Mariana Castillo Deball Among the Ruins
Dieter Roelstraete
I come from a country, Belgium, with a rich enough history (I studied in a city often referred to as the “Manhattan of the middle ages”) – but not one that travels back very far: apart from a handful of shards scattered around the former Roman military encampment of Tongeren (Atuatuca Tungrorum in 1st century parlance), there is very little in Belgium’s sandy soil that would help to lure serious archeologists to these here shores. My wife grew up in Vancouver, one of the world’s youngest cities; there, history means something altogether different still (they do have archeology, to be sure), but both of us pretty much experience the same awe when marveling at the stones of Venice, when roaming the arid expanse of Athens’ ancient agora, or when ambling around a 300-year old colonial slave cemetery in lower Manhattan – the classic response to the presumed nobility of all archeology as something that is somehow engaged in the profound business of uncovering truth (a romantic view that has also fed into the Indiana Jones myth of archeology as something that cannot possibly be very prosaic or banal). Interestingly, however, this is not an atttitude shared by every present-day inhabitant of these hallowed historical sites: for many Athenians, for example, the modest beginnings of an archeological dig, no matter how small the scale of its conception, usually usher in a long, tedious process of urban dysfunction – plainly “bad news,” for there is simply too much buried in the ground there to inspires hope that (as would be the case in either Brussels or Vancouver) nothing will come of the dig and that urban life will soon resume its normal, oblivious post-historical pace. I remember sitting in a cab in Athens once when the taxi driver suddenly erupted in a barrage of expletives – an important thoroughfare had been closed off because what had initally started off as a building site had gradually been turning into an excavation site instead, and the demands of science would doubtlessly mean that this street would remain closed for a long time to come; maybe even forever, if the archeological find would prove epic enough. I immediately tried to imagine the profound, and potetially paralyzing feelings of anxiety that undoubtedly accompany the administration of such historically rich, palimpsestic terrain: every building promoter or project developer who sticks a spade in the ground with the banal hopes of maybe opening up a parking lot probably spends a lot of time praying that his little plot of land will appear miraculously free from history’s ubiquitous traces – curses rather than the blessings we often dream about.
This is one example of the way in which the archeological record, in countries such as Mexico, Italy, Greece and much of the Middle East, insinuates itself in daily life, to paraphrase Jesse Lerner in his introduction to Mariana Castillo Deball’s ambitious project, part book, part exhibition, These Ruins You See; an example of archeology’s weighing down upon the economy of daily life first and foremost. But there is also the tremendous history of archeology’s politicization, its mobilization for political uses as well as the formative influence exerted upon the political project of, say, nation-building; and it is this “politics of archeology” that seems to constitute the core of Deball’s artistic concerns. In These Ruins You See, Deball takes a close look at her native Mexico in particular, scrutinizing (with both the patience and eye for detail more typical of archeology, exactly, than art) the implication of archeology – most of it performed by colonial ‘others’ who sold off their loot to museums in Berlin, London and New York – in the genealogy of Mexican statehood, as well as in the construction of the imagined community of Mexicanidad from a wide array of highly distinct precolumbian cultures such as the Aztec, Maya, Olmec, Toltec, Totonac and Zapotec. Part of Deball’s interest in these creation myths concern the paradigmatic character of the archeological enterprise as an episteme, i.e. as a truth procedure and site of the production of knowledge: archeology is by its very definition bound to a materialist view of culture, history and society, and it is also always a science of origins (“arche” being the ancient Greek word for “beginning” or “first principle”; on a related note, images culled from both geology and mineralogy as such exact materialist sciences of origins do appear quite regularly in Deball’s work). Dig and ye shall find – and seeing as the earth, or the many mute materials that it hesitatingly hands over to the industrious digger, cannot lie, the process of excavation functions as a promise of revelation, of the unveiling of a hidden truth. This high ideological charge – anacalypsis or the “raising of the Veil of Isis” – is what permeates much scientific thinking in general, and Deball has devoted much of her research in recent years to mapping out these intricate histories of enlightenment and illumination – often in close collaboration with her Amsterdam-based, Argentinia-born colleague Irene Kopelman, with whom she initiated the Uqbar Foundation in 2006 (named after a doubly fictional place in a Borges short story). In one collaborative project, A for Alibi (organized at De Appel in Amsterdam in 2007), both artists took the historical collection of scientific instruments from the museum in Utrecht as the point of departure for an interdisciplinary reflection upon the disconnection between the imagery produced by science on the one hand, and the ‘reality’ of the laws produced by it on the other: alibi is Latin, it is worth remembering here, for ‘elsewhere’ (like Borges’ Uqbar, in other words) – shorthand for the experience of spatial disconnect.
