical, archaeological and legal-political proposals.

Of all the visual trends today, they only establish some form of dialogue with branches derived of post-dada, minimalist and conceptualist ideas, all of them tendencies positioning the visual artist within the gathering of objects made by others with an attached theoretical discourse, independently of the reality that originates them. For such tendencies, the art object does not exist for its own sake but in terms of its capacity to relate to other objects whose specific existence is not too important and which the artist does not produce on the basis of primary but gathered materials.

Thus, the artistic fields would be defined as follows:
Gathering of secondhand materials with attached theoretical proposal.
Transformation of firsthand matter into silence
Theoreticians, perhaps the most competent, went with the gatherers. We the sculptors remained alone.
There has been no serious reflection about our sculptural practice and effort of the past years.
However, sculpture continues to progress.

The form of the local art system remained linked to language and the main theoretical proposals. It is in this scenario, which is neither useful nor touches upon my way of working, that I have had to move in the past yeas. In this scenario of generalizations I have opted for the particular. I realized that if I want to contribute something to the field of sculpture I must focus my efforts on work outside the avant-garde movements and within the specificity of my own practice. This same thing happens in the great artistic movements I knew in Europe, such as “British Sculpture” which derives absolutely from its local conditions and whose universal character originates in the specific ration of light that is afforded to Britain, which is why its sculpture is based more on structures than volumes, unlike Mediterranean sculpture for example. British sculpture is made for placement in the green fields of England. We Chilean sculptors had the chance to learn this firsthand when Henry Moore sent his very dear friend Marta Colvin back to Chile because “South America is the continent of sculpture.”

I left Europe, where I had reached a limit in terms of what I could learn from its powerful traditions or what I could research scratching the surface of its best traditions. Thus, I left my house and university in England and returned to my garden and my fig trees.

Here, in close and permanent communion with the landscape of my quarry, where I live and work, in the Andean part of the central valley, far from the great art systems in Europe, I opted for the only thing that was truly mine: myself in the landscape.

Water and stone, a river that cuts mountains in two and animal forms that inhabit that environment Coleopterans, insects and minerals, crystals as motifs.

Stone and river, the Maipo River, the winds and the glaciers of its valley are responsible for 50% of the form of the stones in this exhibition. The river polished them on the outside when it passed over them cutting in two the mountain on whose foothills I live. On the opposite bank are the quarries and town of La Obra; on this side, Pirque. I respected as far as I could the forms of these stones, which were created by the river over millions of years.

The stone is granodiorite, the hardest of igneous stones in Chile

The work in exhibition is the outcome of a careful observation of the landscape that surrounds me. There I discovered the great crystals of granite and basalt, hard structures both inside and out, without the elasticity of the human body and trees. Crystals are three-dimensional and mathematical formulas in the midst of the chaos of matter.

Three of these sculptures reproduce, literally, the larger dimensions: an atacamite (copper ore) crystal, one of galena (lead ore) and other of cassiterite (tin ore). Together with the stone crystals I find the coleopterans. The acanthinodera cummingi or madre de la culebra living on the banks of the stream that runs behind my house and which, after dying and being washed away by the water, forms a fine layer on the surface that is the equivalent of its bones. When looking at those great carcasses, emptied of their muscles, when I look inside them, I realize that their interiors are fantastic sculptural caverns. The idea of working on the insides was reaffirmed by the observation of ammonites and fossilized cyrtinas from the Maipo, mollusks that lived millions of years ago.

Many of these sculptures are stones I split, worked on the inside and closed again, leaving a minimum of visual access.

I believe these sculptures have something of the basic configuration of the stone walls of Pirque or pircas.

Occupying citizens’ space, the relationship between works that will be inside the gallery and works placed outside in the open space. Public art, landscape as support. The validity of public art at a time when the most public of spaces is the Internet.

The content and material of these sculptures is the same. Five of them have been conceived for larger spaces and were placed out on the street in a space already colonized by sculpture, the median strip on the corner of Americo Vespucio and Vitacura. The remaining eight, were deployed inside the Gallery.

This idea of linking public space and the space of the gallery is not new for Artespacio Gallery, because it has promoted the most important sculptural projects for public spaces in the past years: Sculpture Park at the University of Talca; Ciudad Empresarial in Santiago; Plaza El Roble, in Chillán; Radomiro Tomic Mining Company in Calama; Mirador CCT Interactive Park, Santiago.

Sculpture is either out in the streets or it simply isn’t.

All forms of culture can, to a greater or lesser extent, be shown on the Internet, the new public space. Sculpture cannot.

Perhaps it is this awareness that has led sculptors and the promoters of sculpture to bring it out into the streets with such force.

I think sculpture grows in the citizens’ space more than any other form of cultural expression.
Santiago, February 3, 1998
Ver Más

Tim Scott, sculptor, London June 1995

Introduction to the work of Francisco Gazitua, by Tim Scott, publicado en el libro F.Gazitua escultura Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile.

The word “sculpture” has become one of the most abused in the language. Its simple Latin origin, “cutting,” with the direct connotations of “making” and “building” that it historically acquired, has become obscured in a morass of superficial and mindless misappropriation. Andy phenomenon, any object, any activity, be it the elementary fumblings of school children or the theatrical cavortings of “performance art” can now be dignified with the word “sculpture.”

This is not the place to five an historical account of the semantic confusion. Suffice it to say that when Minimalism posed the idea that the “experience” of an object was of greater import than the object itself )an idea of Duchampian origin) and that the object could thereby be demoted to the category of a pre-designed piece of manufacture, could be conceived of as a diagram, an illustration of the all important “idea” or philosophical “concept,” the cat was out of the bag.

The battle for the establishment of an authentic, integral, modern sculptural object free of literary dominance and pictorial illusionism, that has been our history since Rodin, was inseminated with the total confusion at one stroke. We are constantly told that the avant-garde’s appropriation of “sculpture” as descriptive of the types of experience it propagates has made redundant and old fashioned the task of investing a simple conglomeration of inert material with sufficient power and understanding to transform it into an “object” of expressive uniqueness, that such effort is historically out-date and out of touch with our times.

It is refreshing and an act of re-confirmation when one encounters those brave souls, who, despite the critical clamour around them, doggedly hold to the idea that not only can we in our time further and extend the traditions of thousands of years of sculpture making, but that it is indeed a necessity if we are not to lose sight of the values and dare I say it, the morality of plastic art.

Francisco Gazitua is one such. He has sculpture in his blood. From his Iberian ancestry he no doubt has inherited the gene of making, of crafting, of building and constructing. From his Andean birthright he has learned to view plastic art as something more than the mere representation of natural form; he has inherited that deep feeling for material and its working that only cultures who live with nature and the land, rather than from them, possess.

I have spoken before of that particular problem of “colonial” culture such as are relevant to Chile, and it is a measure of the depth of Gazitua’s attempts to uncover the inner layers of what constitutes real plastic understanding in relation to place that his “Chileanness” is a major and integral part of his sensibility.

Chance or perhaps destiny, brought Gazitua together with a group of sculptors in London, including myself, who were all in one way or another searching for ways forward from the sense of “impasse” that frequently occurs along the line of artistic development, occasionally to be unblocked by a surge of clarity, often from totally unexpected sources and by unforeseen means. In the late Seventies, at St. Martin’s School of Art in London, an immobilized tradition of abstract constructed sculpture, dominated by the work of Anthony Caro, and having roots in the Spanish/American lineage of Picasso, Gonzalez and Smith, was forcing on some of its participants the necessity to question and rethink of the foundations of their art. Gazitua immediately became an integral part of this effort as he too was at a crossroads in his career.

From the many arguments, discussion a and teaching programs that evolved at the time in an attempt to further thinking in Sculpture’s future path, some main concerns were: That of sources for sculpture, That of sculptural form consisting of a “language” which must be learned in terms of construction, grammar, syntax, etc. That of the sculptural object as being non-finite, capable of indefinite change and improvement. That of sculpture as an area of human sensibility allied to but nonetheless unique from other areas; the ways in which there is so justifying its existence. That of the role of tradition, what it means to sculptural development now and in the future.

From these and other “issues” developed attempts to rethink the nature of a sculptural structure, what it consists of, what distinguishes it from other structures in the physical world and their makeup. Gazitua’s particular contribution to the research, coming as he did from outside the Caro-centered orbit, was a fresher view of body centred sculpture traditions than existed at that time in the St. Martin’s fold, and also a renewed interest in other materials as a working base than the all dominant steel. Internal structural analysis of the body as a source, “investigation” as Gazitua would call it; renewed links with historical sculpture from all cultures (the body as subject); working directly from observation instead of a “one sculpture systematically generating the next” syndrome; the change from reliance on the “givenness” of a material, particularly steel with its manufactured forms; all this became dominant passions amongst the group of sculptors and students with whom Gazitua collaborated. On his return to Chile, he has retained the hard core of these concerns as central to his thinking and development.

If there is anything worse than photographs of sculpture as a means of understanding and visualizing its nature, it must be verbal descriptions of it, so I do not intend to attempt a descriptive analysis of the developments and moves that have taken place in Gazitua’s work of the last ten years, developments which, in any case, are fully visible to the visitor in this exhibition. Suffice it to say that his return to his native land has stimulated and encouraged a sculptural effort that I for one would scarcely have believed possible in London days. From the large public sculptures of the mid-eighties in Parque Forestal (steel) and the Puerta Del Congreso at Valparaiso (steel and stone,) to the small scale recent variations on figure and wind instrument themes (wood/stone/steel,) Gazitua has shown himself to be consistently challenging his own thinking and precepts with fresh insights and perceptions.

In particular, his use of laminated wood (inspired by observations of musical instrument making_ is an intensely original uncovering of the possibilities of a material, it characteristics and strengths, in the grip of a sufficiently felt sculptural motif. In fact, Gazitua’s use of wood in these sculptures is not only structurally developed, but has the seeds of what all great sculpture seeks for itself, the opening up of a completely new vision of physicality through the freshly understood development of the innate properties of a material in the grasp of a highly tuned imaginative idea. So that just as, for example, the shapes of the wood parts that are assembled into the form of a violin or a cello are the consequence of their source – acoustic function combined with aesthetic refinement – so too do the parts of Gazitua’s wood sculptures come together in conclusions which arise both from the demands of an intensely observed and understood visual source and from aesthetic satisfaction as a product of the particularities of the material and its working. Here the twists and turns, thickenings and planning down, changes in direction and angle, thrusts and tensions of the various boned and trued woods, acting in conjunction, stand in for physicality as sensation strained through the actual physicality of the materials and the working. I would go so far as to say (though I would be the last person to wish to impose on him any restraint in his use of stone and steel for example_ that recent developments in his work in wood are some of the most original and authentically new sculptures today.

Chilean sculpture has gained for itself, in the return of a prodigal son, a visionary of the power, strength and capacity of the sculptor’s art. Francisco Gazitua is that rare individual, a man who is sure of the foundations of his thinking, and convinced of the nature of the path he must follow to realize it. The Andes have mothered much sculptural sensibility in the historic past; it is an exciting prospect that this can again become an option for the future.
Ver Más

Drinker of the Winds
F. Gazitúa, 2003

The Wind

The Ecuadorian photographer Pablo Corral once said, “The true lord of the Andes is the wind. In Patagonia and Bolivia’s High Plateau, in the mossy moors of Venezuela and the foothills of Ecuador’s volcanoes, random winds blow:

The history of the Andes is one of the winds.
We are all huairapamuska, sons of the wind.”

My horse-sculpture also seeks that wind. Its structure is that of a musical instrument. It seeks that wind in order to sound in the high Andes.

It seeks the wind at Las Llaretas, a borderline plateau and one of the best wind-catching chutes in the Andes. Three thousand three hundred and sixty one meters above sea level, between mount Aconcagua and mount Mercedario, the highest summits of the Andes.

“On May 4, 1899, we climbed to the plateau” the geographer Luis Risopatrón tells us, adding: “…and the force of the wind was such that we had to struggle to remain seated on our mules. Stones two and three centimeters in size flew right by us.”

So I named my horse-sculpture ‘Drinker of the Winds.’
Beyond the sound of the stones carried by the waters of its rivers and the creaking and cracking of its glaciers in the night, beyond its thunder the sound, nay, the voice of the Andes is the sound of the wind.

