Antonio Muntadas and the Media Landscape

A catalogue essay and interview

Meditating on Art and Life in the Information Age

Catalogue essay for Des/Aparicions, Centre d'Art Santa Monica, Barcelona, 1996

Talking about plans for his current Des/Aparitions exhibition, Antoni Muntadas observed that
"creating a useful structure is the creative aspect of the work." He was referring both to the
production of specific artworks and to the economic exigencies of the life of an artist; or--to put it
another way--to the connectedness of art and life. This is the principal subject of my essay. But I
also invoke Muntadas's comment because it stimulated my thinking about catalogue-writing itself:
its nature and its inherent (ideological) assumptions about the writer's objectivity and the
presenting institution's authority, all embodied in a seamless flow of rhetoric. Then there's the
matter of the essay's possible structure. Pondering Muntadas's over-all project--the examination or
deconstruction of contemporary life in what he terms the media landscape--I wondered what sort
of form or structure might do justice to his broad concerns and my obliquely-angled subject.

Writing and installation-art-making could hardly be more different. The installation viewer takes in
a number of sights in an unprogrammed sequence. They frequently encompass more than just
views of objects or series of objects. The objects themselves may be augmented by sound,
comprise works in varied (non-object) media such as projections, and be presented within a
specific architectural, historical and autobiographical context that constitutes part of the site-
specific installation's meaning. Art is the most complex form of knowledge.

Catalogue writing, by contrast, tends to be linear--discursive, historical, and/or promotional. After a

decade of the so-called institutional critique in the art world, the catalogue remains its last, largely
unexamined product. Muntadas's practice of inviting several writers to discuss varied aspects of
his work and create wide-ranging commentary about it is one logical response to the hagiography
and obscurantism usually enshrined in the museum catalogue. But even these results frequently
remain rather specialized and can seem suited for an audience exclusively comprised of
specialists.

What I am writing is less an essay than a meditation. The former suggests an argument, the latter
a more personal response to issues inside and outside of the work, including the citation of
questions that cannot presently be answered. (Long live subjectivity!) I am drawn to Muntadas's
work, in part, for its rigorously critical and analytical bent, its progressive world view. "Criticism
must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny,
domination and abuse," wrote historian Edward Said. "Its social goals are noncoercive knowledge
produced in the interests of human freedom." I share Said's belief, which should prick the
conscience of many writers. It is also an apt descriptor of Muntadas's art.

***

In the 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg famously announced his desire to locate his aesthetic in the
"gap between art and life." Two decades later Muntadas coined the ideogram or visual
emblem arte = vida, which might be translated as "art into life and life into art." But where
Rauschenberg saw a distinction between art and life, Muntadas saw their interpenetration. This
interest in energies, in the dynamic and reciprocal connection between art and life, may be the
chief link between Muntadas's early inclination to be an engineer and his later decision to become
an artist.

It is the historian's commonplace that we are all products of our time; that is, our socio-political
moment. Muntadas's expansive interest in what was previously the province of life, rather than the
visual arts, could not have been enacted prior to the late 1960s and the advent of conceptual art.
In conceptual art, the cultivation of an idea--rather than the production of an object--drives the
creative process. Conceptualists reacted against the narrowness of art discourse as embodied in
the increasingly commercialized art world of the 1960s and the formalism of postwar art. In 1971,
Muntadas (until then a painter) wrote on the occasion of a Madrid exhibition, "The picture as such
exhausts its own function." (At precisely the same moment, the American conceptualist Douglas
Huebler noted that "the world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any
more.") Muntadas went on to suggest that the aggressively marketed art object ought to be
replaced by works that are more open, more demanding, more educational, more interactive (in
today's parlance), and more life-embracing.