Sites for the production of knowledge, or laboratories where new truth procedures can be developed and tested – isn’t that also what (art) museums are, or what we want (art) museums to be? Isn’t this historical association, mediated through the museum, of truth and art the exact location of the polemic initiated by what has since become known (and, one should add, institutionalized) as “Institutional Critique” – an effort to “mine the ruins of the museum”, in the critical parlance of our times, hoping that it will yield the many unsavory truths of its corrupt political genealogy, its implication in a messy meshwork of power relations and relations of ownership? It is no coincidence that the exhibition component of Deball’s These Ruins You See – most fully articulated at Mexico City’s Museo Carrio Gil in 2006-2007– seems to lean rather heavily, tongue subtly lodged in cheek, on the formal idiom commonly associated with the canonical phase of Institutional Critique: firstly, there are audioguides (providing the actual narrative red thread that holds together the exhibition, their use inevitably reminds us of Andrea Fraser’s hilarious Museum Highlights video pieces); unopened crates, disused pedestals, office furniture and similar suggestions of knowing glances furtively cast behind the scenes of ‘the’ institution (the reference here being to Mexico City’s world-class National Museum of Anthropology), scattered around the exhibition spaces in such a way as to conjure the ghost of Hans Haacke; empty vitrines and remnants of exhibition design and display architecture of all kinds, exuding the casual candor of a making-of documentary – enter Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Louise Lawler, Fred Wilson et al. Yet Deball’s museological installation, which luckily lacks the bitter righteousness of much of the work referred to above (Broodthaers being the priceless exception), is doubly folded, just like Borges’ original Uqbar is doubly fictional: if the museum is the natural destination of all archeological artifacts, and if an art project ‘about‘ archeology ventriloquises Institutional Critique’s fetishistic problematization (through the heavy-handed foregrounding of the politics of object selection and display) of the museum as a mummifying destination of living art as well, what are we left with then? The museum as the natural destination of the museum, or the archeology of archeology? The museum of museums (the museum as the context within which reflections upon the nature of museology are staged) and the archeology of archeology: such double binds and other avatars of the mythical figure of Ourobouros, the (featherless!) snake that bites its own tail, are really only possible, of course, provided that there is an element of empathy, of enjoyment even, underlying all this relentless meta-scrutiny and constant epistemological poking and prodding. Deball’s relationship to the objects of her research, no matter how detached and clinical-looking, is ultimately animated by this exact empathic glow: the archeologist’s loving care for even the minutest shard, the museum guide’s unending devotion to the stony beings he or she guards or lends his or her ear to, listening to their every story of ruin and recovery.
Interview with Mariana Castillo Deball
Maastricht, 3 December 2004
JD: Johan Deumens
M: Mariana Castillo Deball
K: Karen Cheung
JD: I have chosen Penser/Classer as one of the books I want to look at in more detail. I want to find out what kind of book it is and how it relates to your work. To begin with, you’re here and you have brought a lot of books with you. I think it is fair to say that the book is an important medium for you. Could you tell me how you started working with artist’s books or books in general?
M: I worked a lot with scientists and I studied philosophy. So, one of my first approaches to art is the way you build sequences, discourses, or view small systems. In that sense, I really like the structure of books, that is to say, as a kind of small system you can play with. For example, you can read in a normal sequence, or you can jump from one page to the next. And I like books as examples of how you organize the world - you have dictionaries, yellow pages, classifications, compilations; in a way, all knowledge is stored in books and I am obsessed with how classifications work and how different orders are mixed together. That's how I began playing with the idea and I started with my own classification and my own way of ordering things. Like the first small collection of books that I did. I followed all the objects and all the rooms in my house for two years; I took photographs of the kitchen and the bedroom and the toilet and the bed, and of the fridge, every time I opened it. It's like a kind of examination of my own relation to the object and how much the object is a wild thing to me: suddenly you lose something and then find it again and suddenly the space becomes a mess and you cannot control it.
JD: When I first met you here, I found that you had a strong affinity with the work of Ulises Carrión and that you had been involved in making a retrospective of his work. Is this something you already did in Mexico, before you came here, or did you make it during your time at the Jan van Eyck?
M: No, I did that before I came here. In fact, that was one of the main reasons I applied to this place. I knew Felipe Ehrenburg and Martha Hellion and Jan Hendrix who were all here in the 70's and they all knew Ulises. I worked three years with them on the retrospective of his work. Then I realized that this place still existed, and I was curious about the fact that there were still people working the same way. It had the same atmosphere, not related to artist productions but to the obsession of working in groups and making collective projects, like this magazine. And that was what I liked.
