The Manna Machine | Cristian Franco

From September 30th, 2016 to March 12th, 2017

Manna-Manna, or We’re Not Alone!!! … We’re Completely Alone!!!

I could begin this text by explaining that Cristian Franco is not from Guadalajara, but from Tecate, on the northern border of Mexico. I could also begin by describing how, when he gets drunk at a party (where I have been with him, and not just a few times!), he almost always puts on a song by the Guadalajara group Maná in order to annoy the rest of the guests and change the mood of the party. Let’s just say that this “tactic” of destabilizing the ambience is but a small example of how he uses humor and “bad taste” not only in his work, but also in his relations with the people around him, whether or not they are friends or acquaintances. With Cristian, words, names, and people themselves undergo changes in their nomenclature because he is always looking for their scatological (as well as eschatological) side: he likes to “dirty” the conversation with an out-of-place comment, and I have noticed that he does it naturally, not as the pose of someone assuming he is better than or different from others, but rather as if there were something in the nature of his thought that always needs to make this kind of bizarre connection between people and whatever surrounds them. He likes to twist language in order to articulate a sort of personal speech, a reflection, perhaps, of his taste for exploring cyberspace in search of programs about people abducted by extraterrestrials, paranormal phenomena, and other detritus of the entertainment world and of life in general; of his taste for looking for secondhand information, opinions from “professionally crazy” people who take part in the debate about whether we are or are not alone in the universe, about whether we are living under an alien invasion or, worse still, about whether we are the product of an evil being concealed somewhere in the cosmos. Be that as it may, these are some of the things that interest Cristian, so now his head is making a sort of updated exploration of the trips to the secondhand stores he liked to make in his early years on the border: an accumulation of things, objects, and knickknacks that bear witness, in their way, to the tastes of people he would never know, phantasms of a civilization that accumulates and accumulates matter and energy to contribute to its own destruction. It is no irony that one of those secondhand stores bears the name of the SALVATION ARMY, since we are all looking for salvation of some kind, whatever it may be, of concealed gods, of beings beyond the stars, of our governments, of our wives and children. The history of humanity is full of armies formed to save us from ourselves.

Cristian Franco’s drawings, in particular, are an example of this playing with language and images, the result of an unbridled accumulation of interests that reciprocally distort and destabilize one another, establishing an apparently absurd dialogue, as when we see an accident on the street or a disaster on television and the “logic of the world” rolls at our feet. We are left with our eyes wide open and a question slithering out of the corner of our mouth along with the drool… All this because we have deadened our ability to be surprised, taming it and accustoming it to the ABSURD, which is a consubstantial part of the world in which we live: WHY WOULD THEY BUY ME UNDERPANTS WHEN I’M DEAD… TWO YEARS OF DARKNESS… NOT INTERESTED IN YOUR BASTARDIZED FOOD… MEDIOCRE AVERAGE OF HOMOPHONIC SACRISTANS… OUR HOUSES ARE OF BLOOD PLASTERED WITH SEMEN… THE CHILDREN EATING DEHYDRATED SQUIRRELS ARE DYING… THE ICEBOX DOESN’T WORK… These are some of the phrases that pop out of Cristian’s new drawings. They probably recall phrases on the T-shirts of the some of the bands whose names are as absurd and improbable as the music that Cristian likes: Hard-cork, Popo-punk, Electro-vernacular, Metal-baby, Rock-capuchino… Yes, THOUGH YOU MAY NOT BELIEVE IT, these subgenres do exist in popular music and have been “devolving” since the birth of so-called young people’s music, which is to say, rock ’n’ roll… And in this “devolution” of humankind, Cristian keeps “bad company,” people like André the Giant, André Breton, Beckett, Bozo, Bicéfalo, Carlos Castaneda, Carlos the Jackal, Devo, Dj Pakal, Mike Kelley, Mike Tyson, Jim Shaw, Jim Morrison, Kraken, and Krautrock, not to mention, of course, the street culture of flyers and the wanderings of urban tribes.

What Cristian Franco’s work does is to bring back to us, the spectators, reports of those journeys, those explorations: secondhand reports to be compared with our own experience, so that we can draw conclusions that will lead us to the long dark dead-end that is life itself. BUT DON’T GET SCARED!!! … We’re not alone on the journey: that is what Cristian’s work shows us somehow, that we are part of something larger and collective… A SALVATION ARMY… In closing, I would like to say that Cristian is a promoter, along with some of his friends and accomplices, of cultural projects that alternate with his time and work as an artist: DOÑA PANCHA FEST, HOMELESS, LOS NUEVOS MAEVANS, and SER DE METEPEC RECORDS, all of them projects that embody the “wandering” of his thought and his interests in art, which make this “wandering” a positive antidote to the generally pigeonholing world of contemporary art, full of polished, well-presented, and properly sellable works… May we all take our place in the SALVATION ARMY most suited to us.

P.S. This text was finished to a soundtrack of so-called Krautrock… especially Neu!, Kluster, Cluster, Harmonia, and the solo work of Michael Rother… Hence, I suppose, the slightly wandering tone of the text…

Daniel Guzmán

Guadalajara, August 2016