| So
Much I Want To Say | 1983 | video | 5 minutes
Mona
Hatoum interviewed by Janine Antoni
Bomb Magazine, NY Spring 1998
I met Mona
Hatoum in December 1994 when we were installing our work, side
by side, at the Reina Sofia in Madrid. The exhibition was
called Cocido y Crudo, “The Raw and the Cooked.” Mona was
showing Corps étranger, a video made with a
medical camera that had been threaded in and out of her orifices
and along her body’s surface. I was showing Slumber, a
performance where at night I slept in the museum’s gallery, and
in the day I weaved, from strips of my nightgown, the pattern of
my rapid eye movements into an endless blanket.
The Reina
Sofia, a former hospital, was a beautiful and scary place. Each
night in the old building I could hear many sounds - - as if the
spirits were wandering around its long halls. Even the guards
who passed through my room every hour told me they were afraid
of a ghost named Ataulfo. It wasn’t easy to sleep. And every
morning at six o’clock I would jump out of my skin, waking to
the lights and sound of Mona’s video automatically turning on.
Since then,
Mona and I have often appeared side by side, in many
exhibitions. Most recently, we spent a month together at the
only active Shaker community in Sabbath Day Lake, Maine. This
is where I finally got close to Mona; but I felt I knew her way
back in Spain when all day long I weaved while listening to the
pulse of her body.
mona hatoum:
I dislike interviews. I’m often asked the same question: What in
your work comes from your own culture? As if I have a recipe and
I can actually isolate the Arab ingredient, the woman
ingredient, the Palestinian ingredient. People often expect tidy
definitions of otherness, as if identity is something fixed and
easily definable.
janine
antoni: Do you think those kinds of questions have made us
overly self-conscious about how we represent ourselves and its
effect on the work?
mh: Yeah,
if you come from an embattled background there is often an
expectation that your work should somehow articulate the
struggle or represent the voice of the people. That’s a tall
order really. I find myself often wanting to contradict those
expectations.
ja:
Everyone seems eager to define you. When I was looking at your
catalogue and the articles written about you, I was struck by a
certain consistency. Three articles started as follows:
“Lebanese-born artist, Mona Hatoum”; “Hatoum was born into a
family of Palestinian refugees”; “Mona Hatoum is a woman, a
Palestinian, a native of Beirut...”
mh:
It’s more the inconsistencies that bother me, like when
people refer to me as Lebanese when I am not. Although I was
born in Lebanon, my family is Palestinian. And like the majority
of Palestinians who became exiles in Lebanon after 1948, they
were never able to obtain Lebanese identity cards. It was
one way of discouraging them from integrating into the Lebanese
situation. Instead, and for reasons that I won't go
into, my family became naturalized British, so I’ve
had a British passport since I was born. I grew up in Beirut
in a family that had suffered a tremendous loss and existed
with a sense of dislocation. When I went to London in 1975
for what was meant to be a brief visit, I got stranded there
because the war broke out in Lebanon, and that created another
kind of dislocation. How that manifests itself in my
work is a sense of disjunction. For instance, in a work like
Light Sentence the movement of the light bulb causes
the shadows of the wire mesh lockers to be in perpetual motion,
which creates a very unsettling feeling. When you enter the
space you have the impression that the whole room is swaying
and you have the disturbing feeling that the ground is shifting
under your feet. This is an environment in constant flux -
no single point of view, no solid frame of reference. There
is a sense of instability and restlessness in the work. This
is way in which the work is informed by my background. On
the other hand, I have now spent half of my life living in
the West, so when I speak of works like Light Sentence,
Quarters and Current Disturbance as making a
reference to some kind of institutional violence, I am speaking
of encountering architectural and institutional structures
in Western urban environments that are about the regimentation
of individuals, fixing them in space and putting them under
surveillance. What I am trying to say here is that the concerns
in my work are as much about the facts of my origins as they
are a reflection on or an insight into the Western institutional
and power structures I have found myself existing in for the
last twenty-odd years.