To many artists of the late sixties, cultural ferment seemed to be taking place not in the studio, but
in the streets. The birth of conceptualism coincided with the Vietnam War, the rise of women's,
gay and black liberation movements, and the emergence of the counterculture. Happenings
pioneer Allan Kaprow wondered how art might compete with compelling spectacles like the first,
manned moon landing of 1969. Experience became the order of the day, rather than definitions or
interpretations of it. Ironically, by focusing on matters of presentation, reception and analysis,
conceptual artists engaged in more theorizing than art critics and art historians. But it was called
self-criticism then.

In Muntadas's work, the erosion of conventional disciplinary boundaries--or introduction of non-art

methods--began as early as 1971 with the appearance of a sort of sociological survey prompted by
an homage to Picasso staged at Galeria Aquitania in Barcelona. (Those "surveyed" were
encouraged, among other things, to send artist-supplied postcards to the Spanish master
regarding his exile.) Muntadas's aims must have seemed as perplexing to art viewers as the poll
targeting New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller's support for the Vietnam War, which Hans Haacke
conducted as part of the Information exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970. (Like the
events of 1968, or fluxus art of the early sixties, conceptualism was an international modus
operandi.)

Muntadas first employed arte = vida in 1973, when he stamped it on television screens, windows
and mirrors in Barcelona and New York. More than a year later, it became the title of his second
solo show at the Galeria Vandres in Madrid in December, 1974. In the interim, he'd created a
situation and a work which embodied the ideas of both arte vida and conceptual art itself.

In July, 1974, Muntadas organized a workshop with Bill Creston in the Sala Vincon in Barcelona. Its
purpose--in a country with only a single, official television channel--was to introduce architects,
designers, filmmakers and others interested in alternative media and information sources to the
new, portable video technology that promised to democratize video production. The same month,
he initiated a related project called Cadaques Canal Local, in the nearby resort town of Cadaques.
This channel offered programming produced by Muntadas and his collaborators. Their local news
reports and interviews were then shown at sunset in public places like the Casino and other bars
and cafés. It was a radical replacement of centralized television programming produced by the
nationalistic TVE in favor of community programming. Cadaques' local channel was the first
television outlet of its kind in Spain. (Muntadas employed a similar method two years later in a
piece called Barcelona Distrito Uno, which examined ideas of locale and community in a changing
neighborhood.)

Viewers unfamiliar with conceptual art may find the designation of Cadaques Canal Local as art
troubling. Is it not, after all, an example of media activism? Or an important episode in the history
of mass media in Spain? It is both these things and art, too. As Muntadas recently noted, "In the
middle of the seventies, I realized that most of my work is located in a territory that in particular
aspects can be understood by artworld people or communications people or social scientists. But
it's rare to have a dialogue with someone who understands the whole proposition."
By working outside the traditional domain of aesthetic production, many conceptualists blurred the
boundaries between art and non-art--i.e. life. In the late seventies Muntadas, reflecting on his
practice, observed that "In order to provide alternatives [to the status quo] we must be more
objective, and this can only be achieved by combining the contributions of different people and
different disciplines." Conceptual art might take socially engaged forms like Cadaques Canal Local,
which exemplified Hans Haacke's 1971 admonition to "think in terms of systems: the production of
systems, the interference with and the exposure of existing systems." (Muntadas's and Haacke's
straightforward approach seems more European than American, echoing Joseph Beuys' 1969
statement that "to be a teacher is my greatest work of art.")

Some conceptualists--operating within non-art systems--produced nearly invisible artworks.

Consider Les Levine's Canadian-Kosher restaurant in New York or Bonnie Sherk's Farm in San
Francisco, a park-like, educational and recreational center. To many viewers, such works may not
register as art. In order to continue attracting visitors, they must effectively function as restaurant
or park (or local television channel.) They also embody conceptualism's opposition to modernism's
exclusive, either/or reductionism and insistence on so-called aesthetic purity. Their opposition to
these fundamental tenets of modernism made conceptual artists some of the first postmodernists.
(This impurity is the one of the few aspects of postmodernism with which Muntadas identifies; it
was the intellectual raison d'etre for his exhibition Hibridos, at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in
1988.)

