Re 03: Interview with Oscar Murillo
By Nicholas Smith in the artist’s studio
Re: This issue is about the surface between work and politics, I thought therefore a good point of departure would be to talk about the news that you destroyed your UK passport on a flight. I was wondering if you considered this a work firstly?
OM: I think humans have learnt to take radical measures out of desperation, and I think while some people might say that I am in a privileged position, and therefore such extreme measures do not apply. Being in that privileged position is exactly the point. So the action was not out of the blue, it was made with the fore knowledge that during the mid and late 90’s, a lot of people I know would leave Latin America and on route during the flight, they would destroy their passport. This was for a very particular reason, they didn’t want to be identified when coming into the UK, as they wanted to seek asylum in the country. So by making it difficult for an immigration officer to identify you, they had to immediately take responsibility over your safety and welfare. Of course me destroying my passport was not for those reasons, but it was informed by these previous actions. In many respects when I did that myself, it was not a protest, it was my awareness that there was nothing more profound and significant to contribute to the Sydney Biennial.
I have been travelling insatiably, in these moments and spaces of transition, I draw, I make small drawings usually on A4 paper. To formalise this act I published a book called THEM, meaning ‘them-lot’ or ‘those people’, it started with a collection of photographs that my mother gave me, these photographs are a fragmented narrative of my family from the 1970s to the early 2000s. There is also an extract of my father, who talks about a lot of his endeavours as a young man in Colombia, and his attempts to leave the country, he worked as a Trade Unionist and he was an activist in Colombia. I take this book with me everywhere, there are hundreds of blank pages in these books — it is here in these blank pages that I now make my drawings, one of these books was with me when I destroyed my passport. In short, the destruction of my passport, was the most substantial action I could offer to the Sydney Biennial, and to exclude myself from that situation was the best thing that I could have done. I feel that I would have felt very disappointed with myself if I had not attempted at something more significant.
It is a kind of Japanese harakiri, there is almost a sense of shame, when there is nothing to do in an avoidable situation so you have to commit suicide. It was a very personal moment.
Re: Two works that stick in my mind from the various works I have seen are videos, the video from New Year’s Day, La Paila meet me! Mr. Superman 2013–2015, and the live-stream of A Mercantile Novel. I thought that the camera angles on both were very interesting, with meet me! Mr. Superman 2013–2015 being literally shot from the hip and A Mercantile Novel being a much different viewpoint, almost like CCTV at work, monitoring the workers, these works are particularly interesting as they are I feel consolidatory of your practice. So firstly could you talk about the role of video in your working process?
OM: Video is very difficult for me, not in the technical sense, but precisely because I find it hard to meditate, I see it as a gesture in my practice, in the most part making video work is so full of processes, you know, production, post-production and so on. I do the shooting myself, and when it is effective it is a chance encounter, including the meet me! Mr. Superman, which was filmed in the early hours of New Year’s Day.
The Mercantile Novel is part of a larger installation, and the footage becomes making work out of work. With meet me! Mr. Superman it is coping with a personal situation; how does one deal with encountering difference even if it is so familiar? The lens becomes a filter, quite literally, as I struggle to engage on a face to face level in that colloquial context — it is very nuanced and is not even about language but more acutely the lack of profound connection that requires time to nurture — it is also a desire to indulge after-the-fact, even before it was a work the footage was archived, it was about me indulging going back and revisiting that event.
Re: In a sense these works both the Mercantile Novel live-stream and Meet Mr Superman, have a high degree of voyeurism.
OM: That (Mercantile Novel) was more factual, to give some context, I did not want to expose the individuals that collaborated with me from Colombia. There was a very clear division between the public and this private moment, the private moment being the production of candy. So the viewer would only have access to these screens, there were other things to navigate other than the screens, but the public could only experience the people on the production line through the live-feed. That work is more literal, and I think it was more about putting the viewer in a position of a kind-of voyeurism. There was a huge shelving system that divided the space, so the live-feed allowed for clear viewing of the activity. Those videos have a completely different set of parameters to how I would find myself making a video.
Re: Something else I wanted to talk about was distribution, as it’s a theme that I think is not talked about so much and is just as important as the role of labour in your work I feel. There is a flatpack nature to the shows, or even a feeling that they are liquid and the exhibition is the point it stops momentarily, I wondered how distribution informs the shows and I also wondered if you saw the works and shows as consolidatory?
