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Interview with Tania Bruguera

by Roberta Tenconi

One of your most recent artworks is "Tatlin's Whisper #6", a performance presented in Cuba for the Havana Biennial (March 2009): a podium with an open microphone for people to say what they wanted. What is the relationship - if there is any - in your work between individual and personal experiences and the broader context of social and historical situations?

 

Tania Bruguera: As you say, a podium, an open microphone and the right to a minute without censorship were the most important elements in this piece. But the entire description includes also other elements functioning in a practical-conceptual level, as one of the loudspeakers pointing out of the building, donating 200 disposable cameras with flash to the audience (thus creating a new and instant potential audience). As well as others functioning in a symbolic level: two persons in military uniform accompanied those who took the mike and placed a white dove on their shoulder (a reference to the first speech by Fidel Castro after his triumph in 1959) and, finally, stood at both sides of the podium while their minute lasted.

 

The dimension of these elements is based, as with the other pieces in this series, "Tatlin's Whisper," in a collective political memory shaped and formed by the accumulation of images provided by the mass media. Images that, at the same time, are alien because they have taken place in a different moment and/or place and, or they are anesthetized images because of their repetitiveness, because of the wear and tear of their potential meaning. Images that have not been previously linked with a personal experience are staged in order to transfer what was solely an intellectual political knowledge into a personal memory.

 

In these pieces there is a negotiation between what is theatrical and what is spontaneous in historical matters (in their political dimension). Theatrical seen as what a priori is presumably "effective," what is considered proved in its specificity and ability to react, what is assumed as part of a generically shared sensitivity, a call to memory; spontaneity seen as a space to renegotiate a future that you do not accept as predetermined. What I try to do is decide which spaces I am going to pre-define and which I am going to leave the construction to the audience: I bring a stage, I open a situation. But something that is very clear to me and that I want to emphasize is that the elements I choose for my works are not based in their symbolic value, but in their practical operational capacity, in their function. The symbolic dimension, if it is political art, should come later, with the consequences of the piece, with its operational capacity. These are consequences that imply fulfilling an ethical system and placing yourself within it.

 

When I began to study art in Cuba, I saw very clearly that we would be the exponents of a community and that something more than individual sublimation was expected from us, perhaps instead training a collective super ego, to give it a name. What I believe important from this training stage has to do with the relationship created between what is individual and what is collective. Something very much present in my work is ethics seen within the emotional realm, as the location of pleasure. My work in many cases is the presentation of a negotiation between ethics and desire.

 

To live in a country where every once in a while you hear a speech informing you that you are living a historical moment of which you are a part and in which you are expected to participate makes you have a rather daily relationship with what is historical. A relationship that is either of doubt and confusion almost, or one that makes you monumentalize the slightest event in a kind of contest to have (to own) your share of historical responsibility. The main tension is perhaps to be found in who has the right to utopia. In a triumphant socialist revolution it is understood that utopia is a required stage of thinking, not the evidence of failure. Of course, once utopia is achieved and established, it calls for a new one and it is there that my work attempts to intervene.

 

Last year at the Tate Modern, visitors were stopped by two mounted policemen, who controlled them with instructions and warnings when they were entering the museum. With this action, entitled Tatlin's Whispers # 5 (January 2008), you appropriated the structures of power (people in uniform, the idea of controlling crowds, people's fear of animals) and forced the audience into an uneasy position. Can you comment on this critical intersection between art and everyday life (since it was not clear at all that this was an artwork)? How did the audience reply? And also, what was your reaction to their response?

 

An important thing in my work is to delay the moment of awareness of what is being experienced as art. It is precisely the moment when the doubt whether something is artistic or not is there that I believe the experience is more fruitful. This does not mean that I am not interested in a reading from the point of view of the history of art of what I am presenting; on the contrary, many of my works contain a comment on artworks I am attracted to, but I am not interested in having them assessed only in that sense, since this would reduce their intention and also because I sincerely believe that is not their main motivation, that is not what leads to them. I can say, for example, that the Tate piece also dialogued with the history of equestrian painting, but this is actually a secondary effect, not the intention of the piece. This is a dialogue which is established later, with references and not with intentions. I am not interested in having what is artistic seen in everyday life, but in having an everyday life with a sense of the critical distance and freedom that is reserved to art.

 

The process I am interested to create in my work is one in which the "audience" transforms into "citizen" and not the other way round. To achieve this, for the dialogue established to be on ethics and on behavior, it is necessary that references come first from the world of their social and daily living experiences and not from the world of art. What interests me as art is the process, but not the process in the sense of "showing" something that is taking place in time and space, but the thinking process activated in the spectator.

 

You say that I appropriate power structures. Yes, I am very interested in that, but not as a contemplative exercise or as an extension of the linguistic possibilities of art. I appropriate the structures and some mechanisms of the way power functions to create political situations, which must be negotiated in an environment of critical observation.

 

In an interview at Tate you said: "Every piece I have done so far, let's say it's the quotation - the visual quotation - of an image I've seen on TV, in the news, on TV". Is using that same language a way for art to actively contribute to society?