To function as art, works like Levine's and Sherk's and Muntadas's required the complicity of
viewers and writers to "complete" them. In the late seventies Muntadas announced his belief in
"different levels of interpretation," arising from perceptual, conceptual and cultural differences. "I
like to...pose questions and deflate absolute artistic values." Conceptualism tell us that meaning is
something an audience arrives at, as much as something an artist produces.

***

Of course, much of Muntadas's art is not invisible. If it were, he could never have made a career in
the art world. Ironically, many of the most successful conceptualists--On Kawara, Lawrence
Weiner, Richard Long and Daniel Buren, among them--utilize a surprisingly narrow range of
imagery, thinking, and even visual style. But for Muntadas, style is almost irrelevant. (Visual
appearance and style are not synonyms.) It is simply an outgrowth of suitability or
appropriateness. What characterizes his work is not its signature appearance, but a constellation
of recurrent themes, approaches, strategies and ongoing discourse.

His over-arching project--the analysis of what he's termed the media landscape--comprises an
investigation of nothing less than the creation (or mediation) of contemporary consciousness by
powerful individuals and institutions, and by economically- and culturally-determined forms and
forces that we are likely to take for granted. These range from fundamentalist religious figures to
the values and practices that govern the art world, and from the ideologically-determined
construction of "history" to the disappearance of public space. But commentary devoted to an
artwork by Muntadas cannot be said to be merely "about" a particular subject. (As far back as the
1964 essay Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag warned against the now-ubiquitous style of art
criticism--and art making--that "By reducing art to its content and then interpreting that...tames
the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable.")

Consider The Board Room (1988). This evocation of telegenic religious figures including the Pope,
Ayatollah Khomeini, as well as a bevy of Christian televangelists, was also an investigation of
architectural space and religious imagery. It metaphorically implied the shared values of the
corporation and institutionalized religion, emphasized by the 13 TV-headed figures gathering in a
cabal reminiscent of the Last Supper. The drone of their recorded voices emanating from tiny, TV-
monitors implanted in photos of their faces was hypnotically seductive; an installation without
sound would have been far less intriguing.

Representations of architectural spaces and the generic institutions or social policy associated with
them have become an important aspect of Muntadas's work of the eighties and nineties. Examples
include Stadium (1989), an investigation of the architectural form and the nature of spectacle; City
Museum (1991-95), an analysis of the commodification of history and the nature of contemporary
tourism; and Press Conference Room (1991), an evocation--and interrogation--of celebrity and
future-speak in the media age. These architecture-themed installations are art and something else
as well: The Stadium, for instance, is both an artwork and an architectural exhibition, although
some would deny its status as the latter because it seems too subjective. It makes no pretense of
objectivity or global reach, as if objectivity could be precisely defined in such a situation.
(Muntadas explicitly invoked this issue in 1978 in On Subjectivity, a work surveying the varied,
cross-cultural responses of people to fifty images culled from Life magazine.)

A longer list of installations and videotapes relate to the cultural place and effects of mass media.
It includes: On Subjectivity (1978); Between the Lines (1979); La Television (1980); Media Eyes
(1981); Watching the Press/Reading Television (1981); Media Ecology Ads (1982); Media
Sites/Media Monuments (1982); Credits (1984); Political Advertisement (1984); This is Not an
Advertisement (1985). This list might be expanded to include The Press Conference Room and The
Board Room, previously considered as architectural installations. But classification is hardly the
point here. What's especially interesting about Muntadas's work is its range, which in this case
encompasses an investigation of investigative news reporting itself (Between the Lines) and the
wickedly witty designation of Media Sites/Media Monuments, such as the locations of historic
demonstrations that those in power would rather forget. Media-related works that are so diverse in
tone, outlook and approach mingle in the memory, like an anthology of written works composed of
essays, memoirs, and fiction.