JD: I would think that doing the retrospective on Ulises also brought you into contact with his books and his mail art. His mail art is also an important part of his archive. I actually had the pleasure of seeing it - I met Ulises Carrion in1984 and he had an archive in a flat in Amsterdam. It was all stored in boxes. He was a bit of a sad person, because archiving was not the aspiration of his life. On the other hand, it was very central to initiating the project on mail art and his book project. You get so many things coming at you, which you are not able to answer. So you have to collect them, because you do not wish to throw them away. And you start putting them in boxes. Then, of course, it turns out he is a very ordered person, making classifications of how to organize all of this and this grew into books and other stuff, all classified in the archive of "Other Books & so". So, classification is a recurring issue. You can also see it in this catalogue of an exhibition in Groningen, which was dedicated to Ulises. He made a series of books using existing landscape paintings which were damaged and – probably for that reason – thrown away. He cut them into square pieces to make them interesting again, since these paintings were quite boring. By cutting them into pages, and by going through the pages, you have to construct your own idea of the painting in your mind instead of seeing the painting before you in its entirety. And it was much more interesting to go through the pages than to have the paintings themselves. The theme of this exhibition in Groningen was archiving and creating adventures. Which is in fact one of the main rationales behind artist’s books. As you said, the book as such is very suitable to making your own classifications or to organize a collection.
Now, you just told us that you started archiving by making registrations of your daily life. How did this continue into the art world, so to speak?
M: When I did the project, it was already part of my idea.
JD: You made a project of 24 books in the Invisible Collection. How did you start working on that?
M: I started the project here. I did not have any idea beforehand that I would do it until I was here. It was part of a bigger project I was working on - the Estocastic Archive. It was a show but it was also a big project about different ways of organizing information for newspapers, dictionaries, magazines and books. It was about how you reuse design and how information is displayed and also about how, sometimes, art world becomes a parasite of all the ways of organizing information.
In the section on the books - the Invisible Collection - I started like this: I took 10 books referring to different characters of writers who were really obsessed with ordering the world. It is about the possibilities and impossibilities of doing so.
JD: And George Perec was one of the most important ones?
M: No, he was not the most important one. But I was inspired by one book George Perec did, his Penser/Classer, and I took one text called ‘How I organize the things that are on my working table’. So, this book is like a comment on that text and I displayed many photographs, taken over the years, of how I organize things on my working table. For each of the books in the Invisible Collection, I used the same format and the same number of pages and then I added my insertions. Sometimes they yield the rest of the book, like here, but other ones are almost empty. You have a couple of pages with image, or text or some information.
JD: What is this about the information being emptied? Is it quantity? What is it?
M: For me reading is very much to do with how you flip through the pages and suddenly something jumps at you, which surprises you and you read it. But if you want to find it again, it can be quite difficult.
JD: So, it represents a kind of highlighting.
M: No, it is more like a kind of playing with the idea.
JD: But you can also say that you can highlight things by leaving out the rest, some pages.
M: Yes, like in the other books, there are quite a few which are almost empty, or books which are interrupted. They start on page 147 and finish on page 162. And usually they don't have a cover. So, they are interrupted books and you don't know if they are just fall-out from other books or compilations of the other book.
JD: For a French-speaking person, it is quite clear that this may be the key to the work, because Penser/Classer is George Perec’s title. But for somebody from China, it is just your title.
M: Yes, I showed the book to a friend of mine in New York, who had not seen it before, and she said: ‘Wow, the other day I was in the book shop in the philosophy section and suddenly I saw this book. I had been looking for this book for ages, I looked in Paris and I could not get it because it was sold out. So, I thought, wow, finally! And I took it out and then I started going through it and thought 'What's this? It's nice but who did it?' She could not find the author’s name. In the end she bought it because she was curious about what that was.
JD: She bought your book?
M: Yes, but just because it happened to be in the wrong place. Even the people in the book shop did not really know where to put it. They did not know what to do with it.
JD: I would just like to refer to another book, by Joseph Bartscherer. He is a New York based photographer. He collected everyone whose death had been reported on the front page of the New York Times. To appear on the front page is quite rare, even if it is on the occasion of your death. He collected front-page obituaries of the New York Times for 10 years, from 1990 to 2000, which amounted to a total number of 288 obituaries. Then he made a book called ‘Eva Gardner Dies’, showing all the photographs from obituaries on the front page. Within this collection of 288 obituaries, there are 18 without photographs, so there are blank pages in the book. In those cases, the only information you get is the absence of the portrait of the person who died. Even people in China or Europe may have heard of Eva Gardner, because she was an actress and one of the wives of Frank Sinatra, I believe. So, that may be a key. If you go through the book, you see Marlene Dietrich, you see Nixon, you see quite a lot of American based well-known people. I think the concept of the book is that these people are on the front page because they are so important; hence we don't need any classification of who they are. No names. That's the nature of the book. But if you show the book in Europe, most people probably do not know these celebrities
Going back to your book, I wonder if people also need some key to enjoy your book, to see what is in it, because there is much more in the book if you’re aware of this Penser/Classer background than if you’re not.
