A Conversation between Richard Whittaker and Enrique Martínez Celaya

Richard Whittaker: I can’t help feeling you’ve come an amazingly long way having left science not that long ago, but I don’t really know your history. I know you were living in Spain as a child.

Enrique Martínez Celaya: Yes, my family emigrated from Cuba to Madrid in 1972, and then to Puerto Rico a few years later. Spain, back then, was not an easy place for foreigners, but the difficulties and the lack of distractions helped strengthen my relationship to drawing, so when we moved to Puerto Rico I became an apprentice for a painter and took courses at the academy there.

RW: What academy was that?

EMC: La Liga del Arte de San Juan. Most artists from the island, at one point or another, have been associated with it.

RW: So when you were apprenticing to a painter, how old were you?

EMC: I was around ten or eleven.

RW: Would you talk a little about your apprenticeship?

EMC: At first I did many still-life drawings, pastel portraits and copies of Leonardo’s paintings—not very well. As I got older that interest in academic drawing continued, but it took the form of narrative paintings—allegories of what was happening around me. I still have a few of those paintings, and I really like some of them.

By my mid-teens expressing my feelings didn’t seem good enough anymore, so I devoted more time to physics, which was appealing, partly because it gave me access to an emotionally simpler world. Physics held the promise of an orderly life.

The summer I turned sixteen, I worked for the U.S. Department of Energy and built a laser in my spare time. But I continued to paint and read and was fortunate that at my high school everyone was encouraged to explore all disciplines.

RW: What was this school you’re describing now?

EMC: It was a school founded in the nineteen-twenties by the University of Puerto Rico as an extension of the College of Pedagogy. By the time I was there, it had evolved into one of the best schools on the island.

RW: What a great stroke of luck!

EMC: Yes. It was. My life would not be the same had it not been for that school, especially its bully and its principal. Back when I enrolled, it was a custom for the upperclassmen to grab new students by the arms and legs, like pigs, and humiliate them by forcing their butts onto a pipe located in the middle of the courtyard. I got the treatment three times, so I modified a kitchen knife to stab the ring leader, a bully named Chelo, next time he tried to bother me.

Luckily I laid the knife on the desk of my high school principal before I could use it. And that exchange, which could have gone many ways, started a relationship that lasted the whole time I was there.

RW: With these gifts, sometimes one feels the wish to give something back.

EMC: Yes, when I started teaching, one of my motivations was to give back some of what I had benefited from; to put myself out there, to be honest and to be interested.

RW: You’re an art professor right now, although you’ve tendered your resignation, something I’d like to ask you about later; but a basic question arises; you must have thought about this: what is of value—potential value—in the pursuit of art and art making? I don’t see our culture as particularly supportive of the fine arts, and yet you are teaching that; and that is what you yourself are deeply involved in. A big question.

EMC: Many people want to change the world in a big way, but that’s difficult to do in art or in teaching. Broad political work is better done in the streets. In the classroom, or with an artwork, the transformations are one at a time. And if in ten years you touch twenty students, that’s great. Maybe some of them will push forward and make something out of it.

RW: Driving out, I was thinking about this thing we call “art.” We say “art” and have an idea, vague, but an idea of what that means. Art is something, right? But the concept of it we have today is not old, historically. What? Four or five hundred years old?

EMC: About that, maybe less.

RW: So we read that whatever we now look at and call “art” was totally integrated with some societal, institutional form in the past. Then, at some point, the phrase appears, “art for art’s sake” which, in a way, defines this separation; that art stands alone. Can art really have some kind of meaning without integration in some other structure?

EMC: I think this separation you are referring to began with the Enlightenment; the proposition that art must be disinterested should be reconsidered. Only art for life’s sake makes sense to me. And by that I mean art as ethics—a guide clarifying one’s choices and life.

RW: You’ve made a connection there between ethics and the process of clarifying for yourself, your own life. I’ve never heard it put that way before. Ethics and coming to a clearer understanding of oneself. Can you say anything more about that connection?

EMC: I don’t see any useful distinction between understanding of oneself and understanding of one’s duty. I think that much of what we are shows up in how we view what’s right and wrong and how consistently we live by that view.

RW: “What is the Good?” In a way, that’s the foundational question, as I hear you. And it’s not an abstract question, right? It cannot be an abstract question. When the question becomes abstract, when people speak of “the good” and there’s no connection with a real person, it becomes dangerous, it seems to me.

EMC: Being ethical away from the world is easier than in the world. I think some people see the path of abstraction as pure, uncompromised, but it could just be avoidance; artists who insist on removing their work from human struggles take a tidy path, which seems especially wasteful for those whose lives are in turmoil and confusion.