Significantly, the media installations do not primarily derive from Muntadas's longstanding interest
in the media and media theory, just as the architectural installations (Muntadas thinks of them as
"life-sized maquettes") do not derive from his burgeoning interest in architectural history and
urban policy. All of this artist's work is rooted in a desire to reveal the nature of contemporary,
media-suffused existence; to show us the way things are. To do this Muntadas characteristically
employs a method familiar from the history of rhetoric and literature (the drama and the novel),
rather than the history of art. It is based on dualities and the juxtaposition of opposites. The first
and most important is the meta-tension between art and life, followed by other dialectically
related concepts including public/private, reality/media, and visibility/invisibility.

Such overt oppositions have been fruitfully mined in installations beginning with
Emision/Recepcion in the Arte = Vida show in 1974, which contrasts slides of broadcast television
with slides of viewers in public and private spaces containing TV sets receiving those images.
Another series of installations, Standard/Specific (1988-89), juxtaposes the culturally-specific,
historical signage of a particular city with the new, multi-national visual language of the credit card
visible in every city. While Muntadas's dialectical probings are rarely as explicit as in these works
they are virtually always present.

***

Muntadas's current exhibition is called Des/Aparitions. It is linked to a number of earlier shows on

the themes of visibility and absence. Credits (1984), a videotape and installation, showcased
credits from films and television programs, something on which we invariably fail to focus. But for
Muntadas, the issues raised were more complex. He also intended the credits as evidence of
power structures and institutional heirarchies awaiting representation and decoding.
In Exposicion (or Exhibition), produced a year later, he presented a critique of institutional
authority and its relationship to the "selling" of art. Blank, framed canvases, empty vitrines, video
monitors showing only "snow," and slide projectors projecting nothing but light suggested that the
generic art-product need only be inserted into the literal and figurative (or conceptual) frames. But
viewed from another perspective, the brightly lit blank canvases or light-emitting slide projectors
offer viewers the haunting visual experience of nearly palpable light. Such experiences remind us
that nothing is absolute, everything exists in relation to something else--first and foremost the
dualistic relationships Muntadas invokes.

Disappearance and absence may be related states of being, but they aren't synonymous ones.
Disappearance implies willfullness and aggression, while the causes of absence are potentially
more innocent; they encompass passivity and oversight as well as disappearance. The Latin
American transformation of disappear into a transitive verb--referring to those "disappeared" or
kidnapped (and presumably executed) by military regimes in Argentina and elsewhere--conveys
the term's newly sinister connotations.

Des/Aparitions may be Muntadas's most personal show. Presented in his native city of Barcelona,
its centerpiece is a previously unexhibited videotape, TVE: Primer Intento (or Spanish Television:
First Attempt). The tape was commissioned by Television Espanola for Metropolis, its weekly arts-
magazine program, in connection with Muntadas's 1988 exhibition at the Reina Sofia in Madrid.
When the show's producers approached him to do a piece about himself, Muntadas proposed that
he instead produce a work about Television Espanola. Surprisingly--given the deconstructive
nature of his work--his proposal was accepted.

Two years later, the work was finished. In that time, a succession of producers used to three-month
production schedules "lost control" of the piece, Muntadas says. Far slower than Metropolis' usual
frenetic pace, Muntadas's tape ruminates on the history of television in Spain, mostly through
found footage from TVE's archives. A surprisingly untelegenic Generalisimo Franco is seen
castigating the "licentiousness" of the international media. A parade of technological progress
embodied in TVE's expanding arsenal of hardware rolls past. Vintage documentary footage shows
viewers exclaiming about the wonders of television or revealing their addiction to the idiot box.
Visual and audial "static" crackles. It's not a very pretty picture, especially in Muntadas's own
footage of the archive captured in what the artist terms "repetitious pan[oramic shot]s of chaos."
Metropolis rejected the work and never provided Muntadas wih an explanation. "I think it was
disturbing to them," Muntadas speculates. "Because my piece is an image of disorder."

