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Dialogue with
Papo Colo, Mary Anne Staniszewski and Jeanette Ingberman
Wednesday January 9, 2002
MS: When I think about Colo’s paintings I always have to start
from a more expansive view. Colo is someone who I think of
as a “cultural producer,” which I believe provides the most fully realized
strategy for an artist. He does make paintings, but he also
makes installations, he curates, he does performance art, he does theater,
he shoots photography, he writes poetry, he plays music. This approach
is also part of a grand tradition in terms of the twentieth century.
In the postwar era, Warhol is an example. So many of
the great artists of the international avant-gardes of the teens and twenties
similarly worked within a spectrum of activities. Lissitsky is an example.
We are here to talk about the painting, but I do view it as a part of this
much larger framework of activities and they all augment each other and
the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Also, a lot of these other activities--the more performative or
the curatorial or the installation design--are associated with conceptual
artists. Now Colo, different from a lot of his generation that do multiple
practices, does return to the painting. From my point of view, the
painting for Colo is almost like breathing. He’s hyper- active. He
is always generating, creating things, like the way he is playing the guitar
right now. The painting is something that I think he does everyday.
There is this very constant, intimate, relentless relationship that you
have with this practice. So how do you think about your painting?
PC: Painting is the autonomy of my hands. I think that
hands have a kind of autonomy. And I learned this through playing
the guitar. For example, you practice and finally your fingers, your
hands, possess an autonomy and they go straight to the precise place that
is needed to produce a note. You are producing something incredible beautiful
without thinking about it because your hands have this autonomy.
They go to the precise place to produce the sound. How you explain
that? I explain it though painting.
MS: So it’s like a different kind of language. Can
you elaborate?
PC: I think the most primal movement--the hand touching--is the
most intellectual for me, because the hand becomes so wise that it doesn’t
need any explanation. What makes us different from the animals--and the
way I understand civilization--is that we have civilization because we
have hands, we have fingers, and we produce tools.
MS: Yes, there is this prejudice that a text is always
more intellectual than a gesture, but the hands can be so eloquent. We
are kind of blind to that.
JI: I thought it was really interesting that Mary Anne used the
term breathing. Because I have been watching Colo work. What’s really
interesting to me about the paintings now is he is often painting them
on the floor. He is literally inside the painting, moving around.
So when you mentioned breathing, it is so appropriate because the breath
is about the body. We are talking about intellectual things, but
breathing is about how your body moves. So as a performer performing
inside the painting, maybe the strokes are also about the breaths in some
way. I see Colo as an actor and breathing is also very important to an
actor. I hadn’t thought about it that way. But it is a nice way to
bring it all together, the breathing with the performing, with the hand
and the mind. I thought it was an interesting metaphor.
MS: Colo said painting is an intellectual act. I think there
is such prejudice against the body, against different kinds of languages,
even against the oral in our culture.
PC: All these prejudices are prefabricated by education.
JI: As an artist who deals with a lot of different mediums,
you paint, you do theater, you write poetry, you do film, I am going back
to something Mary Anne said. You are always painting, the painting
is something you do everyday. She was asking: is that the central focus?
PC: The central focus is always the mind. I go to
the gym to train the mind. I go to the gym to train my circulation of the
blood into the brain. Which gives me more energy.
MS: I didn’t mean to imply that one of these activities
is more centralized. I don’t think Colo has described it that way
in our various conversations through the years. The whole thing is
greater than the sum of its parts. All are related in a constellation
or web and they all feed each other in some way. But the painting
is the thing that I think he does every day.
PC: What I am discovering now with my paintings: I am becoming
an expert in Shakespeare, through reading and courses. In reality the old
poets have the upper hand. Homer, Shakespeare, 500 years, 2000 years, still
we have this work. This tells you something. It is an act of poetry.
For me doing theater, doing painting, doing drawing, doing writing, is
an act of poetry. The act of poetry is the most magnificent act that humans
invent.
For me, poetry is like a huge woman in the universe. In Spanish
it is “la poesia,” it’s female. Poetry nurtures, feeds all these mediums.
Mediums are mediums, they are not ends. Painting is one of my love mediums,
one of my activities of my poetry. I practice three or four
hours a day like a musician who practices three or four hours a day to
be a musician. I know about music and maybe I can practice one or two hours
a day, maybe I can read two hours a day. The day is divided into parts.
To tell you the truth, what I find to be the most easy in the world of
the visual arts is the curation. Because it is a world of relationships,
of class, of backgrounds, of ethnic backgrounds. It is easier to see. I
feel like an anomaly because I just love to read, to write poetry, I love
to paint, I love to do theater, I love to do music, I love to do curation.
All these things are like fingers of the hand to me.
MS: I like the way you use the term poetry, I would use the word
“poetics,” so as not to reduce it to just an association with poetry
in the traditional sense. Can you speak about the themes, the content
of the paintings?
