Interview with Ruben Verdu: Updated February 20, 2008

(El Organismo del Animal. La Raya. Ciudad Juarez. 1992)

January 3, 2007

Thanks for the clarification–I always tend to mix up things. But you raise an issue I want to address, so this is going to be a long question, and that is, if I’m correct, much of your work tends to reference and/or be influenced by an amalgam of “disciplines” and “discourses”: theoretical, historical, literary, and philosophical works (Bentham, Deleuze, Borges, Roman history). Not that this is a solitary endeavor, but it’s certainly a “mode” of working that is not too popular or evident today, and perhaps even within the last 20-25 years in contemporary art (in the critical non superficial way that is). What role do these discourses and practices play in your work, and how important is it for viewers to identify them via visual signs or gramaphones?

I always felt uncomfortable seeing how a culture totemizes its artists. I know this might seem kind of disingenuous, but I’ve met some of the most celebrated, most mediatized, most trivialized contemporary artists, and I’ve seen how we’ve encumbered their endeavors as if they’ve toiled suspended in a vacuum, destined, or almost exemplifying an unresolved call for ancestral heroics. This kind of individualism, you know, should be considered as to belong to the pre-Historic, that is, far from the concerns of a collective memory. Truth is that our culture is mostly cannibalistic. It’s very important to acknowledge this ingestion. What I know of Bentham, of Deleuze, and of Etruscan Art, is far from what they meant. What I’m quoting is what I misread, or misrecognized; in short, what I’ve missed, what I consumed.

We are all products of an infernal machinery, and I say infernal because it is quite Dantesque at all levels. I aim, above all, to be affected by this monstrous dimension. My ability to respond to it, my rhizomatic responsibility, can only take place there, after I submit to it. How could I otherwise bring my proposals to the scrutiny of an audience? I’m not more than just given to that continuous and pulsing attempt that tries to gain the complicity of others. Isn’t this the basic condition of our mutual exchange, of this right to public discourse? I’m given this right to exhibit what, my symptom, or ours?  

I relate to your conception of blurred identities. But perhaps your outlook on subjectivity is exemplary (as exemplary as one can be) of these “situs” and of your own “blurred, undefinable, mistaken identity, a bit of this, a bit of that…” In this light, are you, and your work, proposing an “alternative” or new subjective space, or assuming Cadava and Nancy’s problematized question a few years ago, which could not be without the “who”, “who comes after the subject?”

The masses come after the subject, or, as I just said, go after the subject. The subject is simply a minuscule attempt at an ordering construct. The pulse of the many goes, however, clearly beyond this production of a discreet self. Let’s be honest. A priori, we don’t have agency in the many. Action from the many is only spontaneous and dependable, meaning that it is reached in coincidence. But let me formulate a possible scenario. Now there are some that propose to serve the tenets of a horizontal cultural exchange, and have acknowledged the existence of what they call a relational aesthetics. This brings about a shift in production priorities up to a point in which is not the traditional subject that manages his or her gestures, expressions, or exposures anymore. Production is spread across. Inevitably we begin to subordinate ourselves to a certain fate, a certain uniformity, a certain social scale that we cannot call subjectivity anymore. That’s very exciting. The most acknowledged subject is the public subject, the famous individual, the constantly monitored self that is at the mercy of the tumultuous demands of the crowds. The rest are statistics.

I ask this because in your work there seems to be a desire for a certain eye, a certain ear, and a certain emotive-analytical framework, one to be encountered, and Nietzschean perhaps. In this sense, the work reminds me a bit of Tom Stoppard, Gaspar Noe and Jorge Luis Borges, particularly in the sense that these individuals (for the most part) seemed/seem to have an audience that is more hermetic than diffused. Assuming I am correct, are you an artist’s artist?

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