Politics of Public Space: Reimagining the Americas, May 9, 1997
Panel Discussion: Antonio Martorell (AM), Rosa Luisa Marquez (RL), Rebecca Schneider (RS),
Diana Taylor (DT)

This discussion took place during the Second 'Encuentro' of the Institute of Performance and Politics in 1997, before it became the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.  The event consisted in turning the Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth College--the institutional home to departments of Politics and Economics--into a place inhabited by all the people who would not normally be in that space. Rosa Luisa Márquez, Antonio Martorell, Miguel Villafane, Peter and Elka Shumann of Bread and Puppet, the Puerto Rican photographer Pablo Delano among other artists worked to transform the space that we inhabited for three days.  In the following discussion, Rebecca Schneider and I spoke to Rosa Luisa and Antonio about why and how they go about transforming public space.

RS: Tell us about contestatory spaces and performance.

RL: Can you be more particular in your question?

RS: What about "coming into an official space?" In its everyday use. Making it into something else.

RL: I would say we deal with the appropriation of any space. The transformation of any space. It might be a theatre hall turned upside down or a street corner so nothing is like it seems to be.  We work with the 'seeming' and we transform that. We've been doing this for thirteen years in Puerto Rico and whereever we've been invited. We invite people or whoever invites us brings people.  We deal with the materials we have and the time constraints. It becomes an exercise in things that are determined and things that are there by chance. It's always a very intense negotiating process. Sometimes the politics of space impose themselves and we really have to seduce it (or the people involved with it) to transform it.  Our art is basically is an art of seduction and to try to convince people that it's worth doing.  Sometimes it's quite easy.

RS: How do you do that? How do you convince people that it's worth doing? What is the point of doing it? Why do you transform and appropriate space?

RL: Because things don't have to be the way they are. That reality does not have a set of rules that have to be the same all the time. I think we're like laboratory experiences that culminate in a product but process is very important. For instance, here, every day we had a new element. The first day we dealt with space. A new space--the Rockefeller Center. We had seen photos of the space but we dealt with the reality of the space that was three dimensional not two dimensional as in the photos. We had asked Diana for materials like newsprint which is cheap or free and cardboard. And when we saw the cubicles we thought about housing projects. We have a lot of them at home and in Latin America.  Clusters of people living together...  and we were going to be living together for three days, so why not? That first day when we came in we were working with the space.  The next day Pablo Delano brought his photos which I thought were going to be placed in the hallway. He said, "do whatever you want with them." We had started working with cardboard. OK so the cardboard windows.  When we came from Puerto Rico, Miguel who is my husband besides being a photographer, knew that he was going to be brought into the performance. There was no negotiating there. He likes it and he's used to it. But Pablo we didn't know, so he was placed in a very protected space that people could discover (by opening the windows of the casitas). The next day came Elke Schumann with the work of Peter Schumann which is humongus--huge painted banners. That solved a problem because we didn't have to cover the whole space. We now had material that connected to the theme that could cover those areas but at the same time we had to negotiate with Elke about where to put these pieces. Peter Schumann is one of the greatest artists of the century and we are there co-existing with him and it had to be negotiated.  Antonio had to talk to Elke and convince her. Then the next day it was Diana's alter to Nelson Rockefeller with all the memorabilia in the showcase. Her students and the altar had to be integrated into the whole.  So each day there was a challenge. And the first day we had to talk to the people around here that were coming around and saying: "this is our space how dare you come in?" Very often over the handrails. We were told, "you cannot put sticky things on the walls you cannot punch your holes." So everything was assigned so that we would not affect the space permanently, so that had to be negotiated. Then we came the first day with whoever was working-- people that we don't know. And how do we negotiate relationships? Then we start getting the people that are going to be the core group. And people we haven't worked with before that have common links either with a theme, either with the university, either with the languages that we are using and they start committing themselves a little bit more. So what can you create in a given time in a given space with these given human beings and with these given materials and theme? And that is the challenge and it changes every time in terms of the product but the process is a negotiating small society.

DT: You always seem to deal with, from the work I've seen of yours.  Is there something about that-- taking what other people don't want and creating something out out of it-- that is particularly Latin American or Puerto Rican?

RS: Like you said...it's a negotiating, small society. That would make me wonder is that kind of like the ways that PR and smaller countries negotiate..

RL: Yes, but we've done this everywhere. We've done this in Cuba, in the States often. We did this in Mexico.  We went to a very beautiful hacienda with a tree and a bridge and we worked with music from Mexico and with film history from Mexico and love scenes and dream sequences and whatever. So in every place we go we feel various levels of authority.

DT: But that's the thing-it's sort of a method of work as a kind of way of looking at art. There seems to be something that's very, very different from what people normally do here in the sense that it's a statement about taking leftovers, it's a statement about negotiating...

