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Antonio Torres
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estebanana
Posts: 9352
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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 RE: Antonio Torres (in reply to Michael1917)
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yep, I have a small bodied guitar plantilla that I designed in the "spirit" of Torres rather than make an exact copy. I've built it once in Maple and it turned out very well. It was sold to a player who turned out to be a total douchebag who talked me down right before my rent was due and then turned around and sold the guitar to a local collector for several hundred more dollars a few months later.
I would like to find this guitar and hear how it changed, but every effort I've made to locate it has failed. It was about five years ago.....
Anyway, I think the Torres bench copies are kind of stale personally. I like the concept of putting oneself in the mind set of Torres and his contemporaries and making a guitar that has the style of the era, but not an exact replica of any individual guitar. I think that it's entirely plausible to study Torres' construction and details enough to make a guitar that could have been yours if you had lived in the same town at the same time as Torres and you sneaked a peek inside his shop. I prefer the idea of trying to get inside Torres' head, so to speak, to make a copy the same way Anders describes Torres making a copy of himself.
So to put a post deconstructionist spin to it, Jean Baudrillard would have said about a guitar built this way; that it is a simulacrum of something imagined, and the instrument imagined was copied time and again by the person who imagined the "original". ( Or perhaps Borges would have said that, but for arguments sake let's just imagine some hardcore mid twentieth century intellectual said it or once thought it up.)
In essence, if a guitar is an Antonio Torres, it's a copy of a copy. So all guitars by Torres are simulacra, or a copy of something that never existed, because if Torres copied himself exactly he would have been making replicas of his own guitars, but each of his guitars are unique works. Each guitar Torres made was different from the one he copied which makes them inauthentic because a copy of a copy is a simulacra and if he did not replicate his own work perfectly it is the realization of something half imagined and half built by rote.
Thus any single Torres guitar replicated once and perfectly by a modern guitar maker is in fact more authentic and less removed from Torres than a guitar by Antonio Torres, which was merely a copy of a copy, of a copy, of a copy ad infinitum.
And there you have the Torres Conundrum.
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Personally I can't think up a more egregiously boring pursuit than to replicate in
exactitude a Torres guitar. The more fun way of acquiring a unique Torres guitar would be to create a Torres pastiche. A pastiche because it would be a mash up of specifically Torres characteristics and the "spirit" of Torres could be more fully imbued into the guitar because it would be made much the same way Torres himself worked, by making copies of Torres'.
What would Torres think was more clever: An exact replica of one of his works? Or a unique guitar that could have been made by himself as he copied himself?
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What is a replica of an object made by a man named Antonio Torres? Is it a symbol of connoisseurship? A place holder of cultural values as the result of the expression of connoisseurship? Would a replica of any object made by the man named Antonio Torres hold the same cultural status, or only select objects of the same type and function?
Would the hairbrush of Antonio Torres have the same cultural gravitas as an object authored by Torres? Or is cultural significance only granted to the utilitarian items used by performitist cultural icons such as Liberace?
Is Liberace's haircomb equal in cultural place holding value to a Torres guitar? If so, would replicas of Liberace's haircomb be more desirable as markers or symbols of good taste and connoisseurship than replicas of an object made by the man named Antonio Torres?
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And what of the unknown craftsmen who created the hairbrushes of both Torres and Liberace? Is the conception and realization of a hairbrush any less noble or valuable than playing the piano or the making of a decorated wooden box?
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https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Apr. 25 2010 13:08:51
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estebanana
Posts: 9352
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: Antonio Torres (in reply to Michael1917)
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Hey John,
I was being halfway silly and halfway serious about all I said. I agree that a study or knowledge about Torres in someway or another is important to building in the Spanish way.
I can't help poke a bit of fun at the idea that a Torres copy is in part built as a symbol of prestige or connoseurship for a player or collector. I agree that it's quite possible with how much Spanish building has progressed without diverging too much from what Torres was doing that some makers can build guitars which may be better than Torres.
The idea of slavishly making a bench copy of a specific guitar still sounds tedious to me. I'm all for studying the details and little problems an solutions found in older guitars. I find it one of the best tools for teaching yourself and that it's not only good for making a Santos model be Santosy, but that it helps make my original work be more refined and subtle.
I do find it difficult to get past the idea that you can build anyone else's guitar except your own and that in the end any Torres copy is really the copyists guitar in Torres clothing. It seems to me making every part an exact copy right down to the dimensions of every single glue block would make a fine guitar, but what makes it more like Torres is really more about the spirit of how it was made more than the precise replication of each individual part.
Torres had mannerisms and favorite ways of resolving problems, I prefer to study how he did things like lead the bindings into the heel on the back or how he used proportions; how thick did he make his veneer lines in a rosette. I think one can assimilate as many of those small things as possible and build by freely letting those traits come into the guitar as you build it. It seems Torres worked this way as he improvised and adjusted his ideas and aesthetics constantly. For this reason I think that Torres style guitars made through close study and then filtering the information through your own nervous system and intelligence make a truer version of Torres, than a precise mechanical reproduction. A replica does not allow, or allows to a lesser extent, discovery though the building process. Seeing that evidence in a Torres guitar, that he did discover as he worked, is in large part what makes his work so compelling.
I often see guitars where you can tell the builder has profoundly absorbed Torres and I get great satisfaction knowing that they saw what Torres was doing and assimilated it in their own building. Then I see a precise replica and can't quite bring myself to have the same feeling of wonderment about it, something about the spirit of the instrument gets lost in translation when it's created as a picture perfect copy.
That's just my notion on the situation of copies and copying.
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https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Apr. 26 2010 15:36:26
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where the shape is the same. 
