Marta Minujín hand in hand with Analía Saban: An unusual meeting of two generations
Marta, I’d like to ask you some questions I have lingering. I’ve often heard you say you come from another planet. In that case, to what extent do you feel you’re the author of your works? Perhaps you feel a channeling of the collective unconscious, a bit as though ideas can come from elsewhere, from beyond. If that is the case, have you drawn any conclusion about it?
MM: I never feel that it’s my work; rather, I feel that it transcends me. The ideas come to me on their own, as if they were using me.
AS: A few days ago, I ran into Marta in Paris. We arrived the same day – another coincidence. Marta was going to show her films in the retrospective the Pompidou organized for her, and I was there to inaugurate a show at Praz Delavallade Gallery. So I went to the Pompidou and the next day Marta came to my exhibition.
But seeing all the movies (it was a fairly large retrospective), they showed things from The Parthenon of Books, hippie films, everything up to The Tower of Babel. And I thought, “What energy!” And one of the films that you showed was one you had made under the influence of LSD, and it seemed interesting to me, because just recently Steve Jobs died in California, and he spoke a lot to the fact that one of the greatest influences in his creation that revolutionized Apple was that he experimented with LSD, and that not even people as close to him as his wife had a clue as to what had happened to him. Yet after, when the film ended, you said: “ultimately, the only interesting thing about this film is the fact that it was made under the influence of LSD.”
MM: Yes, exactly.
AS: Well, then, I wanted to ask you if you’ve come to any conclusion about that.
MM: Well, LSD’s very helpful because it expands your consciousness and you see things with great intensity, and if you really are living within that effect you’re leading another life, because the hippies had a life parallel to society’s. A society that ended up wrecked, but it was so interesting to have done that, I would do it over again, though now it would be totally old-hat to do it.
AS: But after, on the creative level, was it really useful?
MM: On the creative level it’s of no use, because psychedelic art loses identity. If you open a psychedelic art book, you can’t tell to which artist a given work belongs.
AS: And is that a bad thing? Does it matter?
MM: Yes, it matters, because we exist for some reason. You go through the hippie movement, you live it, and all that, but that psychedelic art has no visual interest in itself, in the history of art. In the 60s more doors were opened for art. The whole decade is like the Renaissance, and in the past 40 years, those trends continue, but there are no more doors that have opened.
AS: I wanted to ask you about that too, because it’s seemed to me that, after seeing your retrospective, after you got to know Warhol, Dalí, so many others, Kaprow, all those people who really knew how to have fun, shall we say, you come back to finding meaning in the day-to-day, which doesn’t have any of that vertigo. It strikes me that life today is utterly boring if you compare it to those years.
MM: Well, no, because soon enough I manage to make impossible art like The Tower of Babel. I believe in the impossible.
AS: Then you’ve found meaning in your own work. The movitation, the wish to keep on amusing yourself. You’ve turned that into your own work.
MM: Into my own life.
AS: About your brush with death, which happened so early, with the death of your brother. I also had various experiences, ever since the bombing of the Israeli Embassy, in 2005 they kidnapped me for several hours, and I thought they would kill me. To come into contact with death, was that also a motivation, knowing from a very early age that all this comes to an end?
MM: It was a catastrophic experience. The experience of the death of my brother and all deaths are catastrophic.
AS: And the suicide? Greco’s for example?
MM: No, I consider Greco’s a work of art. It was art. In fact, it struck me as fantastic, because he always wanted to do it. It wasn’t negative. It was making something of his own life, and deciding his own death.
AS: Yet you wanted to save him, because you went looking for him.
MM: Yes, when I was very young I wanted to save him; but later, I no longer did, because it seemed to me that he had to do what he wanted to, he had to choose his life.
AS: But does that help you in some way as a driving force? Because I’ve also seen over the past few years, and I’ve heard you say in an interview, that you have to hurry things up, that you have to do things. Does it serve you as a motor to know that somehow there’s a limit?
MM: Well, yes, there’s a time limit. There’s the factor of age. There is a limit. I believe you always have to think of something impossible in order to make, because it gives you a driving force for continuing. You can do boring things, but if you have something impossible to think about, that impossibility doesn’t exist.
AS: Regarding your creative process: On the one hand, here everybody knows you, there’s always a swarm of people around you; but do you feel solitude in your creative process? You and your ideas, how do get on with that solitude?
MM: Badly! I feel bad because I can’t be alone, a terrible existential angst comes over me (pause). It’s that angst of existing that you can’t account for in any way.
AS: What do you do to cope with that? Does it help to surround yourself with people?
MM: Work saves me, even if what I’m doing doesn’t interest me. The activity in itself saves me.
AS: Another thing: sometimes it seems to me that artists basically start looking for recognition, seek fame; I wanted to ask you how it was for you on that plane. Have you come to any conclusions about it? Did you ever question yourself about it? What it a matter of something impulsive? Was it worth it?
MM: I think it came to me as a fate, because I was always different from the others. Being different brought me attention, and then, everything that happened, happened. After, in my moment of fame, which was with Warhol, the only thing I felt was that fame interested me, only in the sense that fame interested other people. But I wasn’t interested in being famous. What interested me was the interest, the curiosity in why people would go after fame.
AS: Sure.
MM: To have money, prestige, money – whatever else.
AS: And your own motivation for fame, where did that come from?
MM: It was accidental. It came from the fact that I made something as forceful and convincing as La Destrucción, and everything that came after that was inevitable. These are accidents in life that just sweep you along.
AS: When you’re being self-critical with yourself, what do you think?
MM: I get past it.
AS: You cast it aside, then, and go on?
MM: That’s right.
AS: And the last question is: Talent or discipline? Which of the two helped you more?
MM: Talent. Natural talent. I think I’m a genius, that’s the heart of it. I truly believe that and always have believed it, so no one matters in the least to me who says, “No, you’re not, you’re not,” – because I believe I’m a genius….
AS: Yet there’s a saying in English, “Talent is cheap”, no? Without discipline it’s also … well, it’s as the saying goes.
MM: You know how they say you have to practice the piano 8 hours a day? Well, I don’t believe in that; you can be a genius and not practice. But what happens is that the profession, your trade, sweeps you, and your surroundings do too. So work helps you to develop ideas. You’re doing something mechanical; for instance, I’m putting down some little color tiles or some other equally tedious thing – and yet I’m flying.
AS: The way the pianist keeps his fingers from atrophying.
MM: In order to be able to fly. You use it like an airport. If you go to your studio, it’s your airport. There you either fly or you don’t.
AS: Fine, but you do have to have the discipline to go to the studio.
MM: Well, yes, that’s it.
AS: Nothing else!
Acknowledgements: Jimena Ferreiro
Buenos Aires, November 18, 2011, at 11x7 Gallery.