M: No, I think it is not the key thing. It is important that it is one of the clues. When I do my work, I never believe that there is one secret clue that will give you the answer to the rest. I never play this game of secret messages. Often I include too much information; you may even get more confused if too many things are displayed. Then, because of the small secrets, if you look under the table, you will find ... the whole meaning of the situation.
JD: I’m not suggesting that you are hiding something. It is about the information which is in the book. The question is more: ‘How will the book be experienced by people who know this and how by those who don’t?’ I thought the title already inviting before I knew about the Perec background. When I went through it for the first time, I thought ‘this is my key to the book.’ It is about a kind of activity you have to do or are doing. It could be enough.
M: Especially with this one, I didn't plan to do it. I am always taking pictures of everything I do. I am really obsessed with taking pictures all the time, I photograph everything. In the end, I remembered the text and then I said to myself: ‘maybe I have some pictures of my table, but I’m not sure’. I needed to go through my archive for one year. So I didn't plan it at the start. I did not systematically take pictures of my table. I really needed to look in my archive to try and find those pictures. What you see here is some points in between projects. In some ways, that is why I decided to print it because it's a name index of my work. See here, there is a photograph of a girl. You never get to know what was really happening. And looking at this you know that she was reading this book... and then there is this card game... maybe she was planning to do something, but in the end she did not do it. There are lot of things I actually finished and some other things were just experiments on the table.
JD: But you can find this line because of the relationship between the pages, between what you had been doing. So, the jigsaw is coming back again and again. In other words, there are a number of main themes in your book.
M: Yes, for example, these pencils are the first experiment in another piece I did afterwards. These are the glasses that a friend forgot in my studio. These are the photographs I never used but always have in mind. And also this was the exhibition I always wanted to do but never did.
JD: At the end of the book, there is a table of content, in which you use the Perec book. What is it? Is this also the Table of Content in the Perec book?
M: It is the real index of the Perec book. But I just erased all other texts and only left the Perec text that I was talking about.
JD: Yes, I know. But this is not the Perec text.
M: Yes, it is.
JD: It is? That's nice.
K: That is the chapter you got the idea for this book from.
M: Yes, that is the text that I like a lot and wanted to make some sort of comment on. He is doing more or less the same. He was talking about his table and one day he's sharpening the pencils.
JD: Yes, I got that. But I didn't know it was in the contents.
M: That is why I erased the rest of the pages.
K: When I was looking through the book, I got the idea that there must be some sort of guideline for ordering all the things you follow. You said you were inspired by George Perec's book. So there is a connection between his way of ordering things and your way of ordering things. I was wondering what the guideline is for the way you order your things in your book. Before, Johan told me about the name of the book, which told me a bit more about it. I was wondering how you relate your way of connecting things to your reader or audience. There is this previous way of ordering things, and you have your own way, and finally, you show it to the public. Did you have anything in mind when you made your work, in terms of how your work would inspire your audience?
M: I don't think I get inspired by what I read. It is more like a kind of conversation. I don't think I order my things in the way that Perec talks about his table. He is far more organized; for instance, he said he has a big ashtray because he smokes a lot and he was always sharpening his pencil; things I never did. However, there is one thing he is always pointing out which I really share with him: he is obsessed with all the various ways of organising the world which are constantly changing. He can never stick to one way of ordering things. He always has to change it again and to put things in new places and he makes a mess and needs to throw a party and he's using the same space. I'm more obsessed with this kind of crazy narrative of changing the order of things. So, I can get inspired by newspapers, or by how people put up messages on the notice board in the supermarket, trying to find someone who would buy the chair in their house. There are many ways of displaying this information. I really like how they sometimes just self-emerge. They don't depend on a very conscious system of ordering things.
K: So, it is not the system that interests you, but the instances in life...
M: No, I am obsessed by systems, but I really like how they change and how you can play with them. I am not a scientist. I am not someone who makes an ethnology of ordering things. It's more about...
K: Exception from systems...
M: Every system has an exception. You can never find a perfect system.
