Antoni Muntadas: "We have to learn something from everything we do."

BarcelonaThe first time we talked about creating the special artist diary that you can find at newsstands this Sunday, September 28th, was back in April. Antoni Muntadas (Barcelona, ​​​​1942) had just returned from São Paulo, where he had opened the exhibition Public Place at the SESC Pompéia cultural center. But over the course of these months of discussions, he returned to Brazil and went to Madrid—where he presented the exhibition. About Asia at the Casa de la Moneda–, has passed through Lisbon –where in May he opened an exhibition at the Cristina Guerra gallery– and has also made trips to Pamplona –where in October he opens Other fears– and in Shanghai, where he will present an exhibition at the Museu del Vidre in November. Of course, he's been making stops in Barcelona; he's just returned from New York, and he'll soon be off to Valencia, where on November 25th he'll receive an honorary degree from the University of Valencia and the following day he'll inaugurate an exhibition at the Escuela Superior de Arquitectura. Arguably, these are his two most stable bases, although talking about stability for a nomadic artist like him is complicated. We had our last conversation while he was resting for a few weeks in Cadaqués, a place that is part of his history and to which he keeps returning. And the first long conversation took place at his premises in Hospitalet de Llobregat, a former industrial building where he has set up his archive-warehouse. This interview is an edited summary of the various conversations.

For the diary, you've chosen to talk about fear. Why? It's a topic you've worked on a lot, but it suddenly became crystal clear from the start.

— I became interested in it at the time of the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001. That was a moment of general panic. The Americans turned the Arabs into what the Russians might have been during the Cold War. Asians and Arabs, they were all enemies. Taxi drivers from Pakistan or other similar countries would put an American flag on their caps for fear of being attacked. I saw that an era of general fear was beginning. But what made me decide to address the subject was the invitation in 2005 to an event called In site and that takes place between Tijuana and San Diego. They invited artists and architects to talk about the border, an important neuralgic place, and I thought that more than talking about violence, I wanted to talk about fear, because I believe fear appears before and after violence. And fear exists at the border. So they proposed that I do a project that would talk about the border, and that's where it came from. On Translation: fear/mido. And, two years later, On Translation: fear/yaufIt was done as a public project, and they were television programs. The first one was 30 minutes long, and the second 40. The structure was very similar. People from both sides of the border spoke, and I asked them what they felt about fear, and it was clear that the fear from the north toward the south was very different from the fear from the south toward the north.

But he has continued working on the issue of fear.

— More broadly, I saw how fear, in a way, is very much constructed by politics, and how politicians and the media use it. Then I did a work in Venezuela, where fear is very present politically, with some murals that spoke, and later also in Jordan and Morocco, and obviously in New York, Montreal, and Paris. The one in Pamplona will be called Other fears, and it compiles the completed works, but also a new one that will be called Between Fears. Fear is very present everywhere, and with current politics, it's increasing. When I was doing the research, I found a speech by General MacArthur upon his arrival in Korea that already spoke about fear, and it still resonates now. I mean, it's not exactly something new, but it has increased. Bush, at the time of the fall of the Twin Towers, used fear in a way that was already powerful, and now with Trump, even more so. I work a lot on series. From the series On Translation There will be more than 80 sub-works, and there will be eight or nine on The Construction of Fear. These are works that explore a specific territory. Each one is well-defined, but if they are entered into different contexts or viewed from different angles, they can be complemented and expanded.

What are you personally afraid of?

— When I started the project, I realized that we carry fear throughout our lives. It starts in a dark room, alone, and, little by little, as a teenager, and as you grow up, you start wondering if all the decisions you make will lead you to do what you want, to be yourself. And this becomes very clear later, when people are looking for work. I'm talking generally about the fear of not being well, of not having a place, of not being prepared... And then you realize that fear becomes very social and then political and media-related. Fears appear, and sometimes you're aware of it and sometimes you're not. I wouldn't say I live in a situation of fear, but there have certainly been times when, consciously or unconsciously, fear has helped me make decisions in one way or another. And it may be difficult to define why... If we had had to go to Vietnam, if we had had to go to Ukraine or Gaza now, which are situations of fear... The fear we have is a distant fear, in a way, but one with which you identify.

