For the past three decades, the overarching theme of Muntadas's work has been the analysis of what he's termed the "media landscape." Put another way, he's embarked on nothing less than an investigation of contemporary consciousness as created by powerful individuals and institutions, an exploration of the economically — and culturally — determined forms and forces that we are likely to take for granted. His subjects range from fundamentalist religious figures to the ritualistic nature of political TV ads, from the ideologically-determined construction of "history" to the disappearance of public space.

On the occasion of Muntadas' first New York shows in five years, MediaChannel took the opportunity to chat with the Barcelona-born, New York-based artist about his twin exhibitions and about "The File Room."

The Kent Gallery houses "The Nap/La Siesta/Dutje," a video installation featuring footage from leftist Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens projected across a corner of the gallery containing a shrouded easy chair; and "The Meetings," a series of unframed, blueprint format drawings of generic business encounters in the age of the Nasdaq. At Crosby Street Project Space, Muntadas presents "On Translation: El Aplauso," a large-scale video-installation triptych. Black-and-white news photos of political violence are flanked by color, video footage of anonymous audiences seated in an auditorium and applauding, resulting in a surreal spectacle that oddly smacks of the everyday.

The shows — around the corner from one another in Soho, New York City, at Kent Gallery, 67 Prince St., and Crosby Street Project Space, 113 Crosby St. — are up through May 27. For more on Muntadas' projects see Fundación Telefónica.

- Robert Atkins, Media Arts Editor.

Antoni Muntadas: Nap and sleep are two different words and concepts. So in terms of Goya, it's not a literal translation of his title. "The Nap/La Siesta/Dutje" is the complete title for the work, and I had many motivations for it. The project began with an invitation to several artists and filmmakers from the Netherlands Film Museum and the Joris Ivens Foundation. We spent four days in Amsterdam viewing all of Ivens' films and discussing them with Ivens scholars. The intention was to provoke and solicit projects from us, and then maybe they would produce them.

RA: Had you known Ivens' films before? AM: I was familiar and sympathetic with some of Ivens' work — the experimental ones like "Rain" and some of those about the tradition of the political documentary, Dziga Vertof ... ideological involvement or utopias, such as "Borinage." Obviously I knew "Spanish Earth," which is about the Spanish Civil War, and then there are the films made in Russia, Cuba and China.

RA: And all the footage in your installation comes from Ivens' films?

AM: Yes, I mainly chose ones of movement activity, labor and war, and I juxtapose those with images I made in New York. But during the sessions in Amsterdam I began to be very curious about the work's more personal aspects: the intensity of production; travel as a central component of Ivens' projects and life; and the commitment the projects demanded — including the energy needed just to carry on several projects in various places linked only by hope and his ideological beliefs ... All this activity is impossible without some moments of rest; that's where the metaphor of "la siesta" comes in. Ivens' wife even assured me he took one every day.

I also wanted to juxtapose realities and fiction, activity and passivity, moving images and static scenes, and sound with silence. This installation comes out of a thought that's never really manifested itself in my work before, that is: "Every work of art is always autobiographical." From there, you can draw your own conclusions — Goya included!

RA: The chair in the gallery is a nice place for a siesta. It's so archetypal, such a symbol of domesticity. Matisse said art should be comfortable like an easy chair, but Warhol's best works may be his chilling images of the electric chair.

AM: For me, it's a passive element in a silent corner of the gallery. It's a quiet and removed space that can be used to rest ... to pause ... to dream. At the film museum in Amsterdam, I chose to present the work in the curator's office, a sort of private space where it was surrounded by papers and films and the like.

RA: "El Aplauso" is part of the "On Translation" series. Can you briefly describe that series?

AM: "On Translation" started in 1995 with "On Translation: the Pavilion" in Helsinki. Since then I've produced 18 different extensions of the concept. To me translation suggests interpretation in the largest sense, including the audience's reception to art and social conditions. "On Translation: The Audience" (in Rotterdam) and "On Translation: El Aplauso" (Bogota) are the most recent ones. All of them explore aspects of different situations I try to contextualize. They can — and have — taken many forms and mediums and approaches.

RA: "El Aplauso" made me smile. It was affirming to enter the gallery; I thought of Sally Field getting up at the Oscars and saying: "You like me. You really like me." How did audiences in Colombia, in the midst of acute political crisis, respond?

AM: Well, for me it's a pretty sad situation: the applause as an extreme and cynical representation of an accepted condition. But this is the reality, and it's not just in Colombia. The mainstream media has become a kind of translation of violence. I mean this in many senses: military, political, economic, ecological, cultural. And I hope the work points to our passivity, complicity and denial in this ritualistic process. As social beings we applaud. At various times we are actor, viewer and participant.

RA: Most of your work seems to reflect global social issues and concerns. Do you ever deal with local mass media as opposed to globalizing forms?

AM: Yes, for example, in the "Standard/Specific" project. It deals with the transformation of the urban landscape. I juxtapose signs from stores, factories, and marquees with international credit-card logos on glass doors. But you're right, most of the times it starts local and goes global. ...

RA: It's that universality, that abstract or global quality that makes your work accessible to people around the world, I think. For instance, in your third piece here in New York — "Meetings," a series of drawings rather than projected video — you deal with abstracted images or situations. These are not specific meetings, like the Yalta Conference. They clearly suggest business meetings rather than some sort of political forum, but the focus is on processes, the forms of discourse ...

AM: These drawings on inexpensive blueprint format are a kind of X-ray of generic, archival photographs. Their reduction to lines and the elimination of the photographic detail of the sources emphasizes the relationships between people, space and positions. That generic quality also underlines the meeting as a decision-making process where most of the decisions are already made ahead of time. So it's nothing more than the marketing strategies and so on. The subjects of these drawings are meetings in the realms of architecture, city planning, corporate world, media. As you see there's no information here, just the outline of blank pages, empty pads, white books. So it's not about what they — or we — discuss, but rather how.

RA: "The File Room," your archive of social and cultural censorship that's housed here on MediaChannel's server, seems to focus less on the multiplicity of "hows" leading to censorship and, instead, showcase real cases of censorship, in the most specific, local terms possible.

AM: The intention and needs of the project was — and remains — so different. We can't ever consider censorship a closed matter. It's alive and well, sadly enough. And the interactive part offers the possibility to exorcise our frustration and apparent powerlessness against censorship and activate the information by making it accessible. That makes the archive structure a necessity for organization and accessibility.

RA: Being interactive, "The File Room" also seems the most audience-dependent of your works — no audience means no cases in the archive. It also seems to be among the most successful of digital-era, interactive artworks, at least given the acclaim and audience involvement. How do you feel about this interactive direction in art? Does interactivity turn art theory into practice?

AM: Now we use the term "interactivity," while in the sixties we talked about audience "participation." "Interactivity" implies more highly developed technology. But in terms of meaning, the real force is the generosity of audiences.

RA: So the question is how to harness that?

AM: Yes. The problem has always been combating passivity.

RA: No easy task, given the mainstream media's interest in encouraging it. Thank you!

This interview took place May 1, 2000, in New York City.

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