Not living in Spain, he felt that it was inappropriate to make a public issue of the rejection. Instead
he responded to this incident of censorship with a new work, The File Room. This electronic
archive, which is located on the Internet's World Wide Web, documents the history of cultural and
social censorship since the ancient Greeks. Muntadas's experience with Television Espanola
supplied the motive for the piece; it was also the first case history recorded on the archive.

Censorship--one type of disappearance--is hard to define. Writing about The File Room in another
context, I noted that "For some of us, moving a controversial artwork from a prominent to an
obscure place in an exhibition hall fits the bill. But what about a juried show at a mall that excludes
nudes? Or an art institution that never shows the work of artists of color? And let's not even
mention self-censorship." Whether TVE's rejection of Muntadas's tape was legitimate editorial
control or censorship may be difficult to determine. But when all the facts are known--which is
rare--censorship is virtually always characterized by an abuse of power.

The history of art mirrors the history of political power. The outrage that modern artists like
Gustave Courbet provoked was frequently caused by the perceived unsavoriness of their
previously unrepresented subjects. (Such class values were similarly expressed centuries ago
when Caravaggio depicted the Madonna with decidedly working-class, dirty feet.) Muntadas's work
not only refers to power but occasionally even attempts to redistribute it. (The File Room, for
instance, catalogs the grievances of ancient Athenians and gives voice to those today who might
not otherwise be heard.) Art and life have always been difficult to separate. Representation is
power; that is, both the ability to represent and the good fortune to be considered worthy of
representation. By giving form to what's disappeared, The File Room reminds us--above all--that
artmaking remains an ethical act.

Produced in conjunction with Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago and numerous contributors, The
File Room initially comprised nearly 400 entries. It now boasts approximately 5000, thanks to the
contributions of some of the site's 200 daily visitors. Incidents of censorship are accessible via four
categories: geographic location (e.g. Europe); date (e.g. 1900-25); medium (e.g. film or public art);
and grounds for censorship (e.g. behavior, religious, or sexual/gender orientation.) The archive's
reach is especially broad when it comes to 20th century incidents. Sometimes stranger than
fiction, they include the World War I-era internment of Carl Muck, the Boston Symphony Orchestra
conductor who was jailed in 1918 for refusing to play the national anthem, and the prohibition of
Isadora Duncan from performing in Boston after making pro-communist remarks and "expos[ing]
her body" in a 1922 performance there. More recent offenses include Jordan's refusal to license
Schindler's List because of its pro-Jewish sympathies, the Phillipines' censoring of the same film for
sexual content(!), and the banning of the Simon & Garfunkel song Cecilia by the wife of a
dictatorial, African leader.

The fastest growing section of the interactive data base is likely to be the one devoted to current,
Internet-related abuses. A recent posting protested the alleged harrassment of America Online
users for violating the service's vague prohibitions against "vulgar language" or explicit sex talk.
Since then, Compuserve has blocked worldwide access to more than 200 Internet discussion
groups following a German federal prosecutor's statement that the material may be pornographic,
while T-Online service (Deutsche Telekom) blocked access to the Web site of a Canadian neo-Nazi
after German prosecutors warned the company that it was investigating whether the online
service provider was "helping to incite racial hatred." Such policies contrast sharply with the
privacy we more-or-less take for granted when making phone calls.

Muntadas's File Room currently leads a double life on-line as an artwork (to those who recognize it
as such) and as an interactive data base. Conceptual artists like Muntadas not only blur the
boundary separating non-art from art, but question conventional approaches to duration, as in
videotapes like the leisurely-paced TVE: Primer Intento. What will happen, over time, to The File
Room? Ironically The File Room as data base has acquired commercial value that information-
oriented artworks of the seventies could never have possessed. In an era in which public and
private institutions are facilitating the "privatization" of all sorts of information, it is this innocuous-
sounding privatization of information that poses one of today's biggest threats to free expression.

