BARCELONA-- It was a cold day, relatively speaking.

In Barcelona, a cold day is approximately the equivalent of an Indian summer afternoon in New England. We met in a small seafood joint by the shore. He came late, complained about the lack of vegetarian options on the menu, and after learning that I too refrain from eating meat, suggested we move shop. He was twice my age, with explosive white hair, Ben Franklin spectacles and a tie so thick and red that it girded his belly like caramelized sugar on a candy-coated apple. Only a man who is truly sure of who he is and the attention he commands would wear such a tie. His stature was indefinite: if he was short, then he spoke like a man accustomed to the respect and authority that height can bring; if he was tall, then he was modest and unimposing. What remained clear were his eyes: a pair of deep hazel irises hardly seemed to lift their interested gaze from my face throughout the entire meal. Meal? We dined on bread and pastries, white coffee and rosé. The entire sitting lasted only two hours, but two hours so well spent, they could have spanned the course of days. Uninformed, I later realized that I had been granted an unprecedented opportunity: to interview the great uncle of Fraudulism himself, Lumami Juvisádo, an American émigré living in Paris and on a short trip to Barcelona, where his latest exhibition, a twenty-three year retrospective, was being held at the now defunct speak-easy/gallery, Johnny Lupita. I was not about to split hairs over the risibly small quantity of our supper. Neneta Peteta: Since we've chosen to meet over dinner, it seems appropriate to begin with a dietetic slant. If you will, follow the Esquível, Allende and Hemingway trend and highlight the cross-section between food and art. For instance, I see you're a vegetarian, but I haven't seen any signs of animal activism in your work. Do you feel that the same beliefs perhaps affect both aspects of your life? Lumami Juvisádo: Hombre, that's what they say here to delay a thought, correct? NP: You could say that. LJ: Then hombre. I wouldn't quite say that my reasons for having excised meat from my diet are particularly activist. Rather, one day I realized that the only way to experience any true variety is through limitation. It occurred to me that when the world is our proverbial oyster, we must avoid seafood. If not, we have no time to explore any singular facet in detail. NP: Sort of an acid inverse... LJ: (laughter) So I eliminated all animal products, and with that, I began to develop a keener sense of taste. In a way, you could say that I follow a similar path in my art. When I eliminated canvases from my potential raw materials in '73, I was forced to concoct new, more focused media for my ideas: walls, ceilings, floors, water, air, the smell left in an empty bottle of perfume, the vibrating tweeters in the dusty speakers of an old hi-fi. NP: And yet, you continue to classify yourself as a painter, and not, for instance, a sculptor or performance artist. Can you offer an explanation? LJ: For instance... Well, let's say that one of our two pastries was made with margarine and the other with butter. Twenty-nine years ago, I might not have been able to differentiate between them-- that is to say, my diet was so charged with both, and all their nonfat, low-cholesterol, sweet-cream, salted and unsalted derivatives, that I was all but numb to their individual flavors. Today, all I need is but a minimal taste of the char on their crusts. Never again could my taste buds mistake the lovely creaminess of butter for the bland grease of vegetable oil margarine. In the same way, eliminating canvases does not necessarily transform a painter into any other type of artist. On the contrary, it refines his reflexes as a painter. Perhaps a crumbled stone wall in the countryside, or an oil splashed puddle has been waiting hours, days, or years, to be discovered as the ideal sub-meta background for a neo-modernist work. In '70, I might have climbed over the fallen wreckage, admiring the idyllic landscape, or stepped around the puddle so as not to soil my shoes. Today, I am far more likely to stop, evaluate the textures, forms, space and spectrum, imagine various yet unrealized ideas overlaid upon their surfaces. When I eliminated canvases from my raw materials, I was forced to concoct new, more focused media for my ideas: walls, ceilings, floors, water, air, the smell left in an empty bottle of perfume, the vibrating tweeters in the dusty speakers of an old hi-fi... NP: In '73, only the traditional canvas had been exed from your painter's vocabulary. Today, in addition to eschewing the canvas, you decline to use brushes, water colors and acrylics as well. Do you sometimes wonder if you haven't stretched the definition of "painter" past the point where it retains any meaning? LJ: Definition... Hombre. Well, I have abandoned many types of paints, and yet I remain a solid supporter of oils. As for lost significance, I might propose that, rather than having discredited the word "painter," I have been steadily redefining it, honing it, forcing each spectator to conclude exactly what the word means in each particular instance. I am not, and this I wish to emphasize, particularly convinced by this concept of audience participation which claims that the spectators themselves participate in the creative process of defining art. On the contrary, I believe that art defines the audience, and this I have seen happen. When a piece is well enough realized, when it nearly oozes off its mounting with tangible panache, creativity, and practical accomplishment, it can often force irrevocable changes in the very thoughts of the person who stands before it, enveloped in his soon-to-be cracked preconceptions. NP: I see. Let's return to the question of diet for a moment. In '73, you abandoned the canvas. You abandoned meat in '69, so you've been a vegetarian for twenty-nine years. Why was that the turning point? LJ: Touché. Good question. Twenty-nine years ago, I was twenty-nine. Retrospectively, it is rather coincidental that the first person to ask me about the timing of this decision does so with impeccable timing herself, don't you think so? In essence, I met Charles Simic's gypsies. I too was stolen, and was told, by a very old woman, a woman so old she had lost all vestiges of