Francisco-Fernando Granados is an inspiring artist who is on the Media and Design Innovation PhD program at The Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University. His supervisors here are Natalie Álvarez, and me.
F-F is full of interesting ideas and concepts – sometimes, too many! So I wanted to do an interview where I invite him to explain the meanings of the many fascinating phrases that are scattered throughout his dense prose.
DG: So, to get us started: Hello F-F! Can you please say a little about your (artistic) work and why you do it.
F-F: Thank you, David. It’s a good exercise to be in dialogue in this way, where I have to question and clarify the terms of reference I take for granted because of my training. I’m a visual artist currently doing a PhD with you at TMU, and I have committed my practice to figuring out how to rethink abstraction as a contextual mode of art-making. And –
DG: Sorry, I am going to interrupt already! What do you mean by “a contextual mode of art-making”?
F-F: It’s a way of making art that acknowledges art as a mode of knowledge production and the role that time, place, and human interactions have in how we choose to make our work. So, self-expression is certainly a part of it, but there’s also elements of critical awareness of history, social relations, and in my case even the ambiguous perceptions of my body. Context is slippery, and making work in this way tries to dance with that slipperiness rather than deny it or create a fantasy of universality.
DG: OK! That’s very clear and good. I am glad we are doing this. So can you next tell us about the ‘ambiguous perceptions of your body’.
F-F: That slipperiness in context I was talking about, that can mean that depending on where I am, or who I am with, or the role that I am performing in a space, greatly shifts how people perceive me: culturally, racially, in terms of my sexuality. There are often these responses from people who see me and think they know who or what I am, or think they know something about my experience in the world by looking at me. And quite often those responses to perceptions of my body don’t have much to do with my actual experience.
DG: OK great. So we should loop back to the question that I interrupted before you’d really got started – about your work and why you do it. Perhaps you could tell us about why you are drawn to abstraction. As readers will know, of course, abstract art refers to work which doesn’t straightforwardly represent a thing from the actual world, but which still, presumably, has meanings and connections with the world.
F-F: I derive joy and pleasure from playing with form and finding ways of resolving an image without necessarily depicting something in the world. I am obsessed with traces, perhaps because of this experience with ambiguity in my everyday life. I am intensely visual, and there’s something about abstract ways of working that allows me to ride out the pleasure of the visual in an ongoing way – a feeling of being unbound in the process of making the work, where I am always keeping the image at the edge of being recognizable. But I don’t think this way of working is either autonomous or universal, as Modernists tend to think. I like finding a range of contexts and materials for these compositions I make so that they can have different lives as artworks as they go from my studio into some kind of public presentation.
DG: Right. And I’m going to have to ask about traces – you mean like places where things once were, but are no longer…?
F-F: I find Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s definition of a trace most true to my heart: a trace is not a sign, it is something that suggests that there was something there before, but unlike a sign, it doesn’t promise meaning.
DG: Oh yes, I do like that.
F-F: We could think of my drawings as layers of traces: of observations, of movement, of feelings, of relationships that exist within, at the edge, and beyond me. Traces question our certainty in the visual, they bring us back to the slipperiness of what might be, but also what is possible. Traces also demand that we are active viewers. That we don’t just settle into a meaning that is given to us, but that we read the trace in a broader context, perhaps that we read it against our own history. I love the idea that a drawing of mine in a space might elicit something in somebody that I may not have been able to imagine. I am more interested in creating a response that elicits a conversation than in having someone “get my work.”
DG: That’s great. I love that. One maybe rather banal observation I would make, though, is that the drawings you make these days – at least, half the time – are not blurry, indistinct forms. They are solid lines, solid colours. You seem to be making a solid claim to something, rather than blurry, trace-like vagueness. And yet of course there is the vagueness that these works don’t have a straightforward obvious ‘meaning’ — they are the opposite of, like, political slogans. And then you say you want people to bring their own meanings … but every artist says that, don’t they?
F-F: I like the tension, the friction perhaps, between the openness of the compositions and the ways in which they might become materialized and contextualized in relationship to architecture, or the social interactions of a space. All my drawings start as 8.5×11 compositions from an ongoing series called ‘letters.’ I’ve been making them consistently since 2018 and there are more than a thousand works in the series at this point. My drawings are my correspondence. They are a way of reaching out in an open ended way. But rather than messages, I think of them more as sighs, or moans, or laments, or screams, or handshakes, or caressess. They’re never slaps, interestingly. They try to approach a viewer in a way that will engage an encounter. And the rest is unpredictable.