But are you afraid of, for example, closed spaces, or not being able to return to the United States, or losing your friends there?

— There comes a point where you're at an age where what you fear is the loss of your generation. Of all the artists I met when I arrived in New York, most of them are gone now. Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, Helio Oiticica, Lawrence Weiner, Gordon Matta-Clark, Dara Birnbaum... They're gone now. And in Barcelona, ​​wow! Enric Franc, Octavi Rofes, Albert Porta/Zush/Evru, Antoni Mercader... With him, sixty years of relationship with constant conversation and discussion. The fear is losing friends, yes.

You just returned from the United States, and what's coming back from there is also frightening. What did you find?

— In recent years, since the early days of Trump, people have been feeling very frustrated because he's taken over the Republican Party and he's the one making all the decisions. And the Democratic Party has no candidates. Plus, in the wake of the attack on the Capitol and everything that followed, the guy has gone crazy. He's exploded. He's making decisions, both national and international, that affect the entire world globally. In other words, frustration because they don't know how to react to the Trumpists taking over Congress and all the political decision-making bodies. And now there's no way anyone can stop him.

And how do the people you know and who are around you experience it?

— People, above all, are worried about the economy. Everything has become incredibly expensive, and people are barely surviving, because the United States is a country built for the rich, especially New York, where everything is very expensive, prices have doubled, and many people are forced to leave. And the university has also taken a severe hit, because they have inexplicably intervened to force them to cede autonomy over the educational process. Before, at Harvard, at Columbia, at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], foreign students were very important; this relationship was important. Now everything is controlled, and I don't see a future. I went to give a lecture at Columbia University, and when I arrived, they stopped me at the door and asked for my ID. I didn't have anything on me, because you don't normally wear ID on the street, and I had to call the people who had invited me to come down and let me in. This was unthinkable not long ago; before, you could access the campus freely. In short, I think it's a situation of total chaos, because you never know what might happen tomorrow.

Do you want to come back?

— I always say I live where I work and I work where I live. New York is one of my bases, and I won't stop having it. Just as I have bases in Sao Paulo, Vancouver, Boston, and Barcelona. And New York is even less affected than other places in the United States because, like California, it has always voted Democratic and has been more left-leaning.

And why have you been interested in traveling so much? And in doing projects in such distant places?

— It wasn't just for the sake of traveling. Because of the context of the work, travel is necessary. For me, travel is like an instrument. If I went to work on a project somewhere and created a team of people who worked there, I was the one who had to travel. In Barcelona, I have a small team, but in each location, a team of four or five people is created to help produce and enhance the project.

And what is that thing you have in Hospitalet de Llobregat?

— I define it as an archive-warehouse, that is, a place where things accumulate, some organized, which would be the archive, and others in disarray, which would be a bit like a warehouse. I can't say studio because I don't come here every day to work. My team is here: Andrea Nacach, Lola Carrasco, Pablo Santa Olalla, and other people who have passed through, but I can't call it a studio, because for me, a studio is a place where you work every day. I define myself more as a post-studio artist, someone who can work wherever I am.

Why? What is your working method?

— Well, the thing is, I carry the studio with me. The work I do is in very specific locations, which entails traveling and moving around. Therefore, the studio moves and must be relocated to the place where I do the project, be it São Paulo, Shanghai, or Pamplona. For each project, a team of people is created with whom we do the fieldwork, interviews, conversations, documentation... In this sense, there's a part where I appropriate the methodology and form of the social sciences. For example, I think the interview is an important element for learning things you don't know. Sometimes, these interviews and conversations are the beginning of projects. The project always arises with an idea, a curiosity, a concept, but it's the beginning of a long work process that takes as long as it needs. I don't like having deadlines, dates for completing something. I try to leave the deadlines open, and when I think the project is ready, that's when I think about how to present it, how to edit it, how to publish it. Because, of course, I make the selection of the medium at the end of the process. I never start a project knowing whether it will be a video, an installation, a publication, an intervention... I believe the artist should know the media and, for the project they're developing, choose the one that best suits them. Sometimes the process itself leads you to that medium.

