Rube N Ortiz-Torres by David Pagel

02/04/11 15:55 BOMB Magazine: Rubn Ortiz-Torres by David Pagel
Pgina 1 de 9 http://bombsite.com/issues/70/articles/2277
THE ARTISTS VOICE SINCE 1981
BOMBSITE
Rubn Ortiz-Torres
by David Pagel
BOMB 70/Winter 2000, ART

Rubn Ortiz-Torres, 500 Years After / 500 Aos Despues, Valencia, CA, 1992, Fuji color Super
Glossy, 20!24. All images courtesy of Jan Kesner Gallery, Los Angeles.
Rubn Ortiz-Torres is a documentary photographer and filmmaker who harbors
no illusions about the role subjectivity plays in his art. Shot in the streets of
Tijuana, Santa Barbara, Mexico City and East Los Angeles (among other
locations), his ongoing series of maniacally beautiful pictures treats urban centers
and out-of-the way places as equally suitable stages for carnivalesque
celebration. Giddy, dizzying and risky, Ortizs Fujiflex Super Glossy prints and
low-budget films do not depict specific geographic locations so much as they give
physical form to participatory events in which the usual rules no longer hold.
Both phantasmagorical and realistic, his works transform the goal of
multiculturalism into a point of departure at once attractive and accessible. A pair
of color-saturated photographs embodies the polymorphous nature of Ortizs
ambitiously idiosyncratic art. To make the first of these, he traveled to the tiny
town of Campeche, Mexico, where he stayed for three days and produced a
single image of the mock Statue of Liberty that stands atop an oversize pedestal
in the town square. For the second, he visited South of the Border, a tacky
roadside diner that doubles as a souvenir shop, motel and theme park just south
of the border between North and South Carolina Side-by-side, the two prints
demonstrate that despite the lopsidedness of American exports and imports,
cultural exchange is a two-way street. Born in Mexico City, educated at Cal Arts
and currently residing in Los Angeles, Ortiz insists that we live in a topsy-turvy
worldand that art works best when it adds to this craziness.

DAVID PAGEL What are you working on now?
RUBN ORTIZ-TORRES Something that relates to things Ive done in the past, but
that is also different. I have commissioned a car painter to make a series of
monochrome paintings. There are many different car paints, but I am working
with the metallic bases and candy colors of lowrider painting. This type of
painting functions very similarly to Venetian painting. You have bright layers of
underpainting and many layers of glazes, giving you unparalleled luminosity.
DP So in a sense youre making contemporary Mediterranean paintings?
ROT To a certain degree, yes. Academically, I was trained as a painter. Although
I havent painted in a long time, many of the things I do relate to painting.
There has always been this schism between my experience in school in Mexico
and in grad school at Cal Arts. Its funny, because my education was something
like being pasteurized: it really went in two opposite directions, from hot to cold.
When I was in Mexico I was very frustrated because I had to paint. Its not like I
had many options.
DP What years were these?
ROT This was in the 80s. The art school in Mexico was very traditional, there
was no elaborate theoretical discourse, and very few alternative technologies
were available. If I wanted to work in videowhich I didgetting the equipment
took precedence over anything I did with it. In photography, I worked in black
and white because I didnt have access to a color processor. The great advantage
was that what I had thenand what I dont have nowwas time. So I painted.
Painting is a very time-consuming activity. I could be in my studio for hours.
Friends would visit, I had a social life within the studio, but I could still paint. All
this changed when I went to Cal Arts. It was very frustrating, my paintings were
not seen as artistic statements but as commodities whose subjective content
supposedly established their market value. In contrast, my photographsas crazy
as they werewere taken seriously as objective documents of something that
was coming from somewhere else. Even though what I was doing in the paintings
was very close to what I was doing in the photographs, they were never read
that way. So I stopped painting.
DP Because you werent interested in that sort of personalistic reading of your
work?
ROT Well, the whole argument about painting being nothing but a commodity
didnt make much sense to me. I mean, I was coming from a context where
painting could be used for any purpose. It was a medium for expressing any
sentiment, whether political, religious, sensual, sexual, pleasurable or whatever.
What you did with a particular painting defined whether or not it was a
commodity. The simple fact that it was a painting didnt mean much at all.
DP But at the time you were in grad school, photography enjoyed the privilege
of functioning in all those ways.
ROT Not exactly. Back then, all photographs had an indexical quality. Mine were
immediately read as documents brought back from somewhere else, especially
since I was supposed to be a legitimate
DP Mexican artist?
ROT ...Mexican artist who supposedly represented his countrys contemporary
reality, an insiders point of view. Although my photographs rarely present an
authentic inside view, this is the way they were read. Its especially perverse
because I was doing my best to make images of things I thought were clearly
related to America.
DP Do you think that your new paintings will be subjected to similar
misreadings?
ROT Theres always that possibility. The responses these works generate could
be very contradictory because they are both purist in a formal or conceptual
sensealmost Puritan in their notion of what art can beyet at the same time
they invite other discourses. I am interested in how seductive, sensual and
beautiful they are. Im using flake, metal flake, and at the same time I feel that
Im getting to this meeting point between two extreme positions, say that of Ad
Reinhardts black paintings and a street aesthetic, neighborhood car culture.
Nowadays I get confronted with the argument that abstraction or minimalism is a
language that does not relate to certain social or political practices. The truth is
that these styles started out with specific social and political goals, with radical
agendas in which aesthetics and politics were not opposed. I dont know if its
my intention to revive that, but at least I want to question their separation.
DP Didnt McCracken and Bengston and Kauffman and other L.A. artists do
similar things in the 60s?
ROT Of course Im responding to the California Finish Fetish school. But Im also
thinking of the architecture of Luis Barragan and the work of Mathias Goeritz
because for me the most incredible thing about them was that they were able to
create their own languages within the abstract language of modernism. Both
made cultural statements as strong asif not stronger thanthe muralists. So it
is not a matter of the iconography or the materials that you use. It has more to
do with the creative power of really making up your own language and
participating in that. I also think that their works go beyond functionalism to fill
what they thought of as spiritual needs. I wouldnt use these words to describe
my works, but I am sympathetic to their desire to engage us emotionally and
sensually, in ways that are not strictly rational.
DP Something beyond functionalism?
ROT To pleasure, perhaps. I believe that it is possible to use something as
narrow as monochrome painting to change the rules of the gameto come up
with something that can come back to life and talk about something else and
make us see otherwise.