RL: Let me get Antonio. He's more articulate than I am...He's a very strong graphic art, very strong. We're talking about a complete artist in Puerto Rico, it's his whole life in drawing, painting, etching and whatever and this is sort of his sideline. And I'm a theatre person that dedicates my lift to theatre. This a sideline because we do this 2-3 times a year, maybe. But we negotiate how much graphic art, how much performance. There are times when we do more performance than this time. Especially when we have core groups that want to deal with performance skills. Here we're working much more with the visuals, no?

AM: This is a very special case. I think this is the most complicated in terms of circumstances, an event of this kind because we usually deal with graphic theatre, theatrical graphics, animation of faces and colors and shapes. This time we had to work quite differently with different artists, and fortunately, we knew all of them, both the works and the workers...the work of Miguel Villafane, photographer; Pablo Delano, photographer; and Peter Schumann the theatre person here really as a painter, and the mural of Orozco. We had the strong input of this very powerful artist so we worked, created an installation, which is in a way an unorthodox museography to house these different artists.  Aside from knowing them and loving their work we also share a common thread of politics, social awareness, aesthetic commitment.  So while that really helped a lot, it also helped us because the space was enormous. It worked in two ways, a leitmotif that we had to face that and serve it but on the other hand it served us splendidly because the space was so big and we wanted to occupy it as much as possible. When Elke Schumann walked in with those big cloths, banners...at first I was scared. How are we going to fit this? All these volumes. I was planning on throwing down large rolls of paper and color and then paint them but Peter Schumann did it already and beautifully so. So a lot of that was worked into it.

DT: What interested me was the kind of method of work that you two have established together and whether it's here or in Mexico or some place else the method has remained pretty constant. The collective creation, this time in visual arts, reflects a very different vision than a lot of artists are used to in the US. A lot of has to do with this idea of recycling, of re-using what other people throw away and don't valorize and that seems to me to be an artistic and political statement that's very specific.

AM: And it's not exclusively with this carbon material or trash. It also has to do with the work of others.. In that way we're not part of the current of art in which the signature is important. We're not signaturized. If it comes to a signature it's because it organically grew out of the process and you more or less see an installation of ours and more or less see it had to do with us. Both Rosa Luisa and I are professional in that we put our hearts into the service OF. Most of my visual art initial training of the graphic side, poster art, book designer, illustrator of books, set designer. Rosa Luisa is a theatre person. She doesn't think ever of herself as serving herself. She serves both the theatre and the public and the time and place where she can support her work. And also when we met professionally (we have known each other since we were children).

RL: I was a child.

AM: But we began to work together. I was her teacher many years ago in a course I taught in graphics at the University and then when I came back from Mexico she came back from Paris. I was HER student at the university in a drama class where we made up this photostatica play and we've been collaborating ever since. But our view of art and our practice of art has always been very personal and very strongly personal. We really connect to a given place and to a given public and to a given material and circumstances. We don't think that anything curtails our possibility of expression but quite the contrary. It puts it to a test. How to serve better. For us, to me, to do a good job in communicating in art does not limit at all my artistic personality or the development of my skills, quite the contrary. That puts it to proof on how to do it.

RL: There's also something in terms of economics...it is more available to me to work with recyclable materials with my students than to have the money to buy stuff. And for me theatre is very craft oriented and I'm a teacher so I want my students to know they can do good theatre in the classroom and they can do it with very simple elements. That's what I can do in theatre that I cannot do in film or in television.

DT: There's something very specific about the things that you do that are very interesting...

RL: We don't resent having the money to do...that limbo paper in color is fantastic and we used to do a play that's called Photodestatica? in which we had to have cheap but we had to have $125.00 for each performance for disposable materials because they were torn onstage. So we had a blue limbo that was a scenery and after the play was done it was ruined. The actors would create these incredibly, beautiful dresses that were destroyed on stage. They were done in paper. We invited the audience to create the costumes with us--it was the wedding costumes so they were really very lavish.

AM: For one hour we would create the costumes with the help of the public, that was no longer public, that was participants. And when the actual performance of the orthodox performance began, in less than five minutes after it began it was totally destroyed and the first time one of them was destroyed there was this gasp from the audience because they saw, they knew they had participated in the creation of these beautiful costumes. That was a very dramatic hit.

RS: Can you articulate on the one hand why you want participation vs. distance viewing and how that's related to wrecking it or having it be gone?

AM: For one thing it's fun.

RL: It's pleasurable.

AM: It's ephemeral. We really play on the ephemeral and make it unforgettable.

RL: We try to make our work be larger than our lives.

DT: I like that idea about memory.

