Defining ‘interactive’
Artist looks to engage audience in retrospective
In the contemporary art world, “interactive” can mean many things.
Some participatory, social-minded projects engage communities but don’t yield objects of art people might line up to see. At the other end of the spectrum are crowd-magnet, room-size installations involving dazzling displays of technology that immerse viewers in light, sound, silence and space.
Paul Ramírez Jonas’ art falls closer to the former, although he could create a spectacle if he wanted to.
He built the computer and the program for his piece “Another Day” — before Google Earth and iPhones existed. It calculates the continuous countdown to sunrise in 90 cities across the world, from a list that cycles in real time across three monitors akin to airport arrival and departure screens.
Choosing the most exotically named cities along the longitudinal meridians of an old-style printed atlas was his favorite task in making that work, Jonas said, and really the point of the exercise: “to show people the awesomeness of the world.”
Jonas’ first major retrospective, curated by Dean Daderko for the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, suggests the awesomeness of one artist’s quest to engage viewers meaningfully. He wants people to create art with him.
Born in California and raised in Honduras, Jonas has lived in the U.S. since attending Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. His art long has been inspired by reading. Early on, he plumbed archives to recreate historic inventions such as kitelike flying machines and Thomas Edison’s first sound machine.
Those aren’t the only intriguing works that are “just for looking” in the show. The biggest attention-getter is a massive collage containing 25,000 handmade, silk-screened tickets that represent 25,000 bodies in a Kabul, Afghanistan, stadium who could be gathered for an execution or a soccer match.
That’s about as close to politics as Jonas has gone to date. He’s still youngish, and boyish-looking, in his early 50s.
In recent years, he’s focused on public projects outside of museums and galleries, aware that places such as parks and plazas are full of accidental viewers — people going about their lives.
“How do you address the everyday person who’s not necessarily interested in art? And what is public space versus private?” he said.
His first public space works weren’t very sophisticated. “It was just my art, in a public space.”
As early as 1993, Jonas was making pieces such as “His Truth Is Marching On,” a hanging ring of water-filled bottles that can be tapped to create the notes of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” But he felt that kind of work became such a fun experience, few participants thought about what it signified.
Later on, he asked people to create their own sound, with “Paper Moon.” That installation contains a wall of placards that creates an image of the full moon, drawn with dense rows of type. The type repeats the phrase, “I create as I speak,” which is believed to be the English translation of the magic spell “abracadabra.” Viewers take one of the placards off the wall, stand in front of a microphone and repeat the phrase as much as they like.
“You’re trying to make words do things,” Jonas said. “Everybody knows that if you read it out loud, you’re bound. I’m interested in that kind of social contract that can be enacted without fancy technology or a theater.”
In 2009, he created his first public monuments from cork, for an outdoor installation of the Mercosul Biennial in Brazil. They were designed to double as message boards, with pushpins. But no one touched them until Jonas added the pushpins.
That was a step in creating interactive work that didn’t need instructions. “If you see cork and a pushpin, I don’t need to tell you what it’s for.”
Who knows whether most people thought twice, as Jonas did, about why a monument might be a bulletin board, or who gets to write in public space? That idea is a little more obvious with his 2011 sculpture “The Commons,” the flashiest piece in a show that is deliberately not flashy or loud or particularly beautiful, depending on your notion of beauty.
This lifesize cork reproduction of the horse from Rome’s landmark “Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius” has an imposing physical presence, with gorgeously carved musculature.
But it wasn’t complete until after the show opened, when viewers tacked business cards, fliers for yoga classes, photocopies from the copy-machine piece, ticket stubs, a dollar bill and drawings of the horse by small children onto the base. And it’s still in progress, evolving each time someone adds to the collection.
A much smaller cork board on the CAMH’s lawn, embedded into a boulder, is more stealthy. But it, too, filled up quickly and will likely acquire layers.
Jonas’ most complex participatory works now involve transactions.
The plinth of “Taylor Square” holds metal notebooks that bulge with 19,000 forms filled out by people who gave ceremonial keys to each other in a New York park.
That project began with an official ceremony in which then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg relinquished his power to award keys to the city for a few months. Participants received actual keys, plus “passports” that led them to unlock doors, cabinets and drawers at sites across New York.
Daderko has piled leftover keys on a table, appreciating their shiny “materiality” as visual bait to draw people into the display. Such projects can be a challenge to present, long after they’re finished, in museums. The key table looks messy and unfinished; a casual visitor could think the show’s installers forgot to put something away. But that, too, can be a draw.
Daderko and Jonas don’t expect visitors to read more than a few pages of the notebooks. Even Jonas hasn’t read them all. But glimpsing even a few gives one a sense of the profundity in the everyday existence of humans, especially when they work together.
Participants could award keys to each other for any reason, and the citations I perused were simple and intimate: “For being a good friend.” “For taking me out of the country for the first time.” “For being a good bhangra dancer and an even better salsa dancer.”
With his most recent (and still ongoing) piece, “Public Trust,” Jonas may have finally figured out how to take the documentation to the level of artmaking. Jonas calls it both a sculpture and “an engine for participation.”
The “sculpture” is a table neatly laid out with objects that provide a rudimentary, mini courtroom/ printing-press situation.
Facilitators present visitors with several news headlines from the day that relate to promises of some kind, then ask them to state promises of their own. The facilitators typeset the promise and make a rubbing of the text as they speak from a script designed to make people think: “Who’s more trustworthy — these public figures or you?” Or, “It’s interesting that I trust you, but you’re a complete stranger. Why is it that we trust each other, one to one, but when it comes to this, our trust level goes dramatically down?”
Participants must verify their promise with a signature of some kind. Pens are provided, but they also can sign in blood, for dramatic effect. Then they swear on a Bible or whatever other sacred object from the table they choose, including a Jupiter stone and a bottle of water from the Ganges River.
Jonas keeps one copy of the signed document and posts it to a grid on the wall. Participants take the other one with them.
“Public Trust” first appeared last September in Boston, traveling to three parks during three weeks. Facilitators operate it at the CAMH on Saturday afternoons.
The first week’s grid of printed pieces made me laugh. One person promised to eat less kale. Another pledged to be more decisive.
Jonas said people now send him pictures of “Public Trust” promises they’ve framed and hung at home.
“It was always about, how can I get people to make the piece, more and more,” he said. “You can see the evolution: Strike the bottles. Speak. Put your own information in. Eventually it’s about making your own piece of art. We’ll see where it keeps going from there.”