MUSEUM INFO

EXHIBITIONS

EVENTS

EDUCATION

MEMBERSHIP

COLLECTIONS

GIVING

GET SOCIAL

PRESS ROOM

CONTACT

JOBS & INTERNSHIPS

MAP & DIRECTIONS

FIU HOME

A Conversation between Mónica Bengoa and Julia P. Herzberg

The Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum is presenting for the first timeMónica Bengoa: Exercices de Style / Exercises in Style. Bengoahas re­created nineteen stories (read, exercises) in felt, paper, andembroidery of the first ninety­nine stories from Raymond Queneau’sExercices de Style / Exercises in Style. Bengoa, who makes art outof the ordinary details of everyday life, was attracted to Queneau(French, 1903­1976), the co­founder of Ouvroir de littératurepotentielle (OuLiPo), for his incredibly inventive simple story: a plainyoung fellow gets on a bus, has a brief run­in with a fellowpassenger, gets off the bus, and meets a friend who comments onthe button on his overcoat. The French stories are notable for theirsemantic shifts, invented words, linguistic manipulations,embellished elaborations, and ever­changing details that captivatethe reader with the unexpected twists and turns of their reductivenarrative.

Bengoa has developed an innovative, labor­intensive process asinventive as the linguistic modes employed in the written exercises,creating a unique aesthetic vision in which writing becomes imagemaking. The nineteen stories in Exercices de Style / Exercises inStyle are an extraordinary visual dialogue.

CURRENT EXHIBITIONS FUTURE EXHIBITIONS PAST EXHIBITIONS EVENT CALENDAR EXHIBITION PROPOSALS RESEARCH YOUR ART

Julia P. Herzberg: How have you used the photographic image,central to your artistic explorations, in your works in felt, a materialyou have used for the previous six years?

Mónica Bengoa: Yes, the photographic image has been central tomy artistic explorations as long as I can remember, and in thatsense it is central to my works in felt. Each material has uniquequalities and therefore presents a unique challenge, so I strive tofind a specific way to translate the photographic image to thematerial I am using. Working with felt lies somewhere betweenworking with other materials I have used such as dyed thistles andcolored paper napkins. For example, Sobrevigilancia, a large­scalemural with thousands of dyed thistles of a bathroom sink, wasorganized in a way similar to pixels in a digital photographic image.I had to synthesize the details of the original photographic image ofthe bathroom sink because the thistles were so large, an average ofthree inches in diameter. Felt allows me to translate the details of the original photographicimage with great precision, but the process required for doing thatinvolves a greater technical effort than that required when I workedwith the colored paper napkins.

JPH: Talk about your general interest in literature as sourcematerial for your artistic transformations, in particular the writings ofRaymond Queneau and Georges Perec (French, 1936­1982), bothof whom were in the same literary group, OuLiPo. Why were theirsubjects, as well as the stylistic, semantic, and linguisticcharacteristics of their writings, of interest to you?

MB: I find the intersections between the visual arts and literaturevery interesting as subjects. Last year, I was invited to present mybook W, doble ve at the Alberto Hurtado University, I had an opportunityto review the relationship between my art work and literature andrecalled that I had used books as inspiration as early as 1990, mythird year in art school! I have always felt closer to literature than toart theory, probably because I have been an avid reader since highschool. I don’t have as much time as I wish I had to read, yet thereare some books that I return to every couple of years, and it alwaysseems that I am reading them for the first time.

So, for example, I started working with books by Diamela Eltit, aChilean writer whose thematic and linguistic structures arecomplex. Later I created several works in diverse media inspired byLe grand cahier (The Notebook) by the Hungarian writer AgotaKristof. I was very interested in the tone and simplicity of herwriting. She began writing in French only after she fled to a French­speaking area of Switzerland in the 1950s. She thought of herselfas “illiterate” in French, and therefore she used only the mostessential words to express her ideas on war and destruction in acompletely unemotional manner.

I don’t remember exactly when, but it was probably more thanfifteen years ago, that a friend gave me Especies de Espacios(Species of Spaces) by the French writer Georges Perec. I wasimpressed with the formal aspects of his writing, which featuredboth written diagrams and lists and described spaces of all kinds. Ihad never read a book that starts with short texts that are closer topoetry than to conventional narrative. I was also astonished by hisobservations of very insignificant details of everyday life, the onesthat nobody notices, which are the same kinds of observations that

I was interested in addressing in my work. I began reading many ofhis books and noted that they were all completely different fromeach other. Over time I came to realize that he was anunconventional writer who was passionate about the exercise ofwriting itself. As you mentioned, Perec was a member of OuLiPo, agroup of writers, mathematicians, and filmmakers who inventednew rules to enhance their creativity in literature. So Perec has trulybeen important to me through the years. I feel a strong affinity forhis observations on everyday life and for his working methods, eventhough I have only included his texts in more recent projects, suchas Still life / Style leaf. I agree with Perec’s words: “I set myselfrules in order to be totally free.”

JPH: How do your nineteen stories in felt, paper, and embroideryin Exercices de Style / Exercises in Style communicate Queneau’spainstakingly detailed, uneventful everyday stories that surprise thereader by their unconventional narrative structure, invented words,and scrambled syntax? What are the parallels that you have tried toestablish between your work and his?