DG: A criticism of abstract artwork in challenging political times — and when are we not in challenging political times — is that the artist is ducking the responsibility to ‘say’ something about the world. But also, of course, I think it’s really nice that you want to offer these gentle gestures rather than trying to smack us with challenges, or answers, about things in the world that we are already well aware of. As someone who, of course, does think a lot about political, social and cultural issues, do you ever feel a pressure to be more ‘direct’?
F-F: If I have something political to say, I write. Writing is so hard, but it has a sharpness that allows one to be precise, to be nuanced, and at the same time be politically clear and forceful when one needs to be.
DG: That makes sense, because art should be for things that you can’t just write down. That’s the whole point, isn’t it, for visual art, and for music. And the wish that some people might have – real or imagined – that you communicate a simple slogan-like message is not really what art is for – ?
F-F: Slogans are necessary. They give us things to rally around in an emergency. I think the beauty of design as a discipline is clearness in communication. I understand what I do very differently, to inhabit untranslatable moments and experiences, as you say. Maybe it’s a strategic distinction I’ve made for myself, and I think artists distribute the visual field differently. One thing that is not ambiguous about me is my politics. That might be the one thing people can read as soon as I walk into a room. I came to Canada as a refugee, and for me, becoming a citizen meant becoming aware of the violence of settler colonialism in Canada. The first ten years of my practice were an intense exploration of what it means to transition into citizenship and to come into being as queer through performance art. And that work brought me to this place, where abstraction feels like the way forward. I’m too close to it to understand how this distinction between my visual work and what I write really functions, but I can tell you that I need it in order to survive at this point.
DG: And while we’re talking about abstraction, I’ve loved the readings that you’ve introduced me to, about queer abstraction. Which is about – or this is a key takeaway for me anyway – refusing to be pinned down into categories; not having to fall on one side of a binary or the other; a sort of combination of refusal and playfulness in a world which really likes to put people into clear identity boxes in order to pretend to understand them.
F-F: One thing that experiences of queerness and migration share is this relationship to power that is often trying to pin you down, to identify you. As a visual method, abstraction is interesting to me because it is a means of refusal and it’s vital precisely for this reason. In my case, the queer and migrant dimensions overlap and amplify one another. There is an emerging scholarly and curatorial field called ‘queer abstraction.’ I have developed my path to abstraction somewhat parallel to that current, perhaps ‘queering’ things that have shaped me. Reading Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak changed my life, and has trained my intuitions to work in this queer, abstract way. Part of why I decided to do this PhD was because I wanted to be able to trace how it is that I have learned from her by reading and rereading, by listening and letting the echoes of her work touch my sensibility.
DG: You are famously obsessed with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Can you say a bit more about why Spivak plays such a large role in your creative and academic thinking, and, I guess, in your whole consciousness?
F-F: Reading her helped me heal from a lot of heartbreak. Spivak wrote a book in 2012 called An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. I was in the last year of my Masters at University of Toronto, and was trying to figure out what it meant to be allowed to stay in Canada, and to have the opportunity to access post-secondary education in order to continue to make art. From within, I was also trying to figure out what queerness, love, and desire had to do with each other. It was still early-ish days for YouTube and universities were beginning to upload documentation of lectures to their channels. I remember watching one of her lectures and hearing her say that she was interested in aesthetic education, and that for her that meant “training the imagination for epistemological performance.” I was drawn to this phrase because it resonated with me, with where I was in life. That’s what being an artist doing a masters meant: training the imagination. It took me longer to understand what she meant by “epistemological performance” but I was interested in performance, so I made it my business to try to figure it out. I got the book, and I spent more than two years working hard to read it. Slowly getting through it. Trying not to get frustrated when there were things I couldn’t understand, since I don’t have formal literary training.
DG: Oh that’s interesting. I assumed you were the kind of person who heard a phrase like “training the imagination for epistemological performance” and immediately knew what it meant. (For me, sometimes I am captivated by a particular phrase that I don’t necessarily know what it means, but much more often my brain just doesn’t like it and wishes that the ideas could be communicated more simply. And to be honest I’m sort of offended, perhaps defensively, that the person was being obscure).
