CONVERSATION with ERNESTO PUJOL

 Conversation between Julia P. Herzberg and Ernesto Pujol, 2001 was conducted in preparation for the exhibition CONTEMPORÁNEA 2000 at El Museo del Barrio from June 13 through September 24, 2000.

Julia P. Herzberg:  What has inspired you to turn to the landscape or nature in your recent works? 

Ernesto Pujol: Believe it or not, I was originally trained by a private tutor in impressionist landscape painting, with sable brushes, pure linseed, turpentine, oil pigments, varnishes, easel and canvas. Although I eventually left that first style and subject matter behind, when I later began my university art training, a love for landscape remained. Of course, I confess that I did not know how to approach it anew, as the relationship had been painterly, in a late 19th century way, instead of conceptual, in a late 20th century way. However, two years ago one of my exhibition projects unexpectedly traveled to the Allentown Art Museum. Thereafter, during my many trips to Pennsylvania, I was struck by the beauty of the Lehigh Valley, and how its old farm areas where being insensitively encroached by new suburbs and the big glossy boxes of industrial parks. An agricultural economy was giving way to a high-tech economy. And although this was somewhat understandable, just as farms once took over wooded areas, it was nevertheless humanly sad, because a rural way of life was vanishing, as well as ecologically violent. I was also concerned with the genetic engineering of foods, and as I bicycled through the cornfields I realized that this might be the last unaltered corn. Of course, corn had already been domesticated by the Incas and later further refined by the many others, but never to the degree that we can now alter it, endangering other life forms, perhaps causing their extinction.

JPH:  How do you define the relationship between the industrial and the national landscape as seen in this body of work?

EP: When I was recently confronted with, on the one hand, farms, barns and cornfields, and, on the other, industrial parks and the expensive suburban developments that were following them, I innocently thought that I was facing the contrast between nature and science. But I eventually realized that I was contemplating two versions of human industry, as in 16th and 21st century technologies, and that so-called Nature, uncontrolled and without boundaries, had ceased to exist long ago. Therefore, to answer your question, our national landscape is, by now, the landscape of human industry, an industrial landscape; for me they are one and the same. Whatever may look green and unspoiled is a carefully controlled environment, with strict boundaries. We limit animal populations, orchestrate "safe" burns, and are now going to pursuit the exploitation of our underground resources in wildlife preserves, no matter the long-term ecological costs. This new body of art work, these large-scale, beautiful chromogenic prints provide the viewer with a bit of my process, the feelings elicited by witnessing what initially looked like the conflict between the nature and technology, followed by the realization that everything was man-made.

JPH: In your work, there is a relationship between the implied realism of an installation and the "realism" of photography. Can you describe this relationship for your work and how you might manipulate the idea of the "real"?

EP: I have always considered what Robert Storr calls the classicism of installation art, the full immersion environment, as artifice, as theatre. I do not consider it "real" at all, quite the contrary, even if it captures, directly or indirectly, our new identity as consumers. I engaged in the medium back in 1994, precisely because I regarded it as the only surviving visual art form that still momentarily disconnected the viewer from familiar surroundings, like film does, making viewers slow down and ponder. An installation environment could not merely be glanced, as much of painting is nowadays, it had to be walked through. Thus, installation art achieved in the 1990s what painting-as-window did in the 1590s. As far as photography is concerned, and the notion that it is fossilized light, a sort of raw slice of reality, that was the early mythology of the medium. The truth is that there was always a craftsman making technical decisions and manipulating reality. We know realize this more than ever before because of the advent of digital imaging, so filled with tools at the service of advertising. As far as my work is concerned, I strive to embrace this more honest history of the two mediums, their theatricality. I create photographic images not with a documentary pretension, but with the intention of subtly suggesting landscape paintings, by way of composition, as you will sometimes perceive in the cornfields, as well as 1970s grainy television images, by way of the illusion of surface texture, as in the bicycle-racing track. There is no effort to create a visual document, but to explore the way images are noticed, selectively glimpsed at by the imperfect human eye, which is not a cold machine, and later remembered by the mind, in a sort of dreamy or foggy way. My photos have a soft focus, although they are not blurry. I actually love the distortions caused by the panoramic lens, which will probably disturb traditional photographers who try to hide all their seams. Once again, I embrace the fact that reality is always subjective, even elusive. Perhaps if I were a bird, with a limited consciousness, I would experience nature for what it is. But being human, I filter everything through my urban historical memory, so that I do not really see what is crudely there, in front of me, because I am observing while thinking and remembering many other images at the same time.

The new Centro de Documentación of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico in San Juan now  houses my entire archive in its permanent collection of artists' documents.