Associação Cultural Videobrasil

PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND

In the country of Joaquín Torres García (1874-1949) and under the auspices of the Cinemateca Uruguaya, two of the noblest artistic institutions in the small southern country, the personal experience of Martín Sastre—the constant reinterpretation of the avalanche of imported contents in the light of daily life, through a filter of healthy distrust (the artist claims that ever since he was little he always felt that everything he watched in a screen was “a setup”), as he explains in his Interview for this Dossier)—resulted in a satirical oeuvre, faithful to the minutest details that keep the media gears turning, triumphantly, all over the world, capable of provoking empathy in all kinds of (television) audiences, because it does not require the fantasies that the middle man explicitly or implicitly has.

Torres García, creator of the constructive universalism—an aesthetic-philosophical doctrine that combines principles of proportion, unity, and structure, seeking an art that is native of America, “powerful and virgin,” as the artist, theoretician, and professor used to define—, was the person who illustrated that which is currently South America’s best-known concept of historical, ideological, and cultural reinterpretation, based on the upside-down representation of the American continent, transcribed in the map América invertida [Inverted America], which the Uruguayan master developed in the 1940s.

Half a century later, Sastre updates that proposition: he invented the Confederation of American Nations, a South American empire led by Bolivia, which overthrows the United States from its position of global leader, after defeating the country in the War for Control over Fiction. Bolivia 3: Confederation Next, the saga’s title, represented Uruguay in the 26th Bienal de São Paulo, in 2004.

At the Cinemateca, Sastre soaked in all of the learning that the organization destined to children after the fall of the dictatorship regime in the country, in 1985, a more-than-bombastic stimulus for someone who is fanatical for screens, big and small, as the artist defines himself: “I have always been addicted to audiovisual. Wherever there is an image in motion, I will be there, consuming.” Among the first experiments with video resulting from a childhood and adolescence packed with images in motion, there came The E! True Hollywood Story, a work made in 2000 and which, in many aspects, already laid the foundations for the artist’s later works: the emergence of his pop-star condition, the protagonism in narratives, the disclosure of some transforming and spectacular information or fact, the bridge that establishes itself between the domestic, trivial world of the anonymous citizen and the vaudeville reality of the famous people.

In The E! True Hollywood Story, Sastre explores the sensational or uncommon in his biography—the fact that he drank gasoline as a baby, the confusion between the figure of the Pope and that of a rock star—to create a sort of introduction to a personality that is out of the ordinary, brilliant and visionary, intriguing and seductive, which will unfold into new adventures, under fantastic circumstances, in his following videos.

The artist takes stories of his personal life to the mass culture field, reformulating them with a pop appeal, but that is not all. He also dilutes the borders (in case there are still any) between art and popular culture, by massifying supposedly hermetic genres, such as performance or video art.

A clear example is the TV show he hosted in Spain in 2003, where he let out all of the “couch-potato culture” amassed during years of watching TV in Argentina, presenting himself with the traits and styles of the electronic divas of the neighboring country.

Those same aesthetics accompanied another feat accomplished that year: the launch of The Martín Sastre Foundation for the Super Poor Art, established to obtain sponsorships for young Latin American artists.

In the homonymous video made in 2003, where he presents the goals and the functioning of the organization, the author makes an appearance in the paradigmatic white cube of contemporary art, also dressed in white, with a pearl necklace wrapped around him. The vision is that of a guru-art patron who, sitting on top of the traditional artistic production circuits—a position he reached thanks to an unusual sagacity, and despite coming from the South American “backyard”—, prepares, encourages, and operates the reformulation of that system, or at least the equal redistribution of the benefits contained in the reservoir of abundance of the developed world. “Prada for all,” Sastre utters, in praying position.

More recently, the rich and famous in Britain have become the artist’s focus of attention. In 2005, with Diana: The Rose Conspiracy, Sastre revisited his grunge adolescence in Uruguay in the 1990s, to tell how the Princess of Wales escaped the evil plans of the “architects” of the world order and, contrary to what Humanity believes, lives happily in the outskirts of Montevideo.

Last year, the creator started recording a new saga: to change his identity and live in the body of Robbie Williams, who, in turn, will also live his share of moments as a Latin American. The video, currently being finished, can be partially watched on YouTube—which is now the Shangri-La of audiovisual creation to Sastre, and where he spends hours surfing. In addition to finishing Freaky Birthday, the artist is also working on a project for a new TV show, a territory that is no longer new to him, but in which he believes there is still space for creation. “I guess I have had my share of watching TV. That type of narrative is becoming obsolete. Everything seems slow to me and, after a while, it bores me. I think TV is much too structured—makeup, hairstyles, technicians for everything... because of advertising, now it is a controlled medium, whereas YouTube is the opposite, it is destructured, fresh, and has a nerd aesthetics that interests me,” says Sastre. “Anyway, television is a medium to be investigated, as there are still things to be invented in it.”