JD: I’d now like to talk about some details of the production of the book. You made the book by yourself. Do you want to have a kind of independency in producing books? This one has been published here. I think the way you are working is almost like a monk, producing books without being dependent on anyone in making them, bringing them to the world by yourself. Is producing by yourself important to you? Or is it just a question of not being able to find a publisher who would do it for you?
M: Well, .. in the...
JD: It is also related to the fact that most of your books are in black and white. It refers to the world of photocopying in which they are made; it is an easy way to make books, instead of using colour photographs.
M: I don't consider myself a monk at all. I don't make books as precious objects. And I believe there are many ways....
JD: No, that's not what I meant. I was talking more about the solitary way of working.
M: I mean that maybe... I don't think so. For example, in Mexico, where I’m from, photocopy machines are like....well, everybody uses them and everybody produces whatever they want. And it is very cheap to distribute or to share what you are doing with others. So, if I use photocopying it is not because I am a lonely worker, but because it is easier to show my work to people and to make this subject visible.
JD: Yes, that's what I meant with the independency...you can do what you want.
M: Otherwise you have to wait to have enough money to send it to the printer’s.
JD: Yes, that's what I meant.
M: Many of them are books that I like but I would never make into art. It is a kind of experiment to see whether an idea works or doesn't work. What I like about photocopying is that you can stop the edition or you can make more, or you can throw it in the bin and you won’t feel guilty.
JD: That is also the focus I would like to give it: the independency of saying ‘I will make an edition of three, but maybe I will change it again and make a new edition out of it.’ It is related to what is happening in mail art. Somebody is sending somebody else a work and he will recycle or change it and send it to another person instead of returning it to the same person. Maybe in the end, somebody will get the work back as an assemblage or collage in a completely different context. So I can imagine the way you are interested in systems where your book may be published several times in several kinds of editions which are altered again. It may be possible too.
M: Yes, maybe... If I need them for a large audience, I will do it.
JD: Who is your audience? Do you share what you are doing? Who are the people whom you would like to share your projects with? To publish means bringing something to the public. So, what kind of public do you have in mind? If you publish something, at some point you make a decision to make copies of it, which means you want to distribute it.
M: I am not so specific about the kind of audience I would like. I just know that I wouldn't like to have art critics, people who are obsessed with my work. I would like to have writers or scientists as my audience, many different people being able to read my work and not just people who are related to the world of art, the context of art.
JD: Yes, you would like different kinds of disciplines. This is also an aim of this project, to have a plural discourse on your book or on the books we chose, in order to see how people from other disciplines will experience the books we chose.
Going back to the Invisible Collection. This is the only one you have singled out for an edition of 500 copies, to open it up to a larger public. Why this one?
M: Just because of what I said before: it's a kind of index of many things I did.
JD: So, it is important to you. When I show the Invisible Collection to people, there are some books in this collection which are very attractive and which are quite open to an idea of what is going on. And this here is a much more hermetic book; you have to work on it to get a grip on what is going on. I like that you have chosen this one. I just want to know if you had a particular reason for choosing this one.
M: Not really, but I think it's the only one that works on its own. With the other ones, I have the feeling that you need to see all the 25 books together to get the idea. And with this one, you can take it away and it still works on its own.
JD: Are you speaking about a kind of dependency in the books? Because I once talked to someone who had dedicated his works to kingfishers; the strongest aspect of his work is his entire body of works, as a complete set of books. Some books cannot survive, so to speak, when they are taken away from their context. This may also be what you are doing - building up a kind of interrelationship between the books, which makes it necessary to show them as a whole and not as different, single books.
M: In the case of this specific piece, I decided to do it like that - like a small collection. It is not something I will repeat in other works. I don't know... Some things will work on their own and others need a context of other pieces.... But I’m not already envisaging the collection I will be building in the course of my entire life. I am not that organized.
JD: Or you always want to change your way of classification.
M: It would be very boring if there was something I needed to follow all my life.
JD: I know at home they get rather confused when I say I’m going to make a kind of soup and it is always slightly different, because I do not wish to do the recipe the same way all the time. But they don't like it. They like to know what they get. But I could make a book on the different ways of making pumpkin soup. Maybe that's also my problem in classification.
MM: In a sense, is your work also a kind of comment on people who do believe in the finality of systems, like scientists or...?
M: Yes, but, I don't know, some of my best friends are scientists, but they do not think like that, you know. Sometimes they are more open than artists. Artists can be more dogmatic than scientists.
MM: You mentioned, for instance, the artists’ obsession of re-ordering things. Would you like the two worlds to be more connected, or to be more open to each other?
M: Yes, I would like that. One of the main obsessions in my work is how to connect different people working on different levels or in different fields. So, it's something I would really like to see: that you are open, or you have an object and you know to which discipline it belongs: it could be a science manual or a magazine, or ...