RL: Memory--that's unforgettable. In memory I can tell you that when we started doing our work, now no one in Puerto Rico does book presentations even wakes without a performance. We started that trend because people thought this is a way of presenting whatever we're dealing with that is more interesting. Like lectures, we don't do lectures.

AM: It's a struggle against being bored. The cardinal sin in theatre is to be bored. In any art. I also like different readings. What I do now when I do a piece of work. I want to do things that accept, welcome and need second and third readings. I want to do work of art that when you take it home you can literally live with it. That you can discover in that work things as time goes by. Not only the way it works but you are not the same, you will grow, you will become somebody else and the painting or whatever also has its own life and works to grow both because of technical factors and perception of the work. Like oil painting, the colors as time grows by, they tend to we say in Spanish "secosina," to cook, mature, age in a certain way.

DT: I would think this is the opposite of that. Because this is a work that is not going to mature, it's not going to change.

AM : But it changes in your memory, perception change.

DT: But it seems fundamental to this kind of work that the object itself be gone.

RS: I live with a memory rather than take it home so that it is an object.

AM: We are contradictory. We're not one. We're many. Each "I" is many. One of the curses of our tradition, our Judeo-Christian tradition, is that we tend to believe and try to put everything into one. Oneness. The damnation of oneness of unity. You are just this thing, you cannot be this. You are many things at many times and you have many needs. I love to do the ephemeral.

DT: You are many artists. But this particular form of art reminds me of the Latin American tradition, for example, of the 1960's. The little raids, taking over a space, changing it absolutely and then leaving, and leaving that shock and the kinds of things that the performance artists are doing in this country. It changes everybody and then it's gone. And the point of it is. in that sense. is to be gone except for the impression. That wonderful "raid" quality that this kind of work has of space that doesn't belong to it and raiding it. The intrusion. It's very much a part of that tradition, maybe a part of other traditions as well, very much an agitprop thing that came up in the 60's.

RL: We were formed in the 60's. I did a lot of street theatre. Tonio did a lot of very political art in Puerto Rico. There are many layers also. We found between the two of us a chemistry that makes it work. If we had found a musician maybe this would be a theatrical musical venture.

AM: Sometimes we write...like I begin a sentence and she finishes it. Or the opposite. We benefit from being two and one at the same time. We're not the same. We're akin.

RL: We have to resolve conflict also. In our lives it is an opportunity to see each other again in a playful arena because we can focus on one thing and meet with friends, new friends. On that level I think that it's a very pleasurable, it's not threatening, people come up with very beautiful things at the end.

DT: It's like a festival.

AM: I want to learn and when we give a workshop we learn from the trainees.

RS: A lot of things you are talking about--categories like festival, carnival, things turned upside down, the change, the raid. None of these things, obviously since the 60's are even Dada, it's sort of anti-art. These kinds of things aren't necessarily ART in the form of the museumification. If it's a museum it's a museum that lasts only a few days and then it's gone. Do you have any sort ANTI....you talk about it as if it's ART.

AM: We are not ANTI-we are PRO. In a way we are very traditional. I believe ART is the secularization of experience and of things.

RL: Sacrilization not de sacularization.

AM: That's why we take trash and work with it. Garbage. Pick it up and make it into something beautiful and meaningful. I think art has always been a way of making treasures of experience. And this a variation. There is nothing new in that. I don't believe in the new anyways. I'm very traditional. I worship my maestros. I do a lot of reading and see history of art in museums. I love museums. I can go to museums and spend days on end in museums. I believe more in a continuum. I don't think anything we do is revolutionary.

RL: The connection of layers...I think that what we would like is to have more experiences like this.

RS: Walter Benjamin wrote about a real fear of aestheticization. Of politics. He was writing about fascism. He said what we need instead of an aestheticization of every thing is a "politicization of aesthetics." That he really wanted to look always at is the services in some senses that sacrilized art is put to, sometimes frightening, service. So he's arguing against aestheticizations because in his mind it can blind you to politicization. But here we are with this artwork about a lot of the things we talked about is the politics of it. His fear about the separation of those two terms you seem to not have that here.

AM: If there's contradiction it is solved in the process. My son himself is an artist...and one of the conversations we have on and on and with my daughter who is dancer is that the curse of the new, the worship of the new for newness itself. It damns the artist to try to be original which is always a formula or something born from the latest thing. Just developed. I mean ours is more natural than unnatural.

RL: There's another thing in terms of aesthetics. When we occupy space in our projects we clutter the spaces. We work with very bright colors. If we are going to place it somewhere it's very akin to Caribbean art.

AM: We believe that more is more.

