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Carlos Capelán in conversation with Gavin Jantjes, in Graz, 21 September 1996 |
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Gavin Jantjes:
In one of your installations you used a kitsch object which has
on it the familiar phrase "mi casa es tu casa", "My house is your
house". Somehow that encapsulates the notion of home and opens up
your work to a world audience. It's a welcoming sign. But where
is home for you? Carlos Capelán: Home is where
I have all these memories from my childhood, so home is memory.
Secondly, home is where I have my family, my wife and my kids, it's
also my studio and a bunch of people I use to communicate with.
Home is a dream, it is an abstraction, this funny place called Latin
America or this other funny place called Scandinavia. All of these
together, and each one by itself, make home. Your installations
are built in the same manner one constructs a dwelling. You lay
foundations, mark the space, divide it into sections where you then
place objects. The space and the objects define something for you.
It becomes a living space. It's like building another kind of home.
When I started showing my work in Sweden,
I started like my contemporaries in the seventies. I pretended that
I was dealing with art and not with local identity. At the beginning
everything went very well, but then after some years people up there
started putting pressure on me. They said, "Listen, you're too good
to be a Latin American artist, you should change your name. Capelán
is okay, but Carlos is wrong". Suddenly I became conscious of this
other question which was never mentioned at art school - the question
of context, and it took several years of reflection to know what
to do about it. You've mentioned the
importance of trying to create a context for yourself through the
method of installation. There is a sense of "raquachismo" in the
way you create these installations. Tomas Ybarra-Frausto
2
talks about "raquachismo" as "Chicano style",
but its importance is that it subverts convention in order to create
a context, and in this case an identity context for Chicanos. Now
I'm not saying your work is Chicano, but there seems to be a necessity
to create a context, to stamp your cultural presence on the space.
That is true. The only thing is that within
Chicano aesthetics there is a component of exoticism. It's the kitsch,
the fantasy, the colours, and all these weird objects that they
are using. I'm working within something that, with a certain sense
of humor, I call "ethno-technique". I'm using objects from everyday
life, chairs, lamps and carpets, all subjects belonging to Western
European culture. There's nothing non-European or non-Western in
all the subjects I'm using. Maybe the way I'm presenting it is different.
If I try to "ethnify" my work, I'm doing it from this point of view.
In your installations
you relocate, yourself and your viewer. There is a dichotomy to
yourself which is about being in Europe and not from Europe, being
at home yet away from home. Location seems to be a very important
part of your work. Yes, but I am definitely not an essentialist,
I believe that identity is a matter of strategies not a matter of
essence. Now these strategies could work in a social context, in
a social structure that could take years to create. They could also
work on a more individual personal level. You can change and switch
strategies from one day to another or several times on the same
day or on the same occasion. Identities are always about negotiating
something and relating yourself to a context. This constant shifting
of ground implies movement, which is part of the inscription in
your work. Artists like yourself are often classified in three categories.
You are either an immigrant, an exile or a nomad, and between those
classifications there seems to be no difference. Exile is about
looking back to a glorious past and the migrant is someone who is
in a state of arriving in an incomprehensible present, while the
nomad uses strategies to infiltrate, collapse, and re-inscribe their
own particularities in the new space before moving on. Do you see
yourself in a nomadic situation? I see myself in both situations. I recognise
the exile within me. Memory plays an important place in my life
not because of nostalgia at all but in order to face reality here.
Through memory you refer your actions to what you know about your
cousins, and all the people that you grew up with etc. The Trotskyist
strategy of penetrating the system in order to gain some power,
possibly gives a cynical touch to what I'm doing. I'm not defined
as a cynic, but I do believe that without a touch of cynicism and
even humour you can't survive these days. To me your installations
function like a theatrical set. I become audience and you are the
director of the theatrical scene. It makes me a voyeur. I look in
but as I look, there's a certain sense of recognition of myself
in what I see. Your memories spark off memories within me. You manipulate,
and I react. Well, I really don't want to be authoritarian.
