English
EIGHTY-SIX
Questions and Answers.
Interview with Lorena Alfonso
Question: Why did you choose OCHENTA Y SEIS (EIGHTY-SIX) as the title for the exhibition?
Answer: An exhibition title can be as vague as Pinturas y dibujos 2019 (Paintings and Drawings 2019). I have had many exhibitions with criteria as simple as that, or done series where the titles were overall thematic concepts. That is what I did, for example, in the Serie Federal (Federal Series) in 1961 and in La naturaleza y los mitos (Myths and Nature) in 1975. I have been giving titles to my exhibitions for over 20 years, and they are usually vague references, as if they were titles for books of poetry. This time, however, I’ve chosen a clear reference: my age.
Question: You once told me that the most extraordinary thing that had happened to you in your lifetime was the experience of time. Can you tell us why?
Answer: Because time has times of its own. Some times are fast and some times are slow. It bears no relationship to the tempo of a clock. Time during childhood is incredibly slow, but then it becomes increasingly rapid. Past and present play hide-and-seek with one another. There are almost always present times, that is, immediate yesterdays that are so completely forgotten that it’s as if they never really existed at all (this intensifies with age) and there are past times that feel so present when they come to mind that you can even remember the slightest of details, as if you were living through them again. Sometimes, these details are almost insignificant, but still gravitate within you for some reason.
Question: What significance does time have in an artist’s day-to-day working process?
Answer: For me, the artistic working process isn’t something that happens every day, but on those days that there really is an artistic working process. Because there are also days when I don’t work, days when I am processing the spirit that will materialize in a work, only to realize what it is really about once I actually make it. You could call that time the gestation of the gestation. Doing something in the art field (and that can also be writing) doesn’t correlate to a particular work schedule, but to an accumulation of things that take placebin an ongoing flux.
The artistic working process isn’t something you learn the way you do a language, but something that is gradually constructed as a function of what you formulate. Each person has different ways of materializing their own craft, depending on their need to formulate different things.
Question: Is what you formulate related to any theme in particular?
Answer: Above all, the theme is the thing you are looking to understand even though you don’t have a clear idea of what it is. You go along formulating questions and answers in the course of the working process itself. For example, the theme of chaos has been present during my entire life, but formulated in different ways. Initially, I would express it in a romantic way, that is, with the prevalence of a tragic climax. During 1962 and 1963, I began to look for points of rupture, contrast and opposition, and in 1964 and 1965 that rupture became more acute in my chaotic installations (for example, one was called Introducción al desmadre (literally, Introduction to Chaos, but also presented with the title in English as That’s Life, Miss)). This phase concluded when my residency in the United States came to an end, and since it was very difficult to bring such complex works back with me, I got rid of them. A period of reflection began for me then, combined with a process of reconsidering my own working process. I wrote Antiestética (Anti-Aesthetics) at the same time I was making those installations, and I published it in 1965; during the following year, in New York, I set about writing another book, which I called El arte entre la tecnología y la rebelión (Art between Technology and Rebellion), which deals with the consciousness-raising that was taking shape at that time in hegemonic countries. I finished writing it later, once I had arrived in Argentina, but didn’t publish it because I found that what was denominated rebellion in the first world was armed violence in mine. The analyses of the book and the landscape of that consciousness-raising seemed quite correct to me then, but I began to feel that the perspective in terms of the future was naïve. Now I’ve decided to publish it, adding the subtitle: “En torno al 68” (Regarding ’68) because I believe many of the questions it raises are still valid, albeit addressed in different terms and with a different spirit. This is why it’s interesting to compare that era with today. The comparison does not figure explicitly in this edition; I leave it in a latent state, for readers to formulate on their own.
In 1971, all my doubts led me to a personal crisis, and consequently, to undergo therapy. I would draw as I talked to the analyst, and then I would continue drawing at home. This is how I came to develop a theme of subjective symbolism, which led me to write a book that included drawings as well (Recontrapoder (Super Power)) and also to take up painting again in 1975, in the La naturaleza y los mitos series. I left for France the following year due to the military dictatorship, but I soon began to feel nostalgia for “misbehaving” and the Americas, which brought me to travel to the Amazon region. That theme was latent throughout the ‘80s, and during those years I was also revising my different pasts; the synthesis of this can be seen in the piece Estructura para un paisaje (Structure for a Landscape). Reflection and revision of periods from my past were also present during the ‘90s. With respect to the current century, I will say that a physical accident involving my right arm led me to work horizontally, and I came to associate drawing more and more with painting, so that while my concern had previously been to overcome the difference between the figurative and the abstract, now my will to overcome the difference between drawing painting intensified. Without leaving that concern behind, I also developed the works’ irregular forms in that second decade, and returned to the experience of making installations.
Question: How are themes and timeframes coalesced in an exhibition?
Answer: For me, time is something that comes and goes. I become aware of the theme of any work in particular half-way through the process of making it. I don’t make sketches, but rather try to convoke a “world”.
If there’s one thing that does not matter to me, it’s whether or not an exhibition is coherent. That is why this exhibition, OCHENTA Y SEIS, is an example that shows that coherence (if it can be called that) resides in all the variations of my self. I fully assume being a Gemini.