Light Sentence | 1992 | wire mesh lockers, slow moving
motorised light bulb | 198 x 185 x 490 cm
ja: What
makes one claim one history and not another? I am from the
Bahamas but was educated in the U. S. as you were in London.
Isn’t minimalism as much a part of our history as where we are
from?
mh:
Precisely, I was completely taken in by Minimal and Conceptual
Art when I was on my first degree course. Going to University
afterwards, which was my first encounter with a large bureaucratic
institution, I became involved in analyzing power structures,
first in relation to feminism, and then in wider terms as
in the relationship between the Third World and the West.
This led me to making confrontational, issue-based performance
works which were fueled by anger and a sense of urgency. Later,
when I got into the area of installation and object making,
I wouldn't say I went back to a minimal aesthetic as such,
it was more a kind of reductive approach, if you like, where
the forms can be seen as abstract aesthetic structures, but
can also be recognized as cages, lockers, chairs, beds...
The work therefore becomes full of associations and meaning
- a reflection on the social environment we inhabit. Unlike
minimal objects, they are not self-referential.
ja: In the
show at the New Museum I was struck by the difference between
the formal aspects of your later sculptures and an earlier piece
like Measures of Distance. It is a piece that haunted me
ever since I saw it a couple of years ago. This work is very
personal yet its form is illusive. You can’t quite get at it.
Visually you are looking through layers of information: first,
the handwritten letters in Arabic, and finally, the figure of
your mother; you never quite see the nude image of your mother
clearly. The sound works in the same way. I felt like I was
straining to eavesdrop on a private conversation. The video
doesn’t have the direct quality that those later pieces have.
mh: Yeah,
Measures of Distance is quite a significant work for me.
I see it as the culmination and conclusion of all the early
narrative and issue-based work. For years I was trying to make
general and objective statements about the state of the world.
With Measures of Distance I made a conscious decision to
delve into the personal - however complex, confused, and
contradictory the material I was dealing with was. During a
visit to Beirut in 1981, I had taken a dozen slides of my mother
taking a shower. At the time, feminism had so problematized the
issue of representation of women that images of women vacated
the frame, they became absent. It was quite depressing. For a
few years I agonized over whether I should use these images of
my mother in my work. I didn't make the work in its final form
until 1988, but in between I used the material in a performance
work. Anyway, once I made the work I found that it spoke of the
complexities of exile, displacement, the sense of loss and
separation caused by war. In other words, it contextualized the
image, or this person “my mother,” within a social-political
context.
ja: I can
relate to your battle about whether to work with those images
with your mother, because I had similar questions when I started
to work with my parents. I suddenly realized that my baggage had
somehow come from them and to work with them meant asking them
to confront these issues. At a certain point I had to ask myself
whether it was my right to ask this of them and to expose them
in this way. I was wondering whether the fogginess of
Measures of Distance reflects a kind of ambivalence about
exposing something quite intimate about your relationship with
your mother. As well as an attempt to express the complexity by
not allowing it to settle down anywhere.
mh: Yeah,
sort of wading through a mess of meaning.
ja: Which
you do so beautifully, visually.
mh: Well, I
wanted to explore the complexities through the juxtaposition of
several formal and visual elements that create paradoxical
layers of meaning. I wanted every frame to speak of closeness
and distance. You have the close-up images of my mother's naked
body, which echo the intimacy of the exchange between us,
overlaid by her letters which are supposed to be a means of
communication, yet at the same time, they prevent complete
access to the image. People saw the Arabic writing as barbed
wire.
ja: Or a
veil.
mh: That’s
right. I structured the work around my mother's letters, because
letters imply distance yet they are dealing with very intimate
questions. And you’ve got our animated voices speaking in Arabic
and laughing, which is contradicted by the sadness of my voice
reading my mother’s letters, translated into English.
Measures
of Distance | 1988 | video | 15 minutes
ja:
I love how your questions are very confrontational, and yet
she keeps saying, “My dear Mona, the love of my heart.”
mh: Right,
she uses even more flowery expressions that have no equivalent
in the English language. When I made Measures of Distance
it felt like I had unloaded a burden off my back. I felt
afterwards that I could get on with other kinds of work, where
every work did not necessarily have to tell the whole story,
where I could just deal with one little aspect of my experience.