I don't want you to react this way. But I'm putting you in a situation
where you should be able to make your own decisions. I try to confront
you with very personal stuff which is my world, yet I use objects
you will recognise from your own experience - the chairs, the lamps,
are all things you know. At the same time, I'm twisting all these
objects, just a little bit. The lamps are covered with mud, and
making these small packages with leaves and stuff creates a tension
that I like very much. What I'm very tired of, is this old hegemonic
project of the mainstream artist creating one object which contains
the whole creation, the whole universe, and there is only one way
interpreting this object. I'm working with several levels of information,
the emotional, the intellectual, small details like b-scale drawings.
I have several hooks in this strategy because I can't imagine having
one kind of public, one kind of spectator, for my work. I'm trying
to address different kinds of people with different kinds of experiences
and information. There are layers of information in these installations
that are against authoritarianism. Up to a certain point I think
it's like a movie set. But I work with real objects and this is
another tension which interests me. What is fake and what is real?
I mean who cares. The situation of being in the installation and
your decisions are real, this is paramount. The work is done thinking
about and facing the spectator, definitely. The spectator is between
theatricality and reality. Your work is imbued with this tension.
I understand this re-inscription of the space as you making your
mark. Yet this mark, the installation, seems always to focus on
humanity. Is your aim to return us to humanity? Absolutely. I don't pay any attention to
originality. I'm not trying to be original and I don't give so much
for the artwork. For me the process is the main thing. I'm trying
to re-organise things which are already there. I am offering us
a chance to re-write history, to re-read history, to re-interpret
history, to relate ourselves to this context. The periphery is not
only the geographical periphery, it's not just about coming all
the way from Latin America or wherever it is, it's also about belonging
to the tradition of Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Baudelaire and Kafka,
who worked within these kind of margins. I try to imagine myself as a very "primitive"
artist, in the worst sense of that word. I discovered that several
thousand years ago the first humans to live in the South of Africa
used red earth to paint their bodies and the bones of the dead and
the tombs. In the region where they lived there wasn't any red mud,
and they had to go to another place to trade for it. This was the
beginning of trade. Red mud migrated from South to North Africa,
and then on to Asia, Europe even to America. All the so-called "primitive"
cultures used red mud for ritual purposes. I felt that I was forced
to use it in an ironic sense, trying to build primitive-modernist
art. Red mud was the first global aesthetic movement. The red mud
connects me to land art and to ecology. I'm trying to do this with
a touch of humour and self-irony. I'm trying to reconnect. Reconnecting
things is more important than inventing new objects. You describe something
we call internationalism. Today internationalism marks a tentative
place in artistic discourse, a precarious edge for the making of
art. The Western, Eurocentric, hegemonic project you want to step
out of, encroaches on internationalism through the manner it is
discussed in the West. It makes one ask oneself if internationalism
is an abstract way of travelling. We don't really want to go anywhere,
and discover the world, so we imagine foreignness. Do you think
that the way we talk about internationalism could be described as
an abstract form of travelling, a sort of wishful thinking?
Definitely. I think it is a desire, a wish.
I don't believe in these abstract projects. If we are going to use
this word 'internationalism' we should use it in the same sense
that we use the word 'postmodernism'. Postmodernism is not a thing,
it is a situation for some people, and this so-called internationalism,
new internationalism in art, is not a thing, a fact, a project,
nor a theory. It is a situation for some people. We are trying to
get hold of this situation by describing it, and making a thing
out of it. I don't think it's possible, because the world is not
connected in an international network, it's not defined. We receive
new ways of connecting things or passing information and I'm part
of this new phenomenon, and I think it's wonderful. I'm travelling
and meeting all these interesting people for the first time which
was completely impossible ten years ago. I'm against the use of
these notions of new international art. Another notion of internationalism
speaks of it as a discursive space between the polarities of periphery
and centre - internationalism as the bridge connecting polarities.
The artists function as bridge builders in this discursive space.
They are in a sort of no-man's-land, neither at home nor away from
home. They re-inscribe context into an old hegemonic structure to
demonstrate its failure and point to achievements and values which
have been excluded because of their cultural difference. How do
you feel about that? Homi Bhabha, for example, talks about the beyond
as a third space between two polarities. Do you see your art functioning
in this way? I don't see two polarities, I see three or
four or five polarities. I think the situation is much more complex.
Let's pay some attention to this idea of centre and periphery. We
still use these words in their old colonial sense - that the centre
is Europe and America and that the periphery is everybody else.