These winds are born far away, in the middle of the South Pacific, between Australia and Polynesia. After days of travel, they blow onto the shores of America and race up the Andes where convection increases their speed, crossing over to the other side only to dissipate in the heart of the Argentine Pampa. The winter cyclones turn into white winds made all the more deadly by their force and the ice that they carry.
The Place – Las Llaretas Plateau

This mountain crossing is undoubtedly the best in the central zone as you come from the north. It forms part of the ancient Inca Trail, whose itinerary from north to south was: Cuzco – Oruro – Potosí – Quebrada de Humahuaca – Salta – Tinogasta – Pampa de Yaguaraz – Barrial – Los Manantiales – Espinacito – Paso las Llaretas – Alto del Cuzco – Putaendo.

The route was first laid down by nature through its geological faults and later it was the immigration route for the first inhabitants of America, twenty thousand years before the Inca.

The plateau has the best sample of Llaretas (laretia-acaulis) I have ever found in my travels through the Andes, some eight hundred hectares distributed among the small valleys nearby.

Because of fertile soil in this sector of the Inca Trail and also because of its well-trodden track, the greater part of the army of liberation, approximately 1,800 men, 5,000 horses and mules, crossed the Andes here in 1817, with O’Higgins himself and San Martin leading the way.
I have placed my sculpture there because of the quality of its histories, geology and vegetation. It is through these qualities that this place earned for itself its cultural status.

Horses

Drinkers of the Winds are a secret breed of horse that has twice the capacity of other horses to absorb oxygen, as each orifice in their nose is individually connected to its respective lung.

I decided to make a sculpture based on the idea of these horses open to the winds and during the two years it took me to make them, I followed a route opposite to that of Ulysses in the construction of the Trojan Horse, whose interior was built to conceal. All horses after that, the great horses of sculpture, that of Marcus Aurelius in Campidoglio, the Coleone and Gattamelata follow the same constructive scheme. The only horse whose surface reveals its interior stands 50 cm tall at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, Chile. It is the equestrian monument to General Lynch by Rodin, which was never executed.

Unable to find referents of open horses in the greater history of sculpture, I decided to experiment with my own horses, which I might describe as belonging to the Creole-Andean breed.

The real life models I used were: Rey de Bastos and Buen Amigo. These two horses live and pasture in the hills surrounding my studio and usually watch me as I work.

“The artist must be obsessive, he has to live, think and dream sculpture,” my friend Anthony Caro told me not so long ago in a letter.

This obsession also affects the referents of sculpture.

Thus I lived horse, I thought horse, and I dreamed horse, and I also rode them along the thousand equestrian tracks of the Andes.

In these horses there is a mix of all breeds and also the wisdom of five hundred years of genetic adaptation to the mountain ranges.

Very little is known about this breed. In my life with them, I have realized that they contradict all theories about horse species, such as those that assign horses a “flight ceiling” of 3,500 meters above sea level. In March 2003, we rode them practically to the summit of El Plomo, which is at 5,200 meters.

I can say that they are as fine and sure-footed as the mule but with the same discretion and loyalty of all horses. Also, they tread lightly and are as easily governed as the Chilean horses of the valleys.

I have also seen them withstand temperatures of –10ºC in high altitudes, resist powerful winds and carry loads of up to one hundred kilos on journeys ten to fifteen days long.

Perhaps not too beautiful according to established cannons of equine beauty, short-legged and very strong, they are best described as useful work animals rather than the “spirited stallions” of Rubén Darío.

Accustomed to eating anything, they are born and bred at an altitude of between 2,000 and 3,000 meters in the Andean high plateau. They are tamed by the road and their price is never beyond 140 U.S. dollars, although I would not sell my own for even a thousand.

After all these years of our mutual acquaintance, I can say that they are the true ‘drinkers of the winds’.
The Sculpture

A steel horse weighing two tons, 5 meters tall and 2.5 meters wide. It began to be conceived three years ago, gradually developing in the 24 sculptures comprising the collection “Steel Horses.” Its current form is the result of the work process. The self-imposed limitations I faced in the process were:
Models: Two horses: Rey de Bastos and Buen Amigo.

Subject: a sculpture of a horse that at the same time makes sounds like a musical instrument.

Sound advisor: José Pérez de Arce.

Material: Forged and welded steel

Technique: Construction in modules for disassembly into 30 pieces.

Size: Large, visible in the mountains.

Weight: Maximum 2 tons as it must be carried in 30 parts weighing 70 kilos each, using a 30-mule train on a 2-day journey along a mountain track.

Structural Calculations: Steel plates and welding technique, reinforced to resist wind speeds of up to 200 km/hr., four 1-m3 foundations, each one weighing approximately 2 tons.

Work Process

Considering the final objective, I began working on the idea of an open horse. For this purpose, I produced approximately 30 small-scale sculptures whose form provided greater or lesser resistance to the wind and which somehow produced sounds through vibration:

Three wire-mesh horses completely open to the wind.

Six versions made of forged steel plate, opened up.

One version in steel cable

Five versions in forged steel

Three versions with a laminated structure (Origami)

Three versions in which the steel is used in large masses to oppose its physicality to the wind.

Three versions in heavy forged steel following the actual structure of a horse.

One version in oxyacetylene-cut steel designed to make the wind whistle through its cracks.

One version made of steel sheets.

Two hanging sculptures, very light.

Three versions of ‘Drinker of the Winds’ combining structure with plates that can be adjusted according to the direction and force of the wind.

Subject Matter

I mentioned in the beginning that the subject matter of this equestrian sculpture was the figure of a horse placed in the middle of the Andes and designed to make sounds as a wind instrument. However, the deepest referent is a cultural horse: that impossible horse that all we old Chileans carry inside of us and which we will never own, regardless of how many real horses we may own or have owned. A horse that is only possible in the form of a sculpture.

I also said that the referent for this sculpture was The Andes. However, the deepest referent is the enigma of the Andes, an enigma “such that we may die from its absence” (Gabriela Mistral).

However, on the same level as these unattainable referents and with the same intensity, the referent of this sculpture is sculpture itself. That sculpture I have lived all of my life, that which can only be had by making it, and which one never has.

I agree with my master Anthony Caro: “a sculptor must be obsessive with sculpture, live sculpture…” and God knows I have been and I have…

In the course of this work, it finally became clear to me that a sculptor must not only be obsessive with sculpture but he must also be obsessive about his ultimate referents. If he is, somehow, at some point in his life, he may begin to put together things from outside and things from within, the history of sculpture with his own personal history.
Great sculpture has always been created like this: on the fringes of art.
Ver Más

From the book Metal Design International 2008
EPHAISTOS Publishing House Germany.

Those who immerse themselves in the world of Francisco Gazitua’s sculptures feel like they are entering a different universe. For viewers and explorers alike, the Chilean sculptor has created a lifework that takes your breath away! The monumental steel sculptures are, for now, the final stage of his lifelong search for a “Language of Sculptures”; a search that can be described as research on the path to the identity and expressiveness of materials. With his work in steel, stone, and wood, Francisco Gazitua intends to let the material speak in its primal form according to the way he works with it: “My wood comes from the forests around my granite quarry, where I live and work and recover rocks never before touched by human hands. Every piece of steel for my sculptures was modeled in the hot, red fire of the forge. I interpret the material.”

Francisco Gazitua, who was born on September 29, 1944, defines his creative process as “functional design”. With this term, he describes the expressiveness and style of his sculptures. When he is working with wood or metal, Gazitua follows the tradition of classic sculpture. However, he considers metal sculpture to be a very recent form of fine art which he also helped take to a new level through his work at the start of the 21st century.
The master finds themes and motives in his home country. Without, as he says, “being proverbially figurative, my sculptures tell stories about familiar things,” about his home country of Chile, the history of the American continent, the beauty of Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia, the Andes, the Cordilleras. With professional enthusiasm and a childlike enjoyment of form and function, design and pictorial language, he is able to artistically exaggerate trees, horses, and ships – and, in the past, also the human form – and to develop them for his sculptures. His selections also include objects that are not readily apparent as themes for a sculpture, such as approximately 40 preserved water wheels from an irrigation system in the Larmahue region, a Chilean cultural heritage site from the pre-industrial 17th century.

Francisco Gazitua is more than just a performer; he also considers himself a facilitator. For 35 years, his life was filled by teaching. First, in 1968, he taught sculpture at the Catholic University of Chile in Santiago. He himself had studied philosophy there, in addition to his course of studies in sculpture at the faculty of arts at the University of Chile, where he also taught for four years ending in 1973. And then he took the leap to Europe. From 1978 to 1985, he was a professor at Saint Martin’s School of Arts in England; from 1983 to 1985, he also taught at the City Lit School of Arts in London, and in 1984, Gazitua was a guest professor at the Royal College of Art in London. During this time, he also worked in the studios of the British metal sculptors Tim Scott, Phillip King, and Sir Anthony Caro. Gazitua founded three sculpture schools; the first, in 1980, was in Kornaria, Istria, in Croatia. There he taught stone sculpture in marble until 2003. He founded the faculty of sculpture at the Finis Terrae University in Santiago de Chile, and a workshop school also located in the Chilean capital.
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Francisco Gazitua

As an extension of my works, I transcribe a series of reflections – some clear, others obscured, which reveal the themes of my sculpture. Far from wanting to delineate or over-define the discipline of sculpture, I present these writings as a phenomenological medium, based upon my experience in the company of this subject, matter: a field that I have not yet achieved a full understanding but into which, through my practice, I have been forging my own entryway.

I come from a background that will be common to any sculptor formed between the sixties and seventies.

The literary doorway into the realm of sculpture was closed to me due to Rodin and the best works of Constantin Brancusi from the turn of the century, when these artists created sculpture independent of artistic convention. Following this new lineage, and around the same period (between 1916 and 1918) Picasso, via his paintings, opened the doorway to collage. This constructive method of creating sculpture – neither carved nor modeled – was the act of joining various objects together in order to construct a new, plastic totality. This was the beginning point for me, and a challenge myself and all other sculptors of the century had to confront.

Construction was established as the new “cannon.” It was the great alternative to Rodin,

The influence of collage in our epoch has been tremendous; its stature in sculptural composition was founded by Brancusi in France, Epstein and Gil in England, and continued and popularized by the contemporaries of Henry Moore. In Chile, constructive art was developed by the generation of Lily Garafulic, Samual Roman and Marta Colvin, having finally been exposed to the proponents of collage such as Picasso, Julio Gonzalez, David Smith and Anthony Caro. This undercurrent, known by the sculptural nomenclature as the constructed, prepared the sculptural scene in the 1960’s, ultimately establishing the great sculptural circuits of the previous three decades.

There have been two overwhelming revolutions in sculpture over the past century: la talla directa, or direct intervention into matter and construccion, or constructive method: the latter being one of the great contributions of Picasso, who augmented our sculptural dictionary from two words – bronze and marble – to a million: all presented forms of matter in the universe. Any media can be combined in a collage. This change, which arose as an evolution in the field of technique, has had profound implications on the base of sculptural language.

The carving of Brancusi and Epstein changed the practical life of sculptors – no longer are we white-aproned modelers or simple craftsmen. The constructive method definitively changed our workshops and the way we lived. We added to our collections of carving and modeling tools all of the devices created for contemporary and traditional techniques. Our studios were no longer ivory towers, nor cloistered sanctuaries. In effect, this change slowly began hammering away at our mental delineations until we began questioning the whole system of ideas under which we worked everyday.

The majority of these structured ideas were formed in the 16th and 17th centuries through the creation of the first academies, those “bounded courts” upon which the specialized critique of a fixed, inalterable sculpture is based, and is still spoken of to this day. In my opinion, this discourse is valueless with regards to the game modern sculptors are playing.

Inundated by this change, elicited by the great elaboration of the sculptural dictionary, sculptors have lost themselves in an unfamiliar and deep ocean. From the sheltered port of the human figure, carved in marble or bronze, we set sail towards unknown waters: all possible matter with no conventional manner of forming it.
Ver Más

By Francisco Gazitua – 07 August, 2002

Dear Francisco,

Here are my answers to your questions. Things are changing fast in sculpture now, both the place in our lives, materials and subject matter and what is regarded as sculpture’s role. I have witnessed big changes in the last 10 or 15 years – we may not like them all, especially as the subject moved so far away from what used to be our concerns, but at least sculpture has become far more accepted as part of people’s lives, people’s consciousness.

