Martin Sastre: La comida estaba deliciosa
Horace Brockington
Born in l976 in Montevideo, the Uruguayan video artist Sastre now lives and works in Madrid. After receiving a degree in Architecture at the University of Montevideo in l996, Sastre has become part of an emerging group of young nomadic artists moving comfortably between various centers of artistic activity. In the last two years, he’s been in the Sao Paulo, Havanna, and Prague Biennales, at Art Basel Miami, at the exhibition "You think I’m Superficial," at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, at the "Playlist" exhibition at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, at the Site Gallery in Sheffield, and Momenta and the "Terrorism" exhibition at Exit Art in New York. He is quite the international art star, a playful role that isn’t the side-effect of his work but in fact forms its core.
Still, Sastre’s native background consistently informs his art. With a population of fewer than three and half million, Uruguay is one of the smallest countries in South America. Its current economic recession might explain why cable TV has only been recently introduced to the country. As Uruguay is flooded with images produced outside of its own cultural traditions, young artists such as Julia Castagno, Paula Delgado, Daniel Umpierrez, and Sastre himself have produced works that reconfigure this excess of visual information. Using humor and visceral imagery, the characters they create exist somewhere between the alienated viewer and the adoring fan, the popular culture icon, and the all-too-human celebrity. Typical of this approach is Sastre’s The E! True Hollywood Story, which tells the tale of scandal and decadence in a tabloid —TV style. Sastre plays himself as a celebrity artist profiled on E! Entertainment. Layering together footage from E! and photographs from his family album, Sastre creates a familiar rise and fall tale. This intentionally naïve pseudo-documentary includes advertisements and previews of upcoming shows. It opens with the sobbing super-poor artist unable to comprehend why he is unable to make a pop video as good as Britney Spears or Kylie. Confessing to a mythical goddess, Sastre gets some advice: "Honey, the power of pop is with you, no super budget can defeat you, ever, just make a wish and it will come true." With the help of Hello Kitty and several lookalike pop stars, Sastre completes his pop video in true John Travolta/Michael Jackson style. "You are the power, enjoy it," the final frame concludes.
Part of Sastre’s focus has been on artists viewed as part of the fringe, which led to the creation of the Martin Sastre Foundation for Super Poor Latin American Art. The foundation functions essentially as a website, with the slogan, "Adopt a Latin American Artist" (www.martinsastre.com). The foundation genuinely aims to sponsor artists from the periphery who do not have the economic means to access the international art circuit. At the same time, Sastre also uses the site to provide an ongoing critique of the international art scene. Through the foundation, Sastre created a project for the Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar, called, with typical humor: "Be a Latin American Artist (for 3 months)." This is the call for entries:
Scholarship for First World Artists:
We had to wait until the twenty-first century to see this happen… and now it has. The Martin Sastre Foundation for the Super Poor Arts is presenting a three-month project–from June to August 2005–for three Bauhaus University students, to develop a project in the third world and learn surviving strategies while living and working in Montevideo. ACC Gallery has invited Uruguayan artist Martin Sastre to develop a project on irony. Answering this call, he developed this exchange that will allow artists or citizens of the Weimar to live as true Uruguayan artists for three months.
Who is eligible for the "Be a Latin-American artist" Program?
All Bauhaus University students who are natural or legal citizens of any First World country, European Community, UK, USA, Canada and /or Australia and others, that are interested in learning about the survival strategies developed by third world artists–in particular, Uruguayan–facing an adverse global context.
As part of the foundation’s material, Sastre made the video Prada for all, Prada for you, which was included in the Prague Biennale. The work ironically highlights a set of values regarding status and fame that have become the local currency of the contemporary art world.
Sastre was also included in the year long-project, "Man in the Holocene," coordinated in the warehouse space above a gym in Hackney, East London. The project included more than twenty artists. Each one was asked to contribute a work that would function as a trailer for the exhibition. The premise was to play with the concept of a move trailer featuring highlights from a finished work. Sastre’s work for the project was a clip of a Hollywood premier, but done Bolivian style.
For the "Playlist" exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Sastre was included in the video segment, which also featured projects and video installations by John Baldessari, Slater Bradley, Christoph Draeger, Pierre Huyghe, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Christian Marclay, Matthias Muller, and Red Sniper (Kendall Geers and Patrick Codenys). The premise of the exhibition was to question methods of selection, whether by offering a critique of a pre-existing work, proposing a montage of film sequences or archival material, or appropriating film codes and references, or creating a remake of a mythic work of art.
For the exhibition, Sastre’s Videoart: The Iberoamerican Legend was selected. Videoart is an eccentric and highly imaginative work that borrows images contemporary consumer culture and science fiction. Sastre adopts the persona of "Walt Sastre," a cryogenically frozen mogul who awakes in 2492 AD to tell viewer "one of the most exciting stories in human history." This is an art history lesson on Ibero-American video art, and while Sastre’s perfidious proxy-Disney informs us that most art history is boring, Ibero-American video art is apparently an "epic crusade." By means of a fast forward through time and a montage of news footage and film clips set to pop songs, Sastre narrates how artists such as Matthew Barney’s Hollywood production values killed off video art before Hollywood itself was superseded by the hyper reality of news media. The solution is for Ibero-American artists doing remakes of Hollywood films, as Ibero-American dreams are "cheaper." While essentially a video about the death of video art, it is equally a collection of kitsch images including Scarlet O’Hara, Kurt Cobain, Carmen Miranda, CNN, George Bush, Ho Chi Minh, and Hello Kitty dressed as a nun. The film concludes with Sastre posing in famous film poses (Tom Cruise in Top Gun, Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing, and Richard Gere in Pretty Woman), echoing the work of photographer Cindy Sherman. The work is ultimately the story of a Latin American who tells true lies and exhibits a handful of bizarre cult objects for an era that doesn’t know what to worship anymore.
Also shown at Stills was Montevideo: The Dark Side of Pop, for which Sastre won best young artist award at ARCO, Madrid. It continues the story established in Videoart, but is now set in the year 2092. The "European Centre of Intelligence" sends a teenage prodigy to Montevideo to find out the secret behind Sastre’s success. By following the artist around, the teenage investigator discovers a deserted capital city, a forgotten place deep in South America that could be hiding more than a simple secret of success: an occidental experiment that could be a vision of the future of Europe. Sastre sings Karaoke in a sunny street and the work becomes uplifting, positive and loaded with ironic possibility.
Writing on the Stills exhibition, Tom Morton sums up the work of this emerging young talent: "Martin Sastre’s work comments on the systems of global capitalism. The final, and fatal, irony of Sastre’s project is that it is global capitalism…that makes it possible, and gives its hip, naggingly addictive poetry."