Rubn Ortiz-Torres, Charro Chapn (Guatemalan Mariachi), Olintepeque, Guatemala, 1995, Fuji
color Super Glossy, 20!24.
DP So youre really interested in transforming what is available into something
else. Rather than customizing cars you customize language.
ROT Yes. I am customizing the language; I am not reinventing it. The form is
still there, the parts are still there, but I am allotting them to my personal taste
and needs. I hope that people can relate to these paintings and participate along
with me even if their language comes from a different situation. I would hope
that Tony Ortiz, the guy making them in East L.A., can relate the abstract
patterns he paints on cars to my practice as an artist and to art in general.
DP Does your new work circle back to what happened when you were at Cal
Arts?
ROT Sure it does. When I think about my experience at Cal Arts I see that I
had to respond to a fundamentalist and dogmatic conceptual school that did not
allow me to create the paintings I wanted to make. Having just come from
another dogmatic, academic and fundamentalist school where I couldnt do
anything other than paint made me see the similarities between the two
otherwise very different places. I became very skeptical about both extremes.
Once you have a system that does not allow for any other, I dont see any
difference between one system and the other. Dogma is just dogma.
Fundamentalism is just fundamentalism. Both are bad for art.
DP But you survived.
ROT Along with many others. Its funny, but it seems that the best way to
survive is to rebel. Out of Cal Arts came more rebellious painters than any other
school. In an environment where painters are not supposed to thrive you have
David Salle, Ross Bleckner, Lari Pittman, Jim Isermann, Yishai Jusidman, and
now Ingrid Calame, Laura Owens and Monique Prieto. You have very strong
artists reacting against the regime. The same thing happens in Mexico; the
artists doing the most interesting work are coming from the academy of San
Carlos. Trained as painters, they are using readymades, making objects and
other kinds of conceptual art. The most well-known is Gabriel Orozco, but there
are others who are as good, if not better. The point is, what do I do in my
context, when I have been through both extremes?
DP You make photographs that seem to be about identity but are actually about
its undoing.
ROT I guess so. The photographs are full of contradictions and shifts and
changes.
DP I think of them as focusing on flux and slipperinessputting a bunch of
elements in the blender and hitting the highest speed on the dial.
ROT Well, it also has to do with the role documentary photography plays in our
view of the world. National Geographic photographers go to faraway places and
define them by the pictures they take. They establish the borders by establishing
the differences. In my photographs, I try to emphasize that these differences are
not so well defined. What interests me is that both realities exist side by side.
Next to my crazy castle advertising Coca-Cola in the jungle are traditional
villages.
DP They want the clear image. And you want the messy image.
ROT Well, I want the messy image not just because I identify with it, but also
because it tells more about the world in which we actually live. In order to
question the whole practice of documentary photography, I had to make
documentary photographs that functioned differently. It had a lot to do with the
response that I was getting from my images.
DP An identity-based response?
ROT Which I still get. If I go to Mexico now and show my photographs, people
want to read them as documents of what Los Angeles is. If I present a crazy
taco stand where a Japanese guy is eating a burrito
DP A vegetarian burrito!
ROT ...a vegetarian kosher burritothey want to say, Oh thats Los Angeles.
They see my picture as an objective representation of Los Angeles.
DP In a sense they are right.
ROT They are, but I could also take a photograph of the palm trees and the
convertible, and the beach and the girl in the bikini, because it all exists in L.A.
Or I could take a photograph of L.A. where it absolutely looks like Mexico City,
where I go to Mariachi Plaza and I take a picture of a mariachi band. Both are
part of Los Angeles. Of course, if I am doing a piece on Los Angeles for National
Geographic, in order to have that mariachi image, I would first have to
complement it with an image of a girl in a bikini. Otherwise Los Angeles would be
Mexico. At this point I dont think my photographs represent specific places
anymore. They have almost created their own third space.
DP Theyre really about mobility.
ROT Yes. I think they are about mobility. They are about objectivity and how we
select what we see as reality. They are all still grounded in reality.