MM: Do you think art has the power to change that?
M: To change what, like, the order of, or what?
MM: To make people realize that they are thinking within a discipline.
M: Yes, maybe if art has some use in the world, that is one of its uses: that it can slightly change how you are used to seeing things.
JD: Going back to the history of artist’s books. You see (that) quite a lot of people have been working with the same affinity, for instance, Herman de Vries is one of them. Well, there’s also quite a few women who have been involved in artist’s books, but mostly only the men get mentioned. But, lately, I’ve been coming across various people who are in this field of interest. One of them is David Bunn. This book “Subliminal Messages” has recently been published. Bunn has been using discarded card catalogues of the Central Library in Los Angeles. Notes, stains and marks on these cards has been collected in this book. He has been scanning these “signs” and made blow-ups, revealing uncanny connections between these signs and the card texts It is not the kind of book that one might exspect from you, but it has some parallels with observations and themes in your work. Esspecially the way you are observing traces of readers, added to books after these have been read. Bunn concentrates on information which is on library cards, which is exposed here in a very obvious way.
M: They still use this kind of card in almost every library, right?
JD: Not anymore, I think. In fact, it's quite old-fashioned. So, he made blow-ups of all these details on discarded cards, to make them obvious. suggesting aspects of the subconscious and occult features. He also made a classification of this kind of information. Which leads me to your most recent project, which also took place in libraries, in which you were assisted by people from different disciplines, like writers, who wrote texts for you. These texts were deliberately put into books in the libraries. How did that work? You have now been to the three main libraries in New York, Berlin and Paris. How did it work to continue with this project? What have been your observations? How did you come to something which is open to the public, in this project?
M: Well, it is a project called ‘The Interlude’ - it’s about traces left by readers and it was based on the idea that when you go to a public library, many people have read the same copy before you. Sometimes you'll come across traces, like a train ticket someone inserted, or notes, something that can reveal small details about the person who read the book. I wanted to make a collection of fake reader traces, to make a large-scale edition of fake reader traces and to distribute them in many different copies of the same book in different libraries. So, I worked with different people like writers, philosophers, curators, artists.
JD: Did you choose the books involved?
M: No, I didn't choose any books. I just chose the people I wanted to work with. And I told them that they needed to make a kind of nomad text or a text, or an action, or a photograph, whatever they wanted. And they also had to plan a strategy of how they wanted me to distribute these or to perform this action in the space of the libraries. So, some of the texts are very specific, and just for one particular book; others are random; or they have to be placed on the tables where people are working. So, in a way I am performing many different actions and activities, when I do this piece in the libraries.
JD: What is your role in this?
M: I am a bit like the person who hands out flyers in the street, to repair your fridge or other stuff. I just distribute. So, I printed a thousand copies of the texts and in the end I distributed all these different texts, hundreds of copies of each book in the public libraries of New York, Paris and Berlin.
JD: How can you observe what went on in this project? Do you work towards a kind of end result or end product?
M: No, it has a different dynamics. It's for free and doesn't expect any response or any immediate objective.
JD: There is no particular end to this project.
M: I mean I want to make this experiment of ‘how can you perform an accident’. Like when you open a book and you find something by accident, you never know when this small gesture will be repeated. I just want to make an edition of an accident. So, I cannot attach my email on this accident, I cannot expect any immediate response, because it belongs to chance and it's part of a system that I cannot control. I don't know how chance works and I don't know who's going to open this book. Then again, maybe no one will open it ever again. What I like is that I tell you this story and you think: so many papers inside the books and maybe no one will ever open these books and put papers inside and they will stay there for so long. Or maybe a lot of people will read them. You just don't know. It's part of the fictional state of the project, which is very important to me.
JD: I was wondering how you perceive the library as a whole, using it for individual books. In fact, what you say in some of your texts, and which is something one can experience going to a library, is that one moves towards certain keys in a library, such as ‘how to see what’ and ‘what to use’. Maybe, in a way, these interventions are also using the model of the library in moving people towards a way of reading. Do you see what I mean? You make a difference between how you can use a data base and how you can use a book. A book, you could say, has a kind of structure which is in front of you. Of course, you will be influenced by many other things in reading the book; some people read back to front, or flip through it to find out what kind of a book it is. A library already has some restrictions in what you will see and what you will not see. And perhaps you’ve used this model for individual books. Or haven’t you?
