Author | Oscar Lopez
David Trullo is a Spanish artist that specializes in photography and videography. He has exhibited in many cities around the world including Madrid, Barcelona, Milan, Berlin, Cannes, and New York. In 2002 he was the artist in residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. His striking imagery creates a dialogue on the topic of gender identity as well as the meaning and uses of iconography.
Where were you born? Where did you study? How and when did you become an artist?
I was born in Madrid and studied Fine Arts at Universidad Complutense. I remember wanting to be an artist from an early age. It was the first thing I wrote in the first diary I started when I was 8 –I want to be a painter-. The diary was abandoned a day after. My father, Santos Trullo, was a photojournalist and specialized in bullfighting. I often recall the happy times helping him in his darkroom when I was about 10.
http://unavidadetoros.wordpress.com/
Can you name some artists that have influenced your work? Can you explain why their work has been important to you?
I curiously think more of writers and filmmakers than visual artists: Pasolini, Cocteau, Murnau… People say I’m very influenced by artists like Andy Warhol, Yves Saint Laurent, Gilbert and George and the old masters of Spanish and Italian Baroque. I like them, so I guess they are right.
Spain is a country where history, tradition and religion are very important to culture. Has this affected your work? How?
It has affected me in the way that Spanish culture is very about ‘tragicomedy’. We have, like all Southern Europeans, high levels of drama, but I think we have here a special kind of ‘natural black humour’ that comes from the certainty of living in a country that could be great but always ‘fucks up’.
Your work often takes images or ideas from art history or religion and subverts or ‘queers’ them. Why is challenging the canon important to you?
It is not really a ‘conscious attack’ but more playing with the symbols that are part of our visual culture, and find new meanings or uses to them, or just keep playing with images, like all artists do.
In the last two years you have been exploring video. What interests you about this medium?
I use mainly photography and started doing video a bit later, in 1999. I keep going into and out of it. Photography gives me a lot of resources to play with fiction, fetishise, turn subjects into objects, and create alternative realities. Video works as an extension of it, when a photo series works better using time, or needs sound.
You often engage with gay culture, imagery and ideology. What do you find interesting about queer culture? Why does it inspire you? How has your work been received by both queer and non-queer audiences?
I think gender is the last subject to be challenged. We are more or less at ease with breaking ‘class’ or ‘race’, but gender is still following rules from hundreds of years ago. You can always tell if somebody is a man or a woman in the street. That started to change in the 20th century, and it is very interesting because is somehow a ‘new ground’. You can see it in the way people respond to some images. To ‘queer audiences’ I’m not queer enough. To ‘non-queer audiences’ I’m too queer. Nobody is pleased. That is good.
Your work often subverts dominant historical attitudes or ideas, but in works like ‘Fishers of Men’ and ‘You Think You’re A Man’ you also parody and question stereotypes and ideas significant to gay culture. Is it important to question both sides of contemporary culture? Why is the idea of questioning traditions and perceptions important to your work?
Again, it is not so much about criticizing or comdemning, but to developing symbols that can be seen and used in a different way. For example, in ‘Fishers of Men’, I’m talking about ‘group identity’ mixing the traditional iconography of the 12 apostles with ‘bear imagery’. I was also interested in updating the language in religious images. I always had in mind that it could have been a commission from a church.
In the case of ‘You think you’re a man’ it is more about questioning the way that there is a ‘homonormativity’ as well as a heteronormativity, both equally repulsive.
http://issuu.com/trullo/docs/fishersofmen
Your work plays with ideas of masculinity and gender. Why is this interesting to you? Why is photography an interesting medium to question ideas of gender?
Our visual culture is basically photographic. We understand photographs. We pose, we shoot, we expose ourselves and others. My nephew is only 6 months old and can’t speak yet, but already knows what a camera is and knows when to pose. I don’t have a photographer’s approach to the medium. Like Duane Michals, I don’t believe in the power of photography to reveal one’s soul, or the real world. I rather think is a way of being someone else, stop being yourself, create a new person. You can somehow free yourself from your body and start a new existence over the years, which I think is fun and relieving.
In ‘Alter-History’ you manipulated historical photographs to suggest a queer narrative. What inspired this work? How did you find and alter the photographs?
‘Alterhistory’ first started as a way to mock the way Photography is treated in History of Art, and the way it is exhibited in museums. It’s all about masters and masterpieces. But we all have masterpieces at home, family or relatives who were masters of photography, and who are unknown!
The History of Photography is also what hasn’t been photographed. In ‘Alterhistory’, I ransack a variety of nineteenth and early twentieth-century family albums (from my own collection and photos bought in flea markets over the years). I then modified the images of heterosexual couples by substituting the man for a woman or vice versa. In some of the other photos, I just increased the degree of intimacy which same sex couples show towards each other in the original photo. It is all about using lies (photographs) to tell truths that were never documented.
http://issuu.com/trullo/docs/una_historia_verdadera_
In ‘Time-Warp’ you create images that are a historical impossibility. What inspired this process? What does it say about the ability of images to both represent and alter history?
‘Timewarp’ (Fauxtographies) is an autobiography of a sort: photographs I would like to have taken; people I would love to have met; facts that I think happened; events I will never see, I would like to have seen, or have never seen at all; things I would like to have prevented, or have done; moments that have moved me, influenced me, made me; photographs I should have taken. They are new hypotheses on a variety of situations where the concept of truth gives way to invention. Rumors, the denial of evidence, the division of responsibility, subjectivity and desire – in other words, tools completely foreign to the orthodox reconstruction of an historic event – operate as structural elements of ‘documental photography’.
http://issuu.com/trullo/docs/david_trullo_fauxtographies_web-1
What are you working on now? What is inspiring you? What is your next project?
Following previous works such as Alterhistory and Fauxtographies, I’m becoming more and more interested in interpretation of archives. I just opened and installation called ‘1993 (findesiecle)’ which is about time capsules and sentimental archeology, and I’m preparing my contribution to the group show ‘objects of desire’ at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Madrid interpreting pieces of their collection. I am also starting to study my father’s collection of bullfighting in Spain and France in the 70’s and 80’s and hopefully come up with a new body of work.
http://issuu.com/trullo/docs/findesiecle
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