The File Room also leads another kind of double life: In addition to the archive's on-line status, the
project was also conceived as an installation, which debuted in May, 1994 at the Chicago Cultural
Center. It was seen there by 80,000 visitors, and was shown later in on-line and installation
formats in Lyon and in stripped-down installation form (that is, an accessible computer terminal in
a gallery) in Cascais, Leipzig and Bucharest. In his introductory notes to the project, Muntadas
referred to it--à la Joseph Beuys--as a "social sculpture" that "gains its meaning through a group
effort of individuals, organizations, and institutions." The archive offers citizens of formerly
totalitarian societies a place to anonymously document offenses commited by past regimes. It is
also reminiscent of the liberatingly subversive impact of mail art on Iron Curtain-shrouded Eastern
Europe 25 years ago.
The conceptual resemblance between mail art--one of many forms of information- and media art--
and the work of some of today's on-line artists is far from coincidental. In the case of Muntadas
and artist-peers like Peter D'Agostino and Douglas Davis, working on-line is simply a way of
pursuing their long-time interests in communication systems and the decentralization of power.
Defying the (fluid) categorizations of media and architectural installations I invoked earlier, The
File Room also joins The Board Room and The Stadium in their examination of the power relations
historically embodied in public and private spaces.

At Centre d'Art Santa Monica, Muntadas presents both The File Room (in installation format) and
its catalyst, TVE: Primer Intento. But he intends them only to be two elements in a complex
investigation of disappearances--and appearances. The architectural site itself is rich in history,
including the patriotic construction of Spanish history. Originally the convent of Santa Monica, the
building became a journalism school in 1955 during the censorious Franco regime and the set for
the feature film Escuela de Periodismo (1956), which glamorizes the field of journalism. (Then the
building lay fallow until 1987, when it opened as an art center.) This film, too, will be periodically
shown during the exhibition in a space in which the seats will be spotlit when the film is not being
screened. Now you see it, now you don't.

Light will be one of the artist's chief methods of upending conventional meaning. Architectural
details will be brightly lit--jointly "framing" an 18th century wall, an adjacent industrial-era fire
extinguisher, and a postmodern room divider, for instance. Projected slides will feature images of
historical art and artifacts from the building, newspaper front pages, and relevant books like Paul
Virilio's Esthetique de la Disapparition. Video projections will transform the second story windows
(when seen from the courtyard below) into traditional sites of power through ghostly images of
public personalities, apparently "orating" from the balcony-sites so often associated with the
articulation of political and religious dogma. Continually turned on and off, the varied light sources
will not only dramatically affect visibility--appearance and disappearance--but our experience of
time as well. The manipulation--or rationing--of light is a reminder of just how many variables
determine our art (and non-art) experiences.

Writing before this exhibition is installed--like most catalogue writers--I can only imagine the Kafka-
esque sounding Des/Aparitions. Contemplating Muntadas's complex and theatrical ideas about a
constantly changing exhibition that challenges conventional notions of space, time, museum- (and
even church-) going, I suspect this exhibition will be one of Muntadas's most provocative and
poetic efforts. Anxiety reigns as we slouch toward the millenium. (The 20th century is dead, long
live the 20th century!) In a world fearful of the future and ambivalent about the contested
meanings of the recent past, what could be a more resonant organizing-metaphor than
disappearance?

