The goddess of Latin American pop art, who paid Argentina’s foreign debt to a lookalike of Margaret Thatcher with corncobs, and Greece’s foreign debt to a lookalike of Angela Merkel with olives, is an avant-garde who lived in Parisian bohemia and triumphed in New York. She survived on scholarships and sold her first work at age 41. This year she celebrated her 80th and returns with “The Parthenon of forbidden books”.
Marta, you say that you have a vocation to be a plastic artist from a very young age, from the age of 10, how did you realize it?
When I was in fifth grade, when I was 10 years old I think, there, “tac”, I had a kind of light that told me that the only thing I could do in my life was to be a plastic artist. That’s why now there is a giant exhibition, A Survey in NY, with my first works. Sixty informalist women are being shown in London, I made my paintings at the age of 14, the informalist paintings. That is to say that I have been an artist since I was born and the only thing I can do in my life is that. I can’t do anything else, not even cook a hard-boiled egg, nothing.
Vocation comes from voice, and it is said that having a vocation is a voice that calls you, supposedly it would be God for believers, and that it does not call everyone, only a few privileged people. What is your interpretation of that call?
It was like lightning.
And where do you think it came from?
Of the cosmos.
Are you a believer?
No, only in art. I believe that art heals me, takes care of me, protects me. Art protects everyone. I think everyone is an artist. I have some very special concepts. I always thought of others and not of myself. I don’t want to make a painting that is in a museum, I want people to live inside the artwork as they are now living with immersive art.
Being a believer in art, at the same time, is it a faith? Is there also something of religion in this belief in art?
No, but I believe that faith moves mountains. I make absolutely impossible works of art all over the world. The last piece I did was Big Ben lying down with political books in England, and I did it over Zoom because it was the pandemic. Making a work of those dimensions, twenty meters long, was Big Ben lying down with a film, I did it all by Zoom with the engineers, with the architects, with the book packers. So with the new technology out there, now you and I are talking.
Freud said that only artists had a round trip ticket to madness, because their own cure was in their work and at the same time, in their work, they were useful to others. Back then only artists could afford to have a productive craze. What is your relationship with madness, and I don’t know if you ever paid attention to this definition by Freud?
No, I never felt crazy, although I have behaviors, for example I hardly eat, I don’t have time for anything, or sleep, all that. But it is a more messianic aspect, like Federico Peralta Ramos; It is an aspect of art that summons you and makes you do, and you believe so strongly that you spend your life believing and each time you do better in that belief, because now my art is totally international and national, because I summon crowds outside the country, In other countries, and here too. As it was in Documenta 14, which I don’t know how many millions of people saw it.
As you say, things are getting better for you, you are international and you continue to live in the same house as your childhood, on Humberto Primo street, where you have your workshop. What does that place mean to you?
Nothing, I’m totally away, it’s as if I entered my own planet because I was born in this house, but in reality I never lived because I lived in other countries, then I came back. I inherited it from my grandfather, who had a military tailor shop and made overalls, that’s why I always dress in overalls. And I inherited the four houses, which are 900 square meters, open air, a giant patio with sculptures. So, it is the largest workshop in the world that I have, rather than having it in New York it is much better because I work with Argentine people, from my country.