This way of working was a revolution, a complete change in the way artists work, which began in the 1960s. You lived through that moment, when the object ceased to be important and the process became more so, right? Do you feel represented when they say you're the leading Catalan exponent of conceptual art?

— Yes, there was a lot of talk about concepts, about conceptual art... The first conceptual art exhibitions in the United States referred to works with defined concepts, which didn't necessarily have objects but did have the will to express an idea with diverse elements, especially linguistic ones. In Spain, everything that wasn't painting, sculpture, or photography was conceptual art. It's a classification, and I think classifications are very dangerous. All of this comes from criticism, because the art historian puts the label to organize things. Germano Celant created the identification ofarte povera, but none of the artists considered themselves to be making poor art. At first, they saw a sense of it, although that's how it has gone down in history, as a movement. I reject both labels and trends. I don't consider myself part of a trend; rather, you make the work and the projects evolve based on the concerns, interest, and curiosity about what you're doing. We must learn something from everything we do. If there isn't some knowledge, it's not worth it. The process gives you the opportunity to experience new situations, or to create certain situations that are.

You collaborate with all kinds of people: anthropologists, sociologists... You also do some journalistic research. What do you think the artistic perspective contributes to situations that journalism, anthropology, and sociology also address?

— Well, I always refer to a diagram I made in the 1970s, which is three circles: art, social sciences, and communication systems. At the intersection of these three circles, there's a point in the center where they overlap. And it's in that overlap, in that space, where I identify my work. I identified it in the 1970s, and I also consider it to be where it stands now. The elements and ways of understanding things may have evolved, the context has changed, and therefore, the works are closely tied to one situation or another, but I believe the fundamentals remain the same. I'm interested in art expanding its concept and doing so with other disciplines. And I believe that sociology, psychology, and anthropology help open up these concerns of art and allow for a different approach. What we artists do is decide and develop the most appropriate communication systems to display these works.

Speaking of communications, if there's one thing you've done from the start, it's been to pay close attention to the media. From Cadaqués, Canal Local to Verbas: en sala de prensa. Why were you so interested in them? I don't know if you even invented the term "media landscape."

— It's part of my evolution, let's say, my life. In 1971, I went to New York and became interested in communication systems, because that was a country where television was clearly part of the landscape. If I would have continued here, I don't know... Television wasn't as relevant. There was one, and it was important, but it wasn't the media bombardment of the United States. I reacted by trying to understand it.

And that's where his study of critical subjectivity emerged.

— I remember a visit by Xavier Rubert de Ventós to MIT where we talked about this. He spoke of intersubjectivity. And I was left with the term critical subjectivity (critical subjectivity). That, admitting subjectivity, it maintains a critical angle... Because, of course, objectivity means, in a certain way, that you are speaking in a totally detached way, and that you can speak without interference. And well, you know that the media, both television and journalism, are ultimately about opinions, and they are never objective. So, in the work I was doing, I used many elements of television, I recorded programs, I used already made programs, I did interviews or montages of things that had to do with the media. That's why I decided on this name of Media landscape, media landscape. In the art world, landscape is a genre that exists, just as portraiture and still life exist... And the landscape of our time is media-mediated.

They have always been present in his work.

— Yes, but then there are other worries... After the whole period of Media landscapeI'm starting to get interested in the relationship between media and architecture. Anne-Marie Duguet and I worked on a collection. Annarchives for the Pompidou Centre in Paris called Media Architecture Projects, which, by the way, will have a new online version accessible to the public and will be presented in November. These works were based on defined architectural constructions that people clearly recognize, such as a boardroom, a press room, a stadium... These are structures that begin as an architectural space, but I superimpose the media on top of them, which gives a different perspective. For example, The Board RoomThe boardroom was a table where, instead of institutional corporate portraits, there were portraits of religious leaders, each of whom had a monitor in his mouth, through which he made his speeches and proclamations. And, from time to time, a word would appear. The use of words within moving images, or in still images, has always interested me. It's like performing acupuncture on the image to fix it against a background. I mean, it's emphasizing the word and giving it prominence, a presence.

