Reports

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 lifted their penetrating gaze from my face throughout the entire meal.

Meal? We dined on bread and pastries, coffee and rosé, but what did it matter? 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: I was interviewing the great uncle of Fraud himself, Lumami Juvisado, an American émigré living in Paris. He was just briefly passing through 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 small quantity of our supper.

Neneta Peteta: Since we've chosen to meet over dinner, it seems appropriate to begin with a dietary question, that is, follow the Esquivel, 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 might affect both aspects of your life?

Lumami Juvisado: Hombre... That's what they say here to delay a thought, right?

NP: You could say that.

LJ: Then, hombre... I wouldn't quite say I excised meat from my diet due to any particular sense of activism. Rather, one day I realized that the only true way to experience variety is through limitation. That is, if the world is our proverbial oyster, we have to avoid seafood. If not, we will never see through what surrounds us, never be able to explore any single facet in detail.

NP: Sort of an acid inverse...

LJ: (laughter) So I eliminated all animal products and, thereby, developed a keener sense of taste. In a way, you could say I follow a similar path in my art. When I eliminated canvases from my potential raw materials in '73, I was forced to seek out new, more intentional media for my ideas: walls, ceilings, floors, water, air, the smell left in an empty bottle of perfume, the vibrating tweeters in the 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: 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 noticed the difference, that is, my diet was so charged with both, and with all of their nonfat, low-cholesterol, sweet-cream, salted and unsalted derivatives, that I was numb to their individual flavors. Today, I need just a hint of the taste of the char on the bottom. Never again could my taste buds mistake the hypnotic creaminess of butter for the bland, vegetable greasiness of margarine.

In the same way, then, eliminating canvases did not turn this painter into any other kind of artist. On the contrary, it refined my reflexes as a painter. There are crumbled stone walls in the countryside and oil-stained puddles here in the city that have been waiting hours, days, even years, to be discovered as the ideal sub-meta backdrop for a neo-modernist work. In '70, I might have climbed over the fallen wreckage in my haste to admire the pastoral landscape, stepped around the puddle so as not to soil my shoes. Today, I am more likely to stop, evaluate the textures, forms, space and spectrum, imagine myriad unrealized ideas overlaid upon their surfaces.

NP: In '73, you had only eliminated traditional canvases from your painter's vocabulary. Today, in addition to eschewing canvases, you also refuse to use brushes, water colors and acrylics. Do you ever feel you might have stretched the definition of "painter" past the point where it has any meaning?

LJ: Definition. Hombre... I have certainly abandoned many types of paints, yet I remain a staunch supporter of oils. As for lost significance, I might argue that, rather than having discredited the word "painter," I have been steadily redefining it, honing it, forcing each spectator to determine exactly what it means in each particular moment.

Don’t get me wrong. I flat out reject the theory of audience participation that claims that spectators play an active role in the creative process of defining art: it is merely an excuse for lazy artists. On the contrary, I believe that art defines its audience, something I have seen happen on more than one occasion. In other words, when a piece is done well, when it virtually oozes off its mounting with palpable panache, creativity, and practical accomplishment, it can cause irrevocable changes in the thoughts, in the very way of thinking, of the people who stand before it, people just moments before enveloped in their now-shattered preconceptions.

NP: I see. Let's return for a moment to the question of diet. You may not have abandoned the canvas until '73, but you abandoned meat in '69, meaning you've been a vegetarian for twenty-nine years. What made that the turning point?

LJ: Touché. Good question. Twenty-nine years ago, I was twenty-nine. Curious, wouldn’t you say, how the first person to ask me about the timing of my decision does so with such impeccable timing herself? (laughter)

Simply put, when I was twenty-nine, I found myself in a bind. I was an artist, yes, in the sense that I lived off the proceeds from my artwork, however meager, shall we say, those proceeds might have been. Nevertheless, 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 just like your enchanting Barcelona are engaged in the underhanded dealings of the international Fine Arts Cartel. In every gallery or café, in every trendy bar, a new exhibition is hung each week, with new white labels in mismatched, scratched out calligraphy, announcing the title, year, artist, origin and, occasionally, the price of having a given piece transferred from that space to yours. In other words, art and business are hardly strangers, and, therefore, the mere fact that I was selling my paintings was no 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: Of course not. But what I'm getting at goes even further. My very success, if not global, was livable, but it was also what made me mediocre, what lodged me deep in the mire of an awesomely large group of struggling practitioners, of would-be artists fighting to make a name for themselves in a medium long since made rote, cliché, teachable, even. I needed something different, something to set me apart from the others, and yet, at the same time, I knew this could only be accomplished from within the tradition. Only then could it be at once mine and original. What’s more, 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 just another middlingly successful art school grad.

NP: So you became a vegetarian?

LJ: Exactly. It was one of the first steps I took toward individuating myself, toward narrowing down the endless number of paths that stretched out before me as potential futures. Quit, take a soul-deadening job in some corporate sales department and polish off all the summer reading lists I'd never managed to get through. Teach people who were undoubtedly better informed, more talented and more creative than I or, worse yet, people so unbearably thick I would be unable to leave my office for fear of the futility of the lectures I would be expected to give so enthusiastically. Keep filling tiny galleries with more half-seen, entirely forgettable 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 to do that at the time.

NP: And now?

LJ: I still believe in it. Only now I know myself better. Restrictions no longer holds any negative connotations for me. It means more, not less, something along the lines of refine, varnish, put in the kiln and fire to a glossy finish.

NP: And I became a vegetarian for mere personal ethics... On a different note, could you tell me a bit about the origin of your name? I understand you were born and raised in Butte, Montana, a part of the country not exactly known for its ethnic diversity. Is Lumami Juvisado just another artistic alias?

LJ: My name, my name. A rose by any other name... Bon. My mother was something of a psychic: she anticipated the need I would one day have for a name unlike all the Jennifers, Sarahs, Michaels and Matthews the trees bore in surplus out there at the time. She was also obsessed with time, an obsession she passed on to me. Only her concerns were much narrower: she was fixated on the measurement of time, on hours, the days of the week, etc.

Her vision of the world would have fit right in to any number of classic Hollywood films: the constant tearing off of calendar pages, the accumulation of black numbers on white in a wind-shuffled pile beneath. There wasn’t a room in the entire house that did not have at least one calendar and a multiplicity of clocks. She kept them up even after they had expired, tombstones and testaments to irretrievable 365- and, tetra-annually, 366-day moments. I grew up in a veritable cemetery of grandfather clocks, clock-radios, pocket watches and cuckoos, shaded by a canopy of yellowing pages, a glossy pall of Save the Whale photographs, drawings by A. A. Milne and black and white photographs of children holding flowers in Paris offset by ridiculous splashes of primary colors. Ours was a house where time mattered: it was not money but, quite literally, life. My mother liked to live linearly.

NP: And the name?

LJ: My father, whom I never met, was a traveling trapeze artist. He took his show all over the rural Midwest. He was also Argentine and in our town for one week only: Lunes, Martes, Miércoles, etc. My mother never forgot him.

NP: Of course. Why didn’t I notice earlier? But speaking of time, we have very little left. One last question, then. Why did you originally decide to move to New York, and why did you later trade in New York for Paris? What were your intentions, motivations, goals?

LJ: Ex-patriotism has its charms, but an ex-patriot from Montana? It just doesn't have the same ring, much less within the borders of your own country. Émigré, on the other hand... Now that's Millerian abandon!

© k-band, 1999