M: No, it's not like that. It's more like, when you go to a library, you read in a different way to when you read at home - the book that you choose and the book that you did not choose. Every time I go to the library, it's more like, I spend hours there and I pick one book and then I pick another one. You get a feeling of the amount of information that is just for the taking. Maybe you would never be interested in a particular book; you would just pass it by or discover it by accident. Maybe the book you are interested in is just next to the other book. You discover it through randomness. There is no real reason for it to be just so. So this project is an experiment of how you can read this space; how you can read a library. And also, it is a very specific kind of public space. It is not a square. It is not a park. But in the end, it is public. Everyone can go there. Everyone can do whatever they want. You have some rules, like having to keep silent. In the end, there are a lot of different things happening there.
JD: You described it as being quite different from university libraries, where you can't see any book, where you just go to assist them to find out where a specific book is, and they are stored by size and not by classification, for example, in order to use the space as suited as possible. That is quite different. I also noticed you did not mention websites. For instance, I made a website on books, and there are many ways to enter the website. You can go to the artist; you can go to the publisher; you can go to a theme or a subject. You can come across the same books in different ways. But if you look at the registration of how the site is used, you can see that, for example, in visiting a website on artist’s books, names are quite crucial. So, it is not books on photographs, or any particular subject, but the big names that are visited most frequently. You can also see how long visitors stay there to find out if one title is there or not, because they are collecting. You can view a kind of collector’s behaviour from the way they visit the website, because with websites you can register how they have been used, which pages have been visited, and for how long.
I think, for example, that it is very interesting to see that programmes of publishers have hardly been used by people, or specific fields. It's always, nearly always, the names of the artists which count. So, websites like I just mentioned are a third way of using data bases. You can analyse how they have been read.
JD: Another part of your work is interventions in newspapers and magazines. Was it your initiative to do this, or to use it? Or did you also, like some artist in Germany, intervene in a normal use of the newspaper. In other words, as part of the daily use.
M: Yes, I have done something like that.
JD: In Mexico?
M: In a real newspaper. I changed the cover of the newspaper for one day; or did different interventions that were performed in the space of the newspaper itself. For instance, there were many experiments where I changed the normal alphabet, with alphabets made of images of the front page of the newspaper.
MS: Did you do it afterwards? Or did you go to the editor and ask: 'Can I use the front page for this?'
M: It was something we planned beforehand. But I needed to wait until they knew which were the images on the front page. That meant waiting until 3 o'clock in the morning; and then, from 3 to 5, I needed to be ready with the new typeface and then I needed to ask them to replace the original text with the strange typeface. So, it was like publishing on the front page of the newspaper. People who bought it would say: ' What's happening here?'
It would look like a different language - Arabic or something...
MS: So, was there a lot of reaction?
M: Yeah. I liked the reactions. Some people were really angry, and others liked it. But, there were a lot of reactions. People were quite impressed. They called the newspaper and complained, especially the subscribers. They would say: ' I have been paying for this newspaper all these years and suddenly I get this. What's wrong with you? Are you planning to change?...'
But I did other experiments in Vienna and in Amsterdam. I didn’t change the front page but there were insertions in other places. And these works with newspapers I did together with the people I worked with a lot, so it was always like a working collaboration. I could never do a newspaper project on my own. It's like a kind of group project.
JD: The question on how people react is a recurring one. I think most of your projects have an open end - they are not really finished, or they are not meant to be products, but much more of a process which can continue.
M: Well, I think it depends. Many works, for example, this Invisible Collection of Books, could be said to be open. But with these newspapers, I don't want to make any changes in it. I can say it's open in that I am interested in the way I distributed it. That is one of the main reasons why I work with publications, because you can approach a wider audience. And it's like portable art. You just open your bag and you give it to someone and that's all. You don't need to say: ‘this is the photograph of an installation I did’. Like this one here, it is a photograph you cannot see very well, but it's more or less just like that. So, you just give this thing and that's it. That's why I really like publications, or photocopies - all this kind of portable work.
MS: I was wondering what you actually wanted to change in the newspaper. Did you change the language?
M: No, in this one I didn't change the language. I changed the feature like, you have the alphabet: ABC. So, instead of using the letters, I took an icon of the newspaper and changed it. So, the 'a' was the face of the person, the 'b' was the car that was running through the other pages, things you could recognize on photographs, but they became texts. So, it's like a game of how you read the text and how you read an image. And about how, often, especially in the case of newspapers, you don't read the information. You just look at the photographs and the headlines. You are more guided by how the images are telling things.
K: I was thinking about what Maaike was asking. I think what you try to do more or less questions or stops in its tracks a routine way of life, or a routine way of organizing or ordering things. And in doing so, you sort of surprise or shock your public.