PC: They are monsters. They are my little monsters.
They are actors, actors I want to have: my little monsters, and my
little angels, and my big accumulations of armies, or groups of people,
or the anguish on people’s faces. I want to reach what I call--pretentiously
of course--“total painting,” which can deal with a particularity or a collective.
All my paintings in the last five years have been about the collective.
The collective that is the individual. I am discovering my own world at
the same time
JI: The collective and the individual. Knowing you as an artist,
you always have opposites and contradictions. I am thinking: premeditation/improvisation,
director/performer, fragment/whole, image/abstraction. They seem
like they are opposites. They seem like they are contradictions.
But you do both things in everything you do. Can you comment on that?
PC: The whole painting--the whole nine by twelve feet--is the
individual. Inside these paintings, I put all these little beings.
So you have the individual and the collective.
JI: Premeditation/ Improvisation.
PC: Everything is improvised. Let’s go back to the music
department. Wow, you say someone is a great improviser of music, but in
reality you are always improvising. You play the music, you write down
the notes. You are always improvising. When you write poetry, for
example, or an essay, do you say, “I am going to measure this?” You are
always improvising. Invention is improvising for me. Where do our ideas
for our exhibitions come from?
JI: It’s not the way every artist works.
PC: But is not improvised? What invention is not improvised?
It just happens and you start writing. Do you know who writes these things?
Who paints these things? The musician in me says: Who is this guy who is
doing these paintings? This becomes the play within yourself.
This is the beauty of it. This is what I enjoy. I want to explain
it, because it is so marvelous, because it is like you are living in different
personalities. It is not a split personality; it is a multi-level understanding
of the impulses of the mind. There are people who can speak many languages.
I want to be like that. Someone who speaks German and Chinese and Polish.
How is that possible? The mind has this facility. And I feel with
that facility that I can jump from medium to medium everyday. It
is a pleasure for me because it is like characters that speak with each
other and that’s where the theater comes in.
That is why I have to do such heavy exercise. Psychologically it can
kill you. The poet has a different personality than the painter.
The performance artist is public, the painter is private. This apparent
confusion is clarity for me, is a source of energy for me.
Painting is like doing one hundred sit-ups and doing an hour on the
bicycle. It is an exorcism of the energy I have inside me onto the canvas.
And it is not abstract expressionism. It’s not, because I know exactly
what I am painting. I want that figure, and I want that figure holding
a head, and I know the perspective. And I know the proportion of
the body, and I know the classical renaissance perspective. I know what
I am doing. But it is automatic like playing the guitar. I know that I
am playing C or F or E. I know, the ear knows. This is the wonder
that I am enjoying. I am really enjoying this in a most incredible way.
Thanks to Jeanette, who with me has constructed Exit Art, this great
laboratory, I can curate, I can do all the caprices. It is almost
erotic my relationship with art. And this is a very beautiful thing to
feel. That is why I want to have this conversation with you,
so that I can transmit this in many ways. Remember, I am speaking this
in my second language in my second culture. Speaking in two cultures,
the cultures of the Americas, the Spanish and English, it is wonderful.
So I am really understanding Shakespeare and I am levitating with this
thought. Shakespeare is the English language. He is the king of multi-media.
After 500 years he is still relevant. Which artist has done that? It’s
mind-blowing.
MS: Going back to something Jeanette said, you are speaking about
improvisation in terms of creation. And going back to the idea of breathing,
I do think that Jeanette sees something in your working method. However
improvisational all your work is, there is a precision, a discipline and
a premeditation. In Colo’s work there is all this emotion spilling
out, but what is also surprising about Colo is the discipline and a kind
of premeditation. This contradiction that Jeanette described is very
interesting.
I think the three of us agree on this point and try to achieve this
in our work. We don’t want to separate the mind from the body, we
don’t want to separate the hand from the heart, we don’t want to separate
improvisation from discipline. So it’s about embracing opposites.
JI: So maybe that is the artist of the future?
MS: The artist of the future, to my mind, has been around for
one hundred years. So many artists of the international avant-gardes
were cultural producers or trying to be cultural producers. They were writing
manifestos. They were writing poetry. They were making images, objects,
and multimedia installations. We, meaning the culture in general, keep
trying to put artists in a box, so to speak. When Andy Warhol’s work
was shown at The Museum of Modern Art, he was reduced to being primarily
a painter. That is also why Colo, I think, is seen at times as a bit of
an enigma. He is doing this fabulous curation, but then people want to
put him into a slot. He does curation. It’s as if you can only do one thing.
It’s just more difficult for people to see you from a broad, more fluid
perspective.