RL: If you see our houses, Antonio's house, people cannot sleep in his house because there are so many masks and phantasma. And we're loud and in the Caribbean you live on the street because there is the threat of violence but there is not the threat of weather. And the light is very yellow. The light here just blinds me. Maybe to artists here the light of the Caribbean blinds them, to me it doesn't. It's very yellow and very warm. So most of the things we do are very Baroque and that's why we have the more people we have the more we integrate...

AM: Certainly liking, passion for ornamentation, for embellishment. There is nothing as offensive to a Caribbean person than a blank wall...for a Puerto Rican a wall is OK if you can fill it up.

RL: Fear of the vacuum...

AM: I was really amazed when I came in here. The apparent neutrality.

RL: And you know it was very difficult to access that Rockefeller. We couldn't get the correct ladder...we did as much as we could

DT: He was above it all, wasn't he?

AM: But it worked well at the end we put those two Johnsons like two guards and the way he overlooked over the houses. It was quite a commandant. That came about. That wasn't planned. At first he was alone and omnipotent but when we finished that he was kind of paternalistically looking down at us.

RS: This is very interesting to me...in terms of Annabelle Melzer mentioned the danger when you enter a space you leave no mark and you've talked about leaving a mark in memory. And what the kind of issues are leaving some other kind a mark, leaving a fractal (?) mark...

AM: Leaving in the memory in the ones who saw, for the ones who participated in the creation...the memory that recites in the hands.

DT: There's also memory in the space because we are being to be gone and there going to remember what we remember what we did with that space. They're going to talk about what we did with that space for a long time. I remember the first production ever did in the Bentley. I filled it with huge big trucks and every time people introduced me, for years, ten years after that event people said "This is the woman who did this to the Bentley" and it was like the space had taken over and they'll say "Remember those people who transformed the Rockefeller?"

RL: So you can say that Rockefeller can be transformed. It was transformed once, it can be transformed again.

AM: But I also understand the argument about co-opting--being used by the establishment....

RS: They can say "Oh yes, we can contain this..." At least you're there, it's better than not being there. But question is: If this remains in memory and Dartmouth is here as a temporary installation then it should be that we can sit here now and remember Pow-Wows that went on here. We should be remembering these other installations that preceded Dartmouth as an installation. It seems one of the ironies of Dartmouth or other installations is that it seems to block memories...How do we access those installations that don't leave a mark or disappear?

RL: A student asked me a question a week ago: What is the importance of John Cage's visit to Puerto Rico in 1981? Here's a student in 1997 asking me that--so there was some trace of John Cage there if somebody asked after fifteen or so years is asking about the trace that this man has left. I think that when we meet, maybe ten years from now, somebody will remember something and that affects something else.

RS: We're also sitting here right now having this interview into a tape recorder with the intent of leaving a trace.

DT: The anxiety of remains is right here...

RS: We're talking about remains and producing them at the same time. What if we were to refuse to publish this? This conversation, because we are really invested in...

RL: I think part of that is in Schumann's work. Peter Schumann does not allow filming. The production of Hair went to Vermont to tape the museum and he said, "No way. I believe film is a fascist art and you're not going to film this and you're not going to give me any money." And here you have one of the greatest painters in the U.S. and the greatest creators of theatre that works against the memory of himself although there are other ways in which...

RS: Or he works counter, like Foucault has the idea of counter-memory or works counter to the dominant modes of memory.

AM: There's a friend of mine who's now working on a book of my work, including our theatrical work. He's going ape. He's kept scraps and bits of every thing that I've done but not as much as he would want. He always deplores my installation work and my theatrical work because it's gone. "You see. It's gone. I want to do a book, not everything I have photographed..." But he's a psychologist, a very good one and he writes beautifully, but he is obsessed, like most people, with permanence. Write the book your whole life toward it and just throw it? I say, Why not?

RS: I just went to a conference at Columbia where they had invited archivists to talk about the problem of documenting dance. And this woman says, "Well if there's this body-to-body transmission...you just teach the dance, you lose a lot to history that way." That's basically saying oral transmission/body transmission, you lose history that way. There's whole other cultural ways of knowing which are about bodily transmission; not about leaving an obvious document but, what you're saying, about hands-on. Making the installation.

AM: I'll tell you how I learned to dance which is the way most Puerto Rican kids learn to dance. Before I could walk my mother, to get me to sleep, would dance me.

RS: OK. He's standing up doing the bouncing baby move.

AM: Then after that when I was stronger she would dance me like this.

RL: We're talking about this whole tradition that comes from Europe. OK? And that is what has been documented. All of the African tradition in Puerto Rico, all of it, is learned through the body...and people cannot defend it orally because it is there.

AM: It's intellectual

RL: Yes, and rational.

RS: It's not because it's not intellectual because thoughts don't remain either. It's that it's NOT documented, then archive it in a textual or spatial monument.

