Emilio Tarazona: How would you present yourself? Who is Alicia Barney?

Alicia Barney: I don't want to pigeonhole myself, nor to be pigeonholed. One would need to be very insecure to to try to self-define, and in defining something you limit it, and I am limitless. The [artist] statement is a form of presenting oneself, and I don’t need a presentation, because I can elbow my way in there myself. Now, if for that reason you are also interested in that I talk about if I have a style, I can tell you that when I would leave class—before I studied at Pratt, I studied visual arts in a college in [New] Rochelle—and I don’t know what happened in that class, but I think they showed us an artist who was very mediocre and who had a very defined style. From there, I came to the conclusion that to be mediocre was simply to have a style, and so I vowed never to have a style in my life.

ET: As promised, Alicia Barney achieved her escape from style, but I could not escape my attempt at describing her.

In Colombia she is one of the first artists to pointedly focus her proposals on environmental issues. Beginning in the 1970s, through works, many of which are emblematic, her lens insists on warning against and denouncing practices of industrial contamination, deliberate or accidental, the destruction of nature, and the loss of biodiversity.

Working in a variety of media and formats, from artistic interventions to assemblage, sculpture, photography, installation, the two-dimensional image, and most recently, textiles, this conversation focuses on some of her projects and aims to point toward the breadth of her body of work.

ET: Alicia thank you for receiving us in your home once again. Well, the second time for me.

AB: Yes and last time he didn’t even bring me a chocolate, and today he didn’t either!

ET: The chocolates are coming, they’re coming, and a little wine that I promised too.

AB: Hmm, I'll be waiting.

ET: This conversation arises in the context of an exhibition that opened in the month of July in Lisbon, in the municipal gallery Quadrum, curated by Giulia Lamoni and Vanessa Badagliacca.

The idea is to dialogue a little, in part about some things we’ve talked about. So I don’t have a plan. I haven’t brought anything. I have reviewed several things regarding your work, some things that I knew about, and others that I was not so familiar with. In fact, there are several things about which I think it may be best not to ask too precise of questions, especially about things that I am not totally familiar with. You studied in New York in the 70s, not only at the College but also at Pratt Institute. From what I understand, New York at that time was suffering several crises. What is your impression of New York at the end of the 70s, beginning of the 80s, in the social sense, we could say, and in the cultural sense, within the cultural scene. Because in those years, curiously, the magazine Heresies made its first appearance.

The appearance of the magazine Heresies while Alicia Barney courses studies in New York, comes into the story because the number 13 issue of this historical publication, which appeared in 1981, is the reference for the title given by the curators of this exhibition, realized in 2020 in the capital of Portugal in the mode of homage. Earth Keeping/Earth Shaking-Feminism and Ecology, the cover of the edition includes an impactful image of the then-recent eruption of Mount St. Helen as it was in 1980. Perhaps the coincidences of time are never totally arbitrary.

At the beginning of this text, which I have written to be included in in the catalog for this exposition in Lisbon, I begin by highlighting that only five years separate the emergence of the words ecology and feminism. In 1866 Ernst Haeckel, zoologist born in Postam, introduces the term ecology in a study on general morphology in organisms, and in 1871 the word feminism appears for the first time in a doctoral thesis of medicine to designate particular effect in boys caused by tuberculosis, proposed by Ferdinand Valère Faneau de la Cour at the school of medicine in Paris. The context of both is the crisis: the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune, representing a historical fissure, in France and Germany, respectively.

Over the course of editing this dialogue with the artist, I noticed that the title chosen for this conversation plays on her name (and particularly on one of the works that she comments on later [in the conversation,]) which I have directly taken from another work that Charles Dodgson published under his famous pseudonym, Lewis Carroll. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, books printed in Victorian England precisely in 1866 and 1871, respectively.

That is to say, we are talking about stories published simultaneously with the appearance of the words ecology and feminism. If you were to ask me what this means...well nothing really, or at least that’s what I think for now. Without taking more time on this gratuitous factoid, let us continue with the dialogue in progress. We were talking about the crisis in New York in the 70s, the appearance of the magazine Heresies, and the presence of Alicia in that city.