I use the word cultural producer, but maybe you can come up with another
term. For me, it’s being the poet in the grandest sense, being an
artist in the most effective manner, reaching out to all the different
possibilities of creativity in your culture. But this is the expansive
view of an entire body of work, we are also talking about your painting
methods and content. These are very emotional paintings. If you really
look at them, you see little things that inhabit the landscape. Everything
seems to be made of the same stuff. The entire image seems to be vibrating
with the same emotional force, what should we call it, “Ch’i,” a life force.
PC: It’s very simple. Can you tell me what art is not emotional?
MS: I feel the most conceptual work, for example,
is emotional, if it’s about a negation of emotion. It’s a trap to
say that painting is emotional art and conceptual art is intellectual art.
Painting is intellectual art, and conceptual art is emotional art.
Painting is spiritual art and conceptual art is spiritual art. Mind,
body, spirit, you can’t separate the various parts. There is a tendency
to want to separate these things. I view your practice as something that
is trying to go against this type of separation.
PC: I was speaking before about the energy of painting, which
is decoration. So I try to approach that in two ways. I am scared
of my own paintings. I don’t think they are beautiful. I think they
are scary. I think they are kind of bestial-beasts. They are very
performative. What my paintings represent are my actors, my interior
actors that are performing in a painting. To tell you the truth, I would
think twice before putting one of these paintings in my living room. Because
it can be nightmarish. It can affect you. They affect me. Which is the
most sour-sweet thing that I can have from my work. I think that every
expression, not only painting, is between a horrible feeling and a beautiful
feeling. The whole contradiction is between horror and beauty. This is
the thing that motivates me. Even when I do an installation design for
a show, it is about that. Everything for me, at this point, is between
these two things. Basically it is the same for centuries: good and
evil, beauty and horror, bad and good.
JI: Because you always want to put that edge to it.
PC: I don’t want to put an edge on every painting. I just do
it.
The handicap or the Achilles heal is that I am always misplaced. We
have to realize that this is an ethnic country. The philosophy of
Exit Art is so clear on that. This reality of ethnicities and clicks
and class groups and race groups makes me a trickster. I have to become
a trickster. Which is my philosophy. The trickster always has the advantage
of changing. I am a chameleon. If animals can do it. Why can’t the artist
do it? It is the most beautiful challenge for me.
MS: It is a relatively recent historical convention for artists
to be conceived of as they are now. Leonardo, who was working in a pre-modern
context, that is before the late eighteenth century, is a good example.
He wrote that famous letter to the Duke of Milan--and I am paraphrasing
here--where he says: I know bridge-building, engineering, hydraulics.
I am an inventor of the weapons of war, and, at the end of the list he
states, by the way, I paint. In earlier moments, it was common to
work in diverse areas. The founding fathers are an example that most
people would know. Thomas Jefferson was not just a statesman. He was a
farmer, a scholar, a writer, an architect. He made certain archeological
discoveries. Benjamin Franklin was a printer, a publisher of a newspaper
and almanac, a politician. He made contributions to science. In the modern
era that we have become so specialized, but in the past fifty years or
so, many have been questioning these categories. And if you know the subtleties
of our history, you would know that there have always been individuals
questioning these issues and categories throughout modernity. But
mainstream culture keeps trying to maintain very reductive roles.
For some people and for some jobs--let’s say for my eye specialist--I
am very glad that he is a specialist in eye surgery. But in other areas,
let’s say leaders of countries, I would prefer a states-person who knows
a little bit about nature and the poetry of life than someone who only
knows the political world. From my point of view, this can offer a deeper
and richer philosophy of life. I see you manifesting this in your
approach to your aesthetic practice. I see Jeanette working in a
similar way. I view her work at Exit Art as that of a creative artist.
Coming out of a more traditional academic background of a scholar, Jeanette
may be viewed as a director, or curator, but I view her as multifaceted
as well. She does theater, she writes, and she can do more. I am
waiting to see all the different creative things that Jeanette will do.
So again, this more restrictive model, to my mind, doesn’t suit us anymore.
PC: I think that a painter every two years should try to break
his own mold and change skin like the serpent. With this I mean that you
can change the cover but the essence stays intact.
MS: That’s actually what I always try to tell my students. When
you have done something don’t be afraid to do something else. Even if this
means not being an artist in the classical sense. A lot of people, when
they achieve some measure of success, just start making products. This
can give you a great income. But it doesn’t have that poetics, that inspired
vision, involved with making the most of your life.
PC: I think that the painter has to have the grace to play the
canvas, to play the surface, and create with different pigments the surfaces,
figures and abstractions. It is the Midas touch. You have this touch in
your finger, in the point of your finger.
It is so obvious with the guitar, or the cello. If you touch one millimeter,
one centimeter less or more, it’s a different note, a different mood.
When you can transmit your mood, your feeling into this point of the finger,
and you press the chord, the wire, in the right place the way you want
it, that’s painting. But Kandinsky was into that a long time ago.