F-F: I am drawn to opacity. This is perhaps also why I work in abstraction. What kept me reading was finding these islands of understanding that rang to true to my life, even as I was trying to figure out what they might mean: “affirmative sabotage,” asking “who claims alterity,” the idea that “the ethical interrupts the epistemological,” the distinction between sign and trace… and this key thing that I am hoping to explore further in this PhD: the notion that there is another dimension to reproductive heteronormativity that is, as she says “upstream from straight, queer, trans;” where “hetero is the antonym of auto.” I still don’t fully know what it means, but hearing that and trying to engage with that question has changed my life. Something about reading that book at that time just clicked. And so I have remained curious to read her.
DG: Yes. And it’s great that you were open to it rather than feeling intimidated by the complexity, which is basically what I’m describing. You noticed something that has been such an inspiring fire of things for you. For Spivak beginners, what would you say is the one crucial thing to read first?
F-F: A good introduction to her as a thinker is a video of a lecture she did at UC Berkeley around the end of the 2000’s where she delivers an early version of her essay ‘Culture: Situating Feminism’ that would later appear in Aesthetic Education. I think most people only really engage with ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ And it is perhaps her most misunderstood text. That essay is about the social infrastructure that is necessary in order for gendered resistance to be not just heard, but made to count within a political system. That one is definitely worth reading with that context in mind.
One key text I only got around to reading in the first year of our PhD is her last address to Jacques Derrida, this beautiful essay called ‘Touched by Deconstruction.” She very famously translated Derrida’s ‘De la grammatologie’ into English in the late 60’s. In this essay she talks about what she’s learned from being in conversation with his ideas and succinctly surveys the key concepts from deconstruction that, for me, puts into a much broader critical context. She talks about teaching ‘differance,’ which I like given my interest in slipperiness. She talks about ‘telepoiesis,’ which is “touching a distant other with imaginative effort;” I’ve adapted/adopted this phrase as one of my working descriptions of what I hope abstraction can do. And she talks about “originary queerness,” which she describes as “that from which sexual difference differs.” Like the “training the imagination…” phrase more than ten years ago, this bit: “that from which sexual difference differs” lingers in my mind and I want to spend time with this idea, as a way to explore what might be at stake in queer abstraction. I don’t quite know what it means yet.
DG: And I think, is this right, Spivak herself doesn’t exactly know, or want to say, what it means either – like, she’s ‘haunted’ by the idea but doesn’t necessarily want to pin it down?
F-F: Exactly. This is what she says in ‘Touched by Deconstruction.’ I am haunted by it too, perhaps because even though I don’t fully understand it, it rings true. I intuit that she’s right.
DG: But maybe we can try to explore it a bit anyway? If “originary queerness” is “that from which sexual difference differs”, then can we start with: what is “sexual difference”? Is she talking about the most basic thing of what is a woman versus what is a man, or … something else? This seems rather binary and reductive, but I guess she’s referring to the thing that cultures tend to do with genders, which is indeed binary and reductive, yeah?
F-F: For Spivak, sexual difference is a primary instrument of abstraction. She notices how across cultures, differences in sexual characteristics are “unevenly abstracted” into gender roles. This is the link between originary queerness and the more philosophical dimensions of this word I’m interested in: abstraction. It is a means to create difference that has historically imposed binary identities and divisions of labour.
DG: Okay, so to be clear – this is a different meaning of the word ‘abstraction’ to the one we’re thinking about with abstract art, isn’t it? Because this kind of abstraction – dividing ‘women’ and ‘men’ into clear and separate cultural categories – that’s almost like the opposite of the kind of pleasing vagueness that we get in the abstract art meaning of abstraction, isn’t it?
F-F: Yes, what I want to investigate is how this insight Spivak provides can become a basis for understanding a practice of queer abstraction. Her observation is not an endorsement of binarism but rather an articulation of patriarchal conditions of possibility that is useful to understand for the purpose of both feminist and queer resistance. I’m interested in the fact that she talks about it in terms of abstraction, and the difference/differance between these two ways of thinking of the words.