Which is kind of what makes the ARA, right? Emphasize words.

— Exactly. In a newspaper, it's about taking the text you've written and keeping the keywords, which can be one or many. There are keywords, and your keywords will be different from his or hers. They're vocabularies that belong to each person. I strongly believe—and this has to do with the idea of interpretation—that people interpret things differently. And this also leads to the idea of translations.

'On Translation' is a long series that began in 1995 and is still ongoing, with around eighty works. If I may, however, I wanted to take a step back. I mentioned earlier 'Cadaqués, Canal Local,' one of your earliest works, and a bit of a start to this nomadic journey we take in the supplement. Cadaqués is deeply significant, beyond Dalí, for the presence of key artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Richard Hamilton, and Dieter Roth. What did Cadaqués mean to you?

— Cadaqués was a place... by chance. A schoolmate at the Jesuit school in Sarrià suggested I spend a few days there in August. At their house, which was an interesting house because it already represented a different architecture from that of Barcelona. It had been designed by Coderch and completed by Alfonso Milà and Federico Correa. It's the Casa Julià, a rationalist, naturalist, glass, transparent house. For me, it was a shock, the contact with a modern space that also brings a different life. It was full of foreigners—French, Belgian, Swiss... And the town was also very interesting; there were people who had gone to Cuba and had never been to Barcelona. It was a very specific way of being. I think the people of Cadaqués and the people who come from outside are very different, but at the same time, they're very similar. Duchamp, when he goes to Cadaqués, wants to be anonymous, to be left alone. And the people of Cadaqués want to be at peace. Going to school as a teenager was a powerful break from understanding other ways of...

What had your background been like up until then? Your father was an insurance company executive and had spent time in Italy, but you didn't live there, did you?

— No, this had happened before. I lived in Barcelona and after finishing my studies, I went to university to study industrial engineering, although my artistic practice had begun earlier, in 1963. The 1960s at university were interesting years. I think my time at university filled my mind. Pursuing a degree, whatever it may be—be it biology, mathematics, architecture—is important. It's learning a structure of thought that has been very important for me, because it leads me to a method, to decisions.

What kind of art did you do then?

— At that time, I was painting. A painting that I always say was formative, an introduction. I didn't go to the School of Fine Arts, but I was doing what we could have done in school. An art that wasn't academic but was a certain representation. I went through various periods, a certain informalism and a pop art, which is perhaps what later contributed the most to other types of work. My last pop work was a tribute to Monica Vitti. If Warhol paints Marilyn Monroe, I'm interested in talking about Monica Vitti, because they are very different characters and icons.

And why did you give up painting? What made you make this decision?

— It was the moment, it was the context... It's a painting I now keep, but at one point I wanted to burn it. Later I learned that John Baldessari had burned the paintings, and out of respect for someone like him, whom I had known and whom I thought was a good artist, I didn't want to repeat history. They're sealed and hidden, and perhaps one day, not in my lifetime, they will appear. I don't know if they were works of formation or deformation. The last exhibition was at the Ateneo de Madrid.

And he left it there?

— I have an anecdote about this. At the Ateneo exhibition, a writer who later became renowned, Antonio Gamoneda, came to the exhibition. He saw the exhibition and said, "I'm running the Sala Provincia in León. Would you be interested in exhibiting there?" And I said, "Okay, but I won't be able to come to the opening. I'll come at the end." And so it was. I went to the end and noticed three paintings upside down... Eventually, I ran into Gamoneda in 2015, because he'd been awarded Cervantes and I'd been awarded the Velázquez, and I said, "Antonio, thank you for hanging your paintings upside down—that thing." "Man, forgive me," he said. "No, no, I'm very grateful," I said. That was the final straw.

And why did you decide to go to New York and not Paris, which was still very popular back then?