I agree with Trinh T Minh Ha, the Vietnamese filmmaker, who said
the centre is in the periphery as much as the periphery is in the
centre. Go to Hamburg or New York or Los Angeles, and you'll find
yourself in the middle of the Third World, and then you go to Johannesburg,
Seoul or Buenos Aires, and you are in the First World. I don't believe
in these categories, of first, second and third worlds, but I do
have to deal with the notions of centre and periphery. What we are
seeing today is the struggle between the northern and the southern
hemispheres. You would therefore
disagree with any description of an artist that emphasises their
ethnicity. Well, it still works that way. But it also
works the other way. You can be discriminated against just because
you are a German born in Southern Chile, and then suddenly you are
not a German, you are a Chilean. A black person born and raised
in LA, is an American, and he belongs to this hegemonic structure
and he makes a fantastic career, just because he's American, but
he's black. So, I'm not trying to simplify things, I'm trying to
reveal their complexity, not for the pleasure of it but I think
the situation is very complex. The desire to reduce things to simple
structures, responds to the old colonial heritage of trying to have
a simple version of the world, trying to define others for a specific
set of purposes in order for them to be managed. Are the issues of ethnicity
or national identity, important only if its discourse aims to explode
boundaries, or notions of what a contemporary national identity
could be? In other words, to signal the nation state; to say that
one is Argentine or Chilean or whatever, is important only if it
aims to question both nationality and ethnicity? I don't like dealing with national identity,
but I like dealing with local projects or particular projects with
certain groups of individuals or social groups. There is nothing
like a Uruguayan being. There are many different strategies embedded
in the Uruguayan nation. What I'm trying to say all the time, is
that identity is a matter of strategy and you cannot define this
strategy in simple terms. I'm trying to make all these terms relative.
I am at home in Lund, which is a small town in Scandinavia, and
I feel part of this town. I'm a Lundian artist. I am also from Montevideo,
and I belong the to lower middle class, and to a particular neighbourhood.
Yet I speak with a certain accent, or dialect. You don't have to
learn my dialect but you should respect it as I respect yours. I
am not appealing for an international jet-set mainstream thing.
By which I mean sophisticated people who are going around having
drinks and everybody understands each other and we don't belong
to any local project because we are above all these things. The significance of
what's happening in contemporary visual arts is its re-inscription
of who we are. This is being conducted by people who were once considered
peripheral. They are the ones forcing the so called "centre" to
reassess itself. The notions of neighbourhood, dialect, and group
return Germans, British and Italians to their communities. I see
that as an exciting intervention into the European debate.
Jimmie Durham said that to accept any idea
of ourselves as the subject matter of our art is potentially a trap.
I refuse to do a description of my ethnic self or to represent myself
according to the rules of a hegemonic structure in order to be myself.
I work with the identity of the art object, and if I have to refer
the identity of these books, carpets, drawings and paintings, it
would be to Marcel Duchamp, because that's the reference we have.
We're talking about art. Contemporary art has always been related
to identity, since the Impressionists, since the Renaissance. Now,
suddenly, identity is an issue of ethnicity. Well no, if you want
ethnicity I give you back what you have. These are your chairs,
carpet, and lamps, have them. Today the identity of the work should
be referred to Marcel Duchamp, Christo or to installation art. The most difficult
part of looking at a contemporary art is the question of translation.
Sarat Maharaj 3
suggests that it's not
the same as taking a bag of coins to a bureau de change and swapping
it into another currency, it's always much more than that. He also
implies that the bits one cannot translate, one has to accept as
given. Do you recognise the necessity, for an open-minded acknowledgement
of the untranslatable in order not to repeat the old hegemonic mistakes?
Whether the work is an installation or a
painting, I am always trying to deal with different tongues speaking
at the same time. I never use one language in my installations.