DG: Ah ok, so that explains why we are getting excited about what might otherwise just seem to be two different uses of the same word which don’t have that much to do with each other. I’d got as far as thinking that you were sort of deliberately misunderstanding Spivak’s use of ‘abstraction’ in order to link it to your own abstract work in a sort of poetic way –
F-F: – Deliberate misunderstanding is close; my best hope would be for it to be an educated poetic misunderstanding, perhaps. We can think of the space between these two meanings of abstraction as a “grounding mistake” that allows me to understand the notion of difference in the context of queer abstraction. Spivak’s own method is one of “affirmative sabotage” which aims to enter a discourse as commitendly as possible and in good faith, “without accusation and without excuse” in order to find the juncture at which it can be turned around and used for purposes other than what it was originally intended for. For Spivak it’s about an affirmative sabotage of the European Enlightenment and its notion of an aesthetic education. For me it’s about an affirmative sabotage of the language of visual abstraction, taking it away from claims and expectations of autonomy and universality, and trying to craft it into a queer way of making work. There’s abstract languages that are certainly quite vague, soft, or ambiguous, and there’s other visual vocabularies that are quite hard edged, quite certain in their boundaries and divisions even if these differentiations don’t necessarily articulate a meaning. They are figures and grounds even if they don’t depict anything. Within a painterly logic, the figure-ground relationship is irreducible, even if there is an attempt to compact it, or even destroy it as it happened throughout the 20th century painting.
DG: So, the difference between ‘figure’ and ‘ground’ in a painting … that seems like a sort of spurious distinction, which can’t always be straightforward or clear – and in some cases just doesn’t make any sense – that seems parallel to the spuriousness of talking as though there are straightforward clear differences between ‘female’ and ‘male’. I guess that’s all part of what you are doing – challenging those binaries? But then how does that play out in a picture, made by you, that I’m looking at? I guess it’s what is gently suggested.
F-F: Yes, in the sense that understanding that there is a principle of distinction that allows people to create differences in order to make meaning doesn’t mean that you accept binary difference as true or absolute. It just means that you acknowledge the way divisions are made.This differentiation allows you to shape the edges: you can make them stark, but you can also blur them. Figure ground relationships in abstract painting could be thought as an example of something that differs from the male/female difference. Figure/ground relations in painterly terms can take us towards something other than the human. It’s at that juncture that I go towards visual abstraction as a certain act of refusal. Abstraction is often understood as an act of decontextualization, but I am trying to think of it in a queer way precisely against the grain of that perception, as a means to think of opacity and untranslatability in context.
DG: That’s a great explanation. So changing the topic slightly: Is there a tension between making the art you want to make, which helps you feel grounded, helps you to survive, as you said, and the push to make art in the world that appears on gallery walls or in subway stations…? Every artist faces this tension, I guess. So maybe I should ask – do you want your intentions with the work to be understood in some way – in any way – or is it fine if people think you have made some ‘nice patterns’?
F-F: My aim with the practice is to do that thing that Spivak and Derrida describe as ‘telepoiesis:’ to touch distant others with imaginative effort. Living between worlds, in terms of having been a refugee, in terms of speaking English and Spanish, even in terms of being queer, I know that you can try as hard as you can to make yourself understood, and yet meaning will always slip and transform as context changes. I make work in anticipation of the unpredictable moment when things connect, and you experience what Barthes describes in ‘A Lover’s Discourse’ as “the pleasure of understanding, and of being understood.” It feels like magic, and there’s no guarantees. That doesn’t mean as a professional artist one shouldn’t be diligent and generous in terms of creating points of access in the work for the public. For me it means that you create those points of access while remaining open to whom it might touch; that you remain open to learn from what people ‘get’ from the work. Coming from a tradition of experimental artist-run culture, I am more driven by discourse than by concerns around a ‘market’ for the work. This way of thinking is more and more rare these days, and it is only possible to make work like this because of public funding and the possibility of working in critically-aware academic contexts.
DG: Yes. Perfect. You can never really predict how work is going to land, or whether people will connect with it. But you can persist, as you do, and you make such great work – and so consistently – and communicate about it so effectively, so I know this has a great impact on the many people who are touched by you and your work. Thank you so much.
All images: Francisco-Fernando Granados. letters. 2018-2024. Digital drawing. 8.5×11 inches.
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