MARFITA: An Interview with Artist Josh Franco, Part 2

Part 1 of the interview can be found here.

LB: I love this idea of Anzaldúa appearing in Marfa in her textual form. It makes me think of that project you did, copying the letters and putting them on a board the height of her body....can you talk a bit about that, and how you came to that work, especially in light of this idea of moving from writing-to-making? I love that because so often, lately (the past two years) I've been thinking about my writing in this broader sense of life-work of making. The book, for me, is much less the accomplishment than it is simple a point on a continuum of creative life-work that I hope will include some kind making that stems from this lived-in-body, which is at once a unified whole but also so many sites of dehiscence, as you mention, from which things can emerge.

JF: I think you are referring to In tlilli, in tlapalli (three Tejanos in red and black) and to the personal letters written to Anzaldúa now archived in the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Papers at UT Austin’s Benson Library. To clarify: the letters were used in a different work, Teléfono Piece (para las veteranas con respeto y amor). For In tlilli… the texts my assistant, Maya Cueva, and I hand-transcribed were select published works by Anzaldúa, Judd, and Sandra Cisneros. The particular Anzalduan text is a chapter from Borderlands / La Frontera titled “Tlilli Tlapalli: The Path of the Red and Black Ink.” This chapter is extraordinarily important to me as an art historian. I understand it as Anzaldúa’s most focused meditation on what my discipline would call “aesthetic philosophy.” For her, it comes out of a meditation on ritual and art’s inseparability from each other and the everyday. She identifies this inseparability as reflective of a “shaman”istic understanding of life. Judd has comparable concerns. Well, I am curious about their comparability, I should say (dissertation chapter four!). In published writings and recorded interviews he more than once cites the “European Tradition” as the system from which he distinguishes his non-representational and powerfully phenomenological work. Anzaldúa critiques the “virtuous Western aesthetic” for holding art and life apart. There’s an incredibly rich conversation to be had. In tlilli… has a very particular aim: engage Anzaldúa’s and Judd’s erosions of barriers between art and life together for an audience of Texans. Both thinkers are so important to many Texans’ understanding of our regional, state, and border identities. But these Texan audiences are typically striking in their differences. I hope with In tlilli… to erode the combinations of indifference, antagonism, altruism, dismissal, unfamiliarity, and distrust between these audiences (and between my own selves who are scattered across both “sides”). It was incredibly satisfying to transcribe by hand essays from Judd and Anzaldúa. Putting them in my body that way has changed how I re-read and publicly interpret those texts. We have definitely lost something as a species with new modes of reproducibility. It is unfortunate that knowledge no longer consistently travels through networks of scriptoria where people are constantly engaging in this inky flesh-to-letter reproduction process. I recommend it to my students all the time as a studying method. An embodying method.

In the writings I selected to transcribe for this piece, Judd and Anzaldúa both reference red and black as a long auspicious (think prehistoric and pre-conquest) color pair with many interesting formal qualities as well. The plywoods the transcriptions are mounted on are cut to their respective heights, which were over a foot in difference, adding a great visual dissonance to the overall work. I want Texans to stand in both of their presence (along with Cisneros), via their heights and their texts, and confront their own understanding of what it is to be Texan, with all of the deep brown-white tensions that run us through. My hope is that the texts, because they are both such dense writings, push these encounters beyond either translation projects or conquered-conqueror frameworks into the realm of more complex encounter. I understand “complex encounter” through the Nahua language structure of difrasismo (again, see Arteaga, or Laura E. Perez’s Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities) and María Lugones’s concept of “world-traveling” (see Lugones, Pilgrimages / Peregrinajes). Essentially, I hope with In tlilli… to effect situations in which ideologies about Texan whiteness, brownness, and their attendant aesthetic stereotypes are impossible to maintain in the presence of these physicalized texts.

LB: Can you talk about this transition(ing) from writing-to-making (and I keep in mind, too, that writing is a kind of making, but into this 3D making, if you will...) and the poetics of that? (I also take poetics in the broad sense, the sense of "making" and less in the formalist literary criticism/theory sense).

JF: I go over this dichotomy repeatedly: thinking and making. Writing gets associated with the former. Certainly, part of the appeal of Judd’s and Anzaldúa’s works are that they come out of two lifelong projects where playing with this is central. They both took us far outside and beyond it in many ways. The idea of “doing it all” is enticing and dangerous. I was first compelled to it while writing my Master’s thesis. It was a very different project from my dissertation. It had all to do with presentations of sex and gender in mostly two-dimensional visual art by Chicanxs. I was frustrated with the realization that I had something very particular to say and did not really feel inspired to enter or contribute to capital “Q” Queer Studies or Chicano/a Studies, despite being repeatedly told that’s what I did indeed want to do. Finally, the performance piece Rebozo [Man] in Nepantla (exhibited as a series of fotoesculturas) allowed me to say that particular thing. I realized that when language is suspended (what “making” allows us to imagine) much more particular stories could be conveyed. I am interested in those. I have had to learn how to negotiate that intense desire for specificity with an ever increasing responsibility to communities of knowledge (a much more satisfying term than the universalized, Eurocentric notion of “disciplines”).