I use several languages, levels of information, and ways of relating
to reality. Different tongues speak in my work and either you translate
or you learn several languages. You cannot learn them all because
this is impossible, but you can learn the languages that really
interest you. Maybe you have to manage three or four or five languages
and these days there are so many people forced to do this. Speaking
in several tongues is a normal situation. People in the old hegemonic
projects used language in one way and this was considered the correct
way. This gave the hegemonic project its power, because they force
everybody else to speak their way. You say your work speaks
in several tongues, sometimes you use your own writing, sometimes
quoted text. When it's quoted it's very often in the original language
of its author, so it could be in Spanish, English, French, Italian,
or Swedish. That's another complexity. Yes this started as a response to a Swedish
critic who felt my work was very convincing because, intellectually
it stood outside Western culture. I decided to use quotations to
compel critics and viewers to do some reading. Most critics read
about art and little else and I'm not solely referring to art in
my work, so I was forced to give them some references. Then the
use of text became a reference to language, because I do believe
that art is a way of organising knowledge, which is very much about
organising language. Language is an open structure and I found
that books are a wonderful symbol for received knowledge. A book
is a wonderful machine. It doesn't work unless you open it and read.
It lays there asleep. Trying to focus on this activity of, transmitting
knowledge through reading, I began placing books into piles with
a stone on the top, writing quotations on the walls, drawing two
hands holding a book, burning books and sealing the ashes in bottles
to preserve them. All of these actions refer to language, which
is the act of reading and receiving information about the world.
Looking at the world, is like reading a book and reading a book
is like looking at a landscape. I also made books that expanded
as you opened them. One book was nine metres long, others looked
like wallets that you carried in your pocket. A book is a meeting
place. Placing rocks on the
books returns us to the issue of location. The books are fixed in
the space, anchored to the ground. We are faced with a text which
we cannot see, which we have to excavate from its anchorage below
the rocks. On the other hand the walls of the space are inscribed
with texts which dispell the notion of 'mother tongues'. The work
offers the idea that today there are only tongues which have been
mixed, overlap and are hidden. Language is hybrid and polyglot,
much more complex than we once believed it to be. Language is constantly evolving. It is a
living organism. This is why I paint over some of the quotations
I've written. You're not able to read them because forgetting is
part of memory. Your drawings inhabit
the space. Sometimes they are on paper in traditional frames. The
subject of your drawings is the human form but disturbingly dismembered.
Hands, heads and torsos float across the wall. I find these drawings
intriguing, what are they about? The main contribution of the West to the
representation of the human body, is portraiture. Separating the
head from the body, became its normal practice. I had the need to
do the opposite, to represent the other part, the body without the
head. Psychology as a landscape is a very important concept. I like
working with all these elements as multiple signifiers or floating
signifiers. The significance of a drawing is that it's a personal
mark, a trace. By repeating these personal drawings, hundreds of
times you demistify the romantic idea of the artist making an original
drawing. Drawing on canvas, on paper, on the walls, in books, on
objects, is like writing without using the common writing symbols.
I do these drawings with Indian ink, to associate it with calligraphy
rather than the practice of the so-called visual arts. Are all your drawings
texts? Yes they are, and all the texts are drawings.
Different versions of reality, definitely. You have participated
in a number of large scale thematic exhibitions and bienales, is
this the arena for a new internationalism? Over the past years we have all these very
interesting so-called international projects. It started with the
Havana Bienale, maybe with the Sao Paulo, but I think the Havana
Bienale was the main focus. Today you have Johannesburg, Istanbul,
the Kwang Ju Biennale in Korea etc. With contemporary migration
you have artists coming to the "centre" in completely different
conditions than their predecessors. In the former times artists
from the "periphery", used to sacrifice themselves in order to come
to the centre to get the information. Now these artists have a completely
different experience of being in the centre than those before them.
All of this creates a new atmosphere and we are witnessing an attempt
to describe what is happening. There is a historical description
of this new art. New international art is not a thing, as I said
before, it is a situation. It is a process not a defined network.
But there is a desire by an intellectual elite to describe the process
in two ways. One is to control history, to just describe what is
going on without understanding it. The other is a narcissistic self-reflection
on one's ability to describe the process without addressing the
questions that are in the air. Contemporary curatorship
is a thorny subject. The curator has a certain responsibility. Sometimes,
I believe, he or she is more dominant than the artist. The curator,
with the support of theory, structures the concept almost before
the event of the exhibition. This is quite a disturbing phenomenon.
Sometimes the theoretical enquiry will connect things that otherwise
would not be brought together, but there's been a spate of curated,
or rather, constructed, theoretical presentations of art which has
left the event of the visual experience somewhat in the background.