My interest in sculpture has been and is fairly narrow, limited to the subject of sculpture, personal expression through sculpture.

With best wishes,

Sir Anthony Caro

Influence of other Works

At some point the artist has to be obsessive, to live sculpture, think sculpture, dream sculpture. But this does not mean being narrow. I believe that it’s necessary to be a rounded educated person – to read, listen to music, go to the cinema or to the theatre, talk to non-artists. But although it reflects on one’s work the main thing is that such breadth of vision affects one’s outlook on life and this in turn enriches the work.
Do I think that the other arts should affect the sculpture in a positive way?

That’s another question altogether: and there are no rules. In the 60’s and 70’s I felt it was of the utmost importance that sculpture should establish itself as ‘high art’ independent of likeness to nature, not relying on the figure or narrative – pure and clean and essentially abstract. This would re-establish itself as a high art dependent only on form, scale and so on for conveying the expression. Now that that position has I feel been secured, so the sculptor can feel freer to look outside – outside the material, the subject, outside even the clean white gallery. Sculpture now can involve a social context, narrative, non-sculptural elements, parts of reality, surrealism. But we need to beware because it can get woolly. It can begin to lose formal entity, it can become concept, performance, political statement or whatever. Sculpture is expression of feeling in terms of form and material and if other areas contribute to it well and good, but it is a formal expression. Let’s not forget that.

As far as incursion into other art go let’s by all means involve the sculptor in architectural or engineering projects, even in cinema or theatre design. In the same way that Picasso did his ballet we can say, bring something new to theatre because we come from a different place, think differently from most theatre or ballet designers. And in a similar way we can be useful to the architect because we are looser and to the engineer because our priorities are different. But the architect is reluctant to give up any control and wants to relegate the sculptor’s role to designing details like handrails! This is a return to the old 19th or early 20th century relationships and it’s not what I mean at all. If architects and sculptors trained in art schools close to one another (as do sculptors and painters) then there could – as there should – be close interchange of thought and a real exchange on an equal basis which would continue into practice at a mature stage. This I regard as important.
Theory

Go to the Tate Gallery bookshop and you’ll find row upon row of books on art theory. The practice of art requires thought and intelligence but it’s artistic not theoretical intelligence. Indeed I believe the Cubists did not have any sort of fully worked out plan – they were working in the dark. However always they trusted their artistic intelligence in front of the pictures. The theoreticians do not need to make anything – they think art can be figured out in their minds. But that’s not how the making of sculpture (or painting) works. You can conceive a course of action in your head – at night perhaps when you cannot sleep – but in the morning when you are faced with the stuff itself it’s never like you imagined. The stuff, the material, the medium calls for a response, so although you may have a rough road map in your concept the reality forces adaptation, reorganisation, and art. I have always believed in the artist as an intelligent being not a zombie hacking away at a piece of stone for hours on end without a thought, but let’s not go overboard in the opposite direction. You can’t simply conceive a good piece of sculpture – your idea may be good, but the result is all that counts – in the last analysis that’s what we judge the work by.
Education

Teaching at art schools is not always good. For instance in Britain at the present time enormous attention is paid to teaching how to market yourself, or market your product. It is as if art is like shoes or cars and needs to be sold and the artist is treated as if he/she was a film star in the making who needs a gimmick or a personality so as to present a sellable product. All this is nothing whatever to do with making good or great art.

Nevertheless I do not believe that you do not need tuition – that sculptors teach themselves. It may well be that the student learns more from his/her peers than from the professor, but I think that working with others and sharing growth and experience is essential. When I stopped teaching undergraduates at St Martins I initiated workshops where mature sculptors (also painters) worked side by side for two weeks each year. As the participants came from different countries and very different ages, the interchange was excellent and everyone seemed to feel benefited enormously from this pressured experience. I heard it frequently said that ‘in those 2 weeks I learned more than in a year on my own’. Often schools or workshops do speed up development, which is why it’s best to make many small or reasonable sized works rather than say one large one.

One’s education as an artist never stops. One can always learn, from every new experience, every venture into unknown or little known territory. One gains knowledge or gets a suggestion one had not previously thought of.
Patrons, Sponsors, Galleries, Commissions

The artist is of no immediate practical use in society. He is like a poet. He doesn’t mend TV sets, make cars or plough fields and grow food. Even the architect who designs our habitations is a more useful person – and oddly for all its practicality architecture is not an applied art, but at it’s best and following the tradition established with the Greek temples – a high form of art maybe the highest of the visual arts. (There may be a lesson here for sculpture?)

Nevertheless art feeds the spirit. We would be immeasurably impoverished without Shakespeare, Donatello or Giotto or Cézanne. So how to reconcile the uselessness of art in a practical sense with its long term value to the spirit. We artists have to find the means to make our art, run our lives, feed our families, pay for our studio and pay our assistants. There seems to be no very happy solution. Commissions almost invariably demand concessions, modifications, the fitting in with someone else’s dreams or ideas. Patrons, sponsors want their money’s worth. Galleries do not show the work for fun but they have to make money and that’s their main concern, to keep afloat. I wish I felt happier about the disposal of our works. We make too much art – because we enjoy this way of spending our lives. Very few artists become extremely rich, quite a lot of gallerists do become millionaires: I suppose it’s because our first priority is the art, theirs must be money. Truth to tell we don’t speak the same language. As a way round this as a practising artist usually has to teach wether he/she likes it or not.

Personally I have enjoyed teaching. Indeed I only stopped when I felt that I had said my say and was beginning to repeat myself. Teaching is basically teaching yourself and you yourself learn as you teach. The students ask difficult questions which require you to give thought and attention so you teach well when you address these questions freshly and come up with what you feel are true answers.
Links with the Academic World

To my mind the one area to stay away from is administration. That does not feed your art – it teaches you politics and it’s actually an area that eats away at one’s truth. The world of universities is far I think from the world of art schools although students often go to one or the other at some time in their lives. But often what is learnt at either is in the first place a process of growing.

Lectures and Symposia

All the kind of things which relate to the history of art are good: they give one a background to one’s art. I believe the history of painting, sculpture, architecture, photography are good because they feed one’s art. Rubens said ‘Art comes out of art more than out of nature’. Besides as you know I do not believe in the ‘Ivory Tower way of making art’ (at any rate not for me. Nor I think for sculptors in general). So the mixing with others and discussions if they aid the learning process are all to the good. It’s not much point in having an argument with those views that are dramatically opposed to one’s own, but trusting relationships with intelligent artist are bound to be fruitful. In my experience these contacts with artist and critics that I hold in respect have been enormously enriching.

I can’t even begin to give book lists. I must own hundreds if not thousands of books, magazines, catalogues, about art. Yes they are good for art critics, art historians, but they are also good for practising artists too. I see something, a reproduction of a painting, a postcard view, anything and I get it and keep it sometimes returning years later. It’s food.

The art World

Well, do stay ahead of what’s going on and do pay attention. But don’t let fashion throw you. It’s ephemeral. Great art is timeless. And that’s where we’re aiming!
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ART AND LIFE

“… I found that a stone carver and a philosopher look for the same thing, just that they do so through different routes.”
FG

This book aims to describe and offer a critical assessment of some of the more relevant and characteristic works of Francisco Gazitúa.

Based on documents, reflections and testimonies by the artist, the book also provides an overview of the theoretical underpinnings of his renowned sculptural work, within the framework of the various moments of his life, including his travels and sojourns in various countries.

Undoubtedly one of the foremost and most highly regarded artists in Latin America and the world today, in his own country, Chile, the sculptor Francisco Gazitúa is at the peak of critical esteem –primum inter pares, the first among equals: the most outstanding practitioners of three-dimensional art. This is due to the high aesthetic qualities of his work but also to the excellence and rich diversity of craftsmanship there is in each one of his pieces, including, also, the relevance and importance of his opulent and varied heritage of a broad range of subject matter.

Applying multiple techniques, he has worked primarily in stone, wood and steel –although he has also used paper, ice and even water and wind-, all of this covering a period of close to half a century of continuous work.

This also includes a prolific teaching activity and, as part of this activity, drafting and editing of a number of texts related to his sculptural practice.

He is also co-founder of a functional circuit of Latin American sculpture, which is the result of years of work in symposia, meetings, residencies, with other sculptors (Irineu Garcia, Hernán Dompe, Dolores Ortiz, Ted Carrasco, among others), a project that has, as he puts it, “transformed Latin America into a ‘Worthy House’ in which to receive our peers.”

A good example of this was the recent encounter (early 2009) during the exhibition The strategy of form at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Monterrey (MARCO), in Monterrey, N.L., Mexico. On that occasion, he met up with, among others, his friends and former UK teachers: Anthony Caro, Tim Scott, Michael Lyons, Carlos Lizariturry, Piotr Twardowski, etc. Over sixty steel sculptures were shown, most of them very large.

Creation, reflection and pedagogy

Like an essential triad, closely interwoven and presiding over his professional activity from the time of its earliest fruit, creation, reflection and pedagogy have been the three means for a deeply rooted brand of expression, flowing in parallel throughout his professional career, from the beginning.

This is why the reference to them in our speech also runs in parallel, as the reader may corroborate in the development of this panoramic view of his life and work, because having starting from the common source of his talent and creativity, our comments on the results of his artistic practice will also focus on these personal qualities, which manifested alternatively or simultaneously, have been a constant and uninterrupted factor throughout his career and have, moreover, increased to this day.

Francisco Gazitúa has been ready to display such versatility from very early in life. He boldly studied two careers; Philosophy at the Pontifical Catholic University and Sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Chile. Subsequently he did postgraduate studies in England.

Thus, two of his varied capabilities have received wide recognition. Of course, these are not often found in one and the same artist, perhaps with the exception of the valuable ethical substrate of his characteristic style, with a decided inclination toward Chilean themes, without this lessening his international acceptance.

There is, on the one hand, the technical skill and craftsmanship required to see through the execution and fabrication of the work of art in its various stages up to the final product; and then, on the other hand, there is the theoretical knowledge and reflexive capacity to delimit (or define the boundaries of, as our Alfonso Reyes might say) the unique conception of his creativity, contextualizing it within the process of three-dimensional production and also its geographic surroundings.

Concerning the latter, the environment from which this creator launches and realizes his gigantic urban sculptures is definitely very important. The location of the splendid site, like the artist himself, is in the south. A workshop outfitted with cutting edge equipment. This fact is relevant not only because it is in his homeland with the spiritually nurturing environment that this implies, because he works, lives and feels in his place of origin. “In the past, this was impossible. We sculptors travelled and built our works on-site, at the place where they would remain on view to the public. Today, for the first time in the history of sculpture, thanks to globalization, all aspects of a sculpture can be fully executed at the workshop of origin.”

For him –in fact for anyone- it is a privilege to work in the space of his workshop, immersed in the awesome landscape of the mountainous immensity of the Andes. Among these mountains that, to quote the teacher of America, Gabriela Mistral, who lived in Mexico for a time: “make us die in their absence.”

Like Proteus, the classical character who drew his strength from the earth, the artist confesses to us:

“My story is here, my roots, my landscape. I dream here every night, in the same geography where I work, forging and welding. I owe it all to these mountains: the stones I work with, the quarry I inhabit and the culture in which I sail, between the Andes Mountains and the Southern Seas.”

In more specifically intellectual pursuits, as the notable fruit of in-depth research and well-informed critical views, we find the enlightening essay on the history and critique of art that was included in the book Contemporary Chilean Sculpture (1). In it, its author starts with the study and interpretation of the life and work of Virgilio Arias, in its European cultural context as well as the value of his legacy at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Chile, of which he was founder and director during its first ten years.

In the aforesaid publication, Francisco Gazitúa also analyzes the artistic production of other sculptors, including those who participated as teachers (as he himself would be, years later) in the same Faculty during this pioneering period.

The corpus of the essay contains, for the first time in a compendium of the history of sculpture in Chile, contemporary tools of criticism, Such tools are used to study and vindicate the wood sculptures of the Mapuche and Rapa-Nui, native tridimensional sculptural forms that so far had been obliterated or buried under careless forgetfulness and racist ill will.