AM: It's way is through feelings and senses.

DT: There's a whole difference in culture too, in the sense of culture as practiced in every day life as opposed to the culture that's opposite or outside of us and separate in museums that we have in the Western tradition. So I think if we live it and we eat it, as you say, and incorporate and advance it it's not "culture" in the same way.

AM: It is a culture..

DT: Of course it is...

AM:... but it comes through our mother.

DT: Well, perhaps it doesn't end up in objects. It's a culture that is producing an object that is separate.

RL: Then we come back to economics. For instance, when we talk about the price they put on our art, Tonio is a millionaire because in storage he has all the trace of an art.

AM: When I go to a bank and ask for a loan I have accountants and banker friends who make up my financial statement and I am a millionaire. I have the collection of my works which is enormous because I don't sell that much. I keep them all and the collection I have of my colleagues which I trade or buy because I like to buy my colleagues' work. That's up to millions of dollars. It's all very thin paper but that's an asset bank-wise.

RL: And then my work which is somewhere in the head doesn't earn a penny. So it's really very interesting.

RS: So this collaboration between you two-- (to Antonio) you should pay her.

AM: What I do a lot of times...if I have objects that are really of no value to me...a lot of artists say "How do you feel when you sell something of yours?" Well I'm glad I do so I can buy materials and do something else. That also comes 'cause my early training was in graphics in which I could always keep either the plate or some copies of the edition. Even when I do one at a time pieces I'm so happy that it's going to live on in somebody else's space or it's sitting stacked up or facing the wall in my studio and also that I'm getting paid for it. What I do sometimes is I pick a subject, we're having a financial crisis, an artist has to fly somewhere, there's no money to pay for it. I say, well I have this. I have this stuff here and you can take it.

RL: That defines the nature of my other work which is teaching because I found a place at the university where I can teach the way I like to teach it and that provides for my salary so I can do these things that are not rewarding economically. But it's a difference because I don't produce an object that can distributed or sold. So about that we've conversed a lot, the difference in the approach to the trade, because he's one of the few people that can live off art in Puerto Rico.

AM: I live off art, not off silly art, but of selling my services. I have never really catered to a market. I go my own way so I could've made it really very successfully many times a particular trend I myself had established but I get bored. So I want to do something else and my main income comes from giving services like doing a mural, designing a book, giving a workshop, a conference-that's where I get my main income. It's not off selling a product. That's why I have so many products that I can give away or sell for a good cost.

RL: You also find with another job and I'm not complaining because I have been able to harmonize but at home, I think one of the problems is that most people since they have to do art after doing their main job art suffers.

AM: It's also so circumstantial. About two years ago I got appointed Artist-in-Residence at the University of Puerto Rico and the main reason for that was that my home was raided by the FBI in an operation that they highlighted to menace the population. There was a big upheaval because early on in my career I became very politically active and I remember somebody said to me "Tonio if you go on this way the best thing you can do is make a public image for yourself 'cause when the chips are down you won't be persecuted like thousands of use who were persecuted. If you're well-known that will be your best, and maybe your only, defense." I said I always like to be known. That was very easy advice to take so I began to develop a public persona. And when the time came it was very useful.
You know what happened when the FBI raided my place and persecuted me? The University of Puerto Rico, which is a state university was so upset at the public opinion that same year they gave me an homage in the biennial and they offered me the position of Artist-in-Residence. Now it's also a concession--eight years later the government changes and it's a pro-state government and they decided to do away with my services. In was all over the medium. They said I was getting bored in my position, I wanted to go somewhere else. So I meet with my good friends, Rosa Luisa and Miguel, and while I was beginning to write my letter of resignation they fired me.

RL: We said no because we thought that was a spot that he had acquired not for himself but for future artists that can be Artists-in-Residence at the university.

AM: And they could just show that money under the table and then leave. So next paper I called the paper and said I've been thrown out and I read them the letter. What is your opinion. I think it's a grosseria universitaria.

DT: Rudeness. University rudeness.

AM: So the next day it came up in the headlines. That very morning the same asshole who had fired me was calling me for an appointment. I said I don't know you. I have nothing to talk to with you about. Read my answer in the letter to the press. The next person to call me is a member of the council of higher education asking for the president of the university to give me an audience. This was a big mistake.

AM: (inaudible)... but then also the contradictions...I have done a portrait, an official portrait, big, mammoth portrait of the founder and president of Museo de Arta de...Luis Verré (?) who happened to be from the foundation that paid for my art schooling in Madrid thirty years ago..

RL: This is a pro-stative person paying a pro-independence artist..that's why we're so many people.

RS: That's like Rockefeller allowing...