My dissertation began similarly. I needed (and realized I was not alone in needing) to tell a particular story of Marfa. So my dissertation comes out of the installation project MARFITA. There were two years of research and about a year of fabrication involved. Now, four years after its exhibition in Austin, I can reflect on how central that non-written work was to this thing that now sits in my notebooks and computer files. There is now a dissertation, which speaks broadly to heavily populated communities of knowledge and faith, through a very, very particular story of the apparitions of Donald Judd and the Virgin of Guadalupe in the town where my grandfather grew up. Because I am so obsessed with this phenomena of plant dehiscence right now, I can’t help but see it in those terms: take this largely invisible series of events (stories) occurring inside a closed structure; attend to the material conditions around this closed structure with love, con cariño; then dehiscence, and the closed structure (the particular story) opens up spectacularly!

LB: I know we talked about encaustics a bit, and that's something I definitely want to work on this summer (with you!) creating a fleshy-bodied poem, a markable and stampable type of poem that is both page-and-wax-flesh, soft and hard, etc....

JF: It is still hard for me to talk about beeswax, which has been used in a couple of projects now. I think I am still just getting to know it. I love its relationships with light and reflectivity. I love that it is such an amazing preservative (this certainly has to do with my fascination with inter-generational transmissions of knowledges). I love that it can be fleshy and that it smells like honey when it warms. I love its place in art history, from Roman portraiture to Brice Marden, Jasper Johns, and so many others. So for now, I’ll just say, Lillian, I can’t wait to take our place in this material lineage together!

LB: Ok, fotoescultura?! I am suddenly so in love with this word, and part of me feels like it is possible because of how Spanish works (a language I am fluent in almost by chance), and I love the embodiment it suggests, and it makes me think of poemastructura or some other such idea.....Having just turned in my dissertation to ProQuest and now that I will be graduating and getting my PhD, I can relate to "There is now a dissertation." And the dissertation is a product, and it gets sealed into a file, into a book, it gets "bound." That is all well and good, of course, but now I am inspired by deshicence and the ways that this bound and filed object (which isn't even an object, yet, it exists as a data set more than anything) can open up into its own fleshy thing. It is made of scars, after all, and some are filled with pus awaiting release. On that note, I am thrilled we had this "chat" and that we've come to it via Anzaldua, who has so much meaning for us both. I hate questions like "what's next for you!" because, whatever, the answer is usually something like "everything!" To keep it manageable, what are you up to, today?

JF: Yes, fotoesculturas! So, I must admit that Rebozo [Man]… in his current state is not totally fulfilling the formal requirements to be called this. They are basically cutouts, like you find in any retail store or sporting event or cheesy restaurant, but in the 1930's in Mexico they boomed as a mode of displaying family photos in space, off the wall. But I do conceive of Rebozo [Man]… that way. And I performed with this in mind. So what was exhibited are like fotoesculturas in reverse or…photographs in purgatory awaiting apotheosis as true fotoesculturas. One day. We will also have to discuss poemastructura. I have never heard this term.

I am so glad dehiscence has taken you like it has me! So, I promised the person who introduced me and an enraptured audience to this term in an art historical context that I would cite her the first time I publicly made reference to it. I am happy to do so: much thanks to art historian Evelyn Kreutzer!

I love this space too. I am glad we've connected before both heading off in different directions from our current seats in Ithaca. And yes, thank you for not asking me what's next. I'm still staring down the tunnel not sure what's at the end. But asking about today is perfect. I slept until 11am (utterly rare), walked around Greenpoint for coffee and sunshine, and picked up a friend in the neighborhood. We then met two other friends at the Metropolitan Museum where we saw the Plains Indians show. GO SEE THIS SHOW! Try not letting yourself off the hook if you do; we are all implicated in the "resilience" the many Plains groups were forced to demonstrate in the deep dark of colonization. Be prepared to encounter intricately crafted cosmological visions and ingenious weaponry and deeply potent symbologies. Then the four of us walked across Central Park to pick up picnic fodder at Zabar's. I love going to the Upper West Side with a bunch of downtown and Brooklyn kids. It's like study abroad for us. Zabar's--beautiful tangy loud groovy carb-loaded Zabar's--of course did not fail and we walked out packing chocolate ruggelach, babka, cheeses, pickles, olives, breads, and knishes which we took into the park. We ate, talked bawdily, had babies approach us, and we tossed a baseball around. We languored way too long and missed appointments. It was a day right out of Harriet the Spy's notebooks. She's one of my all-time heroes for growing up in Manhattan and being brave with her intimacies, and when I write, be it dissertation chapters or interview responses, I channel her. When I can channel Harriet for a whole day and with friends (unknowing surrogates for Sport and Janie!), I am happy.