In his contribution to the book of the reference the author also outlines different trips from which he has brought –and shared with his readers- an anecdotic background (firsthand knowledge belonging to a long oral tradition that is now being written) and of artistic knowledge that he accurately located within the context of Chilean culture, by the breakdown of the means and causes of its assimilation.

Therefore he is being merely objective and not metaphoric when, in one part of his writings, he says that… “I also travel toward the European masters, especially the French and some English, against which the history of sculpture in Chile bounces like an echo, sometimes close and sometimes far. In this period the European masters were also powerful promoters of a fundamental part of the history of sculpture in Chile: Rodin, Bourdelle, Brancusi and Moore.”

And may the latter serve as an example, one that certainly influenced the way of seeing and doing sculpture in this southern country. Moore did not do this directly, but through one of his most outstanding pupils, Marta Colvin, teacher to several generations of visual artists doing three-dimensional work in Chile, including among them, Francisco Gazitúa himself.

This stubborn pedagogic will to participate, to share and to teach the knowledge acquired is evident throughout his entire written work and also in his daily work as a sculptor. An essential feature of Gazitúa’s personality as a master sculptor is what writers and intellectuals of the generation of the centennial (1810) in Mexico used to call “Eros didacticus.”

Matter itself as model and object of study

“If I could define my life as a sculptor,
I would say that
it has been one harmonious relationship with the material.”
FG

In some modern aesthetic theories, especially those of Benedetto Croce, interest in the material aspect of things (“material” as the term is used in the field of sculpture and painting) is minimized.

This illustrious Italian thinker believed that the only thing that mattered in the creative act was the expression. The only thing of interest was the artist’s intuition and not the shaping of this intuition in a specific material. For him the latter is of a merely technical and not aesthetic importance.

Croce emphasizes the exclusively spiritual nature of the work of art. In his view, all the spiritual energy is contained and is projected towards its finishing or dissipation in the development of artistic intuition. For him, once this process has ended, artistic creation has finished because its fruit is nothing but an external reproduction that is necessary to communicate intuition, but which means little or nothing with regard to its essence.

In this sense, exactly the opposite occurs with the creative behaviour of Francisco Gazitúa. Before even proposing to insufflate the artist’s spirit in the work of art, our sculptor advises his students to concentrate closely on the observation and study of living matter (which later, dead, among other procedures, they will have to manipulate, split, break into pieces, stick, assembly and polish to give it the shape that their concept of the work has dictated), by means of an in-depth and insidious contemplation of the raw material chosen to make the object of their art, until an intense, we could say absolute mutual understanding is reached.

Thus he warned his English students during the fruitful eight-year period he spent in Anglo-Saxon lands, where, in the beginning, he too also received PhD. level classes (from, among others, Sir Anthony Caro and Tim Scott):

“If they had already seen a chestnut in action, they could already have taken advantage of its wood using it to execute the same actions that it executes. (I know that this sounds very difficult, but you will never be able to use the wood in a manner opposed to that in which it works in the forests).”

Through his own work, the Master also taught by example. In this respect, please see his extraordinary series of sculptures called Steel Willows. Then compare each sculpture with the photograph of each one of the eight trees there is in San Juan de Pirque, Chile, where the sculptor has his home and his workshop and in whose neighbouring canals these long living trees, which in Mexico we call ahuehuetes (old men of the water, in náhuatl), were taken as models.

Strictly speaking, in Steel Willows Francisco Gazitúa is making tridimensional portraits of his models (because the artist’s imagination does not invent their forms). They are the sculptured image of each one of the willow trees represented through form and expressed in a deep and intimate relationship with the raw material in which they have been shaped.

In this series, significantly made not in wood but in steel, a material whose resistance the sculptor/blacksmith overcame at the forge, using red-hot temperatures and the force of the hammer striking against the anvil. Through this treatment the material acquires the adequate and precise flexibility that renders it similar to the intricate foliage of its natural counterpart, and whose metal branches sway in the wind, very much like those of their vegetable referents, when this airy and spatial movement flows through its metallic branches.

For this reason, we dare assume that Francisco Gazitúa might agree with Leonardo da Vinci when he talks about the end-purpose of sculpture and of painting in terms of “knowing how to see”, saper vedere.

According to the great artist and scientist of the Italian renaissance, the sculptor and the painter are the great masters of the visible world, because the perception of pure forms is not an instinctive gift that we all possess for the mere fact of having been born and living in this sub lunar world.

For example, we may have on occasion bumped into the same tree many times without ever having perceived its true form. If asked, we would be unable to describe its structural qualities, or even the memory of its shape in our minds. And so, art fills this vacuum because in the world of art we inhabit the realm of pure forms.

The true artist, like Francisco Gazitúa, is therefore the master in knowing how to see what we call reality. He shows us true form, rendering it visible and recognizable. Granted that he chooses only a specific aspect of reality; but this selection process is, at the same time, one of rendering objective that choice.

Once we find ourselves contemplating the work of art created by his hands, we inevitably see the world through the artist’s eyes.

It is as if we had never seen so-called reality under this peculiar light and yet we are convinced that it is not a momentary or intermittent glimpse, but rather something lasting and permanent. Its contemplation has enriched us, teaching us to see reality with a greater understanding.

In this way, Francisco Gazitúa has taught us to see the imposing beauty of the willow trees of his native land that, fixed and dancing, grow, thrive and sway on the banks of the canals of San Juan de Pirque.

Testimony of the artist’s letters

Because we are friends I did something I don’t ordinarily do. I sent the unfinished draft of this text to Francisco Gazitúa asking him for his opinion on the work in progress, while at the same time requesting some data and a few thoughts on his most recent creations.

By return mail he sent me the following biographical commentary of his formation as an artist. It fits in very well with this text so, despite its length, I thought it would be interesting to transcribe it, after some minor editing and with his authorization, mainly because it was written based on motives that have a bearing on the original intention of this book.

While my entire generation ran away en masse from “doing” abandoning the workshops and moving away from materiality towards post-Dadaist, structuralist and conceptualist currents, I feel that I, together with a small group of sculptors, stubbornly remained practically alone in the workshops, the sacred places where we do our work (for centuries, the sculptor’s natural habitat).

In my case, I was illuminated by the great truths I learned and with which I lived side by side during my studies of Philosophy, in the kingdoms of reason. I tried, in my workshop, to find an answer to the questions that Philosophy could not answer for me. I walked away from the single route established by XVII Century rationalism, one which gradually impregnated all aspects of culture, including the educational systems and art criticism. I walked away from “The Lights”, accompanied, naturally, by my poets, my musicians and my master sculptors.

Thus, among the stones, I stopped thinking in order to exist. I started to dig in order to live, to carve in order to understand. I found an immense empty niche, or rather a lost paradise, an illuminated geode that only required a respectful silence of me. I just needed to work with innocence, to cover my ears with wax, like Ulysses, although after a time I did not need it because the sound of the hammer nearly made me deaf.

For forty years I worked with all possible materials using basic techniques, bringing them face to face with the simplest and best-loved subject matter I could find: willow trees, ships, horses, the bodies of human beings…

In retrospect, my story, which I am trying to explain here, was always one of trying to see under the surface, where one cannot really see because it is dark, under the skin, under the seductive surface that covers everything.

I looked beneath the surface at the structure and bones of reality. Then, with the same slowness and patience I worked to bring about the existence, in specific materials and techniques (which have taken me many fascinating years to learn) the manner of being and operating of the beloved subject of content.

After this slow but passionate process, I discovered that sculpture, the material dimension of sculpture, began to be invested with an image, the sculpture itself produced a completely new image, one that for me was unexpected, because it had not been planned or drawn before.

I learned a great deal from Auguste Rodin, Michelangelo and Leonardo, whom I venerate as the pioneers of “looking under the skin.”

After them, the XX century was the century of the image. Brancusi, while being a great sculptor, in the direct carving starts off in the opposite direction, from a drawing on the surface of the sketching block, which becomes a sculpture. Then came cubism, a graphic-pictorial movement. As you say, matter (supra) is recovered by the Russians and those who came later, Gonzalez in particular. I came into contact with “Construction” at St. Martin’s, with Caro, who showed me a world of absolute liberty, an anti-academic way of working.

From the beginning the Construction or Collage is limited by the fact that it moves in realm of the trompe d’oeil, in the quick assembly; the sculptor thus becomes a collector…

I worked differently during my 8 years in London as a professor in charge of the wood and stone projects-workshops.

But… Dear Lily, perhaps I am boring you with the story. I still believe today that that way of looking and doing IN DEPTH could have had tremendous consequences on the academic world of the time… The history of art followed another route but I still feel –and this is the first time that I dare say it, against my natural instinct of modesty-, that we could have saved sculpture. I dare say this, 25 years after I was shown the results. I did not save anything and I returned to Chile (the end of the line). “I’ll run this race alone,” I told myself. At this point, handcraft was not only a matter of discipline or a display of virtuosity, but rather a reason for survival. I had to show that it could be done.

Handcrafting would thus become the only way in which to know the words of my language (something that a poet or a musician does on a daily basis). Therefore, in large scale sculpture, handcrafting and engineering became the means to learn and study the material… The possibility of manipulating its hardness, its flexibility, its life governed by the force of gravity.

Masterly advice

Taken from the Report on the “Wood Group” on occasion of the end of the spring term and in the middle of the summer term at St. Martin’s School of Arts, England (its author, Francisco Gazitúa, received a doctorate and was a professor at this art school and, among other tasks, from 1979 to 1985 was in charge of the Wood and Stone Project of the program of classes at said institution), the following transcript, full of a characteristic playful and sarcastic sense of humour, illustrates the above comprehensively and with insight, the fundamental leaning toward material qualities of sculptor revealed at an early age by the Chilean sculptor.

The following is the fragment of the mentioned text, in which the professor gives his students advice:

Go and see the material in action (I suggest a trip to Kew Gardens). Walk through the park and try to understand these creatures that, before being visited by you, have been standing there for 100, 200, 300 years (…) According to my experience you should spend at least half an hour walking, looking, touching, smelling (even biting the twigs or shaking the larger branches, which will give you a clue about their hardness, elasticity, etc.). Only then will you start to understand wood’s attitude to life. It is this attitude, the tree’s way of existing and operating, that you will use later in the workshops in benefit of your sculptures. In the words of Tim Scott, “you must think what it feels to be a fir or a willow tree”. Because if one is born an osier, it is natural to end up being a basket. Wood is not born in the store, but rather in these individuals: the trees, which are a great deal more than a round, vertical and brown thing (the trunk), that occasionally has a green thing at the top (the leaves). So, go to Kew Gardens and spend a few hours of your life soaking up wood, like a pickle in vinegar.

“Soaking up… like a pickle in vinegar”. A very accurate and cunning bit of advice that, nevertheless, is similar to a very serious declaration by one of his most beloved masters, who has shared with him the secrets of the trade, the extraordinary sculptor Sir Anthony Caro. Written by the top English sculptor of our times, at the specific request of his Chilean student, he says, I quote: “the artist has to be obsessive: live sculpture, think sculpture, dream sculpture”.

And we say “one of his best loved masters” because Francisco Gazitúa, who has never been ungrateful, recalls in his texts on this subject, with respect and a deep-felt affection, those professors who, in his homeland, guided his first steps in the art during his younger years: Lily Garafulic, Samuel Román and Marta Colvin, to whom he renders a deserved and eulogistic homage in the above-quoted historical essay (2), among other publications.

Regarding the methodology that he has used in his long career as a teacher, and although he confesses that he is sorry “he never had any type of pedagogical training”, and through the information he himself has provided in numerous writings, we can infer from the background of his teaching experience in this field and dare to infer, in a few words, that this would be the process through which he has been able to share with like-minded people his enthusiasm for the respect, fascination and love of materials and artistic creation.

But nobody can say this as well as the master himself: “I have the impression that in this complex exercise of ours in which hands tangle with intelligence and sensibility with the tools, that is to say, in this trade that little by little transforms us into an alloy of workmen and learned people, only the ‘artist-researcher’ educates, because the art is only learned by the “researcher-apprentice”.

As Director of Sculpture at Finis Terrae University he issued something very similar to a hopeless complaint against the increasingly commercial spirit that has invaded university classrooms in recent years.