AM: So when the president came to some commencement exercises that very morning when the headlines were out in the paper, the person who meets the ex-governor, founder the museum, the man who had the portrait, the first thing he said was "Hey what's the matter with Martorell?" and now I cannot leave.

RS: Just be rude. They can publish a letter about how rude you are. It will only make you more famous.

RL: Something I think that is connected to performance is when the raid by the FBI happened, there was no way that it could be contested legally because the FBI has license to do anything. They can go anywhere and open houses and whatever so in court there's nothing you can do. So the only thing we did was a huge performance on the act of the FBI. A one-night show in which we transformed the space. It had the actual photographs of the house filled with soup because they were picking up fingerprints. Then the next house was enlargements of those objects done in charcoal by Martorell with the same quality of the soup and then the next space was a performance space in which the objects which were done really big rebelled against the authorities.

AM: It was packed.

RL: People had to sign on a paper and put their fingerprints in order to enter and we had a huge performance. Many people were there and that lasted also in the memory as a possibility to contest what was a major (gratifilia?)

AM: An alternative to courts...

DT: But that's what's very Latin American about all of this too. I remember when we were talking to Super Barrio he said "Because there's nothing else you can do. Because we don't have access to the voting, because we don't have access to the courts. Performance is our only way."

AM: Challenge...the limitations establish a way. You cannot do anything, you can do certain things. So you use that limitation as a springboard for something strong and hitting the right way.

RS: What year was this FBI raid.

AM: '85, August 30, 1985.

RL: Forty-five collaborators participated in that.

RS: How many days after the raid did that take place?

RL: About two months after we met for those two months once a week for four hours each night until it was ready.

RS: And it took place at your house?

AM: No, at the school where I was teaching then, the School of Visual Arts.

RL: And it had two indoor spaces and outdoor space.

RS: Did you interact with the FBI about this performance in any way?

RL: ..not about the performance.

AM: They followed me. They went around the school. They tried to...

RS: Because of the performance?

AM: Because of my presence there.

RS: This was part of the raid...?

AM: Harassment.

RL: It was like making him more nervous.

RS: Intimidating.

AM: This is a joke but it's a true story. About a month ago people from the Smithsonian came to Puerto Rico to try to dig up documents, letters, sketches, papers belonging to artists. They wanted for another artist to give them to them so they could save them so they could make a big file. A beautiful project of Latino and Latin American artists. I said I appreciate it very much but all my life I've been fighting to preserve what is ours. I'm sure they'll be better kept in Washington than here with the mob (?), the humidity, the floods and the fires and all that but it will be a contradiction I'm not able to solve. I want to remain here but I can give you copies. I can give you a copy of everything. But my best document you have already. Not you the Smithsonian but there in Washington, the FBI file because they have taped my telephone conversations three years and that's where my real life is. Because I communicate by telephone. And even when I know it's tapped, I don't care because I have no secrets. So if anyone was to write my true memoirs they would have to go to Washington.

RS: Well what about this no-secrets issue? In terms of one of the conversations today, there's no more secret. Peggy Phelan was talking about...in the true performative there's nothing to secret, there's nothing to hide. And the fact that the FBI sort of depends on secrets and some post-modernists would say manufacture secrets. Now to absolutely refuse secrets, the question is does that also...?

AM: For me it's very personal, coming from a repressed society I just hate to have to hide anything. I hate hiding. I hate pretending. My childhood was quite orthodox, almost military that way and being raised in a colony. I just really think whatever comes to my mind. I do whatever I can as long as it doesn't hurt anyone.

RS: In a sense just feed the FBI, anything else becomes meaningless, you just tell them you don't have any...

AM: I'm not giving them anything..

RL: If you have any information don't tell him (Martorell) because he tells them everything.

AM: One of the reasons I've haven't been ever in a underground movement although I've been very political. I've never gone into underground secrets.

RL: They call it diarrhea of the mouth...

AM: Because they didn't even have to torture me. I would say it right off.

RL: There is something in the work of art that has secrets. There are things that we don't know that come out in the process that we're not aware of. The combination of factors that come out we don't know how to decipher and I think that's the complexity of the work.

RS: Sort of like mystery but secrets and mystery are two different things.

DT: Were you there when Dolores (Sommer) was talking this morning?
She was thinking specifically of testimonials. Where people are like supposedly showing like in a testimonial but they're are secrets. I can't tell. My community won't allow it. So all the places where there are limits to knowing and which she says is putting these breaks, these pauses, into this automatic assumption that everybody has access to everything, and everybody can understand everything and that we can just absorb it. So there are stumbling blocks to understanding and I think that that's something in a way that is here, even though this is a very friendly environment. One of the most wonderful things about it for me is the way the people would live in this building, and used it and are so used to having control of this space and they walk in and they don't know how to read it and they don't know what it's about...and that distance, that pause, that's created.

