Roberto Tejada

By Claire Ruud

National Camera, by Roberto Tejada, University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Roberto Tejada, an art historian, curator and poet, joined the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin last fall. His latest book, National Camera, came out in February, and he recently sat down with ...might be good to talk about its subject—put very briefly, images and identities in the U.S. and Mexico.

…might be good: So your book takes transnationalism as a starting place. I know you grew up in L.A., which seems like the epitome of a transnational city to me—just my stereotype of it from growing up in Berkeley. And I’m wondering about transnationalism as both theory and lived experience. How did your lived experience shape your understanding of the transnational?

Roberto Tejada: Well, I’m glad that you think of Los Angeles as a transnational city, and I’m glad that you’ve noted that, in one important sense, scholarship is largely autobiographical. More and more, I think of L.A. as having shaped the architecture that organizes the way I think about community and public culture in terms of immigration and urban structures of feeling: the shape of a cloverleaf freeway interchange. I grew up there at a time when you really could see the influx of migratory world culture and global connections merging and weaving between L.A., Mexico, Central and South America and the Pacific Rim.

…mbg: I’m trying to understand the relationship you see between the lived experience and the theory of transnationalism. So can you give me an example of the lived experience of transnationalism?

RT: Crossing a border.

…mbg: Okay.

RT: If you live very close to the border you understand what’s at stake and what skills are considered necessary for that embodied linguistic performance. So that’s a lived experience that can be theorized. I actually don’t see lived experience and theory as opposing categories, but rather necessary terms in the spectrum of complexity. I’m interested in human subjects as historic actors and as placeholders for encounters that stage or activate transnational connection.

…mbg: How do you think about images in terms of transnational images?

RT: Well, art history is commonly told in terms of national, developmental storylines pointing back to an originating (often Euro-ethnic) source. I’m also interested in how images travel and don’t necessarily pertain to any one nation, but rather to what I prefer calling image environments: like the very palpable one prompted by the inseparable histories that constitute the United States and Mexico.

…mbg: How did you settle upon images to address the issues of transnationalism? Your approach is super interdisciplinary. You use textual analysis, literary theory, anthropology, history, art history—why did you decide to be an art historian?

RT: Because I like being an insider-outsider. I mean, ultimately, I find that the so-called differences between disciplines don’t necessarily hold. Academics have stakes in policing borders between disciplines, and so they avoid finding valuable connections with neighboring cultural fields. I try to work within the model of art history and, at the same time, find those patterns for producing knowledge that might upset the assumptions of the discipline itself.

…mbg: I’m seeing a theme here. Just like transnationalism complicates the idea of fixed borders between nations, your academic practice complicates the idea of fixed borders between disciplines. And in your book, you skip around between historical moments and locations a lot too, so that even the organization of the book challenges those borders. The borders between time, the borders between places, the borders between so-called different archives, the borders between nation states; the borders between disciplines—

RT: Between sexes.

…mbg: As we talk, I feel like I’m skipping around a lot, too—both as I think about the book and in our conversation.

RT: Well, that pleases me—I’m reading a book I read quite a while ago by Anne Carson called Eros the Bittersweet, which is really on one level a deep reflection on the status of metaphor. I think that I write scholarship with metaphor in mind insofar as I look for structures that seem incongruent, and I inhabit that incompatibility for a time and realize that there’s actually a relation of identity between the two— and then that disappears and the difference takes hold. I like to hover in that space.

…mbg: It’s difficult—finding apparent differences and then hovering there until something takes shape.

RT: Hopefully, my work asks the reader and viewer to reassess conceptual categories of art-historical time and space, fixed cultural geography, or unchanging sexual and ethnic identities.

…mbg: But you conceive of your poetry as separate from your scholarship.

RT: Yes.

…mbg: How do they overlap in your practice?

RT: I’ve kept them separate in one sense, but in another they’re very much linked together. In T.J. Clark’s book, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing, he looks with astonishing depth at two paintings by Poussin. In mid discussion—by way of extended journal entries—the account breaks down and a poem rushes in to illuminate the scene. I haven’t dared to do that yet, although a book appearing later this year, Exposition Park [Wesleyan University Press], presents texts I’ve written that are hybrid in nature. They’re not quite ekphrastic poems in the way that we customarily understand ekphrasis, but in each instance, an originating dialogue between the artist and myself prompts a kind of parallel language-base that then shapes a piece of imaginative writing.

…mbg: I’ve heard you talk about your poems as “strategies and tactics” for breaking down high and low, or other things we see as binaries.

RT: Yes, which is really a Baroque tactic. The Baroque loved the paradox because the paradox brings opposites together momentarily, lets them congeal for a moment and then allows them to separate again. In Exposition Park, I begin literally with translations of Spanish golden age sonnets, one from a Mexican-born sonneteer and then two Spanish poets, Lope de Vega being one of them. Then I intersect these with poems I’ve written, call them sonnets if you like, that reference the act of translation, the transatlantic passages of that particular language art into the contemporary political climate.