“I think that today’s university, which is the only one we have, is fighting against very powerful monsters in my area, and my impression is that we are losing ground. But I am still there, perhaps holding the place for a future sculptor, aware of being alone and unable to transform the universities-enterprises of today into the large ‘spiritual enterprises’ they used to be, and I earnestly believe that universities, inserted in the values of present day Chilean society, will be unable to save and expand culture. If there is some form of cultural life in them, it is thanks to savings, thanks to the fact that the field of culture still has professors trained differently at other universities; but this way of learning and teaching dies with my generation.”

Francisco Gazitúa currently continues to teach, working with postgraduate students at his workshop in El Pirque, Chile.

He also continues to teach as a form of shared learning and enjoyment, through his participation in the workshops and symposia he organizes and/or attends in Chile and in other countries.

Wood and steel

Two of Gazitúa’s favourite materials for making his sculptural creations, wood and metal are well-known to him ever since his childhood, because of his early contact with the rich folk traditions of Spanish/Arab and Indo-American origin. These are still alive in Latin America as forms of survival among the poor and have remained associated to his life or rather, it was he who chose to link his life to these materials forever.

Of vegetable origin and used ancestrally in sculpture the former; and the other, a metal used in tridimensional art only since the first quarter of the XX century by the epigones (Tatlin, Rodchenko, Gabo and Pevsner) of Constructivism, an aesthetic current that flourished in Russia and which was used, practically simultaneously, by Julio Gonzalez and Pablo Picasso in Paris in the making of the latter’s cubist sculptural works. Clearly, we cannot omit to mention the splendid sculptural work of the North American artists David Smith and Alexander Calder, using the same material.

Both materials were used by the Chilean artist in a three-dimensional representation of the nude human body in a seated pose, executed with a double albeit identical intention in sculptures of the same dimensions (35 x 25 x 30), created by the sculptor whilst in a particular search for the “place of the image in sculpture, in 1977”. (3)

Although both are in small format, they are made of different materials but visually, represent the same silhouette when observed through a Chinese shadow screen; that is, they have the same image, but “… Said very different things –as Gazitúa poetically points out, because the wood said yellow and the steel said blue. The wood was warm and the steel was cold. The wood sculpture weighed 800 grams and the one made of steel, 6 kilos.”

The conclusion reached by the artist and researcher, which was based on the results of this investigation, is that “contemporary sculpture will remain in the visual world until it pays the fair price to the material on which it attempts to settle.”

Urban sculpture

Sculpture cannot lose the streets, because the public space is its final mission and the work of the sculptor is to take sculpture into the street: sculpture is in the street or it isn’t anywhere. It’s final expression and raison d’être is that it must be an art for all spectators.
FG

As we have seen, Francisco Gazitúa’s heritage comes in different formats, from small and medium to monumental proportions. Urban sculpture, also, (although some pieces are in rural and/or landscaped locations) is an outstanding facet of his production, with work of this type disseminated throughout nearly the entire length of his native land.

In the capital, he anchored his 44 meter long ship, “Esmeralda” over the Megacenter there is on Av. Kennedy; in Santiago’s Sculpture Park he has a large steel sculpture including sculptures he carved directly in Travertine marble, grey granite and also a tall steel mast. Outside the Chiletabacos company, a large piece dialogues with the passers-by through thick and thin lines of steel and in other parts of Chile there is: Sauce del Maule, University of Talca; Fuente Arrau, at Plaza El Roble, Chillán; Piedras para Rancagua, at Rancagua’s Alameda; Cristal de Atacama, Radomiro Tomic mining company; El Caleuche, Falabella Puerto Montt; and Dos Caballos, Mall Plaza Los Angeles, among others.

There are examples of his work abroad, in Lebanon, Croatia, Slovenia, Oxford, Cherwell Upper School, England; in Humblegarden, Stockholm; in Guadalajara, Mexico, two: one in the Los Colomos Park and the other in the University of Guadalajara; as well as some others that we shall refer to later.

Within the field of urban sculpture, the use of steel in the work of Francisco Gazitúa, finds an expression of imposing size and beauty, which is especially interesting because of its didactic and constructive tendency, within the field of hydraulic engineering, in the context of a form of urban sculpture that is outstanding for various reasons: Rueda de Larmahue, located in the gardens of the Mirador Interactive Museum in Santiago, Chile.

With the following dimensions: 48 x 125 x 15 meters, building it required 48 tons of steel sheets, folded, forged and welded in a process known as metallic carpentry.

The Rueda de Larmahue is based on the form and functions of the hundred year old wheels of the canal of the same name running alongside the road between San Vicente de Tagua Tagua and Pichedehua. In turn, these originate in the wheels used by the ancient Romans to empty water out of underground mines. The wheel teaches visitors to the museum where it has been installed, interesting pedagogic aspects related to a large variety of physical effects of water: from its stillness in the triangular base, then its elevation via the central wheel (with a capacity of eight hundred litres per minute) up to the ten-meter high platform and, from there, the force it has as it descends rapidly, moving the large spiral propeller, which has a diameter of ten meters and also the three rocker arms at the end of the 45-meter long beam-canal.

Through the continuous operation of the kinetic sculpture one can also observe the second wheel causing the water to ascend to a height of 13.5 meters and, when it drops, one can hear musical sounds as it falls from the second platform, producing different rhythms and tonalities as it falls inside the tubes of the large steel musical pipes and down the stair-cascade.

Let us review some of his most recent monumental works, which have been executed in this metallic material, including a few pieces scattered worldwide; to begin with, there are those erected in a plaza in Toronto, Canada that overlook the lake known as City Place: Barca Volante and Rosa Náutica, in which he looks deeper into the knowledge applied in the field of engineering:

As a result of an international competition in which he competed, as he says, with rivals from the “premiership division” because this city owns sculptures by Anish Kapoor, Richard Deacon, Dennis Oppenheimer, the best of his generation –apart from Mark Di Suvero, Anthony Caro, Henry Moore, etc.

The works passed under the scrutiny of two juries, the competition jury itself and the scrutiny of the city’s own curator, both very strict. Barca Volante was his first sculpture in Toronto, then came Rosa Náutica Rose of the Winds or Compass Card. A figure adapted to the dial of the compass card, divided into 32 sections that mark the routes into which the horizon is divided. Located at a distance of 100 meters from each other, in downtown Toronto (Spadina Road, one of the city’s most important streets). During the 4 years of work it took to complete, everything was made at his machine shop in the Chilean mountains, where he also lives with this wife, the brilliant visual artist Angela Leible, painter of the fascinating beauty of the human body and of the strength and movement of horses, as well as their two children.

I quote the artist:

More than a passing mention, a pass for Angela, my travelling companion and formidable artist, she illuminates my daily life with her painting, which, in her own inimitable way, makes us see what is under the skin of reality.

Much of what I write is the fruit of hours of conversation each day and all my modest sense of humour I owe to her and it is like a flock of birds that never seems to stop flying by.

The Maipo River was the first river in which Barca Volante sailed and the “gusty winds” of the Andes were the first to fill its sails.

Then came the transfer in containers to Canada where the sculptor and Canadian engineers set it up on the shores of Lake Ontario, mythical emblem of American culture, and also profoundly ours due to the aquatic elements of its landscape. For Francisco it was thrilling to see, at the end of the installation, how the winds of the northern prairies filled the sails of his “Sailboat”.

The aim of these two sculptures was, among others, to make the large Canadian city more aware of the shores of the lake that surrounds it like an ocean and which can barely be seen through the tall buildings that surround this plaza.

Another important sculpture is Cordillera de los Andes, which he placed in the centre of Stockholm, 200 meters away from the building where the Nobel Prize is awarded every year; it is a large rock carved on the inside like his beloved Andean mountains which, on the outside, look like an impenetrable wall, but which are in fact carved up on the inside by glaciers and winds.

Aeropuerto, made out of forged steel, stands at Pudahuel airport in Santiago, Chile. It measures 12 meters and is the second version of a sculptural navigation instrument; the original piece was 8 metres tall, so it was remade entirely to fit in with the airport’s increased size, three times what it used to be.

Lengas Rojas in Santiago, Chile. The large-scale versions of the outcome of research shown at the exhibition called Tierra del Fuego, árboles sin sombra now stand on Avenida Apoquindo. They create awareness among the people of the capital of the far south, covered with glaciers.

And, finally, the most recent and stupendous news is that he has just won a competition to design a large bridge-sculpture in Toronto, 100 meters long by 7 wide. Therefore, he writes that he is now “working day and night on designing and making models”.

Living “with his entire human wealth”, among water, ice and snow.

In the far south of his homeland, in Antarctica, whose extreme climate is always below freezing point, the sculptor has worked on his artistic work, as is his custom, using the materials that nature has provided.

Because, as he wrote in his youth, in the dissertation he submitted in conclusion of his studies of philosophy, quoted again 36 years later, with a touch of irony: (4)

“In the aesthetic relationship, the subject confronts the object with the totality of his human wealth, not only through his intelligence, but also through his sensibility and effectiveness (phrase by a Lucien Goldman, a structuralist author of that time).”

Likewise, “with the totality of the human wealth” of the sculptor, one who is at the same time a faithful reader and profound admirer of the works of Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, he shares with us deep and sublime emotions and sentiments inherent to artistic creation. He does so in a poem praising the natural elements and his devotion to his art, a poem that is at once a fervent prayer and an entreaty filled with hope:

Sculpture in water

I am on the water. I am on the dark water of the Antarctic seas.

In it floats an iceberg of blue ice that I am working on with an ax.

Water supports my sculpture; it is the support for my shifting sculpture.

But the ice supports my feet

and is the support of my sculptural image.

Water is the material of my sculpture.

This ice that I am carving, half of which remains in the sculpture

And the other half returns to its original water.

This fresh water ice gradually falls into the salty sea water

Like iceberg shavings.

Snow and hail, white water and hard water.

are always falling on my face and my sculpture.

When I leave at night, the ice that falls from the sky remakes my sculpture.

And the frosty water of the sea also remodels my sculpture from below.

The clouds are also water that gives the landscape a grey tone.

Water vapour moving in the sky.

And I finally deliver my water sculpture

to the black waves of Drake’s Sea.

May the southern ice cover and protect it.

F.G. (1994)

The ship and the horse

Having settled mostly and preferably in the fertile valleys that lie between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes mountains, it is not strange that the traditional means of travel of the Chileans has been, par excellence, the ship and the horse. Also, given the historic and telluric roots of the sculptor and his love for his native soil, it is not strange, also, that these elements should be among the most recurrent models of his production.

Ships, vessels, corvettes, brigs, liners, boats, a submarine and an albatross, emblematic sea bird in full flight, form part of the nautical series in monumental format to which we will refer now, a series inspired in both historical landscapes and literary works.

A constant and consistent reader, Francisco Gazitúa uses this sculptural means to pay homage to some of his favourite writers who have had the sea as motivation and scene of their tales, poems and fictions: E. Salgari, J. Verne, H. Melville, P. Neruda, G. Mistral, D.H. Lawrence, and finally, he tells us, “I name the biggest sailor of them all, J. Conrad. Although I did not make him a ship, he helped me perhaps more than anybody else (…) And Typhoon, his best tale of the sea, is inside the rivets of each one of these sculptures.”

Executed in steel, these ships allow their creator (a true Demiurge) to conceive his enormous pieces through a process of increasing abstraction, eliminating what is superfluous and leaving behind in its three-dimensional outline the strict effigy of his seaworthy forms, continuing in the honest and respectful treatment of the material he uses, characteristic of all his production:

“… The adequate interlocking of the parts according to their function, to somehow tell what the steel feels as it becomes the bowsprit, when it becomes as tense as possible in a cable or when it is unfurled in a sail.” (6)

With regard to the other model mentioned in the previous subtitle, emblematic figures, the large-size steel horses of the series Bebedores del viento that the sculptor has made, particularly in recent years, reflect the grace, elegance, excellence, spirit, the proud aspect of these fascinating beasts tamed by man. They are also a homage to the two that he owns, and which accompany him in his travels with his wife into the high Andes: Rey de Bastos (King of Clubs) and Buen Amigo (Good Friend).