AM: Well for one thing, rightly so, they feel an invasion of their territory. By aliens. We are aliens.

RS: You're the aliens but the students are working with you so you're also the body-snatchers

RL One thing that is good about this short experience is that we come in and we leave very quickly. So there is no big threat of living in a community and staying for a long time. Again, it's things in transit, things that are ephemeral because if we'd stayed here for a month I know that more conflict would evolve. Enough. When we do it for three days. I've done projects that are longer than three days, like for 6 months. One of my objectives as a director is to negotiate relationships. How can these people survive in an environment that is artificial because in real life you don't rehearse. And you don't spend that long a time...there were people there that related to each other more at that time than they related to their partners. So how to create an environment that is conducive to harmony? Even if conflict emerges because finally what we have to produce is a harmonious piece.

RS: You're trying to create a safe place for conflict. SHE (who?) says "No we want a dangerous place." Sort of a safe place to discuss conflict, to potentially discuss conflict, can be a dangerous place for...

RL: Yeah but she's talking about danger to the other whereas for me it is dangerous for me because I am exposing myself as a performer. To me the theatrical experience is larger than life and it's very acute and very intense and that makes it living life more intensely. And that's dangerous. Everything is on edge. What we're creating these three days...the top of our senses. The five senses are very aware of everything. If you come in with some more information we have to solve this and now we have to solve this other thing. A sense of living that is more living than is more intense than life.

AM: It's a heightening of the living experience.

RL: That's what art is.

RS: I was saying that art can be about that but for instance the Rockefeller painting, art, is not necessarily about heightening, it's about stasis. I think that's partly where you're coming, your raid, where you're going is part of the intensity issue or if your art exists in a house that's over-full of art...we haven't talked about the other thing that this installation housed which was an academic set of papers so that it houses the photographs and the Peter Schumann...These academic papers are a sort of performance thing because academic papers both remain 'cause they are texts but they also don't remain. But also I was curious about that space of the mind or these ideas or these talks existing in the space...

AM: It's also a blend in the game, the game of creating the faces which is our own and our neighbors. In that particular moment we're dealing with all of it because are creating and re-creating a fluid identity. That's what this conference is about.

DT: I think we're talking about the same things in many ways. People aren't trained to recognize it and I think people are expecting to see this anti-aesthetical and I notice when people walked in a lot of the academics looked at this like "What is this? What does this have to do with our conference?" As if it weren't a part, if it weren't the issue, if it weren't the topic, actually, of our conference.

AM: 'Cause it's not spelled out.

DT: And then that little incident between you and Nitza and Agnes and Agnes said, "Well how can you talk to Nitza? When you're pointing you ARE talking to Nitza?" What Agnes was expecting was a much more traditional way of addressing an activist, an academic addressing an activist, when in fact the activist and the academic were saying the same thing. We haven't learned the languages...

AM: ...modify them because surely these pieces are so strong and they carry so much weight and material and are in your face that I was trying to do it like the Americas... kind of give it more of a connection to Orozco's mural...the direct line was up there.

RL: Well it's also interesting too that if you were to re-draw a map the question is do you re-write the same thing? If you put a map into space would it be an indication the way we image it now instead of some other imaginary space.

AM: Even if we don't work it otherwise...let's say if our part of the work has been more directly and overtly political, it would have been a rephrasing, overkill, so we have to tone our statement down in order to parallel off Schumann and this is all done unconsciously but at times consciously. We just kind of steer away through the waves.

RS: This is interesting Schumann is so recognizable that in some ways I didn't have to read and in some cases couldn't read because they were so high. I don't read Schumann. I see that and it's form I can't read it and that's the way the memory question that we were talking about also in another form.

AM: Regardless of whether it's text are not his statements are so strong. He's also an expressionist that we had to pull low because it's like a shout. The performance thing was also toned down.

RSV: I wanted to talk about performance and performance is already kind of political and the focus is on the performance and performativity and because it wasn't this kind of texted shout we could look at the other subtler...


RL: One of the things we didn't talk about is this networking that is done in many levels because we are networking with and Schumann who has been are friend since 1979 and with students that we continue to connect with. I met a woman here from Puerto Rico that I didn't know in Puerto Rico that I think I will continue speaking to. Now we have like tentacles. Yvette is from here. Eliana from Peru we didn't know so in one day we had to create an event that had some sort of warm quality to it.

AM: Yvette has both my books and she's writing a piece, a long term project about memories in Puerto Rico with recent memories that has been written by recent people and she wants to include MY work in that and she'd like to interview. One thing I feel when I know someone has read my books THERE I feel more exposed that in anything I can do theatrically or officially.

RS: Really?