…mbg: So the Baroque is a pretty loaded place to start since its the period of colonization, and I mean, maybe five years ago we saw a lot of talk about the Baroque in contemporary Latin American art—

RT: There’s been an interest in a neo-Baroque aesthetic in Latin America. It’s a theory of culture with a host of contributors that include the Martinique poet and theorist Édouard Glissant, as well as the mid-century Cuban modernist, José Lezama Lima, whose poetry I’ve translated. The Baroque makes sense as a resistant model—with difficulty as a positive value—a way of upsetting the relationship of periphery and center. In Mexico, I’d say contemporary artists like Rubén Ortiz-Torres, Daniela Rossell, Miguel Ventura and Thomas Glassford have appealed to this aesthetic, and one need only view the exhibition Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement to witness how artists who build on the “barrio-Baroque” of rasquachismo have made it productive as well.

…mbg: How do you think the Baroque works to upset the relationship between periphery and center?

RT: Well, Lezama Lima was using Spanish-derived traditional literary forms, such as the décima, as a possible syllabic rhyme scheme for radicalizing Cuban prosody. His tropical surrealism appropriates the form, making it irrecognizable as a décima—one as we’ve never heard it before. His décima forces us to reconfigure all the décima-forms prior to it.

…mbg: The transformation you’re talking about, which compels reconsideration of something after the fact reminds me of your discussion of the importance of the “second take” in National Camera, and you’re the last chapter of the book—my favorite chapter—in which you use the work of contemporary Latina artists to almost re-see the Boystown archives.

RT: I approach archives in such a way as to conceive them not as the archivist would prefer, but rather to re-view and re-envision it, as you’re saying, through a resistant lens. Many of the Chicana and Latina artists that I reference—Christina Fernandez, Amelia Mesa-Baines, for instance—employ the female body as though to offer a second visibility to the mid-1970s sex-worker mise-en-scène in the Boystown archive. I look at contemporary art to unfetter those former photographic subjects from the fear and fantasies of realist interpretation.

…mbg: One of the reasons that last chapter was my favorite was your discussion of the politics of the Boystown archives, and your navigation of those politics. I thought it was beautiful the way you worked the everyday politics of research into your theoretical engagement with the material. I also loved the chapter because it allowed contemporary art to speak to so-called documentary pictures. The idea that contemporary visual art can have some effect on all the other images we see every day—advertisements, New York Times photos, and so on.

RT: I actually realized in writing National Camera that we have art historians to hold up as models for that; image-thinkers who were already doing this back in the twenties and thirties. Aby Warburg—about whose work there has been much contemporary enthusiasm—was interested in the behavior of images: a very interesting term.

…mbg: What do you, what does he mean by the “behavior” of images?

RT: Not so much what they stand for as how they mean; what they set in motion. They don’t necessarily convey, reflect, influence, or derive—they betray, activate, and mobilize.

…mbg: This has a lot to do with the way you conceptualize images in your book. You suggest that images don’t actually mean except for within a larger image field in which they act. So then do you, as an art historian, make them act in different ways?

RT: I can only stage a scene in which—rhetorically speaking—images can act. Naturally I’m the director!

[Laughter]

RT: So the deck is stacked, so to speak.

…mbg: A related topic that interested me in National Camera was your approach to archives. I’m wondering how you think we should use archives.

RT: I wanted to begin by writing about an archive in particular—the Casasola archive. And I wanted to write about it, not only because there are indelible images to be derived from that archive, but also because this archive is always referred to in scholarship. Images from that archive are always used to accompany historical accounts, yet the idea of that archive is never addressed. I spent the first two thirds of the book with a vast set of pictures about which much has been written—the Casasola archive, Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, Manuel Álvarez Bravo. I so focused in part because it was a challenge to write about a set of images that might seem already to have been exhausted. I believe that the archive is never exhausted. On the one hand it’s a system that conserves or preserves a numbered set of images, but on the other it is revolutionary insofar as there is always more that it can contain. This is confirmed wonderfully in Leonard Folgarait’s Seeing Mexico Photographed [Yale University Press 2008]: a terrific study that establishes points of contact with mine. It’s uncanny that analogous objects of inquiry prompt such interrelated, but nonetheless diverse treatments. I’ve learned much from his narrative, and it’s stimulating to examine my own blind spots: “That’s a great point: How could I have missed that?”

…mbg: I just realized that I used the word “should” when I asked you that last question about the archive—“How should we use archives?” I’m not sure that was quite right. But I think I know why I did it. Reading National Camera, I felt that you had some sort of ethical structure that was the impetus behind every choice you made. An ethics of looking, an ethics of writing, an ethics of the archive. So what do you propose “ethical looking” is?

RT: Yes. I would change the verbal structure from “should be” to “could be.” “Should” seems to suggest the terrain of morals. Potentiality is the kind of ethics I’m interested in. What could this world look like, as opposed to some other?

…mbg: Okay, so under that construction, your book imagines, and maybe by imagining, partly creates that new world.

RT: It produces a knowledge-world by viewing the bilateral evidence of a culture as being both transparent and foreign to itself.

Claire Ruud is Editor of ...might be good and Associate Coordinator of testsite.