RW: Intuitively, it seems to me that among artists there’s some form of the wish—if not always consciously —to find what truly comes from one’s self. The need to find my own thought, my own step, my own perception. It’s a profoundly difficult thing to do, really to come to “my own step.” But when one has that experience does that not, in itself, give meaning to one’s life?

EMC: To find one’s self in a gesture or in an artwork, even if vaguely, invigorates life with a sense of purpose. Of course, these discoveries don’t happen everyday, but struggling against one’s limitations is often good enough to give meaning to one’s life.

RW: There’s always our egoism—I don’t mean that pejoratively, it’s just a fact; but intuitively, one knows that’s not the whole story of “who I am.” So isn’t it confusing to say, “What the artist can discover is him or herself?” Maybe that’s not so clear. Would you agree?

EMC: Much confusion comes with the “am” in “who I am.” There’s much in oneself that has little to do with individuality, per se, but which instead is part of a much larger continuum—to discover one’s self is also to discover one’s connection to the world. As one recognizes these connections, a prison sometimes becomes apparent; the prison of what we’ve established or imagined ourselves to be. For instance, wouldn’t it be nice if something were to come out of my mouth that I do not expect? Of course. But it’s unlikely.

RW: Oh, yes. Now the students at Pomona College are a pretty high-level group, and I don’t know if they’re representative of this, but I get the impression that among young people today, and in the culture at large— do you find that “deep questions” are thought to be unacceptable? They’re cornball, or something. Do you know what I’m getting at?

EMC: Yes, big questions can be exposing and ungraceful and many students stay away from risks like that, and if a student is not willing or capable of taking risks, there’s not much one can do as a teacher. Nothing that matters can be solved with “put more paint on the canvas” or “let’s talk semiotics.” But it’s not just them. I think we are evolving into a society afraid to pose certain questions because we’re too embarrassed about the implications.

RW: I was reading a post on an email list where discussions often got pretty interesting. In a philosophical exchange, one fellow wrote, “Courageously—grin, grin, face burning with shame—I’ll admit that I’m interested in meaning.” It’s a curious thing, this cultural milieu where one would feel this sort of apology is necessary.

EMC: The average person still says, “I’m interested in meaning.” It’s only among the intellectual elite that the need for meaning has become a weakness.

RW: Sometimes it seems there’s almost an attitude of pride among the most rigorous reductionists. “I’m strong enough and smart enough to take it.”

EMC: Many people are enamored with science’s authority and want to make themselves into scientists of the arts and humanities, which mostly leads to fancy terminology, detachment and those attitudes you mentioned. Of course, there are works, or thoughts, that are “too soft” because they have no emotional tautness or intelligence. But there are also works and attitudes that are “hard” in a very facile, predictable way. The look of objectivity—the arcane language, the pseudo-science journals, the hard expression in the eyes—only points to what science is not.

RW: Yes. Clearly, one sees this. That’s well put.

EMC: I remember the first time I saw works + conversations. I was curious, but not very hopeful. As I began reading I was surprised by your courage, surprised that somebody was taking risks. I think you’re going exactly where people need to go if they want to change things. But doing that requires a certain willingness to not wear the badge of the “cutting-edge” intellectual.

RW: That makes me think a little about the avant garde. In the artworld, being identified as avant-garde allows the artist to feel located in the place of highest respect. Now I know that for quite a while the whole concept of an avant garde has come under question. But there’s still this tendency to aim for shock value, an old avant garde strategy. This has long since become a convention of the academy. I think what you’re saying has some relationship to this.

EMC: The idea of the avant garde has become a convention of the ruling class it once disrupted. Now, the bourgeois collectors, institutions and galleries are out there looking for the new, the different and the shocking.

RW: That’s amusing, but it’s a very good point. I’ve said before that what would be radical and shocking nowadays would be something that’s quiet, and that doesn’t call attention to itself, something that requires your time and attention. That’d be shocking. Do you know what I’m saying?

EMC: Yes, I think you’re right. Anything that demands serious and sustained engagement is revolutionary today. We are in the age of entertainment. I don’t think the last century will be remembered as the age of computing or nuclear power, but the age when entertainment finally took over our consciousness. Now, most other fields—art, politics, war—are defined through, and in relationship to, their entertainment appeal.

Not even Orwell could have imagined that in our time, control and uniformity would be accomplished without the built-in cameras and microphones, but with family programming and by cultivating interest in all superficial things. And unlike 1984, it’s hard to see a way to rebel, because dissent is now part of the rules.