Censor Sensibility: Antoni Muntadas on the "Media Landscape"

The Media Channel, www.mediachannel.org/arts/perspectives/dir/index.html, May 2000

The anchor of the Media Channel's Media Arts section is "The File Room," artist Antoni Muntadas's
interactive archive of two millennia of social and cultural censorship. It's a simultaneous artwork,
database, and activist tool that chronicles hundreds of cases of perceived censorship, which have
sometimes, but not always, been covered in the media or other public forums. Any visitor to "The
File Room" can add new cases of censorship to the database by filling out a simple online form. Or
search the site by geography, subject matter, medium or time period. The unsettling experience of
visiting "The File Room" not only raises questions about the character of censorship itself, but
offers a repository, or hidden history, of thwarted expression.
For the past three decades, the overarching theme of Muntadas's work has been the analysis of
what he's termed the "media landscape." Put another way, he's embarked on nothing less than an
investigation of contemporary consciousness as created by powerful individuals and institutions,
an exploration of the economically--and culturally--determined forms and forces that we are likely
to take for granted. His subjects range from fundamentalist religious figures to the ritualistic
nature of political TV ads, from the ideologically-determined construction of "history" to the
disappearance of public space. On the occasion of Muntadas's first New York shows in five years,
MediaChannel took the opportunity to chat with the Barcelona-born, New York-based artist about
his twin exhibitions and about "The File Room."

The Kent Gallery houses "The Nap/La Siesta/Dutje," a video installation featuring footage from
leftist Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens projected across a corner of the gallery containing a shrouded
easy chair; and "The Meetings," a series of unframed, blueprint format drawings of generic
business encounters in the age of the Nasdaq. At Crosby Street Project Space, Muntadas presents
"On Translation: El Aplauso," a large-scale video-installation triptych. Black-and-white news photos
of political violence are flanked by color, video footage of anonymous audiences seated in an
auditorium and applauding, resulting in a surreal spectacle that oddly smacks of the everyday.

The shows--around the corner from one another in Soho, New York City, at Kent Gallery, 67 Prince
St., and Crosby Street Project Space, 113 Crosby St.--are up through May 27. (For more on
Muntadas's projects see Fundación Telefónica.)

- Robert Atkins, Media Arts Editor.

Robert Atkins: The title of "The Nap" made me first think about Goya's "The Sleep of Reason
Produces Monsters." Are nap and sleep the same word in Spanish, or am I totally off track?

Antoni Muntadas: Nap and sleep are two different words and concepts. So in terms of Goya, it's
not a literal translation of his title. "The Nap/La Siesta/Dutje" is the complete title for the work, and
I had many motivations for it. The project began with an invitation to several artists and
filmmakers from the Netherlands Film Museum and the Joris Ivens Foundation. We spent four days
in Amsterdam viewing all of Ivens' films and discussing them with Ivens scholars. The intention
was to provoke and solicit projects from us, and then maybe they would produce them.

RA: Had you known Ivens's films before?

AM: I was familiar and sympathetic with some of Ivens' work--the experimental ones like "Rain"
and some of those about the tradition of the political documentary, Dziga Vertof ... ideological
involvement or utopias, such as "Borinage." Obviously I knew "Spanish Earth," which is about the
Spanish Civil War, and then there are the films made in Russia, Cuba and China.

RA: And all the footage in your installation comes from Ivens's films?

AM: Yes, I mainly chose ones of movement activity, labor and war, and I juxtapose those with
images I made in New York. But during the sessions in Amsterdam I began to be very curious
about the work's more personal aspects: the intensity of production; travel as a central component
of Ivens's projects and life; and the commitment the projects demanded--including the energy
needed just to carry on several projects in various places linked only by hope and his ideological
beliefs ... All this activity is impossible without some moments of rest; that's where the metaphor
of "la siesta" comes in. Ivens' wife even assured me he took one every day.

I also wanted to juxtapose realities and fiction, activity and passivity, moving images and static
scenes, and sound with silence. This installation comes out of a thought that's never really
manifested itself in my work before, that is: "Every work of art is always autobiographical." From
there, you can draw your own conclusions--Goya included!

RA: The chair in the gallery is a nice place for a siesta. It's so archetypal, such a symbol of
domesticity. Matisse said art should be comfortable like an easy chair, but Warhol's best works
may be his chilling images of the electric chair.