I'm not criticising curatorship per se. If
you agree that there is something called a 'crisis of representation',
this crisis is not only about how Western anthropologists represented
so-called primitive, peripheral people, but also about ideologies
representing reality, or how artists are seen to represent the world.
Curatorship has a lot to do with representing others and we have
several different models. You have the soft model; the curator who
offers himself to an artist, because he feels very insecure. Nothing
is clear these days so he tries to become your friend. This soft
curator really has nothing but the power to organise things, but
he doesn't have opinions - that's one model. The other model is
the curator that really works with you. His activity is as dignified
as your own, he acts as a curator and he's not trying to let you
illustrate his theory. He respects you and you respect him. This
is a model that I like. Then you have the old fashioned model which
still exists to a very high degree. It's the curator who knows everything,
who has a secret agenda, and you're not supposed to discuss any
theoretical issues with him, you're supposed to illustrate his theory.
This form of curatorship I think is over. Curatorship is a power
that we (artists) have to recover and it's a space in which we should
act. The fantasies of the curator are as scientific as our own research.
We should find interesting models to act or interact as artists
and curators. A postmodern assumption
is that artists have been relieved of responsibility, to both subject
and viewer and that anything goes. By emphasising a context centred
on humanity, you reinstate responsibility into artistic discourse.
You are asking the curator to be aware and to insure that placing
works from a broad range of human experience alongside each other
does not jeopardise their context? I agree with you but postmodernism is not
'anything goes'. That's one version of postmodernity, and there
are several. The postmodern condition is not a set of names. It's
up to me personally to decide if I am responsible. Postmodernity
was a formative element in Latin American culture. Jorge Luis Borges,
the Argentine writer, is not a postmodern invention from the seventies
or the eighties. Umberto Eco didn't invent Borges. The mixing of
different architectural and literary styles is a common experience
that reaches back to the thirties in this colonial, post-colonial
periphery. And it's the same with conceptual art. Luis Camnitzer
said that conceptualism is basic to artists who experienced post-colonial
reality. In Latin America, we never saw the Rembrandts, or the Van
Goghs. We never saw the objects themselves. We got all the information
through lectures, films, and books. We never experienced the object,
but we did analyse their process and structure. Conceptualism was
our way of experiencing the historical interpretations of the European
centre. We dealt with European cultures in terms of concepts. Migration
brought a whole bunch of people to Europe who have this deep experience
of European culture. We confront this conceptual version of history.
You can see this in most of the work done by people from situations
like mine. It reflects an ongoing
process of de-colonisation of the world. The colonisers who espoused
liberal politics and democracy had their colonial life completely
altered, when their colonial subjects took up those very principles
and confronted them with it. Colonialism just fell apart. The chickens
came home to roost, as they say. Today the chickens not only roost,
they breed, and inhabit the European space. Knowing Western European cultural life, from
the perspective of a South American, and then having a similar perception
from the Scandinavian periphery is a dynamic but painful experience.
The struggle lies in knowing that you can put yourself outside history
while at the same time recognising you are part of the hegemonic
project. I suppose this is what
you refer to as the responsibility of the curator. Of understanding,
or grasping the depth and complexity of those issues, and not simply
looking for solutions. There is no objective perspective on things.
There is nothing that says the curator is outside history and that
he is trying to be objective. So he should try to relate himself
to his own context, he should deconstruct his own activity, try
to be self-critical, which is what I'm trying to do as an artist.
I'm trying to do something positive and at the same time trying
to deconstruct a part of myself, and I think this is something curators
can also do. The installation here
in Graz 4
in Austria is very much
a comment on your own practice; it is a moment of self-reflection.
You started off making drawings or engravings, then moved from painting
to installation. This installation ("Maps and Landscapes - The living-room"
1991-1996) is in some ways a self-criticism. You're now re-analysing
installations. Yes, it began with an invitation to redo
an installation I did in Hamburg 1991 called "Karte-Landschaft-Raummalerei"
("The living-room"). A lot of things have happened to me and within
the debate on visual arts during the last five years. From the beginning
the look of this piece was very "homely". You really wanted to sit
down and experience the ambience for hours. People were dating each
other in my installation! I was very proud of that. It was a nice
atmosphere but something was twisted, it was kind of dangerous.
Now five or six years later I don't want to repeat this piece as
a gesture. I want this piece to be a living process, a working process.