Rubn Ortiz-Torres, Sombrero Tower, Dillon, South Carolina, 1995, Fuji color Super Glossy,
20!24.
DP Its often argued that the world is becoming more homogenizedthat every
place looks like everywhere else. Do you think this is true?
ROT Yes and no. For me, these are very complicated issues. Recently, I was
invited to participate in a show of Mexican art in Montreal. The premise is that
we are mobile and everybody travels and there is not one place and that
therefore you cannot reflect any sort of specificity.
DP The old nomad thing?
ROT My point of view is that there is no way to talk about a homogeneous
reality of any kind because the world is so fragmented. So the only homogeneity
is fragmentation. We have an inconceivable abundance of specificities, even
microcosmos. I bet that within Montreal youre going to have all sorts of local
practice that might look superficially alike, but are totally different worlds.
DP I dont believe that everything is the same the world over. Mickey Mouse
may be everywhere, but Mickey in Anaheim is not the same as Mickey in
Tijuana.
ROT I agree. I think were becoming bilingual. We are learning. We may be
speaking English as a universal language but we have accents. Underneath the
similarities we speak Romanian or Turkish or Californian. You can tell the
difference between a guy from Santa Monica and a guy from Northridge. A surfer
speaks a different language than a skateboarder who speaks a different language
than a punk rocker.
DP What does it mean to you to be an American artist?
ROT The beauty of this is that its an open question. Its more about what we
want than what we already have. What do I want to be as an American artist?
Of course, Im going to be selective and choose my favorite parts out of the
abstract construction of America, which I absolutely value. I am fascinated by
the idea of being an American artist even if I dont know if I can qualify for it.
DP The artist part or the American part?
ROT According to immigration, Im still working for both. No, I convinced them
that I am an artist. The American part is a long process. I guess I totally identify
with this sort of utopian construction of a nation, the utopian construction of an
idea. America, as opposed to most countries, is not a country that responds to a
historical past. It is a country that responds to an idea, to a constitution, to such
ideal notions as democracy and freedom. I would add social justice, since its the
only important element being left out. The idea is that were creating or
negotiating in a democratic waythat were involved in an ongoing social or
cultural or artistic process that is never finished. For me, this is something worth
fighting for. I would not, however, identify America with a specific geographic
location because I think that this project is really universal. Thats the beauty of
it. I think the fact that the United States has been opena country of
immigrantsmakes it a universal project, a world composed of everybody.
Likewise, Mexico is also a kind of arbitrary and abstract invention based on a
blend of many cultures and races. Jos Vasconcelos talked about the Mexican
revolution as creating a cosmic race. They say that if you mix everything, the
result is going to be a Mexican. You mix Black and Chinese you get a Mexican.
DP Not a bad fantasy.
ROT This is the reality of the region, of the Caribbean, of parts of South
America and of the United States, too. For me, the challenge of the whole thing
ishow we can construct this project incorporating everybody in a democratic
way?