That’s when I started making installation work.
ja: If we
look at your body of work at the New Museum, the later work
becomes much more open. The political is there but it has
changed forms. Rather than being topical, it is experimental.
Especially in the installations where the viewers find
themselves in an uncomfortable position - from a position of
instability, their response seems to yield the meaning.
mh: In the
early performance work I was in a sense demonstrating or
delivering a message to the viewer. With the installation work,
I wanted to implicate the viewer in a phenomenological situation
where the experience is more physical and direct. I wanted the
visual aspect of the work to engage the viewer in a physical,
sensual, maybe even emotional way; the associations and search
for meaning come after that. And although the title might direct
your attention to one aspect of the work, I hope the work
remains open enough to allow different interpretations. A woman
here at the New Museum said that the light bulbs fading on and
off in Current Disturbance made her think of a sexual
orgasm. How beautiful! But, she said, then she remembered that
my work is supposed to be political and had to think about the
lights in the cages as representing people in prison. So I think
that’s a very good example. There is no single interpretation,
which is why I always find it problematic when museums and
galleries want to put up an explanatory text on the wall. It
fixes the meaning and limits the reading of the work and doesn’t
allow the viewer to have this very expansive imaginative
interpretation of their own which reflects on their experience.
ja: What
role do you want your art to play and what role do you feel the
art world has cast you in?
mh: I want
the work in the first instance to have a strong formal presence,
and through the physical experience to activate a psychological
and emotional response. In a very general sense I want to create
a situation where reality itself becomes a questionable point.
Where one has to reassess their assumptions and their
relationship to things around them. A kind of self-examination
and an examination of the power structures that control us: Am I
the jailed or the jailer? The oppressed or the oppressor? or
both. I want the work to complicate these positions and offer an
ambiguity and ambivalence rather than concrete and sure answers.
An object from a distance might look like a carpet made out of
lush velvet, but when you approach it you realize it’s made out
of stainless steel pins which turns it into a threatening and
cold object rather than an inviting one. It’s not what it
promises to be. So it makes you question the solidity of the
ground you walk on, which is also the basis on which your
attitudes and beliefs lie. When my work shifted from the
obviously political, rhetorical attitude into bringing political
ideas to bear through the formal and the aesthetic, the work
became more of an open system. Since then I have been resisting
attempts by institutions to fix the meaning in my work by
wanting to include it in very narrowly defined theme shows.
ja: Well,
in this climate of political correctness, people really don’t
know what to do with you if you don't fulfill certain
stereotypes. Do you think that has pushed us, as artists, into
making work that refuses to be defined in that way? That it is a
natural response to shy away from re-enforcing the stereotypes.
Knowing it's much more complicated than that.
mh:
I've always had quite a rebellious and contrary attitude.
The more I feel I am being pushed into a mold, the more I
feel like going in the opposite direction. Like when I made
a work called Jardin public. I discovered
that etymologically the words "public" and "pubic"
come from the same source. I used a wrought iron chair similar
to those you see in public gardens in Paris - I gave it a
French title to emphasize this association. And I implanted
pubic hair in a triangular shape on the seat like grass growing
out of the holes. I enjoyed the surreal aspect of this work.
By the way, my point of entry into the art world was through
surrealism - in fact the first art book I ever bought
was on Magritte. So this work was quite humorous and light-hearted;
but at the same time you could read it as a comment on the
fact that women's genitalia are always on public display.
A number of people were surprised by this work. I realized
that people didn't expect to see humor in my work.
ja: When
you were talking about people wanting you to speak from the
margins, as an outsider, as the other, it reminded me of the
artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres trying to locate himself at the
center. He took a form which was recognizably art, in the high
art sense of the word, and slid his content underneath or inside
of this form. People would accept his pieces initially and then
have to deal with what they were really about.
mh: With
the early performances, I saw myself as a marginal person
intervening from within the margins of the art world, and it
seemed logical to use performance as a critique of the
establishment. After a while I was becoming dissatisfied with
the obviously rhetorical attitude and I wasn't sure any more
whether the work I was doing was really what I wanted to do or
the result of internalizing other people's expectations and the
fact that I had been molded in the role of political artist.