AM: Oh yes because I think the word is more revealing. The word to me by nature is more confessional. When I use the word either talking or writing I try to explain myself.

RS: Yes there's no secret. You use the word confessional and you have no secrets. It's good, it's good.

AM: It reveals more than maybe I wish I would.

RL: When is translated in English which he has been but it hasn't been published you see how the visual image is a provocation for the memory. He talks about the table or the rocking chair the bed but it comes from visual memory and then it leads to...

AM: It's translated into words but its the visual that is the detonator of the words themselves.

RS: So you go from memory to visual to words. That's the way you work. 'Cause visual is not from my now seeing this table but from some memory of a table.

RL: But he has memories that were very early in life...

AM: But they manifest themselves as visions either they go from the state of the picture or they go directly into words but it is through the vision.

****

AM: My work is everything but abstract but the Orozco chapel in Houston I felt that emotion comparable to Sistine Chapel in Rome. A lot of my colleagues cannot understand that one can appreciate and be touched in such a common way by art that is not directly related to yours because we are forced into one voice, one signature. An artist is as great as his uniqueness. This is something I rebel against. I rebel against the notion of oneness and uniqueness. I think you don't have to worry about that. You cannot help but be unique. It's a natural.

DT: Someone was telling me "Look at the back of all these packages." How everything here has to be labeled. Everything here has exactly the same thing in it. Why does it have to be labeled? OK Tonio tell me about the colonial people.

AM: Limitations is how you face them. If you list them to your advantage. It has to do a lot with being part of the colonial people. We deal with limitations and raise to them and with them. It also has to do with being relatively weak. Using the weaknesses to be strong. And we cannot take away with the picture of Rockefeller. You cannot remove a poster. You cannot do away with the showcase of Rockefeller's memorabilia. You cannot remove the breakfast nooks so you make a beautiful Caribbean shanty town on top of it and do an alter of the showcase and place two pictures of Lyndon Johnson as a cowboy, a Puerto Rican cowboy guarding an acolyte to Rockefeller looking over all of us, very paternal. You learn those tragedies 'cause they're the tragedies of survival and of confrontation. So you confront colonial power in a way that you can come out alive and triumphant. Like when my house was raided by the FBI, as ten other houses in Puerto Rico in 1985. I knew I couldn't go to court, it would be costly, it would take a lot of time and it would be dark because of the law of being dark, somber. No one would know about it. It takes month from decision to the other. So we did a spectacle and we invited artists to come and help us do it and we showed it to as many people that we could.

RS: That was your justice.

AM: And that was my platform, that was our fellow...

RS: Can I ask you a question...it's very interesting what you just said. What kind of installation... actually two thoughts. One is does the reason that this one would go away and Rockefeller remains. The difference of the installation that Orozco made that doesn't go away. That's one question ..if someone mentioned that you brought into that space the students sit there and ignore his work but if your goes away, this is what you were saying, people have to remember it, it's not ignored in an everyday context. The second question is: If you and Rosa Luisa were asked to make in the reference room in the library, what kind of installation would you have made there, in and around the Orozco mural? Would it have been as contestatory? That's an official space, the reference room, and yet it has this permanent installation.

AM: In a way what we did here was a continuation of that. We took the academic gowns. We and Diana were thinking of a procession leading from that. It was a continuation of that mural in this given time and space. I think Orozco's piece is magnificent. I was overwhelmed when I first saw it and every time I see it. It's a lesson in so many things. One of its main attributes to me it invades reality. The mural becomes real. The students and bookshelves become painted. That heightened reality.

DT: I remember you saying that and it's true. I couldn't see these students as real. They think they're so real.

AM: They're washed out.

DT: They're totally little stereotypes, like ornaments.

AM: This mural is larger than life.

RS: Even with these various Rockefeller portraits, the students become fake in the face of that, maybe or maybe not. If you go to some of these classrooms there are these busts of the founding fathers...

AM: This portrait of Rockefeller is an awful portrait, an awful painting. I mean it has no artistic redeeming value. The only value it has is that it's Rockefeller. It should be burned...not for political reasons but for artistic reasons. But Orozco's is a magnificent work of art, it's prophetical. It's sheer prophecy and the subtlety of it also is grandiloquent, he's also very subtle. There's so many morals in it. And it's so damning and it has survived. And there's another thing that Rosa Luisa has pointed out to me when I said these people have kept it...the other Rockefeller covered it, destroyed it, and Diego had to do the mural all over again in Mexico. There's also no assurance of colonists. That's one of the reasons we like to work in an ephemeral way is because we know ephemeral is part of our world to be ephemeral.

DT: And they can't come and destroy it.

AM: Because WE destroy it. And we only live on in the memory. So it's our doing and our erasure and our permanence.

Comment on this page