With a broad diversity of attitudes and sources of inspiration (there is even one that is a strict copy, in larger dimensions and in metal, of an origami figure in paper), as well as poses, either fixed or in different actions, Gazitúa’s equine sculptures have been installed in many urban or landscaped locations of his country, as sites of spatial reference and motives of pride that give national identity to his countrymen.

The work of the past twenty years is due largely to the efforts of Rosita Lira and Maria Elena Comandari, directors of Artespacio Gallery, an exhibition space born with the mission of promoting small and large scale sculpture among art collectors and with whom the artist has worked from the very beginning. It would have been impossible for him to work in the quiet of his mountain workshop without the promotion and publicity work of Artespacio.

In addition to the collaboration with the artist’s sculptural work, we must also consider the publication of his numerous writings both in the field of sculptural theory as well as its historiography.

The sculptural stones of the sculptor’s Chilean quarry

“This was my option, to live in the chaos of materiality,
to learn something about it,
to try to represent it with transformed matter,
to represent it until it became
simply what it was,
only in a different way
without imposing any images on it.”
FG

Additionally to craftsmanship as such (of which he is definitely a master), there is also his fine artistic sensibility, his well honed powers of observation, his sharp mind and also his overwhelming understanding of the material, all which he has demonstrated since he first heard the call of his vocation. These are qualities of the artist Francisco Gazitúa that, according to our particular and modest way of seeing, enjoying and understanding his work, are optimally reflected in his large scale pieces, made by direct carving in lithic materials, some of them as hard as granite.

Not only is the beauty of these enormous rocks retouched by his hand or his unusual and unquestionable respect for the raw material something out of the ordinary, but also his capacity and might in this field is so awesome that it seems as if they themselves have told him how and what he has to do to show them in their best light. (5)

Yes, it would seem that as if by divine gift the sculptor (remember the Classic Greek myth of Pygmalion) has been given the power to listen to the authorized aesthetic opinion of a large variety of enormous stones from the rich Chilean quarry that have confided in him in order to become masterpieces of contemporary art. Advice such as: “cut me here, polish me here, leave this part as it is, sharpen the other a bit more, etc.,” or similar.

According to their creator, this is due to a debt that he acquired with nature through his work: “There is a price I must pay to the material where the image attempts to settle”.

And yet he has also used this material in utilitarian pieces, such as furniture. The most outstanding of these are some recent sculptures in granite for City Place in Toronto, Canada. These tables certainly have a maritime referent in the shape of ships that seem to be drawn standing on the flotation line, with their pointed prows, curved port and starboard sections and the stern where the rectangular-shaped propeller drives the piece. About this, the artist comments:

“Urban furniture has been one of the historical fields of sculpture, nobody does it better than we do; it is our duty to reclaim our share of this field, which today is in the hands of architects and designers.”

This opinion of Francisco Gazitúa, with which this essay comes to an end, is a valid and brave claim and also a homage to the work of his fellow craftsmen (“nobody does it better than we do”). It expresses forcefully and with determination features of his particular character: the certainty of a calling that, day by day, is vindicated by the creation of three-dimensional beauty, such as very few currently do so in the world.

Lily Kassner
Summer of 2009.

Notes

1 Gazitúa Francisco, De Virgilio Arias a Lily Garafulic (1850-2004). Editorial Artespacio. Santiago, Chile. 2004.

2 Ibidem

3 Imagen y materialidad in Francisco Gazitúa, esculturas 1970 – 2003. Editorial Artespacio. Santiago, Chile. 2003.

4 Arte y Ciencia. Text presented at the Art and Science Congress, Mirador Interactive Museum. 2004.

5 Piedras e imágenes en los Andes del Sur. Conversation with Luisa Ulibarry, published in the book Piedras, Editorial Artespacio. Chile, 1998.

6 ¿Cuál es la enseñanza? Published in Francisco Gazitúa, esculturas 1970-2003. Editorial Artespacio. Santiago, Chile. 2003

Sculptures in steel and Stone

In 1990, I was asked to make the ceremonial doors of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate in Valparaiso, large sculptural objects measuring 2.50 – 5.0 meters.

From the beginning, based on a literary metaphor of democracy, I thought that these doors should be firm, permanent like stone but, at the same time, flexible like steel.

I worked with the simplest of forms: circles, wheels; I knew from previous experiences that the stone would not capture the drawings as I was used to doing with steel, when I impressed on it the movements, tensions and compressions found in positions of great mobility of the human or animal figure, of forests or ships.

In the history of sculpture, the origin and development of steel and stone are very different.

Stone is associated to the quarry it comes from, to the modeling, to clay which is nothing but stone (pulverized granite) combined with water. Clay provides the original model, prior to the carving, which is why the surface of a sculpture in stone always retains traces of the water.

Granites (Granodiorites), the stones that I combine with iron, are formed only 50 kilometers below the surface of the ground of the quarry where I built my workshop.

Granites form part of the family of igneous stones, better known as plutonic stones, together with the basalts, gabbros and andesites.

Pluto is a cold planet, the one farthest away from the sun.

Pluto is also the god of the underworld, authoritarian, like the stone, he does not accept insubordinations or disorder.

Iron forms the core of the earth; it is found much deeper, 5,000 km beneath the granites. This metal transformed the planet into an immense magnet that, through the force of gravity, produced the weight of the stones and consequently their immobility.

The Greeks locate the workshop of Vulcan, the god of iron, in Sicily, deep inside Mount Etna. Hephaestus or Vulcan is not only the god of iron but also the god of fire, of the energy that the Earth holds inside it.

Iron is born of fire; stone breaks and dies with fire.

Iron is the primary component of the meteorites that fly through space toward the earth.

Iron is also a conductor of electricity, malleable, it can be transformed into thin sheets, wire, shaped, hot forged, shredded, re-welded, re-forged in the form of a red-hot soup, only to be refrozen into the original iron pig and then return to the fight, brilliant, as untouched as if it had just come out of the mine.

Steel is mobility itself: any object made of iron retains the memory of its flight as a meteorite or of the journey from the core to the surface of the earth.

The cultural history of stone is immense; it is so long that it becomes mingled and is lost in the origins of our craft, 30 or 40,000 years.

With all its incredible attributes, in my opinion iron is the material that is most adequate for sculpture. And yet, the history of steel in sculpture is short: 100 years since the first collages made by the Russian constructivists.

A brief history is we compare it with that of stone, or with the 25 centuries of human forging or casting. Iron enters history together with writing, a contemporary of Socrates and Aristotle, a contemporary of philosophy.

Iron, elevated to the category of steel in the XVII century, the century of Descartes, was the cause of the Industrial revolution and the rapid progress of the exact sciences. Thereafter, steel began its transformation into a machine, a bridge, a train, a railroad track, a tower, graphics, on a large scale in the cities.

Today, steel is a word that is shared in the realms of both public and private space. In iron sculpture, which is just starting, steel has the role of a “Drawing in space”, as three-dimensional graphics.

Using red-hot steel, I “write” with my right hand, whilst the left hand holds the tongs, and these in turn hold the piece of steel; but it is the hand holding the hammer, the right hand, that gives it its shape, the one that “writes.” This is similar to the fingers of the right hand on clay or the same fingers driving the pencil in drawing or literature.

Iron is very close to reason; it is directed by the left hemisphere, which explains its habit of writing, of telling stories: “The thousand and one nights of iron”.

I do not write with stone because the hand that carves the stone is the left hand. The hand of the unconscious mind, connected to the right lobe of the brain, is the one that guides the chisel and in hewing it creates deep places in the stones, refuges for the shadows and heights that invite the light.

Prior to thought, the stone was always with us the sculptors, there was nothing to understand about it, we merely carved it.

The stone only knows how to “be there”, like a kind of queen sitting there, it does not bend or become sheets, we only have one opportunity with it when carving, if it breaks it cannot be welded, if it melts it becomes glass, transparent and even more delicate and fragile, if it is ground and pulverized it becomes clay which, when it dries, becomes dust once again and flies away on the wind.

During the 40 years that I have worked with these two materials separately, each one of them, because of their particular way of being, created in me a sort of heteronomy, two, very different sculptural personalities; something similar can be seen in the work of the poet Pessoa who wrote his poetry from 3 different positions.

In practice, these materials started creating different places and different accumulations of tools inside my workshop, a place for stone and a place for iron.

It was because of stone that I arrived at the quarry where I built my house and my workshop, but it was the iron that created the conditions. The pulleys and trucks were of iron; the forge, the chisels, the wedges and hammers to work the stone are made of steel.

After nearly two years of work I conclude the following:
– The stone never moved at the rhythm of the music of the iron.

– Every sculpture tells a story in its own way; in the beginning I thought that stone and iron were the characters of the story, but that was not the case. I had to look for the sculptural equivalent of the characters in their interaction, a new synthesis that was neither stone nor iron, but rather, a new creature.

– In the beginning, I always started with iron shapes, because of iron’s attribute to become the word, the writer of the story. Bit by bit, as I worked, I began to silence the iron and listen to the stones, until I reached an economy similar to that of crafts like jewelry making, where metal is used as mounting for the stones, it supports the immobile stones; it supports them and also surrounds them, almost without touching them.

“Black and white”

Light and shadow of these two materials, so very different in their cosmic origin and habitat that lies between the darkness and light.

I explain here the conclusions reached with respect to a reflection on the changes that took place in me, as a human being, as a sculptor, faced by two beloved forms of matter.

These sculptures are the final outcome of work where, in the process of combining two materials, the white of the stone and the black of the iron, I gradually began to bring together parts of myself that had been separated:
My head with my two hands. My left hand and my right hand. My dual personalities of carver and blacksmith, fire and water, without either of them being extinguished. For the first time, I connected one half of my workshop, the quarry, with the other half, the forge, at the same time that I was bringing together in my mind the magnetic center of the earth with these rocks that weigh on it, using the force of gravity that the very same center generates.

In the stones, I linked Vulcan to Pluto.

I joined two halves of myself that required 40 years of work in order to come together again.

The result is also the repose of iron, which finally rests on the stone in peace, liberated like Scheherazade from her thousand and one stories.

Francisco Gazitúa
Pirque, July 2009

Artespacio proudly presents, once again, the sculptor Francisco Gazitúa.
A lover of form, a few years ago he allowed himself to be seduced by an object from everyday life that can be particularly sculptural. He began building bridges with passion and superb craftsmanship.
About two years ago, Karen Mills, a Canadian art consultant, invited him to participate in an International Competition for the execution of a sculptural bridge for the city of Toronto. The bridge was to be 100 meters long x 5 x 5 meters high joining the city, which is divided in two by the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Gazitúa was awarded the competition, fuelling his obsession with bridges. The project that took first place is called “Bridge of Light.” It has already been completed and will be inaugurated on October 26 of this year in Toronto.
Ver Más

My last contact with any science was in the area of what at that time we called human sciences, and more specifically, philosophy.
In 1966, after four years of dedicating my time exclusively to philosophical thinking, I delivered the final thesis for my degree. The title of this thesis was “Art as Knowledge”.
Forty-five years later, in preparation for today’s meeting, I unburied my thesis again. In it, I found a paragraph that I believe still describes the way to get closer to the reality of understanding the difference between a scientist and an artist: “In the aesthetic relationship, the subject is facing the object with the totality of his human experience, not only with intelligence, but also with sensitivity and emotion.”
Ver Más

Dialogue with Anthony Caro

Beyond a mere text, this narration is a personal view that summarizes a 46-year journey through the craft of sculpture. It also refers to my guild’s efforts to reinstate sculpture in our country’s public space and that of many cities in the world. Also, I submit fragments of an exchange of correspondence dated on Wednesday July 27, 2011 between myself and the sculptor Sir Anthony Caro (Tony) in connection with the subject of Public art. This text pays homage to this dear friend and master who passed away on October 23, 2013.

I do confess that as I wrote, I felt a great admiration grow within me for my “Die Hard“ craft and for my sculptor colleagues, their fortitude and consistency, not to mention their quiet working style. Admiration, also, for the place that we earned for ourselves within the visual arts, from the public space. An unprecedented growth in the past 30 years since 1980 to this day. Also increased was my love for our craft, the one that in the end gave us an independent and honest life, as well as my gratitude to those who believed in us: sponsors, entrepreneur-patrons, collectors, public and private sector art managers, creators of monumental sculpture parks and collections. Cultured architects who consider public sculpture as part of the building.