It's quite a thin line. I wanted to make work that privileges
the material, formal, visual aspect of art making and try to
articulate the political through the aesthetics of the work. I
like Gonzalez-Torres' attitude because his work is both
aesthetic and political. What I admire most about his work is
that it looks very simple, yet it deals with issues of
vulnerability of the body, early death issues etc., but doing it
all through the language of art.
ja: So
let’s talk about “the body.” We both get lumped into this
category. Could you speak about the specific role of the body in
your works. In a lot of your pieces the body is physically
absent but implicitly present, or the body in question is really
that of the viewer. I'm interested in the way you make the
viewer feel physically in an installation or in front of an
object.
mh:
The body became an issue for me when I was a student in the
late seventies at the Slade School, which is part of London
University College. It was a very cool environment which favored
intellectual inquiry. But I had this distinct feeling
that people around me were like disembodied intellects, It
was in opposition to this kind of attitude that I started
focusing intensely on the body, first using its products and
processes as material for the work, and later using it as
a metaphor for society - the social body. Without going into
too much detail here, it seemed that anything I wanted to
work with at the time was faced with restrictions and even
censorship. I was perceived as this isolated incident, a person
coming from nowhere and trying to disrupt a respectable intellectual
environment. Those same issues that I was trying to discuss
in my work at the time have become such common currency in
the art world now - I mean in a very general sense the focus
on the body. By the late eighties I wanted to take my body,
the body of the performer, out of the work. I wanted the viewer's
body to replace mine by interacting directly with the work.
My work is always constructed with the viewer in mind. The
viewer is somehow implicated or even visually or psychologically
entrapped in some of the installations. The sculptures based
on furniture are very much about the body too, they encourage
the viewer to mentally project themselves onto the objects.
Marrow
| 1996 | rubber | dimensions variable
ja: There
are two works that have epitomized the range from which you
approach the body in your work, both bed pieces, which in the
end somehow become the body. One is Marrow, which for me
is a collapsed body. It is so moving because it brings me to the
fragility of the body, or a kind of disappointment when the body
has failed you. The fact that it is a collapsed crib also makes
me think of a past that has imploded under its own weight.
Divan Bed, a bed made out of cold steel, seems to be about
the alienated body, a body grown uncomfortable with its own
environment. Do you want to talk about that range?
mh: I
called the first work Marrow, as in bone marrow but
without the bone structure to support it. So as you say, it
becomes the collapsed body. I used a honey-colored rubber which
looks quite fleshy. In Divan Bed, I used tread-plate,
which is an industrial flooring material. The distinctive raised
pattern of the tread-plate is a cold unyielding equivalent to
the soft quilted material that usually covers a divan bed... I
was originally going to call the piece “Sarcophagus”. That gives
you an idea of what I was thinking about.
ja: Both
Divan Bed and Marrow are built in the same way that
surrealist images are constructed.
mh: Yeah,
it makes me think of the paintings Magritte made where every
surface in the painting, the person, the table, the window,
everything has been chiseled out of rock. Also Magritte's
Madame Récamier where the stiff-looking woman from David's
painting has been replaced by a coffin lying on a chaise longue.
ja: Earlier
we talked about whether people pick up these references and how
most people are likely to talk more about everyday life. That
piece has as much to do with Surrealism as it does with
Minimalism. One would think that was a big leap in one work, but
in the end they seamlessly come together. (pause)
mh: I like
to use furniture in my work because it is about everyday life.
