Interview with Efren Quiroz
Exhibit "Relics of Prester John"
What is the function of the Necker cube in most of the pieces? It is formal or does it is has any meaning?
Many of the drawings contain one or more cubes and some of these are Necker Cubes, either as frames or as solids. The optical illusion of the conventional linear Necker Cube is exploited in only a few of the drawings, and I was not particularly concerned with geometric accuracy for the sake of the Necker optical illusion when I made the drawings. The fact that some of these are Necker Cubes is coincidental.
I am more interested in other aspects of the cube, its structural, representational and symbolic meaning. The cube is the basic unit of a three-dimensional grid. Two-dimensional grids (sometimes disguised as patterns) have regularly though mostly spontaneously appeared in my drawings since I was a teenager, and most likely it has deep psychological meaning in my life and practice. The three-dimensional grid, out of which the cube arises, is therefore the portal or Pandora's Box through which the world flows, structurally, symbolically and artistically. In the history of my practice, the evolution of the grid from the plane to the volume (in the mid to late 1980s) allowed the conceptual shift away from the limited formal and thematic concerns of high-modernism.
I am interested in drawings of cubes as a kind of hyper-real metaphysical image. I don't remember seeing representations of cubes in De Chirico's paintings, but he included many forms derived from cubes. These missing cubes are both Platonic and mundane. Like the brick, it is one of humankind's earliest tools to grid, or control, the natural world. De Chirico's paintings depict a rationalized nature in the guise of a personal metaphysics of civilization.
Who is Preston John?
Pester John is, or was, a mythical ruler of a lost Christian kingdom speculated to be somewhere in North Africa, the Middle East or India. Before the invention of the inter-net information about Prester John was not easily accessible. Lots of information about him is now easy to reach.
Do these drawings reflect nostalgia for your childhood?
No, Relics of Prester John has little to do with my actual childhood. First of all, there was little about my childhood that I feel nostalgic about. Secondly, I think nostalgia is a negative, non-critical emotion and attitude, one that necessitates an essentially conservative attitude toward the present relative to the past. Thirdly, even if nostalgia were a positive emotion, it would always remain the victim of memory, and that mental activity is notoriously inaccurate.
However, because I discovered a particular version/invention of the person, Prester John, when I was a youngster, it is understandable that it would be assumed that the drawings reflect nostalgia. This is not the case. I first learned of the fictional person, Prester John when I read 1910 boys' adventure novel by John Buchan of the same title when I was about ten years old. The novel was thrilling for a young boy, and I have never forgotten certain hair-raising scenes.
(Coincidently, as part of the research for the project, Relics of Prester John, in 2007 or 08 I read the novel again, and I discovered all its weaknesses as a novel as well as its problematic attitudes. The particular scenes that have haunted me since about 1957 no longer seemed as thrilling as they were when I was ten years old. However, I have noticed that in the past few years, despite my more mature and critical insight into the novel, the emotional power of my original experience of the adventure has re-asserted itself in my memory.)
A few decades later I learned about the 'real' Prester John when I bought a rare scholarly book about him that I discovered in an antiquarian bookstore in Toronto. The book included a reproduction of the travel letter (I think in Latin) in which the character Prester John was invented; there was a modern English translation of the letter as well. While I enjoyed the new information about Prester John, my interest in the meaning of the personal and cultural impact of false knowledge did not surface in my drawings until about 1986.
Another commentator regarding these drawings, Christine Clark of the blog, Art in Victoria, suggests an association between Relics of Prester John and my childhood. It is not clear to me how this interpretation develops. I don't mind the association, though I am concerned about the linkage with nostalgia. I feel sdaness for my childhood; therefore perhaps the drawings are a kind of wish fulfillment of an idealized childhood; I would not object to this interpretation. In a way, therefore, it could be suggested that the drawings reflect an Arcadian yearning for a fictional and idealized childhood. This notion melds neatly with the meaning of the title of the series, which points to the condition of the drawings referring to the fictional remains of the life of a fictional character. However, these associations between my past and a fictional leader of a mythic kingdom are an armature on which the process and meaning of the drawings unfolds.
The drawings do refer to my history as an artist, but I am not nostalgic about that either. I am reworking many themes I have explored since the early 1960s. As a matter fact, as well as this conceptual exploration of a particular artistic history, the drawings accumulate collage elements in that I have recycled for works produced as much as twenty-fine years ago. In this sense there are actual relics in these drawings.
Why Do You Refer to these Drawings as Relics?
In the drawings Relics of Prester John, the notion of relics of a fictional person is a metaphor of the layering of factual inventions, intended or not, that constitutes personal knowledge and broader culture. Prester John might also be a stand-in for myself; in this case the relics are memories, invented as well as actual. At the same time, because these drawings always remain in a state of flux (I have already been reworking them since the exhibition), I am, in effect, constantly re-inventing the relic nature of the drawings.
These drawings are relics in another sense as well. Throughout our life, each of us is constantly producing and discarding relic material. The history of relics within Catholicism refers to hair, finger nails, fingers themselves, other parts of bodies, clothing, right up to The Holy Cross. But relics exist in the secular world as well; family photographs, heirlooms, a lock of a girlfriend's hair, travel postcards, letters, memories, knowledge, opinions, superstitions and misinformation.
Why Do You Describe the Drawings as Being Incomplete?
I enjoy the notion that while we spend our lives leaving behind relics of our existence, these relics are themselves constantly evolving, usually through recycling or, more often, through disintegration and loss.
However, I'm more interested in the idea that the art object ought to live as long as the artist lives, that the art object is complete when the artist dies, at least as far as the artist's direct contribution is concerned. I also like the idea that one of the reasons why artists continue to make art is that the core of their idea cannot be completed in a single work of art. Increasingly, I see my art as one vast, endless drawing, one long struggle to figure out my art. So, why should I consider a particular drawing to be completed?
I also distrust the completed work or art. It assumes a finality that is false. It means the artist has finished something, and has found an answer, and therefore achieved a sense of security. This is impossibility. Within the new series of drawings, I am deliberately forcing myself to rework each drawing as I discover/invent new layers of ideas, meaning, processes and materials. More important, through constant reworking, I dismantle the security of each drawing as I discover new questions about the meaning of life, as well as new questions about my life-long notion of finding any answer through art.
Why the presence of the scribbling, handwriting, collage material,, stamping and other material around the actual drawing?
All this stuff around the drawings can be called marginalia. It refers to the history of notation that has appeared in all the books and documents that have passed through my life. Marginalia reflects the relationship between the text, the reader and the reader's varied responses, much of which is beyond control. It represents the intervention of art, personal life and world in the relationship between the reader and the text, or in the case of these drawings, the viewer and the image.
Most art is made as if there is nothing intervening between the artist and the creative process or betwwen the art object and the viewer. Perhaps one could claim that the pristine nature of much art is the result of the artist's struggle to avoid the distraction of the 'outer' world. My current drawings are an attempt to acknowledge and appropriate the distractions that always distract a person trying to concentrate. Art is a conflict between daydreaming and intention.
At the same time, it is largely through the graphic relationship between the 'main' drawing and the marginalia that these works can be associated most closely with the relationship between the long history of the interaction between the image and the text. I was raised on the holy relationship between the image and the text.
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