 

I don't believe that using the same language or the same formal resources of something that is not art is a way in which art (and I am not only speaking of visual arts) actively contributes to society. I rather see it as mnemonic resources to enter into a conversation where the subject and/or the strategies to use are clear. Although I admire some works done with this technology, I am more interested in the contribution of art to society by the creation of an ARTE UTIL (useful art). An art aiming at practical applications for art in society, a function for, and generated by, art not limited to a visualization or signalization of a problem, but a proposal to solve it. Art could actively contribute in society, not as much as a laboratory where in vitro interactions can be seen, but as the potential "applications" of this knowledge, as "field work." I am not talking of art as a replacement for social entities in charge of implementing and watching the long-term development of structurally functional social structures, but as a way to regulate these structures suggesting, in practice, other locations for their potential utopias. To that end, we must appropriate not the language but the dynamics of / in the structures of power addressed. The idea is not to make references, but to create them; to go from being a proposal to be a working temporary reality.

In 2003 you founded an art school project in Havana, the Cátedra Arte de Conducta (Behavior Art Studies), the first course for performance art in Cuba. After six years the school closed. Why have you decided to end this experience of "silent revolution"? Do you have the feeling a change has taken place in the Cuban younger generation of artists and, more generally, in the local educational system?

 

The Cátedra Arte de Conducta emerged under the idea of being a space to study performance and time art, but it could also be said that this is the first study center for political art I know of. We directly discussed in it the way in which ethics, ideology and history intertwine with memory, sociology, history of art. It is a space where behavior and rumor were seen as two resources of social art, but above all, where there was the attempt at bringing forth some statements on ARTE UTIL.

 

It was a project under the umbrella of the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, without which it could not have existed. I was fortunate to be given by them a large independence to act. Although I was interested in its existence to be known, I did not want it to have a too well defined presence. I wanted it to be rather a mobile space where the relationship between art and politics would be discussed, aware of the tradition in which art was defined in relation with its service to the revolution, to ideology and to "the people." It was an open space to all those who wanted to come, whoever they were or the training they had. The only way you could see the project was participating in it. I wanted those who saw the project to focus in the works made as a result of the debate sessions and the young artists attending them and not as a project by me.

 

I believe in art as a way to present moments that are socially possible, models to gain access to those moments. In this case the model simultaneously included doing something that everyone believed impossible and dissolving it at a given moment. In this case, I did not want my use of the institutional structure be confused with the self-institutionalization of the project. Artists must be vehicles for things to happen, but must not be the purpose of things. Those who work in social art must dissolve with the end of the project or with the transition of the project's authorship.

 

It took me long to think how to end the project, because this gesture was as important as opening and continuing it. It took me two years from the moment I thought I had to leave the project to the moment I finally ended it. Socialist societies had five-year plans to achieve their economic and social goals. I thought this timed system could be interesting for the project. I did not stop after five years because those participating in it asked me not to and I saw myself in an ethical situation created by the fact of it being a project for them and by them.

 

I continued thinking in several potential models for the "dissolution" of the project, because I saw the danger of its continuation. I thought that "handing down" the project to another person (something I considered problematic since I as the first author would be an unavoidable reference as "the original"). Then I thought in a contest to see what new models might emerge from people interested in this project, but I considered it unfair to perpetuate a name, as if it were a brand, if it would be based on a different idea.

 

Then, when the institution itself, the real one, asked me not to close the project, and since the project was precisely to infiltrate the institution to question it from within, this was a sign that the moment to end it had arrived and could not be delayed any further. I chose the Havana Biennial exhibition for it, because I would be able to leave the participants in a privileged position and, I hope, at a good point of entry to their professional lives. I believed that nostalgia, that creating a space in which you feel something is missing, was as important now as filling this space was before, when I created the project. That is, for me, the best way to continue the project: by liberating its participants from its past.

You live between Havana, Chicago, Paris and Venice, always working on very different types of projects. Can you tell me something about the editorial project Memoria de la Postguerra? Are you still working on similar editorial projects?

 

For me the difference is: why am I in these places? What challenges do they bring me? How do they make me grow? At times I say that Havana is (and contains) my past, Chicago is my job and Paris is the chance to build my utopia. I like to be able to go from one place to another and see how the political and social behavior models change. I like to see where and how political spaces are formed. I am fascinated by trying to see a place through another one (or while I am in another one).

 

As to the editorial project Memoria de la Postguerra, this was something that functioned at a given moment and, although I would like to have an editorial project someday, it was conceived as art. What I still have from that experience and to what I have precisely returned is to the appropriation of power structures that I tried for the first time in that work.

 

Though the concepts you deal with - like freedom and self-determination - take a very physical form in your work, many of your artworks also have an ephemeral aspect, since they are living actions or use minimum material. Do you feel your practice is close to conceptual art experiences?

 

I grew up studying conceptual art in the Instituto Superior de Arte in Cuba: Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs, Magritte's games with written and visual images and Duchamp's immensely incomprehensible seduction under the aura of a McEvilley's article. Years later, a professor who thought I needed feminine models showed me Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and Cindy Sherman, but instead I arrived at Ana Mendieta's ideas of territory and at Hans Haacke's political strategies. What was happening in the Cuban art world in the '80s was more intense, more interesting and more attractive than any work I could see in a magazine or a slide. It was living art, political art in action. Although one wants to find commonplaces and to think there is a mainstream we may share, my mainstream was not the production in NYC but the immediate discussion around paradigms for political art production happening in Havana. If I believe it is conceptual it is in the sense that I try to enter into a system while I am questioning it. I am interested in objects as a generator of behaviors not as a mean in themselves. I am interested in their power to trigger a reaction.

 

I have been researching forms in which art can be applied to everyday political life. The concept of the ephemeral is one that presents itself in the form of the political and its effectiveness. The ephemeral is the transitory condition of what is political.