Special thanks to Galleria Artespacio as promoter of the Ciudad Empresarial collections, collaborator in the creation of the open air sculpture collections on permanent exhibition at the Lircay Campus of the University of Talca and Paseo La Pastora in the borough of Las Condes. Also, I would like to express my admiration and homage to the past, to our old statue makers, male and female, who have passed away: Nicanor Plaza, Virginio Arias and Rebecca Matte, to my masters also male and female, who inhabit the netherworld: Lily Garafulic, Marta Colvin and Samuel Roman; to the pioneers of the previous generation Castillo†, Juan Egenau†, Carlos Ortúzar† and Federico Assler.
Ver Más

This text is almost a logbook where I enter useful facts drawn from my personal voyage across the vast expanse of my craft: Forging for sculpture

I am editing and rearranging brief notes jotted down here in the workshop, things I was thinking about at times when mental concentration was not required, repetitive tasks that leave the mind free, such as filing, waiting for steel to heat up or cool down slowly, or cutting with a saw. I wrote other notes during my eleven or four o’clock coffee breaks, sitting on the anvil and writing on papers that were kept for years in my tool-chest and are now being transcribed. Despite its complexity, ironworking is a craft of repetitive rituals and liturgies. I understood it later when I entered the world of sculpture and found another habitat, full of great mystery, varieties of lights and opposing winds.

THE FORGE

The traditional forge is gradually disappearing due to the demands of contemporary technologies in terms of scale and volume.

Engineering schools stopped teaching forging in the 1950s and technical schools barely teach it anymore.

Steel is gradually turning into a “resource” or “something practical.” Bars or profiles of different dimensions and resistance, specifications in computation formulae and programmes, a matter for project engineers (compression, traction, elasticity, welding possibilities…). Steel joins the digital world as just one more item in the avalanche of virtual reality.
Difficult to understand nowadays the advice of mi British master and friend the sculptor Tim Scott: “Steel is a soup, a red hot soup that can be modelled like clay “
My admiration grows daily for the manufacture of the huge pieces of machinery that are part of modern life: trains, aircraft in which I travel all over the world, for the ships and steel containers that transport my sculptures and the gigantic cranes that we use to erect them.
But I miss a deeper knowledge of steel:
Professionals, engineers, architects and most of visual artists merely “design” on their computer screens, no touch with material
I see a loss of transparency in the final results if I compare today’s structures with the engineering works of Eiffel and his contemporaries, all of whom started off in the forge, consequently, there is a didactic demonstration in their structures, a lesson in metal that can be seen and touched

TO BE AT THE SOURCE – TO BE UP TO DATE

I keep the origin:
My forge continues to be the operating centre of the workshop, the key and gateway, the primary instrument in the design small tools, scale models or my monumental steel sculptures

My work in public space has taken me to where I am today, in many aspects finally at the cutting edge of metal handling techniques, in a constant dialogue with the best engineers and with the companies producing metallurgical technology in Chile and North America.

I am “up to date” because I am also at the “source” : Archaic technology, my forge:
Air-wind
Coal-fire
Water
Steel
I stick to my origin and location: a small forge-workshop on a mountain in Pirque, Central Andes of Chile.
From the point of view of the way I work with my hands, I can honestly say: all the past and the future are mine

Handicrafts have no written history; they are not learned in classrooms.
Essential condition to a sculptor or craftsman is a constant movement from the frontiers of the future to the remotest past.

A blacksmith is obliged to start afresh over and over again, returning to the “iron age”
In our Andean America, back to the first forges working with meteoric iron, in Europe to the Industrial Revolution, starting in the 17th century in northern England, making nails and chains, and then understand how that material created railways and steam engines and how need led to the invention of tools to expand mining, and the laminating rollers of the gigantic steel mills for moulding metal into different shapes and sizes, not to mention the repair shops, shipyards, ships and aeronautics….

Being up-to-date at the forefront of my field, I know that I would not have got there, even less being a sculptor, if I had not been a genuine product of the past and from that basis, become an expert in the contemporary science of steel, forming teams on an equal footing with engineers and technicians, as occurred in the “Puente de luz” in Toronto.

APPRENTICESHIP

“I come from a land
Where nothing was lost”
Gabriela Mistral
Chilean Nobel Price in poetry

I need to describe the route from the beginning, and how in the course of time I became a valuable relict of a specific past, the primary source in a history that I lived myself, with basic habits and intuitions that continue walking and expanding with me today, in this 21st century.
I come from very low down and very far back, from an old story preserved in a “cultural greenhouse”: The small valleys at the foot of the Southern Andes.
I grew up in a world where nothing was ever lost; it simply wore out and what remained… was transformed into something else.
One summer when I was between 9 and 10 years old I made a knife with the remains of a broken billhook. When the blade wore out, I exchanged it for another made out of the spring from a gramophone. When the handle of the billhook wore out, I changed that too for one made of plywood and fixed the blade onto it with copper rivets… It was still the same knife when my hands and arms grew and I made it bigger, replacing blade and handle as each wore out in its own time. None of the original material remained except my need for it, just the name, the function and my gratitude to what I have always considered to be “my first instrument” since any piece of work always begins with its function: cutting.
Sixty years later, I still have the knife in my toolbox, and it will always be there waiting obediently. In its current version the blade is a broken piece of a carving knife from Porto Alegre, Brazil and the handle, made from “Guayacan” wood still has the good habit of the three copper rivets.
Most of the articles in my workshop follow the example of the knife: the chisels, tongs, hammers and modelling pegs are made out of other things: they are prototypes in a constant process of evolution. They have no fear of death because they know that other objects will emerge from their remains.

MAESTRO HERNANDEZ
My first apprenticeship took place in a world where everything was made or manufactured by hand, and the value of things, was in their personality, created at their origin by their progenitor, a value based on the care that the makers had put into them, ordinary people with whom I shared a territory and a culture of basic acts and needs.
I was born in 1944 in a “backward” rural country. While the developed countries were making dizzying progress in sciences and technology, that rural Chile was still living in the 15th century. The technologies of the forge, Arabian in origin, had mostly remained intact since time immemorial and were repeated exactly the same, as an unchanging ritual, yet another rural liturgy: rituals for cutting, beating, perforating, fitting, welding with borax, tempering, riveting, polishing, sharpening…
In the “Haciendas” in Chile’s central valleys, there was nothing to buy. We lived in a small self-sufficient cosmos surrounded by raw materials, primary substances with a single central point: the forge with its bellows and charcoal from “espino” or “talguén”, where all the material was transformed in order to solve practically every problem, including the mechanical problems of hay-baling machines or of a tractor “The red bull”.

In charge of that centre was the blacksmith, Maestro Hernández, whose saying was “A dead thing never wins out over a living thing”.

Chile of the 1940s and 50s moulded my way of making and relating with objects, thinking and of practising my trade, sculpture, even today.
The first apprenticeship determines all the rest.
I am sure that as regards transformation of materials, by learning the bases of forge-work at about the age of 10, as an apprentice of blacksmith Manuel Hernández, however small my first piece of work may have been – a knife made from the remains of a bill-hook – I was given a power that, when I look back, was what admitted me to a new world that I have never been able to leave. From that day forward I had, potentially, all the powers over the world: I could change the nature of things by changing and modelling its origin :Matter
Since that day, by my work I have made objects appear that are additional to my hands and to myself, and I continue to do so. At first it was little toys carved in wood: boats, horses, letter-openers, bows, sandals and catapults, and later tables, machetes, chairs, staircases, sculptures, houses, bridges: objects for which others admire and love me.

Craft apprenticeships happen almost wordlessly. I learned more by imitating the movement of Maestro Hernández’s hands, his gestures when picking up the tongs, plunging the red steel into the water to temper or cool in short bursts, making the steam rise in successive clouds from his wooden barrel, like a steam engine.

In addition, and even more importantly, I learned something from his way of “being there”, engrossed and serious, giving orders to his underlings without words, with a single blow of his hammer. The only time he was heard to speak was when a piece of iron caught fire and melt. After swearing, he would exclaim, “It’s my flesh that’s burning!” His contagious, almost solemn way of “being there” is something I have never seen since, not even at solemn masses or on the high altar of any church.
I also learned that steel was Maestro Hernández´s flesh.
The first apprenticeship undoubtedly determines all the rest.
There is a saying among maestros: “He who has learned one craft can easily learn another, but his way of working and solving problems will always be marked by the first”.
There were two learning processes
The first was that of the craft itself: fire and tongs, extreme delicacy in the tempering and polishing, the colour of the iron, the shape and weight of the hammer, the type of blow, the force of the blow, the right aim, the height of the anvil, the shape of each pair of tongs.
The second: the attitude of the master, his intensity. That was the virtue that I always sought later on in my successive maestros. I subjected them all to the “Hernández test”, watching them work. If I saw their absorption, that same vesture, that aura of “a king in battle”, I knew that there was something to learn from them. I found masters and peers and the test never failed. There were other sculptors whom I saw and still see as moving in slow motion, the opposite of Hernández, however high they might stand in the Rankings of the art world.

ARTS AND CRAFTS

In 1896, John Rankin and William Morris founded a school in London: “Central School of Art and Design” to recover and conserve the crafts lost due to the industrialisation process.
I integrate the teachings of these masters into my praxis as a sculptor followed subsequently by Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier in architecture and in sculpture by Erick Gill, Henry Moore, Antony Caro and specially Tim Scott.

… “A man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. As it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising, his brother; and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers and miserable workers”- John Ruskin

At St Martin’s we relit the forges and furnaces that had been cold for many years.
I disagree with Rankin in his “Anti-machine-ism” and romantic position, in which everything must necessarily be made by hand (an aircraft is not made in a forge), though I agree with them insofar as keeping the “Sacredness of the material”. At the same time, I go along with the positive forces of contemporary industry i
My stay at St Martin’s reaffirmed my position as “A man for two worlds” with the past and the future living together, having fierce arguments with the “British World of art” at that time abandoning Matter and going Conceptual
From the Andes South America mi question is:
How could England abandon (in visual arts) his Historical vocation: The commandment of matter?

I learned to live that way and in solitude, still holding the position even today.
With a few companions we lit a forge in the centre of London and at the same time began a “war defence”, exercising and presenting sculpture as a whole: materiality, content, message and interlocutor

MIND AND HEAD

“Sculptures are made with the head, not with the hands”- Marta Colvin (Grate Chilean sculptor contemporary of Henry Moore) told us repeatedly in the apprenticeship of art sculpture in the Art Faculty Universidad de Chile
Here advice of 1967 was far from any conceptual athletics
Marta was a great carver of stone and wood, with wise hands in clay… a Woman with her head firmly set on her shoulders.
I have often asked myself: How do you think while you are working with your hands? How does the creative head that Marta was talking about actually work?
Handwork is a flow of a river, large or small, where the head at last finds a challenge of the right size, where it can show its infinite power, and where it is never too small, moving around “for all it is worth”.
In every second of a half minute which is the maximum time steel remains red hot, the sculptor is consumed by an energy that unifies “EVERYTHING” in the movement where a thousand tiny actions take place, each entering the stage at the right moment as in a successive chain, like the pictures at the cinema: intuition – arms – maximum heat and colour of steel – the skill of the body – hands – feet – sweat – eyes – faith , and , what in the depths of the soul one wants to say, the immanent message, which before landing in the forge, passed via the head to remain printed on that piece of steel ….
I describe step by step the 30 seconds:
Check the degree of temperature in the red part of the steel – walk 3 steps and choose the exact pair of tongs for that peace of steel – move the right arm and hand – walk another 3 steps from the tongs rack to the forge – put on the ear protectors – grab the steel with the tongs – move the steel in the coal to confirm the colour –remove steel from the forge-scrub to remove slag and shavings – damp down the forge – walk one step between the forge and the water to cool the part you do not want to bend – walk two paces between the forge and the anvil – spit on the right hand – take the hammer – place the red-hot steel on a specific part of the anvil – start hammering – change from anvil to “Chancho” – change from flat-headed hammer to round-headed – smooth, polish in the final blows on the blue iron, straighten out the details, return to the fire on the forge ….
There are only 30 blows – a different position of the two arms in each one – the eyes commanding the whole process, checking the changes of section and form in each blow and the colour on which the hardness depends, also controlled by the ears depending on the key that rises from C minor to major as the iron cools…
Maestro Sergio Castillo, sculptor and great ironworker used to say, “I dance with mi steel ”. In answer to the question: What is happening with the mind and the thoughts during physical activities? I answer, “In that dance, he who thinks will be killed”.