MS: Kandinsky was apparently frightened when he saw his first
abstraction, according to the mythology. But I also want you to talk about
these paintings on photographs. I see certain traditions here, I see Goya...
Why don’t you talk about these monsters that are coming out of the clouds.
PC: These monsters are myself in disguise.
In reality you look like your paintings. And collectors look like the
painters they collect. You can see it. Can you see a Jasper Johns as a
CEO of a company?
MS: It’s an act of self-representation. I think that all art
is a kind of self-portrait to a degree.
Your description of your monsters and your paintings is the way I see
my dreams. I need to know my dreams. I need to experience them, but
they are so intense for me, I can’t live with them all the time. I have
to forget about them in the day. That was the feeling I was getting about
the way you were describing your paintings.
PC: Maybe that is what art and painting and drawing is all about.
Describing the things that you don’t want to describe. Then you become
so anguished that you have to do physical and spiritual activities to balance
that madness. The only thing that saves painting from decoration is madness,
and old Van Gogh knew this a long time ago. Madness is a cliché
for expressing your own anxieties. Your hand, your autonomous hand, is
expressing that. This is what’s funny about conceptual things. I always
think that paintings have always been conceptual. Even conceptual things
you have to do with your hands. You have to write the concept with your
hand. Your hand is autonomous from the brain. I think that this whole thing
against painting is not against painting. It’s against decoration, it’s
against the commerce of painting.
I have a love of doing this. We can talk hours and we come to the same
conclusion. It’s about passion. Its about passion to do it, its about a
passion to buy it. The curators in the museum have a passion about your
work and they put it there, and people who come to see it in the museum
have a passion. It’s like love. It’s the force that generates everything.
You can talk theoretical stuff, and you can talk about how I do this painting,
about what system I use. Basically if you have that passion to do it, and
that passion transcends to the people who come to see the place you transmit
that passion.
JI: At the risk of sounding cliché or trite, you
are talking about all these really deep ideas, so how would you answer
people who say that because of where we are socially, politically, and
intellectually, painting has nothing more to say.
PC: Its like saying that poetry has nothing to say. It’s a medium.
Why do you describe that about painting and not about photography?
JI: Maybe it’s a curatorial decision. But the public is telling
us they like seeing video installations, they like seeing photography,
they like these kind of mediums that engage them in a different way.
Obviously I am playing devil’s advocate here. Why do you like to paint?
PC: I paint because I love to paint. It’s about love. You have
to love it. I don’t want anything back. I don’t want money back. I don’t
want recognition. I just do it because I do it. This is the beauty for
me.
MS: Can you describe the process of how these cloud drawings
get made?
JI: Every summer he is photographing the clouds. So he has to
wait until he comes back to New York to develop the film and the contact
sheets and to make the prints. So every summer he takes one hundred to
two hundred photographs. You think each summer the photographs are from
that summer. But he is working on the photographs from the summer before.
So in St Martin he was drawing on the photographs he took the previous
summer in St Bart.
But when you are looking at the photographs you don’t remember which
summer they are from. At this point, Colo has a stock of hundreds of negatives
of clouds. He goes to the darkroom and prints. Do you know Colo, when you
are drawing, what island the images are from?
PC: Those drawings are a way to be in contact with god. Because
you are in the stratosphere. You know how this work is photographed?
It is basically like the way a child sees shapes in the clouds. The clouds
give me a clue to the drawing. That is the beauty of it. Very simple. Very
Direct.
JI: Looking at these drawings remind me of when I first met Colo
twenty years ago. He was drawing these strange little monsters in pastels
and oil sticks. Maybe they are coming out now in a different way.
PC: Every culture has their monsters. There is a big reference
book that I use a lot, which is Jorge Luis Borges’s The Book of Imaginary
Beings. He explains it very simply and very profoundly how every culture
has their monsters because they need to create these monsters in order
to create the supernatural. It is very beautiful and is very simple. I
don’t know why art is so complicated. Because basically art is the
production of the supernatural. This is the beauty of it. It’s
like, why do you believe in god? Now I am getting pretentious, but
basically, this is what moves you to do art. We have been trying
to do this for hundreds of years and the more we explain it, the more unexplainable
it is. It’s a labyrinth. And I want to be in this labyrinth
forever. It gives you the energy. It is a kind of total existence.
Of course, I feel privileged. I have been able to do this for
thirty years. I can wake up and paint, draw, curate and help other
artists. What a privilege it is, that I can do this. It is very emotional.
When you are painting, the emotion is within yourself. But when you
curate and you help other artists, the emotion is multiplied because you
are helping other human beings to realize and to express their feelings.
I want to end with this. The major conceptual artist of the twentieth
century, finally, we are realizing is the curator. We help other people
to express themselves. What else do you want?
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