BIOGRAPHY
Paul Ramírez Jonas was born in Honduras, 1965. Lives in New York
2009 The Quick and the Dead, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA
2008 I Create As I Speak, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, USA
2007 ABRACADABRA, The Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, USA
2006 6th Shanghai Biennale
2005 inSite_05, San Diego, USA & Tijuana, Mexico
2004 Heavier than Air, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, United Kingdom
Selected Bibliography CUY, Sofia Hernandez Chong (ed.),
Paul Ramirez Jonas. Manchester, Cornerhouse Publications, 2004; HEARTNEY, Eleanor,
Art & Today, New York, Phaidon Press, 2008; SÁNCHEZ, Osvaldo & CONWELL, Donna (eds.),
[Situational] Public> Público [situacional]. inSite_05/ Art Practices in the Public Domain San Diego-Tijuana, San Diego, Installation Gallery, 2006.
INTERVIEW
Santiago García Navarro: How is the relationship between author and reader in your work?
Paul Ramírez Jonas: Recognizing my debt to Jorge Luis Borges, I find reading more creative than writing, the reader more creative than the author. Most of my works start with a preexisting text. I use this text as a musical score for an action, an object or any kind of work. I consider the word “text” as widely as possible. So, it can be a path, such as a piece of music, the design of a technological object, a newspaper, a play, a map, in short, any cultural trace that can be followed or interpreted, similarly to how a musician uses his / her score. What interests me is the tension between the originality of an author and the originality of an interpreter. I am interested in the text that can’t be art without the participation of the reader.
Santiago García Navarro: How has this dynamics been changing?
Paul Ramírez Jonas: In the past, my work focused almost exclusively on myself. I was the reader. I was the researcher, the explorer, the one who performed some actions by heart (because a great part of this dynamics relies on the fact that the preexisting text is the past, while the reader and the reading are the present). Five years ago, when I made two works using keys, I started to think more about the audience. If I am only a reader, and the audience is an audience of readers (instead of authors), don’t I have more in common with the audience than with the author? But being a reader is ambiguous… On the one hand, an audience of readers implies an active audience. But, on the other, the reader is also passive, quite lazy, because he / she is not yet an author, a genius, a creator, a revolutionary. For me, the ideal is this vague field, where apathy and activity are mixed.
Santiago García Navarro: Why only explore this “vague field,” instead of establishing a certain direction for it?
Paul Ramírez Jonas: I wanted to promote an exchange with the audience: it is necessary to give in order to receive. But I wanted to ask very little, the minimum: one cent, your voice, that you walk by my side for one minute… almost nothing. I would like this exchange to mean something, not only if you get involved in it, but also if you keep passive. In my view, in order to reach this level, very little should be demanded from the audience – so little, in fact, that one can feel that what separates participation and non-participation is inside each individual. The only obstacle is an inner one.
Santiago García Navarro: Which notion of public and private does Talismán question?
Paul Ramírez Jonas: The work talks about being neither pessimistic nor optimistic. It is based on the exchange of two gestures, which, in the end, are only symbolic. In the first gesture, the audience of the 28th Bienal de São Paulo can receive a copy of the door key of the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion. Although it may seem like a transgression, it is just the return of a public space to its public. The second gesture is based on the transgression of the private space. The audience exchanges a copy of a personal key for the pavilion key. But the two gestures are neutralized because, despite the fact that there are real keys for these two fields, their possession does not subvert any of the spaces. The Bienal can’t find the spaces opened by the private keys, because there is no trace of their owners. And the audience must still respect the rules, security guards, accesses and social norms that determine the public space of the pavilion. As a consequence, the question I propose is: where can a public sphere be created?
Santiago García Navarro is a writer, translator and art critic. He lives in Buenos Aires.
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