Some of the objects are vaguely useful, but often they turn into
uncanny objects. We usually expect furniture to be about giving
support and comfort to the body. If these objects become either
unstable or threatening, they become a reference to our
fragility. For instance, Incommunicado, is an infant's
hospital cot. It has been stripped to the bare metal which
makes it cold and harsh, and instead of having a solid base to
support the mattress, there are thin wires that have been
stretched across the frame. It looks more like an egg-slicer,
and you immediately associate it with a situation of danger and
abuse. I called it Incommunicado to associate it with
prisoners in solitary confinement. But also an infant in those
situations has no ability to communicate about extremes of fear
or pain.
ja: It's an
interesting object, because it feels so cold. The minute you
look at it and think of an egg-slicer, it becomes incredibly
visceral.
mh: When I
started making these works I was criticized for not showing the
"spectacle of horror," but expecting the viewer to imagine for
themselves the impending disaster. I personally felt that this
was precisely the strength of the work and a sign of maturity in
the way the work conjures up certain images in the viewer's
mind. That these things are implied through the visual poetry of
the work rather didactically stated is much more satisfying for
me.
ja: I
wonder whether it's something to do with the fact that people
want you to act out for them, to do for them what they can't do
themselves. I agree that it's much more interesting to have the
viewer establish a relationship to the object and then analyze
that response, as opposed to seeing you act out a relationship.
mh: I find
work that obviously reveals itself, its intentions, so boring.
It is about spoon-feeding people instead of treating them as
intelligent and imaginative beings who could be challenged by
the work.
ja: Why
don't we talk about Corps Étranger. First, what was it
actually like to do the piece? Did it hurt? And second, what
about the position of the camera as literally penetrating your
body?
mh: The
video was shot with the help of a doctor using an endoscopic
camera. It didn't hurt at all. I was given a drug that seemed to
dull the pain, but I remained completely conscious, and as my
insides were being filmed - I was directing the video at the
same time. I called it Corps Étranger, which means
“foreign body,” because the camera is in a sense this alien
device introduced from the outside. Also it is about how we are
closest to our body, and yet it is a foreign territory which
could, for instance, be consumed by disease long before we
become aware of it. The "foreign body" also refers literally to
the body of a foreigner. It is a complex work. It is both
fascinating to follow the journey of the camera and quite
disturbing. On one hand you have the body of a woman projected
onto the floor. You can walk all over it. It's debased,
deconstructed, objectified. On the other hand it's the fearsome
body of the woman as constructed by society.
ja: It also
swallows you. You go into the body, both in the image but also
in the installation.
mh:
Precisely. You enter the cylinder and you stand on the perimeter
of the circular video image projected on the floor. You feel
like you are at the edge of an abyss that threatens to engulf
you. It activates all sorts of fears and insecurities about the
devouring womb, the vagina dentata, the castration
complex.
ja: In the
end, was it important that it was your body?
mh: It had
to be my body.
ja: In a
weird way it's a kind of offering. It's an exposure. Did you
feel invaded in any way?
mh: I
wanted the work to be about the body probed, invaded, violated,
deconstructed by the scientific eye. But when we were filming I
was too concerned about getting the right images for my video to
connect personally with any of these feelings.
ja: What
role does intuition play in your art?
mh:
As I got more confident about my work I started allowing myself
to be more intuitive. One of the first and most intuitive
decisions I made was to make the video with my mother, Measures
of Distance. At the time, it wasn't quite resolved in
my head, but I decided to make it and worry about the consequences
later. I was going against the grain of the current ideological
discussion, but I'm so glad I made it.
Corps
étranger | 1994 | video installation with cylinderical
wooden structure, video projector, amplifier, speakers | 350
x 300 cm diameter
ja: Does
the work change very radically while you're making it or do
those decisions happen beforehand?
mh: There
is a certain amount of decision making that happens beforehand.
