INTERVIEWS
Whittaker, Richard. 2004. A conversation with Enrique Martínez Celaya: Self and beyond self. works + conversations, No. 9: 3-13
	Richard Whittaker is the editor of the magazine works + conversations.
	EXCERPT:
	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.
Wolgamott, L. Kent. 2004. Radio Interview with Enrique Martínez Celaya
	L. Kent Wolgamott is a critic writing for the Lincoln Journal Star.
	EXCERPT:
	KW: The time aspect is also apparent. I thought of 'Slaughterhouse Five' and the idea that you can't stay in one place in time. It struck me that was what a lot of this series is driven by.
	EMC: Time is the central issue, I think. Time is an insurmountable gap only negotiated through memory, remembrance, regret, longing, love. I think we are rarely blessed with the ability to see the present for what it is - all that there is.
Hoffmann, Roald. 2003. The Fuzzy Boundary: Science and Art. Pages 91-99 in Enrique Martínez Celaya: Poetry in Process. Boulder, Colorado: CU Art Museum
	Roald Hoffmann was born on July 18, 1937 in Zloczow, Poland. He survived the Nazi occupation of Poland that began in 1941, and he eventually emigrated to the U.S. in 1949. After settling in New York he attended Columbia College, graduated in 1958, and went on to earn a Ph.D. in chemical physics from Harvard in 1962. Hoffmann has won many prestigious awards over the course of his career including the Arthur C. Cope Award of the American Chemical Society, the National Medal of Science, and the 1981 Nobel Prize for chemistry. He is also an accomplished writer, having published several books of poetry. Roald Hoffmann continues to share his insights and wisdom through his writing and Professorship at Cornell.
	EXCERPT:
	EMC: You have described the language of science as a language under stress and therefore poetic. Could you tell me more about this?
	RH: The practice of science demands precise meanings. Which must be defined in beautifully imprecise words. Mathematical equations and chemical structures are required to be explained in words. All the time, new concepts, begging for new words, force themselves on us.
Fox, Howard N. 2001. Interview with Enrique Martínez Celaya. Pages 77-89 in Enrique Martínez Celaya 1992-2000. Cologne, Germany: Wienand
	Howard N. Fox is Curator of Modern and Contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and a member of the humanities faculty of the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Prior to arriviing in Los Angeles he was a curator at the Smithsonian Institute's Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. He has written, lectured, taught extensively on issues of content and meaning in the art of our time. His exhibition catalogues on Lari Pittman (1996) and Eleanor Antin (1999) received annual achievement awards from the American chapter of the International Association of Art Critics.
	EXCERPT:
	HF: You've described 'reinventing' painting for yourself and working within a rigid structure. I get the impression, in looking at your work, that structure is like a visual language with its own vocabulary and syntax–a language that is personal to you yet rooted in western art and iconography, so that it has resonance for viewers. Is this a fair impression, that your painting strives to the condition of language? Does language somehow edify your art?.
	EMC: Language exists in my work, in the books that are published and the poems that are included in the exhibitions, but I do not think of my visual pieces as language, or even as constructed language. Instead, I see them as objects, concepts and images that exist as an experience. This experience is not a private language nor is it translatable to language. Images and gestures re-appear in the work but not as parts of a hieroglyph. They, perhaps like the trees in a forest, are different and the same in each encounter. Some of the ideas in my work have interested many people before me and that is why my exploration seems to connect with the Western tradition of art and literature, and even folklore.
Baechler, Donald. 1999. Imagery and Process. Pages 78-83 in Unbroken Poetry: The Work of Enrique Martínez Celaya. Venice, California: Whale and Star
	Donald Baechler, born in Hartford, Connecticut has been for almost two decades one of New York's most important and controversial artists. His works are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Centre George Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, among others.
	EXCERPT:
	EMC: I do both, but I was referring to painting on top of them. But I do have an uneasy relationship with all the signifiers or all the things that reference emotion like erasures or transparenies or drips. They only survive in the paintings after a lot of internal reconciliation.
	DB: I think that's clear in your paintings. There is nothing that looks false in those paintings. I know exactly what you mean. I think maybe that's the difference between a good painting and a bad painting, it is that level of conviction with which the painter can bring, just exactly, what you call signifiers. It's easy to drip and it's easy to scribble something out, but it's really hard to do it in a way that means anything.
Yariv, Amnon. 1999. Compassion and Subjectivity. Pages 67-75 in Unbroken Poetry: The Work of Enrique Martínez Celaya. Venice, California: Whale and Star
	Amnon Yariv is the Martin and Eileen Summerfield Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He is one of the key figures who helped shape the fields of quantum electronics and optical communication. Dr. Yariv has published widely in the laser and optics fields and has written numerous texts on quantum electronics, optics and quantum mechanics. He has received the 1980 Quantum Electronics Award of the IEEE, the 1985 University of Pennsylvania Pender Award, the 1986 Optical Society of America Ives Award, 1992 Harvey Prize (shared with Mikhael Gorbachev) and the 1998 Esther Beller Medal of the Optical Society of America.
	EXCERPT:
	AY: Well, art must be much more subjective. I mean, take physics. Take two professors who will teach, let's say, very advanced general relativity. One in the United States and one in China. They will essentially use the same language and say the same things more or less... convey the same picture. While two artists describing the same piece of art, will probably say very different things. There is a certain elemental objectivity to physics which, I guess, maybe doesn't exist in art, because it is so subjective.
	EMC: I do not completely agree. In physics you test your calculation to see if the solution is right. By contrast, many are of the opinion that every position is equally valid in art and that "correctness" is not the issue, that there is no test. While subjectivity is intrinsic to the choices of artists and viewers, it is not the whole picture. You see a tree painted by Mondrian and a tree painted by Leonardo. The embodiment of the idea is very different. Very different trees. But when people describe how these trees evoke feeling and thoughts they will say very similar things. It is true that describing your preference for a visual experience is an aspect of subjectivity. But two well painted trees seem to often speak similarly to their audience despite descriptive differences. Of course, what I am making here is a simple argument for essence. What physicists might describe as the basis of nature. Maybe it is something hard to name without naming those parts that you can see on the outside, but there is something they are all going around. Does that make sense?
Greenstein, M. A. 1998. Why Hegel? Pages 73-80 in Enrique Martínez Celaya: Berlin, The Fragility of Nearness. Venice, California: William Griffin Editions
	M.A. Greenstein is an art theorist and critic who writes on the idiosyncratic, the beautiful and the grotesque in contemporary world art and performance. She is a contributing editor to World Art Magazine and Asian Art News and is on the faculties of Art Center College of Design, Otis College of Art and Design, and the Claremont Colleges. Ms. Greenstein currently lives in Los Angeles.
	EXCERPT:
	MAG: So do you see yourself commenting on the problem raised by other painters regarding what has been called “the mystical,” or do you see yourself embarking on another path of inquiry?
	EMC: I see myself embarking on a different path. In many ways it draws on the experiences you refer to but I try to reconcile views that belonged in the past to different camps. I think that many of the traditional dichotomies about the nature of painting, and art in general, stem from the Judeo-Christian polemic between mind and body. It is their synthesis that seems more applicable in understanding experience. I believe that the dichotomies between the emotional and the intellectual or the physical and the spiritual have been made confusing by polarizing them. It is analogous to what happened in Physics when people fought over the nature of light. In trying to decide whether light was a particle or a wave, Physics was confused for about two hundred years. It was saved from these limiting views by the reconciliation offered by Quantum Mechanics. This can be applied to art and thought where constant oppositions are set up without any intrinsic reason to do so.