— Well, I'd been in London for a couple of years, and it was the second major opening. If Cadaqués was the first, London around 1964-65 was the second. It was a great time of freedom of expression, and it coincided with all the pictorial trends of Pop artists. And London was important, too, because I met quite a few artists, and it was a time when many art schools had artists as teachers. This idea was born that the school needed to be renewed and that teachers shouldn't be artists, but rather artists as teachers. And it's something I've also followed. I don't define myself as an artist teacher. I've had a teaching aspect, but that comes after the practical work.

And why New York?

— I had entered an Anglo-Saxon world, different from the more Francophone world of Cadaqués. I had connections with the French scene, but Paris didn't tempt me. It wasn't until later, in the 1990s, that I developed a closer relationship. I taught at fine arts schools in Paris, Grenoble, and Bordeaux, and did exhibitions and projects in France. It was during this time that I became more prominent in Europe, including Italy. In 2002, I was invited to teach at the Venice School of Architecture, and now 2026 will be my last year, and I'll close out the cycle. Interestingly, in France they were art schools, but both in the United States and Italy they were architecture schools.

In the United States too?

— Yes, at MIT I worked at the School of Architecture, at the Center for Advanced Visual Arts (CAVS), which György Kepes had founded in 1967 to connect artists and scientists. In 1971 I was already in New York, and a few years later I was invited to give a talk at MIT, and after that I was asked to be a professor. research fellow, which is fantastic because it means you get paid for your research and your work. This lasted until the Reagan administration, in 1984, turned off the spigot for institutions and decided that institutions should seek their own funding to finance themselves. That's when they asked me if I wanted to teach classes to continue doing my work. And I did so until 2014.

And what was the artistic environment like in New York when you arrived?

— This would be a long story, because you arrive in New York and you hardly know anyone. But I was very open to going out, to meeting people, and I didn't hold anything back. For example, a gallery owner recommended I go see Hélio Oiticica, a Brazilian artist, and also Vito Acconci. I called them, and we ended up having a relationship.

Why this interest?

— Well, precisely because at that time I was doing some sensorial works—smell, touch, and taste—which were called subsensory experiences, and Hélio Oiticica had also done tactile structures and movable spaces, and Vito Acconci had done works with the body. We coincided. And we established relationships of seeing and sharing time and projects. Furthermore, it was a time when alternative spaces were being created. Neither museums nor galleries were interested in this generation, which was making art that could be called conceptual, performance, or new mediaWhat we did was share the possibilities of creating alternative spaces. And this network gave many artists of that generation the opportunity to get started. At first, it was something largely done by artists, but then the curatorsAnd the galleries started opening. Because they found a way to make all that art that seemed unsaleable, actually so.

Through documentation.

— Through the document, the reference. Let's see, for someone like Marina Abramović, the performance was the performance, but what remained was the video, which is what later goes into the collections.

He's worked a lot on political issues, but he hasn't been involved in political activism. At least, I don't get the impression that way.

— Let's see, the Working Group, which began during Franco's lifetime, was highly activist. It was a heterogeneous group that ended when Franco died. In the United States, I was interested in politics, but the situation is very different. People become concerned about politics when there are elections. However, I think my work was more sociological than political. In France, Pierre Restany championed sociological art, which was linked to New Realism, and at one point I participated in his exhibitions. Everything has a political aspect, but the idea of political art is a label that doesn't interest me either. I think an interest in politics is personal. Whether it's reflected in the work or not is another matter.

You currently hold dual nationality, American and Spanish. Where do you feel you're from? Are you already a little American?

— I feel European. I have a European upbringing, and I greatly admire their critical spirit. The United States is a place to do things, learn, and research, and Europe has a more critical spirit. That's why Canada is a fantastic country, because it has a somewhat European critical sense of things, but then it also acts like Americans. Look, you can't say it globally, because it's all nuanced. But sometimes in the United States, people act uncritically, without taking into account the past or the context. And in Europe, we think so much and go around things so much that sometimes nothing gets done.