Interview with Ruben Verdu: Updated February 20, 2008
I never met Ruben Verdu. This is not quite true. I met him in 1997 in a large warehouse-turned-loft in the then still desolate Willamsburg, Brooklyn. But I didn’t really meet him, because although he appeared for a minute to grab a bite, he was gone before I had time to converse with him. I saw him again atop a Brooklyn roof bar-b-q about a week later, and we spoke for a few minutes.
I then met Ruben again in Williamsburg. But this time I had been in New York for two-years, and yet still hadn’t had a substantial chat with this person I had heard of since my undergraduate days at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP).
My interest in his work, and his ideas, stem from the spectral presence of his reputation within this institution, but also from my first introduction to his work, Mater Politica. I recall seeing this “installation” and being compelled to try to understand it. At that time I grappled with objects, texts, and colors that I would eventually come to understand as “signs.” However, I do believe that even if I had had an understanding of semiotics, this particular project would have been elusive particularly because it employed a system that seemed to resist any kind of interpretation.
This interrelation with Ruben’s art perplexed me, because up to this time my work, and most work at UTEP, did not elicit this experience. I remember hearing how this person, Ruben, for he was only known as Ruben, would argue, contradict, expose, debate, and deconstruct the weak underpinnings of our then beloved art instructors. Yet I still lacked an understanding of his work: a waving fake-fur flag dangling from a free-standing industrial fan; text on a wall; and a sound of a humming motor.
It is crucial to understand El Paso, its surroundings, its sister city Juarez, and the fine arts department at UTEP. El Paso and UTEP are comprised of approximately 75% Mexican American citizens, with many Mexican nationals living in both Juarez and El Paso. Juarez, particularly its most desolate and impoverished colonias (shanty towns), are within walking distance of UTEP and its fine arts department. Sights of burning rubber tires, mountains with biblical texts, houses made of cardboard and refuse material, and three-legged dogs were as commonplace to an art student’s view as were slides of Picasso, Richter, Nauman, and Sherman.
UTEP is a college where most of its students commute from home to school to work. The UTEP Fine Arts Department was, during my tenure, heavily constructed of Bauhaus educated instructors and idealogues, many in love with the notion of experience and aesthetic production–beauty for beauty’s sake. Classes were, and I believe still are, discipline specific: drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, metals, and ceramics. Video, film, audio, and performance were discussed buzzwords but not materialized or taught.
Within a span of 5 years (1994-1999), and after Ruben went on to CalArts and the Whitney Independent Study Program, UTEP had graduated some of the most compelling artists I have ever known (Gilbert Chavarria, Adrian Esparza, Victor Quezada, Ismael de Anda III, and Veronica Duarte, to name a few), with three of the four going on to CalArts. This is of particular import because up to this point UTEP, in its history, had only placed two other graduates in reputable art schools: Sam Reveles at Yale and another at UCLA. I believe this Deleuzian event occured due to the influence and work of Ruben Verdu. It is funny how a place can change, if even for a while, through the presence and influence of just one person.
During my time at UTEP I learned, through this spectral presence, that there existed a possibility of making and interpretation that I had yet to understand, and yet that I desired to learn. That countering institutions, organizations, and pre-determined means of producing and interpreting culture were things to be sought-after and championed. That education and authority figures, albeit not all doctrinaire, were to be challenged and displaced, and that the only realm left for those not willing to succumb to popular culture was the practice of art.
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