AB: Well, I was about fifteen at the time. I arrived in ‘69, so I wasn’t aware of any crisis, rather for me, that city was super thrilling. Pratt is in the middle of a big Latino and Black ghetto called Jefferson Stuyvesant. It's enormous, but it isn’t as violent as the [neighborhood] known as the Bronx. The Bronx is the famous one. I mean, it wasn’t a good idea for one to go there, because you could enter as white, which I am, y no se me ve lo latino. Well, from simply looking, people would say, "if you enter the Bronx, you won't come out." That’s how dangerous the Bronx was.

One day I was in Jefferson Stuyvesant and I was taking my dog out for a walk, and I could hear bottles breaking behind me. Well, it turned out that they were throwing bottles at me and my dog. But I came to know this much later, I mean I was very naive—nothing ever happened to me because i was totally naive! So I think that when one is that naive, one manages to save oneself, but afterwards I came to know that the bottles were meant for me. So well, as a Latina and all, well I didn't feel gringa so what do you mean they were throwing bottles at me?!

ET: And the art scene?

AB: The art scene was the same, eso era de todo. I would see—beginning in the time that I studied in Rochelle, I would go at least once or twice a week—I would go to Manhattan to see expositions, concerts, in other words, to participate in cultural life. So I was seeing a lot of things, so anything and everything could influence me. And anyway, I am the kind of person that likes everything; I am interested in everything. I'm not very selective. I find that even bad movies can be good, they have something good, whether its the music, or the costume design—it could be the movie with the worst actors in the world but it could have the most marvelous costume design. So there is always something to see.

ET: What galleries did you visit?

AB: Well at that time generally, Soho was just starting. The Kitchen was strong in Soho.

ET: At that time while you were at Pratt, we could say, you were basically producing Diario Objeto—a part of it, a version that consisted of an amalgamation of things. You speak about this work biographically.

AB: Totally, yes.

ET: Biographical, we could also say, in an alternate sense, no? You aren’t speaking so directly about yourself, but rather of the objects that you find. I understand that these were things that you would pick up on a given day

AB: Yes but those objects weren’t just some objects for me, not in the sense that they might be for you, rather those objects were the ones that called me. For me they had a certain significance, because if not, I would be someone who picks up trash. And that wasn’t the point, I didn’t pick up everything that I saw.

ET: We could say that it also functions as a kind of calendar.

AB: Yes, at that time I read about—how is it that the quiches (?) are called?

ET: Quipus.

AB: Quipus. I had read about them in something that wasn’t about art, in a magazine somewhere, and I was left very impacted, because here in Colombia, well no—I mean, I didn’t know that that existed, and that seemed fantastic to me—that with colors and a horizontal format that they hang from...and it depends on the knots, so there is information...in other words, its like a form of organizing information that is completely distinct to the work—to the written.

ET: Quipus were like a form of writing, as you rightly say—Inca, from the Inca Empire. Initially, the Spanish reduced it to a form of note-taking, as if it only dealt with statistics. But in reality, it's a very complex language that can tell stories, tales, even fantasy, through a system that today is still not totally decoded. Although there have been many scientific approximations that are starting to translate what basically consists of different forms of knots and colors that hang at different distances from a mother cord.

AB: Yes, that is the horizontal.

ET: Exactly, it is like the horizontal and many various cords which carry that information. I’m not sure exactly how it works.

AB: I had on the floor everything that I would pick up, so a moment came where I couldn't get to bed, it had become difficult to circumvent. I couldn’t do it anymore. So I had to put together all these objects, and it was at that time that I read the article about the quipus, so that was how I arrived at the solution of how to frame all these objects, that were impeding me from getting to my bed. It was like it fell from the sky, it was incredible. Anyhow, those quipus came in the moment that I needed them—that information and so I put together the Diario Objeto.

ET: Its an [artwork that concerns] memory in a manner, because a quipu is also that, its a register of something. So this object began to be articulated departing from, we could say, these memory-capsules of complete days, departing from the objects.