femininity and become an androgynous scarf-wrapped specter, that in the same year I was to double my current age, I would be given a forum in which I could present my philosophies. It was to be an interview that would question me about a certain decision I was to make that day. When I left her tent, I nearly tread upon a dead pigeon. It was as if that poor, nearly crushed form were an omen, and from that moment on, I never touched meat again. (laughter) Bon. No, seriously, I think... Well, when I was twenty-nine, I found myself in a bind. I was an artist, yes, in the sense that I made my living with the sales of my artwork; whatever, shall we say, dainty, sales one could make in those days. Still, the simple commercial exchange of art does not a genius make. Even then I realized that every year, hundreds, if not thousands of people, in cities exactly like your enchanting Barcelona, are engaged in the business of the international Fine Arts Cartel. In every gallery or café, in any trendy bar, a new exhibition is hung each week, with new white labels in mismatched and scratched out calligraphy, announcing title year artist provenance, and occasionally the price for which each work could be transferred from that space into yours. In other words, art and business are hardly strangers, and therefore, the mere selling of my paintings was not at all an indication that what I was doing was in any way new. NP: Sure, but even the most innovative artist can't gauge his talent by buying and selling alone. LJ: No, of course not. But what I'm getting at goes even further. My very success, if not global, was at least livable, but it was also what made me mediocre, what lodged me in the depths of an awesomely large group of struggling practitioners, all of whom were struggling, simply put, to distinguish themselves within a medium long since made rote, cliché, teachable, even. I needed something different, something to set me apart from all the others, and yet, simultaneously, I knew this could only be accomplished from within the tradition. Only then it could it be both truly mine and original. Further, I was well aware that, as a young artist, I was desperately in need of a more personal focus, of something that would define me as ME, and not as another middling successful art school grad. NP: So you became a vegetarian? LJ: Of course, it was one of the first steps I took toward individuating myself, toward narrowing down the endless group of paths that then stretched before me as potential futures. Quit, catch a soul-deadening job in the sales department of some corporation and polish off the sundry summer reading lists I'd failed to complete over the years; teach people who were undoubtedly more informed, more talented and more creative than myself, or worse yet, so unbearably thick that they would trap me within my office for pure fear of impending lectures I would have to present enthusiastically; continue filling tiny galleries with more half-seen, entirely forgotten pieces that seemed masterly only to myself, and even then, only after a conscious re-conjuring of how long it took to make them... So I began to narrow the field, through process of elimination, really, and among other things, I cut out meat. I wanted to focus on growth, not rot, and it seemed like an acceptable way out at the time. NP: And now? LJ: I still believe in it. Only now I know myself better. Restriction no longer houses the negative aspects of its title. It means more, not less. Somewhere along the lines of refine, finish, put in the kiln and bake to a glossy finish. NP: And I just chose vegetarianism for personal ethics... On a different note, could you tell me a bit more about your name, its origins, significance? I understand that you were born and raised in Butte, Montana, and, well, that part of the country isn't known for its ethnic diversity. Could it be that Lumami Juvisádo is but another artistic alias? LJ: My name... A rose by any other name, well, you know the drill. Bon. One might say that my mother was psychic, that she anticipated the need I would one day have for an exotic name, something beyond the Jennifers, Sarahs, Michaels and Matthews that the trees bore in surplus out there. She was obsessed with time, an obsession she passed on to me. Only her preoccupation was far narrower-- she spoke endlessly about the measurement of time: hours, the days of the week, months, years, etc. The way she saw the world could have been placed in any number of classic Hollywood films, the shimmering tearing off of calendar pages, the accumulation of black numbers on white in a wind-shuffled pile beneath. I don't think there was a room in the entire house (and it was a large house, seventeen rooms plus lavatories) where not at least one calendar hung, and a number of clocks too. She never removed them once they'd expired, like tombstones to irretrievable 365-day, and tetra-annually 366-day, eras. An antique cemetery of grandfather clocks, digital alarms, pocket watches and cuckoos, wrinkling with age beneath a canopy of pages. I grew up under glossy photographs of a Save the Whales calendar, monthly excerpts and drawings from various A.A. Milne and Beatrice Potter books, spin-offs on Mad, black and white photographs of children kissing beneath the Eiffel Tower, tinged with ridiculous splashes of primary colors. Ours was a house where time mattered, not where time was money, but where it was, quite literally, life. My mother liked to live linearly, I believe. NP: And the name? LJ: Glancing quickly at the facts, you haven't yet asked me about my father, nor have I mentioned him. He was a traveling trapeze artist who performed in all those small midwestern towns. He was Argentine, and he was in town for one week only: Lunes, Martes, Miercoles, etc. My mother never forgot him. NP: Of course. How embarrassing that I didn't see it earlier! But speaking of time, we have very little left. One last question. Why did you make your first move to New York, and this most recent one to France? What were your intentions, motivations, goals? LJ: Ex-patriotism has its charms, but an ex-patriot from Montana? It simply doesn't have the same ring in English, particularly when confined with the borders of a single country. Émigré, on the other hand... Now that's Millerian abandonment! -Neneta Peteta, Iberian Correspondent © k-band, 1999