AM: For me, it's a passive element in a silent corner of the gallery. It's a quiet and removed space
that can be used to rest ... to pause ... to dream. At the film museum in Amsterdam, I chose to
present the work in the curator's office, a sort of private space where it was surrounded by papers
and films and the like.

RA: "El Aplauso" is part of the "On Translation" series. Can you briefly describe that series?

AM: "On Translation" started in 1995 with "On Translation: the Pavilion" in Helsinki. Since then I've
produced 18 different extensions of the concept. To me translation suggests interpretation in the
largest sense, including the audience's reception to art and social conditions. "On Translation: The
Audience" (in Rotterdam) and "On Translation: El Aplauso" (Bogota) are the most recent ones. All
of them explore aspects of different situations I try to contextualize. They can--and have--taken
many forms and mediums and approaches.

RA: "El Aplauso" made me smile. It was affirming to enter the gallery; I thought of Sally Field
getting up at the Oscars and saying: "You like me. You really like me." How did audiences in
Colombia, in the midst of acute political crisis, respond?

AM: Well, for me it's a pretty sad situation: the applause as an extreme and cynical representation
of an accepted condition. But this is the reality, and it's not just in Colombia. The mainstream
media has become a kind of translation of violence. I mean this in many senses: military, political,
economic, ecological, cultural. And I hope the work points to our passivity, complicity and denial in
this ritualistic process. As social beings we applaud. At various times we are actor, viewer and
participant.

RA: Most of your work seems to reflect global social issues and concerns. Do you ever deal with
local mass media as opposed to globalizing forms?

AM: Yes, for example, in the "Standard/Specific" project. It deals with the transformation of the
urban landscape. I juxtapose signs from stores, factories, and marquees with international credit-
card logos on glass doors. But you're right, most of the times it starts local and goes global. ...

RA: It's that universality, that abstract or global quality that makes your work accessible to people
around the world, I think. For instance, in your third piece here in New York--"Meetings," a series of
drawings rather than projected video--you deal with abstracted images or situations. These are not
specific meetings, like the Yalta Conference. They clearly suggest business meetings rather than
some sort of political forum, but the focus is on processes, the forms of discourse ...

AM: These drawings on inexpensive blueprint format are a kind of X-ray of generic, archival
photographs. Their reduction to lines and the elimination of the photographic detail of the sources
emphasizes the relationships between people, space and positions. That generic quality also
underlines the meeting as a decision-making process where most of the decisions are already
made ahead of time. So it's nothing more than the marketing strategies and so on. The subjects of
these drawings are meetings in the realms of architecture, city planning, corporate world, media.
As you see there's no information here, just the outline of blank pages, empty pads, white books.
So it's not about what they--or we--discuss, but rather how.
RA: "The File Room," your archive of social and cultural censorship that's housed here on the
Media Channel's server, focuses less on the multiplicity of "hows" leading to censorship and,
instead, showcase real cases of censorship, in the most specific, local terms possible.

AM: The intention and needs of the project was--and remains--so different. We can't ever consider
censorship a closed matter. It's alive and well, sadly enough. And the interactive part offers the
possibility to exorcise our frustration and apparent powerlessness against censorship and activate
the information by making it accessible. That makes the archive structure a necessity for
organization and accessibility.

RA: Being interactive, "The File Room" also seems the most audience-dependent of your works--no
audience means no cases in the archive. It also seems to be among the most successful of digital-
era, interactive artworks, at least given the acclaim and audience involvement. How do you feel
about this interactive direction in art? Does interactivity turn art theory into practice?

AM: Now we use the term "interactivity," while in the sixties we talked about audience
"participation." "Interactivity" implies more highly developed technology. But in terms of meaning,
the real force is the generosity of audiences.

RA: So the question is how to harness that?

AM: Yes. The problem has always been combating passivity.

RA: No easy task, given the mainstream media's interest in encouraging it. Thank you!