I started deconstructing the living-room. Recently, I moved to Costa
Rica so I have the experience of deconstructing my own living-room.
But you're not saying
that this is the end of you making installations? No, no, I'm not saying this is the end. This
is also a historical situation. We'll see what happens. Reflections have become
a very important part of your installations. In the Graz installation,
the reflections arise through putting sheets of glass directly onto
the painted wall. You frame or re-frame the wall, but at the same
time you also reflect. Definitely. I like it very much when my decisions
have these multiple connotations. A piece of glass is what you usually
use in order to protect a work of art. I'm trying to protect the
piece of work, but this protection is not enough, because it can't
cover the whole wall. What I'm doing by protecting the piece of
art is that I am reflecting myself. I want people to see themselves
when they approach the piece of glass on the wall. When you start
dealing with what has been called conceptual art, you are not supposed
to step out of logic. You are supposed to act logically. I'm trying
to put together both the left and the right side of my brain. I'm
trying to be a hot conceptual artist and a cool expressionist. I
want to put these things together, like the dark room and the light
room in my South African piece. Connecting things is more important
than discovering new things. This complexity of
dark/light, and the duality of process, have always been there but
whereas the earlier installations were more unitary, more overall,
the new installations reflect this duality more. In both Johannesburg
and here in Graz you have not covered all walls in mud, some walls
have ink stains and some have not been touched. The project in Johannesburg was called "Stepping
out of the White Cube" ("A Little Song for Johannesburg"). I found
a storage room in the museum. It was the place where literally the
museum floor ended and the rough kind of floor started. I decided
to do my piece there because I was stepping out of the space of
the museum, the so called white cube of Modernism and recovering
the unconscious part of the museum. The white cube also represented
the mentality of apartheid. I used forty bandannas that I bought
in Mexico. These colourful bandannas look very African. When you
saw them hung in the space, you connected them to Africa, but they
were actually connected to Mexico. Tell me a little bit
more about the bandannas, they seem to be quite central and many
people don't know what a bandanna is. In Mexico it's called "paliacate", in the
States it's a bandanna. What's it used for?
It's a scarf, a piece of fabric that you
put round your neck, used for different purposes. You can put it
on your head when it's too sunny, and you can use it to clean yourself.
In Mexico you can use it to wrap food or any other object. It's
a mass produced, very colourful and a very personal possession.
It's something that everybody uses. You have hundreds of different
designs so the paliacate/bandanna represents a personal approach
to a social practice. Wasn't it also a symbol
in the Mexican revolution? Absolutely. It's a very popular working class
thing. But it also has to do with identity and diversity. Being
African or Mexican means that one is labelled a colourful person,
full of intensity and these kind of clichés. So I said Okay
lets represent Africa in the wrong way, using the attributes that
are normally Mexican. I spent four months in Mexico gathering the
bandannas for this project. So both the upstairs
and downstairs are about a displacement from the white cube Upstairs there was 'normal' light, a mixture
of daylight and lamp light. Downstairs was extremely dark. I painted
the naked bulb with mud as I usually do, because I wanted people
to struggle to see. They had to make an effort to see this piece.
You use very simple
media. You don't use videos, you use a naked light bulb and that's
about it. Does your work criticise the dynamics of contemporary
culture? Replacing the three minute media sound bite with something
that demands a greater concentration span. Yeah, well, there is a superstition that
says that richness has to do with technical development but I don't
think it's true. I think richness has to do with the relationship
between the means of production and the goals of production. How
well you use your tools in order to achieve a certain goal. This
is the kind of richness that I'm looking for. It's not the complexity
of the technical apparatus. It's using very simple tools to achieve
a high degree of complexity and to say exactly what you want. The
way you produce a piece of work is very much part of the work. These
are ethical decisions for me. Tell me about the work
you made in Montevideo. I made a circle with old books from an archive.
I put stones on top of the books, and filled the circle with mud.
I placed four bulbs in a non symmetrical way in the mud, and that
became a map of the world. I made a map of the world because I returned
to Montevideo after twenty years of exile. I also made a map of
Uruguay and I painted a huge smiling figure with his hands on his
back in the entrance. I wrote in tiny letters 'Welcome to Uruguay'.
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