Question: What was the creation process like for your piece La derrota de la muerte (Death’s Defeat)?
Answer: There’s some of everything in that painting. It is precisely an accumulation of contradictions and opposites. That’s what I am. The title occurred to me as a counterpoint to the concept of the “death’s triumph”, which has motivated other famous works. I am trying to distract myself, because at my age, the “grim reaper” is making eyes at me, inviting me to join him on the dancefloor. This work, which contains a sketch of a self-portrait, also includes a written reflection regarding death as life’s greatest adventure. I have always been drawn to mystery, and none is greater than death. For me, triumphing over death means not being afraid of it.
Question: OCHENTA Y SEIS also includes a work about Arthur Rimbaud. Was this a pending homage?
Answer: There are homages to several authors that I still have pending. One is to illustrate Gargantua and Pantagruel –my homage to Rabelais—which I began to do in the late seventies but then left unfinished. Currently, I had the desire to render homage to Rimbaud because I think it’s extraordinary that an 18-year old adolescent has become the great poet of his century, and also of the 20th and 21st centuries. There are times when I am amazed by the grandeur an adolescent’s soul is capable of. Lautréamont is another example of this.
Among the many paradoxes of memory, you might say, I admire “adolescent maturity” when that adolescence is brilliant. What I am referring to with this oxymoron is an intuition regarding the “wholeness” of life. That is the reason why I rendered this homage to Rimbaud.
Question: When you talk about your artistic working process, why do you refer to Rimbaud’s phrase: “I is another”?
Answer: Nietzsche made a similar statement: “I am one thing, my writings are another”. What is the meaning of this difference between the self and the self that comes into being in formulating something? I do not believe that art is an expression of the self. The self is gradually revealed, it comes about as something absolutely unexpected. What you make is not what you know about yourself, but what is unexpected within, and that is what artistic creation—of whatever kind (including the philosophical)—is. It is a mirror that reveals to you the image of the secret that lies within.
Question: Over the course of your art career, you have shared the creative task with others. The Noé + Experiencias colectivas (Noé + Group Experiences) exhibition, which you had in 1965, and the works you’ve done with Eduardo Stupía are significant examples of this. In this show, collaboration with your collaborators (the redundancy is worthwhile) and your daughter, Paula, is highlighted. Taking the play on words a bit further: One is with others?
Answer: I love dialog and conversation. When you converse with someone, it’s like a boat that moves in several directions; you begin talking about one thing and wind up with something else. It resembles the secret conversation you have with yourself. It’s very interesting when it is no longer a conversation with the other about yourself, but is truly with the other, and therefore, that other challenges you or complements you. For example, if I am working with ceramics with Natalia Revale, she transmits experience with ceramics to me that I lack, and then, I enter into dialog with her proposals and solutions for things that I, on the other hand, also propose. With Cecilia Ivanchevich, the challenge is her exploration with light and how what I am doing might intersect with that search. In the case of Paula Noé Murphy (my daughter), I am interested in what she has been developing very recently: ephemeral works made on the ground and then photographed and printed, then continued to be worked with drawing and painting. She makes works on top of these records of other works. I proposed to make a version of my own working on one of these photographs. Collaborating with them means entering into a dialog with their explorations.
Question: In this exhibition, OCHENTA Y SEIS, there are references to the current political, social and economic situation. What is your relationship with politics and politicians?
Answer: Politics is one thing and politicians are quite another. I believe that everything that has to do with a particular time’s consciousness is politics. Art is political even though it does not touch on political themes. It is political because it always interprets its time. Picasso’s work in its entirety is political, not just Guernica. I believe that the destiny of each individual’s artistic working process is interrelated with the destiny of the culture to which that person pertains. Culture is not solely a phenomenon of the living rooms of the elite. Culture is the destiny of an entire people.
Question: The piece ¿A dónde me han traído? (Where Have You Brought Me?) makes a powerful impact. What do you imagine the world will be like for new generations?
Answer: I understand the desperation of a young 16 year-old girl who has become the world leader in terms of this planet’s survival. It is discovering what is coming toward us quickly. This is why I’d like to know what will become of this world by the end of this century. ¿A dónde me han traído? is the question that an infant asks him or herself when faced with the world’s enormous chaos. But when I name chaos, I’m not talking about disorder, but about what is perpetually unforeseen. Order and disorder are only small anecdotes within this process.
Question: Why do you consider yourself a skeptical optimist?
Answer: I want to be an optimist, but am really a skeptic. You have to be an optimist because otherwise, you fall into utter decadence. That is, if you let yourself be swept up in skepticism, it turns you into a pessimist and pessimism is vital suicide. Since you want to continue living, you have to be an optimist, even when you are truly skeptical about that optimism. We are contradictory beings, and I believe that to be the reason behind my tendency to employ oxymorons. Life is one big oxymoron.
Question: At eighty-six, how do you feel?
Answer: The moment I am living now is my last artistic phase. Titian, Monet, Hokusai, Matisse and many others made their best work during their final years. I don’t want to compare myself with them, but they are a great example of why I want to do my best work now.