Rubn Ortiz-Torres, Jesus Chevy (Homenaje a Enrique Guzman), East L.A., 1995, Fuji color
Super Glossy, 20!24.
DP I just read a biography of Thomas Jefferson and it became really clear to me
was that what Jefferson wanted America to be was a place where the
government would rarely intervene in the affairs of its citizens, who, for their
part, would enter public life voluntarily.
ROT This sounds to me like the Spanish Republic. It is very anarchist. I agree
with it completely. The complicated issue here would be how you would deal with
private property.
DP I love the voluntary component. Democracy is not about institutions telling
individuals how to behave.
ROT Its amazing. Of course it is an ideal. And practice is another question. But
it is definitely something to strive for. In Mexico, I went to a grammar school
that was founded by Spanish anarchists who fled the Civil War. It was the 60s
and its kind of interesting to see the way they described their plans. They
sounded a lot like Jeffersons description of the relationship between freedom
and responsibility. A similar moral tenor can be found in the book I am reading
by Albert Einstein, in which he talks about his experience as a Jew and what he
considers Judaism to be. The way he describes it, he considered himself to be
Jewish as long as Judaism meant the absolute freedom to pursue knowledge and
social justice in an open-ended, participatory manner.
DP Along with your paintings and photographs, you also make videos and
installations.
ROT I have made several films. Currently Im working on a 3-D movie for the
Getty Center. Im very excited about it. A long time ago I read about this Chevy
Impala in a museum in Havana. Ch Guevara used to drive it. The car seemed to
stand for certain positive values and progressive ideas I grew up with in the
60s. It also embodied certain generational contradictions that were particularly
vivid for me as well. At the same time, it was part of my childhood in a polluted
urban sprawlthe largest, most populated city in the world. For me, the car also
evoked a line from a song by The Clash: I believe in the kind of revolution
where everyone drives a brand new Cadillac. It also turns out that the model
Ch drove is the most desirable or classic low-rider.
DP What year is that?
ROT 1960. Low-riders love the 58, the 59, the 60, the 63 and the 64. From
1958 to 1966 all those cars are classic and the Chevy Impala Super Sport is at
the top of the heap.
DP Partly because of Ch and partly because of the way the car looks?
ROT No, its because of the car. I dont think low-riders care that Ch Guevara
drove one. But the car looks great; for me, it is this beautiful object where two
notions of freedom converge. It is the meeting point of not just two senses of
freedom, but of two aesthetic systems. One is iconic and represents a religious
point of view. In it Ch practically becomes a saint. The other is formal and is
concerned with how an object looks and what it does.
DP And at the Getty?
ROT My piece is based on their collection. I discovered that my favorite part of
the Getty is the research center. I like the fact that it is very hard to say
whether or not the artifacts archived there are art or documentation. Included in
the collection are many things that provide information about art and the
humanities, but they are not themselves works of art. The photography collection
raises this question even more dramatically. Many of the documentary
photographs are more interesting than the ones deemed to be artistic. Among
my favorites is a collection of stereoscopic cards documenting the Spanish-
American war as CNN might do so today. This was, by the way, the first war
constructed by the mediathe newspapers played an important role in
generating the momentum to start it. It was a hotly contested war. America was
getting its first colonies, the Philippines and Cuba. Some felt that a former colony
should not have colonies or become an empire. Anyway, the photographs are
particularly beautiful because they include 3-D versions of the battleships that
were sunk. The battleships look very abstractalmost like a Richard Serra
sculpture but from the beginning of the century. Very strange objects, very
modern for the time I suppose, especially contrasted against the Rough Riders
and how people lived in Cuba, working sugar cane plantations.
DP You are interested in the documentary aspects of these images?
ROT And how theatrical or sensationalistic they are. We still go to the IMAX
theater to see the Arctic, Everest and other exotic places. I want both parts to
play a role in this piece. I also thought the stereoscopic cards provided a good
excuse to do something with Chs Impala. So Im making a 3-D movie of a
dancing lowridera sculpture that transports you physically and mentally. I hope
my installation says something about the past, the present and the future, while
providing viewers with certain pleasures. The part that stands for freedom is Ch
Guevaras all-American car. Im particularly happy that its taking place at the
Getty because it doesnt get any more classic than a 1960 Chevy Impala. You
have the Greeks, but the car is the high point, a neo-classical moment infused
with religious and political overtones.

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