It is worth here making a distinction between the concepts of “Mind” and “Head”.
The head, as Marta Colvin understood it, is the great governor situated high up in our body, a great lady endowed with eyes, ears, mouth, skin like the rest of the body, but she is the only part that protects itself with sunglasses, a mask for particles and earplugs.
The head weighs eight kilos and, as such, is the counterpoise of the body
It is also a physical pendulum.
The head is everywhere: touch, in every muscle, its weight keeps rhythm in the dance, while the body sings, amplifying the sound in the internal walls of the head.
The head sees and hears, working the hands coordinate with the legs.
Inside the head is the brain.
The “Mind” as I understand it, has no senses for seeing, hearing, breathing or singing. It is alone in limbo, it is not even in dreams, because one dreams with the body.. The mind is what many people take to the psychiatrist. (And what the conceptual artists work with)
If the “mind” enters in the middle of the dance, trying to unravel mysteries, keep accounts, with its load of fear, guilt and all the rest, the sculptor loses confidence and therefore strength…steel is condemned.
In the dance, not only mind but also time disappears.
Rodin, a great hand-worker, used to say “The cathedrals of France are built “slowly but passionately ”, 500 or 700 years of impassioned slowness.

“What are bridges made of, longing or steel? Asks a poet.
Without longing, without passion, time returns and the reign of the mind, and the entire monsters crowd with it into the workshop. Death makes its entrance, because that “horse”, (which is the craftsman), stops galloping, his perspiration cools and he loses speed.
If the passion fails, there remains only the slowness and Rodin’s cathedrals fall down.

Forging is a long-term commitment, which comes to fruition after a process that may last months, where the person who thinks that “time is money”, who keeps accounts, is lost. He will simply reap anxiety in his heart and bruises on his hands.

My head “writes” with the red-hot steel. It does so with its right hand while the left holds the tongs, which in turn holds the chunk of steel, but it is the hammer-hand, the right, that gives the shape, that “writes” something, as do the fingers of the right hand in the clay or the same fingers guiding the pencil in drawing or literature.
The head is also the great demolisher, the cruel editor that dispatches anything that is no use to the slaughterhouse, cutting it off with its hands.
The head is after all the great governor that holds the message firmly for however long the process demands.

The head is above all the great creator, the one that read all the reports, searches for the materials and negotiates to create the conditions.

The head is the great courageous being, capable of getting into ravines, precipices and sometimes labyrinths without exits
The sculptor’s head is above all the recipient, the sacred fortress, the golden cup where the sculptor keeps and works on his small part in CULTURE, culture seen not as a varnish, but as “the call that comes from the depths of the ages, from a time when man had not yet learned to imitate models, and so took part in this essential, anonymous life which is the substance of all life and every work of art.”

“CULTURAL CHARGE” OF STEEL

For the Greeks, Vulcan, the god of iron, has his workshop in Sicily, in the depths of the volcano, Etna. Hephaestus or Vulcan is not only the god who makes weapons, but also the god of fire and the energy stored in the bowels of the Earth.
In America the source of iron is in the sky.

When Cortés asked about the origin of the iron knives forged from meteoric iron, the Aztec chiefs pointed upwards to the sky.
Meteoric iron was forged all over our continent, including our southern part of the Quechua Empire.
Iron is the major component of the meteorites that reach the earth from space.
Steel is mobility itself: every iron object holds the memory of its flight as a meteorite or of the journey from the centre to the surface of the earth. Iron forms the centre of the earth, very deep down, 5,000 kilometres below the surface
Iron transformed the planet into a massive magnet; the force of gravity produced by iron made us the way we are, subliminally we feel its cultural load, it is in the shape of our bones, in our genes

Sculpture is a language in which we create a dialogue between the materiality – in this case steel – and what we want to say, the content (Subject matter) in a long process until the two are transformed into a new entity: the sculpture itself.

A fundamental part of the sculpted message of steel is its own materiality. In other words steel, as substance, questions and relate to the person receiving the message, regardless of the form in which it comes.
A long time ago I dedicated several years of my life to working on the same content in various kinds of materiality: stone, wood and iron.
The message changed completely when one changed from wood to steel or stone.
After many years I have realised that the change in the message was due fundamentally to the “cultural charge ” of the substances.
“Mechanical perception” of eye, pupil and touch is not enough to understand the message
The eye of the sighted person sees not only “what he sees”; his unconscious “deep perception” is also looking on.
Any object tells two stories and good artists work with the second.
Underneath what is seen and touched lies the “cultural charge.”
Each material has one
A quick check on the “cultural charge” of metals:
Bronze is associated with bells, with the “phrase engraved in bronze”, with statuary
Silver is associated with the moon and the feminine side
Gold is famous for its value and perfection, the diamond of metals, and also associated with wealth.
Steel is “synonymous with both good and evil”.
Steel has its good side: horseshoes, needles, spades, axes, hinges, locks, motorcars, trucks, cranes and ships, and its bad side: helmets, machine guns, bayonets, rifles, cannon, bullets, arrowheads, cutlasses…

Any object made of steel is obliged, unintentionally, to carry something of war in the atoms of its material, whatever form it takes: peaceful scale-pan or horseshoe, spade or plough, sculpture.

In written language, iron is associated with conflicts: “the iron curtain” divides Europe, Stalin means “Man of steel “and the “pact of steel” between Hitler and Mussolini.

If war is made with steel , he who wields steel drives history.

Even if the object is made with new steel, recently mined from the ground with no history or recycling; even if it is original material that has never known man and his aggressive habits, man knows it and feels afraid.

Steel became established in the culture as a foot soldier in violence and warfare.
Steel in its origin is mineral dust, incandescent soup, soft and friendly as clay when red-hot, but sharp and hard when it cools: it is energy, flexibility and intelligence.

After so many years of walking along with steel sculpture, I confess that I have never been able to disguise it with sheepskin. I had to make it work for me, using its violent corporeity, as in the sculpture honouring the ship of Shackleton or in mythological horses, trees struggling with the winds of Tierra del Fuego, steel gave emphasis to each sculpture, producing a message with a cutting blade and rough edges.
When I attempted to sculpt human beings in steel, I tried to create my own small-scale version of Nicanor Plaza’s Caupolicán, the result was terrible, a kind of “Transformer” – “Steel Man”.

SECULARISATION OF STEEL

Over the course of my years, seen from Chile, the corner from which I look at the world, I have witnessed the “Secularisation” and reduction in quality and life of everyday objects, mostly made of steel; their diminished durability; how humans gradually lose their respect and affection for them and how, extremely quickly, they are metamorphosed into rubbish.

The ancient world where I learned my craft taught me to recognise in each object the hand of the one who spent hours in making it. It also taught me to read the organic wear and tear on its surface like a code: friction, erosion, also the marks of use and the nature of the successive owners, the multiple repairs and the constant struggle against rust….
Objects carry a more or less poetic load, and the maker is sure that this will be recognised by their new owner. Anything made from wood; glass or steel is essentially a personal letter, a word embodied in a material form that seeks to open a long-distance dialogue between two human beings who will perhaps never meet. The objects are a “solemn pledge”, a noun activated by the form and quality that a human being put into its substance, design and manufacture. Whether it is a spade or a suit made to measure, that object comes with the name that it has won.

Three centuries after its Industrial Revolution, our world chose that route.
I go more deeply into my own footprint, where I have had the privilege of retaining both extremes in my craft: the systems of doing and thinking of both ancient and contemporary culture.

Because of that way of working, which does not fit into contemporary systems, I had to leave the main highway years ago, and I continue to walk along what is for many people the “slow road” parallel to it.
In that “slow road” sculpture fits in a grand way because gives matter again his sacred character

Mircea Eliade illustrates this point in the final chapter of “Blacksmiths and Alchemists”. Eliade’s argument is more or less the following: in order to live and be part of this world, iron and all the material world had to leave aside its sacred nature, its investiture and privileges, all its stories, those created by it and those created for it concerning its poetry and its prestige. Everything was cast aside. Now it enters the world just like any other material in the dynamics of “Infinite Progress”, where all the protagonists – Nature – Matter –Time – Labour – Worker, are necessarily secularised and thrust into a new scenario, drawn up by the sciences of physics and chemistry. From the publication of the book in 1956 to the present day, these have doubled their impact.
“Nature is no longer a source of sacred revelations nor work a ritual”.

TOOLS FOR SCULPTURE
Tools from the ironmongers, in their final development as robotics, work well for manufacturing objects in series of a thousand or more, all identical, but when the idea is to say something, each word must be different. Sculpture is above all a language of the utmost refinement and its poetry, like that of literature, seeks the exact word: if it does not exist, it creates one, “setting it in the text”, adjusting it and making it fit.
Forging, because of its small scale, is extremely subtle, (jewellery-making is somewhat similar); there are infinite combinations of air – coal – anvil and hammer.
I have given myself quiet space and skill for making a comparative analysis of the techniques and their machines and tools, in the course of which I have discovered interesting new techniques and accessories which the twenty-first century is continuing to improve.
The final balance is that I always return to the oldest, because they are the most intelligent and closest to one’s hand.
There are no new tools for forging “new words” of sculpture. Such a word has necessarily to create its own tool, which is rarely found in ironmonger’s windows.
The tools produced by all the technology of the world of design are useful only for roughing down and the main structure. They are “unintelligent” because they work with lines drawn with a ruler, compasses and set-square, or in a circle. They are no use because sculpture does not work with lines but with volumetric planes. On moving from the line to the three-dimensional plane, there is no top or bottom or overview. Between the straight plane and the circular plane there are a million millimetric planes, semitones that industrial technologies are unable to play.
What is modelled in steel (forging) or clay (pottery), – sculpture’s most appropriate territory – is the three-dimensional translation of those semitones in width, length and height, an impossible task for the tools offered by the ironmongers of today, even the one offering three-dimensional pantographs. Any tool used in sculpture must be capable of the subtlety of the hand on the clay, compressing, cutting, stretching, flattening, and twisting….
Forging, like all handicrafts, never forgets its mother, “The Hand”, but the human hand cannot work directly at 1,200 degrees, nor can it hold pieces and withstand blows of 250 kilos. It has to use tools: tongs, hammers, metallic extensions that are agents of the two hands for moving and modelling steel with the agility of fingers.
In the end, the “steel -working sculptor” is obliged to make his tools. The tool is created only by “the need”. The details of its axes and hardness and the shape of the handle sort themselves out, simply by looking at the service that they will render at the end.
In order to create any tool, the first thought must be: What do I want to make? And then work backwards until, at the end of all the stages, I find “the need”. Only from that point is it possible to undertake the return journey.
In every shape of every sculpture, I have had to walk back, consciously or unconsciously, into the cultural history of my technology.

END
Craft, sacred custom, choreography, cultural tradition, evolving over time from one territory to another until it has given us its history, its legacy and its usefulness to make me and us yet another servant in a long cultural chain.
I have not found the answer in books (which is why I write).
There is very little written history. What there is, in vast quantity, are books about techniques and materials and the qualities of steel: cold books of engineering designed for those whose concern is that “the bridge doesn’t collapse”. Those books only show the rules of the undertaking and its instruments, but they are no more than an external marking of the pitch.
They do not explain, but rather rob steel of its magnetism for the human race. I told of my journey across a field without norms, because the history of iron is still barely a report, an inventory of practical tips. That history is nothing like the history that does exist about countries, wars, politics, philosophy or art.
The historical science that recounts, evaluates and regulates has not reached our workshops; at least I have not seen it. Perhaps it is better that way, so that we can go on working without prejudices or recommendations in our heads; so that sculpture in steel may always be a discovery, a walk in an unexplored dimension, where no one has bought land, an Atacama Desert.
What I state firmly is that iron makes covenants with us and its word never fails. I am its servant; I built for it a complete workshop with the finest tools.
There we share the work, moving by turns in a dialogue of equals.
I work it and it works me.
Between the two of us are only fire, wind and water.

Francisco Gazitúa
Pirque Chile
2017