OM: There are so many facets of distribution involved in the practice, and all of them as valid as the next you know? If I think back to five or six years ago, there was never a grand plan of distribution in a global context, it was more as a young artist understanding my limitations, and working within those limitations to have the best relationship with that limited context. The practical elements that have been put into place with being a student or young artist without much means to ship works around for shows in different parts of the world. I would create these large scale mono-painted canvases only in blue, red and black paint, I call them ink pads rendered flat using oil paint, the aim here is to stretch the capacity to make mono-printed drawings, similar to how one would use carbon paper that would last for a week and make large scale drawings. Also not having space, not being able to stretch the paintings, so rather fold the paintings, these were all ideas that were practical and were made out of necessity and didn’t have any strong conceptual frameworks.
But even when you do get a more conceptual underpinning, like writing words on a painting, it’s about thinking about my domain, as someone living in a city, and having grown up in a certain context, and understanding how certain things were coming into social-cultural vogue, through consumerism. For example going to a supermarket and seeing a mango 5 times the price as it is back home, or coconut water both of which can be also be sourced for free. Yoga also became huge about 10 years ago, yoga infiltrated the city’s craze for health and appearance, but it is a ritual that is part of a civilisation elsewhere. So that is another level of distribution also, even though those words were on paintings I was communicating in them in a rudimentary way. Those ideas are quite important to me and have now evolved into something else.
Re: It reminds me of a very beautiful video of the economist Milton Friedman talking about the construction of a pencil, where he describes how the rubber comes from Malaysia, the brass from here and the graphite for the pencil from somewhere else. I think that your practice evokes those ideas, but it also evokes a western romanticism about those ideas as we are so far-removed from those processes.
One more idea that I wanted to bring in, which is an area I have been thinking about is the use of technology to separate rather than join people together, and the increasing amount of people being mis-informed by fake news etc. I wondered if these increasing technological issues would ever be considered in your practice?
OM: I have not consciously rejected technology, But I am conscious of how societies operate, I think it is very clear that a lot of these concerns, are western concerns, although certain Asian countries dominate the production of technologies — but for example when peasants in Colombia were getting mobile phones. That was very shocking, but it made a lot of sense, I always think how is technology affecting non-western societies, here in the west we have had every facet of our lives infiltrated, but I sincerely enjoy discarding technology. There is also the idea that you are only as good as the worst player in your team! I am always conscious of those parts of society that don’t have access. It is not a romanticising, even if you look at some parts of the north of the UK there is a difference. There is still a reliance on the manual and the analogue.
I always think of the crazy idea of flying, how it’s magical at the same time and I am completely obsessed with planes, not always from a technical point of view, but more so about how irrational it is. Technology is irrational, Instagram for example, having access to millions and millions of moments, in photographs and short videos, that somehow seems irrational. While these things connect you they isolate you at the same time, you are isolated from the world. One can easily spend hours on social media outlets without any awareness of their environment that surrounds you.
For me it is not worrying, it is something to be heavily aware of. Also how these things relate to consumerist culture and a system of capital, which comes back to your reference of fake-news. We don’t have time to research, we don’t have time, so we go online and we take whatever information as factual.
Re: Yeah, it is as though we are living in a world of perceptions rather than reality, and I think that can lead to a lot of mis-translation. I see that in your work, the common mistake is that you are communicating a kind of documentation, but actually you are trying to figure out these moments too, you are not necessarily the reality of those ideas, you are perceiving them. When works are brought together for the purposes of a show it’s a gesture to make a reality.
OM: I think it is probably a kind of questioning; what is the role of cultural production? or challenging what the role is of art? in relation to individuals and institutions and people and how they infiltrate themselves. It goes back to distribution and how people link back to societies who all have their own perceptions. As you say this is a liquid environment and works or shows can act to consolidate under a given idea. The perception of the idea is solid for the amount of time of the show, but then dissolves again.
I am not one for engaging heavily in politics or being dogmatic in activism, I like to play within those structures, but I also find the seduction of form, of colour and aesthetics are very important and are fundamental. I am not so aggressive with these elements, they can all take part, everything can take part. We are complicated beings, we are contradictory. I was talking with a person recently from Switzerland about how the society there is well organised and everything is on time and everything works well, but there is a high suicide rate. But if you go to a place like Katmandu that has been destroyed a number of times by earthquakes and civil wars, and the place is chaotic and dusty people seem to get on with it, a bit like Palestine and the Palestinian people.
So there are so many frequencies of engagement in regards to perception and I think it should be an idea of where can things function, and in that respect the reality happens elsewhere. The reality does happen elsewhere, in a way the artist is a kind of trickster when disseminating their ideas, what is sincere? What is real? What is a painting, sculpture or a photograph? And therefore the artist becomes a kind of commander, the worst example would be an artist as a utilitarian didactic figure in that process.