But as you probably know being an artist yourself, when you
start working with materials they sometimes take you elsewhere
and one has to be open enough to make changes if something is
not working out the way you conceived it on paper or
conceptually. For instance when I was making Incommunicado,
I was originally going to connect safety pins together to make a
grid that would replace the mattress support. I was going to
call it something like “Safety Net.” But when I started putting
the pins together, it did not work visually. I felt that it
looked too literal. Having put the bed together without the
platform, I loved that feeling of void in it. Somehow there was
something wrong with activating that void too much. I wanted it
to be much more subtle. I had already done an installation where
I had stretched thin wire across a whole gallery space, and the
wires were interrupting the body of the viewer in the main space
at ankle level. When you got to the lower space the same wires
hit you at the neck level. I wanted to rework that feeling of
threat and dissection of the space into a more contained object,
and of course because it is an infant's cot, it gives it a more
psychological dimension.
ja: I find
your objects to be stubborn in the best of ways. They are
unyielding, conceptually tight, and formally imposing. They are
what they are. It is your taste for the literal that I am most
interested in. I want to talk about how you make meaning, and
the fact that your meaning is in the object and not applied to
it.
mh: I want
the meaning to be imbedded, so to speak, in the material that
I'm using. I choose the material as an extension of the concept
or sometimes in opposition to it, to create a contradictory and
paradoxical situation of attraction/repulsion, fascination and
revulsion. For instance, I intentionally used a very sensuous,
translucent silicon rubber to make the Entrails Carpet.
You want walk all over it with bare feet. On the other hand,
when you recognize the pattern on the surface of the carpet, you
realize it's something very repulsive, it looks like entrails
splayed out all over the floor as if it's the aftermath of a
massacre. There's a kind of attraction/repulsion operating here.
ja: When I
was looking at your show at the New Museum, I thought of Eva
Hesse and some of her poems and was wondering whether she is an
influence.
mh: Eva
Hesse was very much a model figure for my generation of women
artists. She was around when Minimalism was happening, but her
work was so much more organic and to do with the body. Someone
once made a parallel between Socle du Monde and the
series of cubes Eva Hesse made which she called Accession.
Like they said, my piece was like an inversion of the cubes she
made with industrial material - perforated steel where she
inserted rubber tubes into the holes. So on the inside she
created a furry surface. A quiet exterior and a tumultuous
interior. In fact, when I made Socle du Monde I wanted to
use the cube, the minimalist form par excellence, and turn it on
it's head, so to speak, by covering it with something that not
only looks very organic, but is almost frightening because you
don't immediately recognize what the texture is made of. Unlike
the minimalist cube which would have been made of perfectly
machined surfaces, untouched by human hands.
ja: It's
interesting because it feels very solid, the surface is very
vulnerable. And, of course, you're dying to touch it. (laughter)
A year and
a half ago we both spent a month at Sabbath Day Lake, which is
the only active Shaker community left in the world. We lived
with seven Shakers in a residency that was called “The Quiet in
the Land.” That's really where we got to know each other. How
did the experience of living with the Shakers and their
philosophy affect your work?
mh: There
was such a beautiful, family-like feeling about the Shaker
community which activated all sorts of forgotten needs. They had
taken us in as a part of their family, which I thought was very
courageous of them, because who knows what artists are up to.
There was a beautiful feeling of settledness and warm
domesticity, which is in complete contrast with my nomadic
existence. The work I made there happened very organically and
ended up making reference to kitchen utensils and a kind of
nostalgic domesticity. Being in this situation gave me
permission to work with simple craft processes, maybe even
reconnect with a gentle side of myself. I felt like working with
my hands rather than constantly conceptualizing about the work
before making it. The Shakers talk about "hands to work," which
is quite nice, this kind of focusing all the time on the making,
being always occupied was a wonderful and sobering experience.
ja: The
other half of that statement is "hands to work, hearts to God."
mh: Oh, I
forgot about that one. (laughter)
ja: How was
it for you to be in these spiritual surroundings where that was
really the focus of the making?
mh:
Although this was the focus it never came out in any kind of
preaching. They are the perfect example of a truly spiritual
community which you experience in the way they conduct their
ordinary every day life without the dogma and the preaching.
They show their beliefs by what they do, not what they say.
ja: It
wasn't imposed upon us at all.
mh: Yeah,
I'm against organized religion but that doesn't mean I'm not a
spiritual person. It was only when I found myself living in the
West that I started valuing the spiritual side of myself.
Keeping hold of the spiritual side became quite a focus at one
point. I got into meditation in order to compensate for the lack
of spirituality around me.
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