RW: Dissent - I wonder if there are other words, which would also be worth thinking about? That’s a word that points you in a certain direction just like the word subversive does. But to become more present, to find something more real. The system doesn’t care, one way or the other, I’d say. Language is problematic.

EMC: I understand what you’re saying; it’s uncomfortable to speak this way, but it’s a battle against loneliness, against the dissolution of the idea—problematic as it is—of quality.

However, language is problematic. Every time I give a talk there’s someone in the crowd who says, “Yes, I know exactly what you’re saying.” And as they continue to speak, I realize that they misunderstand me.

RW: Well, yes. I have to say I struggle with this myself in pretty much the exact way you describe it; this problem with language. In so many areas the available words are essentially dead. One searches for alternatives, mostly without much success. “The middle ground” for instance; it’s not as dead as a lot of phrases, but still, it’s burdened with dismissive associations...

EMC: ...and it’s always heard as some sort of compromise between the two sides.

RW: Exactly. And you know, there should be some pretty good associations with “the middle.” The center. Balance. If you’re off-center, eccentric, which in the art world, I suppose is thought to be a virtue, it means you’ll fly off in some direction. A high level of energy combined with a lack of balance isn’t so good.

EMC: “The middle” is difficult. It usually rubs against the edge of language, which leads to confusion and misunderstandings.

RW: It comes to me that there is a word that bears a deep relationship with some of the things we’re talking about. Being. Now that’s a term we don’t hear used too much. One thinks of Heidegger here. It occurs to me that when one is connecting ethics with the pursuit of art, as you described earlier, as a search for clarity, clarity of one’s self first, would you not also be willing to say that it’s also a search for being, for one’s own being?

EMC: Yes, I think you’re right; Heidegger’s ideas are helpful in thinking about the connections between self and world.

RW: Yes. Anyone who loves so much of Heidegger’s thinking, as I do, is dismayed by the Nazi connections, and yet I cannot reject the quality of his thought—so much of it. Do you ever feel hamstrung about that?

EMC: Not really. Our lives, unlike fairy tales, have contradictions that resist resolution, and to insist that these shouldn’t exist is to invite falseness. Heidegger’s mistakes and weaknesses don’t cancel his contributions, even if some people try to argue that his Nazism was already brewing in his philosophy. I hope that the value of my own work is not measured by my human frailties.

Even more challenging than Heidegger, in this regard, is Wittgenstein. He wasn’t a Nazi, but he was both saintly and cruel.

RW: Well, Wittgenstein pretty much reduced what we can say to language games, right? No deep questions need apply, I guess. But with Wittgenstein, there’s this category of “that of which we can not speak.” And he also said, “that which can not be said, sometimes can be shown.” That is pretty interesting, don’t you think?

EMC: Yes. And life, like art, is one way to show. Wittgenstein wrote about logic, mathematics, language, color, but the concerns that seemed most important to him—ethics, belief, spirit—he lived. And as a moral man, he struggled with himself and judged his actions by standards that he often failed. Maybe this goes back to the beginning of our conversation. To talk about ethics, to talk about what is good or bad is interesting, but somewhat useless, academic. To live life with integrity is the thing. And the purpose of art is to support and clarify that endeavor.

RW: That certainly does remind me that you’ve tendered your resignation—of a tenured position, too—at one of the best colleges on the West Coast. I wonder if you want to say anything about that?

EMC: It was a hard thing to do. My approach ultimately failed and that is, partly, why I quit. I couldn’t teach in the environment of the institution as it existed and be happy about it. To give up a tenured position in the fickleness of the art world is a huge decision and, possibly, a stupid one. But I felt I was moving in the wrong direction by staying there.

RW: This is not the first time you’ve made a big change like that. You were on the verge of taking your doctorate in physics and you made a big turn there, didn’t you?

EMC: Yes, and that decision was especially difficult, because I knew it was going to hurt my parents. When I told them “I want to be an artist,” I couldn’t offer any assurances of success. I definitely felt foolish, careless, leaving the promises of my research at Berkeley. But I still did it.

RW: Maybe it’s the only way. It brings me back to your concern with ethics; a life in which one embodies what one represents. Wouldn’t you say that we face these questions, and that we don’t know the answers? It’s necessary to take a step sometimes in order to find out.

EMC: Yes. And also it’s an added motivation when the one direction has shown it has no answers. I might not know where the answer is, but I know where it isn’t. To realize that there’s no answer in something is an important breakthrough. Then, it’s just a matter of coming to terms with the personal sacrifices one has to make. There’s nothing unclear in that. There may be pain. But that’s different.