MB: The most interesting thing for me about Queneau’s book, andthe main reason I chose it for this project, is that for me itrepresents the idea that form is content. By this I mean that everyformal decision that an artist makes, every image, material, size,title or installation decision, affects not only the visual outcome ofthe work, but also its meaning and significance. So when Queneaudecides to rewrite the same short story ninety­nine times, indifferent styles, he actually creates ninety­nine variations, each ofwhich resonates in us in a new way, leading to completely differentinterpretations every time. I wanted to do similar exercises and findnew ways of presenting Queneau’s stories, keeping in mind thequestion: how might the formal decisions I make in felt or paper orembroidery affect the viewer’s relationship and understanding ofeach work.

JPH: Can you elaborate on the process that you utilized?

MB: I started by repeating the process I used the year before whenI made Still Life / Style Leaf, which is a work I did using a story withthe same title written by Georges Perec. First I disassembled theQueneau book, separating all the pages and wrinkling them. Then Iphotographed all the wrinkled pages and used the photographs asthe starting point to make my versions of Queneau’s stories. Thefirst series is composed of the first five stories in Queneau’s bookand, as with Still Life / Style Leaf, I began by cutting out by handeach letter of the words in the felt. As a result, the black felt lookslike the negative page of the book, from which all the letters havebeen extracted and placed on the floor in front of each page. Thewords appear white because their absence actually shows thewhite wall behind the felt. The second series, which corresponds tothe following eight stories of Exercices de Style / Exercises in Style,was produced in a similar way in terms of process. I only changedthe material to white paper and reduced the size of the final works(the ones in felt are 72 inches high, and those in paper, a littlehigher than 24 inches). The differences in the size are important interms of the difficulty it adds in cutting for it’s a handmadeproduction, since each letter in the paper was sometimes less than1/10 of an inch high.

Finally, the third series was done by embroidering the texts of the

following six stories in the book, only this time some of the letters inthe photograph I took of the wrinkled pages appear more grayish,so I used black thread and up to four different tones of gray toreproduce each of the letters in the stories. By using the differentcolored threads, I was able to reproduce the variations of light andits reflections in the photographic images of the wrinkled pages.

JPH: Prior to beginning your series in felt, paper, and embroidery,you had worked on three extensive projects in felt inspired bydifferent books by Georges Perec. Tell us about them and how, if atall, they led you to conceiving the Queneau project.

MB: As I mentioned before, Still Life / Style Leaf is the directantecedent of Exercices de Style / Exercises in Style. In the latter Iwanted to place less emphasis on the stories and more on theformal content and conceptual processes of the series—felt, paper,and embroidery—while continuing to explore ways of using literarytexts in different mediums. I also wanted to use texts on paper andembroideries because, I had never done that before. So I chose towork with paper, which in this series is both the material and theimage. I also wanted to embroider in a different way than I haddone in one hundred and sixty three shades of yellow, green,orange, red, purple, brown, grey and blue (so far), in which Ireproduced several vegetables in an almost photographic way,including many details and colors. However, by embroidering thetexts in Exercices de Style / Exercises in Style with fewer colors,the palette is more austere.

JPH: Do you see any relevant counterpoints between your workand Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky, one of the works in the Frost ArtMuseum exhibition Xu Bing: Writing Between Heaven and Earthduring the time your exhibition is shown? Xu invented thousands ofcharacters replicating the stylistic details of traditional Chineseprinting, but none of his invented characters is intelligible. How doyou perceive similarities or differences, if at all, between the twoworks, which address writing as image making?

MB: I completely agree. In both works the idea of writing as imagemaking is clearly present and, at the same time, the strong visualityis also relevant in both. But I think there is a big differenceconsidering that writing remains in an abstract and conceptual statein Xu Bing’s work. There are no actual words or ideas expressed inthe ideograms he invented. On the contrary, in my “stories,” it ispossible to read most of the words, so the viewer has the possibilityto engage with both the narrative that the story proposes, and thematerial image that I have created, which, in addition, has severallayers of information. The viewer can see the wrinkled page of thebook by noticing the distorted letters and lines of words, some ofwhich disappear due to those distortions. The viewer can also seethe materiality of my new page, which can be alternately big, black,and warm in the works in wool felt; or austere and colorless in theworks on paper, or very intimate and detailed in the smallembroidery works.

JPH: What have been the most challenging and rewarding aspectsof your work on Exercices de Style / Exercises in Style for TheFrost Art Museum?

MB: As with most of my projects, probably the most challengingaspect of Exercices de Style / Exercises in Style has been time.Handmade production always involves a great amount of work—many hours are invested in the same repetitive action, with verylittle visible progress each day. I have to plan every step for eachproject, keeping the timeline in mind, in order to finish on deadline.This labor­intensive work is not easy, not only because of the timefactor, but also because I have to continue work on my otherprojects and teach at the university as well.

For this project at The Frost Museum of Art, I finished the works onfelt first, then, because of time constraints, I had to train an

assistant to produce the works on paper. While my assistant wasdoing the works on paper under my supervision, I did theembroideries. And, as I said before, in every one of my projectsthere is something I have to learn from scratch, something I havenever done before that involves a learning curve that requires timeas well. But having to learn anew is the most rewarding part of mywork: learning and evolving is what I yearn for, and I’m trulythankful for having the opportunity to show the results of this newproject at The Frost. I believe that Exercices de Style / Exercises inStyle is a powerful, yet intimate investigation within the overall bodyof my work.©

Julia P. Herzberg is the curator of Mónica Bengoa: Exercices deStyle / Exercises in Style at The Patricia and Phillip Frost ArtMuseum, Florida International University, Miami. The exhibition ison view from February 14 to April 26, 2015.