M: Yes, I intend to shock the public and also shock myself. Every time you reflect on something, you expect a change, or to understand something else. So, this is more like activities or performances on the ordering of things and the displaying of information, that can make people change the way they are used to approaching this kind of thing.
K: Have you found, so far, a specific way of organizing life or things in your life? Or is the key word still continual change; ‘no system’ is the system.
M: Oh, no. No. I am not a chaotic person who wants to be forever changing. But I am not obsessed with order, either.
K: I have the impression that, as you said before, you are very influenced by science, since you read a lot of scientific or science-related stuff, and in your work you always mention ‘experiment’, which also sounds fairly scientific, or so it does to me.
M: No, for me, all activities related to knowledge have a strong relation with playfulness. For me, science and literature are not so different. All the scientists I know are very exciting people and they really play with ideas. I don't find science to be very stiff in comparison with other kinds of activities, or with fixing cars. It depends on the attitude you have towards the things you want to discover or investigate. The most important thing to me is playfulness. It is not that I like complete chaos or complete order. But I like to play around with things. Of course, in order to play you need some rules. Otherwise, you won't have fun. So, I like to play with these rules and to see what happens.
JD: This playfulness is also part of the mail art, which is, maybe, also your work: sending things to people and changing them and having an exchange with people, which is much more important than just having a conversation with one person. You like to be part of a network. You are part of a network in your conversation about your work and about their work.
M: It's very much related to how the art world works. If you don't belong to a network or a system of people, you'll just disappear. This idea of a lonely artist working in his studio who will be discovered, I think, is almost impossible. From the beginning, you always need to be part of a network. On your own, you would never achieve anything. I like this idea.
JD: It is nice that you have your personal network, which is not the official art network. It touches on different sections of science or other disciplines. Your network has been built up in a very personal way.
M: I don't know if you can talk about a personal network.
JD: I think so, yes. You keep it so by going on communicating with these people. So, it's partly personal.
M: When you communicate with someone because this person is interested in what you are doing, you are part of his network.
JD: It's a question of being active or passive. There are passive networks, which are official networks. You can enter them and go out again. You do not have to do that much in keeping up the network. In that sense, yours is an active network. That's the difference.
K: What do you think of this interview?
M: I think it's nice.
K: Have we asked the questions about your art you want to be addressed? Is there anything else about your art you want your audience, or us, to know?
M: I think I have already said enough. I would not want to indicate that this or that is what I want my audience to read about my work.
K: So, there is no specific message in your art work to your audience. It is just reflexive expressions of the way you are...
M: There are many specific things, but I will not tell the public. Because that would make it more like advertising, like another way of working. I like people to make an effort to read into it what they want.
K: Do you think your audience will know you more as a person through your artworks,?
M: No. Maybe I’m just lying.... Maybe they know me more than I know myself. It is not one of my main interests to put myself in the works, like saying ‘this is my table’…
K: Do you think you know yourself more or know the world more, or is what you make just one record of what you are doing at that point in time.
M: I think I have more questions than answers. I wouldn't say that I know more. In fact, I feel that I know less and that I have more questions. One of the most important things for me is that you make your work and you keep being curious. Until you are hundred years old, you still have questions like: how does this work? I've thought about it a hundred times and I cannot find an answer. For me, it is very important, to keep this activity going.
K: And will you go on doing this printed form of art?
M: I don't know. Maybe after I leave this place, I will never do publication again.
JD: No, no. I can't believe that.
K: Why then is the Jan van Eyck such a condition for you for this kind of artwork?
M: No, I was only joking.
K: But is it true that the Jan van Eyck is an important condition?
M: Well, for instance, you have so many facilities here that other places don't have. You have an amazing printer that helps you solve all your problems. Also, you have a mixture of people: you have designers, theoreticians and artists. You can always make projects in collaboration with these people. There is always a sort of dialogue going on. Theoreticians do books; and designers also work on this kind of thing. These are always questions in the air.
K: In the real world outside, in the art world, is it difficult to be an artist’s book artist?
M: Difficult in what sense?
K: In the production of your artwork. Is it perhaps difficult to find a publisher?
JD: There are places which have a history of working with publications. If you go to the Aachener Kunstverein, they have an affinity with books. They have a rich tradition in this area. It will be a kind of, it seems to be, a free choice. But all these places attract you as well, in collaborating with people. So, there are wide ranges of galleries or institutions who have this tradition.
M: And they are used to working with multiples, or with publications. I think the idea of original or precious objects of art will disappear very soon. I don't believe the object will be that important any more. I think it only still exists because of the art market. Maybe they will keep on selling old paintings. The new artists will no longer do objects, or original objects. It doesn't make sense any more.